Seeing Redd

CHAPTER 8

“T O BE embarrassed of me ’cause I’m a halfer!” Homburg Molly complained as a pair of

imagination-stimulant dealers came at her, each wielding a Hand of Tyman-five short blades rising from the handle grip. She had never fought against Hands of Tyman before, but what did that matter? She could deal with them. She could deal with anything.

“Not to let me show them what I can do!”

Somersaulting over her attackers, she shrugged open her knapsack of blades and corkscrews, landed on her feet and jumped backward, felt the momentary resistance of Wonderland steel entering flesh.

She would lose points for that.

She had noticed too late: Her so-called assailants were only two hungry men hoping for charity; what she’d mistaken for Hands of Tyman were alms cups. She pulled away quickly, before her blades could do much damage. The men stood with stricken faces, their hands pressed to their wounds.

“Sorry,” she said, backing away from them. “I’m…sorry.”

She continued down the street, had hardly gone the length of a jabberwock’s tail when her homburg started to vibrate. She ducked left and-

A rock whizzed past, barely missing her.

She turned, assuming one of the homeless men had thrown it, but they had vanished. Her hat vibrated again. She ducked right and-

Weesh, weesh, weesh, weesh.

A rusted garbage can lid hurtled by, nearly taking her head off. That’s when she spotted them: indistinct figures in the dark at the left edge of the street, taking cover behind a half-tumbled wall and the rotted hulks of what she guessed were transports of some kind. (Where was she anyway? This street was like none she’d ever seen in Wonderland.) She flicked her homburg flat and held it over her head, shielding herself from the hunks of masonry, weather-rotted window-panes, and other junk scavenged from the surrounding buildings being thrown at her.

“Probably Black Imagination enthusiasts,” she mumbled. They always seemed to be the least gifted in imagination.

Clang! Bongk! Dink! A sleet of debris pelted her homburg shield.

But what if she was wrong? What if those bombarding her were simply innocent civilians who were afraid

of her, a stranger with a curious arsenal at her disposal? The question was, should she use the full force of her skills to combat them or was she just supposed to warn them, to hint at what they’d endure if she

gave free rein to her abilities?

Clangk! Thonk th-thonk thonk thonk!

More street-waste was raining down around her than before, as if the number of her antagonists had grown. Yet they weren’t closing in on her; they stayed hidden, under cover.

It was probably another test of her self-control.

She would abide by the Millinery code of resorting to lethal violence only after every other option had failed. She’d already been wrong once this mission. She couldn’t afford to be wrong again.

With an underhanded twist of the wrist, she sent her homburg shield whirling toward the oncoming projectiles. Almost in the same instant, she snapped open her wrist-blades. The homburg ricocheted from one makeshift missile to another, deflecting them back upon those who’d thrown them. With the spinning blades attached to her wrists, she easily knocked away the odd chunks of mortar that made it past the homburg, which now boomeranged back to her like an eager pet. As she listened to the fading footfalls

of her assailants, she snapped the weapon back into its traditional homburg shape and flipped it onto her head.

Something was glowing in the half-ruined wall. She approached for a better look: a luminescent top hat emblem embedded in the brick.

“That was too easy,” she said, reaching out to touch the emblem, when- Eeeeeech! Eeeeeech! Eeeeeech!

A flock of seekers came soaring out of the sky, dive-bombing toward her. No need to debate with herself this time. Seekers were part vulture, part fly, all nastiness.

Molly punched her belt buckle. The long, crescent-shaped sabers of her belt flicked open and, with both sets of wrist-blades activated, she at last exercised her abilities to their fullest, twisting and tumbling through the air, slashing at the shrieking creatures, sending them headlong to the ground with a blood-wet splat until-

They were gone, the street deserted.

She snapped shut her weapons, touched the glowing symbol in the wall and the scene vanished. She was standing in a vast armory, two city blocks square, the ceiling four stories above her head: the Holographic and Transmutative Base of Xtremecombat training, or HATBOX, at the Millinery.

“Definitely too easy, even for someone as embarrassing as me,” Molly huffed.

She marched back to the control booth at the opposite end of the room. Sure, Alyss and Bibwit and everyone else said it didn’t matter that she was a halfer. Sure, she had been made the queen’s personal bodyguard. But it wasn’t as if the position came with any serious responsibilities. Alyss was too powerful to need a bodyguard. And when Hatter had held the post, she knew, he’d been more involved in policy making and missions vital to Wonderland’s security. She’d probably never be treated like a full-fledged Milliner, never be considered good enough. Why else would Rohin and Tock have been sent to Earth to keep a lookout for Redd and The Cat? She was at least as talented in combat as they were.

“More so!” she exclaimed aloud.

At the control booth, she turned the dial to Z, the most advanced skill level. No one in her class had ever gotten past W before, including Rohin and Tock.

She planted herself firmly at the starting position-the top hat symbol inked on the floor. “Begin!” she said loudly, and though she remained stationary, it was as if the walls of the room had been set spinning.

The HATBOX, which never presented the same scenario twice, was scanning its infinity of locations, enemies, and weapons for a suitable trial. The scanning was meant to disorient her, upset her mental balance. Whatever. As a hall in Mount Isolation solidified around her, she took a single step forward, felt the tickle of something like a whisker against her cheek and-

Ooomph!

She was knocked to the ground, her coat shredded near the right shoulder. She looked up and saw The Cat, Redd’s top former assassin, laughing at her. A muscular humanoid who could morph into a cute kitten at will, he stood erect on two legs, his thighs each as thick as her waist. He had powerful, sinewy arms tapering to paws, claws as sharp and long and wide as butcher knives, and a feline face with flat pink nose, whiskers, and a slobbery mouthful of fangs. Bits of Molly’s coat hung from one of his claws. She didn’t even have time to get to her feet before the scene dissolved.

“Again!” she yelled.

This time she activated her wrist-blades while the room was still scanning, its walls flickering with possible scenes and enemies. At the briefest sighting of The Cat or anything feline, she lunged forward, determined not to be caught off guard again. Yet when a new environment took on form and substance around her, The Cat was nowhere to be seen. She stood backed up against one end of a long, narrow canyon of volcanic rock, trapped by three jabberwocky.

“Nice jabberwocky,” Molly said. “Molly jabberwocky’s friend.”

Jabberwocky didn’t need friends. One of them exhaled a jet of fire at her and-

She dropped and rolled, tapped her belt buckle, and the belt’s sabers sprung open and sliced into the beast’s underbelly.

Bad move.

A jabberwock’s skin was nearly as hard as fossilized lava. Far from fatal, the saber wound only provoked the beast into a rage. It stomped and spat fire in all directions, Molly rolling first one way, then another, deftly maneuvering to get out from under the thing without being crushed. Problem was, she came out exactly where she’d been before: trapped against the canyon wall by three jabberwocky.

She shrugged open her backpack-flink!-and from among the variety of blades and corkscrews it offered took hold of two crowbar-shaped weapons, their pointed ends veering off at right angles from

the long handles. With one of these in each hand, she leaped toward the canyon wall, knife points driving into the rock and holding her momentarily aloft over the jabberwocky. She pushed off from the wall with her feet and landed on the back of the nearest jabberwock. The beast went insane, bucking and twisting its head around on its long neck, snapping its jaws at her. It required all of Molly’s strength not to fall off, just to keep her grip on the bony protuberance near the top of the beast’s spine-a lucky vertebra, not unlike the pommel of a spirit-dane’s saddle on the otherwise cratered moonscape of jabberwock skin.

Something hot flashed against Molly’s leg.

One of the jabberwocky had spit a fireball. It grazed her-worse, it grazed her mount, and now her

jabberwock and the other were fighting, burning each other alive with their furnace breath even as they reared up on their hind legs, raking and clawing at each other with their forelegs.

Thwap!

A tail came around and laid Molly flat on the ground. She had time enough to see a jabberwock approach, its mouth opening wider and wider in the yawn-like motion that inevitably preceded a fire-shot from its throat before-

The scene dissolved and the lights came on. “Again!” she yelled.

She had to set aside her anger and resentment. She had to relax. If her time at the Millinery had taught her anything, it was that adrenaline made you impulsive, overanxious. It could trick you into doing something stupid. If she was to complete level Z, she had to stay calm.

The HATBOX began its dizzying scan of possible locations and enemies. Molly took deep, even breaths and closed her eyes, opening them only when she heard the steady murmur of strangely accented voices, the clop-clop of hoofs on cement, the trundling of squeaky carriages.

She was in a city-an ancient one, judging by the looks of things. Carriages like the ones rumbling past hadn’t been seen in Wonderland for generations. And as for horses, those beasts of burden were straight out of the history programs Molly was forced to study as part of the Millinery’s classroom curriculum.

Amid the crush of pedestrians coming toward her: a man wearing greatcoat and bowler. She instinctively reached for the brim of her homburg, but he only dipped his head in greeting and continued past. The pedestrians, those in the carriages-they all seemed intent on their errands. But she wouldn’t be fooled. An attack was imminent. From what quarter, instigated by whom, she couldn’t say. But under no circumstances would she lessen her vigilance or-

A voice rose above the street’s general clamor: “Read about the carnage in Piccadilly! Death and destruction in Piccadilly! Only a tuppence to read the latest reports!”

A boy was selling newspapers on the corner. Molly walked up to him and he shoved a paper into her hand. The London Times? She’d heard Alyss talk of London. It was a city the Queen had visited during her exile from Wonderland.

“Two pence,” the boy said.

She didn’t have the leisure to find out what he wanted, snapped open a set of wrist-blades to spook him and-

Seeing that a trivial flick of the wrist produced such a blur of deadly copter blades, he sprinted off. But

Molly didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself. Not yet. She quickly flicked shut the blades.

The newspaper’s description of the carnage and destruction in Piccadilly read familiar. In the cheese shop hollowed out by an explosion, Molly recognized the aftermath of an orb generator. In witnesses’ clumsy attempts to describe a rifle that coughed bolts of light, she recognized Wonderland’s crystal shooter and its ammo of bright NRG rods produced by the frizzling together of certain gemstones. And as for the carcasses that looked like pin cushions with legs tucked underneath them, those were easy to identify-cannonball spiders in the death pose, their brief life spans having run their course, though not, according to the reporter, before the outsized creatures had taken scores of Londoners with them.

A sound like scissor blades rapidly opening and closing.

Molly’s hand jumped to the brim of her homburg. She scouted the scene.

Nothing. Just Londoners going about their business the same as before. But as she turned her attention back to the newspaper-

There it was again. Unmistakable: the sound of card soldiers being dealt in preparation for battle. She didn’t sight them until Londoners were screaming and running for shelter. They’d already unfolded themselves: a flush of soldiers from one of Redd’s decks. Unengaged, they resembled ordinary playing cards, albeit life-sized ones. But engaged for battle as they were now, unfolded to twice their usual

height, with limbs of Wonderland steel and a forward lilt to their every movement as if perpetually stalking prey, they presented an undeniably menacing aspect.

“Stay calm,” Molly whispered to herself. “Stay cool.”

The only way to “kill” one of Redd’s late-model infantry was to stab it hard in the medallion-sized area above its breast-plate, at the base of its steel-tendoned neck. The knife blade would cut through its vital circuitry and send sparks spurting like fiery blood. Thing was, in the harassment of battle, this kill spot seemed to shrink to the size of a gwormmy’s eye, to a-

Bolts of NRG shot toward her-thip thip! thip thip!-from the muzzle of a Five Card’s crystal shooter. Molly whipped the homburg from her head, used it as a trap, hands moving at the speed of a thousand hurrying caterpillar feet as she caught each of the bolts in the hat’s underside. Fwiss!

She sidestepped the swing of a Six Card’s lance, but only to leap twistingly into the air, barely avoiding an orb generator shot by a Seven Card. She slammed her homburg flat and spun it around and around over her head as if she were a cowgirl from the American West working her lasso. The NRG bolts she’d caught streaked out from its edges, shooting into a Four Card’s kill spot.

The soldier folded up, inanimate.

Her next victim didn’t present himself so readily. It would have been difficult enough fighting so many card soldiers even if they hadn’t been well armed. But armed as they were, with whipsnake grenade and orb generator…

Time and again she unleashed her homburg, which rattled and jarred and dented the soldiers without inflicting serious harm. Her wrist-blades in perpetual motion, her belt sabers whistling through the air, whining to make contact with the enemy, she at last pierced the Six Card’s kill spot with a sword from her backpack’s never-diminishing supply of blades.

Three more to go.

The Five and Seven Cards fired their AD52s. One hundred and four razor-edged cards ripped through the air, clanged against her centrifugal-spewing wrist-blades and skittered away from her. An Eight Card took aim at her with an orb cannon. The blades of one bracelet activated to deflect the incoming

razor-cards, Molly used her free hand to whip her homburg at the Eight Card and then cartwheeled toward him.

The homburg knocked the cannon from the soldier’s grip and- Still cartwheeling, she caught it before it hit the ground, fired.

The orb generator’s explosion engulfed all three rogue soldiers. In the blast’s aftermath, they lay twitching

in the street, outer steel scorched, inner circuitry in need of rebooting. Working her way from the Eight Card to the Five, Homburg Molly-halfer, orphan, supposedly untrustworthy bodyguard to a queen who didn’t need one-thrust a blade into their kill spots, quieting them for all time.

She stood for a moment, catching her breath, not quite believing what she’d accomplished. Level Z. She had completed what no one else…

But then she saw what she should’ve seen sooner: a puddle where no puddle should have been, surrounded as it was by dry pavement on a sunny day. Concentric ripples expanded outward from the puddle’s roiling center, and in a sudden froth of water-

A Glass Eye launched into the air.

Several more Glass Eyes leaped from nearby puddles. In the whorl of action, it was hard to tell exactly how many there were-more than Molly could defeat with just her Millinery weapons, that was for sure. So she ran. The Glass Eyes fired their weapons, cannonballs searing toward her, hatching open to become giant spiders.

She ran straight for the brick outer wall of the nearest building-the Hotel Burberry. She looked as if she were going to slam right into it, but at the last possible moment she dived to her right. Too late for the spiders to change course. They latched on to the hotel and began to crawl up floor after floor, on the hunt for prey. Food was food to a cannonball spider, whether Alyssian, Londoner or tourist.

Dink! With her homburg shield, Molly swatted away a spikejack tumbler, that nightmare missile consisting of six flesh-grating spikes that stabbed out in all directions from a common center.

She had to take a risk. The unnatural puddles dotting the street, maybe she could…

Another spikejack was tumbling toward her. No choice. She gripped her homburg firmly in her hand and took a running jump into the nearest puddle, plunged under the surface, pulled ever deeper by the

portal’s gravity until she slowed, reversed directions and was pushed up, up and- Whoosh!

She came twisting out in a spray of water, her belt sabers slicing into a Glass Eye that had the misfortune to be standing nearby. Time had seemed to slow down while she was underwater, but her disappearance and reappearance above the surface were nearly simultaneous. She again dove into the puddle, came leaping out of another, plucked a dagger from her backpack, and speared a Glass Eye that was still facing the spot she’d occupied half a moment before.

If she had truly been in London, these puddles would have served as return portals to Wonderland’s Pool of Tears, once thought to be a watery black hole for Wonderlanders unlucky enough to have fallen in, a vortex that carried them to another world. For generations, nobody who’d fallen into the pool had ever returned to report of this other world, and so their loved ones had been left to gather at an overhanging cliff, letting their tears fall into the water and thus giving the pool its name. Not until Hatter Madigan and Princess Alyss Heart had returned through it-thirteen years after jumping in, feared dead-was the truth discovered.

But the universes created by the HATBOX had their limits. Puddle portals that would have carried Homburg Molly back to Wonderland in the real world here only connected to other portals. And she made the most of it-jumping into one, splashing out of another, using them to serially ambush the Glass Eyes until she emerged from an inkblot-shaped splotch of dirty water, on the verge of adding to her body count, flicking her homburg at whoever would be her next casualty, but-

The unmoving bodies of her enemies littered the street. She had killed them all. “You forgot this.”

Shwink! Every weapon activated, Molly saw an ordinary-looking woman approach with something cupped in her palm. She retracted her weapons when she realized what it was: a luminous paperweight in the shape of a top hat. She touched it and the London scene dissolved into darkness, all black as pitch save a life-sized hologram of Hatter Madigan, who smiled approvingly at her.

“Today you’ve shown the courage, skill, and intellect required to be a first-rate Milliner,” he said. “Let’s see how you fare tomorrow.”

For two blinks of a spirit-dane’s eye she thought it was really Hatter, that he’d returned. But the image faded and the lights came on.

“Impressive,” a voice echoed.

Molly turned to see the Lady of Diamonds emerge from the control booth. No one but Milliners were allowed in the BOX. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said. “How’d you get in?”

“When will you learn, child, that as a member of a ranking family, I can find a means to do whatever I

wish?”

“When will people stop calling me a child?” Molly shouted.

The Lady of Diamonds looked quizzically at the girl. “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive. Don’t you want to dry off? You could catch cold.”

“I’m fine.”

“You should at least have those tended to.”

What was the Lady of Diamonds talking about? Have those tended to? Have what- “You’re bleeding.” The lady gestured at Molly’s torso, right shoulder, and left thigh.

She had a few cuts, scrapes. Who cared? They were just superficial wounds. “I’m all right,” Molly said.

The Lady of Diamonds sighed like one used to having her advice go unheeded. She held up the ornately carved chest King Arch had entrusted to her husband. “I came to give this to Queen Alyss. I’ve been told she’s here with you.”

“She’s not.”

“No?” Worried wrinkles crowded the Lady of Diamond’s brow. “That’s odd. I could’ve sworn…I guess I’ll have to leave it with Bibwit Harte or Dodge Anders then. It’s too important to leave with anyone else.” She turned to go.

“I can take it,” Molly said. “You?”

Molly nodded. “I am the queen’s bodyguard.”

The Lady of Diamonds pretended to consider it. “Well, I suppose if she trusts you with her life, I can

trust you with this. Be sure to tell her that it was given to me by her mother, Queen Genevieve, just before her death, and that, as her mother requested, I have faithfully kept it safe from Redd.”

“Uh-huh,” Molly said, suspicious, “and why’re you only giving it to Queen Alyss now? I mean, why’d you wait?”

The Lady of Diamonds adopted a sweet, kindly expression. “Because, clever girl, Genevieve left strict instructions that if Alyss ever returned to rule the queendom, it should be given to her after the sixth lunar cycle of her reign had passed. Obviously it contains something of great value to the queendom that requires Alyss to have occupied the throne for a time-intelligence or instructions, I assume. I’ve been curious about what’s inside, but…” the Lady of Diamonds grew sheepish, “…I haven’t been able to open it.”

“I’ll present it to the queen with all possible speed,” Molly said, bowing, acting every bit the professional

Milliner and bodyguard that she was.

With a great show of reverence, the Lady of Diamonds surrendered the chest to the girl’s care. “Will you be returning to the palace through the Crystal Continuum?” she asked.

“It’s the fastest way.”

“That it is,” agreed the lady, “although I can’t be seen taking public transportation myself, being of high rank as I am. I’m sure you understand.”

Molly didn’t understand but kept her mouth shut, not wanting to spend any more time with this snob than was necessary.

“Tell the queen I said hello,” the Lady of Diamonds cooed, and before Molly could respond, she was alone in the massive open space of the BOX, the pneumatic hiss of the door lingering after the exit of Wonderland’s most self-important lady.

She gazed around at the empty room, its blank walls and faraway ceiling, all void of evidence from her recent battles against jabberwocky, card soldiers, Glass Eyes. It was just a big impersonal room. What had felt like a tremendous accomplishment only a short time before-her completion of level Z-now felt small.

Without bothering to dry herself off or bandage her wounds, Molly hurried out of the Millinery to the looking glass portal located outside a sandwich shop on Bandersnatch Avenue. She entered the glass and zoomed headfirst through the kaleidoscopic, tubular-shaped passage until it linked up with another, larger one-the Crystal Continuum’s main conduit. She was adept enough at continuum travel to focus on her destination while mulling over her interview with the Lady of Diamonds. Queen Genevieve had trusted her? No way. From everything Molly knew, the Hearts and Diamonds had never been on great terms. The whole story sounded like a lie. The pretty little chest she was carrying to Alyss could be part of a

trap. The Lady of Diamonds might be trying to ensnare the queen in a scheme designed to cost her the respect of government officials and the general population. It was easy to believe: the Lady of Diamonds conniving to gain advantage over Alyss in political dealings that a needless bodyguard was not allowed to know anything about.

And if it were a trap? Well then, she might be able to prevent it, because what was so hard about opening the chest as the Lady of Diamonds had claimed? It had a single clasp and…there, she unlocked it. Now all she had to do was lift the lid. If she could protect Alyss from the Lady of Diamonds’ intrigue, whatever it was, she would thus ensure the still fragile stability of the queendom. Then Alyss would have to let her take a more active part in military and other important meetings. She would have proven

beyond all doubt that, halfer or not, she deserved the most the queen could grant in the way of responsibility and honor.

Impatient, careening past commuters toward Heart Palace, the continuum’s prismatic surfaces a smear of twinkling colors, she lifted the lid of King Arch’s weapon no more than a vein’s breadth and-

Whoomp!