If she had stayed out of the Old City as she was supposed to, this never would have happened. The doctors told her parents they had done their best, but she would never be beautiful again. It had been open for a long while, the blood oozing from it gone black and brackish, the skin around it tattered at the edges. Her face had been flayed open when they found her, and she couldn’t say how or why.
Her hand went without thought to her left cheek, touched the long thick scar that followed the line of bone from her hairline to the top of her lip. Red running down the insides of her legs and blue marks on her thighs were fingers had been. Two weeks later came Alice, covered in blood, babbling about tea and a rabbit, wearing a dress that wasn’t hers. They both went in, but only Alice came out. Sixteen candles on your cake, a sliver of cake and a cup of tea for you, my dear. But the powders they gave her made the world all muzzy and sideways and sometimes she felt mad.Įverything had happened just as she said, when she could say something besides “Rabbit.” She and Dor went into the Old City for Dor’s birthday. When she acted like that they said she was mad. When they found her all she would say was, “The Rabbit. All that part was hazy, her memory of him wrapped in smoke but for the eyes and ears. Funny how she couldn’t remember his face, though. Someone had given her a cup of tea once, someone with blue-green eyes and long ears. A sliver of cheese, a sliver of cake, a cup of tea to be polite. Just a silver sliver, almost close enough to eat. If she moved her head all the way up against the wall and tilted it to the left she could just see the edge of the moon through the bars.
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