Falling to one’s death was a sensation Alec thought he should’ve well been accustomed to by that point. Turned out, it wasn’t. One did not simply develop a constitutional immunity to the effect of plummeting thousands of feet to an untimely end. He screamed, a great deal. Which helped. He clung to the nearest warm body, in this case Lulu, for dear life. Which also helped, given her hysterics matched his own. There was comfort in the solidarity at least.

“I can fix this!” Alec could hear Hattie shout over the cacophony. A few bangs sounded, something that was probably an expletive, the sound of grinding metal. Another expletive from Hattie, a series of sputters from the ship’s engine that fell flat one after another. Alec wasn’t counting, but there couldn’t have been more than a handful of moments left before their journey would be coming to a very abrupt and unpleasant end.

Adventures certainly weren’t what they were cracked up in all the movies to be.

The trees of a forest below were becoming worryingly near when Hattie gave something one final, vigorous wrench and the ship’s engine roared back to life and sent all the passengers therein careening sideways. Alec felt the wind knocked positively out of him on impact, then again several times as the ship skipped over the dense canopy of trees like a stone on a pond. At last it broke through the branches, bouncing from tree limb to tree limb until they landed rough in a dense copse of bushes.

Not that Alec was aware of any of this, he’d squeezed his eyes shut and elected to stop existing for the duration of it.

Only when the world outside of him stopped moving violently to and fro did he allow it to come back to him in pieces. He was no longer upright, of that he was certain. He hurt in very many places, he was also sure of, and he was being squeezed by something. Quite terribly so. He heard someone make a pained noise above him and he found, once he’d finally opened his eyes and allowed the world to exist again, that it was Lulu holding onto him.

They had rolled some distance away from the crashed longboat, and it seemed as though Lulu had borne the brunt of the fall for him. Alec, feeling for anything in him broken or particularly badly damaged, was relieved to find himself mostly okay. Bruised, battered, aching in a number of places, but mostly okay. He carefully extracted himself from Lulu’s grip to roll onto his knees upright.

“Ow,” he summarized. Lulu gave a grunt of a laugh next to him.

“You ain’t kiddin’,” she said. She rose, too, though she was worryingly slow to do so. She looked scraped in places, but, as Alec gave her a once-over, no bones looked like they were where they shouldn’t be.

“Are you okay?” Alec asked anyway. Lulu gave herself a pat down.

“Somehow,” she said, after her assessment, “Yeah. Not dead, so that’s a start.” She pushed herself to standing and stretched, a couple of joints popping back into place. She helped Alec up. Some yards away from them, in the clearing of yellow-gold aspen trees, Hattie was getting back up to her feet as well. She had a tree’s worth of sticks stuck in her hair and her glasses had bent out of shape, but she too looked mostly alright.

“Everyone in one piece?” she called to them. They limped across the space to her and Hattie did a thorough pat-down of Alec. He tried several times to tell her yes, he was fine. No, nothing was broken (that he knew of). Yes, he could still see and hadn’t gone cross-eyed and didn’t have a concussion and she was holding three fingers up and he was fine. She still poked and prodded and insisted on bandaging the one scrape on his knee that had begun to bleed just a little, but after that she seemed appeased. She then turned her attention to the broken mess of wood and metal engine bits their longboat had become, stalked to the still smoking heap, and gave it a sharp kick.

“Cheap piece of-,” she said, following with an odd word that sounded in tone like an expletive, which made Lulu lurch forward to cover his ears. Hattie gave the longboat’s engine a few more kicks for good measure, then pulled tools from her bag and set to work on repairs, however pointless that seemed to Alec. He almost said something, but Lulu shook her head and shrugged and pulled him away to sit on a nearby fallen log to settle in and let Hattie work.

Hattie was a woman determined. But no matter how many times she smacked a pipe with what looked like a wrench, or shoved something back into place with a grinding noise that couldn’t have been healthy, the thing never approached anything that looked operational.

At least they hadn’t landed anywhere so terribly awful, this time. No forest people had attacked them yet, no strange, glowing, hundred-story tall creatures had come to stomp them out like ants. The forest around them, all golden-yellow aspen trees as far as they eye could see, was quiet. Serene. The trees seemed endless, fading into a pale yellow haze in the distance. The forest floor was carpeted by a thick layer of their fallen leaves, sunlight dappling through the thick canopy here and there.

Hattie worked and an hour turned into another, and still she came no closer to getting the longboat up again. Nor did she come any closer to what had caused their crash landing in the first place. Until, that is, she found something somewhere deep in the engine’s innards that made her sit back and go, “Well now, that is peculiar.”

Alec and Lulu perked up from where they’d nearly fallen asleep on the log.

“Whatcha got there?” Lulu went to peer over her shoulder, followed close by Alec. Hattie held a handful of cables in her hand. Several were frayed and blackened at the edges. One she held apart from the other, cleanly cut in two. Alec hadn’t the first idea what part they played in the operation of the longboat, but something in Hattie’s expression made a ripple of unease go up his spine.

“That’s not...good, is it?” Lulu guessed. Hattie looked sharp, glancing around the clearing.

“No. And it was no accident, either,” she said.

---

Somewhere far beyond the edge of the clearing, in the shadow of a dense knot of trees, a pair of hungry eyes watched them.

The Cheshire Cat had found its prey.