Page 61 of Escaping Wonderland

“I-I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…” She pulled her arms away and allowed her legs to drop from his waist. “You can set me down now.”

But his hands caught the backs of her thighs well before her feet touched the ground, forcing her legs back up. He releasedone only to cup the side of her face, press his thumb under her chin, and turn her face up.

The seriousness hadn’t left his face, but something burned in his eyes—something subtle but intense.

“You have changed everything for me, Alice. Turned my world upside down. I can’t even tell what’s real anymore, can’t tell if everything I’ve ever known is true or an elaborate lie…but like you said,thisis real.Weare real. And even if I don’t fully understand it, I know my love for you is real, too.”

Her heart thumped as warmth blossomed within her chest. “You do?”

He answered her with a kiss, wholly unlike the one he’d given her before their joining. His lips were tender, sensual, and caressing, and his tongue worshipped her mouth once she granted it entry.

Alice wrapped her arms around him and moaned as he slowly pumped his hips. There was no desperation in their lovemaking now, just a gradually building pleasure, just the joy of sharing in each other’s warmth, the contentment of their bodies and hearts coming together as intimately as two people could. Despite the slower pace, they were soon carried away on a swelling tide of pleasure that left them trembling against each other.

CHAPTER 17

Alice and Shadow spent the night in the woods, with the stream’s burbling long forgotten behind them. When darkness came—truedarkness, during which not even stars or moon gave off any light—she curled up in Shadow’s arms, unburdened by fear. He would keep her safe.

She knew what they had to do, but Alice was reluctant to proceed with their plan. What if, once they left this simulation, once they left Wonderland, nothing was the same? What if she never saw Shadow again? What if he wasn’t even in the same facility as her? It wasn’t impossible that Wonderland was a network connecting numerous facilities, each containing hundreds orthousandsof patients. And Shadow didn’t even know who he really was, didn’t even know his real name. How would she find him once they got out?

Alice snuggled closer to him, and Shadow released a contented purr and tightened his arms around her. Her connection with him was stronger than anyrelationship she’d had in her life.

I don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to losehim.

And it was with those thoughts that she’d succumbed to sleep.

They resumed their trek shortly after waking in the morning light, with only a brief side excursion—Shadow vanished for nearly a minute, and when he returned, Sithix’s knife-laden belt was buckled around his narrow waist.

Though his nearness urged her onward, Alice’s reluctance to go to Rosecourt, toward what was meant to be their escape from Wonderland, hadn’t diminished. They held hands through most of the journey, and even when their hands weren’t touching, they remained in contact—with his tail brushing softly against her leg, or Alice holding onto it while he walked slightly ahead. He seemed unwilling to let her out of his sight, unwilling to let her out of reach. And she understood; she felt the same way about him.

Even in this world, there were too many things that could tear them apart. There was too much threatening their togetherness.

Night did not fall again, but it felt like they walked for days, like they crossed hundreds of miles. Despite that sense, Alice was never once bored or tired. Shadow’s presence soothed her, and his conversation—sometimes rambling, sometimes more lucid than she’d ever heard him, but always entertaining—filled the time perfectly.

At some point during their travels, she realized that she hadn’t eaten anything since arriving in Wonderland. Even that realization didn’t awaken her appetite. Thirst and hunger didn’t seem to apply here—she’d only had some water at the stream in all her time in the simulation, not counting the drug-laced drink that had been forced upon her by Madame Cecilia. By now, she could simply accept that food and drink were for enjoyment rather than necessity in this simulation; it made as much sense as anything else. She still found it odd that she needed to sleep—it was as though her mind needed a break from Wonderland every now and then.

Alice’s favorite times were the handful of stops they made—not because they delayed their arrival in Rosecourt, but because those were the times during which she and Shadow made love.

The forest was, maddeningly, both incredibly consistent and impossibly varied. Though their appearances remained the same, the plants seemed, at random intervals, to change sizes, and at a few points all the colors were completely different—blue leaves, purple trunks, flowers that were the inverse of their usual colors. Alice and Shadow occasionally traveled through areas that were decidedly notpart of the forest, the most memorable of which was a neatly tended garden that seemed to be made in the proportion of the trees and plants surrounding it. The barriers between flower beds—barriers that would’ve been perhaps six inches tall back home—stood almost as tall as Alice, and the stone benches set throughout the garden were high enough that neither she nor Shadow could even see onto their seats. The weatherworn statues, many of which depicted cherubic figures in various carefree poses amidst the flowers, were titanic.

The strangest part of it all was how normalit seemed now. Only a few days ago—a few days ago according to the slowly suffocating rational part of Alice’s mind—such sights would’ve been mind-boggling. Now they just seemed mundane. However…

“Are there giants here?” she asked.

“If there are, I’ve never seen one,” Shadow replied. “Though…I’m sure it’s all just a matter of perspective, isn’t it?”

Alice looked at him, cocking her head. “What do you mean?”

Shadow shrugged nonchalantly. “Perhaps we are just very small—or otherwise very big. Who’s to say our normal is normal at all?”

She chuckled. “Here in Wonderland? I guess no one.”

Of course there was a giant garden. Just like there was a place where one of the purple cobblestone paths wound in a huge spiral, its loops growing smaller and smaller as it curled in on itself. Shadow and Alice followed that path, and when they reached the center, they were simply…somewhere else in the woods. She shrugged it off without a second thought and continued onward.

As Shadow had said—they would get to wherever they were going. Direction made little difference.

Despite having never been to Rosecourt, Alice knew when they were close—the atmosphere shifted. They emerged from the trees and stepped onto another cobblestone path, but this one was at least thirty feet wide—a cobblestoneroad. The trees along its edges were bent inward, creating a tall natural tunnel that ran as far as she could see. The air here was thicker, charged with a strange mixture of frantic energy and heavy foreboding. Posts set at irregular intervals along the road were topped with flickering electric lanterns that filled the tunnel with uneven, dancing light. The sunshine did not penetrate the leaves overhead.

“Almost there,” Shadow said, his voice lower and quieter than normal as he stared down the road, the end of which was lost in a distant mist.

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