The Impossible Cube

Praise for

The Doomsday Vault

“Harper creates a fascinating world of devices, conspiracies, and personalities. . . . Alice and Gavin fight to survive and to find love in this steampunk coming-of-age story. Harper’s world building is well developed and offers an interesting combination of science and steam.”

—SFRevu

“You’ll have great fun exploring the Third Ward, and the author created such a rich and lavish world for his characters. . . . Twists and turns abound, and the author managed to lob some shockers at me that I’ll admit I didn’t see coming. . . . If you love your Victorian adventures filled with zombies, amazing automatons, steampunk flare, and an impeccable eye for detail, you’ll love the fascinating (and fantastical) Doomsday Vault.”

—My Bookish Ways

“The Doomsday Vault is a good way to start off a new series in a highly specialized genre. Its combination of science and fantasy and good versus evil work well . . . a clever and worthwhile take on the steampunk universe.”

—That’s What I’m Talking About

“A fun and thrilling fast-paced adventure full of engaging characters and plenty of surprises. . . . I particularly enjoyed all the interesting and unexpected twists that kept popping up just when I thought I had the story figured out.”

—SFF Chat

“The great thing about having all these awesome characters is that [they’re] all snuggled up against a really great plot, several intermingling subplots, and pretty dang great steampunk world building. And excellent writing. . . . [The Doomsday Vault is] fun, funny, and a damn fine romp of a read. So much goodness packed into this book! Highly recommended.”

—Lurv a la Mode

“A goofy excursion in a style reminiscent of Foglios’s Girl Genius graphic series. . . . A highly entertaining romp.”

—Locus

“Paying homage to the likes of Skybreaker, 2D Goggles, and Girl Genius, The Doomsday Vault is awesome. One of my favorite steampunk-zombie novels. Abso-freaking-lutely recommended.”

—The Book Smugglers

Also by Steven Harper

The Clockwork Empire

The Doomsday Vault

The Impossible Cube

THE

IMPOSSIBLE

CUBE

A NOVEL OF THE

CLOCKWORK EMPIRE

STEVEN HARPER

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, May 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © Steven Piziks, 2012

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-101-58540-5

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Printed in the United States of America

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

To my son, Aran, who always manages the most amazing

surprises. Every day with you is a wonder.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I need to thank Tim Smith, PhD, of the University of Michigan, for information about the workings of electrical turbines. Thanks also go to the Untitled Writers Group (Christian, Cindy, David, Diana, Erica, Jonathan, Mary Beth, and Sarah) for pounding through so many drafts.

THE STORY SO FAR

We include this section as a courtesy for new readers who did not have the opportunity to peruse The Doomsday Vault, the most excellent first volume in this series. The information may also prove useful to experienced readers who require a bit of a refresher, or who lack a mechanized cranial implant with fully realized library. Thoroughly experienced readers are encouraged to leaf their way over to Chapter One, where they will find Gavin Ennock in awkward and perilous circumstances.

The year is 1857.

Nearly one hundred years earlier, a new disease ravaged the world. The plague causes rotting of flesh, and also invades the host’s nervous system, causing motor dysfunction, dementia, and photosensitivity. Victims lurching through the late stages inevitably became known as plague zombies. However, a handful of victims end up with neural synapses that, for a brief time, fall together instead of apart. Advanced mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry become as toys to them. But as the virus slowly destroys their brains, they eventually lose their grip on reality. Their attachment to mechanical inventions and their detachment from normal human emotion earned them the name clockwork geniuses or clockworkers, and the disease itself became the clockwork plague.

Two nations—England and China—built opposing empires using the fantastic inventions supplied by captive clockworkers, and only the delicate balance of power holds the two empires in check.

In The Doomsday Vault, we encountered Alice Michaels, an impoverished woman of quality who had finally caught the eye of wealthy industrialist Norbert Williamson. Norbert promised to pay Alice’s family’s debts if she married him and provided their eventual child with a title. Alice reluctantly agreed. Mere hours later, she rescued from great danger a handsome young street musician named Gavin Ennock.

Before Gavin met Alice, he served aboard the American airship Juniper. An unfortunate encounter with pirates left him stranded in London with no means of employment save playing the fiddle on street corners. After Alice’s dramatic rescue, Gavin found himself attracted to her, and she to him, but her circumstances and his social standing didn’t allow for a romance.

A great many adventures followed. Alice’s aunt Edwina turned out to be a clockworker. Plague zombies attacked London. A great mechanical beast kidnapped Alice, and Gavin rescued her with the help of a mutated walking tree designed by another clockworker. Gavin and Alice learned of a shadowy organization called the Third Ward. The Ward, led by Lieutenant Susan Phipps, has been charged by Queen Victoria herself to scour the world for clockworkers and bring them back to London, where they build inventions for the good of the Crown—and the detriment of the Orient.

Aunt Edwina’s diseased mind created a pair of cures for the clockwork plague, but such cures would upset the careful balance of power between the British and the Chinese, so the Third Ward locked Edwina’s work in the Doomsday Vault, which houses only the most dangerous of inventions. Infuriated, Edwina infected Gavin with the plague in hopes of forcing Alice to retrieve the cure and, in the process, kill everyone in the Third Ward. Edwina’s plan worked—almost. Alice and Gavin stole the cures, but stopped short of murder.

Aunt Edwina did not survive the release of her own airborne cure, and Alice found herself the disconcerted owner of a mechanical gauntlet that can cure the clockwork plague with a scratch. Unfortunately, neither of Edwina’s cures helps clockwork geniuses; they only cure people in danger of becoming ordinary plague zombies.

Alice left her betrothed and declared her love for Gavin. She attempted to cure Gavin of the plague and failed; Gavin was becoming a clockworker.

Alice and Gavin fled London in a small airship, with Lieutenant Phipps hot on their heels. Joining them are Gabriel Stark (a clockworker who calls himself “Dr. Clef”), Feng Lung (the son of China’s ambassador to England), Kemp (Alice’s mechanical valet), and Click (Alice’s windup clockwork cat). They are heading for China, which has its own supply of clockworkers, and may have a more powerful cure that can restore Gavin’s fading sanity and save his life.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Interlude

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Interlude

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Interlude

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Afterword

About the Author

Chapter One

Gavin Ennock snapped awake. His temples pounded, his feet ached, and his arms flopped uselessly above his head. Far above him lay green grass strewn with twigs. It took him several moments to understand he was hanging upside down by his ankles. At least he wasn’t naked this time.

“Hello?” he called.

Below him, nothing moved. He shifted in confusion, and the iron shackles around his ankles clinked like little ghosts. How the hell—? The last thing he remembered was walking back to the inn from a much-needed trip to the bathhouse and someone had called his name. Now he was hanging head-down amid a bunch of trees. Most were little more than saplings, but a few were full-sized. Gavin didn’t know trees, but these certainly didn’t seem… normal. Their branches twisted as if with arthritis, and the leaves looked papery. Two or three bloomed with bright blue flowers, and bees bumbled among them.

The forest itself was contained within a domed greenhouse, three or four stories tall. Gavin’s head hung fully two of those stories above the ground. Glass walls broken into geometric designs magnified and heated angry summer sunlight. The whole place smelled green. Water trickled somewhere, and humidity made the air heavy. Breathing felt almost the same as drinking.

Poison ivy vines of fear took root and grew in Gavin’s stomach. “Hey!” Blood throbbed in his head, and his voice shook more than a little. “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?”

From around one of the trees limped a man. His back was twisted, and his sparse brown hair clumped unevenly against his skull. This and his scarred, gnarled hands gave the initial impression that he was old, but Gavin, who wasn’t yet twenty, quickly realized the man was barely older than he was himself. The man was a clockworker, and the plague had left him with physical and mental scars both.

“Shit,” Gavin muttered.

“Is he awake?” The man had a French accent. “Yes, he is awake.”

“I’m an agent of the Third Ward,” Gavin called down to him, lying. “When I don’t report in, they’ll send a team to see what happened to me. You don’t want that. Let me go, and—”

The twisted man threw a lever Gavin hadn’t noticed before, and Gavin dropped. The ground rushed up at him. His stomach lurched, and Gavin yelled. At the last moment, the twisted man threw the lever again and Gavin jerked to a stop five feet above the ground. His ankles burned with pain, and the headache sloshed hot lead inside his skull.

“I think he has no idea who I am.” The twisted clockworker pressed a scarred hand to Gavin’s upturned cheek in a strangely tender caress. The gesture created an odd convergence of opposites. Gavin’s captor stood firmly on the ground. His body was as twisted and warped as his trees, his face was scarred beneath greasy, sparse hair, and he wore a filthy robe that looked like it had once belonged to a monk. Muddy hazel eyes peered at his captive. Gavin had even features, white-blond hair, and blue eyes. His black shirt and trousers contrasted sharply with his fair skin and hair, and his fingers were straight and strong.

The clockworker cocked his head, as if hearing a voice—or voices. “Then maybe he should look around and try to remember who I am. Maybe he should.”

Gavin considered socking the clockworker, but discarded the idea—bad leverage, and even if he managed to knock the other man unconscious, he would still be trapped in the shackles. His earlier fear gnawed at him again, mingling with the pain.

Now that he was lower, he could see nearby a large stone worktable littered with wicked-looking gardening tools, a large control panel bristling with levers, dials, and lights, and, incongruously, a brass-and-glass pistol. A power cable trailed from the stock and ended in a large battery pack.

“Listen,” Gavin said with growing desperation, “I can help you. I can—”

The man turned Gavin, forcing him to look at the trees. “I don’t know if he remembers. Maybe he will if I point out that the forest is old but the greenhouse is new. What do you all think?”

“What are you talking about?” It was useless to argue with clockworkers—the disease that stoked their brains also lubricated their grip on reality—but Gavin couldn’t help himself. “You aren’t making—”

One of the trees moved. It actually leaned down and in, as if to get a closer look at Gavin. The blue blossoms shifted, and a glint of brass caught the light. Long wires and strips of metal ran up the bark. Gavin’s breath caught in his throat. For a moment, time flipped backward, and he was fleeing through a blur of leaves and branches that were actively trying to kill him. A tall, bearded clockworker in an opera cloak rode one of the walking trees, steering it by yanking levers and pressing pedals. His partner, Simon, shouted something as Gavin spun and fired the electric rifle attached to the battery pack on his back.

“L’Arbre Magnifique,” Gavin whispered. “This is his forest. But the greenhouse wasn’t here before, and you aren’t him.”

“I heard him mention my father, L’Arbre Magnifique,” the clockworker said. “But I don’t believe he asked my name.” He paused again. “Yes, that was indeed rude of him. He should know my name is Antoine.”

Gavin’s mouth went dry. Fantastic. What were the odds of two clockworkers showing up in the same family, or that Gavin would run into both of them in one lifetime? The shackles continued to bite into his ankles with iron teeth.

“Look, Antoine, your father is alive and well,” Gavin said, hoping he was telling the truth. “In London. We gave him a huge laboratory and he invents great… uh, inventions all day long. I can take you to him, if you want.”

Antoine spun Gavin back around and slugged him high in the stomach. The air burst from Gavin’s lungs. Pain sank into him, and he couldn’t speak.

“Ah,” Antoine said. “Do you think I hurt him? I do.” Another pause, with a glance at the trees. “No, it was not as painful as watching him kidnap my father.” He turned his back to Gavin and gestured at one of the towering trees. “That is true. My father only taught me to work with plants. I will teach myself how to work with meat. Slowly.”

An object flashed past Gavin’s face and landed soundlessly on the grass where Antoine couldn’t see. It was a perfect saucer of glass, perhaps two feet in diameter. Startled, Gavin looked up toward the faraway ceiling in time to see a brass cat, claws extended, leap through a new hole in the roof. The cat fell straight down and crashed into some bushes a few feet away. Antoine spun.

“What was that?”

It took Gavin a moment to realize Antoine was talking to him and not the trees. “It was my stomach growling,” he gasped through the pain. “Don’t you feed your prisoners?”

A string of saliva hung from Antoine’s lower lip. “Yes. I feed them to my forest.”

The leaves on the lower bushes parted, and the brass cat slipped under the worktable, out of Antoine’s field of view. It gave Gavin a phosphorescent green stare from the shadows. A ray of hope touched Gavin.

“Your father is a genius, Antoine,” he said earnestly. “A true artist. Queen Victoria herself said so.”

The trees whispered among themselves, and a storm crossed Antoine’s face. “You are right! He should never mention that horrible woman’s name, not when her Third Ward agents took my father away from me!”

“Simon and I captured a tree with him, remember? The tree turned out to be really useful,” Gavin continued, a little too loudly. The pain from the punch was fading a little, but his ankles still burned. “It helped us track down a clockworker who hurt a lot of people.”

Another glance at the trees. “Ah, yes. I miss Number Eight, too. What? No, I have definitely improved your design since then. Look at yourselves. I can make you blossom and create seedlings that grow their own metal frameworks, if only you have enough minerals in your roots. The entire forest will walk at my command! I only need more money. Money to buy more metal for my hungry trees.”

Through the hole in the roof flew a small whirligig, its propeller twirling madly to keep it aloft. It trailed a rope. The whirligig zipped down to a support beam close to the ground and grabbed it with six spidery limbs, leaving the slanted rope behind it. Two of the trees creaked and leaned sideways, as if they were searching for something. Antoine, sensitive to their moods, started to turn. The unnatural position of Gavin’s arms started new pains in his shoulders. The aches made Gavin’s concentration waver, and he had to force himself to speak up and divert Antoine’s attention.

“Where are you going to get money?” he said. “You live in a forest.”

Distracted, Antoine turned his attention back to Gavin. “He doesn’t know that I will collect a reward for capturing him, yes, I will. But will I play with him first? Also, yes.”

Gavin froze. “What reward? What are you talking about?”

“Is it a large reward? Enormous!” Antoine began to pace. The cat watched him intently, and when Antoine’s twisted back was turned, it bolted out from under the table and took a flying leap onto Gavin’s back. Its claws sank into Gavin’s skin, and Gavin sucked in a sharp breath at the pricks and stabs of eighteen claws.

“Ow! Click!” Gavin gasped.

Antoine glanced sharply at him, but the cat was hidden from view behind Gavin’s body. “Click?”

“I said I’m sick,” Gavin managed. “Who could be offering a reward for me? I’ve been in France only a few days.”

“That would be Lieutenant Susan Phipps.”

Gavin’s blood chilled. “No,” he whispered.

“Ah. Did you see the way I frightened my new subject?” A pause, and his expression turned churlish. “But I should be allowed to play before I turn him over to Lieutenant Phipps. Just a little. Just enough.”

“What about Alice?” Gavin couldn’t help blurting. “Is there a reward for her, too?”

“Would I like to double the reward?” Click the cat climbed higher just as Antoine snaked out a hand and pulled Gavin closer by his hair, which gave Gavin an excuse to yelp in pain. “Where is your little baroness?”

At that moment, a woman in a brown explorer’s shirt, trousers, and gloves slid through the hole in the roof and down the slanted rope. Her hair was tucked under a pith helmet, and her belt sported a glass cutlass. Her expression was tight, like a dirigible that might explode. Alice Michaels. Oh God. Gavin’s chest constricted and he felt a mixture of love and alarm, devotion and dread. He was so glad to see her he wanted to go limp with relief even as he was terrified the clockworker would capture her as well.

“We split up,” Gavin gasped, too aware of the cat on his back. What the hell was the damned thing doing? “Right after we left England. The Third Ward was chasing us and we decided it would be safer. You’ll never find her.”

“Do I believe him? No, I do not. Do I think his Alice is somewhere nearby? Yes, I—”

“MONSEIGNEUR!” boomed one of the trees. “MONSEIGNEUR! ROCAILLEUX!”

Everything happened at once. Antoine snatched up the brass pistol from the worktable. Click scrambled up Gavin’s legs to his ankles and extended a claw into the shackles. Alice whipped the glass cutlass free with one hand and sliced the rope below her. Clinging to the top piece like a liana vine, she swung downward. With a clack, Gavin’s shackles came open and he dropped to the ground, barely managing to tuck and roll so he wouldn’t hit his head. Antoine fired the pistol at Alice. Yellow lightning snapped from the barrel. Thunder smashed through the greenhouse. An anguished shout tore itself from Gavin’s throat. The bolt missed its target, and four windows shattered. Alice landed several yards away from the circle of trees, stumbled, regained her feet in waist-high shrubbery. Click dropped to the ground in front of Gavin. Antoine took aim at Alice again.

Now enraged, Gavin tried to come to his feet, but his legs, chained for too many hours, gave way. Instead, he snatched up Click and threw. Click landed on Antoine’s head with a mechanical yowl. Antoine’s arm jerked. The pistol spoke, and thunder slammed the air as the yellow bolt tore through the top of one of the trees. Another window shattered.

“ROCAILLEUX,” the tree cursed. To a tree, anything rocky was bad.

Alice crashed through the bushes toward Antoine, who was still struggling with Click. Blood flowed from a dozen tiny cuts on the clockworker’s face and head. He finally managed to fling the cat aside and bring the pistol around on her.

“Alice!” Gavin’s heart wrenched with terror for her. Already he could envision the smoking hole in her chest.

Antoine’s finger tightened on the trigger. Without pausing in her stride, Alice swung the glittering cutlass and severed the power cable. It spat sparks and dropped to the ground like a dying electric snake. A magnificent move, and Gavin grinned. But instead of hesitating, Antoine swung the barrel of the pistol. It clipped Alice on the side of the head, and she stumbled.

“Pute!” Antoine snarled. “Do I care if I get a reward for her alive? No, I do not!”

Angered again, Gavin wrenched himself to his feet and rushed at Antoine, but the clockworker was ready, and stiff-armed Gavin in the chest. Antoine looked old, but he was actually young and strong and gifted with heightened reflexes by the disease that was also burning through his brain. Gavin possessed similar strength and reflexes, but he was still hobbled by his hours in shackles, and he staggered back.

Alice recovered herself, but instead of going for Antoine, she ran for one of the brass-limned trees. Antoine snatched up a set of huge hedge-trimming shears and flipped a switch. They chattered and chopped as he ran toward her, foam and spittle trailing from his mouth. Alice scrambled up the tree. Antoine swung the shears and gouged out a chunk of brass and bark just below her boot.

“ROCAILLEUX,” the tree said.

Knives and needles slashed Gavin’s sore muscles, but he ignored them and forced himself to move. He slammed into Antoine from behind, stopping the clockworker from swinging the shears again but not knocking him over. Instead, Antoine’s plague-enhanced reflexes allowed him to spin and jab at Gavin. The shears snapped at Gavin’s arm, and he barely yanked it out of the way. Air puffed past his fingers as the blades closed. He grabbed Antoine’s wrist and twisted, hoping to force him to drop the shears, but Antoine was stronger than he looked and Gavin’s stiff muscles continued to disobey him. Antoine slowly forced the shears back around until the blades were snapping at Gavin’s neck. A warm drop of saliva dribbled from Antoine’s mouth onto Gavin’s cheek.

“Will the boy pay?” he hissed. “He will!”

The tree Alice had climbed creaked and bent. “Gavin! Down!”

At Alice’s shout, Gavin relaxed and let himself fall. It never occurred to him not to. He dropped to the grass, leaving Antoine standing above him. One of the tree’s branches swung around at chest height. Gavin caught the surprise on Antoine’s face just before the tree swept him aside like a toy soldier knocked off a table.

“Hurry!” Alice called. “Climb up.”

Gavin struggled to his feet and jumped onto the lowered branch. Click followed, his claws digging into the bark and offering a clear advantage over Gavin, who had to cling as best he could while the branch hauled him up to the main trunk. Alice, surrounded by pedals, cranks, levers, and pulleys, was seated on a bench built into the wood. She spun one of the cranks, and the tree straightened again. Then she grabbed the front of Gavin’s shirt and pulled him down for a long kiss.

The world stopped for a moment. The pain in Gavin’s body receded, and Alice’s warm lips pressing against his own made him feel both safe and calm, even as they stole his very breath. He kissed her back, so thankful to see her that tears came to his eyes. They parted.

“That’s for being alive when I came to get you,” Alice said, then slapped him lightly on the cheek. “And that’s for getting captured and scaring me half to death in the first place.”

“I love you, too.” Gavin said. “Now, run! He’ll recover in a minute, and I’m not up for fighting him. I don’t suppose you brought Dr. Clef’s power gun.”

“Too heavy to carry down the rope, darling.” Alice held out an arm and whistled. The whirligig buzzed in and settled on her shoulder. Click took up a position on the bench beside her. “We’re safe for the moment anyway. These trees don’t move unless you tell them to. Do you want to drive? I never handled the original Tree back home.”

Below, Antoine had already regained his feet and was staggering toward the worktable.

“Antoine can control them from the ground,” Gavin said tersely. “Go! Go now!”

Alice didn’t hesitate or ask for further explanation, which was one of the many reasons Gavin loved her. She hauled ropes and yanked levers. The tree stomped forward on a bifurcated trunk that ended in balled roots. Antoine reached the worktable—and the control panel. Alice stomped another step forward, and another. She had nearly cleared the ring of mutated trees.

“Will I kill them?” Antoine screamed from the control panel. “Will I?”

“He’s losing his mind,” Gavin observed as Alice worked. “He’s not even answering his own questions.”

Antoine’s hands moved swiftly over the panel, flipping levers and twisting dials. A low-pitched hum throbbed through the earth and vibrated even the tree.

“FEUILLU,” said the tree.

“Is that French for leafy?” Gavin asked.

“Yes,” Alice said. “He must like the vibrations. I find them most uncomfortable.”

“It’s a very low C,” said Gavin.

“You and your perfect pitch. Good heavens, how I missed you, darling.”

Antoine yanked a large lever, and all the other trees snapped to attention. “Destroy them!”

“Uh-oh,” Gavin said. “Can you move faster?”

“The tree is trying to follow Antoine’s orders instead of mine,” Alice replied grimly. “But I seem to be getting the hang of it.”

The tree picked up speed even as the other trees—four of them—turned as one and stomped in Alice’s wake. Alice, for her part, was guiding their own tree straight toward the perimeter of the glassy greenhouse. Gavin clung to the branch with white fingers. The noise was incredible. Heavy trees thudded across the ground like an army of gods, the vibrations that controlled the others throbbed in Gavin’s bones, and Antoine’s shrieks chased them faster than a flock of ravens.

“It’s still fighting me,” Alice shouted. Her arms and legs worked the controls in a blur. “It wants to do what the others are doing.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” Gavin called over the noise. “I don’t see a door.”

“Cover your eyes!” was all Alice said.

“ROCAILLEUX,” screamed the tree.

They hit the greenhouse wall. Glass exploded in a thousand directions, and Gavin lurched forward. His feet left the branch, and he was flying through the air. The tree hadn’t smashed completely through, and its top third was caught on the remains of the greenhouse. Gavin tumbled forward, but the clockwork plague suddenly took over. The universe slowed. Green leaves and glittering glass surrounded him like strange snowflakes. Just below him were the tree’s branches, and he was aware of the drag coefficient of the bark, which places would slow him down and by how much. He saw every bump and nub, every side branch and twig, and his brain instantly mapped out a route that would take him to safety. Behind him floated Alice, and he calculated the arc of her flight pattern as well, then readjusted his own route accordingly.

The universe burst back into motion, and his body, finally free of its earlier stiffness, turned the dive into controlled leaps and jumps down the tree’s branches until he came to rest on solid ground outside the greenhouse exactly where he wanted. Then he whirled and caught Alice. Her helmet flew on without her and cracked against a boulder. Gavin nearly went over backward, but just managed to keep his feet with Alice in his arms. Thank God. He held her tight, feeling her heart pound against his chest. The universe could come to a complete stop now, and he wouldn’t mind in the slightest.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she gasped, pushing a lock of tousled honey-brown hair out of dark brown eyes. “That quite took my breath away.”

“Clockwork reflexes,” Gavin said. “I should be in a circus.”

The tree was now standing with its lower branches sticking out of the glittering greenhouse, while the upper part was still trapped inside. Behind it stampeded the other trees. Click trotted out of the wreckage, his metal ears back, and the whirligig whizzed overhead, unhurt.

“Now what?” Gavin asked, setting Alice down. “You do have a plan, right?”

She took his hand. “Yes: run!”

A rutted dirt road twisted through the woods ahead of them, and they sprinted down it. The late-summer breeze should have been uncomfortably warm, but it felt refreshing after the hot, still air of the greenhouse. Behind them, glass smashed and tinkled as the trees hit the side of the greenhouse, but they were tangling up with one another, and they were further hampered by the fact that all of them were making the exact same motions under Antoine’s control. Gavin, Alice, and the two little machines rounded a bend in the road, leaving the greenhouse and its howling inhabitant behind.

“Why didn’t you have Click cut an exit at ground level instead of coming in through the ceiling?” Gavin puffed.

“The glass is thicker at the base to support weight,” Alice pointed out. “It’s thin on the roof.”

“So where are Dr. Clef and the Lady? Shouldn’t they be—?”

A crackling crash brought them up short. From out of the trees beside the road about fifteen feet ahead of them burst a pair of mechanicals. They were nearly two stories tall, with squat, round builds, heavy legs, long arms, and gleaming brass skin. A glass bubble enclosed the top of each. Inside one rode a young man with dark, curly hair that peeked out from around his hat, and inside the other sat a woman in a long skirt, puffy white blouse, and fashionably small hat. The man pointed one of his mechanical’s arms at Gavin, and the hand ended in an impressively large gun barrel.

“Aw, no,” Gavin groaned. “Simon, Glenda—you aren’t serious.”

“Surrender, Gavin. You too, Alice,” said Simon d’Arco into a speaking tube. His voice, carried outside the bubble, sounded tinny and distant.

“We’ve got you,” the woman added in a similarly tinny voice. “And you know it.”

“I know nothing of the sort, Glenda,” Alice shot back.

“What if we tell you to piss off, Simon?” Gavin said. “Are you going to shoot me? Squash me? We were partners in the Ward for months.” And you were half in love with me, he added silently.

“You destroyed the Ward, Gavin,” Simon said. “It’s gone now. The Queen herself disbanded it. Our last mission is to arrest you for treason and bring you back for trial.”

“Now that you’ve released that cure,” Glenda added, “we’ll have no more clockworkers to hunt down. The few we have are dead or dying.”

“And millions of other people will live,” Alice replied hotly. “I don’t regret it for a moment.”

“You thought of nothing but yourselves,” Glenda snapped, showing some agitation. “Nothing! The Ward was everything to me, Alice. I gave you a chance with the Ward and with Gavin, and this is how you repay me?”

“We’re not going back to England, Simon,” Gavin said. “So are you ready to shoot me?”

“He doesn’t have to shoot you,” said a voice that made Gavin stiffen. “He only has to delay you. Just like Antoine did, and admirably.” From the trees stepped a second woman. Her black hair, only slightly streaked with silver, was pulled into a twist. She wore a blue uniform with hat, boots, and epaulets. The coat was cut to show her left arm, which was entirely mechanical. It also had six fingers. Her name was Lieutenant Susan Phipps.

“In the name of Her Royal Majesty and the Third Ward,” Phipps said, “I place you both under arrest for sedition, treason, and attempted murder.”

“No,” Gavin said, though some of the bravado had left him. Phipps by herself was more imposing than even two agents in mechanicals. He made himself stand upright, though he was sweating under his arms. “Sorry, Lieutenant—Susan—but we all know that Glenda and Simon aren’t going to hurt us. We saved you from that doomsday invention Alice’s aunt dropped on headquarters. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but it wasn’t very smart to bring those two. You should have brought someone who doesn’t know us.”

“They’re loyal,” Phipps said, unruffled, “and won’t disappoint me. Unlike some.”

Gavin couldn’t help flinching at that. When Gavin was only seventeen and stranded in London, Phipps had offered him a position as an agent of the Third Ward. She had seen him through his training, encouraged him, opened doors for him. She had lifted him out of the gutter and handed him the keys to the world, and he had betrayed her.

“I’m… sorry, ma’am,” Gavin said. “Look, I’m not happy about what I—”

“Oh, shut it, Gavin,” Alice interrupted. “We learned the Empire had been keeping the cure locked away to ensure the plague continues creating clockwork geniuses. You let thousands of people die excruciating deaths, Phipps, and have no right to debate morality.”

“Thousands more will die because you released the cure,” Phipps said. “Because of you, China will have clockworkers for much longer than we, easily long enough to take over the world, and that conflict will cost countless British lives. So come quietly, or come noisily. It makes no difference.”

“Noisily?” Gavin said. “What do you mean by—?”

Phipps reached into her pockets with both hands and came up with a pair of tuning forks. Gavin’s eye automatically measured their length and thickness with clockwork precision. When struck, they would produce the notes D and A-flat. For the second time that day, his blood chilled.

“Run!” Alice screamed, but it was too late. Phipps clanged the forks together. The two notes rang down the road. Dual vibrations tore ugly ripples through the air faster than Gavin could react, and the discordant interval, a tritone, slammed into his brain. The noise made its own string of numbers inside his head, and they spun around him, refusing to coalesce into anything that made sense. A tritone has, at its base, the square root of two, and it is the only musical interval that is expressed as an irrational number, a number that does not truly exist, and yet at that moment it did exist in the sound Gavin was hearing. The paradox that he could hear so clearly tore at his mind and made his head dizzy with pain. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the sound was too loud to shut out.

He was vaguely aware of Alice shouting something, and he heard clunky mechanical footsteps. Hard metal hands scooped him up. The tritone began to fade, then clanged again, and Gavin cried out in fresh pain as an explosion rocked his body.

Chapter Two

Gavin landed hard. The terrible tritone faded, and the mind-numbing pain and dizziness went with it. Dust clogged his mouth and nose. Coughing and spitting, he levered himself upright. A great hole, perhaps ten feet across, had appeared in the road. Gavin lay on one side with Alice and Click and the little whirligig. Phipps and the two Ward agents were on the other. Glenda’s mechanical was sitting down like a toddler who had lost its balance and landed on its backside. Phipps had kept her feet, but she had lost one of the tuning forks. That was one good thing, at least.

“That is called a warning shot,” bellowed a voice from above. “I believe my energy cannon can manage another. The boom may not be so large or exciting, but it will suffice.”

Over the road and just above the trees hovered a familiar dirigible the size of a generous cottage. A gondola shaped like an unmasted sailing ship hung from a cigar-shaped envelope that was clearly too small to provide enough lift for such a mass. A lacy blue endoskeleton Gavin had forged and bent himself glowed like captured sky beneath the envelope’s thin skin, and a long rope dangled from the stern, which sported the words The Lady of Liberty. Leaning over the gunwale was a portly man in a white coat and heavy goggles over a bulldog face. He was pointing a small cannon down at the road. Phipps, Glenda, and Simon didn’t move. A river of relief swept over Gavin.

“Dr. Clef!” he shouted. “You’re my favorite German.”

“Very glad to see you are safe, my boy.”

Alice looked calm and unruffled, but Gavin read a symphony of strain holding her upright. “I don’t suppose,” she called up, “that you could provide a ladder?”

Seconds later, one end of a rope ladder tumbled down. Alice clambered up first, and Gavin followed with Click. The whirligig flew.

“We can still follow you,” Phipps shouted up at them. “We found you now, and we’ll find you again!”

Ignoring her, Gavin pulled himself over the edge to join Alice. His shoes came down on solid planking, and he felt some of the tension drain away. The airship, the Lady, was his place, his home. Wood and hemp made their familiar creak as the envelope strained against her ropes, trying to pull the ship higher while her lacy skeleton gleamed a magnificent azure blue. The generator that ran on paraffin oil muttered and mumbled to itself on the deck, emitting steam and feeding a steady stream of power to the Lady’s skeleton and to her propellers. Dr. Clef, a clockworker once captured by the Third Ward, had developed the alloy that pushed against gravity when it was electrified, but Gavin had been the one to put it into the envelope of a dirigible.

At the helm stood a stocky, sharp-faced Oriental dressed in a pirate shirt that suited him perfectly. He was just over eighteen. His trousers were tucked into his boots, and like Alice, he kept a glass cutlass sheathed at his belt. He saluted Gavin with a rakish grin that made him even more handsome than before.

“No, no,” Dr. Clef was calling down. He continued to aim his power cannon at the ground. “Don’t move, please. My finger trigger, it itches.”

“That’s trigger finger,” Gavin said. “And you let Feng pilot the Lady?”

“It was that or give him the cannon,” Dr. Clef replied mildly. “I did consider pulling apart the clicky kitty’s brain and using it to create a wireless device that would allow me to control the ship from a distance, but the young woman wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Bloody right.” Alice picked up Click and let the whirligig land on her shoulder. “Feng, get us out of here!”

“Which way?” said Feng Lung with a trace of China in his words.

“Any way, as long as it’s east,” Alice said.

Feng swung the helm around. The propellers on the Lady’s nacelles hanging from the outer hulls whirled to life, and she picked up speed, still trailing the rope. Alice set Click down and pulled it in.

“You slid all the way down that to get into the greenhouse and rescue me?” Gavin said. “I must be awfully special.”

“Indeed you are, Mr. Ennock.” Alice coiled the rope on the deck, then turned and collapsed into Gavin’s surprised arms. Her body shook against his, and wet, sloppy tears dampened his shirt. “Don’t you ever do that to me again, you… you cad.”

His own throat thickened and he held her, clumsily at first, then tightly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” After a moment, he added, “What did I do?”

Alice gave a hiccupping laugh and straightened. “Oh, Gavin. Dear God. You scared me half to death, that’s what.”

“So true,” Feng said from the helm. “After you went missing from the hotel, she went mad. Berserk. She would not sleep; she would not eat. When we tracked you to the greenhouse, she almost rammed it with the ship. I insisted to be pilot then.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said again. “Should I write letters in the sky to warn you when I’m going to be captured?”

“Certainly.” Alice pulled off her leather gloves, revealing a metal spider wrapping her left hand from forearm to fingers. Its legs ended in claws that tipped Alice’s own nails, and tubules running up and down the spider’s legs flowed scarlet with her blood. The dark iron gleamed, and the spider’s eyes glowed red, indicating that she had just touched someone infected with the clockwork plague—Gavin, in this case. It was another of the daily reminders that he was dying, and it was inextricably linked to the woman he loved. The thought made him both sad and angry, and he wanted to wrench the spider off her, even though he knew it wouldn’t work. The spider’s joints squeaked slightly as Alice fumbled at her sleeve for a handkerchief, and then she remembered she wasn’t wearing a woman’s blouse. She reached into her pocket for one instead and dabbed at her eyes. “I’ll kill the next one who captures you. I swear it.”

“There’s going to be a next one?”

Alice cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, then knelt in front of him to pull up his pant cuffs. “If Phipps has her way, there will be.”

“Uh… what are you doing?”

“I need to check your ankles. Those horrible chains Antoine kept you in couldn’t have been good for them. This will be easier if you sit down.”

He sank into a deck chair and let her pull off his shoes, wincing as the leather came away from swollen flesh. Alice made a low sound.

“I wish you’d been wearing your boots instead of just shoes,” she muttered. “They might have protected you better. Does this hurt?” She gently massaged his ankles.

“Yes,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “But don’t stop.”

She looked up at him, and he saw tenderness in her eyes. It melted the pain and relaxed every muscle in his body. He slumped in the chair, unable to move as her strong, careful fingers went over his feet and worked at the muscles.

“Oh my God, I love you,” he groaned. “Always and always.”

“And I love you always,” she replied. “Even when you blaspheme.”

“You blasphemed just a second—”

“Now you need to explain what happened, starting from the moment Antoine took you.”

“Not yet, Madam.” A mechanical man emerged from belowdecks. His features were only painted on, as was his black-and-white outfit, yet he carried himself as if he were starched and fully clothed. The only hint of expression lay in the flickering firefly lights that made up his eyes. He set a laden tea tray on a deck table beside the spot where Alice knelt. “You haven’t eaten since Sir was captured. And then you must have a massage yourself to ease the tension.”

“Wonderful, Kemp.” Dr. Clef rubbed his hands together. “Do you have any of those lacy sugar cookies? I have had quite a craving, and the patterns twist through dimensional rifts on golden wings.”

“You have had your tea, Doctor,” Kemp said. “I will make more if I have time, but I have more important concerns at the moment.”

The cake and sandwiches on the tray sent up smells that called to Gavin’s stomach, though he wasn’t yet willing to move away from Alice’s ministrations. “What time is it?” he asked, trying to get a glimpse of the sun around the envelope.

“Two fifteen,” Kemp replied. “Tuesday.”

Gavin bolted upright, and Alice released his foot. “Tuesday? How long was I—?”

“You’ve been missing for three days, darling.” Alice took a teacup, which rattled in her metallic hand. “It’s been hell.”

“Three days?” Gavin sank back onto the chair and bit into a ham sandwich without really paying attention to it. “I thought it was only a night.”

“Antoine has powerful sleep drugs,” Feng said.

Gavin stared past Alice at calm, blue infinity. He should feel safe, at home in the ship he had created with his own hands. She ignored gravity, soared silent currents, explored the limits of daylight. Set him free. But all he felt was violated, stripped of his clothes and then his skin. He wondered how long he had hung unconscious in Antoine’s greenhouse, a piece of meat in the hands of a twisted homunculus. His gorge rose, and then he was at the gunwale, the few bites of sandwich falling to the forest far below. The pieces seemed to fall slowly, pushing aside the billions of tiny bits that made up the air. The bits rubbed against the falling pieces and raised their temperature as they fell closer to hell.

“We could harvest the energy of the pieces,” he said. “The billions of bits would make a hellfire and cook twisted hunks of homunculus.”

“Sir?” Kemp handed him a cup of tea. Gavin swished and spat over the side. The tea spread in both droplets and a stream, both wave and particle. He watched it, an eternity caught in a split second. Then the tea vanished.

“Wave to particles,” he muttered. “Wave them away.”

Alice had had the good sense to keep her seat, though her face tightened as Gavin sat back down in his own chair. “You’re talking like a clockworker,” she said, her voice heavy with worry. “It’s already starting, isn’t it?”

“It’s all mixed up inside me, Alice.” He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to cheer up, but the violation and the fear dragged him down. “I’m sorry. Your aunt knocked me out, locked me in that tower of hers, and infected me with this plague. She treated me like a piece of meat. So did the pirates who captured the Juniper and made me fiddle for them. Now I learn Antoine held me for longer than I knew. He stole time from me, and I don’t have time to steal.”

She took his hand across the tea tray. “We’ll get to China. If anyone can cure clockworkers, they can.”

“The Dragon Men are very powerful,” Feng agreed from the helm. “They can do anything.”

“Hmm.” Dr. Clef opened a chest and unrolled an enormous chart on a table near the helm. “Peking is approximately seven thousand miles away, if we fly over Istanbul and the Gobi Desert. We could detour south into India, around the Himalayas, but that would add another four thousand miles or so. This ship’s top speed is fifty miles per hour. If we travel for twelve hours each day, the journey will take us approximately twelve days.”

“That’s all?” Alice said. “It doesn’t seem like—”

“This is also assuming,” Dr. Clef continued, “that the ship always travels at top speed—it cannot—and that we have the wind behind us—we do not—and that the engines or helium extractors never break down—they will—and that the sky never sends us any bad weather—it shall—or that any number of other delays do not delay us. I believe it will take closer to two months, perhaps three.”

“Oh.” Alice nibbled her sandwich as a cloud drifted past. “Well, that will still be plenty of time. He was infected last May. It’s only late August.”

“It is not much time,” said Dr. Clef. “He is already beginning to babble. You see things, don’t you, boy? Beautiful things. Like the universe is handing you its keys, one by one.”

Gavin thought about his vomit and the falling tea water. “Yes.”

“And you love and hate the tritones,” Dr. Clef continued. “Square root of two, lovely and deadly as infinity.”

Just the memory of that horrible, enticing number and the brain-bending sound that went with it made him shudder. He nodded.

“I shouldn’t be so far along,” Gavin said quietly.

Dr. Clef shrugged. “There is a range. Some clockworkers last only a few months, others last for two or three years. Edwina’s version of the plague was experimental, so who knows what it was like? You shouldn’t have become a clockworker, but you did. You should have shown no symptoms for several weeks, but you have. Losing yourself and talking about what you see is a sign of the final phase, where I am. You have about three months left. Four months if you are lucky. You will be a raving lunatic by the time we reach Peking, and then Alice will still have to find a Chinese clockworker who can cure you, and that assumes such a clockworker even exists. So you will die, my boy. But don’t worry.” He clapped Gavin on the shoulder. “They say once we clockworkers go completely mad, we do not even know what is happening, and we enjoy it. We can go mad together, yes?”

“Why did you bring him with you?” Feng asked.

“He jumped on board the ship while we were running away from the Third Ward headquarters,” Alice said dully. “Perhaps I should have kicked him off.”

“No.” Gavin straightened. “I’m not going to give in to this. We’ll find a way to get to Peking, and we’ll find a Chinese clockworker—”

“Dragon Man,” Feng interrupted. “We call them Dragon Men.”

“Dragon Man,” Gavin continued, “who has a cure. If we can’t find time, we’ll make time.”

An odd look came over Dr. Clef’s bulldog face. “Make time.”

“But we do have a more powerful problem.” Feng moved the Lady’s helm to adjust for a current. “This ship is very easy to see. Many airships fly, but none of them glow blue.”

“She’s very beautiful,” Gavin said, feeling defensive. The motor gave a pleased-sounding hiccup and went back to its normal quiet murmur.

“True. But beauty has its price,” Feng said. “Hers is that she attracts attention. Also, if Third Ward agents are spreading word and money to look for us, we have more trouble. How do they do it so quickly?”

“Several clockworkers in England and in Europe invented wireless communication devices,” Gavin said. “You can send messages at the speed of light to any other wireless device that listens to the same frequency. They’re better than a telegraph because you don’t need to raise poles or string wires.”

“We can’t outrun such a message,” Feng pointed out. “As it is, we lost three days when you were captured. I imagine that was what your Lieutenant Phipps wanted—to catch us up. It is fortunate she seems to have no airship.”

“Yeah. We’ll have to think of some way to hide better. I just wish we had more time.”

“You said that.” Alice set her cup down with a clink of metal on china and came around behind his chair to put her arms around his neck. The iron gauntlet was chilly. “And you’re right, darling. We’ll find a way. We’ll find time.”

Her touch made him feel better, despite the spider. Even though he was barely nineteen and she was twenty-three, he felt no difference in their ages. Alice had been initially put off by it. The gap had been one of the reasons she had resisted admitting she loved him.

Gavin touched Alice’s hand, letting himself drink in her steady presence. And she was so beautiful. Her deep brown eyes set off her honey-brown hair, and her triangle face and little nose and rounded curves all came together like the parts of an intricate fugue, compelling and hypnotic. He still found it hard to believe she was with him—and that it had taken her so long to break society’s rules and leave her horrible fiancé. She leaned down. Her scent wafted over him, and he kissed her softly in the free and open sky. The kiss intensified, and a thrill went through him. He could do this. He could conquer the whole damned world, as long as Alice Michaels stood beside him.

“Very sweet,” Feng said, breaking the moment. “But I have no idea where I am going.”

They broke away and Alice coughed, a bit flushed. “I’d help, but I never learned how to read a navigation chart.”

“Right.” Gavin got up and took the charts away from Dr. Clef, who was now staring into the distance.

“My Impossible Cube had time,” he muttered. “All of it. At once. But you destroyed it, my boy. My lovely, lovely Impossible Cube.”

“Not this again.” Alice sighed. “Click!”

Click jumped down from his vantage point on the gunwale and strolled over to rub against Dr. Clef’s shins. A mechanical purr drifted across the deck. Dr. Clef glanced down.

“Ah, you send me the clicky kitty as a distraction. It will not work. I am so very forlorn.” Still, he picked the cat up and stroked the metal ears. “It won’t work at all, will it, clicky kitty? It will not. It will not.”

“Germans are so good at despondent,” Gavin observed. He pored over the charts. “If we keep our current course, we’ll reach Luxembourg by tomorrow. I know the place—it gets a lot of airship traffic, and the Juniper stopped there several times.”

“Do you think the other airships will give us camouflage?” Alice asked.

“Honestly? No.” Gavin gestured at the softly glowing envelope. “She stands out, even among airships, and the envelope isn’t big enough to lift her without turning on the generator.”

“Then why did you build your ship this way?” Feng asked.

“You’re such a clicky kitty,” Dr. Clef cooed. “You are.”

Gavin’s stomach turned over. “Because I could. You don’t think about consequences when you’re in a… a clockwork fugue. You just build. I didn’t even know I was a clockworker when I built the Lady. I thought I just had insomnia.”

“Whatever the reason, we have a conspicuous ship,” Alice said, “and the Third Ward is spreading word of a generous reward for our capture.”

“Is the clicky kitty hungry? Would he like a saucer of arsenic?”

Gavin sighed and leaned over the gunwale, the fresh breeze on his face, solid wood beneath his bare feet. Forests and fields stretched to the horizon, emerald meeting azure, broken only by a railroad that ribboned through the green.

Alice joined him. “What are you thinking?”

“That you’re right. The ship is too conspicuous,” he said. “We’re too conspicuous. You have that gauntlet that won’t come off. Feng is Chinese. Dr. Clef is… Dr. Clef. And we have all these automatons. I mean, you can order Kemp to stay hidden—”

“We have to for at least a while,” Alice interrupted. “Human-seeming automatons are illegal on most of the Continent.”

“Only in the western part,” Gavin said, “where the Catholic Church is powerful. Once you get past the four French Kingdoms and the ten Prussian Kingdoms into Poland and the Ukrainian Empire, no one cares.”

“Oh.” Alice looked miffed that she hadn’t known this. “Kemp will be glad to hear that.”

“But I was saying that Click has a way of showing up wherever he wants,” Gavin continued. “We’re a very distinctive group, and you know Phipps has described us carefully.”

“Come, clicky kitty,” Dr. Clef said. “We will go below and you will watch me while I work. Would you like that? You would.”

“If I took such a tone with Click,” Feng said to no one in particular, “he would disembowel me. Why does he allow Dr. Clef the privilege?”

A train passed beneath them, puffing smoke and spurting steam. The whistle—a G, Gavin noted automatically—sounded high and thin up in the air. The locomotive was painted bright red, and the cars sported bright colors as well. It looked like a child’s toy. Something about it tugged at him, but he couldn’t say what.

“We’ll have to figure something out soon,” Gavin finished. “Luxembourg is the only place nearby where we can stock up on paraffin oil for the generator, and we have to stop there.”

“And the food stores are nearly nonexistent,” Kemp added. “Madam and everyone else were searching for Sir, and I was not allowed to shop.”

“That’s another worry,” Alice said. “Money. We don’t have much left. The Ward won’t be paying our salaries anytime soon, and I rather doubt Norbert would be willing to wire me any money now that I’ve left him.”

Gavin stared across the free sky as tension tightened his muscles again. Even here, on his own ship, problems weighed him down. He wanted—needed—to leap over the side and coast away with nothing but bright and flowing air beneath him. The clouds twisted in the air currents, droplets hovering like trillions of tiny spirits buoyed by—

Alice touched his arm. “You’ve been staring for a long time. Would you play for me?”

“A long time?” He blinked at her. “How long?”

“Over an hour.” She handed him his bow and fiddle. “Maybe this will focus you.”

Gavin looked around, bewildered. The sun had moved a considerable distance. Dr. Clef, Click, and Alice’s whirligig were nowhere to be seen. Only Feng remained, still at the helm. Gavin looked down at his fiddle. It had been his constant companion ever since he could remember. His inborn perfect pitch let him pick up songs almost instantly, which meant he was able to play street corners in Boston at an early age and bring the pennies home to his mother and siblings. He had secretly fantasized that one day he would play in a music hall or even in an orchestra. But later, on his twelfth birthday, Gramps had brought him down to the Boston shipyards and introduced him to Captain Felix Naismith of the Juniper. From that day on, cabin boy Gavin Ennock had barely touched the ground while he played for airmen and ran their errands. Then came the attack. In seconds, both Naismith and Gavin’s best friend were dead and Gavin was forced to perform for pirates. They had stranded him in London. Unable to find work on another airship, he’d gone back to playing the streets for pennies until Alice’s aunt had snatched him away and locked him in her tower. For three weeks, he’d had nothing to do but play the violin until Alice had appeared and rescued him. And then he had rescued her, and then she him, and so it went.

He drew his bow over the strings and was about to begin when Alice abruptly held up a hand. For a dreadful moment, he thought he’d made a mistake and she was stopping him. It was one of his secret fears—that he’d made a mistake while playing where someone could hear. His playing, like his pitch, needed to be perfect. It often felt as if someone were watching over him, waiting to pounce if he played wrong, though he couldn’t say why.

But Alice said only, “A moment. I want to try something first.”

From her pocket, she took a small bird made of gleaming silver. Sapphires made up its eyes and glowed softly at the tips of its claws.

“My nightingale,” Feng said. “Yours now, Gavin. I am glad Antoine did not get it.”

“I found it in the hotel.” Alice set the bird at Gavin’s feet and pressed its left eye. “Now, play.”

Gavin nodded and swung into a song familiar to all airmen. He played a verse, relieved when he got through it with no mistakes, then sang.

For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam, ten thousand miles I traveled

Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes to save her shoes from gravel.

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys, bedlam boys are bonny

For they all go bare and they live by the air, and they want no drink nor money.

“Tom of Bedlam” was the unofficial song of airmen everywhere. The idea that men who lived by the air went naked and didn’t want for drink or money held immense appeal, and the song’s infinite verses were made for pounding out on wooden decks. Gavin started to sing the second verse when Alice jumped in herself:

No gypsy, slut, or clockwork shall win my mad Tom from me

I’ll weep all night, with stars I’ll fight, and the fray shall well become me.

Gavin laughed and joined in for the chorus.

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys, bedlam boys are bonny

For they all go bare and they live by the air, and they want no drink nor money.

The orange sun sank to the horizon and shadows snaked among the trees below. The sputter and hum of the generator continued beneath Gavin’s music as he played and sang his way through “Bedlam” with Alice clapping her hands to the beat beside him. He caught Alice’s eye, letting her know the song was for her. Her face flushed, and he flung her a wide smile. The music cast itself out into the darkening void, sweet as wine, carrying Gavin’s spirit with it.

“That was wonderful,” Alice said softly. She picked up the nightingale and pressed its left eye again. Then she pressed the right eye. Instantly, the little bird opened its beak and the sound of Gavin’s fiddle trilled forth. It was a smaller sound, with a tinny undertone, but otherwise a perfect replica, a recording. Then Gavin’s voice joined the music, and “Tom of Bedlam” again floated across the deck. The sound struck Gavin. He had never heard his own voice before. It sounded different than it did in his own head, but also vaguely familiar. It made him uncomfortable. He tapped the nightingale to stop the music.

“I like the real thing better,” he said.

“I do, too.” Alice kissed him on the cheek, and he smiled again. “Where did you learn to play? You’ve never said.”

“Gramps—my grandfather—started me on the fiddle when I was five or six,” Gavin said. The strangeness of the nightingale’s reproduction stayed with him. “I mostly taught myself. It’s easier when you have perfect pitch like I do, and when you never forget a song after you’ve heard it, like I don’t.”

“So the fiddle was your grandfather’s?”

Gavin was all set to say yes, when something stopped him. For a moment, a tiny moment, he remembered something else. A man was handing him the fiddle, but it wasn’t Gramps. A much younger man, tall, broad-shouldered, with white-blond hair. The memory hovered in front of him like a reflection in a soap bubble, shiny and distorted.

“You can play just like Daddy. Would you like that?”

Gavin realized Alice was waiting for an answer. “I’m… I’m not sure,” he said. “Gramps used to have it, but…”

“Was Gramps your father’s mother or your mother’s father?”

“Hold the fiddle like this and the bow like this. They’re big now, but you’ll grow. Do it right.”

“My father’s.” Gavin’s voice grew distant. He felt strange, mixed up. “He lived with us, even though Dad… didn’t.”

“Didn’t? What happened to him?”

“This one is D, this one is G, this is A, and this is E.”

Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know. He left when I was very small. Ma refused to talk about him, and she became angry if anyone asked. After a while, I stopped wondering.”

“Good! Keep that up, and you’ll play ‘I See the Moon’ for your ma just like me.”

He raised the bow again. The horsehair was new, but the wood was old, burnished from hours of skin and sweat. He waved it, and the bubble burst, taking the memory with it.

“I’m sorry, darling.” Alice put an arm around his waist. “I didn’t mean to awaken painful memories.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “It was a long time ago, and I don’t really remember. Though,” he added wistfully, “I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a dad. Gramps was there for me, of course, and Captain Naismith was kind of like a father, but… you know.”

“I know,” Alice said. “I find myself wondering what it would be like to have a mother. Mine died when I was so young.”

“Well, between us we had a full set of parents,” Gavin said with a small laugh to break the heavy mood, and Alice smiled. He buried his face in her hair and smelled her soft scent. “All I really need is you.”

Feng spoke up. “The romantic moment unfortunately will not keep me awake all night. We have to anchor ourselves.”

“I’ll take over.” Gavin took back the nightingale, stowed the fiddle in its case, and accepted the helm from Feng. “I don’t sleep much these days.”

Feng disappeared belowdecks. Alice stood beside Gavin for a moment, her presence warm and solid. Gavin steered with one hand so he could put an arm around her. “We’re alone for the first time in ages,” she said.

“Unless you count the Lady,” Gavin replied with a smile.

She rested her head on his shoulder. “I want more time with you, Gavin. I feel like we never have enough.”

“No one ever has enough time.” Gavin checked his heading on the compass set into the helm, visible thanks to the soft blue glow of the envelope, and corrected his course. “Especially not clockworkers.”

Eventually, Alice kissed him good night and went below herself, leaving Gavin alone on the deck. He felt her absence, even though she was only a few yards away.

In the morning, everything changed.

Interlude

Lieutenant Susan Phipps threw her hat onto the rickety table. She had intended to drop into the ladder-back chair next to it, but found she couldn’t, and paced the tiny room instead, her hands clasped behind her. Her brass left hand felt cool and heavy in her fleshy right one, though the sensation was so familiar to her now she barely noticed it.

Glenda Teasdale, her blouse and skirt looking worse for the wear, stood behind the other ladder-back chair while Simon d’Arco, equally disheveled, hovered near the bed. A tiny lamp shed grudging light over the table as the sun slid away. The quarters, part of what passed for a hotel in this little town, were dank and cramped compared to her spacious rooms at Third Ward headquarters back in London, but Phipps refused to voice a single complaint, even to herself. What sort of commander sent her troops into conditions that she herself refused to endure?

“We were close,” Glenda said in that flat voice that was still new to Phipps. “So close. If that bloody Dr. Clef hadn’t shown up—”

“It’s fine,” Phipps interrupted, still pacing. “They’re traveling by airship. Very hard to hide an airship. We will catch them; we will bring them back to London; we will see them put on trial.”

“It’s just… We’re very tired, ma’am,” Simon said.

She suddenly realized what she was doing. They had to remain standing while their commanding officer was on her feet. “Sit, sit,” she ordered. “I think better on my feet.”

Simon dropped onto the bed while Glenda perched on the chair. The woman looked odd in skirts. Ever since she joined the Ward, she had put aside feminine clothing in favor of more practical male attire, like what Phipps wore. However, when female agents traveled abroad, especially in places where the Third Ward had less influence and no actual authority, they typically wore skirts to avoid attracting attention. Phipps continued to wear her uniform, partly because it conveyed authority whether she had it or not, and partly—she admitted only to herself—because it provided her with a wall that made her feel safe.

“They’re heading for Luxembourg, no doubt, judging from the general direction they took and the fact that it’s a major trade city,” Phipps said, thinking out loud. “Alice will want to spread her cure there. And that’s a fine thing for us. The Crown has strong ties with Luxembourg, and I can force a fair amount of cooperation with the local gendarmerie. They’ll help us find Ennock and Michaels in no time. The mechanicals will let us catch them up fairly quickly, so we won’t lose much time.”

“Maybe we should check the hotels first, Lieutenant,” Glenda said. “They’ll have to stay somewhere, and if we find them without starting a fuss with the police first, so much the better.”

“I like that,” Phipps said with a small nod. “We’ll start there, then use the police.”

“Good plan.” Simon paused, then added, “How long are we going to chase them?”

Phipps turned. The monocle that framed her left eye amplified low light and let her see better—a clockworker invention she had confiscated nearly a year before the incident that had claimed her left arm—but she didn’t need it to read the tension in Simon’s body.

“We’ll pursue them until we catch them, Simon,” she said evenly. “There’s no question.”

“Only I was wondering,” Simon replied in a low voice, “whether it’ll be worth the cost.”

“Worth the cost?” Phipps repeated. “Simon, they are dangerous criminals. In addition to releasing a weapon from the Doomsday Vault, they let Dr. Clef out of the Ward. Have you forgotten him?”

Simon didn’t answer. Dr. Clef worried Phipps. He was a classic clockworker—completely absorbed by his work and utterly oblivious to the impact any of it might have on the world around him. His Impossible Cube was one of the most powerful inventions she had ever seen, and thank God it had been destroyed. Unfortunately, he was running about loose in the world with Gavin Ennock, a new-made clockworker. The thought of the two of them creating world-class inventions together made her sweat ice water and lent new urgency to her need to capture the little group before China got hold of them. Every hour she regretted not killing Alice Michaels beneath Third Ward headquarters. It was the biggest mistake of her career, and now the world was paying for it.

“Dr. Clef will probably be dead in a few weeks,” Simon said at last. “As for the doomsday weapon Alice and Gavin released… Well, we can’t put the cure back into the bottle, and England’s clockworkers will be gone within the year. If we let them go to China, they might be able to ensure the same thing happens to the Dragon—”

“You shut it, Simon d’Arco!” Glenda was on her feet again. Two spots of color rose in her cheeks. “I’m going to capture Alice Michaels—Lady Michaels—and drag her back to London by the hair if I have to. Every damned mile over broken glass, if I can arrange it.”

“Why, Glenda?” Simon asked. “What for?”

“What do I have, Simon?” Glenda snarled. “The Third Ward is dead, by the Queen’s order. Once the final clockworker dies, we’ll have no reason to exist anyway. Maybe a few of us will hang about to guard the Doomsday Vault, but nothing more. And where will I go? I’m a woman, Simon. Shall I become a seamstress? A schoolteacher? A parlor maid? A wife? For nearly ten years I’ve been hunting clockworkers and keeping England safe and I brought Alice Michaels into the Ward because she was small and timid and I felt solidarity for my fellow woman. Now that bloody bitch destroyed the Ward and I have nothing. I’ll see her hang for treason, and I’ll piss on her grave.”

“Oh,” was all Simon said.

“You may sit down again, Glenda,” Phipps said quietly, and Glenda reluctantly obeyed. “And I don’t answer to you, Simon,” she added.

“Yes, ma’am.” He shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “But I… I just…”

Phipps leveled a hard gaze at him. “Simon, I want the full truth from you, as a gentleman and an officer of the Third Ward.”

He stiffened. “Ma’am.”

“I brought you and Glenda on this assignment because you are my absolute best agents. I am not saying this as flattery or to puff you up. It’s simple truth. However, I am also fully aware of your… romantic proclivities and of your feelings toward your former partner. I don’t much care about the former, since you are an officer of the Ward, and as such, you have my complete loyalty and support. As for the latter, I assumed that your loyalty toward the Ward would be the overriding concern, but now I must ask, Agent d’Arco: Is your loyalty pure? Will your feelings for Gavin Ennock get in the way of our mission? Answer honestly. You will not be reprimanded, but I do need to know if I must send for someone else, someone who can be a fully capable man.”

Simon got to his feet. His face was stony, but Phipps’s monocle told her that the heat in his body had shifted into a pattern she associated with anger, exactly the emotion her final remark had been calculated to engender. He stood at attention, unconsciously making himself stiff and hard as a fully capable man should be.

“Lieutenant,” he barked, “I am willing and able to carry out any orders you give me, as my oath to the Third Ward dictates.”

“Excellent, Agent d’Arco,” Phipps replied. “Your hard work will not go unnoticed. Dismissed.”

Simon saluted. The door snapped shut behind him, and his footsteps faded down the hotel hallway as he went to his own room. Glenda coughed.

“Fully capable man,” she said. “You know how to hit below the belt, Lieutenant.”

“Hm,” Phipps said, and stared out the window, though now it was dark and there was nothing to see.

“Just between us,” Glenda said, “and knowing that I’m perfectly happy to come along because I want to see Alice pay, why are you doing this? You did let them go, down in the Doomsday Vault.”

Phipps chose her words carefully. “Simon persuaded me not to kill Alice, but only because she had stopped Edwina Michaels’s device from exploding and killing us all. Simon said I owed her, and he was right. That debt is paid, and now it’s time for Alice and Gavin to pay their other debt to us. To the Empire.”

“That doesn’t quite answer my question,” Glenda said. “Why are you here? You never go into the field.”

“I used to,” Phipps said. “It’s where I started. My father was a military man, and he was away quite a lot. But he always sent home money to make sure my mother and I had food and clothes. And his brother, my uncle, visited often to ensure there was a man about.”

For a moment, the reflection in the window showed a Susan Phipps much younger, without the streaks of silver in her hair, and with the smooth features of a girl not yet twenty, but who still held the ramrod posture expected by her father, her dear father, who never showed emotion but who could grind her to the ground with a tiny frown or fling her to joyful skies with a simple nod. The reflection showed her younger self hurrying home on one of the rare days when Father was in town. He met her at the door of their row house with two carpetbags in his hand.

“The world is upside down,” he said simply. “I do not wish to live here any longer, so we are moving.”

Susan knew better than to ask why, but she felt she deserved more information, so she said, “I don’t understand, Father.”

“I found the love letters. As far as I am concerned, your disloyal mother is dead, and so is my brother.”

Susan remembered the overwhelming despair, the fear, and most of all, the anger. Not at Father, of course, but at Mother, who had committed such a betrayal of loyalty. The bedrock of Susan’s life, her parents’ marriage, had crumbled into sand, and it was Mother’s fault. It had to be. Otherwise Father would be in the wrong, and that was unthinkable.

“Loyalty, Susan,” Father had said as they climbed into a cab. “Loyalty.”

For a while, Susan wondered if Father’s reference to Mother’s death was metaphorical or literal. She never heard from Mother again, but neither did the police come for Father. No one was even reported missing, and for the first time Susan wondered what sort of work Father did for the military. Eventually Susan dismissed the matter as unimportant. A few years later, Father introduced her to Lieutenant Lawrence Garrison, who asked if she wanted to join the Third Ward. When she replied in the affirmative, Father gave her a small nod.

Phipps’s hands clutched the windowsill. Her right fingers turned white, and her left ones left dents in the wood. “I made a terrible mistake when I let them go, Glenda,” she said, “so it is my duty to set it right. Gavin and Alice unloosed several dangers into the world, and we must bring them into custody before they do further harm.”

Glenda gave her a long look, then rose. “I understand. If I may, Lieutenant?”

Phipps nodded a dismissal and continued to stare out the window. I’ll find them, Father. I’ll set the world aright for you. For us.

Chapter Three

Alice glared down at the unyielding numbers. They glared stubbornly back, hard little loops and corners that wouldn’t move no matter how hard she tried. Twice she had rubbed them off the page and run through them again, but they always came out exactly the same. She resisted the urge to throw the book overboard. Instead she snapped it shut and slipped it into her trouser pocket so she could lean on the gunwale to think while cool morning air washed over her like water.

In the distance ahead, airships of all sizes and designs floated, cruised, and hovered above the sprawling city of Luxembourg like tame clouds. London controlled airship traffic, but Luxembourg apparently didn’t. Alice glanced over her shoulder at Gavin, lean and strong at the helm of their ship. The rising sun caught his pale blond hair and turned it nearly white, making a stark contrast with the torn black clothes he still wore from last night. His sharp features and long jaw made her hunger for a kiss. He caught her eye and grinned that grin that always sent a delicious shiver down her back. And she felt all that when he was silent. When he sang, his voice melted her soul. She’d follow him into a volcano if he only sang to her first, and a part of her was glad he didn’t seem to know that yet.

And there it was. In the end, she had betrayed her country for him. She had broken into the Doomsday Vault and released the clockwork cure, an act which would eventually destroy the British Empire as she knew it. And all for the simple reason that Alice, Lady Michaels, had fallen in love with Gavin Ennock. What would the history books say about that? The thought that schoolchildren might one day read about her both fascinated and frightened her. What gave her the right to change the course of mankind for the love of a man?

The book of figures sat heavy in her pocket. Alice leaned out into the fresh breeze, trying to feel the freedom she knew carried Gavin forward. All her life she had followed the rules of traditional society, done as her traditional father had told her. And then Gavin had innocently blasted her life to pieces. Now she was spending her days with not one, but three strange men, and no other woman around to chaperone. Frightening. Exhilarating. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff with one foot over.

Below the ship lay a rumpled checkerboard of fields and pastures bordered by hedgerows and stone walls that surrounded the city proper. Arteries of rail and cobblestone ran in and out of the place. Canals threaded through it, and church spires pointed at Alice like accusing fingers. Castles with rounded walls took up the hills, and square houses occupied the slopes. It looked both foreign and familiar at the same time.

Several miles from the city, the Lady of Liberty’s blue glow dimmed, and the ship began to sink. Startled, Alice turned to Gavin, who was moving from the generator back to the helm. “Is something wrong with her?”

“We can’t dock at the shipyard,” he said. “Not if Phipps has gotten word out about us and what the Lady looks like. But I think I know a place.”

They came down in a weed-filled pasture surrounded by a scraggly hedge on three sides and a stand of trees on the fourth. Near the stand of trees were a small stone farmhouse and a large stable, both half in ruin. Kemp, Dr. Clef, and Feng emerged from below to see what was going on. Sunlight gleamed on Dr. Clef’s brass goggles, and he pushed them up on his forehead.

“Cut power to twenty percent, Alice,” Gavin ordered.

Alice leaned over the generator and restricted the flow of air and paraffin oil. The machine responded to her precise touch, and she thought about opening it up to poke around inside. Alice wasn’t a clockworker, but she was startlingly talented with the machines clockworkers created. Usually, only a clockworker could create and maintain the fantastic steam-driven inventions that let Britain and China dominate the world. In her short time with the Third Ward, Alice had encountered a number of mind-bending inventions that frightened her out of her wits. Weightless metal and walking trees were just the beginning.

Normal people were able to reproduce a few clockwork innovations—Babbage engines that allowed machines to retain information and appear to think. Tempered glass that let airmen create weapons that wouldn’t spark amid dangerous hydrogen. Designs for dirigibles. Electric light. But the vast majority of clockworker inventions were so complicated, so complex, that only clockworkers could create them, and their work seemed limited only by the materials they could afford. Normal humans couldn’t assemble the materials, even with careful diagrams or instructions. Even taking most inventions apart without breaking them was nearly impossible.

Alice, however, seemed to be unique in the clockwork world. She alone could understand, assemble, and repair clockwork inventions. She had, for example, assembled Click and Kemp with instructions from Aunt Edwina, along with over a dozen spiders and whirligigs, and could strip a clockwork machine to its component cogs in minutes, though this odd ability didn’t extend to the spider gauntlet currently gripping her left hand.

Alice had spent considerable time trying to pry it off, and with every tool at her disposal. It wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t even find a way to open it. It stoically wrapped her forearm and fingers, tipping her fingers with its claws and filling its tubules with her blood. It didn’t restrict her movements, and it left the underside of her hand uncovered, so she didn’t lose sensation, but she still found it… unsettling. It was always there, burbling to itself and dragging at her arm. The demon spider was a part of her now, and she a part of it. So far the demon did everything she required of it, except come off, but she wondered what would happen on the day her desires ran counter to its.

Under her ministrations, the generator’s power dropped and the envelope’s glow dimmed. The Lady descended toward the abandoned farm buildings and touched the ground in front of them with a delicate bump.

“Perfect landing,” Feng said. “You are quite skilled.”

Gavin flashed the heart-stopping grin, then cast lines over the sides. “Let’s get to work. That barn—stable—is big enough to hide the ship in.”

Once the passengers, including Kemp, dropped to the ground, the ship rose a few feet. Everyone took a line and towed the ship toward the two-story stable, which was really little more than an empty shell. The ship barely squeezed through the gaping space left by the missing main doors, and the group lashed her in place at Gavin’s direction, then edged around her to get outside into the late-summer sunlight. Click looked down at them smugly from the stern, clearly pleased that he didn’t have to do any of the work.

“How did you know about this place?” Alice asked.

Gavin shuffled a little, momentarily looking like the teenager he technically was. “Sometimes the Juniper carried cargo that Captain Naismith didn’t want the port authority in Luxembourg to see. We used to drop it off here and pick it up later.”

“Smuggling?” Alice raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Ennock, I am shocked!”

“Well, Luxembourg has high tariffs on certain items that made it more expensive to ship them in than the goods were worth, and we couldn’t always be— Oh.” He caught sight of Alice’s expression. “You were joking.”

“The famous dry British wit,” Feng observed. “So much like my father’s.”

“Madam,” Kemp said, “I am afraid I have to report that the food stores are nearly empty. Breakfast this morning drained what little we had.”

“Then we’ll have to get more,” Alice said. “How far away are we from the city?”

“Less than five miles,” Gavin said. “A decent walk, though we might be able to beg a ride from a farm wagon or a carriage. Alice, I think you should change into skirts. A woman in trousers attracts attention.”

“I was thinking the same thing.” Alice sighed. “And, Kemp, you and Click will have to stay behind with the ship.”

“Madam!” Kemp huffed. “It is my duty to attend to Madam’s every need and comfort. I cannot do that when—”

“The Catholics have made you illegal in Luxembourg,” Alice said patiently. “Besides, the Third Ward is looking for a group that’s traveling with a mechanical servant and a clockwork cat.”

“Madam,” Kemp replied stiffly. On the ship above, Click put his ears back.

“No worrying,” Dr. Clef said. “I will also stay. I am working on a new piece, and the clicky kitty will keep me company.”

“What about food?” Gavin asked.

“There is sufficient for one person for a day or two,” Kemp said. “I said we had little, not none.”

Dr. Clef looked sly. “And it gives farms about, with fruit and vegetables in the fields. If you are gone for a few days, it matters nothing.”

“Right.” Gavin rumpled his hair. “That leaves you, Feng.”

“Oh?” The young man struck a pose. He was, as usual, quite good-looking, though nowhere near as handsome as Gavin, in Alice’s mind. “Do I stand out?”

“I know!” Alice plucked the goggles from Dr. Clef’s forehead and drew them down over Feng’s head, then extracted a red scarf from her pocket and wrapped it around the lower half of Feng’s face. “There! With the right hat, you’ll look like an airman instead of a mysterious Oriental. Around here, that shouldn’t attract attention.”

Feng made a horrified sound. “I was hoping my exotic good looks would attract a great deal of attention, if you understand my meaning.”

“Mr. Lung!” Alice admonished. “That’s hardly appropriate.”

“That is why my father asked you to bring me back to Peking,” Feng pointed out. “Unlike my father, when I see a pretty piece of… a pretty face, I become a bad diplomat.” His voice was muffled through the scarf. “But for your sake, my lady, I will try.”

“Your Ladyship,” Alice corrected. “A baroness isn’t rightly addressed as my lady.”

“You see? Bad diplomat.” He straightened the goggles. “Let us go now. I will be hungry soon.”

“Feng,” Gavin said, “the jar?”

Feng’s almond eyes widened. “How could I have forgotten?” He dashed for the ship.

Alice, meanwhile, quickly changed into skirts in her tiny stateroom belowdecks and snatched up a cloth airman’s cap for Feng. She also took the book of figures. Gavin had changed out of his torn black clothes into a plain workman’s outfit, complete with a cloth cap of his own. He wore his fiddle case on his back, since he rarely went anywhere without it. Feng appeared with a rucksack that clinked. They bade Dr. Clef and the mechanicals good-bye and left.

“Are you still a baroness?” Gavin asked as the trio set off down the dusty, hedge-lined road toward Luxembourg. “I mean, you left the country and abandoned your fiancé and became a traitor, so—”

“Titles are for life,” Alice said. “My father was the last Lord Michaels, and I was his only child. His only relative, really. When he passed away, that left me Alice, Lady Michaels, and I will be until I die, no matter how scandalously I behave, though if I have a child, things become complicated.”

“How?” Feng inquired. His feet kicked up small puffs of dust that hung on the still air. Birds called from the hedges and the trees that grew among them, and cows lowed from their pastures.

“For the line to continue, any child I have must be legitimate,” Alice said, flushing a little. The subject still made her uncomfortable, even though England was hundreds of miles away. “If Gavin and I don’t marry in a Christian church, our children won’t be…”

She trailed off in horror, realizing what she had just said. Gavin would never live to see children. Tears welled up, and she looked abruptly away.

Gavin squeezed her hand. “I don’t care if they’re titled or not,” he said brightly. “We aren’t going back to England, and that’s the only place the title matters. You will be my wife on our airship and the whole world will be our estate!” He spread his arms wide, then swept her into a kiss. “There! Title that!”

Alice had to laugh. “Thank you, Mr. Ennock.”

“You’re welcome, Miss No-Longer-Lady-Alice-Michaels,” he said impishly.

“I believe I will call you Miss A,” Feng said. “If you prefer.”

“Actually, I would not,” she said. “The Third Ward uses Christian names among themselves to show comradeship and to emphasize the fact that they operate outside the usual boundaries of society. Since we are traveling together outside the boundaries of society, and I have little use for my title anymore, I think I would prefer my Christian name. Feng.”

He put his fist into his hand and bowed to her in what Alice assumed was an Oriental fashion. “Then it will be so. Alice.”

“You must be looking forward to going home,” Alice said as they continued to walk.

Feng blinked at her. “What a strange thing to say.”

“Is it? I would think you would miss your homeland, though I would imagine it’s difficult to leave your father. Your mother will certainly be glad to see you.”

Feng was silent for a long moment. Then he said slowly, “I am not returning as any kind of hero, Alice. I thought you knew that.”

“Sorry?”

“I am returning in disgrace. The lowest disgrace you can imagine.”

“I don’t understand,” Gavin put in. “You and your father don’t want you to be a diplomat, so you’re going home to—”

“That is exactly the point, Gavin. I am a nephew to the emperor and my father’s only son. I should be following into his profession. But my father has decreed that I have failed him and the family, which includes the emperor.” Feng’s usual carefree demeanor had left him. The words came out slow and dull as lead pipe. “I am a failure and a disgrace. If I am very lucky, I will spend the rest of my days scrubbing chamber pots with the servants.”

“Good heavens,” Alice said. How outrageous this was! “Feng, I had no idea. You always seemed so cheerful. I assumed you were thrilled to get away from London and go home.”

Feng swiped a surreptitious finger under one lens of his goggles. “What is the worth of moping about? I will be unhappy enough later. In any case, I am in no hurry to face my disgrace, so I am in no hurry to arrive in China.”

“Why not simply disappear between here and there?” Gavin said reasonably. “You’re smart and know several languages. You could vanish into any number of places and live very well.”

“That,” Feng spat, “would show cowardice and bring even more disgrace to my family. I will not do that to them.”

“You are not a disgrace,” Alice said tartly. “Just now you helped save Gavin’s life. Surely that should count for something.”

“Perhaps.” Feng sounded more tired than convinced, and fell silent. Alice didn’t know what to say, so she fell silent as well.

At that point, a farm wagon drove by, and Alice’s schoolgirl French was able to persuade the drover to let them ride on the back for a penny. Less than an hour later, they passed through one of the gates of Luxembourg.

The city was cleaner than London. The air smelled of horses and wood smoke and manure, but none of the scents were as cloying as in London, and dirt didn’t hang on the air with yellow coal smoke. A cheerful sun chased away the dank smell and the dampness. The people on the cobblestoned streets bustled about and shouted good-naturedly at one another. Windows stood open to catch the summer breeze instead of locked against the misty damp. A group of chattering children ran past the cart, laughing and shouting their way through a make-believe world of their own. Alice felt her own heart lighten, and wondered what it would have been like to grow up here instead of chilly, drizzly London.

The cart carried the trio to an open market, and they hopped off. A number of church bells rang to announce midday. The metal tones bounced off the hills and scampered up the side streets. Merchants shouted for attention from brightly colored stalls, and a number of surfaces sported garish advertisements for the Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles. Here and there, a mechanical horse pulled a carriage down the street, or a spider skittered by with a basket on its back.

Alice bought a loaf of bread and a bit of butter, and they shared it for lunch on a corner. Despite the heat, Alice wore bulky gloves to conceal her spider, but no one seemed to take much notice. Most ladies were wearing gloves of their own.

“What is next?” Feng adjusted his scarf and his pack.

“We need to find paraffin oil for the ship, food stores, and a way to get both back to the ship,” Gavin said. “How much money do we have?”

Alice sighed. It was the moment she’d been dreading. She took the little book of figures from her skirt pocket. “Not near enough,” she admitted. “I performed a few calculations based on how much oil the ship used to get this far, how much weight we need to carry, what the winds are like, and the possibility that paraffin oil prices will be stunningly low—unlikely, considering how difficult it is to make, and how rare.”

“Meaning we won’t have enough money to make it to Peking,” Gavin finished.

“No,” Alice murmured.

“Then,” Gavin said brightly, “our plan is both to earn money and figure out a way to get farther on less oil. So. Feng, you buy supplies and find a way to get them back to the Lady without letting anyone know where the ship is hidden. And don’t forget about the jar. Alice, you find a supply of paraffin oil and bargain hard.”

“What are you going to do?” Alice asked.

“Earn money. Back away.” He whipped out his fiddle, sprinkled a few coins into the case on the ground before him, and began to play. The merry music on the crowded corner attracted attention fairly quickly, and even as Alice watched, a few people tossed coins of their own into Gavin’s case. He winked his thanks at them and continued the song. Alice let the golden song wash over her. Though the violin was playing to the crowd, the musician was playing for her. He smiled at her, and her breath caught.

Feng plucked at her elbow. “We have much to do.”

She reluctantly let him lead her away. A few moments later, he dodged down a less crowded side street and opened his rucksack. “We should do this first.”

“Oh!” she said. “A good idea.”

From the rucksack Feng took a largish jar, the sort that might store pickles. It held a bunch of grass and twigs and bits of food. Amid all this swarmed a large number of little fireflies. They winked green in the shady side street and cast odd shadows into the corners.

“They seem to be reproducing,” Alice observed. “That’s good. Let me.”

She took the jar from Feng and carefully opened the lid just enough to allow perhaps a dozen of them to escape and fly off before she clapped the jar shut again. For a moment, she was back in London, in Hyde Park. Aunt Edwina’s shriveled corpse had just collapsed to the ground and the cloud of fireflies was pouring out. Gavin swept the jar through the cloud, capturing a number of them, while the rest descended upon London to sting and bite. Each firefly carried a tiny organism—a virion, Aunt Edwina had called it—that attacked and destroyed the bacillus that caused the clockwork plague. Eventually the hardy little fireflies would spread throughout the world and cure or inoculate the entire human population, but it would happen faster with help.

One of the fireflies landed on Alice’s neck and bit her. Normal fireflies didn’t bite, of course, but these were different. She only just stopped herself from slapping, allowing it to fly off instead while Feng shoved the precious jar back into his pack. “Now, let us see what we can find for food and oil,” he said, sounding more like his old self. “And perhaps female company.”

“Feng,” Alice warned.

“Male, then.”

“Feng!”

He pulled down his scarf and grinned rakishly at her from beneath the goggles. It wasn’t an expression Alice associated with Orientals. “That was a joke. Maybe.”

“Let’s just do our—” Alice cut herself off. In an alley nearby, a shadow shifted with a small groan, and two figures shuffled into view. They were both male, and dressed in rags. Blood and pus oozed from a dozen sores on their hands and faces. In several places, skin had split, revealing red muscle. Their bodies were thin, almost emaciated, and they smelled of rotting meat. One of them reached toward Alice and Feng, but flinched from even the indirect sunlight afforded by the side street.

Feng drew back with a hiss. “Plague zombies.”

But Alice was already moving. She strode forward, stripping off her left glove. One of the zombies had enough brain function left to look a little surprised. Most people shunned or fled plague zombies—anyone who touched one was at risk for coming down with the clockwork plague and joining their ranks, steadily losing brain and body function until they dropped dead. Only one in a hundred thousand victims became clockworkers, and no one wanted that, either. Plague zombies lived as pariahs, turned out and spurned even by family. They usually survived by scavenging garbage in the streets. Most of them starved to death before the plague finished them, and their corpses rotted in alleys and sewers because police and other city workers refused to touch them.

Alice approached the first zombie. Mucus ran from its half-rotted nose, and it babbled something incoherent at her. Alice’s gorge rose, and a lifetime of fear slapped her hard. Her mother and brother had died of this very plague, and it had made her father into a cripple. Still, she forced herself to raise her metal-clad hand. She couldn’t save her family, but she could save the person standing in front of her, and she would.

The iron spider’s eyes glowed red, and its clear tubules, which remained painlessly drilled into Alice’s arm, flowed constantly with Alice’s blood. She swiped at the zombie with the gauntlet and the claws made four light cuts across the zombie’s shoulder. Blood from the hollow claws sprayed over the wound as the zombie recoiled. The other zombie started and slowly moved a hand to his cheek. A firefly zipped away, leaving a green phosphorescent streak in the air. Alice, who had been ready to slash at and bleed on him as well, checked herself and stepped back instead.

“Are you well?” Feng asked.

“They can’t infect me,” Alice said. “Or you, for that matter. I gave you the same treatment. You needn’t be afraid of them.”

“It is hard to remember,” Feng admitted.

“It’s working,” Alice breathed. “Look!”

The zombies shuddered. One looked at his hands, turning them over and over, as if seeing them for the first time. The other licked his half-rotted lips and darted glances up and down the side street. Slowly, he took a step out of the darkened alley into the half-lit byway. The light didn’t seem to bother him, even though extreme photosensitivity was one of the early symptoms of the clockwork plague. As Alice watched, some of his sores stopped weeping. He gave a little moan that Alice could only describe as happy and he lurched toward the entrance of the street, where the market lay. The second zombie had vanished back into the shadows. Before Alice quite realized what was happening, the first zombie entered the square. Full sunlight fell across his face, probably for the first time in months, and he lifted his eyes to the sky in exultation.

A woman screamed, and then another. Shouts and cries erupted all over the market as people scrambled all over themselves to get away. Box stalls tipped under the stampede and wood smashed. Alice only heard—the buildings at the entrance of the side street restricted her view. All she saw was the zombie standing in the sunlight like a misshapen angel, oblivious to the chaos around him.

“Oh dear,” Alice muttered.

“Perhaps we move along now,” Feng said.

Another sound made Alice turn. At the mouth of the alley stood the second zombie. With him was a crowd of others—males, females, children. All of them wore torn, filthy rags that dripped blood and pus. Their skin was as tattered as their clothing. Some were missing fingers or even entire limbs. All of them huddled in the alley, not daring to go into the half-light of the side street. The second zombie, the one Alice had scratched, lifted an arm toward Alice in supplication.

Alice felt abruptly overwhelmed. She couldn’t move or speak. “Oh,” was all she could manage.

“What do we do?” Feng asked.

A small child limped forward, dragging a useless foot. Alice couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or a girl. It held up its arms to Alice like a toddler asking to be picked up. Alice wondered who its parents were, how long it had been on the streets, scrounging for food, spreading disease, hiding from painful daylight in cellars and under dustbins, in pain, wondering what was happening and why no one was helping. She jolted forward.

“I will help you,” she said, addressing the child, but speaking to them all. As gently as she could, she scored the child’s arm and wet the wound with her own blood. The child gasped and lurched backward, then straightened. The cure wouldn’t regrow the bad foot, but at least the disease would stop devouring flesh and bone. Alice didn’t pause. She flicked her claws at the next zombie, and the next, and the next, working her way through the fetid alley in a red haze. The spider grew heavier and heavier, and her arm ached from swinging. The smell of blood hung on the air, mingling with the soft groans and yelps from wounded zombie flesh. Alice’s entire world narrowed to bricks and blood, and she lost all sense of time. She could save them all. Swing, slash, bleed, and move on. Swing, slash, bleed, and move on.

“That was the last one,” Feng was saying. “Alice! You can stop!”

Alice came to herself. The last zombie was shuffling into the light, and the screaming had died down from the marketplace, and whether it was because the people had become tired of running away from zombies or because they had all fled, Alice didn’t know. The strength drained out of her, and Feng caught her before she collapsed.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

“You helped so many,” Feng said. “That was a fine thing you did.”

“But there are still more. I need to save them.”

“They will be well. The cure will spread to them quickly enough.”

“I’m thirsty.” Alice’s mouth was dry, and her head felt light. “So thirsty.”

She was only vaguely aware of Feng half leading, half carrying her somewhere. Eventually, she found herself sitting at a table with a plate of fruit, bread, and cheese before her and a mug of cider at her elbow. A muscular arm encircled her like a warm wing and drew her close.

“Are you all right?” Gavin demanded.

She leaned in and soaked in his scent, his strength. “Yes. I just needed to eat.”

“I found him at another market,” Feng reported from across the table. “He was unaware that the zombie was your doing.”

“I thought it was a chance event,” Gavin said, “so I moved on to play somewhere else, without all the screaming and stampeding. I had no idea you were in trouble.” His voice was tight with tension.

“I’m fine. Really.” Alice sat up to emphasize her words and noticed for the first time the little tavern where they were sitting. It was low-end, with straw on the wood planks and a bored-looking pair of daughters serving bread and beer drawn by their mother, who held forth behind a scarred bar. Alice, Gavin, and Feng occupied a freestanding table near the fireplace, which was empty this late in summer. The faint smell of dead ashes and old alcohol hung on the air, and the working-class patrons were still talking quietly, not drunk yet. “No need to worry, darling. I was just caught a little off guard. Next time, I’ll know better.”

“Next time?” Gavin echoed. “What next time?”

“Next time I heal people,” she said.

“You’re not going to keep doing this?” he asked incredulously.

She pulled away from him. “Of course I am. I have to help, Gavin. The clockwork plague needs to be cured.”

“That’s what the fireflies are for.”

“Every person I cure is one fewer person who dies,” she said with heat. “I can’t hold it back and wait on the chance that a firefly will bite.”

“And you’re putting yourself in danger!”

“It didn’t seem to be an issue when I came to rescue you!”

“That was low.”

Alice’s voice rose. “No lower than you assuming I can’t take care of myself.”

“Of course you can take care of yourself.” Gavin’s voice rose to match. “It’s why Feng had to carry you in here.”

“I often enjoy it when people stare,” Feng said, “but I believe our plan was to keep to ourselves.”

Most of the customers were indeed staring at them. Alice, who noticed she was on her feet, sank slowly back to her chair. Her claws had pierced the tips of her glove. “I apologize, Mr. Ennock,” she said stiffly.

“Me, too, Miss Michaels.”

They finished eating in silence. Alice kept her eyes on her food and fumed, despite her apology. She had a duty to spread the cure. The plague had made victims of her entire family, ruined her life, and she wasn’t going to let anyone else go through the same thing. Her life was replete with sacrifices to the plague, and at last, at last, she could fight back. Was Gavin trying to control her the way her father and fiancé had tried to do? Infuriating! More than that, he was a mere commoner, with no right even to speak to her in such a tone. In some parts of England, a baroness like her could still have him…

. . . flogged.

Alice swallowed a bit of carrot without tasting it. Gavin had already been flogged. By the pirates who had captured his airship and shot his best friend and killed his captain. When she embraced him, she could feel the ropy scars through the thin fabric of his shirt. The thought made her ill. He had seen his share of sacrifice. He had already been hurt so badly, and now she was hurting him again. But iron pride stiffened her neck, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to apologize again.

“Did you earn much money?” she asked in a quieter voice. The other patrons went back to their drinking.

“A bit,” he said. “But not as much as I would have liked. I was interrupted by zombies, so—”

The temper flared red again. “Are you implying that I shouldn’t have—”

“I’m not implying anything. Boy, you’re hot under the corset.”

“Mr. Ennock!” She found she was on her feet again. “That… that…”

“What?” he said evenly.

“That… will be all.” She turned and marched out the door.

Angrily, she chose a direction and stalked away down the darkening street. Luxembourg had a number of yellow gaslights to light her way, but they were spaced widely, and each stood out like a giant candlestick in a pool of ink. Closed shops alternated with pubs and hotels. A lonely set of church bells rang a melody Alice didn’t recognize, and the cool evening breeze smelled unfamiliar. A lonely flyer for the circus, its colors muted by the gathering dusk, blew down the street. Music and sounds of men singing in French drifted across the cobbles, and a few people were scattered up and down the walkways. Now that she was outside in the cooler evening air, Alice realized she had no idea where to go or what to do. But she wasn’t going back to the pub. Not now.

A door banged open ahead of her, and a little man carrying a black bag hurried out of a building, pulling on his black coat as he went. Behind him came a woman wringing her hands. She was pleading in rapid French, but the man ignored her. Normally Alice would have averted her eyes and continued on her way, but she caught the word peste—plague—and halted. The man yanked a small jar of paint from his bag, scrawled a large red P on the door over the woman’s protests, and jumped into a waiting hansom, which sped away. The woman watched the man go, then slowly returned to the building and shut the door.

Alice’s mouth went dry, and the spider hung heavy on her left arm. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she strode up to the door and knocked. It opened almost instantly, and Alice saw the hope on the woman’s face die, replaced with a guarded look.

“Oui?” The woman had straight brown hair and tired, blue-gray eyes. Her hands were red and swollen from work, and she wore a limp brown work dress.

In her halting French, Alice said, “Is someone ill?”

“Why do you ask?” the woman responded. “Who are you?”

“Someone in your house has la peste de l’horlogerie, yes?”

“Non, non.” The woman moved to shut the door. “You are mistaken.”

Alice, not quite believing her own temerity, blocked the door open with her foot. She could smell the dripping paint. “The doctor marked your door for all to see. Now everyone will avoid you and your house. I can help.”

The woman paused. “Who are you? We have nothing to steal.”

“I am a friend. I can help. Is it your child?”

“I… I am…” The woman licked her lips, then suddenly opened the door wider. “Enter, please.”

The door led into a pair of rooms that were part of a much larger building. The front room had a stove and a few pieces of furniture. Alice assumed the back room was used for sleeping. A single candle provided the only light. On a pallet on the floor huddled a little girl, perhaps nine or ten years old. A thin blanket covered her, and her face was flushed with fever. Her hair was already falling out, and her limbs twitched as if possessed by little demons. A smell of sickness hung in the air. Alice’s heart pounded behind her ribs. For a moment, she was looking at her brother in his sickbed, watching the fever make him quiver. Eventually he convulsed and died. Many victims of the clockwork plague didn’t survive this early stage, and those few who did were often scarred or crippled. Most went on to become zombies. At least the early stage didn’t seem to be contagious, though the victims were often shunned as a matter of course.

“My husband is working, and my other children are asleep in back,” the woman said. “Please do not wake them. My name is Theresa Nilsen. This is Josette.”

“I… would prefer to keep my name to myself,” Alice said, remembering Phipps. “Did the doctor say Josette has the clockwork plague?”

“He did.” The woman’s voice choked. “He would not touch her, and he left. I do not know what to do. She will become a monster and die. My little Josette.”

“She will not.” Alice stripped off her leather glove and laid her gauntleted hand on the girl’s forehead. The spider’s eyes instantly glowed red, confirming the doctor’s diagnosis. “This may be difficult to see, Madame Nilsen, but it is necessary.”

Before Mme. Nilsen could say anything else, Alice slashed Josette’s arm and sprayed a bit of her blood over the wound. The girl whimpered in her fevered dreams.

“What did you do?” Mme. Nilsen demanded. “You hurt her!”

“It is a cure for the clockwork plague,” Alice said softly. “Now that Josette has it, she will spread it whenever she coughs or sneezes, but I should give it to you and your other children anyway. Let me check you. It will not hurt.”

Mme. Nilsen hesitantly held out her arm, and Alice took it. The spider’s eyes glowed red.

“You have the plague,” Alice said, and Mme. Nilsen cried out in alarm. “But you are not showing symptoms yet. Do not worry—I have the cure.” Alice slashed and sprayed. “I should check your children.”

“How—?” Mme. Nilsen began, but Alice was already moving to the back room, where four other children were sleeping piled together on a large pallet of their own. Alice checked, but none of them had the plague.

“They are healthy,” Alice said, and strode back to the front room to check on Josette. Already her fever had lowered. When Alice touched her, the spider’s eyes glowed green, indicating a lack of clockwork contagion. Josette opened her eyes, and Alice backed away to let a tearful Mme. Nilsen take her place.

“Mama,” Josette whispered. “I want water.”

Mme. Nilsen hurried to bring a cup. Josette drank and fell back asleep. The fever flush was gone and her breathing was more even. Mme. Nilsen looked at her for a long moment, then burst into tears. Alice didn’t know how to respond. The emotional display made her uncomfortable, but she was so very glad to have helped. Her heart felt lighter, knowing the child would grow to adulthood.

“There are no thanks,” the woman cried. “I will give you everything I have!”

“Just some water, and something to eat, if you have it,” Alice said, remembering what happened the last time.

Mme. Nilsen gave her water and cheese, and then said hesitantly, “Can you do this to anyone?”

“Yes.” Alice swallowed the last of the water. “Until my strength runs out.”

“You must come. I have a friend who also has a child.”

Alice dusted crumbs from her hands. “Quickly, then, while your children sleep.” She paused. “But I need to do something else first.”

Chapter Four

Feng abandoned Gavin after his second pint. “The angel over there can provide me with far more pleasure than you,” he said, and slid away. A moment later, Feng and his laughing female companion were strolling out the front door, arm in arm. Gavin ignored them and took a pull from his third pint. The ale here was stronger, and it hit Gavin a little harder than he was used to, but that was fine with him. Last spring, he had watched his friends die on the airship Juniper, a pirate had tried to rape him, and the first mate had flogged him senseless for fighting back. Now the high-and-mighty baroness was pissed at him, and he was sick with the clockwork plague. In a few weeks, he’d lose his grip on reality, spiral into a fascinated trance while studying a ladybug on a grass stem, and die in a ditch as his brain liquefied into sludge. If all that didn’t deserve a few drinks, nothing did.

He took another sour gulp of red Luxembourger ale. It swirled like pale blood, though it was only red malt and vinegar that reflected red light from the lamps. The ale was more like wine than beer and would have fetched a pretty penny back home in Boston as an exotic treat, but Gavin was slugging it down like water. It made him feel light, as if he might float away. The other patrons in the bar seemed strangely happy, too. They were all happy, despite the plague around them. A small group sang a cheery tune in one corner, and laughed uproariously at every chorus. The noise floated up, taking Gavin’s pain with it. It was a fine thing to be drunk and happy in Luxembourg. For the moment he felt like he had just escaped Purgatory and was now staring at a set of fine gates made of gold.

Gavin tapped the mug on the table, creating vibrations on the surface of the liquid. Everything slowed, and he tracked the tiny motions like chaotic imps that danced across the redness. Fascinating. He tapped again, muscles moving slow as granite, now able to predict where each wave of vibration would appear. Each rose and rippled precisely where he foresaw—or commanded. He tapped yet again, tilting the mug to get a different pattern, and then another and another, a sorcerer making demons dance. A machine, the right machine, would produce the same patterns, and those patterns could be used to—

A hand grabbed his arm. The spell broke and the world snapped into normal speed. Alice was standing next to him. Near her, hovering like a brown butterfly, stood a woman Gavin didn’t know. He felt the literal iron in the grip beneath her glove and instantly knew she was exerting five pounds and six ounces of pressure on his biceps.

“I knew you’d come back,” he said, and tried a grin, but it came out a sloppy grimace.

“Come along, darling,” she said with a wide smile and without moving her lips. “We’re leaving.”

“I paid for this. I’m finishing it,” he said. Around them, other drinkers pointed and winked. A few jeered. The henpecked husband and his domineering wife. Feng was nowhere in sight. He had apparently found a heaven of his own.

“Oh, good heavens.” Alice snatched up the mug and drained it. A number of customers burst into applause. “There. Let’s go.”

He should have been annoyed, but a mild haze had descended over him and nothing could bother him now. “What the hell,” he muttered, catching up his fiddle case. It weighed two pounds, nine ounces. The silver nightingale in his pocket weighed three ounces. “I’m out of money anyway.”

She towed him to the door and outside. Light, laughter, and the woman in brown followed them. He felt a little less muddled in the cooler air but not entirely himself.

“Where’s Feng?” Alice asked.

“There’s a hotel across the street.” Gavin gestured vaguely with the fiddle case. “He got a room with someone. Wanna do the same?”

Alice made a disgusted sound. “Do you do this often?”

“Argue with a pretty woman or get drunk?”

“Never mind. At least you’re coherent. I need to show you something. This is Madame Nilsen. She doesn’t speak English.”

The woman, who was carrying a lantern, smiled shyly at the mention of her name, and Gavin gave her a lopsided grin. “Hi. I’m dying, you know. Not that she cares.”

Mme. Nilsen shook her head. Alice spoke to her in French, and the other woman led the way with her tin lantern. Gavin said, “Do you think the clockwork plague will let me learn French? Or Chinese? It sure as hell won’t do anything else useful.”

“You’re maudlin. I’ve never seen you maudlin.”

“Yeah.” He rumpled his hair. “Imagine.”

“Just keep walking,” Alice said. “It’ll sober you.”

“I don’t want to be sober. I deserve to be drunk.”

“But I don’t deserve you to be drunk. Keep walking or I’ll show you how sharp these claws can be.”

Gavin almost sat on the street in a childish pique, but changed his mind and continued walking with his arms folded instead. After some time, they arrived at the top of a winding street. The climb put Gavin a little out of breath, and, as Alice predicted, cleared his head a bit. On the hills below and above, the city had darkened completely. Street- and houselights made a field of stars on wrinkled velvet, as if the night sky had fallen and shattered on the ground around them. Mme. Nilsen selected a tall, narrow house, knocked, and called out. After some time, the door opened, and a man and woman, both middle-aged, appeared. They wore nightshirts and caps. Mme. Nilsen spoke to them in rapid French, and Alice joined in. The couple looked mystified, then hopeful. At their gestured invitation, everyone entered the long, narrow house that smelled of bread and ashes.

“What’s going on?” Gavin asked as they climbed a steep staircase. In Luxembourg, they were always climbing.

“There’s plague here, but they don’t want anyone to know,” Alice murmured. “If word of it gets out, the house will be quarantined until the family throws the victims into the street.”

“Why do I have to be here?”

“I want you to watch what I’m doing.”

Now puzzled, Gavin followed the group into a bedroom. A boy lay on a bed, twitching in fever sleep. Loose hanks of pale blond hair lay on the pillow. Automatic fear touched Gavin when he recognized the clockwork plague, even though he was already dying of the disease in his own way. The boy’s parents looked on with worried expressions as Alice pulled off her glove, revealing the spider. Its eyes glowed red when she touched the boy’s bare arm. Then she swiped his skin with the claws, drawing blood and spraying a bit of her own. The parents gasped as one, but Mme. Nilsen talked to them and they calmed, though they remained watchful. Alice touched each of them in turn, but the spider eyes glowed green. The mother sat on the bed and stroked her son’s forehead, her cheeks wet with tears. Gavin’s throat thickened as he felt her sorrow, fear, and love.

“There,” Alice said. “Now we wait.”

Mme. Nilsen slipped out to go home. Gavin rocked on his feet, waiting uncertainly.

“Perhaps you should sing, Gavin,” Alice said.

He stopped rocking. “What?”

“Sing. It’ll pass the time.” She turned her brown eyes on him. “Sing the moon song for me. Please.”

Argument or no argument, he couldn’t refuse her any more than the sun could refuse to rise.

I see the moon, the moon sees me

It turns all the forest soft and silvery.

The moon picked you from all the rest

For I loved you best.

As Gavin sang for Alice and the boy, a boy who struggled to heal as Gavin himself had done so many weeks ago, something inside him broke, shifted, and re-formed. The plague hurt a great many people, more than just himself, and Gavin, flying high above the earth or wrapped in music, had forgotten that. He pulled out his fiddle to accompany himself for the second verse.

I once had a heart as good as new

But now it’s gone from me to you.

The moon picked you from all the rest

For I loved you best.

The leering eyes and sticky blood of Madoc Blue faded a little. The sharp memory of Tom Danforth’s lifeless corpse falling from the rigging dulled around the edges. The opaque stone walls that trapped him in Edwina’s tower thinned. And then another memory came back to him. He himself was lying sick in bed, hot with fever. A woman—Ma—bent over him, bathing his face with a cool cloth. A man with pale hair played the fiddle and sang just for Gavin, his voice rich and low and perfect, and Gavin felt better, enveloped in the soft love of both parents.

I have a ship, my ship must flee.

Sailing o’er the clouds and on the silver sea

The moon picked you from all the rest

For I loved you best.

The memory vanished when the song ended. The boy’s twitching eased. His breathing evened out, and the fever faded. He opened his eyes and looked straight at Gavin for a long moment. A connection between them held for a second that lasted an age, and Gavin felt that the boy somehow understood what had just happened. Then the boy smiled and dropped back into sleep. Tears wet and refreshed Gavin’s cheeks, and he felt both exhausted and exhilarated. The boy’s mother flung her arms around him, weeping with joy, and his father swiped at his eyes with his sleeve. He said something to Alice in a choked voice, and she answered gracefully. They spoke at some length, and Alice nodded.

“What’s going on?” Gavin wiped his own face and put his fiddle away as the father padded quickly out of the room.

“He knows of someone else who has the plague,” Alice said. “Do you think I should refuse?”

Gavin put a hand on her shoulder. “I never wanted you to stop helping, Alice,” he said. “I just don’t want you to get hurt because you don’t know when to stop. Look at you—you didn’t even take a wrap, and you’re shivering.”

Even though she didn’t speak English, the mother seemed to notice the same thing and with a firm gesture that she was to keep it, gave Alice a quilt to pull around herself. Alice accepted.

“You have to watch yourself,” Gavin added, “or I’ll tell Kemp on you.”

Alice gave a little bark of laughter at that. “Then come with me.”

“Anywhere. You know that.”

The father returned, dressed, and led Alice and Gavin outside to another house, where two adult brothers were down with the plague. Alice, the quilt still pulled around her, cured both of them while Gavin played, and one of them begged Alice to go to his niece’s house. Along the way, they encountered a pair of plague zombies rooting through a rubbish heap, and Alice swiped at them as well. At the niece’s house, Gavin stopped Alice and demanded that she be given food and drink, which the newly cured niece was happy to give before asking Alice to visit yet another house. And so it continued. As the night wore on, Alice hurried from home to home under cover of darkness, her quilt drawn around her like a cloak while she cured a number of people with the clockwork plague, and each one seemed to know someone else who was sick. The chain of people took them all through Luxembourg, to homes rich and poor, lonely and crowded, wood and stone. Gavin made sure Alice was given a bite to eat and a sip to drink in every household. Alice cured priests and drunkards, bankers and thieves, doctors and patients. Some offered money, always hesitantly, as if they might offend. Alice tried to turn them down, but Gavin stepped in and accepted.

“If they can spare it, we can take it,” he said, fiddle in hand.

“I won’t turn down someone who can’t—”

“Of course not,” Gavin said. “But even saints have to eat. And get to China.”

When dawn checkered the eastern sky, they left the final house. The air was crisp and clean and bright. Morning noises—horse traffic, food sellers, factory whistles, doors opening and closing, people shouting and talking—filled the street. Housewives and storekeepers swept the cobblestones in front of their homes and shops. Gavin noticed with a start that Alice was pale and shaky from the slow but steady blood loss, and she kept the quilt wrapped tightly around her body and head. Gavin himself didn’t feel tired in the least—clockworkers entering the later stage of the plague often went days without sleep—and he mentally kicked himself for not remembering earlier that Alice did need rest, especially after everything she’d been doing.

He flagged down a cab and gave directions back to the pub where he’d been drinking the night before. Alice leaned against him and dozed off, and he was surprised at how light she felt.

The pub was closed, but Gavin found the cheap hotel where Feng had gotten a room and used the money Alice had earned to get them a room while Alice collapsed into a lobby chair. At the last second he remembered not to give his real name and signed them in as Mr. and Mrs. Tom Danforth, in honor of his late friend. He had no intention of actually sharing a room with Alice—Feng’s room would have to do when Gavin finally felt a need for sleep and he would have to hope Feng didn’t have a woman with him—but it was easier to fabricate a married relationship than explain to the clerk, who only spoke a few words of English.

They met Feng, alone, on the way up the dark and creaking stairs, which saved Gavin the trouble of tracking him down. Explanations followed, and Alice went into her room without further discussion.

“You will not follow her?” Feng said. He was wearing his scarf and goggles and on his back he wore the pack with the precious jar of fireflies in it. “My lady friend last night enjoyed herself immensely, and I can give you advice, if you need it.”

Gavin sighed as they squeaked back downstairs on threadbare carpet. Although he was getting used to Feng’s forthrightness and his interest in… romance, it was still a little unsettling, and he could understand why Feng’s father had despaired of him ever becoming a diplomat. Feng’s undeniably exotic good looks doubtless made matters worse—Gavin imagined he found it easy to sweet talk his way into any number of beds. Fortunately, he did seem to understand that showing even the slightest interest in Alice would result in a personal and rather brief experiment with the force of gravity from the deck of the Lady of Liberty, either at Gavin’s hands or Alice’s.

“I won’t share… quarters with her,” Gavin said. “Not until I can make an honest woman of her.”

“And when will that be?”

They reached the little lobby again and a glimmer of brass caught Gavin’s eye. His blood went cold and he nearly dropped his fiddle case. Susan Phipps and Simon d’Arco were talking to the clerk.

“Run,” he whispered hoarsely, and bolted back up the steps.

They both smashed straight into Alice’s door. It splintered open. She lay on the bed and she was still dressed, a fact for which Gavin felt grateful. He scooped Alice up while Feng grabbed the bedspread from underneath her. Alice squawked as footsteps pounded on the stairs leading up to their floor. Gavin glanced at the window, but they were three stories up. No escape that way. They would have to fight their way out. He frantically assessed the room. Bed. Bare wood floor. Window. Thin curtains. Chamber pot. Washstand. Mirror. Light. Feng. Bedspread. Sheets. Fiddle case.

“Put me down!” Alice barked.

Gavin flung her back on the bed along with his fiddle case. He ripped the curtains off the wall with one hand and snatched up the room’s paraffin oil lamp in the other. Then he dug into his pockets for a match. Simon burst into the room, and Feng, who was standing beside the door, flung the bedspread over him like a net and kicked his legs out from under him. Simon went down with a muffled yelp. Phipps appeared in the doorway, more cautious. She held a pair of tuning forks in her hands.

“You!” Alice cried from the bed.

“Caught you,” Phipps said, “you son of a—”

Gavin threw the lamp at her. She automatically parried it with her metal arm, and the cheap glass shattered, covering both her and the bedspread with lamp oil. Gavin popped the match alight with his thumbnail and applied it to the sheer curtain he was holding. Fear clenched his every nerve as it began to burn. Fire was the enemy of every airship, and to die in flame was the secret nightmare of every airman. He remembered Captain Naismith aiming a blazing crossbow bolt at the envelope of the Juniper, and how close he had come to dying in an inferno. His hands shook, making the fire dance.

“You won’t,” Phipps said flatly, and moved to strike the forks.

Gavin ran straight for her, trailing flame. Phipps leaped backward, her eyes wide with fear, an expression Gavin had never seen on her before. Alice recovered herself and bolted after him with Feng right behind her. A bit of blazing curtain flapped behind them, preventing the oil-soaked Phipps from pursuing right away if she wanted to avoid bursting into flame. Smoke and heat scorched Gavin’s face and heated his hands. The clerk stared at the trio from behind his desk as they fled outdoors.

The sun shone on the bright, cobblestoned street. In the distance, calliope music played and people applauded. Traffic and pedestrians were currently giving the hotel a wide berth, though, because Glenda was standing on the sidewalk in one of the big mechanicals.

“Wotcha,” she said, and reached for Gavin and Alice with big metal hands.

“Shit!” Gavin flung the flaming ball of cloth at Glenda’s head. It bounced off the clear bubble encasing her, but the woman jerked out of reflex, which gave Gavin, Alice, and Feng a chance to dodge around the machine.

“This way!” Gavin grabbed Alice’s hand and ran.

Glenda recovered quickly and spun to face them. Gavin jumped into a nearby cab, pulling Alice with him. The startled driver didn’t even have time to protest before Gavin shoved him out with a “Sorry!” and snapped the reins. The horses, already nervous about the mechanical, leaped forward. Feng managed to leap aboard as well, despite the rucksack that weighed him down.

The cab jolted down the street with the mechanical in pursuit. Brass footsteps thundered behind them. Alice shouted at people to get out of the way, and Gavin grimly steered the frantic horses. Glenda swiped at the cab, missed, and gouged a chunk out of the street. People and horses screamed and scattered. Other automatons skittered out of the way. Fear gripped Gavin’s heart. Even if they got away now, their situation remained dire. Phipps was a bulldog, willing and able to track them, and Gavin’s conspicuous airship made the situation worse. They had to escape, not only now but in the long term.

“Where should we go?” Alice cried, echoing his thoughts. “How do we get away?”

And then he knew. It came to him in a flash of inspiration, and he had no idea whether it was inspired by the clockwork plague or his own imagination, but either way, it might work. Hope replaced some of the fear.

“I have an idea,” he said. “But we left my fiddle.”

“I have it,” Alice said, brandishing it. “Didn’t you notice?”

“God, I love you.”

“Faster!” Feng shouted behind them.

Glenda swiped at the cab again, and this time she clipped it. The cab yawed sideways, and Alice clung grimly with her free hand. Gavin hauled on the reins, turning the yaw into a full-out left turn around a corner. The cab tipped on two wheels, then righted itself with a crash that slammed Gavin’s teeth together. The move caught Glenda by surprise, and she had to back up to make the turn, which bought Gavin a bit of lead. He shouted at the horses, but they were already going flat out.

“Glenda!” Alice called over her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this! The Third Ward is dead!”

But Glenda either didn’t hear or didn’t care. The mechanical came after them with implacable determination. The horses were slowing, tired, allowing Glenda to make up the lost time. Gavin listened. The streets here were nearly empty and the calliope music was growing louder. He pulled the horses to a stop and jumped out of the cab.

“Jump!” he said as Glenda brought both mechanical hands down. Feng and Alice leaped free as the mechanical smashed the cab to pieces. The panicked horses galloped away, dragging the remains with them. Glenda turned to face the trio, her expression stony.

“What are you doing?” Feng demanded, but Gavin was already moving.

“Come on!” He dashed down a side street, giving Alice and Feng no choice but to follow. There were still no people in evidence, but the narrow street was cluttered with front stoops, carts, piles of coal, and other street detritus. The trio leaped and twisted around it all, but Glenda was forced to slow a little.

“I’ll catch you eventually,” she shouted. “You can’t keep running!”

Gavin burst out onto a main street and into a crowd lining it. The calliope music leaped into full volume. Coming up the street was a man in a red top hat and a red-and-white striped shirt with garters just above the elbows. He wore a cloak flung back over his shoulders and he carried a silver-topped cane. Behind him lurched a great brass elephant, puffing steam from its tusks. Its gait was oddly uneven. Scarlet signs on the animal’s sides spelled out Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles in graceful, garish letters. Behind that came a horse wagon with an calliope on it played by an automaton, followed by the rest of the circus—clowns and acrobats and lion cages and girls on mechanical horses, all waving and smiling. The crowd that had gathered to watch stared, unsure if Gavin’s actions might be part of the show.

Without a pause, Gavin shoved through the crowd and made for the ringmaster at the front of the parade. He snatched the man’s hat off, revealing sandy hair.

“What the hell?” the ringmaster said, then blinked. “Gavin?”

“Great to see you, Dodd.” Gavin flicked the cloak free. “Just go with this and I’ll explain later.”

“Gavin, what are you—?” Alice began, but he shoved the top hat on her head, tossed the cloak around her shoulders, and ran around the other side of the lurching elephant without looking to see if Feng and Alice followed him. They did, however, and that was fortunate. Glenda reached the mouth of the side street, but her view of her quarry was blocked by the elephant, who bumbled along as if the people didn’t exist. Up top, the mahout looked down at them warily.

“Take off your goggles and scarf and your shirt,” Gavin whispered to Feng, keeping pace with the elephant. “The circus has Chinese. You’ll look like an acrobat. Give me the rucksack.”

“What about you?” Alice buttoned the cloak and drew it around herself, hiding her body and Gavin’s fiddle case. “And how do you know these people?”

Feng handed Gavin the rucksack, pulled off his shirt, and wrapped it around his head in a crude turban. He had a build that could pass for acrobatic, at a distance. Several people in the crowd had noticed Glenda’s mechanical, but they seemed to think it was part of the parade. They pointed and gasped with amazement. Glenda was momentarily stymied. She couldn’t move forward without crushing people or sweeping them aside and hurting them, which Gavin didn’t think she’d be willing to do.

A clown in white makeup, orange wig, and blue nose hurried up with a broom and a bucket. “What are you three doing? Do you speak English?”

“Bonzini!” Gavin said. “Remember me?”

“Gavin?” the clown gasped. “What in—?”

“I’m looking for two men and a woman!” Glenda boomed from the mechanical. “They just came this way. There’s a reward!”

“That’s torn it,” Alice said.

“No,” Feng said. “The crowd speaks French and German.”

“Thanks, Bonzini.” Gavin plucked the wig and nose from the clown, jammed them onto his own head and face, and grabbed Bonzini’s broom and bucket. The pack with the firefly cure in it went on Gavin’s back.

“Hey!” Bonzini protested.

But Gavin was already moving farther back, now using the calliope wagon and then a lion cage for cover. Alice and Feng came with. Glenda gave up on the crowd and was now nudging people aside so she could move onto the street. The calliope continued to hoot out something in D-major.

“Split up,” Gavin said.

“Why can’t we just keep hiding behind the calliope?” Alice hissed.

“The wagon’s high enough for her to see our feet.” Gavin brandished the broom. “Hide in plain sight. Smile and wave and tell anyone who asks that Dodd said it was all right.”

Gavin followed the lion cage with the broom over his shoulder, taking care that the bristles blocked Glenda’s view of his face. Behind Gavin, a pair of jugglers tossed clubs and balls. Alice and Feng dropped farther back into the parade, smiling and waving as they went. The parade moved ahead with aching slowness. The horse drawing the lion cage dropped manure onto the street right in front of the spot where Glenda had finally worked her way through the parade audience to the curb. Gavin swallowed hard and kept his head down as he paused and swept the smelly stuff into the bucket. Glenda scanned the street with flat, hard eyes. Gavin felt her gaze rest on him for a moment, and he forced himself to put a jaunty spring into his step, though tension dried his mouth and tightened his knuckles on the bucket. He was just a lowly sweeper clown. Not worth examining closely. Glenda narrowed her eyes and her mechanical took a step forward. Gavin held his breath. Then Glenda turned and stomped away. The crowd cheered and pointed at her, still sure she was part of the parade. Gavin let out his breath and stole a glance over his shoulder. Alice and Feng smiled and waved near a troop of acrobats. The automaton on the calliope finished its song and swung into another one. Gavin continued on his way with the bucket full of manure.

Eventually the parade made its way to a field at the edge of town. The big striped tent—called the Tilt, Gavin remembered—rose up among a number of smaller tents and circus wagons. Off to one side waited the red locomotive and bright boxcars Gavin had seen from the airship earlier just before a clockworker fugue had taken him away. If not for the clockwork plague and the unexpected memory of his father, he might have recognized the train right away instead of recalling it later. He had also seen the flyers for the Kalakos Circus plastered about Luxembourg by the advance man, but they were in French and he hadn’t paid close attention to them. He wasn’t sure how he had missed the name; the French version wasn’t so very different.

The parade continued right up to the complex of tents. Behind the parade came an enormous crowd, all ready to see the show. The performers quickly scattered, some toward the Tilt, some to the sideshow tents, and others to direct the oncoming crowd toward the ticket sellers, who wore stovepipe hats with oversized tickets attached to the top so people could locate them. An intricately decorated mechanical clock at the entrance of the Tilt ran backward, counting down the minutes until the performance began. A life-sized female automaton was attached to the clock, and even as Gavin watched, she jerked to life. She had only head, chest, and arms, and Gavin assumed this made her sufficiently inhuman to make her legal under Luxembourg law.

“Mesdames et messieurs!” she called in a voice that carried from one end of the circus to the other. “Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes! Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes!” And then she went still.

Nearly an hour before the show, according to the clock. The extra time, Gavin recalled, gave the audience a chance to buy tickets, then get bored and decide to spend money at the sideshow.

A firm grip took Gavin’s elbow. “The ringmaster wants to see you in his car,” said Bonzini, “and you better not have sneezed inside my nose.”

The ringmaster kept an entire train car to himself. Alice took off the red top hat. Feng pulled on his shirt and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. Bonzini ushered the three of them inside, but didn’t enter himself. The car had a large bed, comfortable chairs, two wardrobes, a small stove, full bookshelves, and a perfectly functional bar. It hadn’t changed since Gavin had seen it more than two years ago. Neither had Dodd, who was waiting for them.

“Good God, Gavin,” he said, his face split into a wide grin. “I hope you have a good explanation for nearly wrecking my parade today. Who are these people? And where’s Cousin Felix?”

He pulled Gavin into a warm embrace without waiting for an answer, and Gavin suddenly found himself at the top of an upswell of emotion. His throat thickened, and words wouldn’t come. The memory of Captain Felix Naismith’s last moments slammed through Gavin, and he saw the captain’s expression as a pirate’s glass fléchette sliced his flesh and ended his life. He heard the small sound that escaped the captain’s throat and felt the thud as the captain’s body slammed into the deck.

Dodd read Gavin’s expression. “No.”

“Yeah,” Gavin said thickly. “Uh, this may take a while to explain.”

“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante minutes!”

“I have fifty minutes,” Dodd said.

Alice set Gavin’s fiddle and the rucksack with the cure in the corner and everyone sat down. Gavin introduced Alice and Feng and then started in with the loss of the Juniper to pirates, moving to the death of Dodd’s cousin, Captain Felix Naismith. Dodd’s face hardened as the story progressed. Alice went to the little bar and came back with a half-full glass, which Dodd drained with a shaky hand when Gavin finished.

“I haven’t seen him in almost two years,” Dodd said in a hoarse voice. “I had no idea he was dead. Oh, God. What am I going to do?”

Gavin didn’t know what to say. Alice and Feng, who didn’t know Dodd at all, sat in uncomfortable silence.

“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans vingt minutes!”

“We go months without contact,” Dodd said, “but that was all right. I was so glad when he got off that stupid scow he played second mate for and got on a real ship, and he was so happy when Boston Mail gave him his own command. Youngest captain in their fleet, he is. Was. Now he’s gone. Shit.”

Alice coughed, and Dodd raised his glass to her in apology, then stared off into space. Dodd was young himself for a circus ringmaster, barely thirty, with large brown eyes that made him look even younger, despite the side whiskers. Gavin glanced at him, then around the little car. Whenever the Juniper was in a European port, Captain Naismith checked to see if the Kalakos Circus was in town too, and if it was, he always took Gavin and Tom with him to visit. The cousins caught up while the cabin boys got free run of the show. After the performance, Dodd gave them treats from the grease wagon, or even a windup toy from his workshop.

“I’m sorry to bring bad news,” Gavin said. “I miss him, too. And Tom. But there’s more.”

Gavin gave a thumbnail sketch of how Alice’s aunt Edwina had used her cure for the clockwork plague to manipulate Gavin and Alice into joining the Third Ward so Edwina could destroy it, and how Lieutenant Phipps was now chasing them—

“Wait,” Dodd interrupted. He pointed at Alice. “You’re a baroness who can cure the clockwork plague?” He pointed at Gavin. “And you’ve become a clockworker?”

Gavin nodded. “Yes. Now we—”

“What do you do?” Dodd interrupted again, this time pointing at Feng. “Walk on water?”

“With a good running start,” Feng replied.

“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinq minutes!”

A sharp knock came at the door, and a red-haired man with startling blue eyes poked his head into the car. He wore an Arran fisherman’s sweater and a cloth cap. “Dodd? Show’s on. Are you— Gavin! Good Lord, lad, it’s been ages. Where are Tom and Felix?”

Dodd rose a little unsteadily. “They’re dead, Nathan.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Nathan strode in and caught Dodd in an embrace that went on for rather longer than most Englishmen or Irishmen felt comfortable with. Gavin suddenly put together a number of cues that had completely escaped him when he was younger. He glanced at Feng, who cocked his head, and the ridiculousness of the situation occurred to him. A baroness with an iron spider on her arm, a plague-infested airman, and an undiplomatic Chinaman hiding from a giant mechanical with a circus ringmaster who fell in love with men. A wave of mirth suddenly overcame Gavin, and inappropriate laughter bubbled in his throat. Alice glared at him. Feng looked surprised. The laughter bubbled up again, and this time Gavin couldn’t stop it. He laughed and laughed and pounded the little table with his fist and laughed some more. The odds of any of this happening were so high, they were impossible to calculate. Just the idea that his own ancestors would meet and produce offspring that would end in him while Alice’s and Feng’s own families were doing the same thing, completely unaware that the culmination of their work and toil and sex would end in a circus with a ringmaster who dabbed it up with men. Trillions upon trillions of events, both enormous and minuscule, had to take place in perfect sequence in order for this meeting to occur and if any one of them had failed to happen, the three of them would be somewhere else—or perhaps they wouldn’t even exist. Best of all, they wouldn’t even know the difference. Maybe they didn’t know the difference now.

Gavin doubled over, cackling and howling at the joke. Voices and faces swirled in a twisted rainbow around him. A slight stinging to his face told him he’d been slapped, but it didn’t faze him in the slightest. He laughed and laughed and then the world went black.

Sometime later, Gavin bolted awake. He always bolted awake. The attack by the pirate Madoc Blue and the lashing Gavin had endured afterward had destroyed peaceful sleep and gradual waking. By now, he had forgotten what it was to slip calmly out of slumber and greet the day without sweat on his forehead and his heart in his mouth. He sat up and found he was on the bed with his shoes off.

The sunlight had moved, and the car was dimmer. At the little table sat Nathan Storm, his sunset hair gleaming in the low light. The man was smoking a pipe, and the pungent tobacco smoke floated in a blue cloud near the ceiling. Everyone else was gone.

“Nice to see you among the living.” Nathan puffed gently.

“Where’s Alice?” Gavin asked.

“Exploring the midway. She slept and then wanted some air.” He drew on the pipe again. “That was interesting. You were cackling like…”

Gavin found his shoes on the floor and laced them on. “Like a lunatic? Yeah. Clockworkers are mad. You know that.”

“What’s it like?” Nathan said.

“It’s hard to describe.” Gavin sighed. “The plague shows me things, strange things, true things. I’m not insane. Not really.”

“You sounded pretty mad. You really hurt Dodd.”

Gavin winced. “Shit. Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Nathan.”

His pipe went out, and he tapped it into a bowl on the table. “You’re apologizing to the wrong person.”

“He and Felix aren’t—weren’t—really cousins, were they?”

That earned him a short bark of laughter. “You were young, weren’t you? They met in Hamburg when Felix was working some leaky old airship and Dodd was still winding spiders for Viktor Kalakos. They tried to stay together, meeting up in whatever large cities they could, but it just didn’t work. They did stay close friends. Dodd doesn’t have any other family, so he started calling him Cousin Felix, and it stuck.”

“And now you two…”

“Not ‘now,’ Gavin. For years. Since before Felix started bringing you to visit.”

“Right.” Gavin rubbed his face and remembered Simon, whose romantic tastes ran in the same direction. What were the chances? The corners of his mouth quirked, and he quickly ended that line of thought. “Even clockworkers can be stupid.”

“Damn right. You want something to eat? I’ve got beans and bread here, unless you’d fancy a candyfloss.”

At the mention of food, Gavin’s stomach growled, and he went light-headed. “How long was I… away?”

“All the way through the first show. The second starts in a few minutes.”

Nathan brought him a plate at the bed as if he were an invalid, but Gavin got up and ate at the table. He felt perfectly fine, except for the hunger.

“Where’s Dodd?” he asked around a mouthful.

Nathan looked surprised. “Dodd’s in the ring. The show must go on. If you’re done eating, let’s go find your two friends so you can tell me what you’re really here for. I don’t think you hid in the parade just to have an excuse to deliver bad news.”

Outside, afternoon was fading into evening. The Tilt and the tents cast canted shadows over brightly painted wagons. Gavin knew from his previous visits that the wealthier performers lived in the wagons, which were rolled into the train’s boxcars when circus left town. Poorer performers lived in tents. Other tents housed the sideshow exhibits and the animal cages. Smells of fried food and cooking sugar mingled with calliope music. Men, women, and children wandered about. A few stood in line outside the main entrance of the Tilt, handing over their tickets so they could file inside to find seats as the clock automaton shouted in French that the show would begin in one minute. The performers were out of sight behind the Tilt, awaiting cues and entries.

“There you are!” Alice threw her arms around his neck in a near choke hold and kissed him. “You scared the life out of me. Us.”

“I’m sorry. I need to apologize to Dodd.”

“You must wait,” Feng said. “The performance will begin soon. Mr. Storm, could we go into the main tent? We should not be out in the open in case Phipps has tracked us here.”

Nathan nodded and took them past the ticket taker into the Tilt. Inside, tall rows of bleachers were bent around a wide red ring, and chatting, laughing people filled most of the spaces. Sawdust lay scattered on the ground. Food sellers moved among them with trays of rich-smelling roasted peanuts and pink cotton candy. Off to one side, the automaton played its calliope. Just as the group arrived on one side of the ring, the tent flaps on the opposite side exploded open and Dodd strode into the Tilt. He had his red hat back, and his silver-topped cane waved in time to the music. Behind him came the mechanical elephant, its feet thudding unevenly on the packed earthen floor. The mahout looked a little seasick at the uneven footsteps. Then came a rainbow explosion of clowns and a group of horses, both live and mechanical, accompanied by slender girls in white feathered dresses, and behind them came acrobats in tight red shirts. A trainer led a lion on a leash and made it roar. For the hell of it, Gavin snatched the recording nightingale from his pocket and pressed the left eye just as the trainer made the lion roar a second time. Then he held the nightingale to his ear and pressed the right eye. It opened its beak and roared like a little lion, which made the real lion look around, startled. Alice shot him a hard look. Oops. He hadn’t realized it would be so loud. Gavin stuffed the nightingale into his pocket and looked innocent. The parade, a smaller one than the one in town, stomped round the ring and stormed out to cheers and applause from the audience while Dodd went into the center and leaped onto a small platform with stars on it.

“Bienvenue,” he said, “au le Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles!”

The audience, pleased that Dodd spoke their language, burst into more applause just as a troupe of clowns somersaulted into the ring. Dodd got out of the way, and the show began in earnest. He caught sight of Nathan and his entourage lurking at the edge of the bleachers and trotted over.

“I’m sorry,” Gavin said before he could speak. “We clockworkers do stupid things sometimes. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I’m sorry.”

Dodd nodded. “You’re my last link to Felix, Gavin. I can’t be angry with you.”

“I need help, Dodd,” Gavin told him. The audience laughed. “And only you can give it.”

The ringmaster looked wary. “How?”

In the ring, a clown pedaled around on a unicycle with a bucket of whitewash, which he threatened to toss over the audience. Gavin swallowed, suddenly nervous. Dodd was part of the idea he’d gotten earlier, when Glenda was chasing them with the mechanical. He hadn’t had time to think about it further since the chase had started, and now that everything had slowed down, the day’s events were catching up with him. He glanced at Alice. She and Feng were counting on him. If Dodd refused to help, they’d be in serious trouble.

“We found out that plague cures have been invented or discovered more than once,” Gavin said, “but England and China have suppressed them. English cures were never able to cure clockworkers, only regular victims, but the Chinese ambassador told us the Dragon Men—Chinese clockworkers—might have a full cure.”

The clown flung his bucket, but turned it aside at the last moment. The audience whooped at him, half laughing, half fearful.

“So you need to get to China,” Dodd said. “I’m sorry, Gavin. We aren’t going to China.”

Gavin shook his head. “We don’t need to go that far. I have an airship, but she’s easy to spot and track. It’s how Phipps and the others followed us to Luxembourg. We need to lose them and earn enough money to fuel the ship for a flight to Peking.”

“What’s that to do with me?”

“The circus is a perfect cover,” Gavin blurted out. “You’re heading east. I can hide the ship on the train, and we can hide among you, do some work to earn money. Once we get far enough along, we’ll leave.”

“Oh, Gavin—I don’t know,” Dodd said. “I like you. Hell, you’re almost like a little brother to me. But the coppers already give us the hairy eye when we come to town.”

Feng muttered something in Chinese that sounded like a swear word, and Gavin’s heart sank. The clown drew his bucket back one more time. “Phipps has no real jurisdiction outside England,” Gavin said, still trying.

“Doesn’t seem to stop her. And I don’t know that I have any paying work for you. Look, I want to help, but—”

“How long has that elephant been lurching like that?” Alice interrupted. The clown threw the bucket’s contents, but all that came out was confetti. The audience laughed and cheered.

“What?” Dodd said. “Uh… two months, perhaps three. We bought it from a clockworker several years ago, but it seems to be breaking down. No one knows how to fix it.”

“Is that so?” Alice said.

Interlude

“I was that close, Lieutenant,” Glenda fretted. “I practically had them in my hands.”

“So did I,” Phipps reminded her. “And I am not worried. There are only so many places they can run to, and Alice is on a mission.”

“What do you mean?” Simon asked. Once again, they were in a hotel room, though this one was rather better than the previous one. Clean, airy, with fresh linens on the beds and flowers on the nightstand, and a water closet on every floor. Once again, Glenda perched on a chair, Simon sprawled on the bed, and Phipps paced the floor.

“Haven’t you been listening to the talk on the street? She’s curing people, one by one, with that gauntlet of hers.” Phipps unconsciously flexed her own brass hand. “They break local laws about entering houses of plague, Gavin Ennock sings, Alice Michaels scratches people with that ‘sword’ of hers, and people call them angels for breaking the law.”

“They managed to hide the airship,” Glenda growled. “There’s been no sign of the thing.”

“There’s also been no sign of Dr. Clef since the affair at the greenhouse,” Simon put in. “That worries me a little.”

“It worries me, too,” Phipps admitted. “Though it may mean he has died.”

Glenda muttered, “Life is never so easy.”

“You do have a point.” Phipps sighed. “We must operate on the assumption that Dr. Clef is still alive and very dangerous. The trouble is, we’ve been underestimating them. All of them. Gavin is a clockworker, with all a clockworker’s requisite cunning.”

“And madness.” Glenda poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. “I’ll wager Alice is enjoying herself. At any rate, we’ll never find them at hotels now. They’re going to be wary of public houses. Unfortunately, they could hide any number of other places, including the homes of grateful plague victims.”

Already the pieces were falling together. Strategy and planning, three and four steps ahead. If this happens, then that. If that happens, then this. Though it was difficult to think through the anger—and the fear. She wasn’t afraid of what Gavin and Dr. Clef might do—not really. She was afraid of failing and earning that tiny shake of her father’s head, the one that tormented her every night when she went to bed.

Phipps drummed metal fingers on the windowsill, as was fast becoming her habit. Was she doing the right thing? The just thing? Was she pursuing Gavin and Alice and Dr. Clef out of true justice, or because her father—

No. She couldn’t afford doubt now. Aloud, she said, “The smart thing would be for them to hide, true, but they won’t do the smart thing. I repeat to you: Alice is on a mission, and she can’t accomplish it in hiding. That’s how we’ll get her.”

“You mean to set up an ambush,” Simon said.

“Absolutely. I believe now is also the time to visit the gendarmes and cash in some Crown influence. They can search the city while we set a trap at the appropriate place.”

“What’s the appropriate place?” Glenda asked.

“At the highest concentration of plague victims, of course.” Phipps gave a grim smile. “I want to run a check on the mechanicals first thing in the morning. And then we’re going to shop for bread and wine.”

Chapter Five

Alice shut the huge access panel on the elephant’s left side and set the spanner on the workbench with a clank. Grease stained her face and blouse. The Tilt felt big and empty now, with its rows of vacant bleachers and high canvas roof. All the sawdust was trampled into the ground, and the bleacher rows were littered with dead peanut bags. Dodd stood nearby, watching closely, while Gavin and Feng occupied front-row bleachers.

“That was fascinating,” Alice said. “I even made some improvements on the memory wheels and increased the visual acuity.”

“Meaning what?” Dodd asked.

“It doesn’t necessarily need a rider. Look.” With a sidelong glance at Gavin and a certain amount of pride, she gestured at the big brass elephant, which came smoothly to its feet and plodded steadily around the ring, hissing and puffing steam. Alice gestured again, and it stopped. She felt like a sorceress who had conjured a steaming elemental from the depths of the earth.

Gavin applauded, and Alice turned a little pink. She had to admit that she had done this in no small part to impress him. After everything he had done this morning—rescuing her from Phipps, getting them away from Simon’s mechanical, and ingeniously hiding them in a circus—she felt a need to impress him.

“All right,” Dodd said. “We have a deal.”

“So you’ll take us with you?” Gavin said. Alice made the elephant sit like an enormous dog. This was fun.

“Absolutely,” Dodd said. “We haven’t had anyone who can service the machines in a long time. That’s why we were heading to Kiev.”

“Kiev?” Feng got to his feet, concerned. “Is that wise? The Ukrainian Empire is the source of the clockwork plague.”

“Is it?” Alice straightened. “I’ve never heard that.”

“It’s never been proven,” Gavin said slowly, “and not something everyone discusses. Kiev does seem to have the earliest cases of plague on record.”

“Earliest cases?” Feng said. “That’s an understatement worthy of my father. According to the histories, in 1750 the Dnepro River boiled in the center of Kiev and the plague rose up like a dragon and devoured the city.”

“The river boiled?” Alice repeated. “What on earth does that mean?”

“No doubt some hyperbole found its way into the history,” Feng said.

“Which only goes to show that the stories are unreliable,” Dodd pointed out. “Boiling rivers indeed!”

“Then the plague rose up again ten years later,” Feng continued, undaunted, “and one more time twenty years after that. Kiev seems to attract the plague. No one has more cases of it, and no one has an earlier source of it.”

“Then why go there?” Gavin said.

“The plague is at an ebb right now,” Dodd told him. “Besides, we have Alice, and everyone in the circus is immune by now. The Ukrainians do have world-class automatons. They do have pots of money. And they love a good circus. If we keep our noses clean, we can sell out two shows a day for a month. We’ve played there a dozen times before with no trouble. It’s true they don’t like Jews or Catholics, but we have neither in the circus.”

“I was thinking we would go south, through Turkey,” Feng said, obviously ill at ease.

“That would be out of our way,” Gavin pointed out. “And the Ukrainians have paraffin oil, don’t they?”

“They practically invented the stuff,” Dodd said. “Russia pays them tribute in petroleum, and they’ve done some incredible things with it. I’ve already arranged to rent space and Linda says she saw us in Ukraine, so—”

“Linda?” Alice interrupted.

“She and her husband, Charlie, tell fortunes in the sideshow,” Dodd answered. “They’re very good, especially since Charlie’s accident.”

“You base this decision on a fortune-teller?” Feng said incredulously.

“And everything else I mentioned,” Dodd said. “Look, I’ve already decided that we’re going. If you want to come along, come. We can use Miss Michaels. The rest of you are dead weight, but—”

“Hey!” Gavin said. “I can play the fiddle!”

“And he sings,” Alice pointed out, feeling defensive.

“I could walk a tightrope, too,” Gavin muttered. “And learn the trapeze. Wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Stupid clockwork plague gives me stupid extra reflexes. May as well make some extra money out of it before it kills me.”

“The Flying Tortellis would drop something on my head if I put you in the ring,” Dodd said with a grin. “Besides, you’re supposed to be hiding. I was joking about the dead weight. You really do have trouble with British humor, don’t you?”

“Now, look—”

“I’ve never visited the Ukrainian Empire,” Alice interrupted. “But if it’s the center of the plague, I should certainly go there with Gavin. Why are you so unhappy, Feng?”

“They are Cossack barbarians,” Feng spat. “They build and pollute and fight. They care nothing for balance or beauty.”

“You worry about balance?” Alice asked archly.

“And the Chinese put them in power,” Gavin said.

“That doesn’t make them any less barbaric,” Feng shot back.

“In any case, I want to go there with Gavin,”Alice repeated. She stood the elephant back up and sent it to the side of the ring. “But please explain that remark about power.”

Feng crossed his arms. “England had an arrangement with China,” he said. “After the Napoleonic Wars ended, it became clear that parts of Europe—the west—and the Ottoman Empire—the east—could unite and become a threat to Britannia and China. Our governments didn’t want that to happen. So we came to an understanding. Britannia took the west and China the east.”

“I don’t need a history lesson,” Dodd complained. “Will the elephant work for anyone, Miss Michaels, or just you?”

Alice waved him away. “Anyone, Ringmaster. What do you mean by took, Feng?”

“Took charge.” Feng was pacing again. “Napoleon’s nephew was supposed to rule France after the old emperor was exiled, but the man died. With no strong ruler, France fell into civil war, and now it is four fragments. Why do you think that was? Prussia is ten tiny kingdoms who never agree. Why is that? Your Calvinists and Lutherans war with each other as well. Why does this happen?”

“You’re going to tell me the Third Ward keeps everyone off balance.”

“Indeed.”

“Up!” Dodd said, gesturing. “Up! Miss Michaels, he isn’t moving.”

“You have to use your left hand, Ringmaster,” Alice replied absently. “I assume China has a role as well?”

“China,” Gavin put in, “destabilized the east. Russia and Poland had split Ukraine in half and were draining it dry. The resources gave both countries enough power to make China—and Britain—nervous. Then the clockwork plague hit Ukraine again. For some reason, it created more clockworkers than normal in Kiev. A Cossack captain named Ivan Gonta ended up with a special talent for war machines, and his superior Maksym Zalizniak used Gonta’s inventions to start a revolution.”

The elephant got up and lumbered around the ring. It picked up speed, steam trailing from its tusks. Dodd waved frantically at it, but it didn’t slow down.

“Oh! I vaguely remember something about that from a history book, now that you mention specific names,” Alice said. “Gonta and the other clockworkers put together hundreds of war machines and slaughtered thousands of Russians and Poles until they abandoned Ukraine to the Cossacks.”

“Hello there!” Dodd shouted. “Runaway elephant!”

“Did you ever stop to wonder where Gonta and Zalizniak found the money and materials to build all those machines?” Feng asked.

Alice gestured sharply, and the elephant screeched to a halt. “I have the feeling it came from China.”

“Was that a malfunction?” Dodd asked. “Because I swear I did the exact same thing.”

Feng nodded. “The emperor chose wisely—the Cossacks are content to defend their borders without expanding them, and they make an excellent wedge between Russia and Poland.”

“I am your boss, Miss Michaels,” Dodd said.

“Of course you are,” Gavin murmured.

“At any rate,” Feng concluded, “the ruling Cassocks are actually crueler to their own people than the Poles or Russians ever were. It’s the nature of the warrior class.”

“And we’re walking right into them?”

“Steaming into them,” Dodd said. “We have a train. But I told you not to worry. They love us. Now, show me how to work this damned elephant.”

Alice gave him a wide smile. “What’s the magic word, Ringmaster? As a hint, I’ll tell you that it isn’t damned.”

Gavin laughed, and Alice thought it was the most musical thing she had ever heard.

Later that afternoon, Alice opened the hatchway on the Lady of Liberty in her hiding place at the abandoned stable and climbed belowdecks. The familiar narrow corridor faced with doors greeted her. The creaking space felt eerie and claustrophobic without Gavin here. Alice went past her stateroom all the way down to the end and slid the last door open. Inside was the tiny laboratory Gavin had built into the airship. The entire place was set up for efficiency. Tools hung on the bulkheads, tabletops folded up, tiny drawers kept everything pigeonholed. It even had a tiny forge, which was currently glowing and made the room hot and stuffy. The place was also hung with half a dozen clocks. They ticked madly, their exposed gears whirling. Stuck everywhere were pieces of paper, large and small. Every one of them had the same drawing, one of a three-dimensional wire cube that twisted Alice’s eye. Part of the back passed over the front, or perhaps the front passed under the back. The drawings were done in pencil, charcoal, colored ink, and one medium that looked suspiciously like blood.

Dr. Clef was standing in the midst of all this with his back to Alice. He seemed to be scratching something in a notebook. Click leaped down from the rim of a porthole and hurried over to her, purring loudly. Alice scooped him up. His skin was cool and smooth.

“Click,” she said. “Oh, I’ve missed you.”

Dr. Clef turned and pushed his goggles up. “Alice! When did you come back, my dear? I have not seen you in weeks.”

“Weeks?” Alice stroked Click’s brass back. “Doctor, it’s been only two days.”

“Oh. Are you sure?” He glanced at the clocks. “How interesting. Did you know that gravity affects a clock?”

“Er… no.”

“Look at these.” He pointed at the ones closest to the ceiling. “They are moving at a slightly different rate than the ones down there at the floor. It gets more noticeable when I put them on top of the ship’s envelope. It is because they are farther away from Earth’s gravity.”

“They look the same to me, Dr. Clef.”

Dr. Clef shrugged. “They are not.”

“Are you trying to re-create your Impossible Cube, Doctor?” she asked.

“With difficulty.” He pointed at a small cable spool on the worktable. It was wound with fat, stiff-looking wire. “I have managed to reforge some of my special alloy using nails and other scraps from the barn, but I do not think I can re-create the Cube itself. And I do miss it.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It is—was—unique in all time and space.” Dr. Clef sighed. “I am beginning to think it cannot be re-created, for that would violate the basic nature of its uniqueness. But look at what I have learned while I am trying.” He held up a notebook with a number of formulae scribbled in it. “When you measure certain events, you change them. You can, for example, discover how fast a certain piece of… of matter is moving or you can learn its location, but you can’t pin down both. It is very odd.”

“Ridiculous.” Alice waved her free hand. “There. You can see how fast my hand is moving and you can see exactly where it is.”

“Nonetheless. It is especially true for things so tiny, they cannot be seen and who move so fast, they cannot be captured.”

“Then how do you know they exist?”

“The numbers prove it,” he said, brandishing the notebook again. “It all related to my poor Impossible Cube. I miss it so. The beauty. The symmetry. The way it twisted the universe about itself. Everything about it was perfect.”

“Perhaps you can still rebuild it.”

“As I said, I am beginning to think this is not possible. Can you tell me any more about the way it was destroyed?”

Alice remembered watching Gavin holding the Impossible Cube beneath the Third Ward as he sang a single crystal note that shattered everything around him. Everything but her. Then he dropped the Cube, which fell through every color of the spectrum and vanished in a white flash the moment it touched the floor.

“Only what I’ve told you already,” she said. “Nothing new. Doctor, the way the Cube twists itself—”

“It does no such thing,” Dr. Clef interrupted, agitated. “The Cube is a constant. It twists the universe, but since we are in the universe, we think the Cube is twisted.”

“Of course, of course,” Alice reassured him, though she had no idea what he was talking about. “But I meant that it might be better if you left the Cube alone. Perhaps it isn’t meant to be re-created at all.”

An odd light came into his eyes. “Do you think so?”

“Quite.”

“Hmmm. Maybe I should leave it alone, then. Did you bring back any raspberry jam? I have not had any in quite some time.”

“Oh!” Alice jolted back to the nonscientific world. “We did bring more food, but no jam, I’m sorry to say. Gavin and Feng are down in the barn. We think we have a way to move the ship, and we’ll need your help.”

Dr. Clef rubbed his hands together. “A project! I will be pleased to take part.”

“Madam?” The door to Alice’s stateroom opened and Kemp poked his head into the corridor. “Is that you?”

“Of course it is, Kemp.”

“Thank heavens!” He bustled into the corridor. “I’ve been having a dreadful time keeping the little automatons under control, and I finally had to lock them up. We’re completely out of food, and—”

“Yes, Kemp. You’ve done an admirable job and we couldn’t have survived without you. Now, come down, both of you.”

Kemp managed to look pleased despite his lack of facial features. “Madam.”

On deck, they filed past the little generator, which had only recently been switched back on. It contentedly puffed steam and paraffin oil smoke, a shockingly daring woman smoking a cigarette. Above them, ropes creaked and the envelope’s lacy endoskeleton glowed blue, indicating that it was receiving power and lifting the hull. They all climbed down to the barn floor. At the entrance of the barn was Gavin, who had abandoned his black clothes for an ordinary work shirt, brown trousers, and a cloth cap. He looked like a handsome young farmer. With him was Nathan Storm, his own cap barely concealing his sunset hair, and a team of four horses pulling a wagon, which carried a pile of material covered in canvas.

“What’s this? What’s this?” Dr. Clef asked, and Alice made introductions. Dr. Clef clapped his hands in glee. “The circus! A perfect place to hide ourselves, then. But how will we hide the ship?”

“With this.” Gavin pulled the canvas off the wagon, revealing a pile of wheels and axles.

Dr. Clef clapped his hands again. “Of course, of course. I should have seen. Shall we work now?”

“I told you he would understand quickly,” Gavin said to Nathan, who only lit his pipe. They hauled the Lady out of the barn and tethered her a few feet above the ground so they could set to work. The endoskeleton continued to glow its lacy blue, and Alice felt nervous and exposed, like a fat rabbit on a meadow with hawks cruising overhead, but there was nothing for it.

“Alice,” Gavin said, “could you bring down your little automatons to assist? And then…”

She cocked her head. “And then what?”

“Uh… maybe you could go for a walk? Or just stay out of sight behind the barn. This shouldn’t take long.”

Her ire escalated. “Because you don’t think I’m qualified to help? How can you possibly think—”

“No, no.” He held his hands up. “I just don’t think you should see this.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her voice rose and her metal fist clenched. “I’m too ladylike, is that it?”

“Not at all.”

“Uh-oh,” Nathan said.

“So I’m not a lady, then?” Alice said.

“What? No! I just… Alice, you’ve never seen a clockworker in a full work fugue before, have you?”

“And it’s not appropriate to me because I’m a lady.” She folded her arms. “It’s foolish to give up a pair of hands because of some misguided principles. I’m helping, and the sooner we get started, the better.”

Gavin closed his eyes. “All right. Let’s get started, then.”

They had to work quickly, before they were spotted and word filtered back to Phipps, wherever she was. Alice was no slouch at mechanical work, but even she was amazed at Gavin and Dr. Clef. They both circled the pile of parts and tools for some time, studying them, with her little automatons hovering and skittering nearby. Kemp and Click also awaited orders. A blank look came over first Gavin’s eyes, then Dr. Clef’s. They dove into the parts with great glee and rushed with them toward the Lady, barking orders to the automatons as they went. Alice followed along, and was startled when Gavin thrust an axle into her hands.

“Grind these ends smooth,” he boomed. “And be quick about it! Maybe then I can ride you into battle.” Then he turned away and flung a handful of bolts at one of the little whirligigs, who caught them in midair. He didn’t even seem to recognize Alice. At first she felt indignant. Then she felt sickened. She told herself it was the clockwork plague, not him, and when a clockworker entered a fugue, nothing mattered but the work, but she still felt like she’d been slapped.

“What are you waiting for, girl? The usual offer to tup you for half a sandwich?” Gavin snarled. His eyes were wild and his hair half stood up. Oil streaked his face and hands like blood. “Move!”

Face flaming, Alice did as she was told, and when she was finished, accepted another snarl from Gavin, this time to tighten bolts. The little automatons flitted and scampered about. He snatched her automatons and spiders one by one, opened them up, and changed their memory wheels around. They squeaked in protest, and Alice bit back a cry of alarm. Dr. Clef worked elsewhere, shouting orders at Kemp and Nathan. Click stayed out of the way. Alice felt as tense as the metal she tightened.

“Faster!” Gavin bellowed at her. “You’re slow and clumsy. Typical of dog meat.”

Alice kept her head down, feeling small and stupid and hating herself for it. Gavin had become another person, a sneering stranger, and she didn’t like him. Telling herself that it wasn’t his fault didn’t help much. After being barked at for the fourth time, she began to see why so many clockworkers were forced to build automaton assistants. The only saving grace was that Gavin and Dr. Clef seemed to be working three times as hard as anyone else.

“Hey!” Gavin dropped the automaton he was altering and dashed over to Dr. Clef, who was frantically reworking a set of wheels. “Those measurements are wrong, you fat idiot. You’re off by a good sixteenth-inch.”

Dr. Clef’s jowls reddened. “You’re not half the man your mother is, you grease-faced dog. The tracks are clearly—”

“Did you think I can’t see the obvious?” Gavin barked. “My mind is sharper than any tool you’ll ever touch, and certainly a good deal larger.”

Dr. Clef picked up a sledgehammer and hefted it with an ease and power that caught Alice off guard. She had forgotten that the clockwork plague enhanced his strength and reflexes just as much as Gavin’s. “We will see how large a tool I have.”

“Just a moment!” Nathan plucked the hammer from Dr. Clef’s hand. “Over there, Doctor. Does that axle look crooked to you?”

“And, Gavin,” Alice said, hurrying forward, “I don’t think that automaton is functioning properly.”

Both clockworkers turned, distracted, and moved fairly quickly to their new tasks. Nathan set the sledgehammer down.

“Clockworkers don’t work well together in fugue,” he murmured.

“I can see that,” Alice said.

“You!” Gavin snapped. “The one with an ass like a bag of laundry! Bring me that box of parts.”

“Don’t shout back. You just saw how it only makes them worse,” Nathan said quietly. “And don’t take it personally.”

Alice’s jaw was tight. “I’m trying.”

In a surprisingly short time the Lady sported three sets of train wheels on her underside, and all the automatons had been modified. Still, the sun was setting, and Alice felt dirty, greasy, and half starved, and the steady stream of invective stuck like pitch to her skin. It would never come off.

“We’re done,” she called up to Gavin, who was busy carving ivy leaves into a box that he had mounted on the deck. The box had two buttons on it, one red and one green. His hands moved with inhuman speed. “Gavin! We’re done!”

“Not close, you ignorant filth. Do something useful with your fingers besides twiddle yourself, and bring me a screwdriver.”

Setting her mouth, Alice strode up the gangplank and grabbed him by the shoulders. He shook her off and snarled at her like a dog. A blob of spittle flew from his mouth and landed warm on the back of her hand. She jumped back, eyes wide at the monstrosity of it.

“How dare you lay hands on me?” he snarled. “Keep your disgusting hands to—”

Water doused him from head to foot. It plastered his hair to his scalp and ran off him in rivulets. Gavin gasped and gaped for a long moment. Alice scrambled backward and Nathan set down his bucket.

“Are you yourself, then?” he asked Gavin mildly.

There was a long pause. Gavin dropped the tools, and they thudded on the planking. “Are we done? What time is it? Why am I all wet?” His voice was normal, and held none of the sneering tone she’d been hearing all afternoon. She felt so relieved, she was afraid she would half burst into tears, but she was angry, too. Why hadn’t he come out of it when she talked to him?

“We had to snap you out,” Alice said stiffly. “Thank you, Mr. Storm. We should get moving, before someone spots the ship and gossip spreads.”

Gavin uselessly mopped at his face with his sopping sleeve. “Did it work? Are we ready? Why won’t anyone answer me?”

“I’m assuming it worked.” Alice forced her voice to stay level. Looking at Gavin made her angry at the way he had treated her. It’s not his fault. It’s not his fault. He told me to walk away, she told herself. But it didn’t help. “You and Dr. Clef were doing nothing but decoration, and we probably shouldn’t wait for that.”

“You’re mad at me,” he said. “Did I say or… do anything to you? God, Alice, I’m sorry. I don’t—”

“Not now, Gavin,” she said. “We need to move.”

Gavin looked like someone had kicked his puppy. She knew she was being unreasonable, that she should apologize or offer to hear him out, but she couldn’t seem to do it.

“We’re ready up here,” she called over the gunwale.

Nathan had disembarked. The Lady was still floating a few feet above the ground, and her new wheels just barely cleared the green grass. Dr. Clef, also out of his fugue, was hitching the horses to the front of the airship with Nathan’s help.

“Give it a little more power, my boy!” Dr. Clef called up.

Gavin went to the paraffin oil generator and adjusted the dials. The purring grew louder and more steam emerged. The endoskeleton glowed a little brighter, and the Lady rose higher, but only about a foot.

“Clear!” Nathan called from the horses, and flicked the reins. The four horses started forward, towing the ship, which slid forward at a quick, even pace.

“It works,” Alice said.

“So far,” Gavin said cautiously. “And we can come back for the wagon later. I’m just not so sure about the rest.”

Alice whistled, and whirligigs flew from a dozen different directions to hover in front of her, their brass parts glittering in the dying sunlight. Most of them were carrying at least one spider. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “We’re nearly set for the next step. Please stand ready.”

Looking excited, they flew up into the rigging like a cloud of mechanical bats.

“Do they understand please and thank you?” Gavin asked.

“They seem to work better when I use those words, so I do,” Alice said. “I can’t explain it, so I don’t try.” Her words came out curt.

“Look, Alice, I’m sorry I—”

“Oh look—the tracks!”

The railroad tracks ran alongside the road Alice, Gavin, and Feng had taken into Luxembourg two days ago. No one was on them at the moment. Nathan guided the horses around until the airship was hovering just above the tracks.

“Down!” Nathan called.

With another glance at Alice, Gavin slowly powered down the generator. The blue glow lessened and the Lady sank like a woman settling into an armchair. Alice looked over the side. Kemp, Dr. Clef, and Nathan pushed and nudged the hull as it went down, making sure the new wheels lined up with the tracks. With a clunk, the ship dropped into place.

“Perfect,” Dr. Clef said. “Everything matches.”

“We have an hour before a train comes,” Gavin said. “So let’s hope this works.”

He put his hand over the green button on the newly mounted box on the deck, the one with half-carved ivy leaves on it, and paused. Several moments passed, and Alice finally said, “What’s the matter?”

“I hate to do this to her,” Gavin replied quietly. “It feels like I’m crippling my sister or my mother. But it needs to be done.”

He slapped the green button. In the rigging, all the automatons instantly came to attention. The spiders rushed over the ropes and the whirligigs spun into action. Under the new instructions Gavin had spun into their memory wheels, they unfastened the Lady’s outer envelope. Their tiny fingers popped seams with quick precision, and the sides of the envelope peeled away like petticoats to reveal a glowing wire corset beneath. Alice realized she felt a bit embarrassed, as if the Lady were undressing in public, and she told herself not to be silly. The spiders dodged into the endoskeleton’s framework, and got to work on the interior balloons. As the last pieces of the envelope drooped away, the four interior ballonets deflated with an unhappy sigh, leaving a pile of cloth inside the curlicue endoskeleton. The outer layer of cloth dropped to the deck, and Alice found herself buried in silk. She struggled out of it and found Gavin emerging as well. His expression was sad.

“My ship,” he said.

But Alice could only manage a curt nod.

The endoskeleton, meanwhile, continued to hover, and the whirligigs rolled it up like an enormous piece of chicken wire with the deflated ballonets inside. It was still powered by the generator, however, so the roll hovered high above the deck. Without the additional lift of the envelope, the skeleton didn’t have the strength to lift the Lady’s hull, and the ropes kept it from floating away. Gavin swept silk away from the generator and powered it slowly down. The wire roll, which was the same length as the ship and about five feet in diameter, sank slowly to the deck, drooping ropes as it came. The whirligigs and spiders rode it down, and Alice could swear they were silently cheering. She and Gavin pushed the roll a little to one side so it wouldn’t land on the helm and finally eased it down to the starboard side of the deck. The hull creaked and settled as the weight shifted. Nathan snapped his reins, and the four horses jerked forward. It took them a moment to get started, but at last they moved ahead, pulling the newly wheeled airship smoothly down the tracks.

“We’re not done,” Gavin said to the whirligigs, which rushed down to the wagon and, working as teams, hauled up two large canvas signs. Gavin hung one over one side of the ship and Alice hung the other over the opposite side. In garish letters, they read Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles.