Seeing Redd (6 page)

“T
O BE embarrassed of me 'cause I'm a halfer!” Homburg Molly complained as a pair of imagination-stimulant dealers came at her, each wielding a Hand of Tyman—five short blades rising from the handle grip. She had never fought against Hands of Tyman before, but what did that matter? She could deal with them. She could deal with anything.

“Not to let me show them what I can do!”

Somersaulting over her attackers, she shrugged open her knapsack of blades and corkscrews, landed on her feet and jumped backward, felt the momentary resistance of Wonderland steel entering flesh.

She would lose points for that.

She had noticed too late: Her so-called assailants were only two hungry men hoping for charity; what she'd mistaken for Hands of Tyman were alms cups. She pulled away quickly, before her blades could do much damage. The men stood with stricken faces, their hands pressed to their wounds.

“Sorry,” she said, backing away from them. “I'm…sorry.”

She continued down the street, had hardly gone the length of a jabberwock's tail when her homburg started to vibrate. She ducked left and—

A rock whizzed past, barely missing her.

She turned, assuming one of the homeless men had thrown it, but they had vanished. Her hat vibrated again. She ducked right and—

Weesh, weesh, weesh, weesh
.

A rusted garbage can lid hurtled by, nearly taking her head off. That's when she spotted them: indistinct figures in the dark at the left edge of the street, taking cover behind a half-tumbled wall and the rotted hulks of what she guessed were transports of some kind. (Where
was
she anyway? This street was like none she'd ever seen in Wonderland.) She flicked her homburg flat and held it over her head, shielding herself from the hunks of masonry, weather-rotted window-panes, and other junk scavenged from the surrounding buildings being thrown at her.

“Probably Black Imagination enthusiasts,” she mumbled. They always seemed to be the least gifted in imagination.

Clang! Bongk! Dink!
A sleet of debris pelted her homburg shield.

But what if she was wrong? What if those bombarding her were simply innocent civilians who were afraid of her, a stranger with a curious arsenal at her disposal? The question was, should she use the full force of her skills to combat them or was she just supposed to warn them, to hint at what they'd endure if she gave free rein to her abilities?

Clangk! Thonk th-thonk thonk thonk!

More street-waste was raining down around her than before, as if the number of her antagonists had grown. Yet they weren't closing in on her; they stayed hidden, under cover.

It was probably another test of her self-control.

She would abide by the Millinery code of resorting to lethal violence only after every other option had failed. She'd already been wrong once this mission. She couldn't afford to be wrong again.

With an underhanded twist of the wrist, she sent her homburg shield whirling toward the oncoming projectiles. Almost in the same instant, she snapped open her wrist-blades. The homburg ricocheted from one makeshift missile to another, deflecting them back upon those who'd thrown them. With the spinning blades attached to her wrists, she easily knocked away the odd chunks of mortar that made it past the homburg, which now boomeranged back to her like an eager pet. As she listened to the fading footfalls of her assailants, she snapped the weapon back into its traditional homburg shape and flipped it onto her head.

Something was glowing in the half-ruined wall. She approached for a better look: a luminescent top hat emblem embedded in the brick.

“That was too easy,” she said, reaching out to touch the emblem, when—

Eeeeeech! Eeeeeech! Eeeeeech!

A flock of seekers came soaring out of the sky, dive-bombing toward her. No need to debate with herself this time. Seekers were part vulture, part fly, all nastiness.

Molly punched her belt buckle. The long, crescent-shaped sabers of her belt flicked open and, with both sets of wrist-blades activated, she at last exercised her abilities to their fullest, twisting and tumbling through the air, slashing at the shrieking creatures, sending them headlong to the ground with a blood-wet splat until—

They were gone, the street deserted.

She snapped shut her weapons, touched the glowing symbol in the wall and the scene vanished. She was standing in a vast armory, two city blocks square, the ceiling four stories above her head: the Holographic and Transmutative Base of Xtremecombat training, or HATBOX, at the Millinery.

“Definitely too easy, even for someone as embarrassing as me,” Molly huffed.

She marched back to the control booth at the opposite end of the room. Sure, Alyss and Bibwit and everyone else said it didn't matter that she was a halfer. Sure, she had been made the queen's personal bodyguard. But it wasn't as if the position came with any serious responsibilities. Alyss was too powerful to need a bodyguard. And when Hatter had held the post, she knew, he'd been more involved in policy making and missions vital to Wonderland's security. She'd probably never be treated like a full-fledged Milliner, never be considered good enough. Why else would Rohin and Tock have been sent to Earth to keep a lookout for Redd and The Cat? She was at least as talented in combat as they were.

“More so!” she exclaimed aloud.

At the control booth, she turned the dial to Z, the most advanced skill level. No one in her class had ever gotten past W before, including Rohin and Tock.

She planted herself firmly at the starting position—the top hat symbol inked on the floor. “Begin!” she said loudly, and though she remained stationary, it was as if the walls of the room had been set spinning.

The HATBOX, which never presented the same scenario twice, was scanning its infinity of locations, enemies, and weapons for a suitable trial. The scanning was meant to disorient her, upset her mental balance. Whatever. As a hall in Mount Isolation solidified around her, she took a single step forward, felt the tickle of something like a whisker against her cheek and—

Ooomph!

She was knocked to the ground, her coat shredded near the right shoulder. She looked up and saw The Cat, Redd's top former assassin, laughing at her. A muscular humanoid who could morph into a cute kitten at will, he stood erect on two legs, his thighs each as thick as her waist. He had powerful, sinewy arms tapering to paws, claws as sharp and long and wide as butcher knives, and a feline face with flat pink nose, whiskers, and a slobbery mouthful of fangs. Bits of Molly's coat hung from one of his claws. She didn't even have time to get to her feet before the scene dissolved.

“Again!” she yelled.

This time she activated her wrist-blades while the room was still scanning, its walls flickering with possible scenes and enemies. At the briefest sighting of The Cat or anything feline, she lunged forward, determined not to be caught off guard again. Yet when a new environment took on form and substance around her, The Cat was nowhere to be seen. She stood backed up against one end of a long, narrow canyon of volcanic rock, trapped by three jabberwocky.

“Nice jabberwocky,” Molly said. “Molly jabberwocky's friend.”

Jabberwocky didn't need friends. One of them exhaled a jet of fire at her and—

She dropped and rolled, tapped her belt buckle, and the belt's sabers sprung open and sliced into the beast's underbelly.

Bad move.

A jabberwock's skin was nearly as hard as fossilized lava. Far from fatal, the saber wound only provoked the beast into a rage. It stomped and spat fire in all directions, Molly rolling first one way, then another, deftly maneuvering to get out from under the thing without being crushed. Problem was, she came out exactly where she'd been before: trapped against the canyon wall by three jabberwocky.

She shrugged open her backpack—
flink!
—and from among the variety of blades and corkscrews it offered took hold of two crowbar-shaped weapons, their pointed ends veering off at right angles from the long handles. With one of these in each hand, she leaped toward the canyon wall, knife points driving into the rock and holding her momentarily aloft over the jabberwocky. She pushed off from the wall with her feet and landed on the back of the nearest jabberwock. The beast went insane, bucking and twisting its head around on its long neck, snapping its jaws at her. It required all of Molly's strength not to fall off, just to keep her grip on the bony protuberance near the top of the beast's spine—a lucky vertebra, not unlike the pommel of a spirit-dane's saddle on the otherwise cratered moonscape of jabberwock skin.

Something hot flashed against Molly's leg.

One of the jabberwocky had spit a fireball. It grazed her—worse, it grazed her mount, and now her jabberwock and the other were fighting, burning each other alive with their furnace breath even as they reared up on their hind legs, raking and clawing at each other with their forelegs.

Thwap!

A tail came around and laid Molly flat on the ground. She had time enough to see a jabberwock approach, its mouth opening wider and wider in the yawn-like motion that inevitably preceded a fire-shot from its throat before—

The scene dissolved and the lights came on.

“Again!” she yelled.

She had to set aside her anger and resentment. She had to relax. If her time at the Millinery had taught her anything, it was that adrenaline made you impulsive, overanxious. It could trick you into doing something stupid. If she was to complete level Z, she had to stay calm.

The HATBOX began its dizzying scan of possible locations and enemies. Molly took deep, even breaths and closed her eyes, opening them only when she heard the steady murmur of strangely accented voices, the clop-clop of hoofs on cement, the trundling of squeaky carriages.

She was in a city—an ancient one, judging by the looks of things. Carriages like the ones rumbling past hadn't been seen in Wonderland for generations. And as for horses, those beasts of burden were straight out of the history programs Molly was forced to study as part of the Millinery's classroom curriculum.

Amid the crush of pedestrians coming toward her: a man wearing greatcoat and bowler. She instinctively reached for the brim of her homburg, but he only dipped his head in greeting and continued past. The pedestrians, those in the carriages—they all seemed intent on their errands. But she wouldn't be fooled. An attack was imminent. From what quarter, instigated by whom, she couldn't say. But under no circumstances would she lessen her vigilance or—

A voice rose above the street's general clamor: “Read about the carnage in Piccadilly! Death and destruction in Piccadilly! Only a tuppence to read the latest reports!”

A boy was selling newspapers on the corner. Molly walked up to him and he shoved a paper into her hand.
The London Times
? She'd heard Alyss talk of London. It was a city the Queen had visited during her exile from Wonderland.

“Two pence,” the boy said.

She didn't have the leisure to find out what he wanted, snapped open a set of wrist-blades to spook him and—

Seeing that a trivial flick of the wrist produced such a blur of deadly copter blades, he sprinted off. But Molly didn't want to draw too much attention to herself. Not yet. She quickly flicked shut the blades.

The newspaper's description of the carnage and destruction in Piccadilly read familiar. In the cheese shop hollowed out by an explosion, Molly recognized the aftermath of an orb generator. In witnesses' clumsy attempts to describe a rifle that coughed bolts of light, she recognized Wonderland's crystal shooter and its ammo of bright NRG rods produced by the frizzling together of certain gemstones. And as for the carcasses that looked like pin cushions with legs tucked underneath them, those were easy to identify—cannonball spiders in the death pose, their brief life spans having run their course, though not, according to the reporter, before the outsized creatures had taken scores of Londoners with them.

A sound like scissor blades rapidly opening and closing.

Molly's hand jumped to the brim of her homburg. She scouted the scene.

Nothing. Just Londoners going about their business the same as before. But as she turned her attention back to the newspaper—

There it was again. Unmistakable: the sound of card soldiers being dealt in preparation for battle. She didn't sight them until Londoners were screaming and running for shelter. They'd already unfolded themselves: a flush of soldiers from one of Redd's decks. Unengaged, they resembled ordinary playing cards, albeit life-sized ones. But engaged for battle as they were now, unfolded to twice their usual height, with limbs of Wonderland steel and a forward lilt to their every movement as if perpetually stalking prey, they presented an undeniably menacing aspect.

“Stay calm,” Molly whispered to herself. “Stay cool.”

The only way to “kill” one of Redd's late-model infantry was to stab it hard in the medallion-sized area above its breast-plate, at the base of its steel-tendoned neck. The knife blade would cut through its vital circuitry and send sparks spurting like fiery blood. Thing was, in the harassment of battle, this kill spot seemed to shrink to the size of a gwormmy's eye, to a—