I didn’t want to be here. I was pressed so hard against the corner of the room that my back would hurt tomorrow. My arms wrapped around my legs, and that was tight enough I’d feel it tomorrow.

And it was so fucking quiet, a room like a sensory deprivation chamber, which magnified the things in the space. Me and my emotions, her.

Dot was safer.

“Dot,” I said, getting the little one’s attention. “Were you there when she worked on Hunter?”

“Yes. I remember Hunter. I like the name. It sounds like blood and biting, but the Hunter I met bites the air.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it went wrong, didn’t it?”

“My Queen says so. But Hunter was gloomy and bleh before. She’s exciting now. She laughed more after.”

Maybe Dot was a key, or a way I could distill a message clear enough for Amy to get, without running into walls.

“But she’s your queen. She’s not happy with it, is she?”

“No,” Dot said, almost absently. She crawled along the bar at the foot of the bed, slinking along, crawling under and squeezing through the narrow gap between bar and mattress, looping over, then squeezing through again, in a spiraling path from one corner of the bed to the other. Each time she got far enough through the gap, the dress she wore went from being compressed to poofing out dramatically. “She’s unhappy, so it no good, probably.”

“I’m not happy with it either. You’re the Red Queen’s subject, aren’t you?”

“What are you doing, Vicky?” Amy asked.

“Aren’t you?” I asked Dot, ignoring Amy.

“Yes.”

“You’re hers to look after?”

“Yes,” Dot said. She reached the corner of the bed, gripped the bar with clawed hands, and walked up the wall until she was doing a handstand. Moving hand over hand, she began to move down the bar, legs extended above her. The poofy layered nature of her dress meant it didn’t flop down.

“Hunter was someone I tried to look after. Someone asked me to help her, and I made sure she got that help.”

“Your subject,” Dot said.

“Not quite but close. And the Red Queen used my name without my permission to get close to Hunter. And then she broke her.”

Dot went from handstand to sitting with one leg on either side of the bar in a single, sudden motion that made the bar sing, and would have had me seeing stars in her position.

The goblin looked at me, then at Amy, and then at me again.

“I can handle it,” Amy said.

“She can handle it,” Dot echoed.

“But she betrayed trust,” I said. “Is that how a Queen is supposed to act?”

“Are you trying to turn her against me?” Amy asked.

“I’m asking,” I said. This was easier when I could focus on Dot, without Amy chiming in.