by Frank Beddor
Lounging in his palace tent with wives numbered eleven, six, seventeen and twenty-eight, all of whom were trying not to look or act depressed, he called Ripkins and Blister to his side.
“My ministers have informed me that Alyss is ridding her land of Glass Eyes.”
“Her people can’t control them,” confirmed Blister.
“Overriding the imperative that Redd embedded in them is harder than she thought,” added Ripkins.
“In other words, they’re designed to kill and nothing more.”
The bodyguards bowed that this was so.
“Perhaps the trick is not to override their imperative,” Arch mused, “but to reprogram them to acknowledge a different master. Everyone in Wonderland—even the otherwise rebellious Redd Heart—is, was, or always has been occupied with inventing things. But what good are things if there are no clever schemes in which to use them? I put things to unexpected and imaginative use.”
The man wasn’t named Arch for nothing. Arch politician. Arch tactician. Arch strategist. By the age of seventeen, he had risen through the ranks of his birth tribe, the Onu, to become Boarderland’s first sovereign. Before his ascension, the country’s nomadic tribes had been completely independent, with nothing in common other than the landscape over which they traveled. He had forced them into having something else in common: the honor, respect, and obedience they showed to him. This, he often reminded his ministers, was what united the tribes of Boarderland. His subjugation of them gave the nation its identity, its focus and culture.
“I’m a uniter, not a divider,” he would laugh.
By the time he crowned himself, he had amassed his own tribe, the Doomsines, having siphoned off from the Onu and others the most skilled fighters, the smartest intel ministers, the most beautiful females to become his wives and servants. He had also recruited numerous wayward souls and misfits from Boarderton, Boarderland’s de facto capital city. Among the Boarderton recruits: Ripkins and Blister.
“Leave us,” he ordered, shooing his wives toward the exit.
Promptly, and with a tinkling of jewelry, the women removed themselves from the tent.
“You are to enter Wonderland and capture a Glass Eye,” he commanded Ripkins and Blister. “I want it fully intact or it will be useless to me. That means every pore of its engineered skin, every swath of its manufactured muscle and tissue, every nanochip and filament in its brain: all undamaged so as to be properly dissected and understood. You must bring back a live one.”
Ripkins nodded, but Blister stared coldly at nothing. Impossible to know what he was thinking.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Blister?”
“I understand.”
It had been an annoyingly peaceful time in Boarderland, Blister cranky and depressed because he hadn’t filled anyone with pus for nearly an entire lunar cycle. Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dane corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy.
“No one can know of your mission,” Arch said. “You must remain absolutely invisible. It’s necessary for Alyss and her people to believe they will have cleansed the realm of Glass Eyes. I intend to manufacture my own army of them, using the one you bring me as the model from which the rest will be cloned.”
Following Ripkins out of the tent, Blister sulkily pinched the blade of a silver-leafed palm between finger and thumb. The blade bubbled, swelled. Then another and another. The longer he held on to the plant, the more it suffered until—
Swollen to bursting, it leaked yellow liquid from every blade, and died, a wilted husk of a thing.
“Intact, Blister,” Arch warned.
Blister bowed, was gone.
Crossing into Wonderland was, for the average citizen, a tedious way to spend several hours. One had to wait in long lines, undergo elaborate security searches, sit through mild or not-so-mild interrogations conducted by overworked officials. What is the purpose of your visit? The expected length of your stay? But Ripkins and Blister had a difficult time blending in with average citizens and so they chose to cross into Alyss’ territory, not at one of the official checkpoints, but at an unpopulated spot between a silty edge of Boarderland’s Duneraria and a particularly dense patch of Wonderland’s Outerwilderbeastia.
To be invisible meant that whatever death and injury the bodyguards caused would have to be done by conventional methods—no ripping or shredding for Ripkins, no blistering for Blister, lest their victims’ bodies serve as evidence of their mission. Accordingly, Blister wore elbow-length gloves, and he and Ripkins carried a wealth of traditional Boarderland weapons hidden in their clothes, munitions that might be used by a variety of the nation’s tribes: mind riders, remote eyes, kill-quills, gossamer shots. They were likewise armed with the whipsnake grenades and crystal shooters so prevalent in Alyss’ armies. But to be invisible also meant that members of their own tribe could not witness their doings; unwanted chatter, possibly compromising intel, could come from any quarter.
The guards patrolling the Boarderland side of the demarcation barrier were members of the Doomsines—two youths born into the Astacan tribe who had found life among their own kind uninspiring. Like all Astacans, their long, spindly legs and foreshortened torsos, which had evolved from generations of Astacans making camp in mountainous regions, rendered them particularly adept at maneuvering on irregular terrain. Some Boarderlanders thought Astacans elegant and graceful creatures, but others—Blister among them, fellow Doomsine or not—thought them grotesque.
“I’m feeling a tad Maldoid-ish,” Blister said, taking a couple of mind riders from his coat pocket.
Self-propelled darts with serum-infused tips, most commonly used by Boarderland’s Maldoid tribe, mind riders could turn the most peace-loving citizen into a brawling lunatic.
“Haven’t thrown one in a while,” Blister said. “Good to keep in practice.”
He and Ripkins stepped into view and the border guards paused in their patrol, surprised to see Arch’s notorious henchmen.
“What’re you both doing here?” one of them asked.
“Nothing much,” Blister said, and with a forward thrust of his arm, released the mind riders.
Thunp! Thunp!
A mind rider lodged in the forehead of each border guard, tips penetrating their skulls, injecting the angst serum into the nooks and gulleys of their brains. Their neural pathways filled with static. Poison spiked their wits.
The serum never took long to produce its effect.
The Astacans looked about in a daze. Then, as if noticing each other for the first time, their glazed-over expressions morphed into visages of hate.
“Aaaagh!” one of them yelled.
“Yaaah!” the other shouted.
They fell together, punching and kicking at each other with a ferocity that would soon leave them both dead.
Ignoring the brawling pair, Ripkins and Blister stepped up to the demarcation barrier—a tight, impassable mesh of lightning-like sound waves. To try and step through the barrier, even to venture a single limb tentatively into its mesh, was to invite a painful end. The sound waves would cause one’s internal organs to vibrate, generating more and more heat until one burned to death from the inside out.
Ripkins removed a palm-sized medallion from his pocket. With a flick of his thumb, he launched it spinning into the air. Like a coin spinning fast on its edge, the remote eye became almost impossible to see. But unlike a coin, the thing flew. Emitting no more sound than the rapid flutter of insect wings, it spun through an opening in the demarcation barrier’s mesh and into Wonderland, transmitting images directly back to Ripkins’ visual cortex. He saw what it saw: the number and location of card soldiers on border patrol.
“A full hand,” he said. “Pair of Threes. Pair of Fours. Lone Two.”
The remote eye flew back through the demarcation barrier. Ripkins caught it and stowed it in his pocket. He called out to the card soldiers on the other side of the barri
er:
“Pretty dull work, just pacing up and back all day, isn’t it? Don’t know about you cards, but I didn’t sign up for this boring detail! Luckily, I’ve got something that helps us Boarderland guards pass the time! Come here and I’ll show it to you!”
The two nations were not at war and the soldiers had no reason to think of Boarderland guards as enemies. The Three Cards ventured close.
“Yeah?”
They tried to get a view of Ripkins through the eyesquintingly bright sound waves, when—
Thewp! Thewp!
Ripkins harpooned them with kill-quills, yanked hard on the coils attached to the quills’ blunt ends and pulled the soldiers into the demarcation barrier’s mesh.
Tzzzzzzzzccckkkkzzzkkkckch!
The dead card soldiers acted as shields, created a gap in the sound waves through which Ripkins and Blister jumped safely into Wonderland, tumbling and rolling because razor-cards were slicing the air and ground all around them, the Four Cards making the most of their AD52s while the Two Card tapped his ammo belt, about to transmit an emergency message via his crystal communicator, except—
Mid-roll, with effortless accuracy, Blister pulled the trigger of his crystal shooter and shot the Two Card dead.
Ripkins lobbed a whipsnake grenade at the Four Cards, and while they danced and hopped to avoid its deadly coils—sending razor-cards everywhere but at their attackers—he and Blister sprinted forward.
Suffering the nasty twistings of body parts that should never be twisted, the card soldiers fell, lifeless, and Arch’s bodyguards were soon pushing through the tangles of Outerwilderbeastia, crunching twigs and leaves underfoot.
“Visit the labs?” Blister said, referring to the squat network of buildings in Wondertropolis’ warehouse district, where a consortium of Alyss’ scientists and engineers had tried to transform a host of captured Glass Eyes into a benign force. On lab grounds were the incinerator baths—large pits into which Glass Eyes were being herded and melted down, scorched into ash. There would be lots of Glass Eyes to choose from at the labs, but Ripkins shook his head.
“Too much security,” he said.
“Find one that’s roaming?”
“It’ll be easier for us to avoid notice,” Ripkins said.
“Yeah, but it’d be more fun to hit the labs.”
The bodyguards knew where they had to go: Mount Isolation in the Chessboard Desert, Redd’s former home and the birthplace of those they hunted.
Avoiding the notice of Alyss’ card soldiers, who were themselves scouring the land for Glass Eyes still at large, became more difficult when they reached the desert. The alternating quadrants of black lava rock and sun-reflecting ice did not allow for much camouflage.
“Not surprising,” Ripkins whispered when they came upon Mount Isolation.
Decks of card soldiers had the place under surveillance. Unable to return home, Glass Eyes might have been hiding nearby.
Careful to avoid detection, the bodyguards began to case Mount Isolation in ever widening circles, their course spiraling out from the dark palace while—
Not far away, behind a boulder that sat like an enormous lump of coal in the landscape, a pack of Glass Eyes was engaged in biological self-assembly. The vacant stare of crystal in their sockets; their eerie, waxwork stillness as if, all at once, they had suddenly paused in the middle of various activities: They were defragmenting their internal hard drives, healing wounds superficial and otherwise with the regeneration cell-buds that could develop into organs, limbs, tissue. But hearing the lightest of footsteps, their heads turned as one.
Ripkins and Blister were on their third time around Mount Isolation, approaching a quadrant of craggy rock formations, when—
Sssst!
A blade came slamming down toward Ripkins’ shoulder.
“Humph.” He sidestepped it with the calm of one avoiding a dollop of seeker droppings, pulled a crystal shooter out of his thigh holster, and fired.
The blade-wielding Glass Eye staggered, went down.
Blister was taking on two of them at once—hand to hand, blade to blade, defensive swivel countering offensive lunge in a ballet of violence. Ripkins sensed it more than saw it, the clash of activity to his left, because he’d become busy with his own pair of Glass Eyes, slashing at them with a forearm-length blade, using his crystal shooter to deflect their swords and knives, all while avoiding crystal shot from a third Glass Eye.
One after another, the Glass Eyes coughed their last breath, sent their last electrical pulse along wire-veins, fired the last synapses in their nanochip-infused brains. Carried away with the fighting, Blister seemed to forget the purpose of his mission.
“I’ll take care of him,” he said, stalking forward to put an end to the last remaining Glass Eye.
Ripkins quickly reached for his gossamer shot—a small, thin tube attached to his belt.
Fffshaw!
A large web bulleted out of the tube, fell over the Glass Eye. Frantic, it slashed and shot fruitlessly at the webbing. Blister, his adrenaline no longer getting the better of his duty, gathered the ends of the web in his fist and pulled; the web went taut, wrapping up the Glass Eye, rendering it helpless. Ripkins took the sword and crystal shooter from its pinned hands.
Ripkins heaved the imprisoned Glass Eye over his shoulder, and he and Blister ran off as—
Half a deck of card soldiers, alerted by the sounds of battle, entered the quadrant. In confused silence, they surveyed the scene: two Glass Eyes with blades sticking out of their guts, a couple more striped with the fatal burn marks of whipsnake grenades, the rest riddled with the puncture wounds of crystal shot. Judging by the weapons used, whoever had managed this carnage could have been anybody—although to defeat seven Glass Eyes, there must have been a lot of them.
For all the card soldiers knew, or ever would know, Ripkins and Blister had never been there, never retreated to their kingdom with a perfectly functioning Glass Eye as their prisoner.
CHAPTER 20
WEAVER HAD rushed to embrace her, and Molly herself had forgotten the effects of the drug-delivery system she wore, had jumped up and—
She’d woken up here, in this tent occupied by eight of Arch’s wives, the place all plush and cozy and fragrant with the scent of crushed swamp blossoms. How could her mother—the woman she had dreamed about for so long, the single photo-crystal of whom she had stared at until she could have traced its image with her eyes closed—be alive? How could Hatter Madigan be her father?
“I want my homburg,” she said to the two ministers guarding her. “And I want to talk to my mother.”
“Do you, now?”
They didn’t even turn toward her. They were watching the newscast on the tent’s entertainment crystal, where a Sirk reporter was describing the recent violence in Wonderland: the military outposts attacked; the mysterious contamination of the Crystal Continuum that had left the bulk of Alyss’ army stranded around the queendom and Wondertropolis vulnerable to invasion.
“No,” Molly breathed. Because Arch’s words were starting to make sense. Too much sense. Trying to protect your queen, you jeopardized the queendom itself. Wasn’t that what he’d said? How could she have been so stupid? So rash? She had contaminated the continuum with the Lady of Diamonds’ weapon and the Diamonds had taken advantage of it.
“A general state of emergency has been declared in Wonderland’s capital city,” the reporter stated, “and authorities now say…”
She had let her worst impulses, her wounded pride, get the better of her. But now her pride took another hit, because…hadn’t her failure, her lack of discipline, fulfilled Hatter’s earliest suspicions of her? For a brief moment, she hated him. Him and Weaver. It was their fault that she was a halfer, a worthless halfer unfit to serve any queen, let alone Alyss Heart. It’d probably be better for everyone if she went off to lead a simple, boring life somewhere far away.
“I have to talk to my mother,” she said. “You can’t keep us h
ere.”
“We aren’t ‘keeping’ Weaver anywhere,” one of the ministers smiled. “She stays with us of her own will. However, I don’t see why the two of you can’t be reunited if you do one thing for me first.” He handed her a brand-new diary. Like Weaver’s, it was the size of a playing card but resembled a typical book from Earth. “Record a message to Queen Alyss—a confession, if you will—of everything that happened between you and Lady Diamond. All you have to do is tell the truth. Tell your queen how you feel.” His eyes swiveled to the newscast, where the Sirk was reporting on the estimated number of Wonderland casualties.
Molly turned the diary over in her hands. She alone had brought destruction to the city that she loved. She had no reason to trust the minister. But it might be the last chance she had of ever seeing her mother again.
She pressed the sides of the diary, its cover popped open and—
“Dear Queen Alyss…” she started, recording her confession.
CHAPTER 21
IT DIDN’T take a genius tactician to see that failure was imminent, Alyss more powerful than Arch had supposed. He would have to focus on his contingency plan and let the Glass Eyes attack on Wonderland fizzle out—a circumstance mildly disappointing, but not worrisome. Such a strategist was the king that he had a contingency plan for his contingency plan, and even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan’s contingency plan. Besides, he had utilized the Glass Eyes as a lark. If he had truly believed that they alone might depose Alyss, why would he have bothered with the scheme involving Weaver and Homburg Molly, which was progressing as well as he could have hoped? If concluded successfully, it would provide him with invaluable military intelligence and no small addition to his special forces for the time he did make his ultimate move on Wonderland.
Resting in his quarters, Arch reached to the bedside table, slid the amoeba-shaped communication nodule into its appropriate slot as if inserting the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle, and a moment later his huddle of intel ministers appeared.