The Looking Glass Wars

by Frank Beddor

  cowards of the population and made an agreement with King Arch, no one was able to leave. All were stuck in Wonderland, forced to endure the teeth of Redd’s anger. Entire families were shipped off to labor camps or, worse, exterminated. Others, who hadn’t attempted to flee the country but nonetheless had issues with Redd being queen, heard about the Alyssians and fled what they knew of normal life to join the resistance.

  Redd chose to rule the queendom from her fortress on Mount Isolation. The fortress served as a constant reminder of her years in exile and unjust banishment at the hands of her dear departed sister, and thus

  was a spur to her ruthless methods. Soon after her coronation, and very hush-hush, Redd had the Heart Crystal moved to the fortress, and she could feel it now, shimmering in its secret chamber as she paced back and forth, listening to Bibwit Harte recite pages of In Queendom Speramus, which she was rewriting, the tutor acting as her secretary.

  “…the queendom had always been a naive, optimistic place,” Bibwit read. “It was as if Wonderland were run by girls and boys-”

  “By children,” Redd corrected.

  “-by children who had yet to put away their childish toys and face the harsh realities of the universe.” “Good,” Redd said. “Now continue: A universe in which only the cruelest survive, a

  jabberwock-eat-jabberwock universe, so to speak.”

  The pointed tip of Bibwit’s quill scurried against the royal papyrus. The Cat entered the room. “Yes?” Redd asked.

  The Cat hissed, “Blaxik has fallen and the slaves escaped. The Alyssians were responsible.”

  Redd clenched her fists. Items around the room began to quiver. The Alyssians: a boil on the face of her reign, a thorn in the fist of her rule. Why hadn’t The Cut done away with them already? Weapons and furnishings, anything not bolted down, shook with her mounting fury. Knowing her intolerance for failure, Bibwit Harte and The Cat hurried from the room.

  “Yaaaaaaaaah!” Redd yelled, standing at the center of whirling chairs, lamps, swords, spears, platters, and books, a tornado brought forth from the bottomless well of her hateful imagination.

  Blaxik attacked? Slaves freed? Heads were going to roll.

  In the aftermath of the Blaxik battle, their adrenaline still pumping, Dodge and the white rook braved a walk through the teeming urban slum Wonderland had become to remind themselves why they fought. The rook camouflaged himself in a hooded coat, but Dodge refused to do likewise. He would not hide who he was from his enemies.

  “I remember when Wonderlanders actually cared for this city,” the rook said as they picked their way along a sidewalk choked with litter. “Streets were clean, roads swept. The curbside shrubs and flowers were always humming bouncy tunes.” He glanced at the curb: nothing but weeds and long-dead growth; all vegetation silent, killed by Naturcide, a chemical Redd had concocted specifically for that purpose. “And you could get a hot, fresh tarty tart on every corner. I miss tarty tarts.”

  Dodge nodded. He had his own memories: the glittering, quartz-like buildings of Genevieve’s time, the twinkling colors of towers and spires regularly cleaned and polished. Wonderland had been a gleaming,

  incandescent place, filled for the most part with hardworking, law-respecting citizens. Now everything was covered with grime and soot. Poverty and crime had oozed out of the back alleys and taken over the main streets, and anything bright and luminescent had to hide itself away in the nooks and crannies of the city.

  “Let’s cross the street,” the rook suggested.

  Dodge saw why: Ahead of them, a fight had broken out-two emaciated Wonderlanders attacking a third. Probably an imagination-stimulant deal gone bad. Dodge and the rook could never walk more than a few streets without witnessing a brawl. It was best not to approach, to not draw attention to

  themselves.

  They crossed the street and came to a corner crowded with smoky gwormmy-kabob grills and crystal smugglers hawking contraband. Dodge tried to call to his senses the aroma of freshly baked tarty tarts. Hadn’t his father bought him one on this very corner? His sense-memory failed him. Impossible to enter into the past. Underneath the shouts and horns that echoed through the streets, he heard a disembodied voice speaking “Reddisms” from loudspeakers mounted overhead. The Redd way is the right way. As in the beginning, there was Redd, so in the end Redd shall be. Three-dimensional faces on holographic billboards told of the latest crackdowns and taxations. Piped in from who knew where played the background music of Wondertropolis’ free fall into decay. It seemed to come from every crack in the pavement, every pothole in the street, every crevice in the time-battered buildings: a composition on infinite repeat, featuring lyrics Redd had written herself, which sang her praises as Wonderland’s savior.

  “I’d like to hear silence again,” Dodge said. “A whole day’s worth of quiet. Do you remember what that was like?”

  “Yes. But you know how it is.” The rook did his best imitation of Redd. “‘Silence is hereby outlawed. Silence breeds independent thought, which in turn breeds dissent.’”

  Not that there were many true dissenters, as they both knew. Those disloyal to Redd were quickly rooted out of the general population, never to be heard from again.

  The Blaxik battle was growing more distant in their minds, their blood cooling. They had their choice of places to visit, provided they were careful.

  “How about a jabberwocky match?” suggested the rook. At the amphitheater, they could watch the huge, ferocious beasts go at each other with a teeth-gnashing hatred rivaled only by that which audience members felt for one another.

  Dodge shook his head. “Fights always break out and I don’t like the feeling I get when we slip away without at least injuring a few of Redd’s soldiers.”

  “The statue then?”

  Again, Dodge shook his head. The Queen Redd statue stood at the city’s western edge, where, from the observation deck, Dodge could gaze out through the eyes of this enormous agate replica at the city

  spread below. It sometimes helped his vengeance to imagine himself inside the queen’s skull. But not today. “Let’s just walk,” he said.

  They passed the boarded-up shop fronts in Redd Plaza, the pawnshops and moneylenders in Redd Square, and the mammoth complex of Redd Towers Apartments, whose advertising slogan, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now,” did little to fill vacancies. They stopped in at Redd’s Hotel Casino where, in addition to gambling with crystal, Wonderlanders could bet their lives on a single roll of the

  dice. Dodge picked up his pace when they passed Heart Palace-now fallen into disrepair and occupied by stimulant-addled squatters-on their way to the Five Spires of Redd construction site. Her Imperial Viciousness had promised that the Five Spires of Redd would be the tallest structure ever erected in the universe-a vertical column of steel sheathed in spiked and mottled crystal, rising magnificently into the sky and topped with five pointed spires like the fingers and thumb of the queen herself.

  “Do you think she’ll finish it?” the rook asked.

  Dodge tensed. “I don’t think we should give her the chance.”

  Everywhere they went, they saw signs urging Wonderlanders to attend meetings of the numberless Black Imagination societies that now flourished in every banqueting hall, while the few White Imagination societies were forced to gather in stealth and secret. Anyone exposed as a practitioner of White Imagination was sentenced to a slow, work-slogged death-shipped off to the Crystal Mines, just as practitioners of Black Imagination had been in Genevieve’s time, but whereas then the emphasis had

  been on hard work and repentance with a chance for freedom, prisoners were now purposely worked past all endurance.

  “What sort of world is this,” the rook asked, angry, “where neighbors and friends inform on one another? Where children, mad at their parents because they didn’t get a Black Imagination starter’s kit for their birthday, can complain to the nearest lieutenant from The Cut, saying they’ve heard their parents cla
im Redd isn’t the rightful ruler of the queendom, and then their parents are hauled off to face unmentionable tortures? And I’m sure Redd doesn’t care if they tell the truth.”

  “She probably prefers it if they don’t,” Dodge said.

  The rook nodded, again imitated Redd: “‘Because it’s much more Black Imagination. My reign thrives on deceit and violence.’”

  “And uncertainty.”

  The rook sniffed in disgust. “Different laws for different people. A member of the Spades or Clubs, he avoids being shipped to the mines with a generous donation to the queen’s personal crystal account; whereas for the average Wonderlander, there’s no hope: It’s off to the mines he goes.”

  They turned their footsteps in the direction of the Everlasting Forest. They had seen enough.

  “I’ll tell you what sort of world this is,” the rook said, answering his own question. “It’s one that can’t last.”

  “No,” Dodge said. But he was no longer thinking of the rise and fall of queens, the corruption of general populations. He was thinking of something more personal, his motivation for getting up in the morning: assassination of The Cat.

  CHAPTER 20

  H ATTER MADIGAN left Paris within thirty-two hours of escaping the Palais de Justice and scoured

  the country in search of Alyss. After weeks of fruitless searching, he arrived in the principality of Monaco on the Mediterranean coast. It was mid-August, the peak of summer. He hadn’t yet visited a single hat shop when he was walking down a side street near the beach and heard a passing gentleman exclaim to a companion, “Ah, regardes cela! Pauvre petit chapeau haut-de-forme!”

  Hatter had picked up enough French to know that chapeau meant “hat.” As the men continued on their

  way, he turned for a glimpse of the headwear in question and saw a top hat floating in the middle of a puddle. He knew in a moment; it was his hat. How had it gotten there? Hatter examined the puddle. It should have been evaporating in the heat, but he could tell by its edges that it wasn’t. An evaporating puddle would have had a ring of damp around it, indicating its original size before the effects of the sun.

  Hatter had studied his share of puddles during his time in this world, wondering which of them, if any, might take him back to Wonderland once he was reunited with Princess Alyss. There had been nothing telltale about any of them, nothing signifying their use as a return portal. But this one…careful not to step

  in it, he bent down and picked up the hat. It was soaked but it looked all right. He flicked his wrist. There they were, the S-shaped blades. So the weapon still worked. With another wrist-flick, the blades morphed back into a dripping top hat, which Hatter put on his head, tapping the crown as might a dandy adding the final touch to his wardrobe before heading out for a night of frolic and fun. As a test, Hatter picked up a stone and dropped it into the puddle.

  Ker-whoosh!

  The water sucked it down and out of sight.

  Could this be a return portal? Might the Pool of Tears, the only means out of Wonderland, have many return portals, various portal routes connecting to it like tentacles to the head of an octopus? And what if Alyss had discovered one of them-a puddle situated where no water should naturally have been-and traveled back to Wonderland? It was unlikely, since no one who’d entered the Pool of Tears had ever yet returned. But Alyss was not your average Pool of Tears traveler. She wasn’t average in anything. If she had returned, she would not survive long. She didn’t have the training, her imaginative muscle unexercised, and Redd wouldn’t stand for it.

  Hatter flattened his top hat into blades, aligning them in a stack to make them as compact as possible. He tucked the weapon into a secure, thick-lined pocket inside his coat; he had no intention of losing it again.

  But what if his theory was wrong? What if this puddle led to some unknown destination instead of back to Wonderland? Stepping into it was a serious risk. For Alyss’ sake, and for that of the queendom, it was one he had to take.

  CHAPTE R 21

  A FTER THE temper subsides and one has a moment to calmly reflect, it isn’t uncommon for declarations shouted in a fit of rage to strike one as untrue, and because they may have been hurtful to family, friends, lovers, husbands, or wives, one wishes them unsaid. But this was not the case with eleven-year-old Alyss Heart, who had waited with impatience for the Reverend Charles Dodgson to complete the book describing her life in Wonderland, all the while entertaining visions of comeuppance for those who’d doubted her. When Dodgson at last presented her with a copy of the book during a picnic of cold chicken and salad along the river Cherwell, and she discovered that it had little to do with her and that he’d purposely twisted everything she’d told him into nonsense-How could he? A vicious

  joke!-anger filled her to the tips of her fingers. If her talk of Wonderland wasn’t fantasy, it might as well have been, for all the hurt and trouble it had caused her.

  She meant exactly what she said and never once, in all the years afterward, regretted it.

  “You’re the cruelest man I’ve ever met, Mr. Dodgson, and if you had believed a single word I told you, you’d know how very cruel that is! I never want to see you again! Never, never, never!”

  She left Dodgson on the riverbank, perplexed, and ran the entire way home. She stomped into the hall

  and slammed the door behind her, surprising Mrs. Liddell. “What, back already?”

  But Alyss-her face twisted with grief and rage-didn’t stop. A cruel, vicious man! What am I supposed to do now? Can’t live as Odd Alice. She took the stairs two at a time up to her room and locked the door.

  “Alice?” Mrs. Liddell called, following her. “Where are Edith and Lorina? Where’s Mr. Dodgson? What’s happened?”

  But Alyss wouldn’t say, nor would she come out of her room. She didn’t hear Mrs. Liddell knocking at the door, the annoyed but futile turning of the doorknob, or the imperious demand: “Alice, open this door. Open it this minute.” The blood roared in her veins and suddenly she was ripping the drawings of Heart Palace off her walls a fistful at a time, tearing them into confetti. No more. Erase it all. I will no longer be Odd Alice. Odd Alice must die. Yes, it was a solution: Give up her so-called ridiculous,

  fantastical delusions and enter wholeheartedly into the world around her. Become just like everyone else. Listen.

  Mrs. Liddell was no longer accosting the door to her room. She heard voices downstairs. Dodgson and her sisters must have returned. The beastly man!

  “Alice, come downstairs!” Mrs. Liddell called. “Mr. Dodgson is here!” “I won’t see him!”

  Thinking afresh on what he’d done, remembering the feel of his idiotic book in her hands, she became enraged all over again-He tricked me! A man with a heart of ice!-and kicked at the heaps of confetti lying on the floor. What was-? Something had moved in the looking glass: not a reflection of herself, of anything in the room. No! It was Genevieve, dressed as Alyss last remembered her, but without her crown.

  “Never forget who you are, Alyss,” Genevieve said.

  “Shut up!” Alyss cried, and threw a pillow at the looking glass.

  Her mother-or whoever the woman in the mirror was-had never been through what she’d had to deal with these last four years. The mirror was suddenly empty, reflecting only the room. But of course

  nobody had been in the mirror. How stupid! Her imagination had been playing tricks on her.

  Exhausted, Alyss dropped to the floor, sobbing. Before long, she fell asleep amidst the scraps of paper palaces. When she emerged from her room the next morning-a room perfectly clean, no confetti on the floor, no sign of the violence done to it hours earlier-the Liddells were at breakfast in the dining room. They immediately noticed a change in Alyss without being able to pinpoint what it was. Edith and Lorina fell still, mid-chew, their open mouths revealing a mash of scrambled egg. Dean Liddell paused in the midst of buttering his scone, and Mrs. Liddell continued pouring tea into her cup even after it spilled over onto the sauce
r. Not until the servant started to clean it up did she notice what she’d done.

  “You’re wearing the dress,” Mrs. Liddell said. The dress she had purchased months before but which

  Alyss had always refused to wear because she feared it would make her appear common. “Yes, Mother.”

  But that wasn’t it, didn’t account for the change. “You look…rather lovely,” said Dean Liddell. “Thank you, Father.”

  The change was in subtler things-the tilt of Alyss’ head, the particular sweep of her arms, her careful steps forward. The Liddells were so taken with her appearance that they failed to realize it was the first time she had ever called them by those most intimate of endearments: Mother and Father.