Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor Read Free Book Online Page A

was, the creative source for the universe, its glow—as always—causing the crystal to seem on the verge of swelling beyond its confines.
    Depressing to see it stowed in this underground prison. How can I reinstate the Inventors’ Parade if the crystal must remain hidden away, as it does in order to be kept out of the hands of those who’d misuse its power?
    But being in possession of the crystal as well as the scepter from her Looking Glass Maze, wasn’t she powerful enough to defeat any foe? Presumably. But why risk it? She and Bibwit had decided: Better to keep the crystal hidden.
    Alyss knew that reviving the annual Inventors’ Parade didn’t rank high in the hierarchy of what was important to Wonderland’s security and improvement. But whenever she remembered the parades of her earliest youth—the Heart Crystal out in the open for all to enjoy, the public lining the streets to see the latest contraptions dreamed up by fellow citizens, the inventors doing their best to show off so that Queen Genevieve might pass their inventions into the crystal, upon which, in some other world, a version of them would come to be—whenever she remembered all of this, Alyss longed to bring back the Inventors’ Parade, hoping it might signify a small return to…well, if not a better time (as Bibwit would surely deny it), then a different time, one in which her parents had been alive.
    The hatchway slid closed and Alyss took up her usual position on a viewing platform halfway to the chamber floor, as close to the crystal as possible. Her scepter in one hand, she reached out toward the crystal with her other, to maximize her remote viewing ability. Her imagination’s eye immediately filled with the bright wash of the crystal’s light, which faded by degrees to reveal an old-fashioned dining room with mahogany wainscoting, floral-patterned wallpaper, a heavy wooden sideboard: the dining room at the deanery of Christ Church College, Oxford. Among those enjoying a dinner of roasted hens at the table, she saw herself—rather, she saw her double, whom, by twining her powers with those of the Heart Crystal, she’d created and sent to Earth to take her place in the Liddell family.
    Miss Alice Liddell: adopted daughter of the reverend and his wife, former friend of Charles Dodgson, near-wife to Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, but now enamored of Reginald Hargreaves, who was sitting across the table from her.
    Reginald was a student at Christ Church, a country squire who enjoyed tramping about the fields of his Hampshire estate, Cuffnells, much more than being holed up in a room with books and theories. Although he sat between two of Alice’s sisters, Edith and Lorina, his attention was markedly fixed on Alice—which the reverend and Mrs. Liddell, presiding happily over all, did not fail to notice.
    How cozy and simple things seem .
    Alyss knew better. She had eaten in that room many times, and when in the thick of whatever traumas a day in Oxford had offered up, nothing had seemed simple. But she couldn’t help thinking it—things were simpler there.
    She watched, feeling like one of the company even though the scene was silent and she could only guess at the amusing anecdote Reginald had related that set everyone laughing. Alice was laughing the hardest to show how much she liked him. He grinned, not taking his eyes off her even when Lorina asked for his attention, apparently reciting some humorous tidbit of her own.
    The easy way they show their affection…
    She thought of Dodge, of herself and Dodge, how theirs was a stuttering kind of love, a tentative, timid thing, a—
    Tzzzz .
    Something’s wrong . The hatchway had opened. The march of pressing business was descending toward her.
    â€œWhat is it?” she asked as Dodge, Bibwit, and General Doppelgänger came into view.
    â€œThe queendom is under attack,” said the general.