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. Dink! With her homburg shield, Molly swatted away a spikejack tumbler, that nightmare missile consisting of six flesh-grating spikes that stabbed out in all directions from a common center. She had to take a risk. The unnatural puddles dotting the street, maybe she could… Another spikejack was tumbling toward her. No choice. She gripped her homburg firmly in her hand and took a running jump into the nearest puddle, plunged under the surface, pulled ever deeper by the portal’s gravity until she slowed, reversed directions and was pushed up, up and— Whoosh!
She came twisting out in a spray of water, her belt sabers slicing into a Glass Eye that had the misfortune to be standing nearby. Time had seemed to slow down while she was underwater, but her disappearance and reappearance above the surface were nearly simultaneous. She again dove into the puddle, came leaping out of another, plucked a dagger from her backpack, and speared a Glass Eye that was still facing the spot she’d occupied half a moment before. If she had truly been in London, these puddles would have served as return portals to Wonderland’s Pool of Tears, once thought to be a watery black hole for Wonderlanders unlucky enough to have fallen in, a vortex that carried them to another world. For generations, nobody who’d fallen into the pool had ever returned to report of this other world, and so their loved ones had been left to gather at an overhanging cliff, letting their tears fall into the water and thus giving the pool its name. Not until Hatter Madigan and Princess Alyss Heart had returned through it—thirteen years after jumping in, feared dead—was the truth discovered.
But the universes created by the HATBOX had their limits. Puddle portals that would have carried Homburg Molly back to Wonderland in the real world here only connected to other portals. And she made the most of it—jumping into one, splashing out of another, using them to serially ambush the Glass Eyes until she emerged from an inkblot-shaped splotch of dirty water, on the verge of adding to her body count, flicking her homburg at whoever would be her next casualty, but—
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. Dink! With her homburg shield, Molly swatted away a spikejack tumbler, that nightmare missile consisting of six flesh-grating spikes that stabbed out in all directions from a common center. She had to take a risk. The unnatural puddles dotting the street, maybe she could… Another spikejack was tumbling toward her. No choice. She gripped her homburg firmly in her hand and took a running jump into the nearest puddle, plunged under the surface, pulled ever deeper by the portal’s gravity until she slowed, reversed directions and was pushed up, up and— Whoosh!
She came twisting out in a spray of water, her belt sabers slicing into a Glass Eye that had the misfortune to be standing nearby. Time had seemed to slow down while she was underwater, but her disappearance and reappearance above the surface were nearly simultaneous. She again dove into the puddle, came leaping out of another, plucked a dagger from her backpack, and speared a Glass Eye that was still facing the spot she’d occupied half a moment before. If she had truly been in London, these puddles would have served as return portals to Wonderland’s Pool of Tears, once thought to be a watery black hole for Wonderlanders unlucky enough to have fallen in, a vortex that carried them to another world. For generations, nobody who’d fallen into the pool had ever returned to report of this other world, and so their loved ones had been left to gather at an overhanging cliff, letting their tears fall into the water and thus giving the pool its name. Not until Hatter Madigan and Princess Alyss Heart had returned through it—thirteen years after jumping in, feared dead—was the truth discovered.
But the universes created by the HATBOX had their limits. Puddle portals that would have carried Homburg Molly back to Wonderland in the real world here only connected to other portals. And she made the most of it—jumping into one, splashing out of another, using them to serially ambush the Glass Eyes until she emerged from an inkblot-shaped splotch of dirty water, on the verge of adding to her body count, flicking her homburg at whoever would be her next casualty, but—