It had begun to hum — not like the Cheshire Cat’s purr, but like something vast and circular, dropping silver light upon her like a second moon.

She had tumbled down rabbit holes before, but this was an ascending sort of tumble — upward through violet dark, toward a door with no handle and no keyhole, only light.

The White Queen had once believed six impossible things before breakfast. The visitors, Alice noted, appeared to believe them all simultaneously, and before any meal whatsoever.

Off with their heads! cried the Queen of Hearts. But the beings in the shimmering craft simply tilted their vessel and regarded her with eyes like polished telescopes, quite unbothered.

The crystal they lowered was not a key, exactly. But it opened something — the way a song opens a room you did not know was locked.

“Who are you?” Alice asked, as she had asked so many before. The light rearranged itself into something that felt, unmistakably, like a smile.

She had always supposed that adventures fell downward. It was startling — and rather wonderful — to discover they could also ascend, ringed in neon, humming like a lullaby from the stars.