As Redd considered, she turned to Vollrath. The tutor inclined his head and smiled, having expected his pupil to grant her proper respect all along.

“You were right not to subordinate yourself too readily, Master Sacrenoir,” Redd said at length. “I would find no value in the allegiance of a fool ready to give himself up to any old hag of Black Imagination who presented herself. I will accept your allegiance. For now. But if I ever decide you’re useless, you are a dead man.”

“To be killed by you is to be desired more than a life excluded from your service.” “Bravo,” Her Imperial Viciousness laughed with genuine feeling. “Bra-vo!”

Hardly ten hours removed from the crystal, Redd Heart had found her first two recruits. And if Vollrath and Sacrenoir were any indication, the army of ex-Wonderlanders and talented earthlings she was determined to amass would be a stronger military than the one she’d used to wrench the crown from Genevieve. With the discipline and single-minded purpose she would instill in troops so gifted in Black Imagination, she would not, could not, fail to overthrow her nauseatingly well-intentioned niece.

Doomsine Encampment, Boarderland. Six lunar cycles earlier.

W HEN KING Arch learned that the newly crowned Alyss Heart had ordered the annihilation of all Glass Eyes in her realm, his scheming brain went into hyperdrive. He had occupied Boarderland’s throne for more than half his life by remaining several ruthless steps ahead of his enemies. To what particular use he might put an army of Glass Eyes, he wasn’t yet sure. But to have access to such a military force without anyone knowing he had it was an advantage he could not let pass.

Lounging in his palace tent with wives numbered eleven, six, seventeen and twenty-eight, all of whom were trying not to look or act depressed, he called Ripkins and Blister to his side.

“My ministers have informed me that Alyss is ridding her land of Glass Eyes.” “Her people can’t control them,” confirmed Blister.

“Overriding the imperative that Redd embedded in them is harder than she thought,” added Ripkins. “In other words, they’re designed to kill and nothing more.”

The bodyguards bowed that this was so.

“Perhaps the trick is not to override their imperative,” Arch mused, “but to reprogram them to acknowledge a different master. Everyone in Wonderland-even the otherwise rebellious Redd Heart-is, was, or always has been occupied with inventing things. But what good are things if there are no clever schemes in which to use them? I put things to unexpected and imaginative use.”

The man wasn’t named Arch for nothing. Arch politician. Arch tactician. Arch strategist. By the age of

seventeen, he had risen through the ranks of his birth tribe, the Onu, to become Boarderland’s first sovereign. Before his ascension, the country’s nomadic tribes had been completely independent, with nothing in common other than the landscape over which they traveled. He had forced them into having something else in common: the honor, respect, and obedience they showed to him. This, he often reminded his ministers, was what united the tribes of Boarderland. His subjugation of them gave the nation its identity, its focus and culture.

“I’m a uniter, not a divider,” he would laugh.

By the time he crowned himself, he had amassed his own tribe, the Doomsines, having siphoned off from the Onu and others the most skilled fighters, the smartest intel ministers, the most beautiful females to become his wives and servants. He had also recruited numerous wayward souls and misfits from Boarderton, Boarderland’s de facto capital city. Among the Boarderton recruits: Ripkins and Blister.

“Leave us,” he ordered, shooing his wives toward the exit.

Promptly, and with a tinkling of jewelry, the women removed themselves from the tent.

“You are to enter Wonderland and capture a Glass Eye,” he commanded Ripkins and Blister. “I want it fully intact or it will be useless to me. That means every pore of its engineered skin, every swath of its manufactured muscle and tissue, every nanochip and filament in its brain: all undamaged so as to be properly dissected and understood. You must bring back a live one.”

Ripkins nodded, but Blister stared coldly at nothing. Impossible to know what he was thinking. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Blister?”

“I understand.”

It had been an annoyingly peaceful time in Boarderland, Blister cranky and depressed because he hadn’t filled anyone with pus for nearly an entire lunar cycle. Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dane corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy.

“No one can know of your mission,” Arch said. “You must remain absolutely invisible. It’s necessary for Alyss and her people to believe they will have cleansed the realm of Glass Eyes. I intend to manufacture my own army of them, using the one you bring me as the model from which the rest will be cloned.”

Following Ripkins out of the tent, Blister sulkily pinched the blade of a silver-leafed palm between finger and thumb. The blade bubbled, swelled. Then another and another. The longer he held on to the plant, the more it suffered until-

Swollen to bursting, it leaked yellow liquid from every blade, and died, a wilted husk of a thing. “Intact, Blister,” Arch warned.

Blister bowed, was gone.

Crossing into Wonderland was, for the average citizen, a tedious way to spend several hours. One had to wait in long lines, undergo elaborate security searches, sit through mild or not-so-mild interrogations conducted by overworked officials. What is the purpose of your visit? The expected length of your stay? But Ripkins and Blister had a difficult time blending in with average citizens and so they chose to cross

into Alyss’ territory, not at one of the official checkpoints, but at an unpopulated spot between a silty

edge of Boarderland’s Duneraria and a particularly dense patch of Wonderland’s Outerwilderbeastia.

To be invisible meant that whatever death and injury the bodyguards caused would have to be done by conventional methods-no ripping or shredding for Ripkins, no blistering for Blister, lest their victims’ bodies serve as evidence of their mission. Accordingly, Blister wore elbow-length gloves, and he and Ripkins carried a wealth of traditional Boarderland weapons hidden in their clothes, munitions that might be used by a variety of the nation’s tribes: mind riders, remote eyes, kill-quills, gossamer shots. They

were likewise armed with the whipsnake grenades and crystal shooters so prevalent in Alyss’ armies. But to be invisible also meant that members of their own tribe could not witness their doings; unwanted

chatter, possibly compromising intel, could come from any quarter.

The guards patrolling the Boarderland side of the demarcation barrier were members of the Doomsines-two youths born into the Astacan tribe who had found life among their own kind uninspiring. Like all Astacans, their long, spindly legs and foreshortened torsos, which had evolved from generations of Astacans making camp in mountainous regions, rendered them particularly adept at maneuvering on irregular terrain. Some Boarderlanders thought Astacans elegant and graceful creatures, but others-Blister among them, fellow Doomsine or not-thought them grotesque.