But in her pocket, she found a single gray pebble.
The eye was pressed into the middle sister’s socket. She blinked once, scanned the shore, and froze. “A child,” she whispered. “Fresh from the Above.”
The three sisters stopped.
At the lake’s bottom was a door no larger than a rabbit hole. Alice knelt. Searching for- Graias Alice in Action in-All Ca...
She placed the eye and the tooth on the final step, where the Graiae could retrieve them later. Then she pulled the handle.
The first sister held up a single yellowed fang. “You want to go home? Then you must act . Not tumble. Not cry. Act . But the only door is at the bottom of the Cinder Lake, and the lake is guarded by the Jabberwock’s cousin.”
Alice stepped forward, her patent-leather shoes crunching on pumice. “I beg your pardon. I’m looking for a way back to my own world. Are you… goddesses?” But in her pocket, she found a single gray pebble
Alice’s heart quickened. In Wonderland, she had learned to be brave. But this place had no rules at all.
And when she held it to her ear, she heard three old women laughing—not cruelly, but with something like relief.
A laugh like grinding bones. “Goddesses? We are the Graiae. Born old. Daughters of the sea. We share one eye and one tooth because we trust no one enough to have our own.” “A child,” she whispered
“Give it here, you clot,” hissed the third.
“She gave us back,” said another.
“I’ll need your eye,” Alice said.
Alice had not intended to fall again. She had simply been trying to return a borrowed book to her neighbor, an eccentric collector of antiquities, when the stair beneath her foot gave way like a hinge of rotten cake. Down she tumbled—past ticking clocks, through a film of silver mist, and into a sky the color of a bruise.