The roots hang like the veins of some buried giant, each one thick as Alice's arm, reaching up into a sky that seems farther away than it should be. The ground beneath her feet is soft and dark, littered with leaves that have never known sunlight. She has been walking for what feels like hours—or maybe minutes; time has lost its grip here, stretching and compressing like the Cat's grin. That grin appears first, as it always does. A curl of pinkish-purple, suspended in the tangle of roots, floating without a face to anchor it. Then the eyes, yellow and slit-pupiled, blinking slowly one at a time. The rest of the Cat follows in fragments: a paw here, a stripe there, assembling itself like a puzzle that knows its own shape. 'You're still here,' the Cat says. Not a question. Alice stops walking. She looks up at the upside-down forest, at the roots that claw at nothing, at the branches that burrow into the earth like worms. 'Which way should I go?' she asks. The Cat's grin widens—a slow, deliberate crescent that reveals no teeth. 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.' 'I don't much care where—' she begins, the old words coming automatically, but she stops. She does care. She cares very much. She wants to go home. She wants the sky to be above her and the ground to be below. She wants a world that makes sense. 'If you don't care where you get to,' the Cat says, its voice a low purr that seems to come from everywhere at once, 'then it doesn't matter which way you go.' Alice stares at the grin. The eyes are gone now, the paws fading, but the smile remains, hanging in the roots like a half-remembered joke. 'But I do care,' she whispers. The grin flickers. For a moment, the Cat is fully there again, perched on a root that curves downward like a question mark. 'Then perhaps you should ask the trees.' And it vanishes completely, leaving only the darkness and the slow, steady drip of something somewhere in the earth. Alice turns in a slow circle. The roots stretch in every direction, identical and indifferent. Somewhere far above—or below—a watch ticks. She chooses a root that seems slightly less twisted than the others and walks on.