Alice, the real Alice, found her eyes full of tears. She leaned on the mirror, glass pressed against her forehead. Her skin felt clammy and slick with sweat. The mist was getting thicker—even the other side of the courtyard was hard to see, and mirror-Alices continued to gather all around. They had changed, they’d all changed. The masks were no longer blank, but split by a black slash of a mouth, crosshatched into huge, white teeth.

“Ask,” the mirror image said. “Ask, ask, ask.”

“I . . .” Alice was breathing hard. It was difficult to get enough air in her lungs. “Can you show me . . .”

“Yes?” the mirror image said.

Deep in her befuddled mind, a bit of curiosity remained.

“My mother,” Alice said. “I want to see my mother.”

She had no memories of her mother, and her father had never even showed Alice a picture. On the one occasion she’d asked him directly, he’d told Alice she was dead, and the thunderous look on his face was such that she’d never dared mention it again. She’d always said that she didn’t need a mother, that her father was enough. And that was true, but it would have been nice to at least see her face.

“Mother,” the mirror image whispered. “Mother . . .”

The creature sounded a little vexed, as if something wasn’t working right. The mirror flickered, like a movie at the end of the reel, and then went totally, utterly black, leaving the mirror-Alices standing in an impenetrable void.

“Mother?” the echoes whispered. “Mother . . .”

Alice slumped against the mirror, sinking to her knees. She was tired, so tired, and while some part of her mind knew that something was badly wrong, she didn’t have the energy to care. Much better to lie here, pressed against the chilly glass, and wait. Wait for . . .

“Mother?” Her own voice, twisted and echoing.

“Strange.”

“Dark.”

“Meaningless. Had our fill. Take her.”

“Take her. Take her . . .”

Alice felt fingers on her arms, her shoulders. Hands as cold as the mirror, reaching out to take hold of her. The glass under her cheek rippled like water.

“Take her. Take her . . .”

Something moved in the depths of the void behind the mirror. The faintest twitch, darkness against deeper darkness. Then an eye appeared. Not a human eye—this was a vast thing, as big as Alice, with a silver iris that seemed to glow against the utter blackness. The pupil was a vertical slit, like a cat’s, but this was no cat. It was profoundly alien—not a mammal, not a lizard or a snake, not anything that had ever walked the earth. Something other.

And yet, Alice thought, there was the faintest sense of familiarity, of recognition.

Alice.