As the crackling began all around her and her wreath was almost blinded by the electricity the fracturing carbon-lattice released, she knew her imprisonment had ended. Kitty Hawk's heart was filled with joy as her prison shattered and her body fell free. That joy multiplied a thousandfold as she felt herself caught by the ursine arms she'd written herself.

  Chapter Seven

  The Waking Witch

  Outside of the crystal, Kitty Hawk looked even older. Her living face said that None Escaped Time, not even Kitty Hawk. Molly felt the chill of it when she looked at The Witch.

  The surprised Stitchlifes appeared immediately after the sound of the shattering crystal filled Baba Yaga's halls. The bear growled as they approached, and he wouldn't let them take Kitty Hawk from him. At their desperate urgings, and only after she gave a nod of acquiescence, he carried her body to the same, fleshy bed where Molly had slept for weeks while Corina cleaned her blood. Moments later, every entrance to the lab was filled with witch-sped soldiers now loyal to Hala Zamis.

  Teddy Da wouldn't step more than a yard from his mother, and now, he held her frail hand in his soft-padded paws while the vines fed her and she came fully alive again. The ancient Witch turned her head to look at Molly. “In my day, apprentices didn't have horns,” she said with a cackle before she turned back to Teddy Da. “I see my prodigal bear has barely aged. I gave you telomerase chains as long as my arm.” He grinned. “Let me see your claws,” she asked. He shook his head. “Come on, show me.”

  “Snicker-Snack,” he whispered.

  “You still say it!” she cried.

  “I have no choice but to say it.”

  “I know, I know, but it gives me pleasure to hear you say it. 'Snicker-Snack'. Ha! I didn't do everything wrong back then,” she said. “I made you.”

  “Hajume Oto, Li Mei Huang, Kitty Hawk, also known as The Witch,” Hala Zamis said as she entered the lab with Corina. “The dead wake before us.”

  “Never dead,” The Witch replied. “Not quite.” She managed a guarded, close-lipped smile. “Are you the current Queen of the Castle?” she asked. Hala Zamis nodded. “This doesn't look like the Coral Castle.”

  “It isn't. We're across the sea, in the land that once belonged to the noble Hales.”

  “Whose is it now?” Kitty Hawk asked as her ancient eyebrows raised.

  “Now, it belongs to us: the Stitchlife Queens.”

  “Did all my daughters become royalty as I slept?”

  “The nobles failed to serve mankind as you had hoped they would. They've risen high with what we gave them, but mankind still lives in the mud and the rubble. After centuries of serving them with the gifts of your craft we've decided to change the order of things. To better fulfill your oath to serve mankind, we're taking control from the nobles.”

  “I don't imagine the nobles are very happy about that,” Kitty Hawk said.

  “They are not.”

  “The Hales fought back?”

  “We defeated them with our witch-sped army,” Hala Zamis said.

  “All of them witch-sped? Sped like my bear?” Kitty Hawk asked. “Like the Barbary Apes? You made a witch-sped army? But why?”

  “We had to,” Hala Zamis said. “All the nobles are witch-sped now.”

  “When did we start gifting them with speed?”

  “They plan to use what we gave them to murder us. The witch-sped armies of all the noble families are marching upon us as we speak,” Hala Zamis said.

  “And that's more blades than our army?” Kitty Hawk asked. Hala Zamis nodded grimly.

  “Many more.”

  “A fine time to wake,” Kitty Hawk cackled.

  “We'd intended to keep you safe in the crystal until this conflict had been resolved, but it seems the girl and your bear had other ideas.” Hala Zamis turned to Molly. “How did you wake Kitty Hawk, Molly? Tell me.”

  “Vora told me how to do it.” The words were Fin Singh's, but Molly delivered them as her own. “She taught me how to test the carbon lattice crystal and grow the right key to open it. She said Kitty Hawk would save us from the nobles.” Molly thought it was a good lie, but she couldn't tell if Hala Zamis believed her.

  “It's good that you're among us now,” Hala Zamis said to Kitty Hawk. “We need you.”

  “You fear defeat, and you need The Witch to save you.”

  “We do. We need your knowledge – the secrets you kept to yourself. We need one of your mile-high giants. We need a Gargantuan.”

  Kitty Hawk laughed loud and long. “I've heard those words before,” she said. “Those are Famous Last Words.” Then, she burst out laughing again, and when she finally stopped, she sighed and said, “Round and round and round.”

  *****

  While the rhythm of the lab's pump-house heart thumped around them, Kitty Hawk spent what seemed like an eternity simply staring at a seed of the Haunted City that Hala Zamis had brought from wherever it had been secreted. “This seed grows an entire city made of cellular automata?” Kitty Hawk asked. “Self-replicating automata?”

  “I've seen the city,” the bear said. “It's true.”

  “And whose witchery made it?” Kitty Hawk asked.

  “Vora Mbuntu,” Molly said, unable to keep silent. The name sparked no expression of recognition on Kitty Hawk's face, but when Molly added, “and Pietra Fona,” The Witch smiled.

  “I remember young Fona. Barely a year or two older than you,” she said. “Headstrong girl. A troublemaker. I liked her. Does she still live?” Molly shook her head.

  “She turned herself into a golem,” Molly said, “and then she became the city. Sugar Music City, the Haunted City.”

  “The automata city,” Corina clarified.

  “She became the city?” Kitty Hawk asked. Molly nodded.

  “Vora's ghost told me Pietra Fona grew the seed of it inside her. She wrote it to be part her, and part Vora Mbuntu, too.”

  “Well, that's how she overcame the decoherance issue that plagues you, young Corina,” Kitty Hawk said, staring at the seed.

  “I don't understand,” Corina said.

  “What little Fona created can grow and keep growing because it isn't writing the same code over and over and over. The code changes subtly with every new grain.”

  “But that would make every grain something different,” Corina said. “Wouldn't that make every grain a different organism that couldn't be bound and entangled together?” The Witch shook her head.

  “There's many ways to write the same thing once you know the nature of the thing that must be written.”

  “But cellular automata are all clones, each and every grain. Does automata have a nature? An essence that can be expressed in a multitude of codes?”

  “Not on its own. By itself, it's finite. Knowable. It must be, because it was written to be one way and one way only. And to write a million knowable, working codes for your automata is a million times more work than writing one. Even if you did it, then there would still be a point beyond which the cellular automata could not make more of itself. But combine automata's knowable code with the slippery sublime – the mysteries of a living thing – and there are infinite ways to express it. I whispered this secret to Fona once when she was a girl.”

  “But you kept that secret from the rest of us? Why?”

  “Like many secrets I unearthed, I was afraid what might be done with it if I died and the secret survived with my witches. After my bear returned, I kept many such things to myself.” Teddy Da looked away, but Kitty Hawk smiled at her bear and scratched him behind the ears.

  “So how do I do what Fona did?” Corina asked. Kitty Hawk was silent. “I see,” Corina said. “You're not going to tell me. Well, is there a way to make this seed grow something useful? Something that might save us?”

  “A city is useful.” Kitty Hawk looked to Molly as she said it, and Molly nodded her agreement.

  “Useful to us in battle,” Corina said. “Can something like my black automata rewrite the seed to grow living sands that can be bound to make a Gargantuan?” Kitty Hawk shook her head.

  “Your infectious black sands are clever,” she said, “but they rewrite automata like a virus. In the case of the seeds, they'd rewrite a sublime, infinitely replicating code and change it to their own, knowable, limited one. Your black automata can't make infinite copies of itself, and neither can the sands it converts.”

  “Could you make what Pietra Fona did?” Corina asked.

  “I could,” The Witch said, “but I won't. And even if I would, I'd need time. More of it than we have.”

  “Can you make my black sands grow not infinitely, but enough so that they could convert most or all of a city to our use?” Corina asked.

  “They'd have to have the same unknowable, mysterious quality to their code as the cellular automata in this seed. If I could do that...”

  “Then you could grow the Gargantua from a single grain, and you wouldn't need to convert a newly grown city or a seed.”

  “Correct.”

  Hum-buzzing wing-beats floated to Molly's ear, and the moment she recognized them, she no longer heard the words passing between Kitty Hawk and Corina. As the sound of old terror grew louder, the General appeared in front of her, between Molly and the conferring witches. His chameleon-skinned suit took on the look of the lab's skinless, veined walls and made him look as if he'd been turned inside out. In a moment, the wasp flew into the lab, buzzed right through him, and lighted on her shoulder. The rainbow-skinned copper-blood shimmered as its insect body lifted and fell with echoes of its wings' lost motions. “Now that's a pretty Stitch,” Kitty Hawk said.

  “That's Molly's creature,” the fur-belly said.

  “It's not really mine,” Molly said. “I don't control it.”

  The General's face was grim. While Molly stared ahead like a corpse, he showed her why.

  Molly's saw the world through the wasp's warp-eyed view as it flew out of the lab and down Baba Yaga's corridors in a series of dizzying turns until it exited the inner keep and rose over the outer walls. Vargas Hale's cracked manor passed underneath it, and then it flew over the enclave, over the walls, and out to the wilds beyond.

  It rose high enough that Molly could see for miles, high enough that she swore she could see the horizon bending, but she knew it was probably the strange twist of the wasp's eye. The rough shapes of the ruined cities were distant in the haze. Molly wondered if the one in the edge of the copper-blood's eye was where Vora had found her. As the world turned on its side, the fringe-sprawl and the dead city disappeared from view.

  Miles and leagues passed beneath her until she saw a long scar growing across the wilds from the distant horizon. It looked alive like a snake, but it moved in a straight line. It had a head, and when the wasp dove almost straight down to show her what it was made of, she gasped.

  Thirty golems walked in front, and the giants smashed the trees in their path and tossed them aside. Their heavy feet pounded what remained into a rough road for the nobles that followed.

  Molly recognized the black-skinned, white-haired Waltons riding on horseback. Their purple silk was a bright colored stripe behind the golems. There were pale nobles, too – white-skinned and yellow-haired in leather shorts and suspenders. “The noble Holtzs,” the General named them. Behind them were red-haired giants even taller than the rest of the nobles. They all rode on high-stepping chariots with their long swords sheathed next to them, standing nearly as tall as themselves. “The Macks,” the General called them. “And behind them are the Austins.” Their swords curved like scythes near the end, and they rode cloaked, with their faces hidden from view. “You don't often see them in the daytime. They're faster than the rest, but the sun doesn't agree with them.” The ones the General called the Ortegas were shorter than the rest of the nobles, but as broad as two Hales standing side by side. They were little mountains of men, and they rode on open carriages proportioned with as much extra width as themselves and fitted with additional, hoof-footed legs to support their weight. “Ah, the Lees,” the General said as the wasp passed over red-robed nobles. “The last time I saw one of them, he was impaled on the end of my bayonet.” The Lees' skin had a reddish tone to it, but their hair was black and reminded Molly of a lamb's coat. Bringing up the rear were riders in black with broad-brimmed hats that hid their faces from view. Molly couldn't see the arms they carried until the General pointed out the twin short swords crossed on their backs, slung over their long-tailed coats. The General said they were the Southern Gentlemen Schwartz, and when one looked up as the wasp passed over them, Molly was shocked at the bluish cast of his skin.

  There were nearly a hundred nobles from each of the families, and behind them were all the Guard they'd brought. There were three times as many of them as the nobles, and they all carried some kind of long-barreled, witch-grown weapon. Thorn-spitters.

  As the wasp passed over the last of the Guardsmen, it flew beyond them and climbed high again. When the wasp turned and looked down on the column cutting its way through the wilds, Molly could see where it pointed. Out on the world's edge, in front of the nobles' combined army was the thin line of the Hales' enclave walls.

  When Molly saw out her own eyes again, she shouted, “They're coming! I've seen them. They're close. They're just over the horizon!”

  “The nobles?” Kitty Hawk asked.

  “There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. All kinds of nobles. Thousands of Guardsmen. And golems, too. Thirty stone giants. More. They're all marching here. Now!” The knowledge that time was running out pushed all of Molly's feelings to the front of her mind and she couldn't hold her tongue any longer. She turned to Corina and insisted with an urgent, hissing whisper, “You've got to free Juan Chang. If you don't set him free, then I'll tell Hala Zamis that you're the one that gave me the key to free Kitty Hawk.” The last words were Molly's own, and she wasn't proud of them, but Fin Singh's ghost was. Molly heard him laughing.

  Corina's face was white, and Molly saw her look left and right to make sure none had heard. Her next words were spoken softly but with fervent intensity. “Don't you think I want to see him freed? I love Juan Chang, Molly. I don't want to see him in a cell, but if I don't keep my feelings to myself, then Hala Zamis will put me in a cell, too. I can't do any of us any good from there.”

  “You stole his army!” Molly cried.

  “I had to,” she said. “And that was before...”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I wasn't pretending to love him, Molly,” Corina said. “Before my lie became the truth.”

  “You stole the Haunted City's seeds, too,” Molly said. “Those don't belong to you. They belong to the People. They could grow three more cities with those. And those cities would grow more seeds, too.”

  “You stole the seeds?” Kitty Hawk asked Corina.

  “They were Vora's and Pietra Fona's gift to common men,” Molly said. “And the Stitchlifes took them!”

  “We need their power,” Corina said. Molly gave Corina a hard-eyed, gimlet stare.

  “I think, Corina,” Kitty Hawk said, “perhaps we should concentrate on improving your black automata so that it acts faster. While we work, tell me the story of this Juan Chang. And when you do, don't forget to tell me all about the walls of his cell.” Kitty Hawk and the young witch shared a moment where their eyes locked, and then the two of them set to work.

  Hours later, Kitty Hawk stood over a tiny pile of black sand and said, “It's the best I can do in such a short time. It'll work in five minutes instead of five hours. And it's more efficient, too. It won't replicate infinitely, or even enough to convert a fraction of a city to make a Gargantua, but a few grains should be enough to disrupt a golem. Or anything else made of automata.” Then, she looked intently at Corina, raised her eyebrows, and said that they should send for Hala Zamis so that they could show her what they'd made. Corina spooned a few grains of the witchy, black sands Kitty Hawk had made into a piece of cloth, wrapped it tightly, and pressed the package into Molly's palm. She whispered, “Take this. Rub it into the wall of Juan Chang's cell. Just like in the Haunted City, where the stains grow, the walls will fall. You'll need five minutes for it to work. Go, Molly. Free him.”

  “And don't touch any of it with your hands,” Kitty Hawk added as she carefully spooned some of her sands into a vial around her neck and sealed it tight. Corina looked puzzled by what Kitty Hawk said, but no explanation followed. “Go with Molly,” Kitty Hawk told Teddy Da. “I'll be safe enough here. But hurry back. You and your friends wouldn't want to miss Hala Zamis when she visits, would you?”

  Chapter Eight

  Long Live the Queen

  None of the witched musketeers even glanced at Molly or Teddy Da as the two of them made their way through Baba Yaga. Once, they'd all stared, but now they didn't even look at the strange duo, let alone gawk the way they had before. Since smelling from Hala Zamis's vial, strangeness made no more impression on the Stitchlife Guard than it did on the Stitchlife Queen.

  As Molly and the fur-belly approached the end of the corridor and the featureless wall of Juan Chang's cell, she whispered, “Five minutes can be a long time. Someone might come past. If they see the stain on the wall...”

  “Snicker-Snack,” he said softly.

  “Juan Chang wouldn't want want us to kill his men.”

  “They pledged their lives when they joined his army,” the bear reasoned.

  “They pledged to die in battle against the nobles, maybe,” Molly said, “but not by our hands.”

  “A death is a death,” the bear said, “Hurry. My mother said Hala Zamis would come to the lab to see what she made. Juan Chang will want to corner her there and get his army back.” Molly nodded, opened the piece of cloth with Kitty Hawk's sands in it, and pressed it to the wall, being careful to keep the cloth between her and the mysterious, black grains.

  She felt them roll under the cloth for a moment, and then she felt nothing under her touch but the fabric. Molly lifted it from the stone and saw that the grains were gone, and where they'd been there was a fast-spreading inkblot. Baba Yaga and the wall were both made of Corina's automata, and it was the color of wet granite, but the color of the new stain was so dark that it looked like a blackened void. Molly had to reach out and touch it to make sure it was still solid in front of her. In less than a minute, the velveteen darkness covered an area at least as wide and tall as a doorway, and it kept expanding.