Chapter Five
Beads took me around the side of the dome, far enough away from the people I’d shared a boat with that the only sound was the crash of waves against the shore. The door we eventually arrived at had frosted glass that obscured whatever lay beyond it, along with a doorbell.
Beads gestured at it impatiently. “Go on,” he urged when I didn’t immediately press it.
“Where does this door go?”
He sighed, as if my question were tiresome, and pressed the doorbell himself.
It opened within seconds, a man and a woman stood there.
They were both short and plump, with candyfloss-pink hair—the man’s cut short, the woman’s worn long—and beauty spots above their lips that I assumed were fake, given they were perfect mirror images of each other.
The similarities didn’t stop there. Thick makeup covered both their faces, including bright pink lipstick, shimmering silver eyeshadow coating their eyelids, and rosy pink blush.
Fake eyelashes and drawn-on eyebrows made them look constantly surprised.
Or maybe they were surprised. Perhaps there weren’t many ticketless visitors brought to this door.
Their clothes weren’t exactly standard either, both dressed in orange silk, the woman’s a dress and the man’s a suit.
The explosion of color made me think of fireworks.
“Got one for you,” Beads said.
The woman clapped a hand to her chest. “And such a pretty one, too.” She shot out a hand, the action reminiscent of a striking snake. Her fingers wrapped around my wrist, the grip surprisingly strong. “Don’t you think so, Percy?”
“Very pretty,” Percy agreed. “A perfect blank canvas.”
For what? I might have asked out loud, but I was too busy trying to resist being dragged over the threshold. It wasn’t just her grip that was strong. “Oh, come now,” she said. “Don’t be shy. Let Lola take care of you.”
I turned around, searching for something from Beads. Help? Clarification? An agreement that these were two of the oddest people I’d ever met? All three, probably. But he’d already walked away. Percy’s hand closed around my other wrist, the combined force of both of them too strong to withstand.
“I just want in,” I said as the door closed.
“You are in,” they said in uncanny unison.
Lola smiled, her teeth unnaturally white. “And we’ll have you through processing in no time at all.”
“Processing?”
Neither answered. The relief as they let go of my wrists didn’t last long when they both linked arms with me and marched me down a long corridor between them.
In contrast to the color palette of Percy and Lola, the room they led me into was white.
Startling so. That didn’t hold my interest for long when I registered the surgical table at its center.
I tried to take a step back, intent on putting more space between me and the cold, clinical surface that screamed wrongness.
Percy and Lola weren’t having it, shepherding me past the table—thank god—and over to the far side of the room and a full-length mirror.
“What’s processing?” I asked again.
Lola grabbed my chin, her fingers digging in. She turned my head to the left and then to the right, leaning closer to study my face. Her breath smelled faintly of rose and sugar, as if she regularly indulged in Turkish Delight. “Processing is where we get you ready for Wonderland.”
“Ready?”
“We make you prettier,” Percy said.
“Definitely a shave and a haircut,” Lola said as she stepped back.
“More suitable clothes,” Percy added.
Lola narrowed her eyes and looked thoughtful. “I don’t like the eye color.”
“Well, that’s just fucking rude,” I snapped. “I don’t like your hair color or your dress, but do you see me mentioning it?”
She gave no sign of having heard me, her brow creased in concentration. “I don’t think we need plastic surgery.”
If it weren’t for the looming specter of the surgical table at my back, I might have thought I’d heard wrong. “Plastic surgery? Are you insane?”
Percy placed his hands on his hips and raked his gaze over me. “I need to see the body first. We don’t know how big his cock is.”
“And you’re not going to find out.” I mustered some calm by counting to ten. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but you’re not doing anything to me. I don’t need a haircut. My clothes are fine. And I’m not showing you my cock. You’ll have to get your cheap thrills some other way.”
They both stared at me, seconds ticking by in slow succession. Eventually, Lola nodded. “Percy will escort you out.”
Percy frowned. “Why do I have to do it? Why can’t you do it?”
Lola rolled her eyes. “It’s always the same if I ask you to do something. Arguments and more arguments.”
I cut across the beginnings of their domestic.
I hadn’t yet decided whether they were a couple or brother and sister.
A niggle at the back of my mind told me it was likely both.
“I don’t care who escorts me. I don’t even care if nobody escorts me.
Just wave me in the general direction of Wonderland and I’ll find my way. ”
“Oh no, dear.” Lola’s sympathetic expression said she pitied my lack of cognitive ability. “When we say out, we don’t mean into Wonderland. Not without processing.”
“Not without processing,” Percy echoed. “No one goes into Wonderland without a ticket without going through processing.”
“No one,” Lola said.
“So I go back outside?”
Lola beamed at me, clearly proud that I’d managed to make the leap in logic. “There’ll be another boat tomorrow.”
I stared at her. “You’re telling me that my options are to spend twenty-four hours outside on an island—”
“Not twenty-four hours,” Percy said. He checked his watch, a dainty silver affair that hung loosely on his wrist. “The boat will be back in twenty-three hours and thirty-two minutes.”
“Wow!” I said, making zero effort to hide my sarcasm. “That twenty-eight minutes makes all the difference. But as I was saying, sleep on an island, or let you make me”—the word stuck in my throat—”prettier?”
Lola nodded enthusiastically.
This was some weird shit, but I needed to think about Warren. No one else was coming to save him. What was a haircut and a shave compared to that? People paid good money for pampering. I could think of it as a spa session. Not that I’d ever visited one, but there was a first time for everything.
“I tell you what,” Lola said, pulling a panel in the wall open and pressing a button. “Let’s have a nice, relaxing drink together, and then you can make your decision.”
The door opened within a minute to admit a man who looked pleasingly normal compared to Percy and Lola. He had short brown hair, a face devoid of makeup, and he wore a plain white shirt and black trousers. He held a silver tray on which there were three tall glasses containing a bright blue drink.
He stepped forward, Lola and Percy both taking a drink each and then looking expectantly at me. After a moment’s hesitation, I took the remaining glass.
The man immediately turned on his heel and left with the empty tray. “Thank you, Emmanuel,” Percy called after him. “Emmanuel’s such a sweetheart,” he added once he’d gone.
I brought the glass to my nose and sniffed it. It didn’t smell like anything I recognized. “What is it?”
“A Wonderland special,” Lola said.
I tried a different tack. “What’s in it?”
“All the best things,” Percy said. “Try it.”
“Why is it blue?”
Percy blinked. “Why is anything blue? You may as well ask why it’s wet.”
Giving up on getting a straight answer from either of these strange people, I took an experimental sip. Slightly fruity. Definitely refreshing. A slight sharpness. “Is it alcoholic?”
Percy’s answer was to push on the bottom of my glass and make me drink more. “There you go,” he said, apparently pleased by how much I’d managed. “Good boy.”
Good boy. Jesus! “I think,” I said—or at least that was what I tried to say.
In reality, it came out as one word that all blended together.
I closed my eyes, fighting a wave of dizziness.
When I opened them, there were two Percys and two Lolas.
I laughed and tried to tell them that one of them had been more than enough, but it sounded even worse than my first attempt at speaking.
Lola peeled my fingers away from the glass. Or glasses. There were two of them as well. She hadn’t touched her drink. Neither had Percy. “Yoooooudrrruggedmmmee.”
The two Lolas both smiled. “Of course we did, dear. You were being difficult, and we’re busy people. We don’t have time for difficult. You’re not the only person we need to process today.”
I tried to tell them I didn’t want to be processed, but as whatever they’d given me really dug its claws in, it was all I could do to stay standing. Seeing me sway, Percy grabbed my arm and steered me toward the surgical table. “Have a lie down. Bruises aren’t pretty.”
There wasn’t a place in the world I wanted to be less, but I had a feeling that if I tried to stand, I’d throw up. Maybe if I lay down for a moment and closed my eyes. Just a few seconds. No longer. Then I’d get the hell out of here.
“Some bruises are pretty,” Lola argued. “If they’re done right. Like the ones left behind by a whip.”
“Only if it doesn’t break the skin,” Percy said.
“Well, of course. Blood ruins the aesthetic.”
The turn their conversation had taken made me even more determined to fight off the effects of the drug and stay conscious.
But the nausea, the sweat on my brow, and the way the floor had started spinning every time I tried to open my eyes said it was a battle I didn’t have any chance of winning.
And that was before gentle fingers started combing through my hair and making soft shushing sounds.
Percy? Lola? Both of them? I didn’t have a clue.
I remembered nothing more.