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guardsman concerned for his queen, but as one who cared for her above all others.
    Just a single lunar phase earlier—though he’d wished otherwise, wanting always to keep her safe—Alyss’ need for his protection had been largely unnecessary due to her tremendous imaginative gift. But now that she was without imagination . . .
    “You understand the importance of what we’re about here, walrus?” he asked. “To protect Queen Alyss, I need to dress her in clothes not in the least fit for a queen.”
    The walrus-butler glanced at the mound of discarded garments, none of which he suspected any queen in any land would deign to wear. “I will go in search of more, Mr. Anders.”
    The creature turned to leave, but Dodge stopped him with a sigh.
    “No. It’s getting late.” He extended a hand toward the smock, wig, stockings and sandals. “These will have to do.”
    They had better. The life of the woman he loved depended on it.

CHAPTER 4
    T HE SMAIL-transport came to an abrupt stop and the imaginationists crammed inside were ordered to disembark. One by one they emerged into the night, glad to be free from the transport’s stifling heat and humidity. Voices cluttered the air, crying out for mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—family members who had been loaded on to transports and randomly dumped in different limbo coops. But there were other voices too, unfamiliar to the Croquet Court Lofts, belonging to imaginationists residing throughout the queendom, unwilling passengers of yet other transports, kidnapped from their everyday lives and calling in vain for their own missing relatives.
    Sheer walls of dolomite seven meters thick rose to unseen heights around them. The road was unpaved, the structures on either side dilapidated, as if hurriedly thrown together out of garbage collected from construction sites.
    “Welcome home!” a Six of Clubs mocked from his perch in a guard tower.
    An imaginationist, desperate to escape, ran at the lone opening in the limbo coop’s wall. Like the demarcation barrier between Boarderland and Queen Alyss’ realm, it was secured by an impassable weave of lightning-like soundwaves, and the imaginationist could force only an arm and shoulder through it before his whole body spasmed and he was caught, his internal organs vibrating, generating ever increasing heat and burning him from the inside out.
    “Congregating on the street is not allowed!” the Six of Clubs yelled, aiming a mauler rifle at the imaginationists, threatening an onslaught of quicksilver shards from its double barrel. “Idling is not allowed!”
    Dragging their luggage, not knowing what to do or where to go, the crowd began to disperse, slowly at first, but more quickly when it became known that there weren’t enough living quarters to accommodate everyone. In single-room flats throughout the limbo coop, a scene played out over and over again, of broken families seeking adequate space for themselves having to confront a new enemy—not Clubs but their fellow prisoners.
    “We were here first,” a voice said when a musician and his son entered a flat on the main thoroughfare. “Get out.”
    “But all of the flats are occupied,” the musician answered.
    From the dark where he’d been huddling with his family, an inventor emerged. At the Croquet Court Lofts, he and the musician were friends and had often enjoyed dinner together.
    “Gebling?”
    “There’s no room for you here,” the inventor said.
    “But—”
    The inventor shoved the musician’s son toward the door.
    “Don’t ever touch him!” the musician yelled, and threw a punch, and then both men were on the floor, at each other with fists and elbows, their children trembling in silence, the inventor’s wife wailing for them to stop.
    Thimp thimp thimp thimp!
    Razor-cards splintered the floor. The fighting Wonderlanders paused, looked up and saw a pair of Club soldiers at the door. The Four of Clubs pushed in a large litter of a