“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
W EAVER 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 here.”
“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.
I T 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.
“How’s our young guest?” he asked.