Alice's Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #3

With the invention of a serum that prevents most people infected with the zombie sickness from becoming raving cannibals, Victorian society finds itself in need of more standards: to separate the infected from the whole, to control when and how the infected can come into contact with the pure, to establish legal contracts, precedence, employment, and more, with regards to the walking dead.

The very backbone of the British Empire is its standards.

The middle daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, Alice Liddell, finds a certain lack of charm in the standards she must follow, with increasing strictness, day after day. Wild and rebellious, she battles her father’s cold discipline, her mother’s striving to hide her middle-class origins, and the hollow madness of the world around her, in which the teetering Empire desperately pretends that nothing is, in fact, the matter.

Enter Mr. Charles Dodgson: one of the chaste Dons of Oxford, married to his mathematics. He charms Alice and her sisters, often taking them on walks and boat rides (chaperoned, of course), and telling them jokes and stories. He is twenty-four when he first meets them.

And he is dead.

Turned in a tragic accident at Rugby, Charles uses the serum to keep him from the ordinary sort of madness that affects zombies.

But it doesn’t affect the elegant madness of his brain.

And one day, as he sees Alice struggle against the chains that constrict her, chains so similar to his own...

...one of his playful stories becomes something more.

Episode 3: In which Alice, her sisters, the Reverend Mr. Duckworth, and Mr. Dodgson boat up the Thames, and a story--the story--is begun.