WILMA.”

Arch nodded. “It’s sooner than I’d like to put Hatter to my purpose. I wanted to string him along awhile, make him desperate for Molly’s life and weaken whatever rebellious resolves he has in his head. But Redd makes it necessary to take action now.”

The shadow at the tent’s entrance disappeared, the eavesdropper secreting away. “Bring Hatter Madigan to me,” Arch ordered. “It’s time he met WILMA.”

P RETENDING TO be out for a stroll, Hatter passed through bazaars, promenades, and food courts, well-to-do and not so well-to-do neighborhoods, scanning the various scenes with a trained eye and hoping for some evidence of Molly’s whereabouts. He made these excursions whenever possible, sometimes with Weaver at his side, though she thought they were simply a means for him to better familiarize himself with life in Boarderland.

An intel minister whose duty was to keep Hatter under constant surveillance approached. “The king requires your presence,” he said.

Hatter fell in step with the Doomsine and was soon seated in the royal tent, Arch pacing back and forth before his usual pack of intel ministers.

“As Queen Alyss’ bodyguard-” the king began.

“Homburg Molly is the queen’s bodyguard, Your Majesty,” Hatter said.

Arch smiled. “Yes, I forgot. You’re with us now. As the former bodyguard then, of both Queen Genevieve and Queen Alyss, you have privileged access to every gwormmy-length of the queendom-more privileged perhaps than anyone except Bibwit Harte or Alyss herself-and you can

travel anywhere within Wonderland’s borders without attracting suspicion. For obvious reasons, I could not have recruited Alyss for the task I’m about to assign you, and Bibwit Harte is not physically capable of performing it. You are the only Wonderlander with both the access my task requires and the Millinery skill to accomplish it.” To his ministers, he commanded, “Give it to him.”

Hatter was handed a skein of thread wrapped in cloth.

“What you now hold,” Arch said, “is silk from Wonderland’s green caterpillar-oracle, in total weight equal to that of a gwynook’s wing. You are to return to Heart Palace with it. Once there, you are to

scale the palace’s tallest spire. At the top, you won’t fail to recognize my Weapon of Inconceivable Loss and Massive Annihilation. You are to weave the entirety of green silk onto the weapon in this pattern.” Arch handed the Milliner a pocket holo-crystal, which showed what looked like the center of an Earth spider’s web. “You must follow the pattern exactly. If, for any reason, you fail in what I ask of you, if you tell anyone what you’re about, neither you, Weaver, nor anybody else will ever see Homburg Molly alive again. Once the mission is complete, you’re to contact me immediately. But there is a time limit. If I have not heard from you after two revolutions of the Thurmite moon, you will never afterwards hear from your daughter.” Arch glanced at his wrist, on which there was no timepiece. “Now, Mr. Madigan, I suggest you get going.”

Suspecting that he’d be under surveillance so long as he remained within Arch’s borders, Hatter passed into Wonderland before giving over all pretense of carrying out the king’s mission, hiding in the brittle scrub of Outerwilderbeastia and waiting until the last traveler had proceeded through the official crossing. As soon as the card soldiers were alone, he shrugged daggers from his backpack and flung them at one of the demarcation barrier’s pylons.

Clank! Clunk clang!

The soldiers whirled, at the ready. Hatter sprinted up behind them and, with his bare hands, rendered them unconscious before a single one glimpsed him. On the Boarderland side of the barrier: five guards.

Fthap!

Hatter’s top hat was flattened into spinning blades and he was about to eliminate the guards when he realized: A disturbance might alert Arch. Better to leave as little trace of his reentry into Boarderland as possible.

Remaining on the Wonderland side of the demarcation barrier, Hatter walked two hundred paces in the direction of the Valley of Mushrooms, then activated the blades on his right wrist and pushed them into the ground. Dirt and clay and pebbles churned loose. He pushed the rotating blades deeper and deeper into the ground, using his left hand to clear away the debris until he had tunneled under the demarcation barrier and emerged on the Boarderland side. He made the fastest time he could back to Arch’s camp, approaching from the direction of the setting suns so that he would be unrecognizable, a silhouette, to any Boarderlander who happened to spot him. Within a hectare of the camp, he took his top hat from his

head, flattened it with a jerk of the wrist, and folded the blades into a compact stack, which he secured in the inside pocket of his coat. He then slipped off his coat and buried it with his backpack, marking the

site with a melon-sized rock scarred by a spin of his wrist-blades.

Hatter glanced up at the sky. Already half a revolution of the Thurmite moon had passed and he wasn’t even back where he’d started. But he proved lucky. Entering the Doomsine encampment, he came across a load of washing on a clothesline and made away with the loose-fitting pants, many-pocketed blouse, and hooded coat favored by day laborers: necessary camouflage, because if anyone recognized

him, he and his daughter were dead.

W HEREAS OTHERS would have stood gazing down upon the valley in silent awe at the gigantic, multicolored mushrooms and remarked that even the quality of the valley’s light seemed more vibrant than it did anywhere else, Redd started the final descent into the caterpillars’ habitat without pause or murmur. Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire tramped after her-Siren and Alistaire muting their

amazement at a vista unlike any they had ever seen, The Cat stewing in worry because the valley had fully recovered from the devastation his mistress had ordered in her first months as Wonderland’s queen. It wasn’t supposed to have recovered and Redd might punish him.

But Her Imperial Viciousness had other concerns as she stepped along the valley’s spongy floor, searching for the caterpillar-oracles in her imagination. The mushrooms were serving as a sort of cloaking network, deflecting her imaginative sight every which way so that all she saw were mulch and stalks and mushroom tops.

“We’ll have to draw them out,” she said, conjuring a vendor’s cart filled with fresh, aromatic tarty tarts in a variety of flavors.

Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire fanned the delicious scents out in all directions, and in less time than it would have taken a hungry Wonderland child to eat a single tarty tart-

“There!” Vollrath exclaimed, pointing to a blue smoke cloud that formed a beckoning hand.

They followed the hand to a nearby clearing, where the members of the caterpillar counsel sat with their bodies coiled beneath them as they puffed on the same antique hookah. Each of the caterpillars occupied a mushroom as distinct in color as himself: blue, orange, red, yellow, purple, and green.