When mist rolls off the Mojave and over the San Bernardino range, eighteen-year-old Alice Liddell starts seeing another life: a bay horse-girl, a book she never finished becoming, a board laid over California dirt. A child walks into the fog. Alice follows.
Wonderland is not a dream she fell into. It is claiming the Inland Empire. The longer she stays, the more the vision writes itself onto her—ears, tail, three names that will not share a head. She finds Calla Queen, who remembers a dirt thousand meters and nothing of being human, and she will not leave the girl who came out of the weather.
Carroll’s trials are still here. They are rest stops that loop, a diner stuck at six, a salt-flat court, a Red Queen who does not want a head so much as a finished game. Alice fights like someone who refuses to lead until the midpoint. Calla breaks the gate or she is finished.
If the Queen falls, the fog may lift.