ArchEnemy

by Frank Beddor

  “Please, what do you want?” the dean’s voice reached her from the back of the house.

  She sighted them in her imagination’s eye: the dean and Mrs. Liddell, Edith and Lorina. It was just as Blue had shown her. Their clothes a good deal ripped, the family huddled together on the drawing room sofa in fearful silence while Ripkins stood ominously before them, flexing his fingertips—deadly sawteeth pushing up out of the skin in the pattern of his fingerprints.

  “Please,” the dean said again.

  Ripkins moved his hands fast in front of him, shredding air. Mrs. Liddell flinched. The assassin took a step toward the dean, the sisters each let out a sob and—

  “Hello?” Alyss called, walking directly into the room. She had imagined herself into Alice Liddell’s long skirt and blouse, her hair in a tight bun. “Excuse me, I didn’t know there was company.”

  She tried to look startled—eyes wide, mouth half open, head tilted apologetically—as she thought her double would. Wanting to catch Ripkins off guard, she pretended to be meek, cowed, and let him grab her and push her toward the Liddells.

  Where he’d touched her, there was blood.

  Ripkins’ hands became a blur in front of him, churning air and moving in toward the dean’s chest. Alyss had no choice but to expose her imaginative powers in front of the Liddells. With the slightest of movements, she conjured a deck of razor-cards and sent them cutting through the air.

  Fiss! Fiss, fiss, fiss!

  In a single swift motion, Ripkins spun clear and unholstered a crystal shooter, firing a retaliatory cannonade. Alyss gestured as if wiping condensation off a looking glass and the shrapnel-like bullets of wulfenite and barite crystal clattered to the floor.

  The Liddells sat dumbfounded, their fear muted in the shock of seeing their adopted daughter engage in combat, producing otherworldly missiles out of the air—flat blade-edged rectangles resembling playing cards, bursts of gleaming bullets. She conjured them as fast as she defended herself against them, what with the intruder making expert use of the strange guns and knives strapped to his belt, thighs, biceps, and forearms.

  “Father!”

  A fistful of mind riders rocketed toward the family.

  Alyss threw out her hand; the weapons changed trajectory, shooting toward her. She annihilated them in midair with a pinch of her fingers, becoming like gravity itself, pulling whatever Ripkins hurled at the Liddells toward her until—

  The wall pushed out a score of daggers. Ripkins, knocked backward by a steel playing card as big as a man, slammed against them and slumped to the floor.

  Silence, except for the ticking of a grandfather clock.

  Alyss stood catching her breath, sensitive to the Liddells’ awe and confusion but feeling relief above all: She had not been too slow to save the family, not this time.

  CHAPTER 42

  AT FIRST he didn’t see the tutor. On a table just inside the library was the reading matter the albino had gathered for the king’s continuing study of the caterpillar-oracles, but not until Arch progressed deeper into the library did he sight Bibwit pacing as silently as a ghost before a collection of encyclopedia crystals.

  “I have questions, Mr. Harte.”

  The king wanted a firmer understanding of the caterpillars’ abilities. What did it mean that they “saw” the future? How did the oracles define “future”? Because he himself didn’t believe the course of his life was already set out before him, as unyielding as the Glyph Cliffs. He refused to believe he had no power to direct the course of his own life. His future was open, changeable, and therefore unknowable. How then could the caterpillar-oracles foresee it? He would learn what he could from Bibwit Harte while being careful not to disclose his intentions regarding Alyss Heart.

  But the king’s questions apparently didn’t interest the tutor. Because Bibwit went on perusing the encylopedia crystals, too enamored with his thoughts to so much as acknowledge His Majesty.

  “I said I have questions, tutor!”

  Arch stepped closer, stopped. Bibwit Harte was translucent, an obvious construct of someone’s imagination. The king did not doubt whose imagination it was.

  “Gone to join your queen, have you?” he frowned.

  He had been right all along: Bibwit, loyal to Alyss Heart, had maintained contact with her. It would be the same with General Doppelgänger.

  Beep, beep beep.

  His crystal communicator alerted him of an incoming transmission and he reached to answer it just as—

  The Bibwit construct blinked off once, twice, then was gone for good. As if Alyss had stopped focusing on it. Or had left Wonderland.

  Beep, beep beep.

  Arch punched his communicator’s keypad, knowing it would be his lookout by the Pool contacting him to say that Alyss Heart had plunged into the Pool of Tears.

  General Doppelgänger awoke in the war room, uncertain as to how he’d arrived there. Last he remembered, he was two—Doppel and Gänger, and they were abruptly ending communication with an unconscious Bibwit as four Doomsines stormed into his office to inform him that the king requested his presence.

  He tried to stand. Immediately his vision warped as if he were looking out from behind a screen of falling water. His limbs were not his own. He dropped to the floor. Someone must have propped him back up, because after what could have been either a few gwormmy-blinks or an entire lunar cycle for all he could tell, he was back in his chair.

  “Drugs,” Arch said, standing before him.

  On the other side of the conference table, Blister and an intel minister were at a mobile apparatus the general couldn’t identify, its desk-like surface dotted with luminescent squares. Another minister stood before the room’s crystal control panel.

  “You’re presently sporting high Boarderland fashion, General,” Arch said, “a drug-delivery system that secretes through your skin a little knock-you-down concoction whenever you make a sudden, or too ambitious, move.”

  General Doppelgänger carefully shifted his eyes downward to see what the king was talking about. Instead of his uniform, he was wearing a one-piece jumper made of an unfamiliar material that had no visible buttons or clasps by which to remove it. The collar fit tight about his neck, the leggings tight around his ankles, and the cuffs of the long sleeves pinched at his wrists.

  “You’re lucky,” Arch said. “If I was convinced that killing you wouldn’t compromise my control of the card soldiers and chessmen, you’d already be dead.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” the general managed.

  “The lucky rarely do. Now please direct your attention to the holo-screens. I’ve scheduled a bit of entertainment for us.”

  Arch gave the nod, the minister at the control panel dialed in what was wanted, and the Wondertropolis thoroughfares and squares on the walls’ holo-screens were replaced by the same scene: the stretch of land between the Whispering Woods and the cliff overlooking the Pool of Tears.

  “This was recorded a short time ago,” Arch said.

  Onscreen, nothing happened. General Doppelgänger heard the wind, the sound of lapping water in the distance. Gradually, the trees of the wood began to whisper, no more than a few of them at first, but then more and more until—

  Alyss Heart broke from the wood and in a matter of a few impossibly long strides covered the distance to the cliff’s edge. She jumped, plummeting down toward the Pool of Tears as—

  The holo-screens went white. Views of Wondertropolis did not come back online.

  General Doppelgänger seemed to be struggling with an unexpected onset of indigestion, his breathing short, his eyes narrowed and the bridge of his nose wrinkled with tension.

  “You cannot divide into two or four or any number of little Doppels and Gängers while wearing that,” Arch said, nodding at the drug-delivery jumper. “Why not sit still and try to enjoy the entertainment, since you have no other choice?”

  At another signal from Arch, the minister at the control panel tweaked a dial and the room�
�s holo-screens again showed the Pool of Tears, but this time from the vantage of the overhanging cliff.

  “This is real time, General,” Arch said, “the Pool of Tears at the present moment. Keep your eyes on it and be still. I don’t want you to miss what’s coming.”

  Bleep.

  The petulant noise chirped out from the unidentifiable apparatus manned by Blister and the intel minister.

  Bleep . . . bleep.

  A staccato series of blips followed—blip blip blip blip—then a cacophony of bleeps and blips and buzzes coming fast one after another in an extended computerized warbling. Blister raised his eyes to the king.

  “Now!” Arch shouted.

  Onscreen, from camouflaged sites along the Pool’s crystal barrier, Doomsine and Fel Creel warriors emerged burdened by tentacle-like conduits large enough for a grown Wonderlander standing at full height to enter. One end of each of the siphons was attached to a sanitation tanker, the vehicles that sucked refuse from streets to help keep Wondertropolis a resplendent city. There were two siphons to a tanker, four tankers in total. And as soon as the tribal warriors maneuvered the siphons’ open ends into the water, with the tankers humming and rumbling—

  “Drain the Pool!” Arch shouted.

  Sucked into the waiting tankers, the water lowered rapidly, and General Doppelgänger, trapped within himself, unable to move, believed everything was at an end: Alyss Heart would be exiled to Earth forever, the Alyssians and Wonderland and imagination doomed.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 43

  Oxford, England. 1875.

  RIPKINS SLUMPED inert on the drawing room floor. Alyss—in the guise of the woman she had imagined into being to take her place in this world—stood over him while the dean and his wife, Edith and Lorina sat on the sofa silently mouthing disbelief at what they’d just seen: the conjuring of razor-cards, the trajectory of missiles altered by mental power alone.

  “Oh!”

  Alice Liddell and her gentleman friend, Reginald Hargreaves, stared from the doorway at the dead assassin and Wonderland’s queen. The dean, his wife and daughters looked from Alyss Heart to Alice Liddell and back again.

  “I—?” the dean started.

  But that was all he managed before Alyss bolted from the room and out of the house, sprinting until she was well along St. Aldate’s Street. Certain the Liddells weren’t following her, she walked briskly in the direction of Carfax Tower, toward the portal that would return her to Wonderland: a puddle where no puddle should be, in the middle of sun-drenched pavement behind the Tower. But even from this distance she could see that something wasn’t right. The portal was shrinking, its edges drying up fast. She started to run, her imagination’s eye scanning the adjacent streets.

  “How can it be?” she breathed, because all of the portals were shrinking, the Tower puddle already half its former size when she leapt for it, closing her eyes and sucking in her breath, anticipating the swift watery descent through portal waters, the reverse pull of the Pool of Tears, the—

  Knees jarring, she landed on pavement. The portal had evaporated.

  “How can it be?” she said aloud, already running, searching for another puddle where no puddle should be. There! Under a grocer’s awning at Golden Cross, a splotch of water shrinking with every step she took toward it. She held her breath and leapt and—

  She was in, felt herself dropping down through the wet. But the water was up to her chest when it all went wrong. She rose again, fast, the evaporating puddle pushing her up and out until—

  No!

  The force of it propelled her into the air, and by the time she landed, bystanders pointing in dismay, the puddle was gone.

  She traveled the city with her imagination’s eye: not a single puddle portal anywhere.

  “How can it be?”

  Dodge, Bibwit, and the generals had been right: She’d forfeited any chance of saving imagination and the queendom; the caterpillars’ agenda held nothing good for Alyssians. Damp and exposed in crowded Golden Cross, she suddenly felt the staring Oxfordian faces surrounding her.

  Not knowing where she was going, Alyss Heart ran.

  CHAPTER 44

  REVEREND DODGSON was determined to discover how far Molly’s mathematical ability extended—a determination that would have counted for nothing if Molly hadn’t been amenable to his scrutiny, in a lighter mood on account of her recent acquaintance with Miss Alice Liddell. She glanced at the paper before her.

  “Three,” she said.

  Dodgson placed another of his Pillow Problems—the math and logic puzzles with which he occupied himself in the small hours of restless nights—in front of Molly.

  “Fourteen,” she said.

  He presented the puzzles to her in order of increasing difficulty, though one wouldn’t have known it from the effortlessness and speed with which she provided the correct answers. She had no need to work out the answers on paper and appeared to arrive at her answers by instinct.

  Dodgson placed before her a puzzle he had not yet answered himself; nearly a page worth of scribblings had brought him no closer to its solution.

  “Seventeen out of twenty-seven,” Molly said. She had taken perhaps a mere second longer to answer the problem than she had the previous ones. Dodgson didn’t doubt that it would later prove to be the correct answer.

  “How did you learn to do this?” he asked. “Did someone teach you?”

  “No, I don’t know. It’s common sense.”

  “It is by no means c-c-common, I assure you. It is . . . remarkable.”

  Dodgson’s eager appreciation was having an effect on Molly.

  “Maybe I got it from my mother,” she shrugged.

  “What pedagog-og-og . . . methods did your mother use to teach—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said, and told him that her mother had been an alchemist at Wonderland’s Millinery, a regular citizen except for her gift transmutating the elements of the physical world, which she’d done according to formulae kept in three private notebooks tied together with flugelberry vine. She pulled the notebooks from her inner coat pocket, showed them to him.

  Alchemy? Were the girl’s talents related to the incomprehensible symbols covering page after page of the notebooks? Could the girl’s talents be related? Dodgson wasn’t sure, though he knew someone who would be: the unorthodox Mr. Rafters. He knew no one better to assess the girl, not even among the college’s logicians and mathematicians.

  “I’m a halfer,” Molly said.

  “I’m sorry, a h-halfer? What’s a halfer?”

  She showed him the “h” behind her ear. “Half Milliner, half regular Wonderlander,” she said. “You’re either born a Milliner or you’re not, but if you are, you’re only supposed to be with other Milliners—to maintain the purity of the queendom’s ultimate military force. But Hatter didn’t. That’s why I make too many mistakes. Big ones. It’s what halfers do.”

  In time, Dodgson would ask Molly about these mistakes, but right now, unable to ignore the self-laceration in Molly’s tone, his softer emotions were piqued: No one should hate herself as much as this girl seemed to.

  “You say halfer as if it’s a terrible thing,” he said. “But everyone I’ve ever known has been a halfer; if old enough t-to be called an adult, then ch-childish in their prejudices. All of us in this world really, I take to be h-halfers—half human, half divine, halfers of the best sort. I’d think the s-same must be true for the people of Wonderland, that there’s . . . there is no such thing as s-someone who is not a halfer, or even a quarter-er, if you’ll allow me the inelegant term.”

  “Hatter’s not a halfer!”

  “I disagree,” said the reverend. “Hatter Madigan strikes me as very much a halfer. Has his devotion not been split in two, divided between w-w-what he owes to you as a father and what he owes to Alyss Heart and the queendom as a M-Milliner? If he were not so divided, halved in this way, d-do you suppose you’d be here without him?”

&n
bsp; Molly eyed Dodgson with such fixedness that some of his old apprehension returned, his unease at being holed up with a Wonderlander whose abilities he’d hardly begun to comprehend. He called forth his easiest manner, arranged his note papers and put them away in his desk.

  “Come,” he said, “there is someone you should m-meet.” He was leading Molly to the door, out into the quad where the sky seemed wide enough to contain the heavens of both their worlds. “Or perhaps I s-should say, there’s a halfer who really must meet you.”

  CHAPTER 45

  BLISTER STALKED up and back in his shared quarters, touching everything of Ripkins’ that he passed—the quilts of unicorn skin, the entertainment matrix, the virtual reality goggles, the game-controller body gear. Not for the first time, he cursed the fact that his touch didn’t have its enflaming, pus-inducing effect on inanimate objects.

  It wasn’t that he despised Ripkins; he liked the Doomsine well enough, as much as he could like anybody, and he worked better with Ripkins than he had with any of Arch’s previous lame recruits. But the king had chosen sawteeth fingerprints over instantaneous, fatal blistering: Royal favor had been bestowed upon another. It didn’t matter that the ministers said the king needed the blistering assassin close, because nothing they argued could convince him he hadn’t been snubbed, forced to hang around, waiting to be given some scrap assignment the way the king’s doggerels of war were thrown bones after a banquet.

  “Ripkins,” Blister muttered.

  He extended killing fingers toward his roommate’s unkillable sleep-pod, felt movement behind him and spun.

  “Redd Heart.”

  “Miss your playmate?”

  Fast as blood spraying from a wound, Blister hurled a pocket-sprocket at Her Imperial Viciousness, the fin-shaped blades a blur as the weapon rotated through the air like a ninja star of Earth, but—