(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 36 minutes)

Squatters’ Bill of Claim

Just as Hart’s message to her had begun to unfold into fresh shoots thanks to the magic of its green ink, so too did the political situation in Pilgrim’s Anchor find itself ripped open by growing pains. In a single encounter much of what had been settled fact for decades was upended. Now waterlogged powers desperately patched leaks. Curious stowaway rats searched for new unintentional passages.

To the Founders Pursuitia never looked smaller. Their first instinct was to retract into the tortoise shell of Independence Hall. Papering over the exterior to a mad degree, the building now looked as if wagons had literally circled it with their canvas. No doubt they were furiously at work, perched over writing desks, forcing themselves to vomit up new corkscrew legal clauses that would extricate them from this perplexing bottleneck bind.

The Liberty Bell was cracked. Freedom could still ring, but for how much longer? And now use of it against the Bickyplots would prove just as damaging to the Founders who controlled it. Previously it had been rung on the hour, every daylight hour, for years. Now it was silent, which seemed to empty the streets of conversation, as the bell had always been the discreet life of the party. None felt free to speak if it did not speak first.

Plotting among the Freed and the Lenape occurred out of sight, yet all around the Founders. The possibility of open rebellion now hung between the factions, but stayed taut, as the Founders still retained their every advantage excluding the bell, which they still physically controlled as the crown of their castle.

Advanced weapons had only been produced in numbers sufficient to arm the young, and all of them infused with safeguards to keep them from turning against their manufacturers. Signed and sealed documents still affirmed the enchanted legality of their ownership over the land under everyone’s feet, over their water supply, over the food stores, and all drafting materials. If the Founders were killed or imprisoned without signing away these claims the materials would combust, or rot, or lose their potency.

One resource they could never control was time. All mature parties were too old to serve as a fighting force, but there were scattered adults among the Lenape and Freed who were much younger, mere adolescents when swept up in the First Declaration, whereas all the signers had been established statesmen. The labor of these few was needed, as nurses, as inkwitches, as hardened hands in construction and smithing.

Now, experimentally, they refused to do it. Many of the nurses simply did not appear at Independence Hall to take their shifts, just to prod, to see if the old men would spoon feed each other without getting their broth all over the floor. More and more work was skipped each day, testing the waters, heightening the tension, as a way to determine what resource the Founders would restrict first to restore services.

They proved hesitant to do so for many days. Any iron fist wielded now would only reinforce their arthritic feeling, as if their bones became metal. To play the tyrant was to play right into the facts they were still trying to deny, namely that they were succumbing to the same physical process that created the Bickyplots.

It was in these fissures in protocol, the stretch marks on the bubble of their societal stability, that the young became industrious. First, an election. Many had been content to leave the position of the Junior President vacant, pending Muster’s return in some fashion, but his murderer destroyed these notions. Now it had be filled, and the process of doing so took the place of his funeral.

There was an actual funeral of course, disrespectful and curt thanks to the agitated, distracted, guilty Founders orchestrating it. They buried him in uniform, without any weapons, having confiscated them for the stockpile that would help settle their nerves. The young were present, but not in spirit.

Muster’s faith in the democratic process was well known, and the verve with which he had arranged voting procedure was rekindled in his name. There were more candidates than they’d ever had for such a high office. Blueberry Kidd was among them.

And that was as close as she would ever get, to an official office anyway. Her trials at Bickering Hall only meant so much. The same went for the unmarked rod gnawing on her arm, her assessment of two worlds and two sets of monsters, and even her aggressive yet shrewd plan to take the fight to the Bickyplots.

She still could not be trusted. It had nothing to do with the content of her character, and everything to do with her smudged origin in a time none of them could remember. Her parentage was unknown. Like it or not, and none of them did, legal inheritance was a factor in the Carve-Out and every plan that went with it. Whoever was in charge needed a familial claim; having that extra tool at the ready was not something to pass up.

In all likelihood one of the Founders was her father. If she was the product of a union between Lenape and Freed there would not have been any reason to hide it from her. None of them were ashamed of their children, even when their creation was not entirely voluntary. Additionally, when Blueberry had asked the friendliest adults about her family she had received an answer she deemed honest: they had no idea. The Founders had simply ‘acquired’ her as a babe, and she’d been handed off to various households, back and forth, until she found a way to let the surrounding forest serve as her caretaker.

Under this harsh technical logic she could never be the junior president… but she could receive more votes than she ever had before. In the final anonymous count she had taken third, behind Pony Clark and the swiftly sworn-in Windstorm Jefferson. He’s a good choice, if you’re afraid of the Founders’ power. His father drafted the First, and now the Second. That’s what he stands to inherit.

This time the loss was much easier to accept. She already was the leader, according to Muster, and she respected the dead enough to believe him. More accurately, she was to be their savior. No other plan would work but hers, evidenced by nothing else being proposed. Junior President Jefferson’s first act was to approve her daring expedition to the core of Bickering Hall.

Not the Bickering Hall where their hopefully-mortal nemeses lived, no, the scale model currently sitting on a table in the headquarters, and the quarters of the head, of the Inkwitch Coven, constructed from the flesh of Lord Cadavawing. The Bickyplot himself was still their prisoner, strapped to another table in the Franklin Laboratory. Now his head, after being renovated several hundred times, resembled Independence Hall instead, and he’d proven agreeable enough to sign some documents, but he still resisted violently when Blueberry had returned and started sharing details of his home world. Since then he was no meaner, mostly refusing to speak instead.

The importance of this first head that they’d severed in their efforts to generate hospitality in the monster was not lost on Kidd. Spywulph and Flaywood had taken a ‘hunting dog’ in search of it. Some great treasure must have been stored within. Whatever it was, Blueberry planned to use it as leverage. Hopefully it could end the stalemate between the adults, make them equally subordinate to the second generation. Then they could actually go to war, no more pawing at its door like lost whimpering pups.

But first they had to get to it. Too distracted by the Liberty Bell situation, the Founders had not attempted any investigation of the item themselves yet. Crucially, they also could not stand the sight of it. It’s just a hand mirror to them now. Keeping it in the laboratory was seen as an unnecessary risk, given the proximity to its creator. Severed Bickyplot heads talking to each other probably couldn’t achieve much, which didn’t stop any of them from insisting it not be allowed.

In their haste to be rid of it while still securing it, it had gone to the coven building, run by the witches, but overseen and locked up each night by Founder Huntington. Samuel, as he insisted Inkwitch Jessamine call him, was hopelessly in love with the woman fifteen years his junior, telling her that she seemed to age slower every year, while lamenting his own increasing velocity.

Never had his affections been returned, only politely and coyly rebuffed, until a day came, after the Liberty Bell incident, that she told him she would like to write him a letter. Nowhere in her statement did she phrase it as a ‘love letter’, but somehow the implication was made. For her to express herself fully she wished to use a special ink, one called blushing rose.

All inks aside from basic black had to be requisitioned and logged before they were ladled out of the cauldrons and into the wells. Jessamine assured the Founder that it would be best if there was not a record of this particular acquisition. Instead of his signature she wanted his keys, so she could open the coven after hours, just to tuck in and pinch one letter’s worth of ink, which wouldn’t be enough to notice, especially since he was the primary record keeper.

He obliged. The inkwitch approached the coven after dark, both hands separating all the keys on the ring so they wouldn’t jangle. Pilgrim’s Anchor appeared to be asleep; those who weren’t had their noses buried deep in other concerns. Once the lock quietly clicked open Jessamine tiptoed inside. Then Private Kidd tiptoed inside. Followed by the forty tiptoes of her volunteer force.

The sympathy the old woman did not have for Mr. Huntington she instead had for the young. She’d not managed to have children of her own in Pursuitia, and several such women had joined the coven in search of a purpose. She could always be counted on to slip them a missing ingredient if they were about to fail a brewing test. It was a large ask to get her to slip five people into a restricted area instead, but she’d proven willing, even to the extent of enduring one picnic with Samuel at some later date.

For deniability Inkwitch Jessamine then broke away and went to fetch the ink, on the opposite side of the building. Once she had it she would be gone in a minute or so, as her assistance was not required to flee the coven. Meanwhile the actual intruders were headed for cauldron storage: a large backroom lined with shelves of domed and pitted black.

Kidd entered it silently, sweeping the chamber before sweeping her strapped weapon aside. Her musket was kept company by both her hatchets and the unmarked rod, nothing charged with electric fluid thanks to the difficulty of attaining such ammunition without permission, as well as its propensity to crackle noisily and start fires.

Her four companions were similarly armed to the teeth: Bonfire, Honey, Fool’s Gold, and Rutledge II. Voting for her in the presidential election hadn’t done any good; it would be much more straightforward to support her here by committing, possibly their very lives, to her strategy. The group split up mechanically, encircling a table with one particularly large cauldron overturned on it.

Then all their muskets had to be slung so they could commit every arm to silently lifting it off and setting it aside. Underneath sat their goal, the mire-soaked then sun-dried head of Cadavawing Wighthall, which was also a dollhouse version of the Bickyplot manor. Funnily enough, the severed body parts of the creatures that exclusively consumed rot, that had in their spongy tissues an aposematically vibrant blood, did not stink particularly in their decay.

The true Bickyplot was the cardiolic self, a term first smuggled to Pilgrim’s Anchor by Blueberry, who heard their enemies’ anatomist use it: the skittering heart inside the hollow body, armed not to the teeth but with teeth of its own. Everything surrounding it was only partly functional, constructed from emissions of bilious silk and integrated objects.

And now I know why they’re so fiendish in form. In their world everything takes shape and is shaped by intent alone, Earth opposite that and Pursuitia sat between. When they crossed over to this place, likely an accident like ours, they had to struggle to exist physically with some aggression. The heart, the furnace of intent, became the literal craftsman, building brains and muscles that barely work, that must be abandoned at times the way the lizard tail does some of its segments, and filling in the gaps from the refuse pile.

“Edward,” Kidd addressed once she remembered she could finally give orders. He was so attentive he saluted her. “The bill of claim, if you please.” Rutledge was the best draftsman among them, and among the most privileged with Muster gone, so writing up their spell had fallen to him. Out of the dark cloak thrown over his uniform came a scroll, a charcoal chalk, a seal, some wax, and a paper leaf from a bycandelite-adjacent tree that grew hotter the more it was written on. Placing these implements on the table, he wrote warmth into the leaf and melted the wax.

Writing their bill was taken very seriously, a seriousness now translated into motion as Edward cautiously applied the bill to the slanted roof of Wighthall’s head, where even in the dim they could all read the reflective ink used to stake a legal and manifest claim in their purpose:

We five, squatters all, have come across this property in a state of total abandonment. The former builder and owner’s whereabouts are known; they are quite incapable of returning and laying claim, nor is this likely to change in the near future. Imprisoned thus, and not under our authority, we hereby lay claim to the property we are also now naming Miniature Bickering Hall.

Squatters’ rights in our territory have long been recognized as the abhorrence of an empty home, and the shame of its permitted fall into disrepair. And so we draw a direct connection between the building’s dilapidated flooded state and the strength of our claim.

Miniature Bickering Hall, and its total contents, are now the property of Private Blueberry Kidd, Bonfire Lucretia Paine, Edward Rutledge II, Fool’s Gold Nestor Floyd, and Honey Veronica Whipple. Enclosed are the relevant signatures of the squatters, one of the guards overseeing the incarceration of the original owner (who takes no order from us), and the head inkwitch who runs the coven building in which this building has been placed, indicating her permission for us to reside anywhere within, including any smaller contained buildings and structures.

We ask that nothing impede us in our lawful attempts at entry, residence, and exit, regardless of natural or artificial origin, in the name of the longstanding squatter tradition. Minimal changes will be made, further reinforcing our right, characteristic as this is of those passing through and using only what they come across in only the amount they need.

Blueberry Kidd                     Bonfire Lucretia Paine                             Edward Rutledge II

Fool’s Gold Nestor Floyd                     Honey Veronica Whipple                               Cattail Mortimer Walton

Gladiola Newtown

Pursuitian magic was rarely showy, naught but validation of recorded concepts by a world that provided only nods and shrugs, which was here, in the quiet dark of cauldron storage, a blessing, such a blessing that nothing at all appeared to happen. If their claim was now valid they would have to test it themselves.

Their fearless leader volunteered. Stepped up. Stood across from Wighthall’s front doors, Kidd noticed a faint ring around the item: the moist remnants from the cauldron’s lip lingering on the wood. It was as good a property line as any, so for her test that is what it would be. If their bill of claim did not activate with one step onto the table, and over that line, they would have to abort, and her first attempt at command would be irrevocably questioned.

At least her right foot would always respect her decisions. The toe of her boot hit the table, crossed the line. Nothing yet. It wasn’t a step without stepping. It’s mine. By rights it’s my home, because I’m the one to live in it. The world knows. The world never tries to stop you from claiming a home. It will help me walk through my new door.

Somehow she knew not to lift too much, despite stepping up onto the table. The ground in front of her house was remarkably flat after all. All she did differently from any other step forward was close her eyes. Any transition would only confuse eyes that witnessed it, momentarily befuddle the soul, like notes missing from familiar tunes.

She was walking forward. If it was across the table at her regular size it would’ve been over already, so she opened her eyes. Much as she’d seen it before: Bickering Hall. Except… that window didn’t have a sagging eye hanging from its frame. The entryway didn’t have teeth. And it wasn’t all made of skin, bone, and matted woven hair. But it was just as massive, just as terrible, so very uninviting, which was why they had to so assertively invite themselves.

Blueberry slowly turned and saw row after row of black moons, the cauldrons all blown up to imposing celestial bodies. Among them stood adolescent gods, beings somehow willing to bow to her, though not quite yet, for they had not thought to close their eyes, too curious to witness their first ever magical shrinking of a living thing.

The quartet wound up blinkered, and none the wiser, for it. Only after they wiped the confusion from their eyes like sleep did they see their commander, who was now no larger than a tin soldier. She threw up her arms and beckoned them down. Time was as short as they were about to become.

One by one they stepped up, held their breath as if small lungs might make breathing a challenge, and then demonstrated their only lesson learned by closing their eyes. After Kidd’s first bold step it took the others just two minutes to join her. Intimidating as the sky of black globes was, she cut their awe short by telling them to get into the agreed-upon formation with herself up front and Honey in the back, who would unravel her snake-skin anatimal that could drift in idle air, thus providing a guideline for their trek through the bowels of a Bickyplot’s brains.

Now that it had worked, she was free to appreciate her own stroke of genius. To think, simply writing about this object as if it were a property might, in combination with its mimicry, bridge the gap between the two concepts. If we live here, then Pursuitia has to allow us to live here… which is only enabled by an appropriate relationship of size. Being in Bickering has made thinking all the more abstract for me.

If my father never claims me I could hop from man to animal to animal until one does, now that I can live anywhere and any way. The current in a salamander’s creek would be no challenge. Everyone else faces the challenge… of welcoming me.

Miniature Bickering Hall was not welcoming either, demonstrated with their first step upon the lolling carpet hung out the front door, which was in actuality a tongue, and which still contained, even after these months severed from the cardiolic self, and being frozen into a bog over the winter, the spasms of life. It retracted violently, tipping Rutledge over. He quickly rose and insisted he was fine, rubbing the growing knot on his head to shush it so it could not contradict him.

“It’s still alive,” Honey said. “I’d wager other things inside can still move. If there’s any blood left in there it shouldn’t be poisonous at this point… but I’m thinking of spiny ceilings dropping and a basement that can swallow.”

“Anybody who wishes to turn back can do so,” Blueberry said, tone made cold by her immediate entrance through the toothy doors. The others followed quickly rather than be left an idling giant. If they could just get in, find whatever the head was hiding, and get back across the property line, everything would be set right size-wise once more.

It was difficult not to go over their exit options repeatedly. There was the front mouth, then the window to the vomit sluice they had used to infiltrate the real thing, and then, far as they knew, nothing else. An initial cursory inspection had revealed no additional holes from its decay. The chimneys might work, if the interior brick scales could be gripped enough to climb, also assuming the head couldn’t light a fire in itself. The neck was an open stump, but the whole weight of the building pressed it into the wood of the table. If there was any opening down there it would be the gap between gigantic boards, and who was to say if a fall between them would result in a stumble or a plummet off a cliff side.

“It is not laid out in a sensible manner,” Kidd explained to them as she slowed to a stalk and aimed her musket at every shadow. Fool’s Gold instead chose to point his at a rope of mucus along its entire journey from ceiling, to floor, to mouse hole drain. What made the thought worse was the knowledge that while Bickering Hall had mouse holes, it certainly did not have mice. “There’s no point in looking where a drawing room might be. We’ll have to sweep room to room, and we can’t split up, not with it so easy to get lost in, and not with it watching.”

Bonfire turned and looked up to see if the eyes in the windows could roll back and watch the internal chambers; what she actually saw disturbed her just as much. A chandelier, where what should have been crystal was milky bone, big enough to crush three of them should it fall, hung directly overhead. At the back of the foyer, which was also the throat, she wondered if it was a feature unique to the head, as it was alone, and positioned approximately where a human would have their uvula.

Nobody wanted to linger under it once they perceived it, so the team quickly moved on, to the left, where they knew the dining hall was. There they had all fought the Bickyplots to a standstill, and they knew from their memories of free movement that there were few places to hide anything in the open space. Clearing it would be their quickest task, and good practice for the rest.

The dining table, which fed directly into the fire place, was there as before, along with its chairs. Gently tapping their backs and arms with bayonets, the young came to the conclusion that not everything was rigged as a trap, and that most objects were rooted into the floor or wall by bone and could not be extracted easily.

Half-mimicked platters and glasses grew from the tabletop like deformed antlers missing their velvet. Fluid slowly bubbled from the stems and basins of some of these protuberances, thickly, in nauseating shades of purple best described as what you might find seeping out if you cut into a chrysalis made of bruise.

A slight draft of sooty bad breath was exhaled from the fireplace when they crossed the table, and there was a barely perceptible shifting of the walls, but otherwise the dining hall did not respond to their search. It turned up nothing, aside from the curiosity of one outgrowth near the center, a shape deformed both here and in its original incarnation, which the quintet recognized as a Bickyplot instrument manned by Xylofont Phanny-Upon-Twone, something called a ‘sharpsychord’.

There was no desire to attempt playing it; it had sounded like bagpipes with flounder lips being burned at the stake. What drew their curiosity was its position, right where it had been wheeled the evening of their battle. This likely meant that, internally, Wighthall’s head constantly underwent renovation and redecoration as he lived his life. Not a moment went by where his systems were not trying to copy the larger world. Bonfire found a problem with this, and warned the others.

“The kitchen was a nightmare to get through last time.”

“And it will be again,” Kidd said. Resolve could not waver, not this early in the night. “Every room must be checked. We might as well do a troublesome one we recognize first.” Her only backward glance was at Honey’s anatimal, to make sure nothing interfered with its serene stationary glide, silk down a stream. “Leave no pot out of your investigation.”

No body part seemed the right one to push the kitchen door open on its bone hinge, so Kidd rolled a mental die and went with her shoulder. Over the threshold the air was much warmer; it was in fact the greatest concentration of heat remaining anywhere in the head, the last wet embers of Wighthall’s body heat. Pots like barnacles issued billowing steam, also of a purple hue, while green stew full of wiry black hairballs stirred itself in spirals.

During their previous assault the kitchen had been bustling with Silhouette cooks and servers, various utensils gripped in the noodle-coils that made up their bodies, but the head had not reproduced the servants the same way it had inanimate objects, leaving the paths between the stoves and ovens clear enough to traverse.

Passing through them triggered an unseen mechanism however. Perhaps a wrong step onto a bony pressure tile activated a muscle twitch. However it worked in the tissue, the end result was the boiling contents of the pots erupting into momentary geysers. Kidd pulled her cloak up over her head as they rained back down. The sting of heated droplets was little more than that through the material, which she considered lucky. Heat trapped inside Wighthall had likely been diminishing steadily since decapitation. If they had tried this when it was fresh it might’ve melted her clothes to her skin.

Burner by burner she triggered them so her soldiers could follow. Some of the gloppier contents stuck to her back, as if a firing squad of cats had attempted to execute her with hacked-up hairballs. She paid them no mind, she was so single-minded. It was Wagner that slithered out from under the nice steam it’d gotten around her waist to wipe them to the floor with sweeps of its body.

“That’s the kitchen cleared,” Honey said once she carefully checked the last oven, finding only a crumbly amber loaf of something that shouldn’t be investigated further. If they cleared the whole place and didn’t find anything then they could come back and smash it open in case it contained a prize.

“I know the way to the menagerie from here,” Blueberry said, “so that’s next.” Far too much time had been spent in that chamber when she was imprisoned, and the memories were likely to be more painful for her stomach than her heart. What they fed her must have qualified as food, given that she still lived, but it had felt like sustaining on tree bark, cotton tufts, and stagnant water.

When they entered the chamber her team involuntarily lowered their weapons. That was the place they’d kept her the entire time, subject to study through a glass wall that here was made of crystallized mucus with salt cluster inclusions. A central treelike object was the only feature, unless you spent enough days there to start adding each little mogul in the terrain to your mental map. Something like anatimals from the Bickering realm had been her only company whenever she wasn’t submitting herself to Chattelpool’s probing instruments or losing games of strategy to Lord Spywulph. Like the Silhouettes, they were not reproduced.

Fool’s Gold was especially slow to ring the tree; it had been his job to communicate with Blueberry via journal during her incarceration. Before he’d entered the menagerie he thought his efforts had been more than adequate. Enough, even, for a romance to blossom, though he’d not broached the subject yet.

Now, he might never. If she set aside one of his letters, decided to walk around the entire world, she would be done in a matter of seconds, as soon as she rounded the tree. Then she would sit down, pick up her journal again, and see that she’d received nothing else. He should’ve written ten times as much, all throughout the day. Hand cramps would’ve been a fraction of the torment she endured, and the least he could’ve done.

“Gold,” Kidd addressed him, and in his snap reaction he feared she would lecture him about what he had just thought. “Break the glass so we can search behind it.” With a relieved nod he took an agitatingly small number of steps to have the window within reach. He grabbed his musket by the barrel and reared back to swing the stock through the window, a swing that was only halfway there when the window beat him to it, exploding on its own, showering them in jagged mucus shards that stuck like snot and pierced like glass slivers.

Floyd reeled back, grabbing his face. His back struck the tree below its largest knothole. In response the whole structure bent like an inchworm, rustling its nasty canopy and filling the menagerie with the sound of a bucket of broken teeth dumped down a flight of stairs. Its purpose was to get Fool’s Gold’s head inside so that it might swallow, an ability Kidd had neglected to mentioned. She had to dive to knock him out of the way, and saw in the process there were several long crooked needles of the window embedded in his cheeks.

They had missed his eyes, so the frightening wounds were actually minor. To avoid a protracted extraction she grabbed them all in one hand and yanked them loose, surprising him so much he nearly fainted. He might as well have, as the shock immobilized him just as much, and there was another threat about, no longer hidden in the pervading rattle of the tree-thing.

Salt clusters. Initially scattered in the window, now they were scattered about the menagerie, and instead of slowing to a stop they kept rolling, faster and faster. Freed of their prison they now had yellowish, brownish, and pinkish spines. The greater the distance they traveled the clearer their determination to skewer the intruders upon these spines.

Rolling along the walls, dropping out of the canopy, it was difficult to tell how many they were, and none of the humans had thought to count when they were stuck on a neat plane. Floyd remained the best target, and also became the proof that the clusters bore enough intent to target him. Several closed in.

Rutledge shot one out of the air, powdering it into harmless drifting snow. Honey tossed an anatimal from the recesses of her clothes: a heron throat. It swallowed a cluster up, turning it into an inert ball of teal feathers. Bonfire had to deal with the tree inching in her direction now, trying to cage her with branches, leaving Kidd to handle the remaining clusters headed for Floyd’s vital locations.

For each of the two ambushing his ears she had a hatchet. Guillotine strikes didn’t quite split them, instead lodging the blades. The third cluster was not far behind, and it liked the look of his underarm better. A good stomp might have gotten a spike up her foot as high as the ankle, so she instead whipped around toward the tree and bashed both hatchets against the trunk. The resulting shatter was actually two shatters, and it freed her hungry weapons for another dose of salt.

One of the blades made it down just in time for the cluster to slice itself stuck. Then Kidd collapsed on it, hacking away with the other ax until it was nothing but streaked chunks of bilious rock. Vaguely aware of how close each of them had come, Floyd now had enough wits sucked back up through the holes in his cheeks to be helped to his feet. What remained of their strange foes was being mopped up by the other three. As the last was broken the tree-thing stilled, acted as if it hadn’t been a participant at all. Lucky for it there wasn’t time to chop it down with nothing but hatchets.

“Are you alright?” Blueberry asked Floyd, trying to follow his drifting pupils with her face so he might focus. He did.

“Are you?” he asked in turn. In the ensuing silence she understood he was not parroting out of a lingering daze, but concern for her returning to her cell. Do I tell them there’s a certain comfort to a cell? Only I would find it, out of all Pilgrim’s Anchor. A cell is a guaranteed home. No one will turn you out if you start to think of the bed as your own. Pilgrim’s Anchor is sometimes a prison where I am not permitted to sit down.

“I’ve never been better… because I refuse to be anything but my best in this damned horrible hall.”

“Hear hear,” Rutledge seconded, brushing salt off his coat, then trying to shake something invisible off the hand that touched it.

“I think it will be some rooms yet before we find what we’re after,” Blueberry said, “but we do have a reward for besting this one. Follow me.” She took them from the menagerie to a passage she now knew well, intentionally branded into her memory. Sacrificing several precious childhood memories to make space for this one would have easily been worth it. A sound investment that would be, as through this passage was the future of her entire generation.

The five of them came to something that four recognized only secondhand, leaping out of Kidd’s recollections. Equal parts barrier, wall, door, and lock. Thirteen discs were mounted on it in a circle, backed by a diagonal grate over what would have been wood instead of the flaked skin here in the miniature.

“Through there is the Bickering realm,” Blueberry said to help it sink in. “In the real manor, of course.”

“Are we certain this one doesn’t lead there too?” Honey asked.

“I suppose we’re not,” her commander answered, “but even if it does we wouldn’t want to go in there now. What we’re searching for is in the head, and if you go in there without a plan, one that can survive being translated into gibberish, dunked in a mire, and dried out under the gaze of a pair of purple and green suns, you could easily never find your way back… to Pursuitia or to your selves.”

“At the right time then,” Bonfire said to help push them on. She feared no world; it was the worlds that had to fear her when they stole away her friends, family, and love and hid them where she couldn’t find. If given the time she’d master them one by one, see reflections of the last ten or so in her constitutional campfires.

What followed was a symphony of evil lying in wait for the Anchorites to conduct themselves at the threshold of each section. Nothing was exactly like the menagerie, but each was a variation on that theme. Somewhere in the room there was a trap, and when there wasn’t it was just to convince them to lower their guard, soften them up for the next one.

In the sewing room they were attacked by quilts that dropped from their coiled sleep on the ceiling as bats did. Hatchets and bayonets made quick work of them, and slow work could not be afforded, as one successful swoop that crushed an invader’s blades against their body was enough to constrict them entirely and tip them over. Those freed had to gasp, to be sure they could still take air after what felt like the attack of a large snake flattened by rolling pin.

The attic subjected them to thundering stampeding things, undefinable beyond that, covered as they were in billowing sheets. Hiding behind inert likeness, behind each other, taking a corner usually saw four or five attempting to converge on a human, with enough force to compress two humans into one. The clash of these reunions boomed like male bears sparring, each clad in the turtle shell of an open wardrobe. The trespassers, perpetually out of breath up there, as if it was the mating season of these things at high altitude, couldn’t just make for the nearest exit. They had to peek under every sheet for papers.

Once they were all checked, and nothing was found, they descended, only to be ambushed by what might have been a pile of soiled laundry in the full-sized mansion. A volley from their muskets stilled it. Cautiously they then stabbed it, vindicated in their caution by its wheezing collapse.

Care had been taken to reload their muskets after each room was cleared. Balls were spent with worrying frequency, as each new horror had to be checked for holes, or rather the ability to make holes. Ammunition and powder were both low, and they’d not cleared half the place yet. Every Bickyplot was bound to have a private bedroom, and they hadn’t even found one of those so far. Kidd kept the wince from her voice as she ordered no more than two muskets be loaded in preparation for each search going forward.

Deep in the coven, walled off by black cauldrons, and nearly lost in the recesses of a dilapidated cranium, they could nonetheless feel the length of the night as it drew their muscles, quartered their breaths, and set hooks and weights in their beleaguered expressions. When they looked at each other they saw their friends hollowing out, scraped like gourds. For a document that might not be there. For what might be there, but might never be found, because it was disguised as an ingrown hair in an overlooked follicle behind a curtain of shed skin.

They so badly needed the reprieve of the bedrooms. How the configuration of them, a wagon wheel of cake-slice chambers with a circular shaft at the center, presumably for ungodly excretions, fit into the floor plan was a mystery, but it had to, for they had just stepped cautiously into the private quarters of Lady Voluptogast Devalming.

Plush, red, black, cloying, overwhelming, lustful… yet unmistakably refined in an unrelatable fashion. Discarding the natural qualities of it being a nodule inside a skull, and it being pinched on one side where it met the central shaft, it resembled the chambers of a mother-in-law that never allowed the children in to see. Thus its order increased over time, and all its pillows and curtains were fatted from lack of horseplay.

A colossal bed took up much of it. The mattress curled up the wall. Such an unorthodox construction reminded the young, alongside a bout of nausea, that Voluptogast was the concubine of all the others. Bickyplot carnal relations was not an active subject of study, instead handled passively in spotty nightmares all over Pilgrim’s Anchor, like a rash.

Disturbing as all this was, which was extremely, perhaps at the extremest for innocent Edward, they still had to acknowledge the blessing that they weren’t being literally attacked by the room, only figuratively by its suggestive posture and painted face. A quick check under the pillows, all thirty-nine of them, revealed nothing but curls of dust turned toward themselves like sleeping cats.

The central shaft was utilitarian tile; luckily there was nothing to find down but darkness. In that darkness their imaginations flitted and experimented, throwing excrement at the walls of decent thought. Was this the sole chamber of relief for all thirteen? And a direct connection from one of their rooms to all the others?

Poor Edward, and his fellows to a lesser degree, couldn’t help but picture one Bickyplot relieving themselves, straddling the shaft while stood upright, for there was clearly no other way to do it in the confined space, while three or four others climbed over them to get to whomever they wished to spend the evening with.

An intimacy enviable in perhaps any other creature. For them this is one big chamber of sloshing echoes. If you drift away from being a Bickyplot for but one moment, an askew reflection of yourself, a minor deviation of angle and profile, enters and engages. This is where they breathe each other’s breath, where evil shores itself up for another day in attempted devouring of the world.

They need each other… because intent alone cannot sculpt Pursuitia the way it does their own world. Without social reinforcement their monstrous adaptations would collapse… and they have! Cadavawing’s regrown head always contains changes, in form and spirit. It now looks like Independence Hall because it needs to have principles that will be reiterated and strengthened by its surroundings.

If Mustard were here he’d tell me that I am now to the Bickyplots what Honey is to the anatimals. I wish his joke was present to swat down. But we have done it Mustard. We’re in their heads and we know how they think. When we bring them down they will assume it was their own idea.

None of the bedrooms contained hazards, aside from distaste at their decoration. Floyd posited that perhaps this was where Cadavawing had stored the memories he had of his kin, and thus keeping hostility in the same place was not conducive to conviviality. Relaxing their shoulders, which had been tensed for hours straight now, was painful in and of itself, only briefly. After that they searched the bedrooms at restorative leisure.

Lady Middlebitch Flaywood slept in a hammock strung up between four false trees, stalactites overhead constantly dripping, which they supposed she drank while she slept. Stranger still was the bed of Incontible Bludgehaven: nothing more than a large tin box with a hinged door. To fit inside he would have to fold himself at several right angles.

Plaguing their imaginations further, with them now as involuntarily active as a boltworm writhing on insulated ground, were the pieces of furniture that did not involve lying inert upon them as the primary use. In Oolbook Dudgewhistle’s room there was a mechanical spigot mounted in the ceiling, riddled with uniform holes, that when prodded produced a shower of gray-brown dust. That monster’s head was rather like a rigid strong-arming law book, which they now knew to require periodic scrubbing with desiccants, perhaps to prevent Pursuitian book lice.

It turns out they were spared a much worse concert when Xylofont Phanny-Upon-Twone had played the sharpsychord for his skulking audience, as his room was cluttered with instruments not only more arcane in construction, but also more difficult to separate from the category of torture device. A tap on a glass pipe, blown into the configuration of a striking serpent, produced a whistle that howled and bit like a moonless midnight wind, somehow heard, very uncomfortably, in their posteriors rather than their ears.

Hamishand Glazemouth, the Bickyplots’ cook who regularly seasoned his concoctions with his own glossy runoff, had a room coated in gunk. Not just gunk. Slimes were also represented, as were residues, slops, films, phlegms, and discharges. Across the walls were long drag marks, drier than the surroundings, meaning Glazemouth regularly licked them in search of new flavors to experiment with in the kitchen. That meant that somewhere behind or above the walls were many different things rotting, congealing, mixing, perspiring, and leaking down to him. Any mold crawling across one of his surfaces was automatically molding, and most welcome.

Less moist, but no less vile, were the wild murals painted across Impestle Hissmidge’s ceiling, depicting Bickyplots in what was to them regal dress, posing with fur-lined capes, scepters, and orbs like jeweled urchins, usually with one foot raised and set on a pedestal made out of several tangled-up Silhouettes. Buckets of paint dried to garish and gross plugs were strewn about, but no brush, as Hissmidge used her entire head for that.

Sometimes an item’s purpose was impossible to guess, like those found in Licketysplit Godswallop’s chamber. They bore the vaguest of resemblances to parrot perches, only as much as sea shells resembled pastries. If they were for some pet to rest upon the little creatures must have been partly amorphous, as the perch itself was more like a cup with uneven fissures. Dozens of these items stood everywhere, with no sign of whatever was meant to lounge on them, and no sign of any important papers either.

That took them to Questinking Spywulph’s room, which, as expected, proved the least disturbing. Impossible as it was for a Bickyplot to find inner tranquility, given that the essence of their self was a pestilent snaggle-toothed organ forever pacing about a musty hollow trunk, Spywulph was undoubtedly the closest to an approximation. His room was entirely black, and so spartan that the bed, a giant brick set in the floor, was the only feature for their scrutiny to trip over. Consequently his was the simplest to search, done by circling the bed once.

“He seems to know their lives are mere artifice,” Bonfire commented as they left it.

“Yet he doesn’t give it up,” Rutledge added.

“Can you expect someone to give up the only stability they have?” Honey asked, a question that went unanswered when they entered the room of a much less stable mind: Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea. His stability was instead provided by the soil he tilled and sculpted, plenty of which raised the floor in his chamber so that the intruders had to step up aggressively. Many Pursuitian plants were recreated in Wighthall’s flesh there, dense as a jungle. Navigating its gnarly roots practically designed to trip them earned them no sight more interesting than a large shallow hole in the soil, where Pumpwine likely bent over and buried his gourd-shaped head to sleep folded upon himself.

Next in their nearly-completed circle was Eggnonce Chattelpool, Kidd’s primary captor, and she was not surprised to find a place littered with sharp slim devices of brass and silver that each had one very specific purpose, such as splitting literal hairs and mounting leaves in seasick glass. Scientific as he claimed to be, there was little sign of the piles and piles of recorded experiments and logs that characterized the laboratory of Benjamin Franklin. This was lucky, as the search was swift there too.

Not so in Blacknib Bileby’s. He was the Bickyplot draftsman, and from the first glance it looked as if every single page in Bickering Hall was concentrated there. Are the other Bickyplots even literate? Chattelpool’s room was not the torture chamber for her; it was this one. Blueberry’s longstanding difficulty with reading, especially blocks of text in small print with little break-up, was not alleviated by the mind-expanding journey into her nemeses’ realm.

Bileby wrote like the building of a pyramid: block upon block upon block. They snapped to each other almost seamlessly. Stacks taller than the Anchorites rose and fell like an endless staircase around Blacknib’s circular writing desk. Sat in a hole at its center, he would put together many documents at once, the black tentacles emerging from his inkwell head working every angle, writing with gripped stylus and suction cup edge alike.

Just looking at one page filled Blueberry with dread; all the words held their breath and puffed out their cheeks to erase the space between. She tried to blink away the pins of panic jabbing tears into the corners of her eyes, but succeeded only in making that first page look like nothing but a uniform black stamp.

“We’ll have to check them all,” she said to cut off her own dread at the pass, “even if we’re forced to spend tomorrow in here and wait for the cover of another night.”

“No, we won’t,” Honey said, igniting a desperate hope in Kidd. “These pages are all imitation, made out of Wighthall’s flakes, yes? But if they’ve actually hidden something important in here it will be the real thing shrunken down, on proper paper. We just need to find the true paper.”

“You’re right!” Blueberry blurted in the tone of anything but a commanding officer. Honey already knew she was one though, and had known it before the mission even began, as she reached into her coat of many anatimal wonders and withdrew the perfect tool for the job. It was a delicate frilly orb, gray and transparent at its outermost, alive with a thousand minute twangs.

“What is that?” Edward asked, careful not to show as much disgust as he had with the furniture and playthings of the Bickyplots.

“Many many many book lice wings,” Honey said, suppressing a recalled yawn from the labor of assembling them. “All carefully threaded together with a single line of silk. They have no mouths, but they still yearn for the hiding spots favored by their complete selves. They seek a nice warm bed between two authentic papers.”

She gave the ball the gentlest of tosses. It hovered in the air like dandelion spoor before loosening and unfurling: a balled-up cloth tossed into the sea. Dull as the color of pests’ wings was, it still managed to shimmer with its manifold vibrating motions. This featureless angelic sea slug of the air took to the writing desk elegantly, gliding around the stacks in fluid spirals.

The young waited and watched with held breath, tongues pressed against the roof of their mouths. Suddenly it occurred to them that if they actually found it the search could end prematurely and they could get back to living in their own heads.

In less than one full pass around the desk their grotesque little angel disappeared. Bonfire alerted them that she saw it squeeze into a lower section of the tallest stack, and where they clustered around her pointing finger they could see the tiniest motion of something settling in for a nap.

Blueberry thought it best she take the risk of extracting it, as her soldiers had already risked everything in every room she’d dragged them through, so she put on a pair of riding gloves, poor protection against any drafted curses but certainly better than none, and reached with four fingertips for the one corner separate enough from the stack to grab.

Slowly, cautiously, she tugged it loose. There were several large pages secured with a stitch, and now they had a woven cover of book lice wings all happily vibrating. Blueberry gently bunched them up and lifted them as a single skin, folding them over so they could instead settle on the back.

Underneath them were words so large that she did not have trouble reading them. To her they shimmered even more than the anatimals, dark ink be damned:

Bickering Hall Retroactive Deed

“It’s the deed!” Bonfire shouted, hugging Blueberry from behind. Honey clamped onto both of them. For some reason the girls couldn’t begin to fathom or concern themselves with, Fool’s Gold and Edward turned to each other and heartily shook hands.

They’d actually done it. After more than a full floor of their quest they’d become so accustomed to traps and hazards as to expect layers of them, traps within hazards, hazards within traps, and no end to them. In truth the malice and machinations of the Bickyplots only went so far. They had earnestly believed that hiding one of their founding documents inside one of their own heads, which itself bore ten thousand hiding places, at a size no larger and much thinner than a pea, would be sufficiently secure to escape both awareness and seizure.

They were wrong. Every estimation of the second generation in Pursuitia was an underestimation. Their primary skill was to make it so, to treat these underestimations as ignition, the beginning of the downfall of worlds that dared crater into Pursuitia and spread beyond the impact.

“And look,” Honey squeaked, drawing attention to the snakeskin wrapped around her arm, still drifting back the way they’d come, through every room. “Here is our way back, which we already know to be safe, because we’ve cleared each and every danger.”

“Excellent work, all of you,” Blueberry praised. “None of this could happen without you. Alone I am alive, and nothing else.” Honey, adequately hidden from the others in the huddle, leaned into Kidd’s ear and whispered.

“Family isn’t born.” The words, especially combined with Honey’s retracting impish smile, delighted to have vandalized her friend’s ear with sloppy affection, brought an entirely different kind of tear to Blueberry’s eye. Nobody knows this better than Honey. We don’t know where anatimals come from, yet they’re spreading. She sees it all the time, sketches her new friends in her journal. It might just be camaraderie. A new one is born in the warm twine of the bond directly between two others. Bonfire, Honey, Fool’s Gold, Edward, they are all forged here and now between my mission and Muster’s foraged clues.

“Stay sharpened everyone,” Commander Kidd warned them. “We’re not out of the woods until we’re in the coven.”

Resolute nods all around saw them swivel and retrace their steps, across the central shaft for the last time, and back out through Lady Devalming’s room. Honey was winding her snakeskin around her forearm as she reclaimed it, Floyd and Edward flanking her with their bayonets at the ready, while Bonfire covered the rear.

Ignoring her own advice, safe in the middle, Blueberry couldn’t help but pore over the deed in an effort to make sure they’d not misidentified it. Of course her pace was slow, but every word and phrase seemed like it belonged there, consistent with the Bickyplots’ usual tone of assumptive affable dominion and the language that drafted most effectively.

By all appearances it was a profound statement upon those papers, exactly as expected. All it did was grant existential property rights to the Bickyplots, warding their home against invasion and theft. It was their very foothold, their pilgrim’s anchor, in Pursuitia. With it destroyed the humans would be free to march their entire arsenal onto the former property without any ill effect, without any suppression of power as punishment for trespass.

If Blueberry were to destroy it right then and there, tear it into shreds, Bickering Hall would be nothing but a stump waiting for the shovel, at least in the magical sense. Not yet, she had to warn herself, as it was not the best time for what was bound to be an immensely satisfying act. Once it happened it might be sensed, allowing the Bickyplots time to draft something new, not as effective as law that had stood for decades, but still a large concern. It would be best to do it right outside their doorstep, army in tow.

When she next looked up she was right inside their doorstep, the miniature company having returned to the foyer with its high warped ceiling, even higher and more warped than most of the others. The doors were just there, at the end of the passage, yet Honey had stopped.

“We didn’t close them,” she said warily, pointing to where her snakeskin was now pinched in the jamb.

“If we’re locked in we’ll just have to bore our way out,” Kidd resolved, tucking the document into her clothes as safely as she could. Wagner wrapped around it tightly. She took the lead and made for the door, only for the peculiar bony chandelier to come crashing down between her and her goal.

Crashing wasn’t quite the right word. It bounced, off a floor that had been solid one moment and much more bent and breathable the next. In one undetectable motion the foyer now seemed so much more mouth-like. The walls bowed and groaned with inhales and exhales. Teeth previously retracted in gum shadows pronounced themselves like porcelain vases.

Difficult as it was to maintain a disciplined firing line with the floor fluctuating in the fashion of an improper swallow, the miniature company nonetheless managed to keep their barrels trained on the chandelier as it transformed with a gusto outclassing its surroundings.

Tiers of decorative bone plates spread, rode the waves in the flesh underneath, and tightened into more threatening spiny bands higher up on the purplish goose neck of muscle and tissue that kept it attached to the ceiling. Underneath the pulsating mushroom cap of reformation blue veins scrunched and bulged as fluid gathered. What little of the yellow bone, like tobacco teeth, remained beneath the cinch of its main body drifted and moored in places suggestive of clothing: a collar, cuffs, buttons, and a belt.

Two more veins appeared on what had to be called a figure now, on what had to be called the head. Scrunch, bulge. A pair of eye spots they became. The trespassers didn’t want to know if those horrid pustules of dusty Bickyplot blood could actually see, but the tilt of the chandelier-man’s head suggested they could, and that their owner was not impressed or intimidated.

The creature stood there once its shape ceased shifting, blocking the narrowed path between them and the shut doors. It crossed its arms. Any threats it had were to be implied, as it lacked any sort of mouth but the one it resided in, as well as any other garden variety of orifice.

“What is it?” Edward asked, merely a reflex, not desirous of an answer. Honey, who studied the anatomy of multiple natural worlds one body part at a time, had an educated guess.

“It’s the uvula.” The others didn’t know the term, so when they glanced at her she opened her mouth and pointed to the back, where a droplet of flesh dangled over the well fed from the stomach. Looking back at their foe, they could see it occupied roughly the same position in the foyer-mouth.

“Begone or be annihilated,” Blueberry threatened, leveling her own musket right over its crossed arms, though it probably didn’t have a heart there. Mostly unmoved by her threat, only its arms changed position, raising the nubs it might call fists and extending from them retractable sickles of bile-hued bone: a boxer with cat claws. “Fire!” Five reports. Swift as most reactions inside the body, the uvula-man balled itself back up inside the layers of bone at the cinch, causing every ball to take mere chips and splinters off its abundant armor. Then it descended once more, until its blister feet were firm on the tongue-carpet once more, where it again raised its fists in challenge.

“We don’t have ammunition enough to get through that,” Fool’s Gold said, voicing a shared thought. There was another to pluck from the cumulative tree. “Why does it prevent us now? There was no sign of it when we came in.”

“A rooted being must consider its options carefully,” Bonfire hypothesized, shouldering her weapon now that there was no point to reloading. Her hands worried the heads of the hatchets on her belt instead. “If it reveals itself to us at the gates, we can then seek help or weapons from the outside, which is the entire world, and it can do nothing to stop us.

Should it lie in wait however, we then cut ourselves off from reinforcement of any kind once it blocks the exit. And perhaps it never descends, if we leave without our prize. But we have it, and we’re here, so now it’s ready to fight for the deed.”

Kidd spotted morsels of anatomical truth stuck in the teeth all about them. It wasn’t yet attacking because they were still out of its reach, too far toward the tightened back of the throat. Its flesh anchor wouldn’t stretch that far.

“Blades at the ready,” she ordered, “we swarm him.” Her soldiers pulled their own claws, fast as their foe had, faster than Blueberry could internally settle on a name for the creature, made by combining Cadavawing and uvula, so that if they survived and she came to record the encounter in her journal she would not have to write twice as many difficult words that seemed to stutter and repeat their vowels: Cadavula.

Her company’s first united step forward was its last, for it caused the foyer to quiver and contract. The floor beneath them lurched backward, tilted down sickeningly, in an attempt to throw them low in the neck, where they might fall through the severing point, between the slats of the table, and to their death against the coven floor.

After steadying themselves the throat loosened once more. Cadavula’s response was to wave one claw and shake its pseudo-head dismissively. Apparently there were rules to this encounter.

“Does it want us to fight it one at a time?” Floyd asked. Part of the answer was to be found in the cheek-walls nearest their exit, which demonstrated their inflexibility when the back of the chamber moved and they did not.

“As Bonfire said,” Blueberry reminded, “it has to consider its options carefully. If we all fight it at once it will lose, but the only way it has to split us up is to threaten to dump us all out the back.” More assumptions flooded into her brain, faster than she could describe them. “See the front? It’s not moving. There’s no control. If we get past it there’s nothing it can do.

And… and it doesn’t dump us all because it doesn’t know if we’ll survive. And even if we perished the deed would no longer be under its guard. I don’t think it can think… not truly. These are all memories in the muscle.” She again noted the false eyes, which it brandished like real ones. “It can’t even see us; it only knows where we are because our feet are on the floor.” She pointed to its single, thick, slimy puppet string. “Through its connection to the rest of the head.”

“After this assessment it has concluded it should fight us one at a time?” Edward summarized, hoping he had it wrong, performing a larger swallow than their surroundings when his compatriots nodded. “That leaves only the question of who should go first… I volunteer.”

“You do?” Floyd, Honey, and Blueberry asked together. For a moment he couldn’t answer, taken aback by their surprise.

“I’ve got an idea,” he explained, then focusing on his commanding officer. “Your permission?”

“Granted soldier.” Rutledge set all their imaginations afire when he returned his blades to his belt, approaching Cadavula with bare hands and sweating boyish bravado. Only when he stalled a short distance from the uvula-man did the company understand how large their opponent was, as it stood at Edward’s height and then half again. Most of its strikes would aim down as sharply as a guillotine.

Which it demonstrated as soon as Edward was within striking distance. His friends expected him to yelp and leap back the way a rat did when the front half of its body fled before the back half. But no, it turned out he was not capable of faking his bravery when Blueberry Kidd was watching intently.

Ducking and rolling forward, the wood louse configuration of Edward Rutledge II passed straight between Cadavula’s long legs and kept going until he smacked into the closed doors and fell open like a drunken tulip. Nothing else interfered with him as he stood, brushed himself off, and beamed a smile across the chamber to let them know all had gone according to plan.

“Good show,” Floyd half-cheered and half-grumbled, wishing he had thought up the strategy first, especially after they saw Cadavula’s response. Rather than bemoan its fortunes, it made an adjustment to its own tactics by closing its stance, leaving an impossibly small gap no other Anchorite could fit through.

“It can learn. That makes it half as fascinating as an anatimal,” Honey commented, adjusting her shoulders inside her cloak, as if to take stock of her remaining pocketed pet-parts.

“I’ll give it its next lesson,” Fool’s Gold volunteered. Commander Kidd gave him her blessing before he stepped forward. Rutledge outsmarted it, so he must plan to do the same. The trouble is, each person must be that much cleverer if Cadavula closes off another avenue after every bout.

Fool’s Gold rose to that cleverness standard when he, just out of reach of the enemy growth, took his musket and unscrewed the stock. Franklin guns could be disassembled into most of their constituent parts, as they frequently had to be treated with a special wand that stripped remnant magnetic fields that might cause a ball to stick inside the barrel or backfire explosively. On Earth, well after the Founders had built their proposed country, it would eventually be called degaussing, but they knew the process as defranklinizing, a name shared with the more laborious procedure of shuffling the Master of Sciences out of the room when he was helping himself to too much of the anatimal spread at a social function.

Holding just the heavy wooden stock in his left hand, Fool’s Gold began to hop side to side. Cadavula’s head jerked in each direction only after he touched the floor again, reinforcing the notion that it could not see, only feel their applied pressures. On his twelfth landing to the right Floyd leapt again, but not to the left. He shot forward, while his tossed stock landed approximately on the left where he had moments before. Cadavula’s head snapped toward the pressure as the young man sailed by on the other side.

He landed within reach of the creature, but was no longer there by the time it turned around and rushed to his landing spot. No, by then he was already leaning against the door next to Rutledge, grinning on the outskirts of his panting breath. Cadavula likely didn’t have the capacity for frustration, but Kidd thought she spied something of it in its sulking stalk back to the middle position where its umbilicus was lax.

Nothing changed about its body or position this time, but the backward slant of the throat grew steeper, creeping into the arena. Now anyone who tried to jump as Floyd had would not be able to easily land without pitching onto their backs. Another avenue closed.

“I’m ready,” Honey offered. There was no lack of confidence, though she still embraced Blueberry and kissed the stump of Wagner when it emerged to investigate the sudden pressure.

“Leave something for us,” Bonfire cheered, to which the two boys shouted their agreement from across the mouth. Cadavula bristled at her approach, growing more bony spines on its shoulders, hooks that might catch anything trying to flit by. But Honey did not come within striking distance at all, nor did she need some elaborate ruse ritual like Floyd’s hopping.

The girl grabbed both sides of her cloak and threw it wide open, as if baring her chest to the radiant sun. Out streamed her own light, her warm nurturing passion, in the form of every anatimal hidden away on her person for myriad purposes, some quite unknown even to her: the book louse wings, beaver tail chunks, pairs of webbed duck toes, ladybird shells red as glass apples, stinger-bearing scorpion beads, inchworm squirrel ears, bear teeth on sluggish gums, wolf teeth on agile roots, nearly-invisible mosquito needles, and the wicked black sutures of horsefly mandibles.

The cloud of them latched onto Cadavula, their numbers so great that some splashed off. Ignoring such robust stimuli was impossible, and the uvula-man flailed. Thoroughly unable to sweep most of them off, even with boneless arms that could conform to the curve of its chest, it was forced to retract up once more, sloughing the animal parts off as an undulating orb.

Honey was by the door once it reformed, now coated entirely in bone-plate armor, for which it sacrificed a good deal of speed. Honey’s anatimals slowly made their way back to her, though it was always expected to lose some with such a maneuver. She knew they could take care of themselves, even in a foul place like that. Any left behind would probably multiply and have run of the entire hall in a fortnight.

Bonfire and Blueberry shared a look of dread, spread cold across their features. Both had allowed the others to go first, to use their ideas, because they saw themselves as the best in combat, the most capable of taking Cadavula on in a fair fight. Now it came to those fights, the loopholes in the arena thoroughly knotted. And they hadn’t expected the full suit of armor.

“Should we draw lots?” Bonfire asked. “Honey could spare a pair of cat whiskers, I’m sure.”

“No. This is still my campaign. You fight next; that’s an order.”

“Right away,” Bonfire answered with a salute and nod, furious under her words at Blueberry’s sacrifice. Obviously, assuming she succeeded, the last fight would be all the more difficult. Channeling that rage through wrists and hatchets, Bonfire hoped to catch Cadavula off its composure with a quick approach and the first strike, seeing as it had come to expect a ruse.

Bone and metal clashed in a mutual blow. The girl shrank from the force of her larger foe, sunk into the forgiving flesh of the floor. Before it could crumple her she pulled one hatchet from the clash and raked it under some of the bony scales on its forearm, popping them out like a heron striking at piano keys.

Cadavula recoiled, reoriented so that the bare flesh was no longer exposed, then moved back in. Bonfire had recalculated as well in an attempt to keep the wit’s edge in her favor. Swapping her hatchets for her bayonet, she was able to counter Cadavula’s approach with several thrusts, with it unable to notice her extended range just from the shifting weight in her feet.

The blade connected. Chipped bone. Little else. The weapon was nearly forced from her hand by Cadavula’s bulk bearing down. Things weren’t looking favorable, now plain from behind the uvula beast, prompting Honey and the boys to tentatively step forward, see if they could turn the fight into an outnumbered and one-sided battle.

Without looking away, having never so much as conceived of what a look was, Cadavula responded to their approach by having the foyer dry swallow once more. It nearly took Blueberry to a darkness from which she might never be reclaimed, unless they scraped her off the coven floor, either as a terrible mess or a tiny splotch of raspberry jam. She was only able to regain her footing when her soldiers retreated to the door, ending the slow swallow. Bonfire was alone in this.

Alone she may be, because she cannot be joined by a fellow heart, or a fellow mind, but what about a crafty and loyal tail!? That was when Kidd chose to reveal the extent of the sacrifice made by ordering Bonfire to fight first. One loophole remained, an obvious one really, given the strong resemblance between Cadavula’s vertical umbilicus and a noose.

Prompted by the slightest rotation of shoulder, Wagner spiraled down Blueberry’s throwing arm and balled itself up near her wrist. She grunted and threw the anatimal at full force, aiming high so that it slapped against the pillar of flesh supplying their enemy with its lingering life. The hound tail constricted. Flow was cut off almost completely, owed in large part to Wagner’s increased length and girth since its exercise in the Bickering realm.

The uvula-man staggered, grabbed at its connection. Now its sides were wide open for Bonfire to slip through. No time was wasted in doing so, leaving a gap so large in space and time that Blueberry sought to use it as well. Halfway through Cadavula got its pretend-wits about it and managed to reorient enough of its bony scutes underneath Wagner to prevent further constriction. Reforming its man shape, its extending sickle claws snagged Kidd’s cloak and pulled her back into the arena, refusing to let her go without a proper bout.

One of her hatchets whacking its bony breastplate served as the starting bell. The blade stuck, but she had another, already in hand, and she used it as a rudder to redirect Cadavula’s swipes, their force so great that they still bent and threatened to break her fingers.

Wagner could no longer be a slow killing blow, which was far from barring it from participation. Snaking down Cadavula’s suit of armor, it sought to bind one of the forearms to the shoulder, like the tucked mannerism of a chicken wing anatimal, thus preventing swings. While that struggle happened on one side Kidd handled the other. After her second hatchet stuck between armor plates she switched to bayonet, driving it straight through Cadavula’s foot, where the armor did not extend, pinning it to its own tongue.

With two limbs disabled she hoped the fight was over; Cadavula answered with a resounding no, figurative yet blunt as it grabbed one of her legs in the crook of its free one. Once it had her trapped its right hooks struck with rattlesnaking speed. It took both hands to hold its arm back, both palms suffering abrasions from the bumps of bone.

Again her team wished to advance and overwhelm, but were keenly aware that their leader was still facing the back of the throat. A solid throw from Cadavula would send her plummeting. Squirm in thought, not in body. Ideas pool, fill all openings. If there’s a chance I can find it. The key was to stop seeing it as an enemy combatant and start seeing something more clinical and harmless. It was just a uvula, hanging in a dead head, observed by a human who couldn’t possibly suffer at the hands it did not technically possess.

Another sacrifice proved necessary, so that she might free one of her hands. Blueberry pulled her left away. The right was overpowered, and Cadavula’s claws penetrated deep into her shoulder. A scream gushed. Her other pieces and parts all had their own missions though, and stuck to them like gecko toe anatimals.

Her freed left hand struck not at Cadavula, but at Wagner, ripping from it a fistful of dog hair. Most uvulas reviled such substances, as she knew from many personal experiences of a single hair or speck of dust clinging to her own. The inevitable result was a coughing fit. A purple-pink seam existed between Cadavula’s breastplate and its false neck, so that was where Kidd slapped the dog hair and smeared it about on exposed flesh.

This didn’t immediately free her, but the creature reacted with softened quivering and a loosened grip. She was able to slip out and then reclaim its three other prisoners: her weapons. One by one she drove their blades into the vulnerable neck, each strike sending it further into a cowering crouch. On the last Wagner abandoned its grip to return to Kidd’s clothes, so she took that as a sign that the uvula was at least defeated enough to make her escape.

She decided to leave her weapons behind. Before the Liberty Bell cracked that would’ve been unthinkable. The Founders kept a strict inventory on all objects constructed by the Franklin laboratory, and their absence would be noticed within days, but if they got out of there alive and with their prize it no longer mattered, as they would finally have a bargaining chip heavy enough to crush one of those feeble old men to dust.

Her soldiers pulled her into an embrace, smacked her on the back. Difficult as it was to break free of their cocoon of adoration, Kidd still managed, in order to look back at Cadavula, for whom she had the most peculiar feelings, especially upon seeing what had to be a false expression, if she was to suppress this surge of pity.

Those eyes that weren’t eyes, those irritated bulges of vein, positioned with such a threatening glare, were nonetheless pregnant with a woven sorrow of sorts, a wet disbelief at how things had ended. Cadavula looked at them, looked at her specifically, hiding a muscle memory of an emotional wound.

It feels that we cheated. These were not honorable duels. Could it have honor? Bickyplots have their own manners, and somewhere in those jumbled components must be a sense of fair play, and no matter how minuscule it could still be stored in Cadavula and be enough to be its whole character.

Stuck. That’s what it is. Our encounter was the only life it will ever get. Even without the deed, its possible every other head we knocked off Wighthall’s shoulders has one of these left behind, capable only of reaction, never of change. Anchored in its ways, stuck in its flesh. Just like the Bickyplots themselves, just as the Founders now fear they will become. Hopeless and hazardous to those whose free wills are in robust health.

In their world they are the axioms of change. Novelty originates in their breast. Here they must struggle against rising tides of change, and on Earth it would be all the worse. So they must become stuck in their ways, if they are to assert themselves. On Earth they might become so stuck that they turn to… statues. Dare.

Not Mustard. He changed to death, his writings yet grow. Through us he lives on, defeats Founders and Bickyplots all over again and in perpetuity. If only these fools could comprehend that wisdom. If they could allow themselves humility, to be changed by someone else’s home, the worlds would empty of monsters.

Cadavula could know none of this, but perhaps it was felt, an echo of Blueberry’s own sentiments. She would’ve sworn right then, and from then on, that she saw it in those glistening eyes, in its hunched posture, clutching its chest with a fleshy mitten, claws retracted. There was only one way it could speak to them, and that was with the mouth it lived in.

The doors creaked open, washed them with stale backroom air that was nonetheless a thousand times fresher than the gray pathways of Lord Cadavawing Wighthall’s atrophying mind. The pitted black eyes of the giant cauldrons stared back like a great godly spider dropping from its tether in the night sky.

“It’s letting us out,” Edward said.

“There’s nothing it can do now, so there’s no reason to keep us,” Floyd guessed. “We’d just hack the door down if it didn’t open up.” Technically they were not out, or hacked, until Cadavula had its final reaction to the dog hair. Bickering Hall shuddered, teetered back, and then lurched forward in a nasty cough that blew all the young out onto the dry fissures of the old wooden table. A loose splinter, a pike on their scale, nearly got Honey up the nose, saved by Bonfire grabbing her scruff at the last.

Blueberry couldn’t do it. Even as she flew she was staring back into the rectangular throat, watching Cadavula, until it turned away and closed the door on her. The head then settled into itself like a cake gone too warm. Their squatters’ notice slipped loose and drifted to the table.

Secluded in a windowless section of the coven, there was no way to tell the time by light, but several small signs informed them the first rays of dawn had already infiltrated Pilgrim’s Anchor. A soft flap heard was probably cock’s comb anatimals wriggling in the walls, incapable of crowing. The room wasn’t so chilly anymore. And they looked like they hadn’t slept in three nights, eyes trawling with purple nets.

It wasn’t time to rest and recover until they were not under threat from passing feet. Together they trekked to the edge of the table, where Blueberry took the first stride into the chasm and found it to be only a small step down. Moving aside, the others returned to their proper size in moments.

Before they snuck back out they wanted a taste of victory, and something to wash out the last belfry bats of anxious fear. Kidd obliged them, reaching into her coat and pulling out a corner of the deed. There it was, enlarged alongside them, signed by the Bickyplots to the man.

It was slightly deceptive, given its flimsy appearance. This was no legal document.

It was a siege engine.

The Clinging Ivy of Muster Hart

Blueberry, victorious leader,

                                                                                                   declare as one a foothold

                                                             but we will be reunited,

                                                for now,

Our trail together ends here, as I am imprisoned in metal, having taken the form of an iron in the Founders’ dwindling fire. You understand this better than the others, for where their walls imprison me they have always banished you, until now. Our mission continues with this passage , and I promise I am fully present in spirit, as this ink will grow to show, hopefully into a garden tribute to our friendship that will overtake and overgrow the Bickyplot grounds,

                                                                                                                                                 and to what I’ve left unsaid.

                                                  the loyal

                                          the unstoppable                              sister you will need

                                                 the perfect                        the incredible

Please take care of Bonfire the radiant for me. I wish for her to pass me by,

                                                                                                                             living a life

                                                                                                                           full enough for two thousand.

for her not to linger on what we’ve lost, and so will not give her these green tidings and blessings as I give them to you alone .

    When you are

Whether you are elected or not, you are now the leader of our generation, as you have seen the camps of the enemy, been in their heads, and are the only one who bears both the knowledge of two worlds and a golden heart. There is nothing you cannot do but what you are unjustly denied, and all that I have already done, behind locked door, written in a hand that has held yours,

              and does so

                 across worlds

                              time

With love and trust and awe,

your written companion Mustard

PS. That name carries a drafting power, and when you speak it you write it across my soul. Untold sparks, warmth, and campfires, your real homes, you have unwittingly built in me and others. Your pen is your speech, and we are your journal. Never have you been an inadequate draftsman.

Pinned Note

Some papers and thoughts inside the moldering miniature Bickering Hall had been read, skimmed, gleaned, and otherwise absorbed in their hunt for the deed. Nothing regarding Licketysplit Godswallop’s heart-pouring, the date of which, April first, fast approached. Everything would be in motion by then, so in motion that it could only be called a battle, according to the Junior Congress and its president after they’d entered the deed into their collective custody.

If this probably-bodily event granted the Bickyplots some new kind of power it was unacceptable to attack any later, and the deadline was twofold, for it forced the young, the Lenape, and the Freed to act against the Founders and end their interminable stalling that had seen Anchor congeal into two entrenched camps since Hart’s death, a woefully inefficient mess of orders delivered by messenger, sabotage passed off as incompetence or miscommunication, and hostility-degraded goods and services.

The Founders were tired of their nurses’ bedside manner becoming a lack of manners, irritated by keeping a watch on the pillow-encased tongue of the Liberty Bell, and worn thin by a diet now full of the least choice vegetables, anatimals, and native wormstuffs.

So the plan became to antagonize them with joy, something the other camps had always found themselves able to generate without Founding contribution. A feast was in order. For the venue they chose the stripe of land between the lightning farm and tin horse pasture, where the Lenape set up their largest hide tents while the Freed set to planning and cooking the courses, ingredients foraged by the young.

Foraged turned out to be a wildly inadequate term, as the young could only be said to have hunted down the items ruthlessly, ripping them from where they grew with such force they put holes in walls.

Many of the best anatimals, as well as all cultivated Pursuitian vegetables and Earthly herbs and spices coaxed out of incidentally carried seeds, were under figurative lock and key of Founder drafting. To combat this, the young used resourcefulness quite literally, harvesting what had been allowed to grow plentiful and comfortable by the intense labor it usually took to make their flavors or textures acceptable.

Butter they had, from udder anatimals, kept fresh by a Pursuitian cheese-bubbler, a finned worm that endlessly swam through blocks of butter and prevented spoilage with its excretions. Eggs they had too, some free roaming as anatimals, like lazy tops always bumping into doors and getting caught in gutters.

While half the young scoured the periphery of their little city for fiddleheads, mushrooms, and rare native roots and berries, the others plucked every technically edible anatimal out of Anchor’s creases like grooming apes in search of fleas: cricket violins, crayfish tails, goose necks, bear pudge, rat saddle, sunned yolk blisters, carp pouts, catfish bladders, snail corks, pork cutlet cutlets, and many more.

Camouflaged among them was the most peculiar choice of bracket antlers. These were the prongs of various deer that grew like shelf fungi on walls and trees. While an excellent and abundant choice for the carving of all sorts of tools and totems, they were not, as far as the Founders knew, consumable, but they were not well-versed in the lengths to which the Lenape could go to scrape a meal out of the land, so perhaps they could be stewed like other bones to make a broth.

Sacks of these goods were scraped from Anchor’s interior and removed to the tents, leaving it looking much more sterile than usual, a difference that would go unnoticed by any Founder walking through it for several minutes at least. Only after pausing, muttering to themselves, and seeing that the townspeople were nowhere to be found, would that Founder then take note, or rather examine note, the standardized one pinned to almost every Freed door and Lenape flap.

Gone to the feast, back soon

Having scheduled no feast, the discovering Founder would take the news of unsanctioned celebration back to his fellows, and it would have the blame for the sudden absence of their nurses, cooks, and maids as well.

From there they would only become more predictable, their precise steps foretold by Blueberry as she sat at one of the feast tables, playing with her food in the shade of a proper plan, her back facing Independence Hall.

Among themselves they will squabble and pretend it’s a session of congress, none willing to admit they’re just miserable lonely raisins upset that revelry is happening without them. Then they’ll make jokes about our food, as they will have sent someone to check the kitchen and see if we had somehow raided it through their flavor-extracting drafted wards. Garbage, they will guffaw, the savages we stooped to spawning with are eating garbage.

But laughter will become coughing fits, and as much as that laughter represented vindicating cruelty that equal volume of the coughs will state their ill health and phlegm-portended doom. Whatever inner child remains will demand they go and see the fuss. Without any apology or request they will insert themselves here, partake of the garbage, clear themselves of any charge of low class by eating it daintily, swallowing it as they would the sycophantic breath of the Founder beside them.

And they would be welcomed. Kidd would have twice the venom, it could be spilling out her ears, and they would still be welcomed. Their enjoyment was part of the plan, softening them up so the blow would hit all the harder. She kept herself at the periphery so her presence wouldn’t upset them, turned toward the forest of creamy papery canopy, organized into familiar lanes, indistinguishable to most yet practically signposted with their destinations to Blueberry. Stared down the most was the path to Bickering Hall. The first few deceptively vital steps to getting there were in circles.

On cue, she heard greetings. The Freed came and slapped them on the back, unusually friendly, hopefully not so much so that it roused their suspicions. Plates were made for them, notably not ready upon their arrival, sending the clear message that no one was thinking of them. No one would, if they sought to enjoy the life the Founders had tried to chain down, indoctrinate, objectify, and put to rest in a manifest.

How many? Ten? Twelve? Should be enough, and more will trickle in. Blueberry knew all their voices by heart. When she was much younger she’d run them through mental scripts, casting each voice in the role of her father. Many nights she had been unable to sleep, insides blazing and tangling, tears streaming down hot cheeks as she tried to identify the man by the way he said ‘I brought you into these worlds’, or simply ‘I love you’, or even just ‘child’. None of the voices stood out. Child was too kind a name for her. She had been ‘you’ until she’d been pitied with a Lenape-memory. You is not us. You distances with every utterance. I wonder what pit of a world they were trying to push me into. I’ve been to Bickering though; if they succeeded I could think my way out.

In knowing their voices she could have identified them to the man, factored each of their personalities and flaws into the steps following the feast, but ultimately she decided to hear them as an indistinct blob, an opposing force. Her time at the table, looking out on Pursuitia, was better spent building herself up than tearing the establishment down. And it was better for some of it to remain. The Liberty Bell couldn’t break further in the collapse.

She savored her pureed mushrooms. Drank her honey tea, watched its amber steam in the day’s dying light. Wondered what blueberries tasted like. Bonfire came and sat with her. Not a word passed between them. Only the salt.

The excuse used on the Founders was that a cleaning of the town, to remove excess anatimals, had resulted in a preponderance of the tastier variety of refuse, so they had put together a spontaneous feast. Of course Independence Hall had not been invited, as that might insult those who dined every night on full duck breasts, lamb shanks, and trout missing naught but head and tail.

This buttered the old fools up so much that the young were surprised none of the cheese-bubbler worms leapt out of the butter bricks and into their clothes. Now they thought themselves humble, having deigned to dine with the riffraff while saying not a negative word about the fare. Thus greased, and urged into the center of town by day’s end, the people could move together in a single pooling group, slowly back to the trail that ringed Independence Hall, which would do as it had always done, split them along lines of skin color with the Founders’ sharpened precision.

Except those at the front stopped dead in the trail’s dust, kicking some of it ahead, which was prevented from dirtying Kidd’s pant legs by the breeze of Wagner as its tip spun from its perch around her waist. A weapon was held in its coils, like a sheath on her hip. The arm bearing the unmarked rod was tucked behind her back: no need to add its chaos.

Obviously she had snuck around the side of everyone and run to beat them to the doors of Independence Hall, which she now blocked bodily. But what was that weapon her hand hung threateningly over? She saw their curiosity and drew it to give them a good look. The material turned out to be familiar, if not the form. Such tan projections could be found, much more sloppily shaped, growing on many windowsills and roof corners.

The young had harvested all of the antler anatimals and rapidly carved them under the feast tables, disguised as shucking and peeling meal preparation. It was just enough time to remove the offshoots and taper the end to a point that could skewer a man. These were little more than jabbing sticks, but they were untouched by Founder drafting and would not malfunction or betray their wielders when turned against them, as anything out of the Anchor armory would.

Kidd’s point was joined by scores of others that came out behind the Founders, who were now pushed to the front of the crowd and corralled together. For every face of bewilderment among the herded men there was another of rage, and, Kidd noted, a few of detached sorrow, like dead bugs adrift in soup.

“What is this!?” Founder Rutledge demanded, stepping onto the trail and whirling around. He searched for his son among those pointing sticks, but the younger Edward was currently inside the hall, pulling a similar maneuver on the Founders too bedridden or stubborn to investigate the jovial wafting of the feast. Without a target for his rage he naturally snapped back to Blueberry. “Get out of the way you!”

To some she would always be that word, at least until the Carve-Out. That would cleave them from these abominable men much more cleanly than the path Rutledge scored with his angry dirt-spitting boots. It would leave them worlds apart. ‘You’ would become ‘her’: a terse incantation meant to bring them all back and torment them some more. And it would never work. Rutledge senior needed this communicated to him bluntly, so with her free hand Kidd produced the deed to Bickering Hall.

The Founders shuffled forward and leaned to scrutinize it, only permitted a few steps by the young surrounding them. The pages were each near as big as Kidd’s torso, and the title plainer than an exploding sunset. For once Blueberry would have the pleasure of spelling something out for them.

“This… is the deed to Bickering Hall,” she pronounced. On the other side of the doors behind her, Junior President Windstorm Jefferson would now begin repeating her proclamation to the rest of the rulers. “It is what we have all long searched for. Found inside the head of Cadavawing Wighthall, and removed with some difficulty by the Junior Congress of Pilgrim’s Anchor, its optimal destruction will be the tip of our spear, followed by the final invasion, and our first earnest attack on the very idea of our enemy.”

Balderdash, they were thinking; it was plain on their faces. Kidd silently dared them to interrupt, hoping to see at least someone poked in the behind with an antler so they could all see, in the most ridiculous way, that it had come to blows inside their fences. Even without a word from them she knew they were less stunned by the deed’s hiding spot, and by the implied magic of trying to claim it, than they were by the name of the Junior Congress.

Across several years not one Founder had learned of the organization run between their journals and in parallel to the designs of Independence Hall. Whatever the latter did, the former operated within, a lifeboat stowed away in a larger ship. The Carve-Out was what that boat hoped to escape to, but it wasn’t yet time for the Founders to hear that part of it. All they needed to know was that

“We have taken the Liberty Bell,” she declared as she raised her antler skyward. The onlookers followed it, and saw not Autumn Middleton perched by the pillow-muted bell, hidden as she was from that angle, but Emperor the pig-ear anatimal in majestic flight around the tower. Its presence showed them it was no bluff; the bacon butterfly was fully capable of lifting any of them off the ground and flying them up there without the need to travel through Independence Hall’s security checkpoints. With the top of the tower taken, they could incapacitate the Founders with a single strike, with the note of freedom.

“Why this hostility?” Master of Sciences Franklin asked, emerging from the Founders alongside Rutledge. If someone made an equivalent objection inside it would be Thomas Jefferson, and he wouldn’t do it with the kind sad eyes of Franklin, sparkling by the light of his electric spectacles.

“Freedom must ring,” Kidd answered him, taking note of Editor Lightfoot Lee, who drifted across the gap portly Franklin had left in his fellows. She watched the man’s gnarled hands. “Those who cannot aid it in doing so can no longer make the decisions for this town. The Junior Congress has made the plan of attack. It will happen no later than the date of Godswallop’s heart-pouring. And not a soul will rest this night until every Founders’ signature is on a provisional agreement to this strategy.”

“Let me get my quill!” Rutledge snarled, drawing a Franklin pistol. He leveled the gun squarely at Blueberry’s heart. Not so much as a flinch. Not for him. I refuse to die if the ball comes from his gun. Do you hate me so much because I am yours? I’d rather the culprit be an ass cheek anatimal.

“Edward, we’d best hear her out,” the science master advised. He didn’t like the sight of one of his own inventions turned on someone who would always be, to him, a babe that had tumbled into an empty military uniform.

“After she hands over that deed,” the man barked without looking at his superior in all affairs. “I’d wager she can’t even read the damn thing.” Kidd could read it, and had, slowly and deliberately, at the same time orchestrating these events to feather-combing precision. Yet no prediction was perfect, and she had to read something unexpected as a streak of red slithered between Rutledge’s legs and into the air toward her, no, toward the deed.

It was the editing ribbon of the editor pro tempore. Francis Lightfoot Lee was not a social creature. If he died and managed to find his way through the dark howling forest between worlds to his Christian heaven and its attendant god he still would not have found the patience to make small talk or try a cup of god’s tea.

Therefore Blueberry had not expected him to attend the feast, which he technically did not. All the event had done was rouse his suspicions, and he had skulked about nearby without ever coming under the tent or partaking of the food. Part of her marveled at whatever infernal mechanism powered his spite, as he was among the more decrepit of the Founders, but always ready to seek out the most advantageous physical position.

His crimson tool carried out his will with even greater cunning. Kidd realized too late that Lee was just bitter enough, just burnt enough in the soul, to risk destroying the deed prematurely just to get it out of her cocksure youthful hand. The ribbon would break her arm and shred the pages to end possession, and it would have succeeded if Wagner wasn’t capable of reading its master’s first bodily impulses upon her skin.

In perfect anticipation the hound tail launched from her waist and met the ribbon midair. The pair knotted together and fell, doing dusty battle upon the trail. Their writhing stalemate still left the threat of Rutledge’s pistol, but when he too was distracted by ribbon and tail Fool’s Gold Floyd and Crow Eyes had shot up behind him and pressed their whittled antler points to the back of his neck. From there he was quickly disarmed.

“Gentlemen, this has come to a head because we failed to act swiftly,” the Master of Sciences said to ease the tensions. It was a misstatement; he was too genial to understand the depths of their opposition. The man had not fathered any of them, seeing his work as his children instead. Everywhere his legacy was on radiant display, not bastardized into a younger body with looser morals. “And I’m much too full to argue with you as to why we should attack the Bickyplots. If you see reason you’ll see there’s never been a bad day to oppose them, merely no opportune ones. Our youth have foraged one for us, and served it beside some truly lovely… what were those little golden brown balls with the yellow sauce?”

“Fried cricket violin mush,” Fool’s Gold answered him.

“Really!? I’ll have to write that one down, right after I sign my name.” There were protests from some of his fellows, but he swatted their muttering away like mosquitoes. The young had the documents and inks at the ready, Blueberry choosing to interrupt them before Franklin could push his creeping glasses back up his nose.

“There’s one more condition. I demand to know my parentage.” She had cleared this term with the junior Committee of Five; as far as they were concerned she had more than earned it when she’d fought the lump in a Bickyplot’s throat. Franklin turned an impressive degree for his burial mound physique, pursing his lips and staring at the other Founders, who were too busy looking at the dirt they’d kicked to reciprocate.

“No one’s told you?” he remarked, as if it were a matter of chores made unnecessary. “Dear dear. Alright. I’ll be first to sign and first to speak.” He turned again. “Perhaps you should spend more time in the electrified air! Apparently it has made me into the trailblazer.”

Things progressed swiftly from there, with tables appearing and then suffering crowds who wanted to read whatever edge of text they could catch. The Master of Sciences gave his signature without hesitation and then beckoned the Founders he knew to be the most obsequious in order to keep the affair moving. If the machine was properly oiled it couldn’t break down into violence.

Whether Founder, young, or both, those inside Independence Hall must have been working fruitfully as well, since no distress knock came. Poor Autumn wouldn’t get to ring the Liberty Bell after all. Any encouragement that was needed came focused silently on the tips of the antler anatimals. Rutledge was the last signatory, and had a bone pressed deeper into his neck than his quill was on the page. He had no choice but to relent.

If closing out their trap had been up to Blueberry she would’ve failed at the crucial moment, right after Franklin said, so casually, so resignedly, that he would hand over what she had sought her entire yearning life. The unmarked rod would’ve dropped if it wasn’t biting down. Wagner had never felt such a reaction in her skin, so different from the soothing heat it sought after the cutting ribbon was called back to its master. Seeking certainty, the tail wound around her chest and rested over her heart, only to find its beat was a rapid flutter, the confused desperate splashing of a hummingbird that had accidentally found the surface of a clear lake.

It must have been written all over her face, since Crow Eyes appeared and took her in order to hand her off to Founder Franklin. The transfer was extremely literal; her hand slipped into his. None of these ruling men had ever touched so gently, so mundanely. She wasn’t sure she’d ever had such a guiding touch from an adult, only adding to her hypnosis.

“We’ll go somewhere private,” she thought she heard him say. More certain was the repeating creak of his charged cane, one of so many devices he used that had no obvious purpose for the electric fluid they stored.

Privacy turned out to be the lightning orchard: a field where Franklin kites drifted above extending lightning rods, its boundaries marked by insulating strips. He led her just past them, so they could walk the edge of the interior.

Harvests occurred during storms and rainfall, but there was ambient fluid in the air in small concentrations, just roused to visible activity by the nudging of the kites and rods. Feathery streaking sparks, daylight fireflies, appeared within the insulation lines, dancing across exposed skin and tickling necks and ears.

This activity invigorated Franklin, who already had a surprisingly good mood after the toppling of the Founders’ authority. He inhaled like the air had a special scent. Before he said anything he grunted and drove his cane into the soft soil and left it there. Sparks began to gather, slither in its every seam.

“I’m sorry young lady, I truly assumed someone had addressed this matter long ago. I take responsibility, as I know I’ve long given inadequate attention to the thorny relations between parent and child here in Pilgrim’s Anchor. None of it ever seemed to be my business, and I can hardly give advice on how to raise children, only rods.”

“So you do know who my father is? My mother?” she finally managed to say. How did Cadavula get into my throat, and how is it stealing all my intelligent words?

“Before I answer you, I’ll ask that you tell me about yourself Miss Kidd. What are you to Pilgrim’s Anchor?” He strolled about this way and that, hands folded behind his back, no sign of infirmity while he was within the orchard he’d built with his own two hemispheres.

“To?” A soldier. No. “Its salvation.” The response surprised him slightly, yet was quickly chuckled off.

“If that’s true then you were certainly a gift when you came to us,” the aged man said, eyes plunged into the sky. “I worry the Second Declaration will return you, making us look ungrateful. I am not; I am very grateful to have lived in this world.”

“Return me where?”

“That I cannot say, for I do not know, nor do any of the other Founders. What we do know is that you came to us in the First Declaration, as it was happening. You were found upon the doorstep of Independence Hall, naked and squinting like a mole, without a cry anywhere in you. Thomas almost stepped on you when he threw the doors open to investigate what had just occurred, the dropping of the American anchor in Evidentia.”

“I did always feel the oldest,” she said numbly, mind probing the alien shape of his more meaningful admission.

“We took you in, and I’m sorry to admit we set you entirely aside for what must have been several hours, as we examined this world by the light of our first day here. In short order some of the Freed, who were of course not called such yet, made their way to us, and then the Lenape. None of them witnessed your discovery, and they must all have assumed as you did, that you were the illegitimate offspring of someone in our fateful meeting, the only one created before the transfer.”

“I am alone then,” Blueberry said. The delicate sparking became the wriggling of muddy worms. She sank without losing height. “I have no family, and if I do they will not spend one hour of one day in the same world with me. I have been abandoned, but for what reason?” Her damming voice broke, tears alongside its rubble. “Why Mr. Franklin!? I don’t have the poisonous blood of the Bickyplots. I have no spines, no sting, no fangs, and no spray of a skunk. What is there to abandon? How could they even see me as anything other than their own?”

“I don’t know child,” he said, approaching to comfort her. His hand on her shoulder achieved that, yet in equal measure it burned. She withered under him, down to her knees. Electric fluid leapt between her tears, over the bridge of her nose like white rabbits across a lunar hill. “We don’t know that they did.”

“Mr. Franklin, is there anything plainer than a babe on a doorstep?”

“Nothing is plain in the crosswinds of the unknown. If you had told me, in the throes of worry over the intent and cruelty of a king across an ocean, that there was a place where animals did not need their entire bodies to live, indeed did not even need mouths to take in food or eyes to see, I would not have believed. Now such things are a dozen to my breakfast. Now our guns fire the bolts it previously took Zeus to throw.”

“Please, tell me with that inventive mind of yours, tell me what else could’ve happened.”

“Gladly child. You came to us individually, from parts unknown, meaning you could be anything that resides in those parts. You may not even be human.” By his smile she knew he meant that as a compliment, or at least as a curiosity. “If Independence Hall pierced heaven on its way to Evidentia you might be an angel.

You might be from a world where man is better in every way, and any ill-fitting experiences are the result of our inability to keep pace with you.

Your loving parents might have dropped you, a most unfortunate accident, and you landed in another realm instead of a puddle.

Or you could’ve been sent to help us. That, yes that, is what I believe.”

“You do?”

“Without a doubt.” He went and stood beside his planted cane, which was sucking up the last of the feathery sparks on its surface. They pooled in the glass nodule atop it, generating a light so much brighter than the sum of its parts. It should’ve hurt to look, but Kidd found herself staring into its center, and thinking it was a sun good enough to pluck from the branch, a treat she deserved.

“My cane can refill its reservoir from the most minor sources,” the science master said in recognition of her hungry admiration. “While doing so it appears as idle as a stump. It’s but a feature of the landscape… but all the while it gathers, pools, churns, froths the fluid energy. You have done the same Miss Kidd. Your whole life with us was the mere gathering of energy from this world. Today you revealed your true purpose. You are the explosive catalyst, getting us off our bottoms into marching orders. You are heaven sent or heaven dropped, and I’d be just as grateful for either.”

Swift as a man half his age, Franklin freed his cane and tossed it at Blueberry, who rose to catch it. Its fine grain sizzled in her grip. Wagner emerged from her sleeve to explore it, entwining halfway down where all its fur bristled on end.

“Thank you Founder Franklin.” There will never be a better chance to ask. “What does this cane do?” He smirked, this time like a boy a fifth his age.

“Try it out on your way back. You’ll see. Go on now. I’ll stay here awhile. Best to let all the griping die down a little.” Kidd’s legs were so versatile, silent as an egret’s, determined as a raccoon’s, that she thought the only thing they couldn’t do was mimic infirmity. As she walked back into town she probed the ground ahead of her with the item, casting aside the occasional crimped half-shell of a turtle.

When she tapped her first stone with some trace of metal ore she felt it and finally understood the cane’s purpose. That hedonistic old goat. While other Founders walked at his side, muttering pleas to the Christian god, sly Ben was awash in bursts of sin, in the utmost pleasures of the flesh.

Each metallic tap released an electrical burst into the palm that then traveled up the arm and rapidly fanned out across the entire body. The euphoria lasted until the wielder needed to be mentally present for the next footfall, where it abruptly receded. I thought this gem of industry looked like a growing sun, and now I have actually gotten to taste it! No wonder he has always been the least of our opposition; he’s been busy living in yet another world, this one between steps. Who would’ve thought you could fit one in there? Me. I should think such things; I already know them.

Over ninety and frequently suffering gout, Franklin’s activity and sunny disposition had always been related to this treatment, which could not be called an addiction because of its apparent healthful connection to brisk outdoor walks. Kidd tested its relief again. Again. Again. Once more. Then she ran into a door. And again, to treat her bitten tongue. She stopped herself in fear of excess. As its waves of joy vanished back into the recesses of her muscles she understood that he had granted her this taste to dull the guillotine he had just dropped, the one that severed her from her past.

I am an unknown. Or… I am instead all that I know. I have just learned there is pleasure to be found in every step. And that Bickering was not my first jaunt between worlds. Even within Pilgrim’s Anchor I have always been on the move, never granted the comfort of the same bed thrice in a row. This was my role in miniature. Practice.

Most alive are those who move. Those who settle turn to stone. And so I will move. Into Bickering Hall and battle we will go. Once victorious we will not stay. Then we march for Independence Hall and we carve out a path to somewhere new. Home is not the land where you are born, it is where you die, for your bones rest there eternally.

If the Founders understood that they would not be so eager to conquer. Their bones cannot swim these soils. Those who come after, even if they dredge the drowned, will see nothing but passing pests, but the dead and unfamiliar, both statuses irreconcilably linked.

Onto Bickering. Onto victory. Then on and on and on.

Until Wagner can be the tailor’s sewing tape to a continent in need of a waistcoat.

Continued in Part Four