Through a Looking Glass Darkly: Five of Cups, Part One
When Alice was twenty years old, she committed high treason for the first time.
To be fair, the past couple of years had been hard on her. For one thing, once you reached Ace rank, promotions tended to slow- not so for her; she was an Eight, and it had taken her only three years since entry into the Ace ranks to get there. She had the responsibility to make sure that both her hands- hand, the Suit division, not the limb- were coordinated, which was no easy task to manage, especially when the Nine you served under hated your spleen as much as Harlan did. Not to say that being an Ace didn’t have privileges; it did, or else she never would have worked so hard at it. She got priority on the firing range, clearance to learn knife fighting and special forms of hand to hand combat that was considered too dangerous to teach the regular ranks. She got more face time with her superiors who didn’t hate her, like Uthar and Claude, who had come around to her side of things when she’d started making inroads with the King.
And it wasn’t like Wonderland on the whole was breezing along either. Food was something that was always a touchy subject. There was enough for the Suits, of course; they were always sure to have several months’ worth of food in storage, as well as the royal gardens. The rest of the city wasn’t doing so well; you needed a permit to live outside the city, and many who did manage to complete the screening process ended up running away to join the Resistance at the first opportunity. They’d had to suspend applications for a time, and then the Queen had demanded a crack-down on illegal farming communities, and suddenly their normal state of ‘just shy of enough food’ turned to ‘not nearly enough food at all’. The city was full of starving desperate people, which understandably didn’t lend itself to civility. Ironically, in hindsight it became evident that the Resistance had benefited from the losses the Queen’s crackdown had inflicted upon them more than the Suits had. The city’s sympathy was with them, now, and it wouldn’t be long before spontaneous bouts of civil unrest turned to full-out civil war.
In the past week, Jelly had lost seven men under her command to rioting, three to the executioner, and shot fourteen civilians. It was such a waste, and she couldn’t stomach the thought of continuing on as she had been when it was so obvious to her what could be done to prevent it.
This was what led her to commit treason.
It was done with the permission of the King, of course, which under a great many schools of thought would negate it as treason: that was certainly a good part of why Othello was helping her. None of these schools were established in the Queen’s head, however, so they didn’t count; and besides, the King would have disavowed any and all knowledge of her work if it had become public knowledge. But her chances of surviving were greatly improved with him knowing and telling her boss to give her an extra long leash while her plan was put into motion. Or rather, while she put the plan the Resistance man in holding cell 212 had told her about into motion, with some modifications to make it more palatable.
The problem was hunger; while she knew that the Queen was pushing her father to develop a Stuffed Tea, she also knew that he didn’t think it could be done- not in any timely, efficient manner, anyway, no matter how many times he was called to Court to be threatened. So that meant they would have to solve it the old-fashioned way, with food. The King could (and did) authorize the silos in the city to operate like a soup kitchen, which stabilized the areas around the city’s center, but it was a stop-gap measure at best. They needed more.
The first step was to get the King to call the Queen back to the city. She’d been looking for the illegal farming communities herself, and, as rumor had it, was greatly enjoying her ability to bomb, burn, and then observe her targets from a safe height. It was easy enough for him to plead a rapidly escalating domestic situation that needed her expert touch. Once she was back, his direct involvement was mostly limited to keeping her attention from being focused on the food problem, and Jelly went to see her new Resistance contact.
She assumed an identity for this. She dressed in the casual clothing of someone who lived in the city and might have a close family member as a member of the Suits; a brilliant cobalt greatcoat over soft lavender trousers and a violet pinstriped blouse, complete with a fashionable wide-brimmed hat and veil combination. She almost decided to speak in her passable Court accent, but decided at the last minute to Albune (not-exactly-Scottish, her father called it). If anyone noticed it slipping, then they would assume that she was covering up something more Wonderlandian than Long Island. Othello went with her; he introduced himself as Iago, and she called herself Deborah. The contact was called Humpty Dumpty, and she hoped for his sake that that was a codename he hadn’t picked himself.
“We’re not going to give you anything that will actively hurt those under our command,” Jelly stipulated.
Humpty Dumpty looked quizzical, his long, pale face scrunching in upon itself.
“What she means is that we’re giving you this information so you can avoid our patrols. If we find our groups being ambushed, we won’t be in touch with you, we’ll come after you,” Othello clarified.
“Of course!” Humpty sniffed. “And in return, we expect you to actually steer clear of these locations for a while.”
“That was the deal,” Jelly said. “We just need to be sure that you know the consequences of breaking it.”
They stared at each other for a moment, she and Humpty. Othello stood behind her, ready to back her up if things went wrongwards or the Resistance man trying to hide in the shadows made an unexpected move. Then they switched folders of intelligence and made their way out of each other’s company.
It panned out, and after a few weeks the riots began to die down. So they met again. And again, until one night she sought out Humpty on her own.
Even though they didn’t know who Jelly and Othello were, exactly- they probably thought she was a Diamond, or a Club, and Othello kept dropping hints that he might be a Lizard- they would find it suspicious if they both showed signs of defecting. This part rode on her ability to act, at least as far as the King was concerned; she saw it more as a brief respite away from constantly watching herself around anyone who might report her behavior to the Crown. When safe zones and workable routes were established for the influx of food, the next step would be to make sure that food would keep moving through them, and her suggestion would have more weight if it looked like she was conflicted about her loyalties.
“Nobody can know I’m here,” she told Humpty. “I want to help, but there are too many people I’m responsible for, and if they find out what I’m doing-”
“I’ll keep it between the two of us,” Humpty promised. “No one needs to know where the information came from.”
Somehow, the Police Spades managed to ‘lose’ several of the packages of seeds the Eggmen had engineered to be higher yielding alternatives to the ones currently used by the Crown’s farms. The panic they caused by disappearing sent the Queen flying into a rage. It was all Jelly could do to keep the Spades under her command from getting the axe, and she herself ended up in a holding cell twice. There was a scramble to replace the seeds, but the King managed to keep the Queen’s focus on other things. It helped that Jack chose that moment to pull some truly spectacular stunts, so the Queen really was too busy trying to control her son to keep a close watch on what was going on with her seed production, which was good, because somehow or another packages just kept disappearing.
“Are you sure we’re not dancing too close to the fire?” Othello asked her as they made their way to another intelligence swap meet.
“I started leaping over the fire ages ago,” Jelly told him.
“That’s not exactly helpful,” he replied.
“Come on, Iago,” she said. “If we don’t do something to take the pressure off, Wonderland will fall into civil war, and then there’ll be fire everywhere.”
“Cheery thought, Desdemona.”
“Deborah,” Jelly corrected him. “Don’t screw that up in front of the Resistance.”
“What the hell kind of name in Deborah, anyway?” Othello shot back.
It’s my middle one. “I’m pretty sure it’s an Oyster one, actually.”
She was never quite sure if Othello knew whether or not she was an Oyster. He’d grown up in the city, and so didn’t have a chance to run into her father back when he would still tell people that he didn’t belong here and neither did his family. She’d gotten a shot that prevented the light that burned other free-range Oysters from marking her in the same way. Her accent was weird, but she was hardly the only one with one like it. If he knew, though, he didn’t give any indication, and time passed without undue incident and without any remarks to the contrary being made. They passed along the information, she passed along the seeds, and Wonderland pulled itself back from the brink of starvation. It couldn’t last, though.
The problem was, of course, that the seeds represented a shift in the balance of power. Without Tea to keep them sated, the people’s loyalties would go to those who fed them. Finally, when they’d gone a good five days without so much as a loud protest, the King called the whole thing to a halt.
The Resistance knew her too well, ushering her inside the building with the most cursory of weapon’s checks that missed the small-caliber gun hidden in the lining of the jacket. When Humpty joined her in his office, she had taken it out, and ditched the coat and hat in favor of being recognized as a Spade, as Jellybean.
“If you don’t start leaving now, my hands will scoop you up,” she told him.
She didn’t have to warn him, she rationalized. It would be much safer for her to not. Othello would kill her if he knew what she was up to in here. But strangely enough, Humpty didn’t appear to appreciate that.
Humpty lunged at her; she sidestepped him and knocked him out with the butt of her pistol before re-donning the civilian clothes and sounding the alarm for the benefit of the rest of them. She gave the Resistance a thousand count wait as she divested once more, before tapping out the order to storm the building.
It was a very successful crack down; in addition to Humpty Dumpty himself, they bagged fifty-seven men out of a suspected cell of seventy-five. This was a good thing, because the tracking devices the King had ordered deployed into the seed the Resistance had taken weren’t working as advertised, some broadcasting only intermittently and some not broadcasting at all. Worse still, when one of the patrols did manage to get a fix, they found themselves on the wrong end of an ambush, and Claude was killed in the ensuing firefight.
Dad was called in to defend his invention’s performance; he had several explanations for their failure to work as advertised, many of which would be difficult and expensive to prove. Jelly was worried, but unsurprised: Dad knew better than to fight the Crown when it came to Tea, but when he had the opportunity to muck up anything else without getting caught, he’d take it. The problem was that this was as important as Tea brewing, and for all that he seemed to have managed to not overstep his bounds this time, he’d trodden on them very hard.
She held back when the Queen left, her entourage trailing behind her and the rest of the Court using the opportunity to escape. She didn’t want the King to focus on what her father was capable of, and discussing ways to prevent the Resistance from infiltrating the city further presented itself as a useful distraction. And there was the matter of repairing the damage to their public image. And how to keep such a near thing from happening again. And, as the King had eventually pointed out, the matter of succession amongst the Police Spades.
With Claude dead, Nine Harlan should have ascended to the rank of Ten. Instead, he was shuffled sideways to become the new Agent White when the previous holder of that title unexpectedly retired. The other Nine, Uthar, was passed over, but considering how slow his career path was it was hardly surprising.
So Jellybean became the Ten of Spades, promoting Othello up a rank to be her top Nine as her first act. And as long as it didn’t place her father in any danger, there she would stay.
~*~
Three years later, Jelly stared at her mother in shock. “Wait, what?”
Mom took a tentative step forwards. “Jellybean…”
“Back up a moment here,” Jelly protested, not aware that she was doing just that until Dad reached out and stopped her. She took a deep breath. Pull it together, Jelly. It’s not like this is bad news.
She wasn’t entirely sure what this was, but her mother was alive, so it couldn’t be bad.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve been asking the wrong question. How? How are you alive?”
“Somehow or another the Resistance heard about my work with the Tea addicts,” Mom began. “When the Suits put me in the cell, the Resistance was waiting. I wasn’t in there for more than five minutes before they came to me with an offer: my freedom in exchange for my information on how to treat Tea addiction.”
Jelly nodded. “Okay. That makes sense, I guess?”
“They lied about executing her,” Dad cut in. “The Crown wouldn’t have wanted to lose face, and anyway…”
“It was supposed to keep you in line,” Jelly finished for him, as gently as she could.
Dad pressed his mouth in a thin, straight line and nodded once, curtly. Jelly turned back to her mother. “So, have you been here the whole time?”
“No,” Mom replied. “We had a very long talk about combating addiction and theories behind psychological dependency and methods for treating physical dependency, and then they sent be to a safe house in the country.”
“So you were in the country.” Mom nodded. “You were hiding in the country for eleven years.” Mom stopped nodding and shook her head.
“Not exactly,” she replied. “I couldn’t-”
“Jellybean!” Charlie yelled as he clamored down the stairs at the end of the corridor.
“Uh,” Mom said.
“Mom, this is Sir Charles,” Jelly introduced as Charlie made his way towards him. “And Charlie! These are my parents.”
“Oh, yes, of course: they’re even more poufy than you!” Charlie’s face broke into a wide grin. “Delighted to meet you both.” He swept into a low bow, and got stuck halfway when he tried to straighten.
“Quickly, quickly, sacroiliac,” he muttered, and Jelly helped him stand up straight again. “Good-O. Caterpillar would like to see everyone up on the roof, by the by.”
He wandered back the way he’d come. Mom turned to her, and said in a whisper.
“Sir Charles?”
“The last of the White Knights,” Jelly confirmed. “He’s been hiding out in the Forest of Wabe for the past hundred and fifty years.”
Mom stared at her.
“Surprise?” Jelly offered.
“You ragamuffin!” Charlie bellowed from the stairs. “Are you coming or not?”
“You could try asking them politely!” Hatter yelled from the top of the stairs.
Charlie seemed to think about it. The three of them were nearly at the bottom of the stairs when he finally said “If you would be so kind as to ascend?”
“…thanks, Charlie,” Jelly replied. The knight beamed, and clanked back up the stairs, oblivious to the looks her parents were shooting each other.
She’d never been inside the Hospital of Dreams proper. She’d escorted some of her Suits here, when they became too steeped to perform properly, but she’d never been close enough to any of them to visit. She’d heard the rumors, though, about what the treatments for being steeped in Tea could be like, and her imagination ran wild now that they were accompanied by a soundtrack and occasional glimpses as they made their way up.
The Hospital of Dreams was short on windows, and the sunlight was abundant on the roof. Jelly squinted against the light, just barely able to make out Jack’s figure, standing next to another man that must be Caterpillar. She almost missed Hatter entirely until he was right next to her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, fine,” Jelly said automatically. “Why?”
“Well, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jelly nearly laughed, but didn’t, with the thought that if she started now she might have another breakdown. “Funny you mention that.” She turned around to make sure she had her mother’s attention. “Mom? This is Hatter. He’s my contact with the Resistance.” She turned back to Hatter, who had puckered his lips into a small ‘o’. “Hatter, this is-”
“Tortoise,” interrupted the other man. Jelly whipped back around to face him. “She’s Tortoise.”
“What?” Jack asked, while Jelly was still busy trying to form words.
“I couldn’t just stay in the safe house while the both of you were still in the Casino,” Mom explained.
“You couldn’t have told me earlier, Caterpillar?” Jack asked. “I would have passed the word on to Jelly and we would have had this meeting years ago!”
“Yes, it’s evident that if either of the three were more forthcoming about their situation we might have been able to resolve this conflict much sooner,” Caterpillar replied. “But until Mock Turtle came with news of Jellybean’s defection we didn’t have the whole picture, and so we were left with the supposition that as much as Tortoise would like to reunite with her family her family would not go quietly, that Carpenter might be acting under the Queen against his will and inclination but he would continue to do so as long as his daughter remained under her power, and that Jellybean herself was devoted to her duties with an almost fanatical passion.”
There was an awkward silence as everyone digested his words, save for the sound of Charlie’s tuneless humming as he absorbed himself in peeling flecks of red paint from the white roses lining the edge of the roof.
“Somebody had to play royalist,” Jelly said finally, turning to her parents. “We all thought you were dead,” she jerked her head in Mom’s direction, before locking eyes with Dad “And no one would have believed it coming from you in a thousand years.”
Dad’s eyes widened, and Jelly realized that he’d never had any idea how much of being a Spade was an act.
All this time, and he probably thought I was loyal to the Crown, she thought, her horror mounting. And I’ve been fighting my own mother for years. You don’t always hit what you’re aiming at. I could have killed her. She could have killed me.
“I was a child when we came here,” she said aloud. “I’ve spent more than half my life in Court. If it was going to be any of us, it was going to be me.”
“Jelly-” Hatter began, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said, jerking away. Hatter snatched his hand back, and she winced. “Just- one minute, give me one minute.”
“One-” Jelly swallowed around a lump in her throat. No. she was not going to break down in tears twice in two days. That would be stupid. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She walked quickly away from them, just barely resisting the urge to break into a run. She spotted the armrest of a bench around the corner from the rooftop door, and made a crowflight for it. She sat down, kept her breathing deep and blinked the moisture from her eyes before it could overflow.
Charlie clanked over to her before sitting down on her right side, rubbing absently on the petals of a particularly red rose, singing quietly to himself. Jelly stared at him.
“What am I doing?” she asked, only half to the knight. Charlie stopped singing, and tilted his head at her, curious. She continued. “I had my plan all nailed down. I would go to the Resistance, and they would get Dad out, and I would do their work until either the Crown found me or I racked up enough favors to follow him. None of that’s even an option now. It’s not all bad, but I don’t know what I’m doing. Jack has the Stone, Mom’s alive, Hatter’s shop was probably torched, you exist, and I’ve killed my own-”
She stopped. This wasn’t helping.
Charlie peered at her curiously, still working the paint off the rose in his hands. “How old were you, when you were brought to Wonderland.”
“Ten,” Jelly replied. “I was ten.”
“Ah,” Charlie replied. “Must have been quite a shock.”
“It was.” She didn’t remember very much of her first day in Wonderland, only that her head really hurt and there was a lot of shouting involved. But shock was definitely an applicable word.
Charlie stopped peeling the paint off his flower and stared at it.
“You okay?” she asked him.
“I was ten once,” he replied distantly. “I was ten when the armies came- one of three squires to the real White Knight. My job was to carry the great lance. But when it mattered, when I was needed most… I lost my nerve, and I ran.”
Jelly stared. Charlie began to work on his rose again.
“I hid for three days,” he continued. “And when I came out, everyone was dead, even the magnificent Red King, still sitting on his throne. At first I wished that I’d died with them, but after a while a deeper feeling took over. I wanted a second chance. I wanted to avenge them. So I stole the White Knight’s armor, his name… his courage. And I waited for the right time. When the three of you showed up, ring in hand, I knew the right time had finally arrived.”
He held out the now-white rose to her.
“Thanks,” Jelly said numbly, and took it.
There was a small cough from the corner. Jelly looked up and faced her mother.
“As long as were stretching minutes,” Mom said. “Could we talk, Al- Jellybean?”
“Surely!” Charlie answered for her, jumping to his feet. He clamored away, and Mom took his seat on the bench.
Alice stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say.
“Look at you,” Mom said quietly, reaching out a hand to cup her face. “You’re taller than me, now.”
“I had half a tree in my face earlier today too,” Alice told her, tugging her mother’s hand away from her face and intertwining their fingers.
Mom squeezed her hand, and pressed her mouth into a thin line. “How have you been?”
“Lately? Kind of confused,” she admitted. “In general? I’m okay. I’m just fine.”
“Do you want to try that again with sincerity?” Mom asked.
Alice snorted. “No, I’ll stick with my first story, thank you. How about you? How have you been?”
“I’m okay,” Mom echoed. “I’m just fine.”
“Rain check?” Alice offered, only smirking a little.
“I suppose that’s for the best,” Mom admitted. “I just don’t- I missed so much of your life. I missed you growing up. I missed you, and I’m so sorry I didn’t try harder to get back to you.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. Not anyone here at least,” Alice protested. “We all did the best we could with the information we had. We just never felt safe enough to check each other’s notes.”
Mom frowned.
“The way I hear it, you came running when you heard we were out. Besides, you haven’t missed everything yet,” Alice continued. “It’s not like I’m married, or courting or anything yet. You’ll be here for that.”
Mom gave her a searching look.
“What?” she asked.
“If you aren’t courting,” Mom said. “What’s the deal with Hatter?”
“I told you,” Alice replied. “He’s my Resistance contact.”
“Which is why he looks at you like you’re at the center of the universe,” Mom half-asked.
“… What?” Alice said.
Mom raised an eyebrow.
“Hatter’s just a flirty, friendly person,” she explained.
“He didn’t come off that way,” Mom replied.
“It’s been an intense couple of days,” Alice said.
Mom’s eyebrow climbed higher.
“By which I mean we found out Jack was Resistance, walked in on Hatter’s shop being ransacked, got chased by a Jabberwock, and were ambushed by Suits,” she added hastily. They’d also ridden on horseback, had a moonlight heart-to-heart, and cuddled a bit, but she figured including those tidbits would give off the wrong impression. “Look. Let’s go back with the men and figure out what’s going on as far as overthrowing the Crown goes.”
“I’ll hold you to that rain check, Jellybean,” Mom told her.
“I know,” Alice replied.
To be fair, the past couple of years had been hard on her. For one thing, once you reached Ace rank, promotions tended to slow- not so for her; she was an Eight, and it had taken her only three years since entry into the Ace ranks to get there. She had the responsibility to make sure that both her hands- hand, the Suit division, not the limb- were coordinated, which was no easy task to manage, especially when the Nine you served under hated your spleen as much as Harlan did. Not to say that being an Ace didn’t have privileges; it did, or else she never would have worked so hard at it. She got priority on the firing range, clearance to learn knife fighting and special forms of hand to hand combat that was considered too dangerous to teach the regular ranks. She got more face time with her superiors who didn’t hate her, like Uthar and Claude, who had come around to her side of things when she’d started making inroads with the King.
And it wasn’t like Wonderland on the whole was breezing along either. Food was something that was always a touchy subject. There was enough for the Suits, of course; they were always sure to have several months’ worth of food in storage, as well as the royal gardens. The rest of the city wasn’t doing so well; you needed a permit to live outside the city, and many who did manage to complete the screening process ended up running away to join the Resistance at the first opportunity. They’d had to suspend applications for a time, and then the Queen had demanded a crack-down on illegal farming communities, and suddenly their normal state of ‘just shy of enough food’ turned to ‘not nearly enough food at all’. The city was full of starving desperate people, which understandably didn’t lend itself to civility. Ironically, in hindsight it became evident that the Resistance had benefited from the losses the Queen’s crackdown had inflicted upon them more than the Suits had. The city’s sympathy was with them, now, and it wouldn’t be long before spontaneous bouts of civil unrest turned to full-out civil war.
In the past week, Jelly had lost seven men under her command to rioting, three to the executioner, and shot fourteen civilians. It was such a waste, and she couldn’t stomach the thought of continuing on as she had been when it was so obvious to her what could be done to prevent it.
This was what led her to commit treason.
It was done with the permission of the King, of course, which under a great many schools of thought would negate it as treason: that was certainly a good part of why Othello was helping her. None of these schools were established in the Queen’s head, however, so they didn’t count; and besides, the King would have disavowed any and all knowledge of her work if it had become public knowledge. But her chances of surviving were greatly improved with him knowing and telling her boss to give her an extra long leash while her plan was put into motion. Or rather, while she put the plan the Resistance man in holding cell 212 had told her about into motion, with some modifications to make it more palatable.
The problem was hunger; while she knew that the Queen was pushing her father to develop a Stuffed Tea, she also knew that he didn’t think it could be done- not in any timely, efficient manner, anyway, no matter how many times he was called to Court to be threatened. So that meant they would have to solve it the old-fashioned way, with food. The King could (and did) authorize the silos in the city to operate like a soup kitchen, which stabilized the areas around the city’s center, but it was a stop-gap measure at best. They needed more.
The first step was to get the King to call the Queen back to the city. She’d been looking for the illegal farming communities herself, and, as rumor had it, was greatly enjoying her ability to bomb, burn, and then observe her targets from a safe height. It was easy enough for him to plead a rapidly escalating domestic situation that needed her expert touch. Once she was back, his direct involvement was mostly limited to keeping her attention from being focused on the food problem, and Jelly went to see her new Resistance contact.
She assumed an identity for this. She dressed in the casual clothing of someone who lived in the city and might have a close family member as a member of the Suits; a brilliant cobalt greatcoat over soft lavender trousers and a violet pinstriped blouse, complete with a fashionable wide-brimmed hat and veil combination. She almost decided to speak in her passable Court accent, but decided at the last minute to Albune (not-exactly-Scottish, her father called it). If anyone noticed it slipping, then they would assume that she was covering up something more Wonderlandian than Long Island. Othello went with her; he introduced himself as Iago, and she called herself Deborah. The contact was called Humpty Dumpty, and she hoped for his sake that that was a codename he hadn’t picked himself.
“We’re not going to give you anything that will actively hurt those under our command,” Jelly stipulated.
Humpty Dumpty looked quizzical, his long, pale face scrunching in upon itself.
“What she means is that we’re giving you this information so you can avoid our patrols. If we find our groups being ambushed, we won’t be in touch with you, we’ll come after you,” Othello clarified.
“Of course!” Humpty sniffed. “And in return, we expect you to actually steer clear of these locations for a while.”
“That was the deal,” Jelly said. “We just need to be sure that you know the consequences of breaking it.”
They stared at each other for a moment, she and Humpty. Othello stood behind her, ready to back her up if things went wrongwards or the Resistance man trying to hide in the shadows made an unexpected move. Then they switched folders of intelligence and made their way out of each other’s company.
It panned out, and after a few weeks the riots began to die down. So they met again. And again, until one night she sought out Humpty on her own.
Even though they didn’t know who Jelly and Othello were, exactly- they probably thought she was a Diamond, or a Club, and Othello kept dropping hints that he might be a Lizard- they would find it suspicious if they both showed signs of defecting. This part rode on her ability to act, at least as far as the King was concerned; she saw it more as a brief respite away from constantly watching herself around anyone who might report her behavior to the Crown. When safe zones and workable routes were established for the influx of food, the next step would be to make sure that food would keep moving through them, and her suggestion would have more weight if it looked like she was conflicted about her loyalties.
“Nobody can know I’m here,” she told Humpty. “I want to help, but there are too many people I’m responsible for, and if they find out what I’m doing-”
“I’ll keep it between the two of us,” Humpty promised. “No one needs to know where the information came from.”
Somehow, the Police Spades managed to ‘lose’ several of the packages of seeds the Eggmen had engineered to be higher yielding alternatives to the ones currently used by the Crown’s farms. The panic they caused by disappearing sent the Queen flying into a rage. It was all Jelly could do to keep the Spades under her command from getting the axe, and she herself ended up in a holding cell twice. There was a scramble to replace the seeds, but the King managed to keep the Queen’s focus on other things. It helped that Jack chose that moment to pull some truly spectacular stunts, so the Queen really was too busy trying to control her son to keep a close watch on what was going on with her seed production, which was good, because somehow or another packages just kept disappearing.
“Are you sure we’re not dancing too close to the fire?” Othello asked her as they made their way to another intelligence swap meet.
“I started leaping over the fire ages ago,” Jelly told him.
“That’s not exactly helpful,” he replied.
“Come on, Iago,” she said. “If we don’t do something to take the pressure off, Wonderland will fall into civil war, and then there’ll be fire everywhere.”
“Cheery thought, Desdemona.”
“Deborah,” Jelly corrected him. “Don’t screw that up in front of the Resistance.”
“What the hell kind of name in Deborah, anyway?” Othello shot back.
It’s my middle one. “I’m pretty sure it’s an Oyster one, actually.”
She was never quite sure if Othello knew whether or not she was an Oyster. He’d grown up in the city, and so didn’t have a chance to run into her father back when he would still tell people that he didn’t belong here and neither did his family. She’d gotten a shot that prevented the light that burned other free-range Oysters from marking her in the same way. Her accent was weird, but she was hardly the only one with one like it. If he knew, though, he didn’t give any indication, and time passed without undue incident and without any remarks to the contrary being made. They passed along the information, she passed along the seeds, and Wonderland pulled itself back from the brink of starvation. It couldn’t last, though.
The problem was, of course, that the seeds represented a shift in the balance of power. Without Tea to keep them sated, the people’s loyalties would go to those who fed them. Finally, when they’d gone a good five days without so much as a loud protest, the King called the whole thing to a halt.
The Resistance knew her too well, ushering her inside the building with the most cursory of weapon’s checks that missed the small-caliber gun hidden in the lining of the jacket. When Humpty joined her in his office, she had taken it out, and ditched the coat and hat in favor of being recognized as a Spade, as Jellybean.
“If you don’t start leaving now, my hands will scoop you up,” she told him.
She didn’t have to warn him, she rationalized. It would be much safer for her to not. Othello would kill her if he knew what she was up to in here. But strangely enough, Humpty didn’t appear to appreciate that.
Humpty lunged at her; she sidestepped him and knocked him out with the butt of her pistol before re-donning the civilian clothes and sounding the alarm for the benefit of the rest of them. She gave the Resistance a thousand count wait as she divested once more, before tapping out the order to storm the building.
It was a very successful crack down; in addition to Humpty Dumpty himself, they bagged fifty-seven men out of a suspected cell of seventy-five. This was a good thing, because the tracking devices the King had ordered deployed into the seed the Resistance had taken weren’t working as advertised, some broadcasting only intermittently and some not broadcasting at all. Worse still, when one of the patrols did manage to get a fix, they found themselves on the wrong end of an ambush, and Claude was killed in the ensuing firefight.
Dad was called in to defend his invention’s performance; he had several explanations for their failure to work as advertised, many of which would be difficult and expensive to prove. Jelly was worried, but unsurprised: Dad knew better than to fight the Crown when it came to Tea, but when he had the opportunity to muck up anything else without getting caught, he’d take it. The problem was that this was as important as Tea brewing, and for all that he seemed to have managed to not overstep his bounds this time, he’d trodden on them very hard.
She held back when the Queen left, her entourage trailing behind her and the rest of the Court using the opportunity to escape. She didn’t want the King to focus on what her father was capable of, and discussing ways to prevent the Resistance from infiltrating the city further presented itself as a useful distraction. And there was the matter of repairing the damage to their public image. And how to keep such a near thing from happening again. And, as the King had eventually pointed out, the matter of succession amongst the Police Spades.
With Claude dead, Nine Harlan should have ascended to the rank of Ten. Instead, he was shuffled sideways to become the new Agent White when the previous holder of that title unexpectedly retired. The other Nine, Uthar, was passed over, but considering how slow his career path was it was hardly surprising.
So Jellybean became the Ten of Spades, promoting Othello up a rank to be her top Nine as her first act. And as long as it didn’t place her father in any danger, there she would stay.
~*~
Three years later, Jelly stared at her mother in shock. “Wait, what?”
Mom took a tentative step forwards. “Jellybean…”
“Back up a moment here,” Jelly protested, not aware that she was doing just that until Dad reached out and stopped her. She took a deep breath. Pull it together, Jelly. It’s not like this is bad news.
She wasn’t entirely sure what this was, but her mother was alive, so it couldn’t be bad.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve been asking the wrong question. How? How are you alive?”
“Somehow or another the Resistance heard about my work with the Tea addicts,” Mom began. “When the Suits put me in the cell, the Resistance was waiting. I wasn’t in there for more than five minutes before they came to me with an offer: my freedom in exchange for my information on how to treat Tea addiction.”
Jelly nodded. “Okay. That makes sense, I guess?”
“They lied about executing her,” Dad cut in. “The Crown wouldn’t have wanted to lose face, and anyway…”
“It was supposed to keep you in line,” Jelly finished for him, as gently as she could.
Dad pressed his mouth in a thin, straight line and nodded once, curtly. Jelly turned back to her mother. “So, have you been here the whole time?”
“No,” Mom replied. “We had a very long talk about combating addiction and theories behind psychological dependency and methods for treating physical dependency, and then they sent be to a safe house in the country.”
“So you were in the country.” Mom nodded. “You were hiding in the country for eleven years.” Mom stopped nodding and shook her head.
“Not exactly,” she replied. “I couldn’t-”
“Jellybean!” Charlie yelled as he clamored down the stairs at the end of the corridor.
“Uh,” Mom said.
“Mom, this is Sir Charles,” Jelly introduced as Charlie made his way towards him. “And Charlie! These are my parents.”
“Oh, yes, of course: they’re even more poufy than you!” Charlie’s face broke into a wide grin. “Delighted to meet you both.” He swept into a low bow, and got stuck halfway when he tried to straighten.
“Quickly, quickly, sacroiliac,” he muttered, and Jelly helped him stand up straight again. “Good-O. Caterpillar would like to see everyone up on the roof, by the by.”
He wandered back the way he’d come. Mom turned to her, and said in a whisper.
“Sir Charles?”
“The last of the White Knights,” Jelly confirmed. “He’s been hiding out in the Forest of Wabe for the past hundred and fifty years.”
Mom stared at her.
“Surprise?” Jelly offered.
“You ragamuffin!” Charlie bellowed from the stairs. “Are you coming or not?”
“You could try asking them politely!” Hatter yelled from the top of the stairs.
Charlie seemed to think about it. The three of them were nearly at the bottom of the stairs when he finally said “If you would be so kind as to ascend?”
“…thanks, Charlie,” Jelly replied. The knight beamed, and clanked back up the stairs, oblivious to the looks her parents were shooting each other.
She’d never been inside the Hospital of Dreams proper. She’d escorted some of her Suits here, when they became too steeped to perform properly, but she’d never been close enough to any of them to visit. She’d heard the rumors, though, about what the treatments for being steeped in Tea could be like, and her imagination ran wild now that they were accompanied by a soundtrack and occasional glimpses as they made their way up.
The Hospital of Dreams was short on windows, and the sunlight was abundant on the roof. Jelly squinted against the light, just barely able to make out Jack’s figure, standing next to another man that must be Caterpillar. She almost missed Hatter entirely until he was right next to her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, fine,” Jelly said automatically. “Why?”
“Well, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jelly nearly laughed, but didn’t, with the thought that if she started now she might have another breakdown. “Funny you mention that.” She turned around to make sure she had her mother’s attention. “Mom? This is Hatter. He’s my contact with the Resistance.” She turned back to Hatter, who had puckered his lips into a small ‘o’. “Hatter, this is-”
“Tortoise,” interrupted the other man. Jelly whipped back around to face him. “She’s Tortoise.”
“What?” Jack asked, while Jelly was still busy trying to form words.
“I couldn’t just stay in the safe house while the both of you were still in the Casino,” Mom explained.
“You couldn’t have told me earlier, Caterpillar?” Jack asked. “I would have passed the word on to Jelly and we would have had this meeting years ago!”
“Yes, it’s evident that if either of the three were more forthcoming about their situation we might have been able to resolve this conflict much sooner,” Caterpillar replied. “But until Mock Turtle came with news of Jellybean’s defection we didn’t have the whole picture, and so we were left with the supposition that as much as Tortoise would like to reunite with her family her family would not go quietly, that Carpenter might be acting under the Queen against his will and inclination but he would continue to do so as long as his daughter remained under her power, and that Jellybean herself was devoted to her duties with an almost fanatical passion.”
There was an awkward silence as everyone digested his words, save for the sound of Charlie’s tuneless humming as he absorbed himself in peeling flecks of red paint from the white roses lining the edge of the roof.
“Somebody had to play royalist,” Jelly said finally, turning to her parents. “We all thought you were dead,” she jerked her head in Mom’s direction, before locking eyes with Dad “And no one would have believed it coming from you in a thousand years.”
Dad’s eyes widened, and Jelly realized that he’d never had any idea how much of being a Spade was an act.
All this time, and he probably thought I was loyal to the Crown, she thought, her horror mounting. And I’ve been fighting my own mother for years. You don’t always hit what you’re aiming at. I could have killed her. She could have killed me.
“I was a child when we came here,” she said aloud. “I’ve spent more than half my life in Court. If it was going to be any of us, it was going to be me.”
“Jelly-” Hatter began, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said, jerking away. Hatter snatched his hand back, and she winced. “Just- one minute, give me one minute.”
“One-” Jelly swallowed around a lump in her throat. No. she was not going to break down in tears twice in two days. That would be stupid. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She walked quickly away from them, just barely resisting the urge to break into a run. She spotted the armrest of a bench around the corner from the rooftop door, and made a crowflight for it. She sat down, kept her breathing deep and blinked the moisture from her eyes before it could overflow.
Charlie clanked over to her before sitting down on her right side, rubbing absently on the petals of a particularly red rose, singing quietly to himself. Jelly stared at him.
“What am I doing?” she asked, only half to the knight. Charlie stopped singing, and tilted his head at her, curious. She continued. “I had my plan all nailed down. I would go to the Resistance, and they would get Dad out, and I would do their work until either the Crown found me or I racked up enough favors to follow him. None of that’s even an option now. It’s not all bad, but I don’t know what I’m doing. Jack has the Stone, Mom’s alive, Hatter’s shop was probably torched, you exist, and I’ve killed my own-”
She stopped. This wasn’t helping.
Charlie peered at her curiously, still working the paint off the rose in his hands. “How old were you, when you were brought to Wonderland.”
“Ten,” Jelly replied. “I was ten.”
“Ah,” Charlie replied. “Must have been quite a shock.”
“It was.” She didn’t remember very much of her first day in Wonderland, only that her head really hurt and there was a lot of shouting involved. But shock was definitely an applicable word.
Charlie stopped peeling the paint off his flower and stared at it.
“You okay?” she asked him.
“I was ten once,” he replied distantly. “I was ten when the armies came- one of three squires to the real White Knight. My job was to carry the great lance. But when it mattered, when I was needed most… I lost my nerve, and I ran.”
Jelly stared. Charlie began to work on his rose again.
“I hid for three days,” he continued. “And when I came out, everyone was dead, even the magnificent Red King, still sitting on his throne. At first I wished that I’d died with them, but after a while a deeper feeling took over. I wanted a second chance. I wanted to avenge them. So I stole the White Knight’s armor, his name… his courage. And I waited for the right time. When the three of you showed up, ring in hand, I knew the right time had finally arrived.”
He held out the now-white rose to her.
“Thanks,” Jelly said numbly, and took it.
There was a small cough from the corner. Jelly looked up and faced her mother.
“As long as were stretching minutes,” Mom said. “Could we talk, Al- Jellybean?”
“Surely!” Charlie answered for her, jumping to his feet. He clamored away, and Mom took his seat on the bench.
Alice stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say.
“Look at you,” Mom said quietly, reaching out a hand to cup her face. “You’re taller than me, now.”
“I had half a tree in my face earlier today too,” Alice told her, tugging her mother’s hand away from her face and intertwining their fingers.
Mom squeezed her hand, and pressed her mouth into a thin line. “How have you been?”
“Lately? Kind of confused,” she admitted. “In general? I’m okay. I’m just fine.”
“Do you want to try that again with sincerity?” Mom asked.
Alice snorted. “No, I’ll stick with my first story, thank you. How about you? How have you been?”
“I’m okay,” Mom echoed. “I’m just fine.”
“Rain check?” Alice offered, only smirking a little.
“I suppose that’s for the best,” Mom admitted. “I just don’t- I missed so much of your life. I missed you growing up. I missed you, and I’m so sorry I didn’t try harder to get back to you.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. Not anyone here at least,” Alice protested. “We all did the best we could with the information we had. We just never felt safe enough to check each other’s notes.”
Mom frowned.
“The way I hear it, you came running when you heard we were out. Besides, you haven’t missed everything yet,” Alice continued. “It’s not like I’m married, or courting or anything yet. You’ll be here for that.”
Mom gave her a searching look.
“What?” she asked.
“If you aren’t courting,” Mom said. “What’s the deal with Hatter?”
“I told you,” Alice replied. “He’s my Resistance contact.”
“Which is why he looks at you like you’re at the center of the universe,” Mom half-asked.
“… What?” Alice said.
Mom raised an eyebrow.
“Hatter’s just a flirty, friendly person,” she explained.
“He didn’t come off that way,” Mom replied.
“It’s been an intense couple of days,” Alice said.
Mom’s eyebrow climbed higher.
“By which I mean we found out Jack was Resistance, walked in on Hatter’s shop being ransacked, got chased by a Jabberwock, and were ambushed by Suits,” she added hastily. They’d also ridden on horseback, had a moonlight heart-to-heart, and cuddled a bit, but she figured including those tidbits would give off the wrong impression. “Look. Let’s go back with the men and figure out what’s going on as far as overthrowing the Crown goes.”
“I’ll hold you to that rain check, Jellybean,” Mom told her.
“I know,” Alice replied.