“I’m feeling a tad Maldoid-ish,” Blister said, taking a couple of mind riders from his coat pocket.

Self-propelled darts with serum-infused tips, most commonly used by Boarderland’s Maldoid tribe, mind riders could turn the most peace-loving citizen into a brawling lunatic.

“Haven’t thrown one in a while,” Blister said. “Good to keep in practice.”

He and Ripkins stepped into view and the border guards paused in their patrol, surprised to see Arch’s notorious henchmen.

“What’re you both doing here?” one of them asked.

“Nothing much,” Blister said, and with a forward thrust of his arm, released the mind riders. Thunp! Thunp!

A mind rider lodged in the forehead of each border guard, tips penetrating their skulls, injecting the angst serum into the nooks and gulleys of their brains. Their neural pathways filled with static. Poison spiked their wits.

The serum never took long to produce its effect.

The Astacans looked about in a daze. Then, as if noticing each other for the first time, their glazed-over expressions morphed into visages of hate.

“Aaaagh!” one of them yelled. “Yaaah!” the other shouted.

They fell together, punching and kicking at each other with a ferocity that would soon leave them both dead.

Ignoring the brawling pair, Ripkins and Blister stepped up to the demarcation barrier-a tight, impassable mesh of lightning-like sound waves. To try and step through the barrier, even to venture a single limb tentatively into its mesh, was to invite a painful end. The sound waves would cause one’s internal organs

to vibrate, generating more and more heat until one burned to death from the inside out.

Ripkins removed a palm-sized medallion from his pocket. With a flick of his thumb, he launched it spinning into the air. Like a coin spinning fast on its edge, the remote eye became almost impossible to see. But unlike a coin, the thing flew. Emitting no more sound than the rapid flutter of insect wings, it spun through an opening in the demarcation barrier’s mesh and into Wonderland, transmitting images directly back to Ripkins’ visual cortex. He saw what it saw: the number and location of card soldiers on border patrol.

“A full hand,” he said. “Pair of Threes. Pair of Fours. Lone Two.”

The remote eye flew back through the demarcation barrier. Ripkins caught it and stowed it in his pocket. He called out to the card soldiers on the other side of the barrier:

“Pretty dull work, just pacing up and back all day, isn’t it? Don’t know about you cards, but I didn’t sign up for this boring detail! Luckily, I’ve got something that helps us Boarderland guards pass the time! Come here and I’ll show it to you!”

The two nations were not at war and the soldiers had no reason to think of Boarderland guards as enemies. The Three Cards ventured close.

“Yeah?”

They tried to get a view of Ripkins through the eyesquintingly bright sound waves, when- Thewp! Thewp!

Ripkins harpooned them with kill-quills, yanked hard on the coils attached to the quills’ blunt ends and pulled the soldiers into the demarcation barrier’s mesh.

Tzzzzzzzzccckkkkzzzkkkckch!

The dead card soldiers acted as shields, created a gap in the sound waves through which Ripkins and Blister jumped safely into Wonderland, tumbling and rolling because razor-cards were slicing the air and ground all around them, the Four Cards making the most of their AD52s while the Two Card tapped his ammo belt, about to transmit an emergency message via his crystal communicator, except-

Mid-roll, with effortless accuracy, Blister pulled the trigger of his crystal shooter and shot the Two Card dead.

Ripkins lobbed a whipsnake grenade at the Four Cards, and while they danced and hopped to avoid its deadly coils-sending razor-cards everywhere but at their attackers-he and Blister sprinted forward.

Suffering the nasty twistings of body parts that should never be twisted, the card soldiers fell, lifeless, and Arch’s bodyguards were soon pushing through the tangles of Outerwilderbeastia, crunching twigs and leaves underfoot.

“Visit the labs?” Blister said, referring to the squat network of buildings in Wondertropolis’ warehouse district, where a consortium of Alyss’ scientists and engineers had tried to transform a host of captured Glass Eyes into a benign force. On lab grounds were the incinerator baths-large pits into which Glass Eyes were being herded and melted down, scorched into ash. There would be lots of Glass Eyes to choose from at the labs, but Ripkins shook his head.

“Too much security,” he said. “Find one that’s roaming?”

“It’ll be easier for us to avoid notice,” Ripkins said. “Yeah, but it’d be more fun to hit the labs.”

The bodyguards knew where they had to go: Mount Isolation in the Chessboard Desert, Redd’s former home and the birthplace of those they hunted.

Avoiding the notice of Alyss’ card soldiers, who were themselves scouring the land for Glass Eyes still at large, became more difficult when they reached the desert. The alternating quadrants of black lava rock and sun-reflecting ice did not allow for much camouflage.

“Not surprising,” Ripkins whispered when they came upon Mount Isolation.

Decks of card soldiers had the place under surveillance. Unable to return home, Glass Eyes might have been hiding nearby.

Careful to avoid detection, the bodyguards began to case Mount Isolation in ever widening circles, their course spiraling out from the dark palace while-

Not far away, behind a boulder that sat like an enormous lump of coal in the landscape, a pack of Glass Eyes was engaged in biological self-assembly. The vacant stare of crystal in their sockets; their eerie, waxwork stillness as if, all at once, they had suddenly paused in the middle of various activities: They were defragmenting their internal hard drives, healing wounds superficial and otherwise with the regeneration cell-buds that could develop into organs, limbs, tissue. But hearing the lightest of footsteps, their heads turned as one.

Ripkins and Blister were on their third time around Mount Isolation, approaching a quadrant of craggy rock formations, when-

Sssst!

A blade came slamming down toward Ripkins’ shoulder.

“Humph.” He sidestepped it with the calm of one avoiding a dollop of seeker droppings, pulled a crystal shooter out of his thigh holster, and fired.

The blade-wielding Glass Eye staggered, went down.

Blister was taking on two of them at once-hand to hand, blade to blade, defensive swivel countering offensive lunge in a ballet of violence. Ripkins sensed it more than saw it, the clash of activity to his left, because he’d become busy with his own pair of Glass Eyes, slashing at them with a forearm-length blade, using his crystal shooter to deflect their swords and knives, all while avoiding crystal shot from a third Glass Eye.