Seeing Redd

CHAPTER 7

D ODGE HAD left to perform his guardsman duties. Not wanting to be alone, Alyss donned a cloak against the night’s chill and ventured out onto the palace grounds. She probably should have gone to sleep. In his teasing, avuncular manner, Bibwit was always reminding her that, for a queen to be at her best, she should get at least eight lunar hours of sleep a night in order to avoid making an unwise decision due to fatigue. There would be reasons enough for unwise decisions in this life, he explained. Yet here

she was, scepter in hand, following a path between the palace and the outer wall that separated the grounds from the rest of Wondertropolis. Geraniums of yellow, lavender, and red bowed as she passed. The branches of hollizalea shrubs unique to Wonderland dipped in respect. The night air carried the melody of “The Queen’s March” softly hummed by sunflowers.

Alyss approached a hedge indistinguishable from those around it, paused to make sure she wasn’t being watched, then stepped into the hedge and-

Vanished.

The roots of the hedge had unlocked a large hatchway camouflaged with furry groundcover. Alyss descended through the opening into a subterranean chamber, the location of which was known only to

her most trusted advisers and the select few Bibwit had recruited to secretly move the Heart Crystal here one moonless night.

Ridiculous that I have to act the thief whenever I want to visit it.

There it was, the creative source for the universe, its glow-as always-causing the crystal to seem on the verge of swelling beyond its confines.

Depressing to see it stowed in this underground prison. How can I reinstate the Inventors’ Parade if the crystal must remain hidden away, as it does in order to be kept out of the hands of those who’d misuse its power?

But being in possession of the crystal as well as the scepter from her Looking Glass Maze, wasn’t she powerful enough to defeat any foe? Presumably. But why risk it? She and Bibwit had decided: Better to keep the crystal hidden.

Alyss knew that reviving the annual Inventors’ Parade didn’t rank high in the hierarchy of what was important to Wonderland’s security and improvement. But whenever she remembered the parades of her earliest youth-the Heart Crystal out in the open for all to enjoy, the public lining the streets to see the latest contraptions dreamed up by fellow citizens, the inventors doing their best to show off so that Queen Genevieve might pass their inventions into the crystal, upon which, in some other world, a version of them would come to be-whenever she remembered all of this, Alyss longed to bring back the Inventors’ Parade, hoping it might signify a small return to…well, if not a better time (as Bibwit would surely deny

it), then a different time, one in which her parents had been alive.

The hatchway slid closed and Alyss took up her usual position on a viewing platform halfway to the chamber floor, as close to the crystal as possible. Her scepter in one hand, she reached out toward the crystal with her other, to maximize her remote viewing ability. Her imagination’s eye immediately filled with the bright wash of the crystal’s light, which faded by degrees to reveal an old-fashioned dining room with mahogany wainscoting, floral-patterned wallpaper, a heavy wooden sideboard: the dining room at the deanery of Christ Church College, Oxford. Among those enjoying a dinner of roasted hens at the

table, she saw herself-rather, she saw her double, whom, by twining her powers with those of the Heart

Crystal, she’d created and sent to Earth to take her place in the Liddell family.

Miss Alice Liddell: adopted daughter of the reverend and his wife, former friend of Charles Dodgson, near-wife to Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, but now enamored of Reginald Hargreaves, who was sitting across the table from her.

Reginald was a student at Christ Church, a country squire who enjoyed tramping about the fields of his Hampshire estate, Cuffnells, much more than being holed up in a room with books and theories. Although he sat between two of Alice’s sisters, Edith and Lorina, his attention was markedly fixed on

Alice-which the reverend and Mrs. Liddell, presiding happily over all, did not fail to notice. How cozy and simple things seem.

Alyss knew better. She had eaten in that room many times, and when in the thick of whatever traumas a day in Oxford had offered up, nothing had seemed simple. But she couldn’t help thinking it-things were simpler there.

She watched, feeling like one of the company even though the scene was silent and she could only guess at the amusing anecdote Reginald had related that set everyone laughing. Alice was laughing the hardest to show how much she liked him. He grinned, not taking his eyes off her even when Lorina asked for his attention, apparently reciting some humorous tidbit of her own.

The easy way they show their affection…

She thought of Dodge, of herself and Dodge, how theirs was a stuttering kind of love, a tentative, timid thing, a-

Tzzzz.

Something’s wrong. The hatchway had opened. The march of pressing business was descending toward her.

“What is it?” she asked as Dodge, Bibwit, and General Doppelganger came into view. “The queendom is under attack,” said the general. “By whom we don’t yet know.”

“We know,” Dodge said, a vengeful, dissatisfied look about him, a look that Alyss knew had everything to do with Redd, The Cat, and Sir Justice’s murder.

“Several of our outposts have been routed,” the general continued, “and several more are engaged with the enemy as I speak. I have ordered the deployment of reinforcement decks to prevent any attacks from penetrating farther into the queendom.”

Under attack? Outposts routed? They were waiting for her to say something. “There are reports,” Dodge said.

“Of?”

“We have reason to believe that those attacking us are Glass Eyes,” Bibwit informed her. “We’re in the process of verifying the intelligence.”

“Glass Eyes?” Alyss echoed in disbelief. After Redd’s downfall, attempts had been made to reprogram them, but this proved a more difficult task than Wonderland’s engineers and programmers had originally supposed. Only a small number of them had been successfully reconfigured when she and her advisers realized that the populace was too used to being terrorized by them to ever view them as a safeguarding element.

Dodge spoke in a tense whisper, as if to raise his voice was to unleash unappeasable fury: “Redd must have survived. You should have let me go into the crystal after her.”

“We don’t know that it’s Redd,” insisted the general. “How else could the Glass Eyes be attacking us?”

It was a good question. Alyss looked to Bibwit. He shrugged. His ears swiveled sideways, as if abashed. “Learned albino that I am, I hate to admit ignorance, but in this instance it’s all I have.”

Alyss closed her eyes and cast the gaze of her imagination around Wonderland’s borders, glimpsing one military outpost after another…

In a shady jungle of Outerwilderbeastia, a Seven Card was battling a couple of Glass Eyes with his crystal shooter, getting the better of them until an orb generator exploded against the cache of munitions he was guarding and he lost his life.

In a quadrant of black rock in the Chessboard Desert, pair after pair of card soldiers stumbled choking out of a half-destroyed bunker, managing to escape death by fire or asphyxiation only to be skewered by waiting Glass Eyes.

And at one particularly distant outpost, situated between a scrubby edge of the Everlasting Forest and the lava geysers of the Volcanic Plains, Alyss saw the aftermath of a battle the Glass Eyes had clearly won; wherever she directed her imagination’s eye, card soldiers were splayed in various attitudes of death, among them a Two Card whose hand was on his still-holstered crystal shooter, and a Four Card who, if she was to judge by the bodies surrounding his, had taken out a respectable number of the enemy before giving up his life.

“It is the Glass Eyes,” she said finally. “But I don’t see Redd.”

“She’s not going to show herself with the front line,” Dodge said, impatient. “She’ll wait for a better opportunity.”

General Doppelganger nudged Bibwit and jutted his head forward, urging: Tell her. “Is there something else?” Alyss asked.

“Jack of Diamonds has escaped the mines,” said the tutor.

Just what she needed: on top of everything, to worry about a renegade brat of high birth and large buttocks who believed that the world owed him…the world. “Are his escape and these attacks related?”

“There’s no intelligence to prove it,” said the general, “nor rule it out.”

She trained her imagination’s eye on an outpost in an icy quadrant of the Chessboard Desert, where an entire platoon of card soldiers was about to be annihilated by a cascade of AD52 razor-cards. In the Heart Crystal’s chamber, she swung her scepter. Dodge, Bibwit, and the general jumped, startled. But the motion of Alyss’ arm rippled across great distances and the razor-cards suddenly changed direction, as if bouncing off an invisible force field. The Glass Eyes responsible for the attack stood in momentary shock, but the card soldiers, finding themselves still alive, shot round after round of their own razor-cards at the enemy and ran for cover behind the charred remnants of a bunker, surviving for the moment.

“Send as many reinforcement decks as you need,” Alyss told General Doppelganger. “Ready the chessmen, if you haven’t already. Use every means necessary to keep the violence out of Wondertropolis. Bibwit, issue a warning to citizens: There is scattered fighting on the distant edges of the land, with little threat of harm to any of them. But to be safe, they should remain indoors whenever possible.”

She would again test the limits of her imagination, use her powers to aid each and every outpost. Too bad she couldn’t kill the Glass Eyes simply by imagining them dead, but such a thing wasn’t possible. Glass Eyes were, in their limited way, willful. Imagination by itself, no matter how powerful, could not kill

those who possessed the will to live.

“I’ll do what I can from here,” she said. “That is all.” Bibwit and General Doppelganger turned to leave. “And me?” Dodge asked.

“A guardsman’s duty is to guard the palace,” she answered, knowing he wouldn’t like it. “However…” Something in her tone made Bibwit and the general stop and turn. The queen stared only at Dodge. “…as for Redd, we should expect the worst.”