The HATBOX began its dizzying scan of possible locations and enemies. Molly took deep, even breaths and closed her eyes, opening them only when she heard the steady murmur of strangely accented voices, the clop-clop of hoofs on cement, the trundling of squeaky carriages.
She was in a city-an ancient one, judging by the looks of things. Carriages like the ones rumbling past hadn’t been seen in Wonderland for generations. And as for horses, those beasts of burden were straight out of the history programs Molly was forced to study as part of the Millinery’s classroom curriculum.
Amid the crush of pedestrians coming toward her: a man wearing greatcoat and bowler. She instinctively reached for the brim of her homburg, but he only dipped his head in greeting and continued past. The pedestrians, those in the carriages-they all seemed intent on their errands. But she wouldn’t be fooled. An attack was imminent. From what quarter, instigated by whom, she couldn’t say. But under no circumstances would she lessen her vigilance or-
A voice rose above the street’s general clamor: “Read about the carnage in Piccadilly! Death and destruction in Piccadilly! Only a tuppence to read the latest reports!”
A boy was selling newspapers on the corner. Molly walked up to him and he shoved a paper into her hand. The London Times? She’d heard Alyss talk of London. It was a city the Queen had visited during her exile from Wonderland.
“Two pence,” the boy said.
She didn’t have the leisure to find out what he wanted, snapped open a set of wrist-blades to spook him and-
Seeing that a trivial flick of the wrist produced such a blur of deadly copter blades, he sprinted off. But
Molly didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself. Not yet. She quickly flicked shut the blades.
The newspaper’s description of the carnage and destruction in Piccadilly read familiar. In the cheese shop hollowed out by an explosion, Molly recognized the aftermath of an orb generator. In witnesses’ clumsy attempts to describe a rifle that coughed bolts of light, she recognized Wonderland’s crystal shooter and its ammo of bright NRG rods produced by the frizzling together of certain gemstones. And as for the carcasses that looked like pin cushions with legs tucked underneath them, those were easy to identify-cannonball spiders in the death pose, their brief life spans having run their course, though not, according to the reporter, before the outsized creatures had taken scores of Londoners with them.
A sound like scissor blades rapidly opening and closing.
Molly’s hand jumped to the brim of her homburg. She scouted the scene.
Nothing. Just Londoners going about their business the same as before. But as she turned her attention back to the newspaper-
There it was again. Unmistakable: the sound of card soldiers being dealt in preparation for battle. She didn’t sight them until Londoners were screaming and running for shelter. They’d already unfolded themselves: a flush of soldiers from one of Redd’s decks. Unengaged, they resembled ordinary playing cards, albeit life-sized ones. But engaged for battle as they were now, unfolded to twice their usual
height, with limbs of Wonderland steel and a forward lilt to their every movement as if perpetually stalking prey, they presented an undeniably menacing aspect.
“Stay calm,” Molly whispered to herself. “Stay cool.”
The only way to “kill” one of Redd’s late-model infantry was to stab it hard in the medallion-sized area above its breast-plate, at the base of its steel-tendoned neck. The knife blade would cut through its vital circuitry and send sparks spurting like fiery blood. Thing was, in the harassment of battle, this kill spot seemed to shrink to the size of a gwormmy’s eye, to a-
Bolts of NRG shot toward her-thip thip! thip thip!-from the muzzle of a Five Card’s crystal shooter. Molly whipped the homburg from her head, used it as a trap, hands moving at the speed of a thousand hurrying caterpillar feet as she caught each of the bolts in the hat’s underside. Fwiss!
She sidestepped the swing of a Six Card’s lance, but only to leap twistingly into the air, barely avoiding an orb generator shot by a Seven Card. She slammed her homburg flat and spun it around and around over her head as if she were a cowgirl from the American West working her lasso. The NRG bolts she’d caught streaked out from its edges, shooting into a Four Card’s kill spot.
The soldier folded up, inanimate.
Her next victim didn’t present himself so readily. It would have been difficult enough fighting so many card soldiers even if they hadn’t been well armed. But armed as they were, with whipsnake grenade and orb generator…
Time and again she unleashed her homburg, which rattled and jarred and dented the soldiers without inflicting serious harm. Her wrist-blades in perpetual motion, her belt sabers whistling through the air, whining to make contact with the enemy, she at last pierced the Six Card’s kill spot with a sword from her backpack’s never-diminishing supply of blades.
Three more to go.
The Five and Seven Cards fired their AD52s. One hundred and four razor-edged cards ripped through the air, clanged against her centrifugal-spewing wrist-blades and skittered away from her. An Eight Card took aim at her with an orb cannon. The blades of one bracelet activated to deflect the incoming
razor-cards, Molly used her free hand to whip her homburg at the Eight Card and then cartwheeled toward him.
The homburg knocked the cannon from the soldier’s grip and- Still cartwheeling, she caught it before it hit the ground, fired.
The orb generator’s explosion engulfed all three rogue soldiers. In the blast’s aftermath, they lay twitching
in the street, outer steel scorched, inner circuitry in need of rebooting. Working her way from the Eight Card to the Five, Homburg Molly-halfer, orphan, supposedly untrustworthy bodyguard to a queen who didn’t need one-thrust a blade into their kill spots, quieting them for all time.
She stood for a moment, catching her breath, not quite believing what she’d accomplished. Level Z. She had completed what no one else…
But then she saw what she should’ve seen sooner: a puddle where no puddle should have been, surrounded as it was by dry pavement on a sunny day. Concentric ripples expanded outward from the puddle’s roiling center, and in a sudden froth of water-
A Glass Eye launched into the air.
Several more Glass Eyes leaped from nearby puddles. In the whorl of action, it was hard to tell exactly how many there were-more than Molly could defeat with just her Millinery weapons, that was for sure. So she ran. The Glass Eyes fired their weapons, cannonballs searing toward her, hatching open to become giant spiders.
She ran straight for the brick outer wall of the nearest building-the Hotel Burberry. She looked as if she were going to slam right into it, but at the last possible moment she dived to her right. Too late for the spiders to change course. They latched on to the hotel and began to crawl up floor after floor, on the hunt for prey. Food was food to a cannonball spider, whether Alyssian, Londoner or tourist.