“Her name was Weaver, wasn’t it?”

Molly was startled. “How’d you know that?”

He waved off the question. “I’ve hardly begun to astound you, Molly. Not only do I know your mother’s name, I know who your father is. And what’s more, so do you. You’ve already met him.”

Molly was so taken aback by all of this that she didn’t hear Arch call for his bodyguards. Shadows fell over her as Ripkins and Blister entered the tent.

“Molly wants to know her father’s name,” Arch said to them. “Why don’t we give her a hint?” “His first name rhymes with ‘splatter,’” said Ripkins.

“And ‘matter,’” put in Blister. “Also ‘fatter,’” said Ripkins. “Likewise ‘chatter,’” added Blister. “And his surname?” Arch asked.

“It rhymes with ‘that again,’” said Ripkins. “And ‘Flanagan,’” put in Blister.

“Also, um…‘pad a fin’?” offered Ripkins. “Or ‘pan a tin’?” Arch and Blister looked at him.

“‘Pannikin’!” he said proudly.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Molly screamed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Perhaps not,” Arch said. “But I can think of at least one person whose knowledge you’ll trust.” He got to his feet as a strange aroma wafted into the tent. “Here she comes now with a plate of DoDo dumplings, one of my favorite Boarderland delicacies, to help you regain your strength.”

Ready to deny all, to denounce Boarderland as a nation of liars, Molly turned and saw the last person in the world she had ever expected to see alive.

“M-Mom?”

CHAPTER 18

R EDD FOUND her usual bitterness amplified by her passage through the Heart Crystal. The roses of her dress gnawed the air, their petal-mouths mutely opening and closing in echo of her black melancholy as she stalked the predawn streets of this alien city and lashed herself with gloomy thoughts.

“If anyone tells you it’s painless to be turned into pure NRG and formed again from the muck of some

Earth person’s imagination,” Redd hissed, “don’t believe them.”

“I won’t, Your Imperial Viciousness.” The Cat glanced side-long at his mistress, licked a paw and rubbed it over his eyes.

“If I’m not powerful enough to defeat Alyss…” Redd murmured, and dropped into a depressed silence. The otherworldly pair walked the length and breadth of Montmartre, not knowing what else to do. Few

people were out and about, and none had passed within twenty yards of them when Redd stopped as if

slapped.

“I am more powerful than that disgustingly well-intentioned niece of mine!”

But what if her journey through the crystal had weakened her power, diluted it to a laughable remnant of what it used to be? What if what if what if. She would test it, flex the muscle of her imagination, and it would tell her all. She reached a hand out to nothing. A stick as long as one of The Cat’s claws formed in her palm, extended lengthwise until it resembled the twisty, knobby thing she’d used as a scepter in Wonderland.

“You try,” she said to The Cat, who morphed from humanoid to kitten and back again, testing his own powers.

“Good.”

But Her Imperial Viciousness wasn’t done. She banged the end of her makeshift scepter on the pavement and, from the point of impact, cracks branched out in all directions, widening enough to let vines of flesh-eating roses slither out of them. Growing at a rate never before seen in nature, the vines methodically covered the entire block-buildings, lampposts, street, and sidewalk. It was then that an unfortunate butcher, hurrying to his shop at this early hour as was his custom, emerged from his apartment. He saw the roses and the menacing figures of Redd and The Cat and he tried to run, but the thorn-laden vines wrapped around his ankles and held him rooted. Thorns dug into him as the vines wound up and around his legs, torso, and arms. He opened his mouth to scream and a vine stuffed itself down his throat.

“It’s like watching an enjoyable narrative on an entertainment crystal back on Mount Isolation,” Redd said as the roses finished with the butcher. She motioned with her stick-a conductor leading her orchestra-and the roses retracted into the pavement’s cracks. “You’ve been to this world before, Cat. Take me to where I can sulk and complain in peace. Someplace suitable to my delicate temperament.”

“Yes, Your Imperial Viciousness.”

The Cat preferred not to admit his ignorance. True, he had recently plunged through the Pool of Tears and traveled to Earth in his hunt for the exiled Alyss Heart, but nothing looked familiar to him and he was certain that he had never been in this city. He led Redd through a series of turns and along countless blocks. They rounded a corner and came upon the dead butcher. They had traveled in a circle.

“You don’t know where we are?” Redd asked.

Her voice was so quiet that it made the fur between The Cat’s ears stand on end. He hadn’t risked a leap into the Heart Crystal only to die now.

“When I was last on Earth,” he said cautiously, “I must not have come to this city.”

“Tell it to the steel,” Redd snarled, conjuring the end of her stick into a blade, with which she was about to pierce him, when-

“I have only one life left,” he reminded her.

She held the spear aloft, ready to strike. With a grunt of vexation, she lowered it, imagined the blade-end back into a nonlethal nub, and jabbed it against his chest with every other word. “Then you’ll have to be more helpful in the future, won’t you? Because I might not be so lenient a second time.”

The Cat licked his paw and rubbed his eyes.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she asked, annoyed. “What?”

Redd pretended to lick her hand and rub her eye.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Your Imperial Viciousness, but I look around and everything is clear and hard. Except you. You’re…blurry.”

“You’re not so clear yourself,” Redd snapped. “It’s probably just the lingering effects of the Heart

Crystal.”

She had noticed it too: The Cat out of focus while everything around him was clear and distinct. It was the same whenever she looked at any part of her body. She seemed to exist within a soft fuzz, the edges of herself dissolving into the surrounding air. Not until she and The Cat passed a furniture shop on the Avenue de Clichy and she glimpsed her reflection in an oval looking glass did she understand the cause.

“That hack of a painter! His style was too soft! His coloring too gentle!” She exploded the mirror into thousands of fragments with the force of her anger. “I’ll kill him!”

The Cat was all for it, but neither he nor Redd could remember the way to the painter’s studio. Her Imperial Viciousness focused her thoughts, searched for him with her imagination’s eye. But she wasn’t sure where to look; no vision of the painter or his studio appeared. Instead, the eye of her imagination alighted on a crumbling stone staircase half hidden by garbage in an alley behind a charcuterie. The