ArchEnemy by Frank Beddor Read Free Book Online

had already been sliced through in several places. Another few paces and the Club soldiers would be upon them.
    They jumped out of one transport into the other, landing awkwardly in the aisle, and Alyss immediately found herself attacked by scarves, blouses, a hooded cloak: imaginationist-prisoners offering what they could for further disguise.
    “They’ll be looking for you dressed as a farmer’s helper,” the sideburned man explained, inclining his head and adding an almost inaudible “Your Highness” to indicate that he knew who Alyss was. He moved his kaleidoscope-like instrument back and forth over the hole in the side of the transport. Wherever the instrument passed, the wall re-formed until the transport was entire again. Up and down the aisle, prisoners had gathered in twos and threes to prevent the Club soldiers in the heavily partitioned pilot’s station from noticing the disturbance, but they now settled quietly into the shadows. Alyss and Dodge sat among them as if they had been there all along.
    “Where are they taking us?” Alyss asked the whiskered Wonderlander.
    “I couldn’t tell you the exact location, but my guess—and my hope—is that we’re going to one of the limbo coops.”
    The limbo coops.
    Dodge—surreptitiously tapping at the keypad on his forearm, transmitting tracking codes to General Doppelgänger—looked at her. They had heard unsubstantiated rumors of limbo coops, in which imaginationists were being imprisoned. But they had known for sure only that Wonderlanders were being routed from their homes and deposited somewhere . . . if not suffering worse.
    The noise of the salvage lot was growing faint and, as the smail hummed through darkened neighborhoods toward the Clubs’ extensive land holdings, Alyss studied the diminutive hairy-cheeked man. He had a single eyebrow nearly as coarse and bristly as his sideburns. Squiggles of hair pushed out from his shirt cuffs, and tufts of the stuff grew thick on the first digit of each of his fingers. The only place he didn’t have hair, it seemed, was on top of his head, which resembled the rounded point of a gwynook’s egg. And unlike Dodge who, finished with his keypad, sat as tense as wire, and unlike the others in the transport, the man’s status as a prisoner apparently did not weigh heavily upon him; he wore an expression of pleasant anticipation.
    “Who are you?” she asked.
    Again, he inclined his head ever so subtly. “Just an average tinker who makes his living by traveling the queendom, offering for sale the modest gadgets I design and manufacture myself, and which I trust either amuse and educate my customers or make their daily chores a touch easier.”
    “But you have a name, I take it?”
    “My name is Mutty P. Dumphy. But as I said, I’m a simple tinker who lives by what modest wit and imagination I possess, as all of my kind must.”
    “You live by your inventiveness, but you subscribe to the Clubs’ anti-imagination propaganda?” Dodge asked.
    “I don’t subscribe to it at all, sir.”
    “Then why were you at the salvage lot to hear them speak?” asked Alyss.
    “I see no harm in my tinkering with ideas as I do objects, if only to better understand why I don’t believe what I don’t believe. But mostly I was there in hopes of getting myself reunited with any number of friends who’ve been taken to the limbo coops. I can’t be sure to which coop I’ll be taken, of course. I don’t even know how many there are. But I can’t help being optimistic. I trust I will meet at least one of my friends, yet if not, others might benefit from seeing me, as I have encouraging—”
    The smail-transport came to a sudden stop and Mr. Dumphy, who’d been standing in the aisle, went tumbling into the pilot’s partition. Ordered to disembark, the prisoners filed out on to an unpaved street, both sides of which were crowded with ramshackle structures that appeared on the verge of collapse—multi-level, if none-too-well