She wore a pinafore-style dress, like overalls at the body but a dress at the bottom, and the dress portion was constituted of five or six layers and colors of wavy, ruffled cloth, to the extent it looked like a flower in bloom with two skinny legs and a thin tail sticking out from the folds. The dress itself was black, but the ruffles and the decoration on the straps ranged from white to yellow, pink, and red. Spiral-striped socks and elbow-length gloves had a similar color scheme. A long, prehensile tail had a tuft of the red hair at the end, like a paintbrush, and a long ribbon where the tuft started. She seemed to like to swish it around and let the ribbon trail in the air.

“I like the outfit,” I said. I wasn’t lying either. There were very few people who could pull it off, but she wasn’t people, and she could pull it off.

“Thank you,” Dot said. Clawed hands and feet gripped the bar she perched on, her tail swishing more energetically. “My Queen made it.”

Made it made it?

Uncomfortable.

“You said she wanted to earn Shin’s trust, so she’d have more freedom.”

“Yes.”

“I think, uh, if she wants to do that, she needs to win my trust, and the trust of people I work with.”

“Then trust her. She knows everything, she’s strong, she’s almost as beautiful as my fallen King.”

“Thanks,” Amy said. “That’s, uh, a ringing endorsement, comparing me to Nilbog.”

Nilbog. Ah.

That was a heavy topic and the reality was that I didn’t know enough about him. I’d known about the Old Man, Case Twelve, but in a way I knew only about as much about Nilbog. They hadn’t broadcasted information about him.

“If everything broken,” Dot said, dark eyes gleaming as she widened them, leaning forward on her perch until I thought she’d fall to the mattress, “let people fix it.”

“Amy? Your Red Queen?”

Fuck, it made my skin crawl to give her a title. Like it gave her more power, when the broken Amy that had twisted me up and spat me out had been so broken and low.

“Yes. She has so much power. Could do anything she want if she use it, but she won’t. She still trying to be something she isn’t, gentle and human. She needs to be Queen instead.”

“It’s not that easy,” Amy said.

“You can claim a Kingdom. You have power,” Dot told her. “You’re halfway there.”

“We’ve had this discussion a lot,” Amy told me.

That doesn’t reassure me, I thought. A little voice in Amy’s ear, saying queen, kingdom, queen, kingdom. For weeks now?