Their memories of the previous night were unreliable, befogged and sketchy, entire chunks of time blacked out by overindulgence. Still, Jack of Diamonds was pretty sure that he had fallen asleep atop a mattress-sized pillow stuffed with the first-growth feathers of tuttle-birds. The Lord of Diamonds was likewise certain that platters of tasty treats and decanters of mind-fuzzing libations had been within arm’s reach when he had drifted to sleep beneath the canopy of an antique Kalaman bed. And both father and son remembered tiring themselves out with dancing, their ears even now ringing from the loud volume of the Boardertonian deejay’s music. How then had they become surrounded by so much blatant industry? “What’s all this?” the Lord of Diamonds asked, waking from a heavy slumber and reluctantly opening his throbbing eyes.
They appeared to be in a factory. The signs of mass production were all around: conveyor lines, automated assembly arms, laser-solders, racks of intel chips, an army of steel skeletons, some fitted with wire-vein armatures and lab-grown muscle, others plain. On the billowing tent walls: blueprints for building Glass Eyes.
“Where are the ladies and servants?” Jack of Diamonds yawned. Which was when the white knight, leading a contingent of pawns and card soldiers, marched into the tent. The knight gazed around at the Glass Eyes manufacturing facility—overwhelming corroboration of King Arch’s story, if ever there was.
“Lord Diamond,” he said, “by order of Queen Alyss Heart, I hereby take you into custody, to be carried back to Wonderland, where you are to stand trial for treason and conspiracy to murder the queen.” “Arrested?” the Lord of Diamonds murmured, backing away and shaking his head. “Treason and murder?”
The knight turned upon the Jack of Diamonds. “And you, sir, being an escapee from the Crystal Mines, are also under arrest. I intend to personally deposit you back where you belong.” The knight lobbed a pair of grenades—one at Jack’s feet and the other at the lord’s. Foosh! Porta-prisons shot up at the grenades’ points of impact, but— They contained nothing. Jack could be surprisingly quick for his size, and he’d jumped behind the machine that screwed Glass Eye heads onto Glass Eye bodies. The Lord of Diamonds, meanwhile, was ducking under mechanical arms and stumbling across loading bays. The pawns and card soldiers split into two groups and gave chase, but the lord ran a serpentine course, erratic and nonsensical enough to avoid capture until he sighted an unobstructed path to the tent’s exit. He sprinted toward it, was just a couple strides from freedom when—