“Alice?” Tim again.

“No,” Alice finally said, a little angrier than she meant it. “I don’t know what The Law of Complex Color is. Should I? It didn’t sound as awful as everything else I just read.”

“But it is,” said Tim. His glasses had slid down the bridge of his nose again; he pushed them back up. “It’s terrifying. Don’t you see? They’ve stripped him of his color.”

“What?” Alice startled. She felt Oliver flinch.

“His color, my dear. His color.”

“But I don’t understand,” she said. “How could they—”

“You should understand better than anyone, coming from Ferenwood as you do,” Tim said. “The laws work the same in Furthermore: Living off the land gives us our color; it’s the magic we consume that makes us bright. Without it—well,” Tim said, gesturing to her face. “I’m sure you know better than anyone the effects of having little magic.”

Alice felt she’d been slapped in the face.

She’d always known what people thought of her; she’d heard the whispers around town. Ferenwood folk had skin and hair and eyes as rich and bright as the land itself; it was the magic in the fruits and plants they ate that gave the people their hue. Being colorful was the mark of being magical, and Alice, having no color, was presumed to have no magic, either. And after her recent display at her Surrender, Alice was sure she’d finally proven true all their false suspicions. She hung her head in shame. She didn’t even try to refute Tim’s point.

“So Father looks like me, now?” she said quietly. “He has no color at all?”

“It’s a bit different than that,” said Tim. “Once an inmate is placed in solitary confinement, he is stripped of all rich color and left only as a grayscale version of himself. He carries not a single bit of brightness, not in his eyes, not in his cheeks. But you, Alice, you exist in full-color, not grayscale,” Tim explained. “The bit of brown in your eyes—or maybe the soft pink in your cheeks—these are full and real colors, despite their limited presence.

“But prisons in Furthermore are built only in scales of gray. Currently, your father possesses no full-color of any kind, which makes him incompatible with the real world. If he tried to go home as he is now, the physical demands of a full-color existence would crush him. It’s a security measure that makes it impossible for him to escape.”

A single sob escaped Alice’s lips before she clapped a hand over her mouth. There was such a sudden influx of awful news to contend with that Alice didn’t even know where to begin.

At least she finally understood why Oliver so desperately needed her. He wanted to solve his task by using her talent. The talent Alice hadn’t shared with anyone. The one she should have surrendered, and had not.

The talent she hated.

Oh, she could kill him for it. For lying to her. For deceiving her. For making her think he actually cared about her or Father or any of the pain she’d suffered in Father’s absence. Oliver didn’t care about her, Alice thought. He cared only about completing his task.

Oh, how could she ever trust him again?

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

“Alice?” It was Tim again. Tim, the only person willing to tell her the whole, ugly truth. “Do you understand? Do you now understand why you’re so desperately needed?”

“I do,” she said softly. “But there’s still one thing I don’t understand.”

“Yes?”

Alice didn’t know how to put this delicately. “Why didn’t they just eat him?” she asked. “Why put him in prison?”

Tim was suddenly and visibly uncomfortable. “Well,” he said airily. “You mustn’t see us all through the same lens, Ms. Queensmeadow. We don’t all approve of eating visitors, you know. In fact,” he said, holding up a finger, “in fact, just the other day I initiated a petition to spare the young ones, you know, whose magic is most pure, and thus most coveted—”

“All the same,” Alice said steadily. “Why is he still alive?”

Tim cleared his throat. “Well, you see, it’s the law that requires it. The law says that prisoners must be made as useful as possible before they’re . . . sold off to the highest bidder.”

“Right.” Alice nodded. “So, just to be clear: You enslave us, work us nearly to death, sell us, and only then do you eat us.”

“Why, Ms. Queensmeadow, when you put it like that it sounds almost inhumane—”

Alice stood up carefully, collected her pamphlets, her dignity, and her broken heart, shoved them in her pockets, and turned to Oliver. “Our deal is done, Oliver Newbanks. You may return home now. I will find Father on my own.”

And with that, she turned on her heel, stormed out the door and down the stairs and through the hall and back outside, and left in her wake a stunned Oliver and a disheartened Tim, and did not cry but six tears before she sniffed the rest away.

And then she ran.

She ran as far as she could get from Tim’s red door, ran directly into and through the forest Oliver had told her to stay away from (Alice didn’t care a whit what Oliver thought anymore) until she reached the edge of the woods and could go no farther. It was there, in the middle of nowhere (not to be confused with Nowhere), that Alice fell to her knees and hugged herself through a crush of heartache.

Father was in Enslaved Imprisonment.

This was a truth Alice’s young heart could not handle. Three long years Alice had been lost and tortured, hoping and wishing that Father would come home. She’d always prayed he was okay, that she would one day know what had happened to him, but now that that day had arrived, she was sorry for it. Her heart seized, her lungs squeezed, and Alice fought through the pain for a gasp of air. She felt infinitely powerless in the face of Father’s enslavement, but being angry gave her something to do, so she took hold of it with both hands and refused to let it go. Oh, there was so much to be angry about.