The Impossible Cube

“It’s like putting whore’s makeup on a queen,” Gavin muttered.

Alice was sure she wasn’t meant to hear that comment, so she ignored it. She climbed down a rope ladder, dropped to the ground, and trotted a short distance from the tracks to get a good look. The airship’s gunwales looked like the railings that graced the top of most circus wagons. Silk covered the name The Lady of Liberty painted across the stern, and the banner signs completed the trick. The airship looked like a tall wagon or high train car being hauled somewhere for repairs or a bit of publicity. Alice climbed back up. Kemp was back on deck, along with Gavin. Nathan and Dr. Clef drove the horses below. Click had disappeared, but Alice was confident he would show up again. He always did.

“Go below and hide, Kemp,” Alice said. “You’re illegal here. Take the little ones with you.”

“Shall I bring tea first, Madam?” Kemp said.

“I’m not hungry anymore,” Alice replied.

Kemp withdrew. The horses were making good time on the tracks. Already they were nearing the boundary of the city. The fields and trees were nearly dark, and the sounds of the city—voices, horses, clattering machinery, laughter, music—floated past in snips and pieces beneath shy stars. A faint breeze from the country brought smells of earth and hay. Alice drummed her mechanical hand on the gunwale with little clicking sounds.

“I tried to warn you,” Gavin said quietly. “And I’m not going to fall all over myself apologizing.”

“Don’t expect you to.”

He shrugged casually, but Alice could see the stiffness in his posture. “I didn’t bring the plague on myself, and I don’t like it that you’re treating me as if I did.”

The anger flared again. “What are you talking about? I gave up everything for you, Gavin Ennock. I gave up a marriage and abandoned my position in society and, God help me, I even destroyed the British Empire, all to save you.”

“You wanted to watch me work and whatever you saw scared you.” Gavin flung his cap away and spread his arms. “Get a good look, Alice. I’m the monster your dear aunt made me.”

“Don’t you bring Aunt Edwina into this!” Alice cried. “She was just as insane as… as…”

“As I am?” Gavin finished for her. “Go ahead. Blame me. Blame her. It doesn’t matter. In a few months I’ll be dead. Then you can rush to England and see if Norbert will take you back.”

He stalked over to the other side of the deck and stared viciously out at nothing. Alice turned her back on him, stiff with fury. The city slid past with a faint rumble and scrape of train wheels. The Lady swayed a little. It felt distinctly odd, the familiar rhythm of a railway car on the open deck of an airship. Some of Alice’s anger gave way to nerves. Somewhere out there, Glenda and Simon and Phipps were looking for her. For all she knew, they were one street over, or just around the corner. She shivered and glanced back at Gavin. The anger came back. It didn’t matter that it was the plague that—

Yes. It did matter. She looked back at the streets and buildings, now only lit by occasional streetlights and yellow lamps in windows. This part of the city was mostly residential, and there was little street traffic at night. Three of the doors each had ragged red P’s painted on them. The deserted sidewalks and cobblestones suddenly seemed an echo of her life. The plague definitely mattered. It was all that mattered. It had stolen her entire family and her future, turned her into a fugitive, and forced her to make choices that would change the entire world. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it made her so angry.

Movement caught her eye. A tattered, gaunt woman shuffled along the sidewalk as the airship glided past. She wore a battered straw hat and sores split her skin. The light from a streetlamp made her flinch. Plague zombie. A lifetime of reflexes made Alice flinch away, but once she recovered, she turned to tell Gavin, but then thought otherwise. What business was it of his?

Alice scuttled down the rope ladder. The airship moved slowly, and Alice easily dropped to the street. Nathan and Dr. Clef didn’t see her and continued on with the horses. She didn’t want to shout and call attention to herself, so she simply dashed over to the zombie woman, pulling off the glove that covered her left hand as she went. It would be easy enough to cure the poor woman and catch the ship back up. She couldn’t save her family, but she could save this woman, and so many others like her. She had to do it, or what was the point of everything that had gone before?

The zombie woman barely reacted when Alice slashed her, but straightened fairly quickly. Much of the misery left her face, replaced with relief. She blinked and looked around, like a blind person seeing color again. Alice’s heart lightened. Every life she changed for the better made her own existence a bit more worthy. The zombie—now a full person again—wandered away with an expression of wonder.

“Excusez-moi!” Another woman Alice hadn’t noticed stepped out of a doorway. “Êtes-vous qu’elle?”

Alice started, and her light mood evaporated. “Am I she, who?” she asked cautiously, also in French. The woman was young and very pretty, with enormous blue eyes.

“The one who cures people,” she clarified. “People with the plague.”

The airship-cum-wagon was pulling out of sight, but if this woman also needed help, Alice didn’t see how she could refuse.

“I am she,” she said.

The woman abruptly caught Alice in a hard embrace. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you. You are an angel.” She broke away, suddenly embarrassed, and said, “But where is your friend?”

“My friend?”

“The one whose music gives you power to cure them.”

“Oh.” Alice thought about correcting her, then thought the better of it. “He’s… he’s nearby.”

“There are more who need you. Many more. Can you come? Please?”

The airship was curving away, nearly gone. Alice chewed her lip. She was still angry, but she wasn’t stupid, either. “I can’t come right now, but I will, I promise. Where?”

“To the Church of Our Lady,” she said, “at the top of the hill in the center of the city. Ask for Monsignor Adames.”

“I promise,” Alice repeated, and ran back to the clattering airship. At the front with the horses, Dr. Clef was telling Nathan, “The closer one comes to its position in time, the farther one wanders from its position in space.”

She had just reached the ladder when a trio of men on horses cantered around the corner, the horses’ iron-shod hooves clattering on the cobblestones. The men wore smart blue uniforms, and one of them carried a torch. The woman fled into the shadows.

“You!” one of the men shouted at the airship in French. “Halt!”

Nathan and Dr. Clef stopped the team. Gavin poked his head over the gunwale, a startled and worried expression on his face. Alice hurried up the ladder, her hands chilly with apprehension.

“Where were you?” Gavin hissed at her.

“Never mind,” she whispered back. “Get out that nightingale.”

“What?”

“Just do it!”

“Yes, Officer?” Nathan asked pleasantly, also in French. He sucked at his pipe with outward calm, but Alice could see tension in him. Dr. Clef had slid to the side of the team opposite the two police officers and was keeping his head down, away from the torchlight.

“What are you doing out at this hour?” the first man snapped. He was older, and wasn’t carrying the torch.

“We are with the circus and had to move one of our cars,” Nathan replied. “It was the only time the tracks were free.”

“Where are your papers?”

“Here, sir. All signed and stamped.” Nathan drew a set from his pocket and handed them over. The man with the torch held the light so his superior could examine them. The third man took his horse around the other side of the disguised airship, clearly to make sure no one slipped away and vanished. Alice held her breath, hoping they would take the explanation and leave.

The officer gave the papers only a cursory glance. “We have reports of certain dangerous criminals from England and America. A woman with brown hair and a younger man with pale blond hair.”

“I was afraid of that,” Gavin whispered. “The Third Ward has connections all over Europe. Phipps must have talked to the police.”

“I’m from Ireland,” Nathan said.

“What about him?” The older officer pointed at Dr. Clef, who was still huddled behind the horse.

“He’s mute, and an idiot,” Nathan said. “His mother was a sideshow freak and he was born funny, but horses love him.”

“I still need to search this wagon,” the officer said.

Alice’s heart beat fast now. Before she could lose her nerve, she shouted over the gunwale in her heavily accented French, “What is wrong down there? We should not stop for long, you know.”

“Who’s there?” the lead officer called up. He drew a sword. “Show yourself!”

Alice tied a handkerchief over her hair in an impromptu head cloth and peered over the side. “I am Lombarda, lion tamer extraordinaire. Who are you?”

“Lieutenant Ovrille of the Grand Ducal Police,” he said. “Come down immediately! We are searching the wagon!”

“If you like,” Alice called back. “But the lion, he will not be happy.”

Ovrille paused. “What lion?”

“The cage, it has broken, you see. That is why we are using this wagon. The lion, he is up top, and I have no leash or cage right now, and it is far past his mealtime. He is quite hungry. Fortunately, he does not feel women are a threat, no?”

The other officer, the one with the torch, looked uncertain. “Sir—,” he said.

“Our orders are clear,” Ovrille said stubbornly. “We are to search everything even remotely suspicious.”

“Yes, yes,” Alice called. “Please come up, then. But make no sudden moves, especially if you ate meat for supper. I do not know how much longer I can keep him quiet.” She changed her tone of voice, as if she were speaking to a child. “Can I, baby? No, I cannot. I just cannot keep ums quiet!”

Ovrille dismounted and reached for the rope ladder hanging over the side of the airship. Alice gestured sharply at Gavin, who fumbled with the nightingale and finally managed to press its right eye. It opened its beak and the lion’s roar from the previous evening’s parade snarled through the night, a little quiet but realistic enough. Ovrille froze.

“No, no, no,” Alice cooed loudly. “It is all right, little one. The man is not here to hurt you. He is not for you to bite. You must sit quietly and let him—”

Gavin pressed the nightingale again, and it played the roar a second time. Ovrille snatched his hand away from the ladder as if the rungs were hot pokers. The officer with the torch backed his horse away, as did the man who had gone to the opposite side of the airship.

“What are you doing?” Alice said. “I believe I have him under control. Come up now before he again becomes angry.”

Another roar. Ovrille went back to his horse. “Yes, well,” he said. “I think we can let it go this time.”

“Are you sure?” Alice said. “We would not wish for you to get into trouble. If you let him lick your hand first, he probably won’t bite.”

“Just go,” Ovrille ordered.

“Huh. As you wish, then.”

Nathan tapped the horses, which jerked forward, and the airship creaked along the tracks. Once the officers were out of sight, Alice blew out a long breath. Every muscle went limp and she collapsed to the deck.

“I never want to do that again,” she half sobbed, half giggled.

“You thought it was bad for you.” Gavin sank to the deck beside her. “I had no idea what you were saying and had to guess about making the nightingale roar.”

“Good that you’re intelligent, then.”

There was a long pause. Alice wanted to say something more, except words wouldn’t come. The anger curled around her heart like a dozing tiger and held everything in. Alice envied Gavin’s easy way with words, how he could say whatever was on his mind.

After a while, Gavin brought his cupped hands with the nightingale in them to his face. When he brought them down again, he tossed the nightingale into the air. It spread its wings and fluttered about for a moment, then flitted over to settle on Alice’s shoulder. Alice knew that the nightingale, meant to carry recorded messages, would fly back and forth between the last two people who had touched it. The moment it landed, the little bird sang in Gavin’s voice.

I picked a rose, the rose picked me,

Underneath the branches of the forest tree.

The moon picked you from all the rest

For I loved you best.

Alice closed her eyes at the beauty that surrounded her but still couldn’t respond.

“Most people think,” Gavin said, “that if the melody of a song is written in a minor key, the accompaniment or counterpoint has to be played in a minor key, too. But that’s not right. The counterpoint can be the major fifth chord, if you leave out the mediant, the one note that clashes.”

She made a small, noncommittal noise. Ahead of them, the tracks stretched through the city, turning neither right nor left, taking the airship down its predetermined path.

“I’ve never been in love before, Alice,” he continued. “And I’ve never been a clockworker. So I don’t know what all this means. I can only play the music fate hands me. When I sing, all my songs tell me that I want to be with you. If you don’t want to be with me, just say so.”

Suddenly she couldn’t bear it any longer. She sat up and grabbed his hand. His fingers were strong. The nightingale hopped back to his shoulder. “I hate the plague. I hate what it’s doing to you. To us. I don’t want to let you go. I can’t let you go. But I’m frightened of what the plague might do.”

“So am I,” he said quietly. “It steals memory from me, and it steals time from us. We have to get to China and find a cure.”

“What if there is no cure, Gavin?” she asked suddenly. “What if the Dragon Men can’t do anything, or they just won’t, or we can’t find a cure in time?”

He squeezed her hand. “Alice, the plague might be able to steal my sanity, but it can’t steal love. No matter how insane I go, there will always be a part of me that loves you.”

And she still didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t. That didn’t seem to bother Gavin. They sat on the deck in simple silence together until the airship pulled onto the spur that led to the park Dodd had rented for the circus. When the ship came to a halt behind the dark circus train, Alice headed for the ladder.

“Get your fiddle,” she said. “We aren’t done yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll explain below.”

Nathan was already unhitching the horses with Dr. Clef’s help. Alice explained how she had met the woman. “She said there were more who need me at the Church of Our Lady.”

“I know where that is,” Gavin said.

“So do I,” Nathan put in. “Dodd and I have gone there for confession once or twice.”

Gavin blinked innocently. “What did you confess?”

“That you were an arse.”

“She said to ask for Monsignor Adames,” Alice said. “I need to—”

“There you are!” Dodd ran up and caught Nathan in a hard embrace. One of the horses snorted. “Jesus, you scared me out of my wits.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Nathan gasped. “What’s wrong?”

“Mingers.” Dodd let him go. “Gendarmes. They turned the whole circus upside down looking for Gavin and Alice and demanding to know if we were hiding you. No one said anything, of course, but thank God you weren’t here.”

“Are they still looking?” Dr. Clef asked.

“I should think so. They seemed pretty intent. They called you criminals, and Dr. Clef a danger to society.”

“Was a woman with them? Tall? Dark hair? Metal arm?” Gavin said.

Dodd shook his head. “You mean your Lieutenant Phipps. She wasn’t there, but I heard them mention her name.”

“What about Feng?” Alice said.

“He was easy to hide.” Dodd waved a dismissive hand. “We have two families of Chinese. She didn’t even ask about him.”

“That’s a relief, then.” Alice tugged at Gavin’s elbow. “We need to go.”

“You can’t go now,” Dodd said. “Didn’t you just hear? Phipps has patrols looking for you all over the city. You’ll be safe here—they’ve already looked—but you can’t go out.”

“I promised, Ringmaster,” Alice said. “Those people need my help. Every moment’s delay means another plague victim might die. So unless you intend to lock me in a lion’s cage, get out of my way before I knock you down.”

“She will,” Gavin told him.

“Fine.” Dodd made the same dismissive gesture. “But you aren’t going alone.”

“Certainly not!” Alice said, and Dodd looked surprised that she was agreeing. “Only a fool would do that. And a number of people who aren’t coming should know where I’m going so they can mount a rescue if I don’t return in a reasonable amount of time. Gavin’s coming, of course.”

“Am I?” Gavin was grinning.

“You are. You know where the church is. Feng must come, too. That leaves Mr. Storm, who also knows where the church is, on rescue duty with Dr. Clef and the ringmaster.”

“As long as you’re running my circus,” that man sighed, “you might as well just call me Dodd.”

Chapter Six

They took several moments to gather equipment. Alice wanted to get the firefly jar from Feng, and Gavin wanted weapons. He couldn’t bring himself to use actual pistols, however. A lifetime of training had instilled a healthy fear of anything that created flame, a deadly threat on an airship. Even after several weeks on the Lady, which used newfangled helium, Gavin still shunned gunpowder for the cutlass of shatterproof glass favored by airmen. Unfortunately, he no longer had a fléchette pistol, which used compressed air to fire glass needles. The circus, meanwhile, had gone back to sleep, recovered from its encounter with the gendarmes Phipps had commandeered, but Gavin wondered how long before they returned—and how many they’d encounter on the way to the church, which was why he wanted weapons. He looked at Dr. Clef’s power canon where it lay on the Lady’s deck, and sighed with regret.

“It’s too heavy,” Gavin said. “I wouldn’t get twenty yards.”

“Perhaps you could make modifications with this.” Dr. Clef held up a spool of alloy wire, the same stuff as the endoskeleton rolled up and lying on the port side of the deck. “Can you do it alone? I have fear that we shall fight if I assist.”

Gavin looked at the wire and at the power cannon. His brain leaped ahead, and he saw wires and pulsing power and batteries. He ran his hands over the cannon, able to feel how it all fit together, every bolt, every shard, every pathway, right down to the tiny pieces so small they couldn’t hold a name. He saw a number of fascinating ways to reshape them, gently move matter and energy along a number of different venues. He was only vaguely aware that Dr. Clef, that annoying Dr. Clef, had withdrawn, and the vibrations of his receding footsteps on the deck came out as long, distorted strings that vibrated against the air and kicked it about. Gavin’s fingers flew, snatching up tools and setting them down again, braiding wire, snipping metal, connecting pieces of the universe in new ways.

“Gavin?”

The high-pitched voice intruded, interrupted, interjected. He turned to snarl at the interruption—

—and saw that it was a woman. He knew her. He… had feelings for her. He struggled for a moment. She had broken his concentration, which made him angry, but she was also someone to be trusted, someone he didn’t want to be angry at. The contradictory feelings warred for a split second, equally matched.

Alice. Her name was Alice. The new fact tipped the balance, and in a flash he remembered that she wasn’t someone who deserved disdain. He twisted inside like a cat changing its mind in midleap and yanked back the retort.

“Alice?” he gasped, and realized he was panting. A trickle of sweat slid down his cheek. “What’s going on?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.” She had changed into trousers, which Gavin found strangely attractive on a woman. They accentuated her hips and showed her legs. She was wearing a tighter-fitting blouse as well, and it clung to her neck and breasts. Her braided hair caught the moon and held it. The silvery light shifted, moving in a shower of particles, then splashing as a wave, but doing both at the same time, just as the Impossible Cube had twisted and changed before his eyes. It was beautiful and terrible all at once, and Gavin couldn’t look away if he wanted to. For a moment it was hard to breathe.

“What is that?” she asked. “Did you make it?”

Gavin held up the object in question. An eight-foot braided lash trailed to the deck from a heavy brass handle, and the handle connected to a cord that ran to a backpack with a battery in it. Dr. Clef’s power cannon lay dead on the deck, its brass entrails scattered across the wood.

“It looks like a whip,” said Feng, who had also climbed up. He was dressed in what looked to Gavin like soft black pajamas from head to foot. “Show us, please.”

Gavin shook off the last of the clockwork daze. He shrugged into the backpack and flicked a switch on the handle. A low thrum—D-flat, he automatically noted—throbbed across his ears and pulsed against his palm. The metal lash glowed incandescent blue. The weight eased in his hand as the power pushed Dr. Clef’s alloy away from gravity. Gavin swung. The whip flicked through the air, quick as a demon’s tongue, and slashed at the barrel of the power cannon. The barrel didn’t move. For a moment, neither did anyone else. Then the barrel fell neatly into two halves that thudded to the deck.

There was a long, long pause.

“I watched someone called the Great Mordovo cut his assistant in half this afternoon,” Feng said at last. “I do not believe you should show this to him.”

Alice swallowed visibly and shifted her pack. “That took you all of half an hour to make?”

“I didn’t keep track of the time.” Gavin flicked the switch off. The glow vanished, and the whip grew heavy in his hand again. He coiled it and hung it on the right side of his belt, opposite his glass cutlass.

“You must be careful,” Dr. Clef admonished, approaching from his previously safe distance. “Every slash takes power, you know, and the battery does not last forever.”

“Then let’s go now,” Gavin said.

“I’ll carry your fiddle,” Alice said.

The three of them slipped away from the circus and hurried down the city streets. Gavin led the way, since he knew where they were going, and Feng brought up the rear, with Alice in the middle. The air that stole over Gavin was growing chilly and damp, with an early breath of autumn to it. In the distance, a church bell repeated a dark F that pressed lonely against his ears. A scattering of lights glowed in houses or shops, but most windows were dark, and the moon coasted through a field of stars like a bright airship through a cloud of fireflies. Even the public houses were closed at this time of night, and the trio had no good reason to be on the street, which meant any gendarme would stop them for questioning. Gavin slid into another shadow, trying to control his nervousness. The cutlass and whip lent him a whiff of power, but one pistol shot could bring him down, or worse, bring down Alice. Gavin didn’t know if Phipps intended to capture or kill at this point, but capture would mean transport back to England for hanging, so it didn’t make much difference. He kept one hand on the smooth whip handle.

A pair of horses clip-clopped from around the corner ahead of them. Gavin grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her into an alleyway. Her backpack clinked slightly, and the noise made Gavin’s heart jerk. Feng seemed to have disappeared. The riders rounded the corner and trotted down their street. Gavin pressed himself face-first against the rough alley wall, leaving the pack’s uneven shape sticking out. He could hear Alice’s butterfly breathing next to him, feel her body heat mingling with his. She clutched his fiddle case, and he felt oddly comforted that she held it. When the pirate captain had threatened to throw it off the Juniper, it had felt like the man’s filthy fingers were running over Gavin’s soul, but Alice’s touch made him feel that the fiddle was safe, even with danger only a few steps away.

The horses clopped past the mouth of the alley, and moonlight gleamed off pistols holstered at the riders’ belts. Gavin held his breath. He had turned his face away from the street so his fair skin wouldn’t catch a stray beam of light, and he was looking right into Alice’s eyes, just visible in the scattered wave of photons. They were wide and brown and beautiful, even when filled with unease.

One of the riders paused at the alley mouth and said something in French to his companion, who also paused. Fear made blood pulse in Gavin’s ears. Alice’s lips parted, and her breath came in short gasps, but she didn’t move. The man spoke again, every word as harsh as a drop of melted lead.

And then they were gone, their horses trotting away to fade in the distance. The weight of fear vanished so quickly, Gavin thought he might float away. The tension went out of Alice’s body as well. Gavin surprised himself by leaning in and kissing her. She stiffened again, then kissed back, her mouth warm on his. When they parted, he pressed his forehead against hers.

“Why were we scared?” Alice murmured. “You could have torn them in half with that whip.”

“I could have,” Gavin replied. “That’s exactly why I was scared.”

The street was still empty, no sign of Feng. A cough over Gavin’s head made him grab for the whip, but Alice put her hand on his arm. Feng was perched on a windowsill two stories above them. His dark clothing made him look like the shadow of a spider. Carefully but steadily, using rough bricks and other windowsills for footholds, he descended to the sidewalk.

“I’m impressed,” Alice asked.

“I have climbed in and out of a number of windows in my life,” Feng said. “More than once with a husband in hot pursuit. It is interesting how well one can climb with the correct motivation.”

They hurried away, dodging the gas lamps. Occasionally, they heard footsteps or horses’ hooves a street or two over, and every time they hid in alleys or doorways or under stoops, though they didn’t have any more close encounters with police. The streets wound steadily uphill, and Gavin’s legs started to ache from the steady climbing, and the battery pack pulled at his shoulder muscles. After a while, he said, “Where are the plague zombies?”

That made Alice pause. “I don’t know. We should have seen at least one or two by now.”

“Perhaps the priest will know,” Feng said.

They finally arrived at the Church of Our Lady. The huge stone building loomed over Gavin, buttressed high and stiff, surrounded by a low wall and a square marked off from the street by a line of stone pillars that stretched between them like an iron lattice. Stained glass windows shut themselves against the night.

“It is… large,” Feng said. “I imagined a small stone church, not an entire cathedral.”

“I think they’ve applied for cathedral status with the Pope,” Gavin said.

“They have to apply to call it a cathedral?” Feng looked doubtfully up at the walls, which seemed half fortress, half heaven. “I would enjoy seeing the paperwork for that.”

“The Papists do have their ideas,” Alice said. “Where do we go in?”

The main doors, half large enough to admit a dirigible, were obviously locked and barred, and the idea of knocking on such enormous timbers felt ridiculous. They followed the wall around until they found a more normal-sized pair of doors in an alcove. Feng knocked hard, then pounded at some length. Gavin nervously dropped his hand to the whip. Time passed, and the door wrenched open to reveal an old woman in a dressing gown and nightcap. A candlestick glimmered in her hand. She demanded something in French, and Alice responded. Gavin caught the words Monsignor Adames. The woman looked doubtful, but finally gestured them inside and shut the door behind them. Gavin found himself in a small room, but he could sense a great echoing space beyond.

“She wants us to wait here,” Alice said as the woman padded away, taking the light with her. Gavin waited in uneasy blackness with Alice and Feng beside him. None of them spoke. The emptiness beyond seemed to eat words, or even the idea of speaking. Time didn’t move. Gavin sensed the weight of the pack on his shoulders, and the heft of the whip handle in his hand, and the pull of the cutlass at his belt. Alice’s and Feng’s breathing beside him pushed about tiny amounts of air that puffed against his face, bounced off and swirled away in chaotic forms that held patterns just beyond his understanding. He reached out and put his hand into one and felt it scatter and flee. Another swirl of breath bounced off him, creating patterned chaos on his skin, and if he just concentrated hard enough, he might be able to understand it, perhaps even control it, even—

“Gavin!” Alice’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Are you coming?”

“Chaos swirls against my skin,” he said, “but the pattern remains out of reach. How can I touch it?”

“We shouldn’t stay up here,” said a man’s voice in lightly accented English. “Just bring him along.”

And then Gavin was within the great empty place, standing before a half-sized statue of a woman on a pedestal holding an infant—the Virgin Mary. Behind her, windows of stained glass rose above an elaborate altar. She stood on a crescent moon and wore robes of gold and crimson. In her right hand she held a scepter. The baby Jesus cradled a ball in his hand and stretched out the other in benediction. Both mother and child wore tall crowns of gold that sparkled with jewels. Candles flickered around her feet and in the candelabra behind her, lending her an otherworldly glow.

“Consolatrix Afflictorum,” said the man, and Gavin noticed for the first time he wore a long black robe and a white priest’s collar. “Comforter of the afflicted. If you believe the legend, she dropped out of a tree trunk in 1624, right around the time the black plague struck, and she cured a number of people. In 1794, the clockwork plague appeared, and so many people overwhelmed the Jesuit chapel outside the city, we moved her in here.”

“But you take her out and bring her around the city just after Easter,” Gavin said softly. “Eight days afterward. The Octave.”

The priest blinked. He had receding gray hair and a thin build. “You’ve heard of it.”

“No. It’s just obvious.” Gavin flicked a glance at the statue’s pale brown hair and dark brown eyes and rounded beauty and machine-like scepter in her hand, then glanced at Alice. “She looks like—”

“Don’t,” Alice said.

“But she really—”

“I said don’t,” Alice said again, and her voice floated to the high ceiling. She repositioned her backpack. “Monsignor Adames, I have a cure for the clockwork plague, and one of the people I helped told me to come here.”

“A cure?” Adames repeated. “I don’t understand.”

“Her touch cures the clockwork plague,” Feng said.

“Her touch,” he echoed, then gave a small laugh. “I’m sorry if I seem doubtful, but… well, I’m doubtful. I believe in the holy miracles, including the ones that founded this very church, but—”

“I play the fiddle,” Gavin interrupted, “and I sing.”

Monsignor Adames fell silent. Then he said slowly, “There are rumors. I’ve heard of a beautiful woman with a sword and an angel with a golden voice who appear to cure the afflicted at night and who are pursued by brass demons during the day. I thought they were nothing but desperate stories from people who want comfort. But now…”

“How can we help?” Alice asked.

Adames hesitated only a moment. “This way.” He caught up a candle from the statue’s feet and led them to a door behind one of the carved, earth-colored pillars lining the cathedral. A tight spiral staircase twisted downward. Adames pulled back the skirts of his robe with his free hand and held up the candle with the other to light the way as they descended.

“You’re an angel?” Feng said to Gavin on the stairs. “May I be the one to write your family about that? Please?”

At the bottom was a stone passageway, low and cramped. The top of Gavin’s backpack brushed the ceiling. Soot from thousands of ancient candles streaked the walls. Damp darkness pressed in from all sides, hushing Gavin’s footsteps. A number of alcoves and rooms opened at regular intervals, some with doors on them and some without. Adames led them to one alcove, and pressed against the back wall. It turned on an axis, and he ducked through the opening, motioning for them to follow.

The large room beyond was fitted out as a hospital ward. Iron bedsteads lined the walls, and about twenty patients lay in them, some asleep, some twitching or moaning softly. Gavin automatically pulled back from the smell of sickness in the place, then forced himself to enter. One corner was set up with cupboards and tables covered with medical equipment and supplies. Washtubs and buckets held both water and effluvia waiting to be disposed of. Lamps hung on the walls to provide soft light. A woman in a nun’s habit bustled over, and Gavin realized with a start that she was an automaton. The habit hid her body, but her face was metallic, as were her hands.

“Vater,” she said quizzically, “wer sind denn diese Leute?”

“English, Berta, if you please,” he said. “I don’t think our guests speak German. Are there any changes?”

“Some.” Berta’s voice buzzed slightly, and the grill that made up her mouth didn’t move when she spoke. “Clarissa has become worse. I fear she won’t last the night.”

Adames crossed himself. “Perhaps we can help now.”

“Monsignor!” Alice said. “I thought the Catholic Church strictly forbade human automatons.”

“That’s why we keep everyone down here,” he said blandly. “Berta can minister to our patients without catching the disease herself or passing it on to others, and she doesn’t require rest. I’m trusting you and God to keep the secret. We are the only hospital in Luxembourg for those afflicted by the plague.”

“Is it not against priestly vows to disobey your Pope?” Feng asked.

“It wouldn’t look good on our application to be declared a cathedral,” Adames admitted. “And if the Pope learns of it, we will forever remain a church, and I will never become an archbishop.”

“It’s still a sin,” Alice said. “How do you reconcile that?”

“We sin when we miss the mark of perfection,” Adames replied. “None of us can hit that mark, and we can only ask forgiveness from he who managed it. My heart tells me I’m doing the right thing, however imperfect it may be.”

“They all have the clockwork plague?” Gavin asked quietly.

Adames nodded. “Most of them die, but we save a few.”

“And the ones who become zombies?” Alice asked.

“It’s hard.” Adames looked away. “I have Berta put them in the catacombs, and she leaves food out until the plague takes them. A number of them come in from the street as well. They seem to understand that we will feed them at least a little.”

“This explains why we saw none on our way over,” Feng put in.

“It’s difficult to come up with enough food for everyone without arousing suspicion,” Adames concluded.

Alice pulled off her glove and put her left hand on Adames’s arm. The spider’s eyes glowed green. “You don’t have the plague,” she said.

He looked down at the spider with a mixture of curiosity and uncertainty. “I wouldn’t, no. I caught it as a child and survived.” He pulled back the sleeve on his robe, revealing a scarred, withered arm. Alice’s face tightened, and Gavin knew she was remembering her father, also scarred by the clockwork plague. “My mother said I owed God, so I entered the priesthood.”

One of the patients cried out in pain from her bed. Berta turned, but Alice pushed past her. “Gavin, I want you with me. Please?”

Gavin shrugged out of the heavy backpack, set the whip down, and accepted his fiddle case from Alice. While he was taking the fiddle out, something occurred to him. “Alice, when did you last sleep?”

“I caught a few hours when you were in that fugue state in the train car,” she said absently, bending over the first bed. “Just play for me. It’s all the rest I need.”

He played, and Alice led him around the room. She drew back white sheets and slashed each patient as gently as she could, spraying a bit of her own blood into the wounds while Gavin spilled liquid harmony from the strings. With Adames in the room, he felt nervous, pressured to play without making a mistake, even though he was sure the priest would never notice.

I once had a heart as good as new

But now it’s gone from me to you.

For a moment he was somewhere else. His mother was sitting in a rocking chair, holding a baby in her lap, and the man with pale hair—his father—was teaching Gavin a song. The fingers that pressed against the familiar strings felt tiny, and the gut bit into them. “Keep trying. Once day, you’ll play better than your old man, but only if you do better.”

The moon picked you from all the rest

For I loved you best.

Where had his father gone? Was he dead? Had he run away? But why? He wanted answers, though the questions had only recently come to him. Maybe the plague was awakening old memories, or maybe he just wanted to remember now, painful as it was. Other longings rushed in, filled him like water in cupped hands. He wanted to hear his father’s voice, touch his hand, be a son instead of a grandson, protégée, or cabin boy.

The memory faded, though he continued playing. Once his bow quivered and he made a mistake. A note—F—came out with a squeak, far below proper pitch. Gavin’s face went hot. He corrected and moved on as if nothing had happened. Had Adames noticed? Had Alice? Or even Feng? None of them reacted. Gavin continued to playing, forcing himself to concentrate harder. By the time Alice got to the last patient, the first one was sitting up and speaking. Berta hurried over with a cup of water.

“Incredible,” Adames breathed. “Dear Lord, it is a miracle. The Consolatrix come to life.”

Feng surreptitiously wiped at his eyes. “That was the saddest I have ever heard you play.” Gavin gave him a wan smile. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed the error, then. Still, he felt a little sick. It was stupid, he knew, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching, counting up every mistake, and one day he would be called to account for them.

“Now, take me to the catacombs,” Alice said, but she was weaving.

Gavin put his fiddle in its case. “You can barely stand. How much blood have you given up in the last two days?”

She hesitated. “The jar, then,” she said. “In my pack.”

Feng set a stool behind her, and she sank onto it while Gavin pulled the jar from her pack without bothering to remove it from her back first. The fireflies glowed faintly within the glass.

“You rest,” Gavin said. “Let Berta bring you something to eat. Monsignor Adames can take me to help the zombies.”

Leaving Alice under Feng’s watchful eye, Gavin followed the priest out the pivoting door and down a short flight of steps. “The catacombs are almost directly under the altar,” Adames said, brandishing his candle. “When I conduct Mass, I sometimes wonder how the parishioners would respond if they knew what lies beneath their feet. Prepare yourself, my son.”

He pulled open a thick door. It exhaled air heavy with rot and fear. Gavin let the darkness swallow him as they moved inside, though the fireflies provided pale green light. Niches carved into the walls like short beds held dry skeletons, many with ragged cloth still clinging to them. Some clutched rosaries in yellowed fingers while the skulls stared eyelessly at the ceiling, the leavings of death. Gavin shrank away from them, not wanting to touch. He felt like an intruder, one who would be caught and thrown out by some monstrous gatekeeper at any moment. He followed Adames’s candle down a side passage until he heard shuffling footsteps ahead. Bones clattered with a sound that crawled over Gavin’s skin. Ahead, he saw the passage widen, and a shadowy group of zombies huddled in the dark. They shielded their eyes from the candle with ragged arms and groaned like a choir of uneasy spirits. Two of them lay sprawled on the floor, motionless. Dead. Gavin flinched at the sight. If they had arrived a day ago, an hour ago, a minute ago, could they have been saved? There was never enough time. If only there was a way to make more.

Gavin thought about what Adames had said as they entered the catacomb. He saw wealthy ladies in silk skirts and gentlemen in fine coats, their stomachs filled with a good breakfast prepared by paid servants. They spoke in hushed voices and smiled quietly to one another, their soft faces scrubbed pink, while below them moaned hungry, sick people.

“What can you do for them?” Adames asked.

The priest’s voice pulled Gavin back—he had nearly fallen into another fugue. With an embarrassed cough, he stepped farther into the bone room, opened the gleaming jar, and waved a dozen of the fireflies out of it. They streaked through the darkness and landed on some of the zombies.

“What are they?” the priest asked.

“I’m not completely sure,” Gavin said. “Alice’s aunt made them. They spread the cure, and anyone they bite spreads the cure as well. Alice’s cure works faster, but she’s not strong enough to help everyone. How will they get out once they’re better?”

One of the zombies reached a tentative hand toward Adames, who handed it a chunk of bread from his pocket. The creature fumbled to accept it and eat. “The same way they get in—through the graveyard. There’s an entrance in one of the mausoleums. Are you sure this will . . ?”

“Yes.” He looked around, feeling suddenly uneasy. “I think we should get back to—”

A crash thundered through the catacomb and vibrated the very stones. The candle danced in Adames’s hand. Gavin swore.

“They found us!” he said.

Adames was already heading for the door. “Who?”

“The brass demons. We have to run!”

They met Feng and Berta at the spiral staircase. Berta had Gavin’s backpack, and a worried-looking Feng was half carrying Alice. Gavin cursed himself for letting her push herself so hard. Another crash thundered overhead. Wordlessly Gavin yanked on the battery backpack, slapped the whip onto his belt, and snatched Alice out of Feng’s arms. The clockwork plague roared through him, and he barely noticed her weight as he bundled her up the stairs. She clutched the firefly jar to her chest.

At the top, he burst out of the transept and into the crossing of the cathedral, the enormous open space just in front of the altar where the Consolatrix stood on her crescent moon. Two of the priceless stained glass windows, one on each of the long walls of the nave, had been shattered, and the confessional booths standing beneath them were smashed to flinders, crushed beneath stomping metal feet. Standing in the nave, the echoing pillared hall where the congregation gathered for services, were the two mechanicals, their glass bubbles gleaming like captured moons. In front of them was Lieutenant Phipps. Her brass monocle stared coldly about the pale brown chamber.

“How did you find us?” Alice gasped.

“The good father’s secret hospital isn’t as secret as he likes to think,” Phipps said in a scornful tone. “The Ward has known of it for quite some time. It was just a matter of watching until you showed up with your cure—as you did.”

“This is a house of God!” Adames roared, and before Gavin could stop him, he rushed forward to confront Phipps. One of the mechanicals—Glenda—leaned forward and almost casually knocked him aside. Adames slammed into a pillar and slid moaning to the stony floor.

“N shì shénme dngxi!” Feng exclaimed.

A chill rage fell over Gavin, burning away all other emotion. “Why?”

“You are criminals,” Phipps said through tight teeth. “You released a doomsday weapon and broke a dangerous clockworker out of custody. You are a menace to society, and I will bring you to justice.”

“We don’t want to hurt you, Gavin,” Simon said. “Just… just come, all right? You’ll get a fair trial.”

“Why did you hurt the priest?” Gavin’s voice was level and deadly. “He helped more people in one day than your Empire has in a hundred years.”

“I’m not here to debate, Ennock. You’re under arrest.”

The lieutenant dipped into her pockets and came up with the tuning forks. Time slowed. Gavin saw the length of the metal forks, heard the creak of the mechanicals’ joints, felt the weight of the cathedral ceiling high above. His hand moved smoothly down—impulses contracted muscle, shortened tendons, curled fingers—and came up with the whip. He stepped forward and swung. The lash sliced through the air. He saw the individual currents split and eddy away as the braid hissed them to pieces. At precisely the right moment, Gavin flicked his arm and the lash changed direction. Air swirled like water, and the tip of the lash broke an invisible barrier. Sound cracked as the tip flicked across the fork in Phipps’s right hand. The fork shattered. Phipps cried out and jumped back.

“Get Alice out of here,” Gavin barked over his shoulder at Feng.

“What are you waiting for?” Phipps snarled at Simon and Glenda. “Grab them! Grab her!”

“No.” With one hand, Gavin drew his glass cutlass. With the other, he pressed the whip’s power switch. Blue energy flowed along the lash. He slashed the air, leaving a sizzling azure trail. “You won’t get past me.”

Glenda’s mechanical lunged for him, but Gavin heard the pistons hiss, saw the machine’s posture change, felt the tiny shift of air, and he was already moving. He whirled the lash and struck the mechanical’s arm. Sparks flew where the braided alloy touched brass, sending a small jolt up Gavin’s arm, but the cut was clean. The arm thudded to the stone floor. Before Glenda could react, Gavin swung again, catching the mechanical at the shin. The mechanical, caught in midstep, lurched forward, leaving the lower part of one leg behind. She stumbled, fell sideways, and crashed into a pillar. It cracked, and bits of it crumbled. Glenda crashed face-first to the ground. Her glass bubble shattered, and Gavin caught the tail end of her scream. The cold anger, however, let him feel no mercy or remorse. Behind Gavin, Feng was hauling Alice toward one of the side alcoves and an exit, the firefly jar still in her hands.

Simon raised his mechanical’s hand. The fingers clicked together into a gun barrel. He fired something over Gavin’s head with a whump that thudded hard against Gavin’s eardrums. The munition smashed into a pair of statues over the alcove and shattered them. Chunks of stone fell in front of the alcove entrance, throwing up a choking cloud of dust and blocking any exit. Alice cried out, and Feng pulled back.

“Don’t touch her, Simon!” Gavin snarled. A skin of black ice encased his heart, and he flicked the lash, but Simon’s mechanical was out of range.

Phipps pointed a metal finger at Gavin. He heard the tiny fft, and barely brought up the glass cutlass in time to catch the dart. It shattered on the tempered glass.

“You’ve lost your edge, Susan,” he said evenly. “I’m not a piece of street trash anymore. I’m a clockworker now, more dangerous than you can understand.”

“And more arrogant,” she said. “I’ve captured dozens of your kind, boy, some who wanted to destroy the world. Mere pirate toys don’t measure up.”

With that, she leaped at him, faster than a human should have moved. It caught Gavin by surprise, and then she was inside the circle of the lash, where the whip couldn’t touch her. Her metal arm batted aside Gavin’s glass cutlass and she gut-punched him with the other hand. The air burst from him, but he didn’t feel pain. Not yet. He grabbed her wrist (ninety-seven pounds of pressure), twisted upward (joint bending at 110 degrees), and planted his foot behind hers. To his left (nine feet, five inches), the cutlass clattered on the floor. With a flick, he brought his foot up to upset Phipps—

—but she was already gone, leaping backward and away. She snapped her metallic left hand open, and a lash of her own snaked out of the palm. Gavin slapped it aside with the lash, and only then—

“Gavin! Look out!”

—did he realize it was a diversion. Simon’s mechanical stepped forward and almost delicately grabbed Gavin’s backpack. With easy strength he hoisted Gavin aloft. Simon’s face looked pale through the glass. Gavin swung the lash as his feet dangled over empty air. The whip wrapped around Simon’s forearm, but the blue glow flickered and died, drained of power.

“No,” he whispered.

“You’re mine, Ennock,” Phipps said from below.

“Actually, he’s mine, Susan,” Alice called from beside the half-conscious Glenda amid the wreckage of the mechanical. With a deft motion, she spun a clockwork gear through the air at Simon. It trailed a pair of wires from Glenda’s machinery. Simon twisted in his chair in time to see, but not to react. The gear clanged against his mechanical’s shoulder. Electricity snapped and sparked. Ladders of it arced up and down the mechanical’s body, and inside it, Simon convulsed and shuddered. Gavin, who wasn’t touching metal, felt nothing. The mechanical’s fist opened, and Gavin dropped to the ground as Simon and his mechanical collapsed noisily to the cathedral floor. The backpack smashed Gavin flat, knocking the breath out of him just as Phipps’s punch had.

“You’ve lost your toys,” Alice panted, “and you’ve lost us. There’s no point in pursuing this, Susan.”

“You haven’t earned the right to call me by my Christian name, girl.” Phipps was standing upright a few paces from the wrecked machinery, cool and unruffled, and for a moment Gavin was getting another dressing-down in her office back at Third Ward headquarters in London. She leaned a little toward Gavin and inhaled deeply, then nodded to herself, as if confirming something. From the floor she plucked a bit of stone from the cracked column and with her metal hand threw it with quiet nonchalance. It shattered a single pane of stained glass above the altar at the other end of the cathedral.

“I wonder,” she said, and threw another piece. It broke the pane next to the first one. “I wonder who your ally is. That man who’s keeping to the shadows so I don’t see his face. It occurs to me that the son of the Chinese ambassador vanished from London at the same time you fled. Is that he? I like his infrared pattern.” She tapped her monocle. “He has a very interesting jar in one hand and a pistol in the other, but he won’t fire, either because he’s too cowardly or because I’m not attacking you right now. Which is it, boy?”

Feng, wherever he was, didn’t answer. Phipps threw two more pieces, shattering two more priceless panes.

“Stop it!” Alice said. “It’s senseless!”

“Let God stop me. If He cares.” She threw more and more pieces, and each one blacked out a piece of glass. “I could hit you easily enough, you know.”

“No,” Gavin said. He had dropped the backpack and snatched up the cutlass again. His hands were steady as icicles. “You couldn’t.”

“You’re probably right. Clockworker reflexes.” Toss. Smash. “Those reflexes and that strength come at a price, you know. The plague burning through your body’s resources.” Toss. Smash. “How does it feel, Ennock, knowing that the plague is devouring your brain from the inside out? How does it feel to know you won’t last the year with your lady love?” Toss, smash. “How does it feel to know that she’ll cry over your grave for a while and move on to someone else? She already left one man.”

Her words were light as pebbles, but they slammed Gavin with the force of cannonballs. His grip on the cutlass loosened, and he only just remembered to keep it ready. “You’re just… trying to make me feel bad.”

“Of course,” Phipps replied conversationally. Toss. Smash. “I want you to feel bad about what you’re doing, Gavin, because it is bad. You’ve done wrong. You are doing wrong.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Alice gasped from the safety of her mechanical barricade. The rush that had carried her through the fight was wearing off, and it was clear she was struggling to stay conscious.

Phipps flicked a rock in her direction, but Alice ducked into the mechanical, and it pinged off metal. Gavin’s anger started up again. Phipps interrupted it. “You know I’m right, Gavin. It’s bloody scary out here. Chaotic. Difficult. Imperfect. So many choices, so many paths, so many roads, and no resources to help with them. You always miss the mark.”

“Silence!” Feng called from the shadows. “Or I shoot.”

“If you were going to shoot, you would have,” Phipps countered. “You’re a coward, Feng. Otherwise you would have stood up to your father when he said he planned to send you home in disgrace. But you know that, don’t you, Feng? It’s why you’re slinking home like a castrated dog with his tail tucked between his legs. The longer you stay with these people, the worse it will become, you know. They don’t appreciate you. They’re bringing you home to your doom.”

“Quiet!” Alice was trying to shout, but the words came out in a harsh whisper that spun through the room and wrapped themselves around the Consolatrix. Feng didn’t respond, but Gavin thought he heard a choked sound from the shadows.

Toss, smash. Phipps turned back to Gavin. “You can build whatever you want at the Ward, Gavin. It’s calm there. Quiet. Patterned. Perfect. Every day, every room, every meal. No chaos, no confusion, no disorder. Come back to us. You won’t hang for treason, not if you’re a clockworker. We like you, want you, need you.”

Her words, her tone, her ideas were hypnotic as music. He remembered the underground rooms where the clockworkers lived and worked at Third Ward headquarters, their regular stonework walls, the patterns, the perfect schedule. When he was training as an agent, he’d found the required regularity difficult, even stifling, but now it sounded attractive, even alluring. The world would make sense there. Gavin realized he had sheathed the cutlass and taken a step toward Phipps.

“Gavin!” Alice croaked. “Don’t!”

“It’s beautiful down there now,” Phipps cooed. “We’ve already made repairs after what you did, after what you hurt, after what you destroyed. We made it pretty and patterned and perfect. Patterns within patterns, spirals within spirals. No worries, no troubles, no cares. No fear, no dread, no fright. Just the machines. Orderly, mannerly, heavenly machines.”

Her words wrapped him in warm velvet. It would be so fine to have a place where he didn’t have to think and plan all the time, where worries evaporated, where patterns ruled. What had he been thinking, running away from all that in the first place?

He was vaguely aware of someone, another woman, shouting something at him, and the shadowy figure of a man stepping out of the darkness, but Phipps, beautiful, kind Phipps, flipped a stone at the man, and he retreated. Phipps always hit her mark. The shouting woman’s words washed past him like tiny waves, easily ignored. He took another step.

“We can give you a cure, you know,” Phipps said. “I told you before we had more cures than the one Edwina created in the Doomsday Vault. We can cure clockworkers, too.”

This jolted Gavin. The perfection cracked, the velvet vanished, and he realized he was nearly face-to-face with Phipps. “Cure? There is no cure for clockworkers.”

Too late Phipps saw her mistake. Her single eye blinked rapidly. “Of course not, of course not. What I meant was that you can look for a cure. The Ward has resources, anything you need to find one, seek one, look for—”

“You’re very good,” Gavin said quietly. “Distract, pacify, capture, right? That’s the pattern. We do it with Dr. Clef all the time, except we use Click.”

Phipps narrowed her eye. “I’ll take you now, boy.”

“No, you won’t. Without Glenda and Simon, you’re outnumbered and outmatched, and if you touch me, Feng really will shoot. You wanted me to go with you on my own. I won’t, Susan. You’ll put my head in a noose.”

“I want justice, boy,” she hissed. “I want what’s right. You destroyed my empire and even now you hurt Simon and Glenda.”

“Leave, Susan,” Gavin told her. “You let me walk away from the Doomsday Vault, so I’ll let you do the same here. Next time I’ll probably change my mind.”

“Because you’ll be completely mad?”

“Go, Susan. You won’t get your justice today.”

For a long moment, she stared at him. Then she tossed one final bit of column at the stained glass, turned on her heel, and stalked out.

Heart tight with worry, Gavin ran over to Alice. She had slumped over inside the mechanical wreckage, looking pale and delicate as paper with the spider gauntlet weighing her down, but she blinked up at him when he leaned into the machinery. Simon sprawled beside her, unconscious but breathing. Thank God they were all right. The thought of Alice getting hurt made him cold inside and out, and Simon… well, even now he still thought of Simon as a friend.

“Can you walk, Alice?” Gavin said. “We shouldn’t stay.”

“I think I can manage for a bit,” she replied. “Those last few moments took a lot out of me.”

“You were magnificent,” he blurted. “Incredible!”

“Funny,” she said softly, “I was going to say the same, Mr. Ennock.”

“Your little friend will live,” Feng called from Glenda’s mechanical. “But she will have a dragon’s headache when she wakes up. Should we tie them up?”

“With what?” Gavin helped Alice out of the mechanical. “How’s the priest?”

But Berta had already arrived and was helping Monsignor Adames to his feet. He held his side and his face was pinched with pain.

“Two of your ribs are cracked and it is possible a third is broken,” Berta said, and her mechanized voice managed to sound concerned. “You must come downstairs so I can wrap them.”

Adames waved her off. “Not yet.” His breath came in gasps. “Alice and Gavin have to know. I saw… I saw… the world coming to an end in flood and plague.” He panted with the effort of speaking. “Dear God, the pain.”

“Your ribs,” Berta began.

“Not my pain,” he gasped. “The world’s. So many people will die if you fail, Alice. Millions upon millions.”

Alice struggled to more alertness. “Me?”

“You must not fail,” Adames said. “God has shown me. Oh, He has. I’m so sorry.”

Something in his tone made Gavin uneasy. “Sorry?”

“Your trials aren’t over, my children.” He was leaning heavily on Berta now. “Flood and plague will destroy us if you don’t cure the world.”

“That’s my intent,” Alice said, holding up her gauntleted hand.

Adames shook his head. “Not you. Gavin.”

“Me?” Gavin started. “But Alice has the spider, and her aunt made the fireflies.”

“That’s not what God showed me,” Adames repeated stubbornly. “You will cure the world, and Alice… Alice must let go.”

“Let go?” Alice asked. “Let go of what?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s not… it’s not like looking in a picture. It’s a dream that I know is real. Oh, Alice. Your love destroyed an empire. Now it will destroy the world as well.”

Gavin’s mouth went dry. Alice froze. “No,” she whispered.

“You have to let him go, Alice,” Adames gasped out. “You have to release him or the world will die.”

A crowd was gathering outside the enormous church, summoned by the noise. They pointed and stared at the shattered windows, but seemed unsure whether they should go inside or not. Gavin carried Alice, who was too weak to stand, and tried to blend in. He’d been forced to leave the depowered backpack behind, but he kept the lash and his cutlass and had stuffed his fiddle into Alice’s pack. Feng had the firefly jar. Alice felt disturbingly light in Gavin’s arms as he worked his way toward the back of the crowd around the church, and the spider gauntlet lay inert in her lap, though its eyes glowed red when it brushed against Gavin’s chest.

Flood and plague will destroy us if you don’t cure the world. What the hell did that mean? Gavin had never been particularly religious, and minister and priest were really no different than musician, really. Their words spun people into other worlds just like music did. Priests has no more power than Gavin himself. Yet Monsignor Adames’s words chased after him.

Your love has destroyed an empire. Now it will destroy the world.

He looked down at her in the near darkness as they moved through the bewildered people with Feng close by him. Those last words chilled him. Neither Gavin nor Alice had mentioned the Doomsday Vault or how the cure would eventually destroy the British Empire to Adames, and Phipps had said something only after Glenda had knocked Adames unconscious. He couldn’t have known, but he did know. What did that mean for the rest of his words? The crowd pressed tighter around them, pointing and staring.

“We must bring her back to the circus,” Feng said in his ear.

“It’s all about destruction,” Gavin muttered, pulling Alice tighter to him. It was getting harder to move. “Never creation. Even when we create, we destroy.”

“Gavin,” Feng said.

He shook his head. “I know, I know. I’m not… fugueing. Just thinking out—”

“No.” Feng pointed. “Look.”

Feng, and most of the other people in the heavy crowd, were pointing at the stained glass windows at the back of the nave, the panes Phipps had flung casual stones at. The broken panes formed a pattern, one Gavin hadn’t noticed backward, inside the church. Outside, the broken glass formed a clear symbol: √2.

“The signature of the Third Ward,” Gavin said.

“What is the significance?” Feng asked. He was still clutching the firefly jar.

“It’s a message. Phipps isn’t giving up, and she has the power to touch even the church.”

“Gavin!” Phipps’s voice carried through the churchyard loud and clear. Alarm speared Gavin’s chest and he held Alice tight. “One last gift for you and your friends.”

At the last moment he spotted her on a shadowy window ledge above the crowd’s head. She had a pebble in her mechanical hand, and she threw. Fearful for Alice, Gavin spun, shielding her with his body. But instead of feeling the bite of stone on flesh, he only heard one more note of shattered glass. Feng stood next to him, the pieces of destroyed jar in his hands. Blood ran from a cut on his arm. A chill ran over Gavin.

“No!” he whispered.

The cloud of fireflies hovered in place for a moment, keeping the shape of the jar. Then they scattered, swarming over the crowd, streaking green starlight in a thousand different directions. The people scattered, yipping and slapping. Hundreds of dead fireflies dropped to the ground, crushed by hands and stomped by feet.

“Damn you!” Gavin cried at the church. But Phipps was already gone.

Interlude

“When will you be well enough to travel?” Phipps asked.

Glenda lay propped up in her hotel room bed with a steak on her eye and her arm in a sling. “I don’t know. Three days, perhaps four. I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”

“I should be sorry, Agent Teasdale. I’m your commander, and I let you down.”

Since Glenda had the bed, Simon occupied her customary place in the chair. “I’m not feeling very well myself,” he said. “We wrecked a church, Lieutenant.”

“A church that violated a number of laws regarding human-shaped automatons and the illegal sheltering of plague victims. Monsignor Adames knew the risks,” Phipps replied, fighting to remain calm. This was the second time Gavin and Alice had slipped away from her, and she hated looking the fool. She was also fighting to push aside a growing unease that Simon had a point. “In any case, I’m sure the amount of money he scavenges from the wrecked mechanicals will more than compensate him.”

“A church, Lieutenant,” Simon repeated. “How do we justify—”

A knock interrupted him. Simon answered the door and returned with a letter addressed to Phipps. She had a good idea what it was about, and reading the heavy paper inside only confirmed her suspicion.

“It’s from the office of the grand duke,” she said. “The gendarmerie is no longer available to assist us in our enquiries and we have been asked, in the politest manner possible, to leave Luxembourg as soon as we are able. I suspected as much.”

“Why did you break that jar?” Glenda asked.

Phipps almost grimaced and stopped herself. Breaking the jar had been a mistake, her temper getting the better of her. She had no idea what the jar had contained, only that it was somehow valuable to Gavin and Alice, and the final pebble in her hand had been too much of a temptation there in the shadow of the church. Lately, it was harder and harder to keep her emotions in check. How could she know if her decisions were based on logic or emotion when she was angry all the time? She was fighting for what was just, as Father had taught, and Father was never wrong. As long as she did that, she herself could not be wrong.

“Never let an opponent think he has the upper hand, even when he’s handed you a… setback,” she said in an explanation that sounded lame even to herself. “Better to take a small victory.”

“Hm,” said Glenda.

“So what now?” Simon asked, a little warily.

“Once Glenda can travel again, we will follow that circus.”

Simon blinked. “The Kalakos Circus? The gendarmes searched there and found nothing.”

“Of course they didn’t. Alice was out and about on her little mission at the time, and circus performers won’t admit anything to the police.”

“Then how do you know they’re with the circus?” Glenda asked.

“Didn’t you catch the scent of peanuts and cooked sugar on Gavin when we were in the church? It was all over him,” Phipps replied. “He’s hiding there, all right. Unfortunately, we can’t confront them now, not with Glenda injured and the mechanicals destroyed.”

“And the gendarmerie unhappy with us,” Simon put in.

“True. Fortunately, while you were out fetching the steak, Simon, I was able to make some enquiries. The circus plans to spend some time in Berlin, and from there it will travel to Kiev.”

Glenda sat up straighter, and winced. “The Ukrainian Empire? Are they mad?”

“It will be an absolute hell,” Phipps agreed.

Chapter Seven

The world rocked and wobbled. Alice tossed about, trying to make everything settle down, and finally she came fully awake. It came to her that she was lying on her narrow bunk in her stateroom on The Lady of Liberty. She wore a nightgown and cap, and the blankets lay heavy atop her. How had she come to be here? The last thing she remembered was Gavin carrying her out of the ruined church.

The room continued to sway, more like a train than the Lady’s usual stately glide, and Alice’s sleep-addled mind finally remembered the day she had helped fit the airship with train wheels and hook her up to the circus train. They must be under way. Mindful of the low ceiling, she sat up as the door slid open and Kemp entered with a tea tray.

“So glad to see you awake, Madam,” he said brightly. “I thought you might be hungry.”

The sight of food and drink awoke a leonine appetite, and Alice gratefully accepted the tray. Tea, fresh bread, butter and jam, soft-boiled eggs, and… liver? Kemp knew very well she hated liver, and it was completely unlike him to serve her food she disliked, but when the smell reached her, something primal took over. She snatched up fork and knife and crammed in mouthfuls, heedless of ladylike manners. The spider gauntlet on her left hand clinked softly against the flatware.

“I noticed the change in your heartbeat and respiration,” Kemp said, answering a question she hadn’t asked, “and stepped out to prepare a meal. Sir said you had lost a fair amount of blood, and the proper remedy for that is tea and liver.”

Alice swallowed a mouthful. “How long was I asleep?”

“Nearly two days, Madam. I urge you to drink as much as you can.”

“Thank you, Kemp. As always, I don’t know what I would do without you.”

His eyes glowed. “You are quite welcome, Madam. In anticipation of your next question, Sir is in the workshop with the doctor. Shall I alert him to your present state?”

“Not if he’s in a fugue.” Alice tapped an egg with her spoon and unwound the shell. “Where are we? What’s been going on?”

“We left Luxembourg late last night. Ringmaster Dodd became nervous at the number of ‘mingers,’ as he calls them, patrolling the streets to look for you. In any case, their presence seemed to have a dampening effect on the number of people who attended performances. So we are moving on to Berlin. I believe the local baron is giving a birthday party for his son and he wants a circus. Eventually, of course, we will travel on to Kiev.”

Alice glanced out the porthole. Greenery rocked past in a blur, and the engine gave a long, low whistle. Sharp coal smoke and cinders mingled with the scent of liver and eggs. She remembered traveling by rail with her father and mother and brother and eating on tall-sided trays just like this one. Mother always bought a large bag of peppermint candies and shared them with Alice and Brent. Father sniffed that he didn’t care for peppermint, but pinched pieces outrageously and made Alice giggle. Then Mother assigned Alice the task of counting cows in the fields they passed while Brent was to count sheep. Father joked that it was faster to count all their legs and divide by four, which made Alice giggle all over again and lose count. That had been in happier times, in the days before the clockwork plague struck her family, sending her mother and brother to the graveyard and twisting her father’s body into a wheelchair. She held up the dark spider gauntlet for a moment. Her blood still coursed through the tubules. What would happen if she cut the tubes, sliced off its legs until it had nothing to grip with? It wouldn’t be difficult, just time-consuming. But the spider moved with her perfectly, responding to every muscle twitch far more efficiently than a simple glove. How deeply had it bonded to her and how much would it damage her own flesh to cut it off?

She pushed the questions aside to finish her breakfast, wash up, and dress, opting for a simple blouse and skirt and not bothering with a corset. Her legs were a bit shaky. Sharing the blood cure was difficult, time-consuming, and physically draining, and although the people Alice cured would themselves spread the cure with every cough and sneeze, it took time, time, and more time to get the cure to those who needed it, and every day it took was another day someone else’s mother, father, or brother died. There had to be a faster way. The fireflies would help, of course, since they could fly and spread things even faster, but they had their limitations as well. They couldn’t cross an ocean or mountain range, and chance or nature might destroy all the ones in a particular area before they had the chance to do much good. Still, they were helpful, and would take some of the burden off Alice. She would have to make more use of them in the future.

That decided, Alice left Kemp to tidy up her room while she went off in search of Gavin. Out in the corridor, however, she encountered a seething mass of metal. A brass flock of whirligigs flitted and hovered in the air while spiders scampered back and forth over the corridor floor. They jumped and squeaked when Alice emerged, and crowded around her. She laughed, and put out a hand. Two whirligigs landed on her arm, and spiders crawled up her body to her shoulders and head.

“All right, all right.” She laughed again. “I’m glad to see all of you, too. Good heavens.”

The little automatons refused to leave her sight, so Alice wore them like odd flowers or jewelry as she went off in search of Gavin. She tapped on the laboratory door and slid it open. Gavin, clad in a leather coat and goggles, turned to glance at her. His eyes widened, and he dodged away with a yelp and snatched up a beaker, ready to throw.

Alice backed away. “Gavin! What’s wrong?”

“Whirliblades chopping the chaos into wrong patterns,” he babbled. “So much fluff.”

Her heart lurched. He wasn’t a snapping, snarling monster, but the nonsense wasn’t much better. “Gavin, it’s me,” she pleaded. “Snap out of it!”

His blue eyes swam behind the lenses and he was breathing fast. Gently, she pulled the goggles off and touched his face. When had she last really touched him, just to touch him? His handsome face, so young but so old at the same time, felt warm and a little raspy under her palm. She wanted to take this man’s hand and run with him somewhere safe, to a place where there was no plague, no machinery, no ticking clock. Just the two of them.

He grabbed the back of her hand and pressed it harder against his face. “Alice?”

His voice was normal, and she felt better for it. “It’s me, darling.”

“What are you wearing? You look like a knight who went through a threshing machine.”

She laughed for the third time that day and turned. “Do you like it? Give it time, and whirligigs and spiders will become the latest rage.”

“You’re beautiful in everything, Lady Michaels.”

The sincerity in his voice made her blush. “Well. For that, you may have a kiss.”

She meant it to be a quick peck, but she found herself wrapped in his arms. The whirligigs and spiders exploded away from her in a startled cloud, and Gavin’s entire body pressed against hers. He ran his hands through her hair and down her back as his mouth came down on hers. The world swirled away, and her entire universe became nothing but him. She felt his muscles move on hers, and felt his hardness press against her. Her body throbbed in response. She ran her own hands over him, touching his jaw, his smooth collarbone, the ripples on his chest and stomach. Her breath quickened as—oh God, how daring could she be—she explored lower and touched his erection. He groaned against her teeth as her hand traced its length through his clothing, and his arms tightened around her. Her skin felt feathery, and she wanted to pull Gavin into her, make him part of her and never let him go.

“Alice,” he whispered hoarsely, “oh God, Alice. I don’t… We have to stop now or…”

“Or what?” she whispered back.

“Or we have to keep going.”

She moved her hand again, fascinated and excited by his length and hardness, by the reactions and gasps of pleasure her touch elicited in Gavin, and she ached for his hands on her, but he was barely moving now, as if he were afraid he might explode. He gave another groan.

“. . . should we keep going?” he murmured. “Can we?”

She knew what he was talking about. A baby. If she got pregnant now, before they found a cure for Gavin, the baby would grow up without a father. That would destroy Gavin, not to mention what it would do to her. Further, an illegitimate child would also be unable to inherit her title, and despite all the traditions she had flouted, this one she wasn’t willing to give up.

It would be so easy to take him back to her stateroom, put him on the bunk and help him undress. She wanted to see him, feel him, touch him skin to skin, no barriers between them. And no one would know, or care if they did.

Her body hungered for him. But no. She had flouted any number of traditions, but this one… This one she wasn’t ready to forego yet. She dropped her hands and turned aside. Gavin swallowed, then turned his back so he could adjust his clothes. When he turned around again, she couldn’t help reaching out to brush his white-blond hair back into place, and she nearly leaped into his arms again.

“I’m sorry.” With effort, she pulled her hand back. “I wish there was some way we could…”

“We’ll live,” he said.

But you won’t, she couldn’t help adding to herself. I can save everyone else. Why can’t I save you?

The little automatons were still hovering in the doorway, some of them literally. Alice shooed them off. “What happened while I was asleep? Kemp told me only a little.”

He turned back to the efficient worktable, upon which perched a new machine the size of a shoe box. A speaking trumpet was affixed to the top, and a crank stuck out of the side. One side of the box was open, and a few stray pieces lay on the table with some tools. Alice craned her neck to see what the machinery inside was for, but the angle was bad, and Gavin’s body blocked the way.

“Let’s see.” Gavin picked up a screwdriver and set to work with it. “After Phipps broke the firefly jar, we got back to—”

“She what?” Alice cried.

He set down the screwdriver. “You didn’t know?”

“No!” Alice’s knees went weak, but there was no place to sit down. She leaned on the worktable instead. “How do you mean it broke?”

“Phipps threw a rock. All the fireflies flew away, though they bit a lot of people first. I’m sorry, Alice. I thought you were still awake when it happened.”

“Dear God.” She looked down at the spider gauntlet on her left hand. No possibility of cutting it off now. The escaped fireflies would infect a number of Flemish, but only a few of them would travel beyond their homes, and it would take years for the cure to reach around the world without artificial means. She had planned to release a few fireflies in every city they passed through, hastening the cure’s movement, but now…

“I’m all of it,” Alice said. “I have to spread the cure as far as I can now.”

Gavin set his face and went back to work with the screwdriver. “You can only do so much, Alice.”

“I have to do what I can. I have to save them, Gavin.”

“It won’t do the world any good if you kill yourself in the process.”

Despair crashed over her, extinguishing her earlier arousal. “What should I do, then? Every day I malinger in bed, recovering from curing people, someone else dies.”

“I’m working on a way to help.” Gavin tightened the last piece of machinery and closed up the box. “There!”

Alice blew her nose into a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes, a little miffed that Gavin wasn’t offering more sympathy, but also curious about the machine. “What is it?”

“I call it a paradox generator. But I can’t actually use it. Not directly.”

“What? Why not?” Alice drew back. “Will it destroy the world or something?”

“I hope not.” Gavin snagged a set of ear protectors similar to the ones Alice had seen Aunt Edwina use back in London. “But if it works, it’ll… Look, I can’t explain it. Let’s take it up top and I’ll show you.”

The wind on the main deck was fierce. It blew Alice’s hair and skirts straight behind her and roared in her ears. The disguised airship was the last and tallest car on the train, so there wasn’t even any shelter from the brightly painted boxcar ahead of them. Far up the track, a plume of black smoke blew from the engine’s stack backward over the rest of the train. Ash and cinders clogged the air. The little automatons, afraid of being blown away, stayed below. Gavin took Alice’s hand and brought her to a three-sided, roofed shanty that had apparently been erected on the deck while she had been asleep. The opening faced the leeward side, allowing them to stand out of the wind but still be outdoors. In the shanty was Dr. Clef, who was scribbling in a notebook. Click sat beside him, but he ran over to rub against Alice’s legs. Alice picked him up and cooed at him, eliciting his mechanical purr.

“So good to see you up and moving, my young treasure. I have kept your clicky kitty wound for you,” said Dr. Clef over his pencil. He face and hands were gray with soot. “I find the fresh air helps me think, don’t you?”

At that moment, a particularly thick cloud of cinders engulfed the shanty before being blown to shreds by the wind. Alice coughed over Click’s back into her much-abused handkerchief. “Fresh air. Hm. What are we doing up here, Gavin?”

“Just listen.” He set the new machine down and pulled the protectors over his ears. They were wooden cups stuffed with wool, apparently designed to keep out sound. Then he turned the machine’s crank.

From the speaking trumpet emerged an unearthly sound. It sounded like a chorus of ghosts sighing from high to low and low to high all at once. Gavin continued turning, and the sound repeated endlessly. The pitch rose higher and higher and higher and fell lower and lower and lower, but it never seemed to reach the top or bottom of any scale. It turned endlessly, the tonal equivalent of a figure eight, always moving and going nowhere. It made Alice’s skin crawl.

“I don’t understand,” she said when he stopped.

Gavin pulled the protectors off his ears. “I think I broke Dr. Clef.”

Dr. Clef sat motionless. He stared into space without blinking, and only the faintest breath fluttered from his chest. A line of spittle drooled down the side of his mouth. The engine blew its whistle, high and shrill.

“Good heavens.” Alice shook Dr. Clef’s shoulders, and he didn’t respond. Gavin handed her a bottle of smelling salts, and she opened it under his nose. He coughed awake and waved the bottle away.

“Where am I, then?” he asked. “What is happening?”

“I think only Gavin can explain that,” Alice said.

Gavin gestured to the new machine. “It generates a tritone paradox,” he said. “Kind of hard to explain. The machine plays a one-octave scale that goes down and another that goes up. When the machine reaches the top of the ascending scale, it drops back down to the bottom and starts over, but the volume changes so that you don’t notice the switch. It does the same for the descending scale. But then things really get interesting.”

“It’s just a noise,” Alice said doubtfully. Click squirmed in her arms, so she set him down.

“Not really,” Gavin said. “The machine also adds another pair of ascending/descending scales, but those are a tritone above the first two. It creates the illusion of a sound that’s always going up or always going down—it depends on your ear—but it never actually goes anywhere. Clockworkers, though, are sensitive to tritones and have perfect pitch—”

“—so it creates an unsolvable paradox for us,” Dr. Clef put in. “And the addition of the other tones does away with the pain and makes the entire scale hypnotic. I remember only a lovely sound that— Wait! Wait!” He clapped his hands and his face flushed. “Du Lieber! Ach, das ist ja nicht zu glauben! Wie habe ich das verpaßt?”

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Alice asked. “What did you miss?”

“This tritone paradox is an auditory version of my Impossible Cube! Play it again! Play it now!”

“Just a moment,” Alice said, holding up a hand. “We don’t know everything this does yet. Is it harmful?”

“I don’t know,” Gavin replied. “It seems to have helped Dr. Clef. He’s talking to me instead of arguing.”

“Why, so I am!” Dr. Clef exclaimed. “We should be fighting, yet we are not. I am filled with goodwill toward you, my boy. What an amazing thing! Did you create it just for this purpose? So that we can work together?”

“No,” Gavin said. “I created it because I think it’s possible to slow time.”

There followed a long, long pause. Wind whistled through the cracks in the shanty walls, and Click’s steel wool tongue rasped as he cleaned his paws.

“Sorry,” Alice said. “Did you say—?”

“It’s possible to slow time,” Gavin repeated.

“How?” Dr. Clef said in a low, steady voice.

“With your new alloy, Dr. Clef.” Gavin gestured at the rolled-up wiring that still lay on the deck. “I saw your calculations, the ones that prove gravity distorts time.”

Dr. Clef held up a finger. “That is not quite correct. I proved that time isn’t a constant. The flow of time speeds up or slows down based on a number of forces, including the power of gravity, but we don’t notice because we’re in whatever passes for local time. If you could somehow put a clock two or three thousand miles above the surface of the planet, for example, within a few days you will find it is running faster because Earth’s gravity is weaker up there. Time for an object also changes based on how fast it moves. I have reason to believe—though I have not yet proved it mathematically—that if you could somehow accelerate to the speed of light, time would stand still for you.”

“This is more than I can follow,” Alice admitted.

“But”—Gavin lifted a finger—“you used your electric alloy to make the Impossible Cube, and it warped the universe around itself. Have you thought of why the alloy does this?”

Dr. Clef shrugged. “I assumed it was to do with the nature of electricity. Electric current cycles back and forth between negative and positive, like a mouse running back and forth between its hole and a piece of cheese. We measure the distance between the two points and call it volts.”

“But,” Gavin said again, “we don’t actually measure the farthest distance. I’ve been reading your notes. We measure from a point just below and above the two extremes. To use your metaphor, it’s as if the mouse paused on the way to the cheese, and then paused again on the way back to its hole, and we actually measure how far the mouse ran from the pauses, not from the cheese or the hole. We do that for convenience because it’s very hard to measure electricity at its peak and its low.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Alice asked.

Gavin turned his eyes on her, and they all but glowed with intensity. “To get the distance between the stopping point and the peak, that is, the distance between the pause and the cheese—”

“Oh!” Alice interrupted. “You’re going to tell me it’s the square root of two.”

“Well, you multiply by the square root of two, but yes.”

“God in heaven!” Dr. Clef dropped his pencil and scrabbled for it on the rocking deck. “I knew this fact, my boy, but I never made the connection. The electricity in the alloy cycles between the average and the peak—the square root of two—and when combined with the Impossible Cube’s design, it forces a constant on the universe and changes local time.”

“My paradox generator might do the same thing,” Gavin said. “If we used your alloy in it and powered it correctly.”

Dr. Clef clapped his hands with newfound glee and cooperation. “It would take a lot of work and careful calculation.”

“Wait a minute,” Alice put in.

“And precise measurement, which we couldn’t do here, with the lab rocking.” Gavin began to pace within the shack, stepping over Click without really seeing him.

“One moment, please,” Alice said.

“But we’ll be in Berlin in a few hours.” Dr. Clef flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “The train will stop.”

“Now, see here,” Alice said.

“And we’ll be able to buy more materials in a large city,” Gavin said. “We may have to build a few tools first, but—”

“Wait. A. Minute!” Alice shouted.

Both men blinked at her, as if only then remembering she was there. Click’s green eyes shuttered open and closed with little clicking noises that were clearly audible despite the rushing wind outside the shanty.

“What’s wrong, my dear?” Dr. Clef asked at last. “You see how well we are working together. Is this not a fine thing?”

“You should not be discussing any of this,” she said, one hand pressed to her bosom. Her heart fluttered about her rib cage like a frightened bird, and she felt a little sick. “You’re treating the idea of changing something as fundamental as time itself like nothing more than some schoolboy’s science experiment. This is… it’s… Good heavens, I don’t know what this is! Why would you do such a thing?”

Gavin looked at her, truly puzzled. “It’s for you.”

Alice hadn’t thought she could be more shocked, and was even more shocked to learn she’d been wrong. His words sent an electric jolt through her gut, and she found herself pressed against the wall of the shanty. “What do you mean?”

“You need more time,” Gavin said. “We need more time. You need to spread the cure and recover from it. And I’m… well, I don’t have much time left. If I can find a way to change the way time flows for us, I can speed us up—or slow the world down. You’ll have more time to recover. We’ll have more time together. We can save the world, Alice. Just like Monsignor Adames said.”

Nausea and more than a little fear sloshed around Alice’s stomach. The very idea of tampering with time, let alone doing so in her name, screamed with wrongness. Alice tried to reply, but all that came out was a squeak. She tried again. “Gavin, Doctor—you can’t be serious. I would never ask for such a terrible thing.”

“I know. That’s why I’m doing it.”

He reached for her hands, but she snatched them away. “You don’t understand at all. This is a horrible idea, Gavin. It’s the sort of thing the Doomsday Vault was built to contain. What if you make a mistake? What if you speed time for us and the rest of the world goes ahead as normal and that tears a big piece out of the earth itself?”

“I wouldn’t make such a mistake,” Gavin soothed. “Truly. I don’t make mistakes.”

“You make mistakes all the time!” Alice felt like she was arguing with a tree. “You decided to escape the world’s most powerful police force in an airship that can’t fly without making a spectacle of itself. You used that whip of yours without knowing how much power was left in it, and it fizzled away right when you needed it most. Just now you tried your… your thing on Dr. Clef without considering whether or not it might damage his brain. No sane scientist would—” She clamped her lips shut and turned her face away. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Gavin wasn’t… wasn’t…

She couldn’t bring herself to complete the thought.

A hand took one of hers. Gavin looked her in the face, his expression worried and agitated at the same time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. It’s… I’m going in strange directions, Alice. I’m changing. My brain runs ahead of my mind, and I don’t think. No, that’s wrong. I do think. I think too much, and these ideas come to me, and it doesn’t even occur to me that there might be something wrong. It scares me, Alice. I don’t know what to do.”

Alice squeezed his hand in both of hers, flesh on metal on flesh. The spider’s eyes glowed red. “It’s the plague. You have to fight it, Gavin. For as long as possible.”

“Help me,” he said simply. “Lead me.”

“I’ll try.” It was hard to speak around the lump in her throat. “I’ll never stop trying.”

“Don’t fail,” Gavin said. “Adames said I can cure the world, but you mustn’t fail. Maybe that’s what he meant.”

“I am confused,” said Dr. Clef. “What are we doing?”

“We’re realizing what we should and shouldn’t do,” Gavin said. “This”—he gestured at the paradox generator—“was a mistake. I’ll destroy it now.”

He drew back his foot to kick the generator over the side and let it smash on the rocky railroad bed. Then he hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” Alice asked.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I worked so hard on it, and it’s so beautiful and perfect. How can I destroy it?”

“Then I’ll do it.” Alice leaned down to pick up the generator herself, but Gavin’s arm on her shoulder stopped her.

“Don’t!” he cried, then let her go with a start. “I mean, you can’t… oh, God. I don’t want… it’s so beautiful, Alice.”

Alice pursed her lips, frustrated but understanding. “I see, darling. Perhaps there’s another way. Dr. Clef, I’m going to take Gavin for a little walk. While we’re gone, I want you to destroy this thing.”

A horrified expression crossed Dr. Clef’s face. “But it is as Gavin said—so beautiful! We cannot!”

“Of course we can.” Gavin’s voice hardened and he showed a bit of anger. “We must. Do you understand me, Doctor?”

Dr. Clef cocked his head. “I can,” he said slowly. “If I must.”

“You must,” Gavin said. “We cooperate now, and you must.”

“Then I shall.” He sighed. “I promise. Ah, well. It does make fun to knock things apart, yes?”

Alice embraced Gavin hard, and belatedly realized her cheeks were wet. “Thank you,” she said as the engine whistled again. “I love you always.”

“And I love you always.”

They joined hands and strode out into the wind.

Dr. Clef and Click watched them go. A look of bemusement crossed his ashy face. Then he picked up the discarded paradox generator and rocked it like a lost child. A single tear, and then another, leaked from his eye and splashed on the wooden casing. Click rubbed against his knee.

“Mein armes Unmöglicheskubus,” Dr. Clef moaned. “My poor Impossible Cube. He has abandoned us. Abandoned! And now I must destroy this thing of beauty.”

Click continued to rub against Dr. Clef’s knee, and Dr. Clef stroked his metal sides. They were gray with soot as well. “You understand, my clicky kitty. You are a delightful machine and would not alter your path, just as this train would not. Could not. But that boy, he is brilliant, far more brilliant than I, yet he follows his genitals to obey the woman. How can they save the world when they don’t have enough time, my clicky kitty? How? The boy and the girl need more time. The boy needs more time. He needs more time.”

Tears ran down his face and he rocked the paradox generator in his lap, lost in memory for a moment. Then a change came over his face. Sadness and despair dropped off, gave way to crafty resolve.

“We must show them they are wrong, mustn’t we, my clicky kitty?” he cooed. “Yes, we must. Yes, we must! I can use the boy’s theory and his generator to re-create my Impossible Cube, can’t I, my kitty? Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Once I have my Cube back, I will be able to stop time forever, and that will give the boy and the girl all the time they need. At last the boy will have more time. Yes, he will. Yes, he will. I will stop time forever, my clicky kitty. Forever!”

Click only purred as Dr. Clef’s joyful laughter poured out of the shanty.

Chapter Eight

Kiev was the opposite of Luxembourg. Funny how two places could be populated with human beings but be so completely different, Gavin mused as the train puffed and growled through town. Although the city was built on a series of seven hills with a winding river at the bottom of the valley, the place had no greenery in it whatsoever. Not one tree, flower, or blade of grass grew anywhere. Stone and steel, smoke and sludge hemmed Gavin in. Street after street of blocky buildings crouched low over cobblestoned streets. Gargoyles clung to rooftops and intricately carved monsters crawled across archways. Forests of chimneys belched out clouds of smoke or flashed plumes of yellow flame. Pipes urinated endless streams of waste into the river. A crowd of workers huddled outside a factory, hoping to be called in for a job. More people moved up and down crowded sidewalks. The men wore gray shirts, and the women wore brown dresses and head cloths, and they kept their heads down as they walked. Bright colors seemed to have been outlawed, and the lack pulled Gavin’s spirits lower and lower with every passing moment. Something else bothered him about the crowds, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Mechanicals ruled the streets. Skittering spiders and brass horses and hovering whirligigs clogged the pavement and the air above it. Automatic streetcars rattled down their tracks, drawing iron boundaries behind them. They all pumped out steam and coal smoke, turning the air thick with white mist and yellow sulfur. Gavin turned away from the window with a feeling of nausea. The something he couldn’t figure out continued to bother him, and it gave him a slight headache.

“How can people live here?” he said.

“People live in all kinds of places,” Dodd said philosophically from his own chair near the table. “Many of them can’t go anywhere else. My usual thought is to be grateful I don’t have to stay.”

Gavin thought of his ship, his graceful Lady, now being hauled inexorably into this stony trap by an iron demon, and wondered how grateful he should be. He sighed. Once Alice had finished distributing the cure here, and once they were reasonably safe beyond the reach of Phipps, they could reassemble the Lady and fly for the Orient. As it was, he felt restless and out of sorts after days of inactivity. They had arrived in Berlin to find reward placards with Gavin’s likeness on them plastered over nearly every empty surface and a notice about him that circulated daily in every local newspaper. Alice, who hadn’t been with the Third Ward long enough to be photographed, had escaped such treatment, but her description had been bandied about, as was Feng’s. This forced Gavin to stay hidden either aboard the Lady or in Dodd’s car during the circus’s entire time in Berlin. Alice and Feng risked slipping out to spread the cure around and brought back reports that underground stories of a woman with a demon’s hand and a man with an angel’s voice were already circulating. A number of Alice’s “patients” asked Feng to sing, and he quickly demurred.

“When I sing,” Feng said, “donkeys die in the street.” So one night Gavin spent an hour with the little nightingale, recording the same song over and over until he was satisfied he’d done it perfectly. He gave it to Feng so he could play it for Alice on her nightly missions. But some time later, the nightingale came fluttering back to him. His careful music was gone, and the nightingale instead spoke in Feng’s voice.

“The lady wants you to know that the nightingale’s music is pretty, but not the same as yours,” it said, “and it makes her sad to hear it.”

More than once, Feng himself happily remained behind to accept from a grateful cure recipient what he called “additional gratuity,” a practice that infuriated Alice and Gavin both—Alice on moral grounds and Gavin because it meant Alice was forced to travel back to the circus unescorted through Berlin streets. Feng, however, seemed unfazed by their fury, and Gavin understood more fully why Feng’s father had decided not to allow him to continue as a diplomat in England.

When Alice returned from these midnight excursions, she collapsed into a deep sleep that lasted long enough to make Gavin nervous. He spent hours sitting by her bunk, just to be near her. The iron spider on her arm lay between them, glaring red and bubbling with blood. He barely got to speak with Alice, hardly even saw her awake. This mission to cure the world drove her to exhaustion, and while he couldn’t fault her for it, he found himself wishing she would give up some of her intensity. Leaving London and Alice’s fiancé behind was supposed to have granted them the freedom to love each other, but instead they found even less time for each other than before. How could Gavin compete with a world of plague victims? At times he wanted to shake her and shout that he was dying, that any day his life could end, and she would have all the time she wanted to spread the cure. But he didn’t. The devotion and intensity made Alice herself, and changing any of it would make her into a different person, someone he wouldn’t want to spend his remaining time with. He could either love her or change her, but not both.

Dr. Clef didn’t seem to share Gavin’s unhappiness. He stayed locked up in the ship’s laboratory, scribbling with pencil on endless sheets of paper or with chalk on a slate, and manipulating long sections of his alloy into odd shapes. Gavin had been afraid that he was trying to re-create his Impossible Cube, but Dr. Clef waved this idea aside.

“It is as I told you,” he said blandly. “I cannot re-create it, now or ever.” But he would not say what he was working on.

As time passed, Gavin took to spending more and more time in Dodd’s car. It was larger and more comfortable than any stateroom on Gavin’s ship, and Dodd seemed glad to have him, his sole connection to Felix Naismith, though they never spoke of the man.

Enforced idleness didn’t sit well with Gavin, and his hands worked without him. Even now, as the train puffed through Kiev, he wound wire around a wooden dowel, slid the dowel free, and snipped the length of the resulting coil with cutters, creating a pile of little rings.

At last the train screeched to a stop. It had taken a spur of track that cut past an enormous open square, perhaps three hundred yards on a side and bordered by tall buildings, beyond which rose columns of smoke and flame. Half the stone square was crowded with market carts and sooty freestanding tents. The other half, the side closest to the tracks, had been painted off, clearly set aside for the circus. Just beyond the tracks lay the slate-gray Dnepro River. Oil glistened in a rainbow sheen on its surface far below the cut stone banks. Steel boats of varying sizes chugged along in orderly procession, their stacks spewing yet more smoke into the already overburdened air.

The moment the train halted, the door to Dodd’s car jerked open and in popped a portly man with long mustaches under a bowler hat. His name was Harry Burks, and he was the advance man, the person who traveled ahead of the circus to start the publicity and smooth the way with local officials. He spoke a dozen languages and loved nothing more than spending an evening in a pub making new friends. Gavin had never known him to forget a name or a face.

“Dodd!” Harry boomed. “Right on time. Good, good! You know how the Ukrainians feel about punctuality.”

“What’s the news, Harry?” Dodd asked.

“Nothing major, thank heavens, thank heavens. We have the southern half of the market square for as long as we need it, and we can leave the train on this side spur, though I had to promise the chief of police and the town council and their families front-row tickets along with the usual bribes. Placards are already up all over town, and I’ve taken out advertisements in all the usual places. I’m also trying something new—paying hansom cabs and spiders a small fee to paste placards on themselves. Walking advertisements, you know. We’ll see if it helps, if it helps.”

“Fine idea,” said Dodd.

“And remind everyone not to go out after dark,” Harry warned. “Kiev clockworkers can snatch anyone off the street after sunset, and there’s nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do.”

Dodd nodded. “Will do. And the other matter?”

Harry gave a sideways glance at Gavin. “Not a word, not a word. Your little friends may have been the toast of Berlin, but no one’s talking about a reward for an American boy or an English girl, and clockwork cats are all the rage in Kiev. I think you can come out and breathe some smoky air at last, my boy.”

A load of tension drained from Gavin, and he slumped in the padded chair. Freedom at last!

“But,” Harry continued, holding up a finger, “there are other rumors. I’m hearing tales about a young woman, an angel who cures the plague with a touch, with a touch, and of her young lover who makes beautiful music for her.”

“Uh-oh,” Gavin said. “How is word getting around so fast?”

“Who knows, who knows?” Harry shrugged. “But there is more. The newspapers are saying there are fewer new cases of plague, and more of those who have it are recovering. Recovering! People are beginning to hope. That should give you reason to be careful, my boy, especially here.”

“I’m always careful,” Gavin said, though even as he said it, he knew it was mostly a lie. “But why here?”

“Don’t forget that Kiev is supposedly the birthplace of the plague. She certainly has more zombies and clockworkers than anywhere else in the world, and it’s a pity the Zalizniak and Gonta put all their resources into machines of war. They might have found a cure of their own, otherwise. At any rate, if the general population learns where to find you and that young lady, you’ll be overrun, like Jesus and the lepers. So watch your step, my boy, watch your step.”

An image of Alice caught in a mad mob of desperate plague victims flashed through Gavin’s mind and his fingers went cold. “Understood, sir,” he said.

Dodd rubbed his hands. “Let’s get set up. I want the midway ready by nightfall so we can make parade by tomorrow afternoon.”

Outside the train, a crowd was already gathering under the gloomy sky, though everyone stayed carefully outside the painted boundaries. Here, no one stepped out of line. Once again, something about the crowd nagged at Gavin. He examined the people, trying not to stare, but still he couldn’t work it out. They looked perfectly normal. Perhaps a few more than the usual had clockwork pieces or prosthetics, but that wasn’t it. Gavin shook his head. It would come to him later, he was sure.

Performers in work clothes spilled out of the other train cars and slid open the boxcar doors. The animals within howled, roared, and growled with agitation, glad to see sunlight, however hazy. Gavin sympathized. An official-looking man dressed in a blue uniform and accompanied by a brass spider the size of a collie strode up to Dodd and spoke in Ukrainian, to which Dodd smiled blankly. Harry stepped forward and took over, withdrawing a sheaf of stamped papers from his coat pocket while the circus buzzed to life and the drab crowd watched with interest. The cool autumn air was heavy with acrid smoke and steam, no little of which was added by the circus’s own locomotive. Gavin smelled coal and ash and dust and polluted river water, but the city air wasn’t as close as the air within the train car, and Gavin stretched, enjoying it.

Despite frequent visits when he was younger, Gavin had never been part of the circus setting up, and he turned to Dodd with a certain amount of excitement, especially after spending nearly a month in hiding with so little to do.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Dodd said frankly, “so the best thing you can do is stay out of the way.”

The circus performers worked liked a well-oiled mechanical. First the mahouts led the elephants, both mechanical and biological, out of the boxcars while other roustabouts hauled out enormous rolls of canvas and bundles of wooden stakes with the ease of long practice. It wasn’t possible to pound tent stakes through cobblestones, but before Gavin could wonder about that for too long, he saw a pair of roustabouts slide a stake into a hole that already existed, drilled long ago for exactly this purpose. It meant that the circus had no flexibility about what tent could go where or how big each could be, but it did allow a circus or other events to exist in the center of a city with no parks or grassy squares. The roustabout teams pounded the long stakes into the earth below the street with sledgehammers while teams of other workers laid out canvas. Once two rows of stakes were all in place and the red-striped canvas was laid out between them, the roustabouts pushed two long poles under the canvas and propped them up to create an opening underneath. Two more poles were placed farther in to lengthen the opening, which made enough space for the next step.

The mahout whistled, and the mechanical elephant puffed and snorted its way into the dark interior. Roustabouts followed with more long poles. Gavin, itching with curiosity, couldn’t stand it anymore. He ran down to the tent and ducked inside. The brass elephant, now operating with perfect efficiency under Alice’s careful repairs, was dragging tall, heavy tent poles upright, thereby shoving the tent’s roof higher and higher. Gavin stood out of the way, feeling like a child near the enormous mechanical beast in the increasingly larger space. Once there was enough room, more elephants—live ones—were brought in, and the work went faster. The three enormous center poles took a trio of elephants to haul upright, with the trapeze artists and spiders up in the rigging to ensure they were set properly at the roof. Other spiders scampered about, fastening ropes and tying knots. The center ring was hauled in piecemeal and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. An automaton wheeled the talking clock woman to the entrance and wound her up, touched her metal cheek, and went off to help with other jobs. More people brought in bleacher seats to assemble, and the tent became loud with clacks, clatters, clinks, and shouts. For once, the clockwork plague kept its distance, and the analytical side of Gavin’s brain remained quiet, allowing him to watch in wonder as the Tilt assembled around him like a genie rising from the desert.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” said Alice.

Gavin hadn’t noticed her slip up to next him. A smile automatically burst across his face, and he leaned in to kiss her. She still looked a little pale, her skin contrasting sharply with the dark metal of the spider on her hand.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Not entirely myself, but one can only sleep for so long,” she said with more candor than she usually allowed herself. “Thank you for watching over me.”

He flushed a little. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I heard you singing in my dreams and knew you were there.” She squeezed his hand, and the entire circus slowed and stopped. He became aware of the softness of her skin on his, the warmth of her breath, the pulse of their hearts. He never wanted the moment to end, but the second hand on the clock outside ticked forward, and the noises smashed back into existence.

“We need to go,” Alice said.

“Where?”

“Linda wants to see us.”

Outside the tent, the midway and sideshow were taking shape. Animal cages and brightly painted wagons were rolling out of the boxcars, and several smaller tents were going up. No one merely talked. They shouted and hollered, bellowed and bawled, trying to attract as much attention as possible for the circus. Lions roared, seals barked, elephants trumpeted. The sounds bounced off the hard buildings that bordered three sides of the square, creating a swirling cacophony that both unnerved and exhilarated Gavin.

As they picked their way through the chaos, Gavin noticed the dam for the first time. It rose high above the oily Dnepro upriver, clearly visible in the dank air even though it sat between two hills well over a mile away. Water gushed through spillways, and Gavin’s sharp ears picked up the faint roar of it all even above the noise of the circus setting up.

“Wow,” he said. “How did they build that?”

“I have no idea,” Alice said. “But I’m sure it’s the reason Kiev has so many electric lights. Come along.”

Where the sideshow was setting up, they came to a canary-yellow wagon, its wheels chocked into immobility. The door sported a sign: MADAME FABRY. The sign also showed a crystal ball, stars, and a palm, in case the viewer couldn’t read English. Gavin knocked, and the door flew open to reveal a tallish woman who Gavin happened to know was over sixty but could have passed for ten years younger. Her thick brown hair was covered with a gypsy scarf, and she wore glasses. Her overly patched skirt and blouse—part of a costume, now that they were setting up—rustled about her busy frame as she put her hands on her waist.

“Well, it’s about time you got here, honey,” she said brightly. Her accent was American, probably Midwestern, though Gavin had heard her speak with a Southern drawl more than once.

“Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘You’re late,’ or something like that?” Alice said.

“Why would I say that, sweetie?” she said. “Oh! The fortune-telling. Right. No, dear, I save that for the flatties. Gavin’s been rude, is all. Dozens of cookies and butterscotch sweets I’ve given him over the years, and then he hides in the circus for weeks without coming to see me even once.”

“Sorry,” he said, unabashed. “I’ve been a little busy.”

“Kemp said you wanted to see us,” Alice said.

“Yes, yes, come in.”

Linda ushered them into her comfortable wagon. Against the back wall stood an intricately carved bedstead with a plump featherbed and duvet covering it. Wooden cupboards hung from the walls, and a tiny stove took up one corner. A table folded down from the wall, with stools to sit on. But Gavin’s eye went straight to the automaton. He stood in the corner opposite the stove in a case of glass and metal similar to a ticket booth. From the waist up he looked like a brass man wearing a brown jacket and red vest. From the waist down, he was a complicated mass of metal and gears—no legs or feet. His jointed fingers gleamed in the light of the lamp hanging from the ceiling off the rivets on his face and neck. The top half of his head was made of glass, and suspended in some sort of clear medium within which floated a human brain. Copper clips and wires were attached to it, and little electric sparks flicked and jumped about like fireflies. No matter how many times he had seen that, it took Gavin a moment to remember not to stare. Alice put a hand to her mouth.

“Hi, Charlie,” Gavin said.

The automaton opened his mouth. “Gavin,” he said in a metallic voice. “And this is Alice?”

“I am,” she said. “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

“Sorry. Charlie Fabry. I’d offer to shake hands, but…” He tapped the glass in front of him with a brass finger. “And you’ve met my wife already.”

“Quite,” said Alice, and Gavin knew her well enough to see she was trying to cover shock.

“Charlie used to be a wire walker,” he told her. “He fell during a show and would have died, but a clockworker happened to be in the audience, and… well, you can see the result.”

“Gives you a whole new insight,” Charlie said cheerfully. “No appetites, fewer needs, simpler wants. Liberating.” He leaned forward with a creak until his nose nearly touched the glass and his voice dropped to a raspy whisper. “You can see what you never saw before.”

“I don’t understand,” Alice said.

“We’ve been discussing your little trip to the church in Luxembourg, honey,” Linda said.

Alice looked startled. “You know about that?”

“Everybody knows about that,” Linda said. “Not much goes on without everyone hearing about it eventually. I read in the newspaper that a large piece of the church was destroyed, too, but the vicar is planning to rebuild it even bigger, which will help when he applies to have it declared a cathedral.”

“Is that what you wanted to ask about?” Gavin put in.

“Lord, how I do talk. No, honey. This is.” Linda lifted a handkerchief from the fold-down table, revealing three tarot cards. The first card portrayed a skeletal figure swinging a sword over a field of grain and was labeled XIII. The second showed a burning tower falling to pieces. Two men fell screaming from it, and it was labeled XVI: LA MAISON DIEU. Laid crosswise over the dying tower was the third card, on which was rendered a man in priestly red robes. He held a golden staff in one hand and made a gesture of benediction with the other. This card was labeled V: LE PAPE.

“I don’t know anything about tarot cards,” Alice said primly. “I avoid this sort of thing as nonsense.”

“Place your hands palm-up under the window, if you would be so kind.” Charlie slid aside a small opening at the bottom of his glass case, much like a ticket taker might. After a moment’s hesitation, Alice obeyed. The spider on her left hand left her palm bare, but the metal clanked against the shelf beneath the window opening. Gavin watched warily. A pair of red lights beamed from Charlie’s eyes and ran over Alice’s hands. She jumped, but didn’t pull away. The lights ran over every inch of Alice’s hands, then went out.

“Very interesting,” Charlie said. “You have refined tastes, but you work with your hands. You’ve been touched by the clockwork plague more than once, you are deeply in love, and you can’t get this spider off your arm.”

“And you can tell all that from my palms, can you?”

“No, that’s just gossip around the circus. Your palms say the future is going to be difficult. Your fate line is ragged and rough, especially after your heart line. That means your future will be twisted and shredded by emotional decisions. You can change that, of course, but it’ll be entirely up to you.”

“Didn’t Gavin say you were a wire walker?” Alice asked. “Why are you telling fortunes?”

“I was a wire walker first,” Charlie replied genially. “But now that I’m freed of my body, I can see a great deal that other people can’t. It lends itself to fortune-telling.”

“So you’re not reading my palms at all.” Alice’s tone was shrewd.

Charlie shook his head with a faint creak. “No. I pretend because no one believes pronouncements from thin air.”

“That’s not true,” Alice said. “We believe pronouncements from teachers and parents and others in our lives.”

“You didn’t believe Monsignor Adames.”

Gavin blinked. “How did you know we talked to Monsignor Adames? The church… mess was in the newspaper, and I can see how people in the circus might put that together with our absence, but we didn’t even tell Dodd that we talked to Adames, or what he said.”

“I saw it.” Charlie ran a metal finger over the glass casing that topped his head. “Everything is connected. I told you that. Bits of pasteboard can give us a crude glimpse into the future, and the particles that run through my brain give me even clearer knowledge.”

Alice said, “That’s—”

“Nonsense? Ask your Dr. Clef about that,” Charlie said. “According to some very interesting theories he’s been busy proving as we speak, certain tiny particles affect one another over long distances. Turn one particle, and its twin, no matter how far away it is, will turn as well. Just like flipping a card. Clef also claims that time is nothing but an illusion created by our own limited senses, and that as many as eleven other dimensions exist beyond our ability to see, but they still affect what happens to us. Everything is connected in one way or another, and once you accept that idea, the possibility that three tarot cards could fall out of Linda’s deck and my electrical systems could play ‘Camptown Ladies’ at the very moment you had a conversation with a man named Nicolas Adames doesn’t seem very far-fetched.”

Linda, who had been waiting near the table all this time with her hands folded, said, “Honey, let me tell you what the cards mean and then you can decide what to do about it, all right?”

“Very well.” Alice sighed, clearly not convinced. She took up a stool next to the table and Gavin stood behind her. Strangely, he didn’t share her skepticism. In the long moments when he watched over Alice, he sometimes found himself drawn into deep places, places where things could exist everywhere and nowhere all at once, where tiny, graceful objects appeared and disappeared so quickly, it was difficult to say they had hardly existed at all, where almost everything was vast, empty space that threatened to swallow him up, where matter was made of an infinity of tiny, delicate strings that vibrated and sang with a wonderful perfection that made him weep with joy and envy. And just as he was reaching out to touch them and change their song, alter matter itself, Alice murmured in her sleep, and the sound snatched him backward and upward into a bumbling world of impossible hugeness that could only be manipulated by tearing it apart by fire or grinding it around gears. It was maddening. If there were a way to better understand how it all fit together, he wanted to hear about it.

Linda took up a stool opposite Alice while Charlie watched from his booth. Tiny jolts of electricity arced across his brain.

“Normally, honey, I’d dim the lights and burn some incense and have Charlie make some whoosh-whoosh noises,” Linda said, “but you aren’t flatties, so I’ll give it to you without the show.”

“We appreciate that,” Alice said.

“How do you tell fortunes to people who don’t speak English?” Gavin asked.

“I speak more than just English, honey, and Charlie speaks what I don’t. The pictures on the cards tell the rest. Most of my business is actually from women who are expecting.”

“Why them?” Gavin said.

“They want to know if it’s a boy or a girl. I dangle her wedding ring on a string over her middle and tell her what the baby will be based on which way the ring moves. Then I write it down in my book.” She gestured to a leather-bound diary on a high shelf. “I have predictions going back twenty years.”

Alice leaned forward, interested despite herself. “And how many come out right?”

“Lord, honey, I have no idea. Probably half. I can’t tell a thing from a wedding ring. I just tell them what they want to hear. Part of the show.”

“So what happens when you’re wrong?” Gavin wanted to know.

“Usually we’re long gone by the time the baby’s born, dear. But sometimes when we come back to a city, I’ll get an annoyed mother who shows up with a daughter, ready to fight because I told her she’d have a son. I tell her that I didn’t get the prediction wrong. She heard me wrong. Then I get my book down and show her where I wrote she’d have a daughter, and I’m off the hook.”

“Because you write the opposite of what you say,” Alice supplied.

Linda nodded with a smile. “There you have it, honey. It won’t do to have the fortune-teller come out wrong.”

“So why should we believe you now?” Alice demanded.

“Do or don’t.” Linda shrugged. “But you aren’t paying me and I like you both, so I have no reason to make anything up.”

Alice didn’t look convinced, but Gavin said, “Fair enough. Tell us what the cards mean, Linda.”

“Sure, honey. Look closely.” She gestured at the cards on the tiny table in front of her. “All three cards come from the trumps. They indicate large, important events that are difficult to control or change. The first card that fell out of the deck was the mystery trump, which everyone calls Death. Before you panic, let me tell you that it doesn’t mean someone’s going to die. It means one thing will end so something else can begin. You can’t stop the end from coming, but you can decide which direction the new thing will take. Since it fell out first, I assume that’s what’s coming first.”

“All right,” Alice said.

“The second trump card is the House of God. It’s as bad as it looks—utter destruction. Unlike the Death card, this is an end out of which nothing new can begin. It doesn’t mean someone will die, but it might. It’s not a good omen, honey.”

Linda’s words sent a chill over Gavin’s skin, and her cheerful tone only made the dreadful prediction worse. Alice, however, remained unmoved.

“I see,” was all she said.

“The third card landed across the House,” Linda continued, seemingly oblivious to Alice’s attitude. “This is why I called you in to talk to you. Charlie told me what the priest said to you, and this card is the Hierophant or Pope. He symbolizes religious leadership, power, and discipline. When one card lands across another, the crossing card is interfering with the card beneath. In this case, we have a religious leader who is interfering with total destruction. And just as these cards landed on the floor, Charlie told me what your priest said.”

“That flood and plague will destroy us all if I fail,” Alice murmured.

“No.” Gavin put his hand on her shoulder. “He said flood and plague will destroy us all if I fail. He said that I can cure the world, but you have to let go.”

“Let what go?” Alice growled. She held up her spider hand. “This? I wish I could.”

“He said that you have to let him go,” Charlie said gently.

Alice rounded on him. “How do you know that?”

“I believe I already explained that. And the fact that I do know lends credence to what Adames said,” Charlie replied. “Gavin can cure the world, but only if you let him go. Otherwise the world will perish in flood and plague.”

“How am I to let Gavin go?” Alice was getting truly worked up now. “I don’t hold him. I don’t chain him down. He’s free to leave anytime he wishes.”

But when the words left Alice’s mouth, a pang went through Gavin. He shook his head. “No,” he said.

Alice halted and twisted on her stool to look up at him. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t leave you, Alice.” His throat grew thick, and his jaw trembled. “I could never leave you. I love you always.”

Her eyes softened. “I know, darling, I know.” She took his hand. “But I’m not holding you. I’m not forcing you or chaining you. Am I?”

“You’re leading me, Alice Michaels.” The snaps and sparks that danced across Charlie’s brain created a hypnotic pattern of particles that blurred the edges of Gavin’s vision. Words poured from his mouth in an electric river. “You go, and I follow. You pulled me out of that tower of destruction and changed me, and then you took me through the city of white and changed me again, and now you’ve led me down to the city of sulfur to change me one more time. You bring me places, Alice, and I can’t stop you and I don’t want to stop you.”

“Is it a bad thing, Gavin Ennock?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.” The half trance fell away, and he gave a little laugh. “I’ve never been in love before.”

Alice smacked the table with her free hand. “What’s the point in making prophecies if they don’t make sense? Why can’t a fortune-teller—or priest—simply say, ‘Don’t leave the house on Wednesday; you’ll be hit by a streetcar’?”

“The monsignor did say he couldn’t see everything properly,” Gavin reminded her. “At least now we know that I have a role in spreading the cure, too.”

“There’s one more card,” Linda said. “I saved it for last because it landed some distance from the others.”

From her pocket she pulled another card and laid it face up on the table. It showed a white-haired man seated on a throne surrounded by water. He wore blue robes, a yellow cloak, and a crown. In one hand he held a large cup and in the other he held a scepter.

“This is the King of Cups,” Linda explained. “He’s a fair-haired man, very artistic, patient, and unselfish, but given to flights of fancy. He cares deeply about others and shares their pain.”

Gavin picked up the card to examine it. “That sounds a little like me, but—”

“It’s not you, honey. Kings are older men, and fathers.”

The remark sliced through Gavin like a knife made of ice. His fingers went numb and he dropped the card again. It landed on the table. For a moment he couldn’t speak. Then he said, “This is my father?”

“Probably,” Linda said. “Court cards are usually people, and kings are often father figures. It fell away from the others, which tells me that the person is far removed, but coming closer.”

Gavin touched the card with a shaky finger. “I always thought he was dead. Where is he? What is he doing? Why did he leave me? Us?”

“I don’t know.” Linda looked sympathetic. “I just know he’s out there somewhere, and your destinies are intertwined.”

Alice gathered up the cards and handed them to Linda, her posture once again brisk. “We know nothing of the sort. I’m sorry, Linda. I know you believe what you’re saying, but I simply can’t.”

“Listen, honey,” Linda said, “the reason for casting fortunes isn’t to tell you what will or will not happen. It’s to let you know the choice is coming so you can look at your options and prepare yourself instead of being hit blind. Believe or don’t believe—it doesn’t matter. We’ve had the conversation, and you can’t unhear it.” She reached into her pocket and handed them each a small candy wrapped in paper. “Butterscotch?”

“I’m not twelve anymore, Linda,” Gavin said, but the remark came out a little dazed.

“Honey, you’re young enough to be my grandson. As far as I’m concerned, you’re six.” She shooed them toward the door. “Now, get out there and change the world before it changes you.”

Chapter Nine

The zombie straightened. Its eyes cleared, and it slowly wiped the drool from its chin with a sore-encrusted hand. Alice lowered the spider gauntlet with a sigh. She’d lost count of the number of people she’d cured now, but the relief and satisfaction she felt for each case never lessened. This was seventh or eighth plague zombie she’d cured tonight, and she was feeling a little light-headed now.

Behind her, Gavin played his fiddle, something sweet and soft, and she drank the music in as the zombie shuffled off into the shadows of Kiev. Berlin had been difficult without Gavin, more than she wanted to admit. She drew strength from every note he played, and Feng was no substitute, even when he played Gavin’s music with the little nightingale.

“My father taught me that song,” Gavin said. “I’m sure he did.”

“Hm,” Feng said. “How can you miss a man you barely remember?”

“I just do.” Gavin sounded testy. “You wouldn’t know what it’s like. You had a father all your life. You got to live with him, work with him, see him every day.”

“And live with his disapproval,” Feng added. “Maybe it’s better not to have a father. Then you have no one to disappoint. Perhaps you should think of that.”

“Now, look—”

“Boys,” Alice said tiredly, “I know we’re all nervous, but I’m not up for mediating an argument. I would prefer to move on now.”

Gavin looked away. “Sorry.”

“Now where?” Feng asked in a subdued voice.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Alice replied, and tried to make herself sound more cheerful. “You know, it’s rather nice to walk about and not worry about being followed by Phipps.”

“Phipps, no,” Gavin fretted, “but Kievite clockworkers are another story. Remember what Harry said—they can take anyone they like off the streets after dark. Every time I play, it draws attention.”

“That’s the entire point,” Alice said, trying not to show she was uneasy, too. “How will people find out the ‘angels’ are in town if they don’t hear your music in the dark? Besides, you’re armed.”

“Hm.” Gavin touched the glass cutlass at his belt and fingered the heavy, brass-adorned bands that encircled both his forearms.

Feng checked the pair of pistols at his own belt, a hard look on his handsome face. “We do not know for sure that Phipps has failed to follow. She will eventually notice that we twice appeared in the same city as the circus.”

Alice clutched the amber-handled parasol Gavin had given her and stole a reflexive glance down the street, as if Phipps—or a clockworker—might leap out of the smoking sewers to carry them off. Then she admonished herself for being silly. It was well after midnight, and the gritty street was empty of pedestrians, if brightly lit. This latter aspect had taken Alice by surprise. By day, Kiev looked dark and moody, ready to pounce on newcomers. But at night, the city gleamed with lights. Every street and byway was hung with them, and many doors and windows shone with a steady, unwavering glow. Alice actually found it more unnerving than beautiful. Light should flicker and pulse and live, not remain steady and dead as a granite statue. She wondered whether it existed to ward zombies off the main streets, or to let prowling clockworkers see better.

“Even if Phipps does make that connection,” Alice said, “it’ll take her a few days to track us down, and we’ll be leaving soon. How much money do we have?”

“Not as much as I would like.” Gavin took off his cap for a moment and rumpled his hair. “People didn’t donate much in Berlin. Dodd owes us some more for automaton repairs, and he won’t pay us until the circus has done a couple more shows here. But yeah—once we get that money, we should be able to buy enough paraffin oil to make a run for Peking. Ahead of Phipps.”

“Proschennia mene,” said a quiet voice. A young woman in a head cloth had emerged from one of the nearby houses and now edged uncertainly toward the trio, ready to run at the first sign of danger.

“That’s you, Feng,” Gavin said.

“I have nothing else to do,” Feng muttered half under his breath. “Nowhere else to go.”

Before Alice could say anything in response to this remark, Feng greeted the girl in careful Ukrainian and spoke with her at some length. Alice was glad Feng, someone she trusted, spoke a certain amount of Ukrainian—China watched the Ukrainian Empire carefully and many diplomatic families learned at least some of the language—but Feng’s behavior was different of late.

“The rumors have reached Kiev,” he reported, “just as Harry said. Lilya here heard Gavin playing, and she has braved the clockwork night to ask if Alice can cure the plague.”

“Lead on,” Alice said.

“Lady mine.”

“Feng,” Gavin said, “is something wrong?”

“No,” he said shortly. “Please, let us merely come along.”

Alice exchanged a glance with Gavin. He had noticed it, too—the closer they got to China, the more shuttered and surly Feng became. They needed to discuss this, but now was clearly not the time. In the tiny, low-ceilinged flat where Lilya lived, Alice cured the girl’s parents, who were both lying abed with fever. Gavin played until their pain lessened. Feng, whose facility with the Ukrainian language was the reason they brought him along, asked Lilya if she knew of anyone else who needed help. As Alice expected, Lilya did, and she threaded them through grime-laden blocks of houses lit by dead lights, chattering volubly with Feng, who listened with animated interest.

“What’s she talking about?” Gavin asked.

“Nothing in particular,” Feng replied loftily, and said something in fast Ukrainian to Lilya, who giggled.

Keeping a wary eye on dark sky and narrow street, they dodged beneath gargoyles to the next flat, where Alice cured three children, her parasol under her arm. The joyful parents pressed food on Alice and money on Gavin. She still felt odd about taking cash for curing the plague, but she reminded herself that they needed to buy paraffin oil if they wanted to reach Peking, and Gavin never asked for money. He only took what was offered.

“That went well,” Alice said as she brushed bread crumbs from her skirt and straightened her hat. She avoided trousers on most of these outings on the grounds that the spider gauntlet drew more than enough attention. A woman in trousers would only compound the problem. She looked about the flat’s tiny kitchen, which smelled of watery cabbage and rye bread. “Where’s Feng?”

They found him just outside the flat’s back door, which opened onto a stone courtyard shared by several blocky houses. He was caught in a passionate embrace with Lilya. Her skirt was hiked up to an embarrassing level and her blouse was open.

“Feng!” Alice gasped from the doorway.

Feng drew away from Lilya and blinked at her in the light that spilled from the door. There were no lights out back, and the shadows had half engulfed the pair. An oily smell wafted in from the river, covering everything with an olfactory patina of chemicals and damp. “Do you mind?” Feng said.

“Not this again!” Alice blurted, shocked. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“The same thing you have done for weeks,” Feng said as Lilya straightened her clothes, “only you do it with Gavin.”

Alice became aware that the inhabitants of the flat were standing behind her, as was Gavin, and she felt her face redden. “You’re… This is…” She recovered herself somewhat. “Feng, we have to leave. Now.”

“Of course.” He nuzzled at the girl’s cheek. “Lilya knows of another house of plague and we must go right this moment, must we not? Exactly on your schedule, and no one else’s, because you are English.”

Either he was oblivious to Alice’s outrage or he was a master at ignoring it, which only added to Alice’s fury. The girl was all but hanging out of her blouse and Feng’s… arousal was all too evident. There was certainly no possibility she could reenter the house and face the looks of the two strangers, so she marched down the back stoop and around the corner of the house, her face growing hot again as she heard Feng bid the couple good night in Ukrainian. Gavin came after.

“You are quite a… What is it you say? A piece of work,” Feng drawled. He was holding Lilya’s hand, and she was all but skipping along beside him, apparently now enjoying her adventure. She was pretty, he was handsome, and they would have made an attractive couple under other circumstances.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Alice snapped. A few blocks away, a stack erupted in bright yellow flame, then went out with a whump.

“You and Gavin carry on very plainly, like two animals in—”

“Watch your words, Feng,” Gavin growled.

“Why? Will you strike me?” Feng shot back. “I am tired of hypocrisy. You two have no stronger a connection than sweet Lilya and I do. You are not married or even engaged to be married, so by the rules of your own society, you are a pair of”—Gavin inhaled sharply, and Feng shifted ground—“a pair of very bad people. Yet you enjoy yourselves together for weeks. And then you have the nerve to tell me I should not do the same?”

“Enjoy?” Alice whirled on the narrow sidewalk to face him, almost too affronted to speak. Smoky fog curled around her body, and the amber-headed parasol banged against her shin. “What do you mean by that?”

Feng made a scoffing noise. “That is so English of you. Perfectly willing to tell everyone else what is right while you ignore your own rules. You and Gavin sent me to hide with those acrobats so you could—”

“What do you mean enjoy?” Gavin’s face was turning red. “What are you telling people about us?”

“I need speak not at all. Which is how well I get along with those smelly monkeys you forced me to live with.”

“We thought that you’d get along with them fine,” Gavin said.

“Just because they are Chinese? Ha!” Feng spat, and Lilya cast about uncomfortably, clearly uncertain about what was going on. “They are not fit company for the emperor’s goats, let alone his nephew. As much to hide you with a family of Scottish coal miners.”

“That isn’t the point,” Alice snapped. “You are accusing me of—”

“Yes, it is always you,” Feng snapped back. “You, you, you, and that cure of yours. You dragged me all over Luxembourg and Berlin and Warsaw and now to filthy Kiev for your cure. So you can save everyone. The world revolves around the great Lady Michaels, who guards her chastity during the day so her not-so-secret lover can spend himself on her at—”

Alice slapped him.

Her hand left a mark that changed from white to red on Feng’s ivory skin. Feng stared at her. Alice stared back, a little startled at herself. She had never struck another person in her life. But the fury continued to burn and she refused to move or flinch. Beside her, Gavin tensed, fists clenched. Lilya looked ready to run away. The narrow street stretched in both directions, its unwavering lights pinned to earth like half-dead stars.

“Keep your filthy false accusations to yourself, Feng,” Gavin said evenly.

After a long moment, Feng said, “Translate on your own.” He turned on his heel and stalked away.

“Should I go after him?” Gavin said.

“Certainly not.” Alice turned to the still-uncertain Lilya and gestured with her iron gauntlet. “Go on, girl.”

Lilya may not have understood the words, but she got the message. Timid again, she led Alice and Gavin to another flat, laid out exactly like the previous one. Lilya explained to the mystified inhabitants why Alice had come and then fled immediately, leaving Alice and Gavin no way to speak short of smiles and sign language. Still, Alice managed to cure a man, a child, and a baby, which cried incessantly after Alice scratched and bled on it. Although the family appeared grateful, the wailing infant put a definite damper on their mood. Alice and Gavin left as quickly as they could.

“That was difficult,” Alice said once they were back outside. “Now what?”

“We should probably just go back to the circus.” Gavin scanned the smoky street and its looming gray buildings. He coughed at the soot in his throat. “We’ll have to walk, too. Doesn’t Kiev have even delivery vans that run at night?”

“That wretched Feng,” Alice muttered, taking Gavin’s arm as he slung his fiddle case over his back. “What’s gotten into him, anyway?”

“No idea. He seemed pretty angry.”

Alice’s chin came up, which made her almost as tall as Gavin. “I’m certainly not going to apologize.” She paused. “Do you think we should apologize?”

Like intelligent men everywhere, Gavin fell back on prevarication. “Uh…”

She continued talking, half to herself. “I mean, it isn’t as if we did anything wrong. I honestly thought he’d get along better with people who spoke his own language.”

“Absolutely.”

“It may have been a little presumptuous to assume he’d be happy with a troop of Oriental acrobats just because he himself is from the Orient any more than I—we—might be happy socializing with any random person we met from England—or America.”

“You may have a point.”

She gave a heavy sigh as they walked. Their footsteps echoed down the eerie, empty street. “You don’t suppose the entire circus has been gossiping about us, have they? I mean, you don’t suppose everyone thinks we… that we’re…”

“If they do, it doesn’t seem to bother them,” Gavin pointed out. “No one seems to mind Dodd and Nathan.”

“I can’t quite get over that,” she said. “Two gentlemen, and everyone knows.”

“Which part can’t you get over? The two gentlemen part or the everyone knows part?”

“Well,” Alice amended, “I can’t say I can’t get over it. It’s not as if one never hears of such things. It’s just that one never discusses them.”

“You seem fine discussing it with me,” Gavin pointed out.

“Yes. It seems I can discuss any number of things with you, darling, and that’s one thing that makes you so special.” She sighed and laid her head on his shoulder as they walked. For a moment, it felt as if the entire city belonged to her and Gavin alone. Even the plague zombies seemed to have retreated. A number of thoughts were working their way across her mind, and with no one else about, she allowed herself freedom to express them. “I suppose I was rather self-centered. I know Feng feels disgraced and he’s nervous about facing his family again, and on top of it all, we—I—drag him all around these cities to visit plague victims and zombies.” She sighed again, feeling more and more guilty. “He said such awful things, though. Am I being womanish to feel bad about arguing with him?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Gavin said. “All the women I know would sooner smack you than sorry you.”

“What women?”

“My ma, for one. She’d smack you cross-eyed if you mouthed and I don’t ever remember her apologizing, but speak against one of her kids and you were in for a world of trouble.”

“Do you think I’ll ever get to meet her?” Alice asked.

“I don’t know.” Gavin’s eyes grew sad. “I don’t know if I’ll ever—”

“Don’t!” Alice cut off the rest of the sentence by squeezing his arm with her iron-clad hand. Her parasol knocked against her knee. “I’m being thoughtless again. We’ll see her; of course we’ll see her. She’ll have to be at the wedding.”

Gavin halted. “Is that a proposal, Lady Michaels? Come to think of it, I never did actually propose to you, did I?”

“Oh!” She colored. “Good heavens! I—I didn’t mean to—”

“Yes, you did. You certainly did.”

Alice floundered. The evening was turning out far more peculiar than she had imagined it might. The street seemed to skew sideways, and words spilled from her mouth in a dreadful torrent that she couldn’t seem to stop. “I didn’t mean to push you into anything, though I rather assumed that once we found a spare moment we would want to formalize our relationship, not that we’re particularly traditional people anymore, but my title and my upbringing both mean I was hoping for something more traditional, and even though we were in a church in Luxembourg we never even had a moment to ask Monsignor Adames if—”

Gavin shushed her. “I’ll make it easy for you.” He got down on one knee on the cobblestones before her and swept off his cap. His new wristbands gleamed in the lamplight. Alice couldn’t help clapping a hand to her mouth, not sure if she wanted to laugh or burst into tears. The horrible businessman’s offer she had gotten from Norbert last year came inevitably into her mind. He had offered her an emerald ring over a delicate luncheon of poached salmon and champagne. Gavin, dear, gallant Gavin, knelt on grimy cobblestones in a foreign city that stank of oil and steam. She couldn’t imagine a more perfect proposal.

“Alice, Lady Michaels,” he said, “will you—”

And then he was gone.

Alice stared in uncomprehending disbelief at the stones where he’d been kneeling. Gavin had simply disappeared. It wouldn’t register. What had—?

A split-second later, the clank of metal brought her head around. An enormous ostrichlike bird, easily two stories tall, was rising above her. It had come out of the alley beside and a little behind her. The bird was made entirely of brass and iron, intricately wrought and jointed. Gears spun and pistons puffed as it moved. Its head, at the end of a long segmented neck, was actually a rounded cage half the height of a man. Gavin knelt inside it, looking as startled as Alice felt.

“Good heavens!” she gasped.

The huge bird stalked forward out of the alley, revealing its body and legs now. Brass feathers shone. On the creature’s broad back rode a plump woman in a pink evening gown. Blond ringlets more suitable for a young girl framed her face, and she wore opera gloves. A console before her sported levers and switches, and she worked them with idle skill. A gleaming collar made of copper encircled her throat.

“Min!” she called. “Spaceeba!”

A hunting clockworker. The city had been so quiet, they had let their guard down. Alice’s heart pounded, and she was already moving, running straight toward the ridiculously sized ostrich, outraged beyond sensibility, her parasol raised. The amber head shone like liquid gold.

“Release him this instant!” she demanded.

“Stay back!” Gavin shouted.

The clockworker pulled a lever, and one bird wing fluttered downward. It caught Alice full across the chest and flung her backward. The air burst from her lungs. Red pain smashed her body and scored her arms as she tumbled over the pavement.

“Alice!” Gavin yelled from the cage. “Shit.”

Alice staggered to her feet as the bird started to turn away. The pain receded under anger and adrenaline as she scrambled upright, only barely managing not to tangle herself in her skirts. Her hat was gone, but she had kept her parasol. Before she could charge the bird again, from the alleyway darted half a dozen birds, smaller ones this time, perhaps twice the size of a cat. They swarmed about the larger bird’s feet, wings spread at Alice with menacing intent.

Gavin put one of his wristbands through the bars, aimed, and pressed a button. A gleaming gear shot from its magnetic release and spun toward the clockworker. She yipped and twisted out of the way with startling agility. Even a woman of her bulk came equipped with plague-enhanced reflexes. The gear pinged harmlessly off the bird’s metal back.

“What you do?” the woman called up to him in English. “Do not fight. I need the meat.”

The smaller birds clacked their beaks at Alice and scratched long runnels in the stones with their claws. Their eyes glowed red. The spider on Alice’s arm glowed back as if in answer. She gave the amber handle of the parasol a deft twist. It ratcheted twice, and a high-pitched whine shrilled in her ears. The parasol handle shone blue. The birds lowered their heads, ready to charge, and Alice slapped the handle. A bolt of electricity cracked from the tip of the parasol to the first bird. It froze in place. Sparks spat from its eyes and beak, and ozone tanged in the air. The bird fizzled with a smell of hot metal, but the electric arc was already jumping to the next bird, creating a wicked electric rainbow in the air. The second bird sparked and collapsed, and the power connected to the third, and the fourth. The arc of dreadful lightning poured from parasol to bird to bird to bird. Alice’s hair stood out like leaves on a wild bush. The lightning arced to the fifth and sixth birds. They crackled and spat and half melted, beaks open in silent screams. Then the electricity abruptly ended. The parasol went heavy in Alice’s hands, and the birds tipped to the pavement with six identical thuds. A line of smoke trickled from the end of the weapon, and Alice lowered it with shaky hands.

“Now,” she said firmly, “you will let him go.”

“Hodynnyk?” the clockworker said.

“Was that an insult?” Alice demanded.

“I think it means clock,” Gavin said. He aimed with the wristband again and fired another cog. This one struck a lever on the clockworker’s control panel and moved it. The cage holding Gavin abruptly opened from the bottom like a claw being released. Gavin, ready for this, kept hold of one bar and swung himself around to the giant bird’s neck, whereupon he skimmed downward until he could safely drop to the ground. The move was magnificent to watch, and Alice couldn’t help admiring it, despite the recent fight.

“You are clockworkers,” the woman said, switching back to English. She clucked her tongue. “You might have said instead of destroying our little pets. There are ethics.”

“Sure,” Gavin said. “And you might have asked before you snatched me up.”

The woman shrugged and pointed to herself. “Ivana Gonta. We see you are from other country. Would you like chocolate?” A mechanical hand emerged from the control panel with a small foil box. It extended itself down to Alice, who took the box without thinking. “You take. Is very useful.”

“Thank you,” she said automatically.

“Is good, is good. Because you are new, we will not kill you for hunting in our part of town, all right?”

“Oh,” Alice said. “Er…”

“The Dnepro divides Kiev. The Gontas and Zalizniaks rule as one, but everyone knows we Gontas are superior, so the Gontas hunt on the much better right bank and the weaker Zalizniaks”—she spat—“have the left. You go hunt over there for when you need meat, not over here.”

“Right,” Gavin said. “Good advice. Thanks.”

“Is good, is good,” Ivana said again. “Circus is in town, you know. We have seen. Wonderful elephant. You must visit. Perhaps we will bring elephant to our house for private entertainment for important foreign guests.”

“Oh, we shouldn’t… ,” Alice began.

“No, no, not you.” Ivana waved a gloved hand. “You are not important. We are only telling you because tomorrow night we are busy with guests and perhaps you can hunt then without that we kill you. You go now. Keep chocolate. Very good for luring children.”

The large bird turned and lumbered away into the city, its cage dangling open. The six little birds lay on the street like half-melted metal candles. Alice looked at the box in her hand, then abruptly tossed it away and scrubbed her hand against her skirt.

“That was very strange,” Gavin said absently.

“Do you truly think so?” Alice couldn’t keep the disgust out of her voice.

“Definitely. Your parasol should have lasted much longer.” He took it from her and held it up to a streetlight with a critical air. The amber had turned black. “I’ll have to look at the design.”

“Gavin!”

“Eh? Oh! I’m sorry.” He handed her the parasol, straightened his clothes, adjusted the fiddle case, which was still fastened to his back, and went down on one knee. “Alice, Lady Michaels, will you marry—”

“Oh, good heavens!” Alice was all set to be angry, but she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window that the ever-present light had turned into a mirror. The sight of her wild hair and disheveled clothing and smoking parasol brought out a burst of laughter instead. It overcame her, and she laughed and laughed. Some baroness she was. An image of her late father’s probable reaction to the entire situation popped into her mind, and for a moment, she understood why Gavin laughed so hard on that awful day in the ringmaster’s travel car. The ridiculousness of the entire world was pointed in her direction, and helpless laughter was the only response. She nearly bent double under the onslaught. Gavin scrambled upright and put his arm around her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Per-perfectly,” she gasped. “Good heavens. Will you marry me, indeed!” And she laughed some more while the gargoyles and dead metal birds overhead looked on. “You’re a true rogue, Gavin Ennock. I don’t know how I ever let you go before.”

Before Gavin could respond, a shot rang out from the direction Ivana Gonta’s bird had taken. A second shot followed. Alice’s laughter instantly ceased. Gavin’s eyes met hers with the same thought.

“Feng,” they both said.

Chapter Ten

“We shouldn’t have let him go off on his own,” Alice panted as they ran. “Foolish in the extreme. What were thinking?”

“Guilt later,” Gavin said. “Run now.”

The twisting, narrow streets remained eerily silent and empty—except for plague zombies. They seemed to be everywhere, rooting through garbage bins, lurking in doorways, shying away from the lights on the main streets. Male and female, adult and child, Gavin noticed enough to populate a small village, and those were only the ones he saw. He had never seen so many plague zombies in his life. Alice was noticing them too, he could tell. She flexed her gauntlet as they hurried on, itching to stop and help them, but they didn’t dare. Not now. They had to keep running.

The trouble was, they didn’t know exactly where they were running to. Gavin’s keen ears tracked the sound of the two shots to a general area perhaps six or seven blocks away, but when they arrived at the place, they found nothing but an empty street.

“Here!” Alice plucked a pair of pistols from the pave stones as another plague zombie shuffled into shadow. The pistols were bent and broken. “Good heavens. What do—?”

“Sh!” Gavin held up a hand, hoping, and for once the clockwork plague cooperated. It rushed through him, thinning the world, making it transparent. Scents of oil and carbon and phosphorous floated on the air as conspicuous as feathers. Bits and beams of light rushed in a trillion directions, bouncing and battering against one another, trying to make a pattern amid their own chaos. Vibrations small and thunderous moved stone and brick and air and water, pressing and moving and swirling the mix. He felt the steady thrum and thud of factory dynamos in the distance, sensed thousands of heartbeats from the people tending them, felt electricity flick and dance. Through it all, he heard a steady pattern, a click-clack, click-clack combined with the hiss and swoop of steam trapped in a metal tube. The bird.

“This way,” he said, taking Alice’s hand. “Hurry!”

They followed Gavin’s heightened hearing, tripping on curbs and stumbling on cobblestones because Gavin remained more intent on listening to directions than on watching where he was going. The neighborhood shifted from lower-class residential to a mercantile district, with signs in Cyrillic that hovered at the edge of Gavin’s understanding, and he became aware that if he stopped and studied them long enough, they would begin to make sense, but he didn’t stop. The click-clack, click-clack continued, growing louder. Ivana was taking her time, which allowed them to catch up. At last, puffing and sweating, they came to a street that ended in an enormous courtyard with a spurting fountain in the center. Beyond the fountain stood a high wall that surrounded an enormous mansion of white stone topped by yet more gargoyles and grotesques. An automaton in the curved armor and metal skirt of an old-fashioned Cossack warrior was opening a double-wide iron gate with a and a 3 wrought into the center to admit Ivana and her bird. The claw-cum-cage that made up the bird’s head was closed again, and inside it knelt a familiar figure: Feng Lung. His face was tight with fear. The sight stabbed Gavin with guilt. It was his fault Feng was in this mess. The thought jolted him out of the clockwork fugue. The world’s minutiae vanished, and he became abruptly aware of his body again. Pain and exhaustion crashed over him. His lungs and legs burned in equal parts.

Alice tried to shout something at Ivana, but she was too out of breath to make more than a squeak. Gavin was equally at a loss.

“Do… something… ,” Alice panted.

Gavin aimed one of his wristbands at Ivana and triggered the polaretic magnetized pulsation device he had built only that afternoon. A gear shot from it and flicked straight at Ivana, but they were well over twenty yards away, and by the time the gear crossed the intervening distance, the automaton had swung the iron gates shut and the gear bounced off the bars. Ivana never even noticed. The automaton went to a guard box just inside the gates and stopped moving.

Alice managed a final run up to the gates with her parasol, her loose hair streaming out behind her. For an insane moment, Gavin thought of Joan of Arc attacking an English castle. She reached the gates, grabbed one of the bars with her gauntleted hand, and jumped back with a yelp. Gavin summoned the strength to hurry over.

“An electric field?” he asked.

“I believe so.” She shook out her hand. “Godd— Good heavens, Gavin. It’s our fault. If we hadn’t argued with Feng, he would have stayed with us and… Oh, I don’t know what to do.”

“Peasants do not approach the gate,” the automaton said, coming out of its box. “Peasants go to the rear for deliveries. Remove yourselves!”

Gavin stepped back, partly in surprise and partly to avoid brushing against the electrified gate. “It speaks English?”

“I speak a number of languages, peasant!” said the automaton. “Go around to the back!”

“Who is Ivana Gonta?” Alice asked.

“One of several members of the Gonta-Zalizniak collective family. Do you have a delivery for her?”

“Yes.” She held up her parasol. “Special order.”

“Go around to the back and wait for a proper hour. Your package will be admitted. You will not.”

“It’s not going to let us in,” Gavin murmured. “Can we get over, do you think?”

They both eyed the wall. It was at least eighteen feet high, studded with gargoyles, and likely contained a number of nasty surprises. All they had with them was a broken electrical parasol, a spider gauntlet that cured plague, a glass cutlass, and a set of wristbands Gavin had tested only sporadically. Although the parasol had proven marvelously effective, they had still severely underestimated the power of the local clockworkers. Meanwhile, Feng was inside the place, enduring heaven only knew what. Gavin thought of Charlie’s bare brain and his hands chilled at the thought of his friend Feng in the hands of someone with the intelligence to perform such a procedure and who referred to human beings as meat. He wanted to find a way to storm the gates, flatten the automaton guard, and force Ivana to release Feng, but he couldn’t think of a way to accomplish any of it. He turned helplessly to Alice. She set her mouth.

“We have to leave and come back,” she said firmly. “With more tools and lots of help.”

“The Gontas and Zalizniaks aren’t exactly a family, strictly speaking, strictly speaking,” Harry said. “They are a… collection, really.”

“Collection,” Gavin said. “What does that mean?”

Harry puffed on his cigar and cast a sidelong look at Alice. They were talking in what was euphemistically referred to as the Black Tent, though it was neither black nor a tent. It was actually a boxcar outfitted as a laboratory, with tools hanging on the walls, a portable forge heating up one corner, and half-finished machines littering the tables that lined the walls. It belonged to Dodd, who wasn’t a clockworker but who did have enough of a facility with machines to repair or even build basic clockwork designs, though nothing on the level that Alice could do. It was here that he had tinkered together the windup toys for Gavin and Tom when they were children, visiting the circus with Captain Naismith. The place smelled of machine oil, bitter coal smoke, and metal shavings, and made Gavin think of a time when he was still learning his way around an airship. Dodd called it the Black Tent because the work area had once been a blacksmith’s tent. When the circus became wealthy enough, Dodd had bought a boxcar for everything, but the original name had stuck.

Gavin was feeling restless again, and as happened on the train in Dodd’s car when he guarded Alice’s sleep, his hands went to work without him. A spool of Dr. Clef’s alloy sat in his lap. He wound more of it and snipped rings free of the dowel. He had quite a collection now.

Harry continued to hesitate. Finally Alice spoke up. “If you’re worrying about offending my delicate sensibilities, Mr. Burks, please stop. We don’t have time for nonsense. You must speak plainly.”

The rotund man moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Very well, very well.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know how much Ukrainian history you know—”

“Maksym Zalizniak was a Cossack who rose up at an outbreak of the clockwork plague,” Alice said crisply. “He used Ivan Gonta and other powerful clockworkers to construct machines of war that forced out the Russians and the Poles—and then the Jews and the Catholics—so they could take back Ukraine and form their own empire. Get on with it.”

“Yes, well,” Harry said, “it didn’t stop there, of course. The Zalizniak clan took the left bank, or western half, of Kiev and Ukraine, while the Gonta clan took the right, or east. At first they got along very well, but things devolved very quickly, very quickly. Cossacks fight as a way of life, you see, and once they didn’t have the Russians and Poles to kick around anymore, they turned inward. The two clans bickered and sniped and fought all the time, all the time, their clockworkers ran rampant, and the people of Kiev were caught in the middle. They especially fought over the dam—and the power it generates.”

“But the house we saw had the two Cyrillic letters in the gate,” Gavin said. “A g and a z. They seem to be getting along fine now.”

“That’s the mystery,” Harry said. “Clockworkers don’t cooperate. Fifty or sixty years ago, the Gontas smashed the Zalizniaks flat, but instead of killing their rivals, they merged with them. How, no one knows, no one knows. Now, instead of having two collective families, they have just one, just one.”

“How do you get a family of clockworkers?” Alice said. “They don’t… they can’t…”

Gavin held his face impassive over the growing net of rings. He knew very well what Alice was trying not to say, that clockworkers, including him, died within three years of contracting the plague. Family relationships were cut unfortunately short. A sudden longing to see his own children filled him, made all the worse for the fact that he knew it could never come to pass, and he had to turn his face away for a moment to get himself under control. China. China would have the cure, if only they could get there.

“That’s the delicate part.” Harry coughed and reddened. “You see, the Gonta-Zalizniaks operate on a process of… assimilation.”

“I don’t understand,” Alice said.

“Nor should you, nor should you. The clans use a sort of forced adoption, you see. Any clockworker who appears in Ukraine is quickly snapped up by the Gonta-Zalizniaks and indoctrinated. I hear that by the time the process is over, they truly believe they are Gonta or Zalizniak.” He coughed around his cigar. “They also engage in experiments on… younger folk. There’s a belief that children are more likely to survive the plague and become clockworkers, so…”

Alice’s face paled and she staggered back against one of the tables. “You mean they deliberately infect children with the clockwork plague in an attempt to create more clockwork geniuses?”

Harry looked unhappy. “It’s only rumor, only rumor,” he said quickly. “People are always looking for explanations about why Kiev seems to have more clockworkers than a city its size should.”

“Numbers,” Gavin put in, though he was speaking through greasy nausea. “If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that somewhere has to have the highest percentage of clockworkers. Kiev is simply it.”

“Of course, of course.” Harry chewed his cigar. “It’s a difficult rumor to unseat, however, when it couples with the fact that the plague got its start here.”

“Is rumored to have gotten its start here,” Alice corrected. “No one knows where the plague started. Kiev just has the first recorded cases. The eighteenth century kept very poor records, unlike modern times.”

“This isn’t getting us any closer to Feng,” Gavin interrupted. He wound more wire around the dowel and snipped. “What is Ivana going to do with him?”

“Who knows?” Harry sighed. “He’s not a clockworker, so he won’t be indoctrinated. Clockworkers have free rein here with anyone they capture, and Ivana Gonta can do as she wishes with him. Kievites have been forced to become adept at avoiding clockworkers, so there’s a shortage of subjects these days. I hate to sound harsh, but she’s likely experimenting on him right now.”

A silence fell over the trio. In the distance, the calliope hooted a cheery song in B-flat, keeping time for one of the acts rehearsing in the Tilt. An idea stole over Gavin.

“How many clockworkers are in that house?” he asked. His fingers moved faster with wire and pliers, creating what looked like a framework of chain mail. He was adding to what already existed, which was currently the size of an evening cloak. On the floor nearby sat a framework and pack and machine parts that awaited assembly.

“No idea, no idea,” Harry said. “Could be two, could be two hundred. And all of them made to specialize in instruments of war. I’ve said it before—it’s a pity they don’t turn their efforts toward a cure for the plague. They might have found one by now. At any rate, the place is a fortress guarded by bloodthirsty lunatics. I don’t like to say it, but I think your friend is gone. Gone.”

“No,” Gavin said. “Maybe not.”

“What are you thinking, darling?” Alice asked. The note of hope in her voice pulled Gavin’s spirits up and gave him more confidence. He set down the growing net of links.

“I think we need to go see Dr. Clef.”

Dr. Clef was working in the little laboratory aboard the Lady with Click watching intently from a perch on a high shelf. He looked up in surprise when Gavin slid the door open. Alice and Harry stood in the hallway behind him.

“Yes?” said Dr. Clef slowly. He was sitting on a high stool.

“I don’t have time for nice,” Gavin said. “I need my paradox generator back.”

Dr. Clef blinked at him. “Generator? What generator, my boy?”

“I know you didn’t destroy it like I asked you to,” Gavin continued. “It was too beautiful for me to destroy, so how could you do it? If I hadn’t been distracted at the time, I would have realized it earlier. Give it back. Now.”

“I don’t have it.” Dr. Clef’s expression remained perfectly ingenuous. “Honestly, I don’t.”

“Like I said,” Gavin told him, “no time for nice. So.” He reached up and took Click down from the high shelf. The clockwork cat looked at him with curious phosphorescent eyes until Gavin flipped him over and lightly depressed a switch on the underside of Click’s throat. Click froze.

“Gavin, what on earth?” Alice demanded.

“No!” Dr. Clef said.

“Hand over the generator, Doctor,” Gavin said, “or I’ll press it all the way. All the power in his spring will release at once, and he’ll shut down.”

Dr. Clef looked horrified. “Not my clicky kitty. Please!”

“The generator, Doctor.”

A torn expression crossed Dr. Clef’s face. He looked at Click and at Gavin, then flicked his gaze to a low storage cupboard. Alice edged around him and from the cupboard pulled the generator, complete with its crank and speaking trumpet.

“I’ll need the ear protectors, too,” Gavin said, and Alice snagged them from their hook. Dr. Clef appeared crestfallen, so Gavin handed Click to him. The cat recovered quickly and shook his head. Dr. Clef smoothed the creature’s wiry whiskers.

“You wouldn’t have done it,” Dr. Clef said, sounding like a recalcitrant child.

“It wouldn’t have hurt him, Doctor,” Alice said. “Though it would have taken an hour or more to wind him back up. And I might remind you that Click is my cat.”

“That is not how he feels.” Dr. Clef tickled Click under the chin. “No, he does not, he does not.”

“As you like.” Alice sighed. “We have to rescue Feng. Do you want to come?”

Dr. Clef looked genuinely puzzled. “Who is Feng?”

“Chinese man, little younger than me, so high,” Gavin said. “Likes the ladies. And the—”

“Gavin!” Alice interrupted.

“I do not remember him.” Dr. Clef cuddled Click. “Please leave me alone now.”

“If that’s what you want,” Gavin said. “Right now we have to collect Kemp and find Dodd.”

The first show of the day was just finishing up in the Tilt. A sell-out audience of all ages applauded and cheered from crowded bleachers while the Mysterious Yins, clad in red, went through their routine in the ring. Gavin thought of Feng and tried not to feel sick. Maybe Ivana was just holding him for now and hadn’t started in on him yet. He tried not to think of Feng clamped to an operating table with Ivana Gonta looming over him, tools at the ready, but worry and guilt continued to gnaw at him. This was taking so long.

A roped-off section down in front kept a group of dignitaries and their families and attendant automaton servants separated from the rabble. Many of the men wore red military uniforms and carried wicked-looking dress swords, and the women wore rich dresses in bright blues and blood reds, with heavy brocaded skirts and fur jackets. Even the children were carefully outfitted. More than one little girl carried a clockwork doll. And then it slapped Gavin in the face. This was what had been bothering him since he had arrived in Kiev: These were the first children he had seen in public. In all the crowds he had seen in the city, every person had been an adult. No children walked with their parents, none played in streets or alleyways. Except for the wealthy ones Gavin had just noticed, none attended this very circus. The only children Gavin had seen were among the families Alice had cured and zombies on the night streets. He thought of Ivana Gonta and her chocolate. Did all of Kiev keep their children indoors?

Three Yins boosted high poles upright while three others leaped from one to the other with the agility of lemurs. The audience applauded again. Off to one side waited the clowns, ready to gently shoo the audience away once this act was done. Gavin, Alice, and Kemp slipped behind the bleachers to the place where Dodd waited between acts and found him. He wore his usual red-and-white striped shirt and red top hat.

“He’s not going to like this,” Alice said in Gavin’s ear. “How are you going to persuade him to take a circus parade to the Gonta House?”

“The Gonta House?” Kemp said. “That would be dreadfully dangerous, Madam!”

“I don’t know how,” Gavin admitted. “I’m flying blind.”

Dodd saw them approaching and gave them a quizzical look.

“We need to talk,” Gavin said quietly. “I’m not—”

“Can it wait?” Dodd interrupted. “We’re all about to be very busy.”

“Busy?” Gavin said. The audience laughed at the antics of the youngest Yin. “I thought the show was almost over.”

“This arrived halfway through the second act.”

He showed Gavin a letter. In neat handwriting with a strange slant was written:

Come with circus to Gonta House for private performance immediately. Bring magnificent elephant.

Gonta

“Oh,” Gavin said.

“It came with a bag of money,” Dodd added. “Linda spouted some nonsense about the three of swords, but for that much money, I’ll face the hundred of swords. We leave in ten minutes.”

“Might Gavin and I ride the elephant?” asked Alice.

The elephant lumbered down the gritty, twisting streets at the head of another parade. Dodd, never one to give up the chance for publicity, insisted on a show. They had even installed a gaudy brass gondola atop the elephant. Normally Gavin would have enjoyed the experience—he was riding atop the elephant at the head of a parade with Alice next to him—but all he could think about was Feng.

Somewhat over a year ago, before the Third Ward, before the clockwork plague, before Alice, Gavin had been busking in London’s Hyde Park. A young man from the Orient—Feng—had rushed out of the fog and begged Gavin to help him. Gavin hid Feng and persuaded the young man’s pursuers that Feng had gone off in another direction. In gratitude, Feng gave Gavin the clockwork nightingale that re-created sounds. Much later, Gavin learned that Feng was the son of the Chinese ambassador to England and nephew of the emperor. When the ambassador discovered Gavin and Alice were fleeing to China, he asked them to take Feng along, since Feng clearly wasn’t suited to carry on his father’s career. Since none of them spoke a Chinese language, it seemed a good idea to bring him along. Besides, Gavin liked Feng. He was funny, and had a wistful air about him. It was only lately that he’d become surly, for reasons Gavin didn’t understand. Maybe something was bothering him, something more than just being housed among acrobats. He should have spoken up.

But did you ask? Gavin thought. Some friend you turned out to be.

“I still think this seems terribly fortuitous,” Alice complained. “Much too fortuitous.”

“Why can’t we have a piece of good luck for once?” Gavin countered, then added, “Don’t answer that. I agree with you, actually, though Ivana Gonta did say last night that she had guests to entertain and she wanted to see the elephant. It’s not that much of a coincidence. Maybe we actually are lucky. Those particles Charlie mentioned flipping at the same time to help us.”

“Hm,” was Alice’s only response.

He shifted the pack on his back and checked his wristbands for the fifth or sixth time. Alice’s parasol, newly repaired, gleamed as she waved it at the people crowding the sidewalk. A whistle dangled from a silver chain around her neck. Calliope music tootled behind them, drawing along stilt walkers, acrobats, horse acts, and animal cages. The parade scribbled a stream of bright colors through the gray city to the wide courtyard Gavin remembered from the previous night. By now it was noon, and Feng had been in Ivana Gonta’s clutches for twelve hours.

Hang on, Feng, Gavin thought. We’re coming.

The automaton guard flung the gates open and Alice guided the puffing elephant through. Its brass back was warm, almost hot, from the boilers contained inside it. Beyond the gate lay another wide courtyard, again all cobbles and stone. The blocky white mansion bent itself in a square C to make the courtyard. It reminded Gavin uncomfortably of a prison, and he remembered that the Gontas built the place at least partly in defense against the Zalizniaks across the river. An impressive set of steps rose up to a columned portico. At the base of the steps looking out over the courtyard were a series of long tables all set with fine linen, gleaming silver, and faceted crystal. A crowd of people dressed even more richly than the dignitaries at the circus occupied benches and divans and chairs placed all about the tables, and they were laughing and talking. Food—roast pork and hams and birds and fruits and dumplings and potatoes and soups—crowded serving platters, and the mingled delicious smells made Gavin dizzy. His stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Automatons of many shapes bustled about. Human-shaped ones replaced food and refilled glasses of kvas and vodka. Spiders scampered about, cleaning up spills and delivering fresh napkins. Several clockwork cats similar to Click lounged among the dinner guests.

When the circus paraded through the gate, the dinner guests stared and pointed. A few clapped. Dodd trotted smartly to the forefront as Ivana Gonta emerged from the crowd to meet him. She wore a pink afternoon dress with a low neckline more suited to an indoor spring tea than an outdoor autumn banquet, but the chill in the air didn’t seem to bother her. A red haze settled over Gavin’s vision and he realized he was growling.

“If she’s up here,” Alice pointed out quietly, “it means she isn’t doing anything to Feng at the moment. Maybe she’s been busy arranging this little event and hasn’t had time to touch him.”

“I hope so,” Gavin said through clenched teeth. “For her sake.”

“We just need to wait until— Eep!” Alice whuffed her parasol open and twirled it, effectively blocking Gavin’s view of the banqueters. “Don’t look.”

“At what?” Gavin’s muscles tensed. The calliope continued to play. Some of the clowns waved and made faces at the banqueters while they waited for a signal from Dodd to begin. “What’s wrong? I can’t see a thing.”

“On a count of three,” Alice murmured, face pale, “we’ll climb out the back of the gondola, slide off the elephant’s back, and sneak to the rear to get Kemp.”

“Why?” Gavin demanded in a whisper. “What is it?”

“Look, but do it quick. In the center, a little to the left. What would be Ivana Gonta’s right-hand place at her table.”

Gavin poked his head just high enough over the parasol to get a look, then dropped back down behind it and the gondola wall. “Shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit.”

Sitting at the place Alice had described were three familiar figures: Simon d’Arco, Glenda Teasdale, and Lieutenant Susan Phipps.

Chapter Eleven

“Quick!” Gavin took Alice’s hand, and they slid down the elephant’s backside even as Dodd called forward the Great Mordovo, Magician Extraordinaire. The circus had spread throughout the courtyard, leaving a wide space in front in an impromptu ring. Gavin wove his way to the rear of the waiting performers, his heart in his mouth. Bonzini, the clown whose wig and nose Gavin had borrowed back in Luxembourg, gave him a quizzical look as the banqueters gave light applause to Mordovo’s first trick.

“Did she see us?” Alice asked. She clutched at the whistle hanging from its chain from around her neck.

“I doubt it. Phipps wouldn’t have let us get away if she had.”

At the back, near the closed gate, they found Kemp standing not far from the automaton guard in his guard house. He came forward when he saw Alice. The animal cages and other performers hid them from view. The people stood around, waiting quietly for their turn. It wasn’t the entire circus, just the performers whose acts didn’t require much in the way of setup—clowns, the magician, acrobats, animal acts both living and mechanical, horse girls, and the calliope. The latter played bright, happy music, which had the effect of covering noise and conversation. The acts themselves were silent, anyway. No traveling circus depended on an audience being able to hear or understand the language.

“Madam,” Kemp said, “I don’t think I approve of—”

“I know,” Alice said, “but it’s necessary.” She faced the guard and gave the handle of her parasol a single turn. “You. I need to talk to you.”

The automaton took a single step forward. “Peasants are not allowed to—”

Alice touched its chest with the end of her parasol. Electricity crackled. The guard sputtered and sparked while energy coruscated up and down its body. Then it went stiff and tipped over with small crash. The lion tamer and his wife turned and stared. Alice put a finger to her lips while Gavin extracted a tool kit from his rucksack. The smell of oil and feel of metal brought a strange taste to his mouth, and he felt the clockwork fugue descending on him. Very little mattered now except the machines. In no time at all, he had the automaton’s head off. Alice turned back to Kemp.

“Kemp,” she said.

“Madam,” he said with resignation.

Alice took up the tools herself and also removed Kemp’s head. The lights that made up his eyes glowed with indignation, but he didn’t speak. His black-and-white body remained eerily upright. Gavin swiftly unbuttoned the front of the guard’s jacket and shirt to expose and open the access panel, where he saw frozen pistons and unmoving gears. Automatically he traced the line of machinery. It was simple to understand, easy as reading a navigation chart, though a part of him was aware that only a few months ago it would have been a meaningless tangle to him. While Alice set Kemp’s head on the automaton’s neck, Gavin set to work resetting power. He was vaguely aware that Alice was touching his tools, and he didn’t like it.

“It’s not a perfect fit,” she muttered, “but it’ll do for now.”

“That’s my wrench,” he said shortly.

“It’s called a spanner,” she replied, “and you need to keep control, please. You’re not a mad clockworker. You’re Gavin Ennock, and you love me.”

Her words and voice penetrated the fugue and pulled him back a bit. He shook his head. “Right,” he said. “Sorry. Thanks.”

“I am not at all comfortable with this,” Kemp complained as they worked.

“It’s for a good cause.” Alice connected a set of wires and tightened two bolts. In the background, a lion roared over the music and the banqueters made Ooooo sounds. “That should do it. Can you start the body back up?”

In answer, Gavin cranked up the spark generator and released the spring.

“Oh!” Kemp’s eyes flickered. “Oh dear!”

“Are you functional?” Alice asked, helping him sit up.

“I-I-I-I b-b-believ-v-v-v-ve th-th-th-th-things a-a-a-a-a-a-a-are working at c-c-c-c-c-capacity, M-M-M-M-M-Madam.” Static overlaid his voice, and he spat out a string of Ukrainian words. “I a-a-a-a-a-am adj-j-j-j-j-j-j-justing m-m-m-m-m-my mem-m-m-m-mory wheels.”

“Try this.” Alice reached into his chest cavity with a screwdriver. Something crackled and she jerked her hand back with small oath. “Ow! Is that better?”

“M-much, Madam. Spaceeba.” Kemp got to his new feet, a little uncertain at first but quickly gaining confidence. “This body is much stronger than my own, and more agile. More advanced, disloyal to my creator as that sounds.”

Gavin’s stomach went into knots as he shoved Kemp’s body into the guard house and set the guard’s lifeless head on the floor with it. As a final touch, he put the guard’s helmet on Kemp’s head. “I really don’t like the fact that Phipps is here,” he growled. “It makes everything too suspicious. The Third Ward has very little influence in Ukraine, but she’s crafty enough to worm her way into the Gontas’ good graces and persuade Ivana to invite the circus into a trap. I just wonder if capturing Feng was her idea or just a lucky coincidence.”

“We can’t call this off,” Alice pointed out. “We have to find Feng.”

“I know,” Gavin said. “And it’s exactly the kind of thing Phipps would count on. Let’s go. Lead the way, Kemp.”

The trio skirted the back edge of the circus and, following the high stone wall, came around to one of the jutting wings of the huge mansion that surrounded the courtyard where the lions were currently performing through the calliope’s incessant hooting. The banqueters were alternately watching and eating and talking. Through the crowd, Gavin could make out Phipps’s ramrod figure sitting next to Ivana Gonta’s plump one on a shared divan. She was holding a crystal goblet in one hand and watching the lion tamer while Ivana talked to her. A polite, attentive smile creased Phipps’s face, and it looked completely wrong on her. She was wearing a scarlet dress uniform with a gold sash that Gavin had never seen before. At any moment, she might turn in their direction and see them. But then they made the corner of the house and she passed out of sight.

“That’s a relief,” Alice sighed. “Crossing that courtyard was like walking on hot knives.”

“We’re only getting started,” Gavin replied. They hurried alongside the house. The windows were small and thick, as if the builders were trying to maintain a fortress wall but had been forced to put glass into it. They finally came to a heavy door. Gavin tried it. Locked.

“Allow me, Sir.” Kemp extended a finger into the keyhole and twisted. The door opened with a click. Beyond was a wide foyer with a stone floor faced with a number of closed doors and a large archway through which Gavin could see quite a number of human servants rushing back and forth, presumably to wait on the banquet. The moment they crossed the threshold, a pair of automatons stationed on either side of the door, duplicates of the one at the gate, instantly sprang to life. Sabers hummed in their hands and one of them said something in Ukrainian.

“Kemp,” Alice said.

Kemp came forward. At the sight of the gate automaton’s body, the guards lowered their sabers and the humming sound stopped. Kemp spoke to them. Gavin held his breath. This had to work. If it didn’t, or if the guards shouted an alarm, an entire army of clockworkers would come down on their heads. Worse, Phipps would find them. Gavin kept his face impassive as Kemp talked, and Gavin’s inability to understand the language became an agony. There was a terrible pause. Gavin’s blood sang in his ears and his mouth was dry as sand. Then the automatons nodded and returned to their stations. The trio stepped quickly past the foyer. Gavin’s legs went a little unsteady.

“Perfect,” Alice murmured, appearing completely unruffled. “Now where?”

Gavin made himself regain calm. “Down,” he said. “Clockworkers usually like nice, safe laboratories underground. Remember your aunt Edwina.”

“She had two such laboratories,” Alice agreed. “Which way?”

“If I may, Madam,” Kemp said. He led them through the enormous house. Gavin forced himself to stand upright and act as if he had every right to be there, though he wanted to scrunch down and creep through the house like a rat. It wasn’t just that he was here to steal away something—someone—that the Gontas no doubt saw as their property. It was also that he had spent his childhood in a tiny, crowded flat that in this house would probably fit into a closet. Everything here spoke of easy, intimidating wealth. Brass and gold fixtures were everywhere, along with heavy furniture of brocade and velvet. Bejeweled metal statues with a definite clockwork air occupied a number of niches. Even one of them would have kept his family going for a year back in Boston, and he felt an urge to snatch, even though he’d never stolen in his life. One of the statues in a room they passed but didn’t enter looked to be of the Virgin Mary, though her face was stern, and her robes were jagged, as if made of lightning bolts. Over her heart was a cog. Two automatons knelt before the statue, hands clasped. They murmured in monotone.

“What are they saying?” Alice whispered as they went by.

“One is praying for the soul of someone, a deceased person, Dmitro,” Kemp said. It was strange hearing his voice coming from a Ukrainian automaton. “The other is reciting prayers in penitence for sins committed by Ivana Gonta.”

“The Gontas use automatons to pray for them?” Alice said, aghast.

“I wonder if it works,” Gavin muttered.

“I wouldn’t know, Sir,” Kemp said. “This way.”

They passed many servants, both human and mechanical, and neither type gave them a second glance with Kemp leading the way. One woman with a large set of keys did pause to ask something of Alice, but Kemp spoke to her, and she went on her way before Gavin even had time to get uneasy.