We both turn to opposite sides as the sound of police cars surrounds the morgue. I peek over my shoulder and see if he is checking me out while I am getting dressed.

He is.

But he turns around and clears his throat once I see him. I blush and turn back, facing the wall. I feel awkward being the weak one with Jack, now that my heart is unconditionally open to him. I wonder how intimate we were when he was Adam, my boyfriend. I know we were in love because my heart tells me so, but how intimate?

"Jack," I say, unbuttoning.

"Yes?"

I am contemplating asking him if he knows anything about our past lives, but don't want to turn him away if he thinks I am crazy. "How do you always find me?" I ask instead.

"I don't know, really," he says. "It's strange. I'll be sitting somewhere, and then feel this need to see you. This intuition that you are in danger. And suddenly I find myself near you."

I don't know what to think of that. I pull on the nurse's dress and glasses.

"And you?" he asks. His voice is muffled now, having zipped himself inside the bag.

"Excuse me?" I put on the glasses.

"Aren't you going to tell me where you live so I can pick you up for our postponed date?"

I turn around and smile at his persistence. My face changes when I realize I can't tell him I live in an asylum. He might be a weird guy. But I am nutcase. At least my life fits a nutcase. The song "I am a Nut" replays in my head.

"If we survive this, I might tell you," I say as I roll the bed out to the entrance.

Outside, the main doors spring open, and an endless horde of men with guns enter. I am surprised when they greet me with concern. They ask me if I am all right.

I play shocked for a while and recite the story Jack told me. I point at the Cheshire's room. Funny how they buy it. There aren't any signs of breaking in. But they believe me. They are good to me. Maybe it's my looks, wearing a nurse's outfit.

Is that what the world asks of me? To blend in? A nurse's outfit or a doctor's would do the job? Is that mandatory to fit into any society, to become a recognizable stereotype?

I feel like I've had too much Pillar in my head lately.

Still rolling the bed toward the main door, I am expecting to meet the Pillar's chauffeur on the way.

"Wait!" Someone summons me right before I leave through the main door.

I turn around, and it's another nurse. A buff policeman stands proudly next to her. I hope my cover isn't blown.

"Yes?" I adjust my glasses and wiggle my nose.

"Who's that you are taking out?" the nurse asks.

"A patient who'd been wrongly admitted about an hour ago." I twist the truth. "An ambulance is waiting for him outside to transfer him to another morgue."

"Him?" Her face knots as she reads the charts.

"Oh, silly me." I play nerd of all nerds. "I mean her. It's a deceased girl."

"What's her name again?"

I shrug. "Wonder," I say. "Alice Wonder."

"Hmm..." She nods as the curious officer peeks into her charts.

"She died in a bus accident."

"Oh. That's right." The nurse points at the name on the chart. "Poor girl. She killed her friends, driving a bus herself."

"Really?" I try not to grimace.

"Aren't you from around here?" The police officer chuckles, hands proudly tucked in his belt. "The incident was all over the news a few months ago," Mr. Know-it-all says.

"Ah, I've only worked here for a month." I smile like a weird girl. What am I doing about the fact that it's impossible the corpse is still unharmed when it's a few months old? Why would I be moving it at this point? "I am from a small town near Oxford."

"That's why," the nurse says. "Haven't seen you here before. You're good to go." She waves a hand without looking at me.

"Thank you," I say. "But wasn't this girl admitted to an asylum?"

"Nonsense." The policeman laughs with the nurse. "It's such a rumor. She is dead like the rest. How could she survive the accident when the rest died?"

"Then how did you know she killed them?"

"A note, honey," the nurse says. "She left a note with her sisters before she did it. You talk too much. Now get going. They say we have an injured mortician inside."

I nod and roll Jack outside.

A few strides into the red-and-blue-glaring street, the chauffeur, dressed as a medical driver, approaches me. It takes him a moment to realize I am the one rolling the bed, not the one inside it.

"I believe things didn't go as planned," he says in his mousy voice. Seriously, he has to shave the whiskers off. I shake my head as he ushers me toward the ambulance.

"We thought so when it took you too long to leave the morgue." He opens the back doors for me. "The toe tag prank was the Cheshire's, by the way," he says, and stops me from rolling the bed inside. "Don't ask me how he knew you'd be at the morgue. I guess he expected it."

"A friend is hiding inside," I whisper.

"A friend?" The chauffeur's mousy ears pop out like two pointed parachutes. "Who?"

"His name is Jack."

Suspiciously, the chauffeur zips the bag open, and then stares with confusion at me.

I don't understand the conflict at first. But then I look into the bag. There is no Jack inside. Just the corpse of some guy I don't know.

Chapter 23

The Pillar's ambulance, driving through London

The Pillar is sitting on the opposite side in the back of the ambulance, curiously inspecting the corpse I mistook for Jack earlier—however that happened, I don't know. I can't even think about it. I just thought I had a grip on the thin line between what's real and what's not. I was wrong again.

The nameless corpse is stretched on the ledge between us. The cold metal of the ambulance is set against my back. The chauffeur is driving us to the outskirts of London, so we take the Pillar's limousine back to Oxford and then to the asylum. He is struggling with activating the ambulance's siren, slowing us down. Foolishly, he sticks his head out of the window and yells, "Wee-woo. Wee-woo!" at the dense traffic so they will make way. "Wee-woo. Wee-woo," he repeats. "Ambulance! Dead man in here. Make way!"

I pretend I never saw this happen, and gaze at the Pillar, who is genuinely amused by the corpse in the middle.

The Pillar cocks his head, sucking on a mini hookah with a sticker saying, I know why a raven is like a writing desk. He reaches for the corpse and inspects the deceased's head. It's also chopped off—probably a fresh dead kid sent to the morgue.

How in Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's name did that happen?

The Pillar is interested in the corpse's mouth, touching it and inspecting it. He hands me his hookah for a moment and uses both hands, trying to make the dead man smile.

"It's a shame you can't smile when on your way to meet your maker," he says to the dead. "You don't want to leave a bad impression when meeting Him. It will be the most important interview in your afterlife." He winks at me and pulls his hookah back.

"Hey," he calls his Chauffeur. "If I told you that this miserable corpse"—he stops and points at the deceased—"is too tired to fly up there and meet his maker, what solution would you suggest?"