The air smells of jam tarts and distant thunder. Alice stands in a clearing where the logic of the forest has inverted itself—trunks plunge downward into the earth, roots splay open against the sky like grasping fingers. She presses a hand to her chest, feeling the rapid pulse beneath her dress. The grin appears first, suspended in the dim light between two twisted branches. Then the eyes, gleaming yellow. Then the stripes. The Cheshire Cat materializes in pieces, reassembling himself with languid deliberation. 'You wanted a path,' he says. It is not a question. Alice opens her mouth, but no words come. She had wanted a path. She had followed the White Rabbit's frantic ticking through corridors of locked doors, through a kitchen that choked on pepper, through a garden where gardeners painted roses red under threat of execution. She had wanted a path home. But now, standing in a place where gravity has abandoned its post, she is not certain what home means anymore. 'The Queen's croquet ground is that way,' the Cat continues, nodding toward a gap in the inverted trees. 'Though I should warn you—she has ordered three executions since breakfast. Two were for singing out of tune.' Alice's throat tightens. 'I don't want to play croquet with a queen who beheads people for singing.' The Cat's grin widens impossibly. 'Then don't. But you'll have to find your own way out of Wonderland.' The last words hang in the air like smoke. Alice looks down at her hands, pale in the half-light. She thinks of Dinah, waiting by the riverbank. She thinks of her sister's steady hand on her shoulder. And then she looks up—but the Cat is gone. Only the grin remains, floating, patient, in the space where a tree should be. 'The path is a choice,' his voice drifts from somewhere unseen. 'Not a direction.' And the grin fades, leaving Alice alone in the upside-down wood, the smell of jam tarts growing stronger, the distant rumble of thunder now unmistakably the Queen's approaching carriage.