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 claim 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.
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?”