ArchEnemy (32 page)

The saddest expression the girl had ever seen marred Rafters’ face. “I did. Before your mother’s time. Hatter Madigan wasn’t even the age you are now.” As a young alchemist, he said, he’d made a mistake. “The exact nature of the mistake isn’t important for you to know. But I recognized it too late. My self-inflicted punishment was to follow the Wonderlanders whose actions earned the Pool of Tears its name—those who’d also made mistakes in their personal or professional lives and had stood on the cliff overlooking Tove Pond, as it was called, letting their tears fall into the water before they jumped, never to be seen by friends or family again. I’ve lived with my mistake for more years than I care to count.”

“But you could’ve gone back,” Molly said. “You can go back now.”

He shook his head. “I’m not yet brave enough to face those I left behind who are, I pray, still living. But I’ve related all of this, Molly, only so you’ll understand when I tell you that I have cried myself out long before today. More tears are needed to enlarge this portal if you’re to return to Wonderland.
You
must provide the tears—genuine, heart-felt tears they must be. I will give you privacy.”

He was out the door before she realized it. But left alone in the garret, with everything—the end of Queen Alyss’ second exile, her own reunion with her father—dependent on her own grief-loosened tears, her eyes remained dry. Only when she gazed round at the trappings of a Millinery alchemist and let her mind drift back to Weaver and the father she was afraid to let herself love, only then did the tears come.

“I can’t decide if it bodes well or ill that I’m without imagination one hour but possessed of it again a few hours later,” Alyss said. “It’s so strange, with regards to imagination, to be at the mercy of what happens in Wonderland.”

“It may be,” Dodgson responded, sifting through the letters on his desk, “that it boded ill when imagination was n-nowhere to be found, but bodes well now that imagination’s returned to us.”

Alyss was skeptical. “Mine is not of much value without the Pool of Tears.”

“You’ve confessed what you find s-strange,” Dodgson said, ignoring his letters, “and so I will c-confess the same. I think it at least as strange that a source of power as great as the H-Heart Crystal can be possessed or c-controlled by a single individual. By any group of individuals. W-we are each of us born with our own talents, that much remains clear. But to th-think, to
know
, that to the extent each of us is able to utilize the imaginative ability with which we’re born . . . to know that this d-depends upon who possesses the Heart Crystal and w-what he or she does with it . . .” The reverend shook his head. “Possession of so much power will always lead to c-c-corruption. If not in the person who controls the object, then in those around her.”

Alyss did not deny it, having for awhile now considered that being sovereign of any state meant constantly guarding against corruption in one form or another. She was about to say as much when the door banged open, as if kicked, and Molly burst in, as excited as in days of old.

“I’ve made another Pool of Tears!”

T
HEY HAD no more than half an hour—the most Alice Liddell was willing to spare apart from her family—and so they didn’t venture far, sitting in Christ Church Meadow and absently watching the people come and go as if it were any other day, any other hour, not the last time two friends would ever meet.

“Father is about his work at the college again,” Alice Liddell said, “but Mother and I spend much of our time comforting Edith, who’s been the slowest to recover. I made her laugh earlier today.”

Only Molly knew it was to be their final meeting. Queen Alyss had thought it best not to expose the Liddells to more trauma or confusion. But it was harder than Molly had anticipated, to sit here and say nothing.

“The authorities refuse to tell us about the man who was killed,” Alice went on. “I don’t mind, really. What does it matter who he was or how he contrived to make it seem as though knives came from his fingers? I doubt knowing either would explain why he did such a thing to my family.”

“What about, you know, the other you?” Molly asked.

Alice shrugged, her hands worrying in her lap. When she spoke, she was too adamant, as if trying to convince herself of what she thought others wanted her to believe though she didn’t, couldn’t believe it. “I think my parents and sisters mistaken as to the extent of the similarity between us. I saw the lady but briefly and am sure I overstated our resemblance. I
would
like to know if she’d been the man’s accomplice and had second thoughts, since how else could she have known he was threatening our family? In any case, I’d like to thank her for saving them, but I don’t expect to have that privilege.”

A boy ran giggling past, chased by a shaggy terrier.

“I should get back. I promised to read to Edith. Perhaps we can meet for tea next Tuesday, if my sister’s improved by then.”

“Yeah,” Molly said, saddened to know Tuesday tea would never happen; Miss Liddell wasn’t the only one who had to get home. “Yeah, maybe I’ll see you then.”

Alyss and Dodgson were waiting for her at Rafters’ garret: the bed of straw, the dresser turned into a workbench, the puddle where no puddle should be. Molly pocketed the Milliner blades she and Rafters had produced with the help of her mother’s notebooks—C- and S-shaped blades, daggers and folding knives, skin-boring tools that looked like mini tridents, all weapons that might have come from Hatter’s backpack.

“You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Alyss asked Rafters.

He bent from the waist. “I thank you. But it’s not as if you’re returning to a paradise. Though, who knows? One day I might have the courage . . . and you’ll see me again in Wondertropolis.”

“I look forward to it,” Alyss said. There was nothing more to do but leave. She looked around and added, “Well . . .”

“Well . . .” said Dodgson, and suddenly bowed: “May we never meet again, Your Majesty.”

“F-for if we don’t meet again,” the reverend explained, “I will know you’ve s-succeeded in retaking the crown and, of course, that imagination for both our w-worlds is safe. I do trust, however, that if we’re never more to meet, I may then be free of your aunt and her followers as well.”

“Oh. I see,” Alyss said benignly. “Then may we never meet again, Mr. Dodgson.”

The reverend turned his attentions to the queen’s traveling companion. “Good day to you, Homburg Molly.”

Difficult to say who seemed more uncomfortable, Dodgson with his starched pose or the fidgeting Molly, though it was the girl who braved demonstrativeness. She stepped forward and, without looking at the reverend, gave him a quick hug, after which, without a glance for anyone, embarrassed, she hopped onto the workbench, next to the puddle where no puddle should be. Alyss climbed up beside her, and without further ado, they jumped one after the other into the portal, neither of them fighting against its steady downward pull, its deepwater lull, its upward push: the question about to be answered, of whether they would emerge into a recognizable Wonderland or an alien place in which friends and beloved were forever absent.

Even amidst the bloody free-for-all outside the Iron Butterfly, The Cat and Blister were left to themselves, as if in hopes they would do away with each other.

Dodge had, for the present, maneuvered as close to The Cat as he wished to be. He hadn’t waited this long for vengeance, suffered this long, to shoot the humanoid freak in the back. He wanted the assassin’s full attention, and so he occupied himself with any enemy who confronted him—tribal warriors, Club soldiers, he didn’t care. He fought whoever came at him.

“Hguuunh!”

Dodge turned, saw The Cat standing with his legs firmly planted and his body positioned as far from Blister’s reach as he could, keeping one arm extended and a pawful of claws rammed up into the bodyguard’s stomach.

“Ghuuuh,” Blister drooled, hands fumbling at the assassin’s arm, blistering it repeatedly.

The Cat rammed his claws deeper into the bodyguard before spitting and flinging him to the ground. Dodge stepped forward.

“Sir Justice’s spawn!” The Cat hissed.

The assassin was badly blistered on his thighs and back, blood seeped from his shoulder and arms, but if he felt pain, he didn’t show it. He sprang at the guardsman, morphing into a kitten while airborne so that Dodge swung his sword too high, and returning to humanoid form as he landed. He swatted the guardsman in the back and sent him reeling. Dodge regained his footing and charged; sword clattered against claw and fell from his grasp. The Cat kicked the blade away and Dodge reached under his jumpsuit for a whipsnake grenade. Within moments he had recourse to every weapon he was carrying. Whipsnake grenade, AD52, shardstorm: not a single one went untried, but The Cat’s speed and agility were more impressive than the guardsman remembered.

Too impressive.

After failing at everything else, he, Dodge Anders, was going to fail at this too. He would not outlive Sir Justice’s murderer. While The Cat bobbed and weaved to avoid shardstorm shrapnel, Dodge made his father a whispered apology for his failure. He apologized to Alyss and offered her his undying love. His clothes were tattered, shredded—his flesh too in many places. He’d exhausted his arsenal except for a single dagger. He ripped a strip of cloth from his jumpsuit and flapped it at The Cat, who abruptly fell still, as if mesmerized. Dodge again flapped the shred of cloth.

“Stop it,” The Cat said, unable to move, fixated on the cloth.

“What’s the matter, kitty?” Dodge teased, waving the string-like cloth, moving closer. “Infatuated by the string, kitty?”

“Stop it!”

But Dodge didn’t stop it, at least not until he was close enough to press the point of his dagger against the hollow of The Cat’s throat. Unfortunately, The Cat at the same time managed to lift a claw to Dodge’s chest, where his heart was.

“So it will end for both of us,” The Cat said. “Do it.”

Dodge stared into The Cat’s pulsing eyes, the moist nostrils, the slobbery fangs. He was not afraid to die, but . . . revenge? It had never been the way to honor his father’s memory. He’d always known it, but now, for the first time, he
felt
it. His hesitation lasted no more than a whisker twitch, but The Cat sensed it.

“Time to join your father,” the assassin mocked.

Dodge suffered the pop of skin as The Cat’s claw penetrated his chest. Revenge might not have been the best way to honor a father’s memory, but what good were such considerations now? He put pressure on the dagger against The Cat’s throat.

“Mreeeooooooow!”

The Cat leapt away, staggered, an entire deck of razor-cards lodged in his back. And there was Blister, barely able to stand, a forearm pressed against his stomach, loosely aiming an AD52 at the feline.