Eyes are everywhere. It’s dangerous to talk. The princess has not returned.”

Hatter didn’t know what the Glass Eyes were-Redd had only recently unleashed them on the queendom-but he wasn’t going to stick around to find out. As long as he had strength in him, his duty dictated that he return to the other world and search for the princess. He would find her, train her in the ways of a warrior queen, as he had her mother; then they could both come home to face plenty of trouble, the Glass Eyes being only part of it.

He dived back into the Pool of Tears, the gravity of the portal-already growing more familiar to him-pulling him down. Likewise more familiar to him was the pause in the deep, the momentary suspension, followed by the heart-in-mouth feeling as he rocketed up and out of a puddle behind a milking shed on the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary. Three unimpressed goats were the only earthly creatures to see the figure twirl out of a sun-scorched puddle and land confidently on his feet.

Hatter wondered whether he could learn to navigate the Pool of Tears as he did the Crystal Continuum, so that he might be able to choose his earthly destination. Control would be more difficult to attain than it was in the Continuum. Water was a heavy medium; to maneuver in it would require skill, balance, endurance, strength of body and mind. But these were considerations for another day, another year, because Hatter’s worldwide search for Alyss now began in earnest.

He trailed people alight with the glow of imagination, believing that one of them would lead him to

Wonderland’s princess, who couldn’t fail to glow in this world.

He visited hat shops in the towns and cities of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Bavaria, Italy, Prussia, Greece, Poland (to name but several). In 1864, five years into his search, having twice

circled the European continent, he took the Calais ferry to Dover, England. Had Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland been published by the time he arrived, any one of the salespeople in the hat shops and haberdasheries he visited would have been stung with recognition upon hearing the name Princess Alyss Heart of Wonderland issue from his lips, though they might have thought him mad-a man in search of a fictional character. As it was, they only tried to sell him hats he didn’t need while complimenting him on the one he wore. Hatter would be far from England a year later when Charles Dodgson’s book was first published.

As he roamed the world in search of Wonderland’s princess, maps sticking out of every available pocket, worn from use and much scribbled on with notes of where he’d been and what routes he’d taken, Hatter’s legend grew. Though the languages in which it was told varied as widely as the terrain he covered-ranging from Afrikaans to Hindi to Japanese to Welsh-and the details of the story often changed, its basic premise was the same: A solitary man blessed with fear some physical abilities and armed with a curious assemblage of weaponry crossed continents on a mysterious quest that led him to

headwear merchants the world over-whether a peddler of knitted caps operating from a tent in a North

African Bedouin encampment or an exclusive hat shop in the heart of Prague.

Hatter sightings were reported in America, which was nearing the end of a civil war-glimpses of him stalking streets in New York and Massachusetts, tramping the snow-covered hills of Vermont, the icy roads of Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. He traveled down through Mexico and South America, skirted the Antarctic Peninsula, and circled back up to California and Oregon. He passed into Canada and eventually made his way to the Asian countries and the Far East.

Then, in the third week of April 1872, thirteen years after he lost Alyss, Hatter entered a shop in a crowded bazaar in Egypt, in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

“I’m looking for Princess Alyss Heart of Wonderland,” he said to the shopkeeper. “I’m a member of Wonderland’s Millinery. Any information you have pertaining to Princess Alyss will be highly appreciated and, in due time, rewarded.”

He had uttered these exact words so many times, and not once met with success, that a normal man would have given up on their power to provoke a meaningful response. The truth was, he didn’t expect the shopkeeper to have any information, so he was surprised when the man beckoned him toward a high shelf, where a book was leaning between a miniature sphinx carved out of sandstone and a basket of dried camel tongues. The man dusted it with his sleeve and handed it to Hatter. It was an English edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Her name was misspelled, but…Wonderland? Surely, it was his Alyss. How could it be anyone else? The girl in the illustrations looked nothing like her, and yet it could not be coincidence. Hatter’s future path had become clear: To find Alyss, he would first have to find the book’s author, Lewis Carroll.

B ULLET-LIKE, DODGE raced headlong through the kaleidoscopic glitter of the Crystal Continuum. “Yeah-ha! Wooooo!”

Wonderlanders, struggling to get out of his way, were sucked up through crystal byways and reflected out of looking glasses into seedy restaurants or the homes of strangers-looking glasses out of which they had never meant to be reflected, on their way to other destinations.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Dodge shouted. “Come on!”

Four Glass Eyes were chasing him. They looked like ordinary Wonderlanders except for the implants of reflective colorless crystal in their eye sockets. An artificial race with enhanced sight, strength, and speed, Glass Eyes were built for hand-to-hand combat, and they patrolled the Crystal Continuum with orders to annihilate anyone suspected of being an Alyssian. Their patrols had effectively limited rebel mobility, all but choked off a major channel for rebel communications. Handheld looking glass communicators had never been viable for anything but short, cryptic intelligence reports, as dispatches could be intercepted

by anyone at any time. The most effective means of sending and retrieving sensitive Alyssian intelligence had been to use portal runners to traverse the Crystal Continuum. But that was before the Glass Eyes. Now being a portal runner meant dying sooner rather than later. Portal runs were one step removed from suicide missions. Dodge Anders had made more portal runs than any Alyssian and he always volunteered to deliver the most important messages, warnings, and intel updates. The occasion for this run: Redd’s troops had been active and General Doppelganger suspected an impending attack on an Alyssian outpost situated in the Snark Mountain foothills. The outpost had to be warned.

Shoooooooomph!

Dodge flew through the Continuum, the Glass Eyes gaining on him. These contests of navigational skill and strength were the only times he felt anything even approaching happiness.

It didn’t matter that he might be killed. He was being useful and it made him feel that much closer to exacting his revenge.

In front of him, the Continuum splintered in many directions. He threw his body weight to the left and made a sharp turn at the last minute. He looked behind him: One of the Glass Eyes hadn’t made the turn. Three more to go. And he had to lose them quick, before others joined the chase.