Kallai smiled to himself when his sister suggested Through the Looking Glass. It was a book he'd read to her when they were younger. Kallai had read both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel more times than he could count. Sadly, Kailani didn't continue reading, instead finding her entertainment interests lying solely in films, because reading took so much more time and effort - true, though completely worth it in his opinion. Somewhere along the line, his sister must have committed the title to memory.

Kallai loved it for more reasons than one. To start with, it was a classic piece of literature. Secondly, it was a story based on the tragic and inevitable loss of childhood innocence which made it one of the more real and appropriate books. But it also told a quite possibly drug-induced story based on a real girl who was met by the author on several occasions when she was between the ages of eight and eleven, in which time she was also his photography subject. Kallai couldn't tell you exactly why that made him like the book more - perhaps knowing the character had once been a real person made it more believable, perhaps the possible influence of drugs made it more realistic, perhaps the room for accusation of things more disturbing than photographs made it darker and more mysterious, like it was hiding answers you would only find after the hundredth time reading it. So he didn't hesitate to name the group chat exactly that, and could only wonder what Shadow's reason had been for putting it in her top three.

But the group quickly dissolved into some smaller space at the back of his mind, because he was in his favourite class. Physics was absolutely wonderful - and that was the best word for it, because it was so thought-provoking and interesting he couldn't help but wonder - but nothing could top his love for English Literature. However difficult physics became when the multiverse theorem was taken into account, libraries of literature were amazingly normal crossroads into more than a million universes of their own.

Unfortunately, because of their Welsh-proud exam boards, every novel they studied had to have some link to Wales. It was a credit to his teachers just how many novels they had managed to twist into having some indirect link to the country.

He quickly found himself re-absorbed into Of Mice And Men - which had apparently been performed in Cardiff. He loved the predictability of each page. It wasn't like the books whose 'twists' were obvious ten chapters earlier. It was the kind where the author was letting you know where it would go so that when it did, it felt normal. Normal for animals and people to die, normal for men to control their wives, normal for every accursed thing of that time to exist rather neatly in such a small book.

What stirred the storm in the pit of his stomach, though, was that with every turn of the page, he was confronted with their faces. It was no longer so easy to concentrate in class, now that he'd been given this ridiculously crazy new task. The worst part, that he'd never admit to anyone, was that he had hope it would work. There was no scientific reason behind hope, there was no deep analysis; it was a purity he hadn't allowed himself for quite some time.

But there it was.

It lived in shape and colour everywhere he looked, whether his eyes were open or closed - sometimes as Kailani's excited grin and others as Minion's calculating gaze, Tallie's willing smile or, more often than not, Shadow's determined stare.

How was it that he'd gotten himself so deep in this mess? How had he let himself fall in with this group, knowing what they stood to question? Was it possible he felt charged with the need to get answers to questions of his own? His anger flared silently as he lost where they were up to, scanning the pages quickly to match the teacher's words to the page.