themselves.

They crossed the street and came to a corner crowded with smoky gwormmy-kabob grills and crystal smugglers hawking contraband. Dodge tried to call to his senses the aroma of freshly baked tarty tarts. Hadn’t his father bought him one on this very corner? His sense-memory failed him. Impossible to enter into the past. Underneath the shouts and horns that echoed through the streets, he heard a disembodied voice speaking “Reddisms” from loudspeakers mounted overhead. The Redd way is the right way. As in the beginning, there was Redd, so in the end Redd shall be. Three-dimensional faces on holographic billboards told of the latest crackdowns and taxations. Piped in from who knew where played the background music of Wondertropolis’ free fall into decay. It seemed to come from every crack in the pavement, every pothole in the street, every crevice in the time-battered buildings: a composition on infinite repeat, featuring lyrics Redd had written herself, which sang her praises as Wonderland’s savior.

“I’d like to hear silence again,” Dodge said. “A whole day’s worth of quiet. Do you remember what that was like?”

“Yes. But you know how it is.” The rook did his best imitation of Redd. “‘Silence is hereby outlawed. Silence breeds independent thought, which in turn breeds dissent.’”

Not that there were many true dissenters, as they both knew. Those disloyal to Redd were quickly rooted out of the general population, never to be heard from again.

The Blaxik battle was growing more distant in their minds, their blood cooling. They had their choice of places to visit, provided they were careful.

“How about a jabberwocky match?” suggested the rook. At the amphitheater, they could watch the huge, ferocious beasts go at each other with a teeth-gnashing hatred rivaled only by that which audience members felt for one another.

Dodge shook his head. “Fights always break out and I don’t like the feeling I get when we slip away without at least injuring a few of Redd’s soldiers.”

“The statue then?”

Again, Dodge shook his head. The Queen Redd statue stood at the city’s western edge, where, from the observation deck, Dodge could gaze out through the eyes of this enormous agate replica at the city

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.

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.