The Impossible Cube

“What was that about?” he asked, shifting the pack on his back.

“That was the head housekeeper, Sir. She wanted to know who Sir and Madam were,” Kemp said. “I told her I was giving a tour of the house to a pair of important people attached to Madam Gonta’s special guests.”

“You’re a treasure, Kemp,” Gavin told him.

“Sir.”

“Where are we going?” Alice said. “I’m lost already.”

“I’m seeing a pattern,” Gavin said before Kemp could respond. “Many of the automatons seem to be coming from one direction, so I’m assuming the entry to the lower level is down that hallway.”

“A memory wheel inside this body agrees with Sir,” Kemp said. “Madam and Sir have their choice of a lift or a staircase.”

“Staircase,” Alice said promptly. “A lift is a perfect little cage.”

In a marble foyer they found a double-wide lift, complete with iron gate that reminded Gavin of the one that descended to the dungeonlike cells where the Third Ward housed its captive clockworkers, no few of which Gavin himself had brought in with Simon d’Arco. Next to it was an archway opening onto a staircase that spiraled downward out of sight. Two guard automatons drew their sabers and rapped out orders in Ukrainian.

“They won’t let anyone go down those stairs, Madam,” Kemp said. “Only members of the Gonta family may do so.”

“I see.” Alice stepped forward smartly and touched the guard’s saber with the tip of her parasol. A spark snapped and Gavin smelled ozone. The guard stiffened. Alice’s parasol flicked like a sword at the other guard, who parried it with the saber, but the touch was all Alice needed. The spark snapped, and the second guard went still. Alice straightened her hat, pushed a tendril of honey-brown hair out of her eyes, and caught Gavin looking at her.

“What?” she said.

Gavin was grinning from ear to ear. “You are remarkable, you know that? How many other women could fence with a pair of automatons and win?”

“Oh.” Alice looked flustered. “Probably not many.”

“And I’m glad.” He impulsively kissed her cheek. “God, I love you.”

“If Madam and Sir are quite ready,” Kemp said. “Someone may come at any moment.”

“How much time do we have?” Alice asked, still blushing a little.

“We have been in the house for thirteen minutes,” Kemp replied. “The circus was contracted for an hour’s performance, leaving us forty-seven minutes.”

Quickly, they posed the deactivated automatons in their original positions. Alice told Kemp to stay behind and run interference if necessary as she and Gavin headed down the stairs. The stairs, lit by a series of electric lights, twisted downward for a long, long time, and Gavin wondered how they’d manage the trip back up without using the lift, especially if they had to carry Feng.

Assuming he’s still alive, he thought, and then quashed the idea. Feng had to be alive. He would be alive. And unharmed. Ivana hadn’t held him prisoner for very long, and she must have been busy planning the banquet. Not much time to play with a new… acquisition.

They reached the bottom of the steps and emerged from the stairwell. Alice stopped dead and Gavin whistled under his breath.

“Good heavens,” Alice murmured. “What will we do?”

The space beyond was cavernous, easily large enough to store four full-sized dirigibles, in Gavin’s estimation. Worked stone arched up and away, several stories high. Rows of columns that looked too thin to hold up the ceiling—and the house above it—reached upward like graceful fingers. Staircases, ramps, doorways, and balconies studded the walls, as if a small city had exploded inside the giant room. More than forty hulking mechanicals two, three, and four times the height of a man and many times broader stood motionless on the main floor. One of them was Ivana’s giant bird. The cage that made up its head hung open and empty.

Gavin felt an urge to examine the machines more closely. The clockwork plague tugged at him, and his fascinated eye measured slopes and angles, calculated area, felt volume. Forges hissed from beyond the balconies, putting out thousands of calories in heat. The sharp smell of molten metal tanged the air, and the wrenching scream of it when it hit cold water bounced and echoed. Spiders scurried across every surface, and whirligigs whooshed through the empty spaces. Most of them carried bits of machinery or wicked-looking weapons. Electric lights lit everything, as did the red glow of coals emanating from the balconies. No actual people were visible, which both puzzled and relieved Gavin. In a flash of clockwork insight, he understood that the Gonta clockworkers didn’t spend much—or any—time out on the main floor, but worked in private laboratories that opened onto it. The clanking, hissing forges called to him, and the tiny laboratories on the Lady and in the Black Tent suddenly felt cramped and primitive. Here was a place where a man could work. Certainly there would be a vacant workroom somewhere in all this. In fact, he needed only to listen for empty space to find one. He could already feel the tools, see the machinery come to life under his hands. His fingers curled into fists and he started forward.

“What on earth is that?” Alice exclaimed.

Alice’s voice sliced through the terrible need, and it faded. Gavin shook his head hard. “What’s what?”

She pointed. “There.”

Gavin followed the line of her finger. Along one wall was a row of cages with square bars, ten cages at a fast count. Inside each was a child. Some were boys, some were girls. All were under the age of twelve, some were as young as three or four. They sat or squatted within the bars, eyes listless and downcast. Each had a dog bowl of water.

“Good heavens,” Alice whispered. “Oh, Gavin.”

Gavin felt sick again. He didn’t resist when Alice took his hand and pulled him over to the horrible enclosures. Some of the children looked up and scuttled backward in fear. Most didn’t respond. A girl in a tattered gray dress reminded Gavin of his sister Violet back in Boston, and it made him want to tear the cages free of the walls.

“We have to get them out,” he said. “Now.”

“Look at that one,” Alice said, “and that. Their faces are flushed and their lips are cracked. It’s the clockwork plague.” She held up her spider gauntlet, whose eyes were glowing red. “I need to help them. I’ll cure them and we’ll take them out.”

Gavin hesitated. He glanced around the great room uneasily, feeling torn and not a little helpless. “Alice, how are we going to get them out of here?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We can probably get these cages open with minimal work,” Gavin said reluctantly, “but what then? How will we get all these children upstairs and past all the people and automatons in the house and over the wall outside? We’ll get caught, the children will end up back in here, and everyone will be worse off.”

Alice’s expression darkened and she looked like she wanted to argue. Then she nodded once, hard. “You’re right of course. But we’ll find a way later.”

“We will,” he agreed.

“And I can still do this.” She reached through the bars with her gauntleted hand and scratched one of the sick children before he could shy away. He barely whimpered, though he did shuffle to the rear of his cage, the scratches dripping blood. The others, seeing this, also drew back out of reach.

“Poor things,” Alice said. “I wish I spoke Ukrainian so I could explain what’s going on. At least the first one will infect the others with the cure.”

One of the children began to cry, and Gavin caught something that sounded like “Mama.” In that moment, Gavin nearly violated the good sense he had just quoted to Alice. He had to force himself to avoid tearing at the cages with his bare hands. His rubbed at his face and realized his cheek was wet with salt water. Damn it. He had been beaten half to death by pirates, locked in a tower by a madwoman, and infected with a disease that was killing him by inches, but this brought a tear to his eye?

“Let’s go,” Alice said, “before I pry these bars open myself.”

Gavin nodded around a thick throat and, feeling wretched, forced himself to turn his back and walk away from the children. He swore to himself that the sun wouldn’t set on another day before he came back for them.

“We need to concentrate,” Alice said briskly. “How are we going to find Feng in all this?”

Gavin did his best to push thoughts of the children aside. Alice was right—he needed to concentrate on the mission at hand. “I already know how.”

He took the silver nightingale out of his pocket. Alice reached for it, but Gavin moved it away from her. “Don’t. It returns to the last person who touched it. Feng sent it back to me when the song I recorded for you in Berlin turned out not to help.”

“So he was the last one to touch it,” Alice finished. “Brilliant!” She paused. “Why didn’t you use it when we were looking for him in the city?”

He gave her a strange look. “I didn’t need to.”

Alice pursed her lips, then muttered something that sounded like “Clockworker logic.” “Just toss it, then. Quick!”

Gavin flung the little bird into the air. It sprang to life, fluttered in a circle, and headed for one of the staircases across the main floor. Gavin and Alice hurried to follow, dodging giant mechanicals and ducking whirligigs, feet thudding on worked stone. They dashed up the staircase with a wall on their left, just barely able to keep the little streak of silver in sight, and hurried down an arched hallway. Electric lights glared down from the ceiling.

The hallway abruptly widened into a large, dark room. Even Gavin’s clockwork-enhanced eyes couldn’t make out details, though he got the sense the space was round. It was certainly large enough to echo. A single beam of light from high up stabbed down to illuminate a small circle in the center of the room. In the center of the circle was a square cage six feet tall, and in the cage huddled Feng Lung. Or, Gavin assumed it was Feng. A blanket wrapped his body and head like a tattered cloak. Between the blanket and bars, Gavin could see only part of his face. It seemed to be Feng, and the nightingale zipped into the cage to land on his shoulder. The figure in the cage didn’t react. Gavin wanted to run over and pull the cage open, but he also felt suspicious.

“Does this seem strange to you?” Alice whispered as they entered the room. The place was cold, almost icy. The duo stopped about twenty feet from the cage. “I mean, stranger than it should be.”

“Very,” Gavin whispered. He raised his voice a little. “Feng? Is that you?”

In response, the figure in the cage raised his head. The blanket fell back, revealing his face. Alice gasped. Gavin’s heart jerked and nausea oozed through his stomach, though he also felt a strange and exciting fascination. Feng’s hair had been shaved off, leaving nicks and cuts behind. A brass spider the size of a hand sprawled across the right side of Feng’s head, its body covering his ear and its legs framing his eye, nose, and mouth. Four of the legs drilled into his skull and neck. Gavin’s hand went unconsciously to his own skull, and he bit his lip. Scar tissue puckered Feng’s cheek and his right eye drooped. A line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth. He shivered with cold.

“Oh, Feng,” Alice said. “What did she do?”

Feng didn’t answer. He simply stared at them with his good eye. The nightingale perched motionless on his shoulder. Alice sniffled and, with a low cry, ran to the cage.

“Don’t touch!” Gavin cried.

Alice halted mere inches from the icy bars. “Why?”

“It might be a trap.”

Lights exploded to life all about the room. A barred gate crashed down to block the exit. Gavin flung up a hand to shield his eyes against the painful and blinding brightness. Alice cried out again.

“Really, Gavin,” came the voice of Susan Phipps. “I’ll have to have a word with Simon. He should have trained you better.”

Gavin’s heart sank. When his vision cleared, he saw the room was actually an operating theater, with Feng’s cage in the bottom and high, circular walls all around. Above and out of reach, a circle of chairs ringed the room, set so anyone sitting in them could observe the events on the floor. Perhaps a dozen people in lab coats, work clothes, and formal dress occupied the chairs, including Ivana Gonta in her pink tea gown. All of them wore copper collars with buttons on them. Among them sat Susan Phipps, flanked by Simon d’Arco and Glenda Teasdale.

“Shit,” Gavin said, and not even Alice admonished him.

“Indeed.” Phipps still wore the scarlet dress uniform and gold sash, though now she had added a matching hat with gold braid on the brim. “I’m actually disappointed in you both. You should have known it would be child’s play to connect you with the circus and follow you here. The Countess Ivana was pleased to be involved. She has a new experimental subject, and I have you.”

“You’re traitors, Susan,” Alice said. “All three of you. You don’t even see it, do you? You’re traitors to every human alive, and you live in hell.”

“You’re imprisoned in the circle,” Glenda pointed out. Her blouse was a deep yellow. “Not us.”

“Simon,” Gavin said, “you were my best friend. Help me, instead of stabbing me in the back!”

Simon looked at Gavin and swallowed. His fingers clenched and unclenched. Then he looked at Phipps, set his mouth, and straightened his black jacket without saying a word. Gavin’s heart dropped.

“What did you monsters do to Feng?” Alice demanded.

“Very important experiment,” Ivana called down. She was sitting behind a console similar to the one Gavin had seen on her bird the night before, her hand on one of the levers. “You should be proud that he has become part of Gonta heritage.”

“And Zalizniak,” put in a man sitting near her.

“How did you do anything at all?” Alice continued in the same demanding voice. She shook her parasol angrily up at them, drawing every eye to her. Gavin slowly slid his rucksack off, his eye on the lever in Ivana’s hand. “You didn’t even have him for a full day.”

“That is Gonta-Zalizniak way,” said the man who had spoken earlier. He wore a lab coat with red-brown stains that Gavin didn’t want to think too closely about and a whirligig with spikes on its tiny feet sat on his shoulder near his copper collar. He pointed to himself. “Danilo Zalizniak. Our sister was not the only one to work on him. We all worked on him together.”

“That’s what you tell everyone,” Alice huffed theatrically. “But we know clockworkers don’t work together. They all want their own way and eventually tear each other to pieces. Quite literally, in some cases.”

For a moment, Gavin flashed on the conflicts between himself and Dr. Clef. How long before one of them tried to kill the other? Assuming Gavin survived the next few minutes.

“Ah, that is for normal clockworkers,” Danilo said. “We are not like them. We serve the family.”

And Gavin saw the pattern. “That’s what the collection is,” he said. “You don’t think of yourselves as individuals. You don’t even call yourself I. It’s always we. I’ll bet you weren’t born with the names Danilo and Ivana, either.”

Danilo grinned a demon’s grin. “You have good brain. We would like to see it.”

“He and the baroness are mine,” Phipps said. “You have the Oriental boy. As we agreed.”

“So, so.” Ivana removed her hand from the lever and waved it negligently. “Perhaps we wish to change the terms of our agreement.”

“What do you mean?” Glenda demanded. Simon remained silent.

“Do you think that you are the only ones who know of this cure your Alice carries?” said another woman. Her voice echoed about the chamber. “It interests us very, very much. This cure is already destabilizing Europe, and we approve. We predict that within five years, all European clockworkers will be gone because cure will destroy plague. China’s machinery will continue to grow, and she will easily take all of India and Africa and possibly west coast of America before cure reaches her empire and stops creation of more dragon men. By then it will be too late. China will reign supreme.”

“No,” Phipps said flatly.

“Feng,” Alice whispered. “Can you stand up?”

The young man stared blankly, and Gavin couldn’t tell if he had understood her or not.

“Feng,” Alice whispered again, “you have to stand up. Stand up!”

Feng instantly got to his feet. The blanket fell away. He was shirtless. Corded muscle moved under ivory skin recently scored with a series of terrible scars that ran across his chest and abdomen. Tiny, neat stitches held the edges together. Gavin’s nausea returned. Hadn’t the spider on his face been enough? What else had they done?

“Like or not like, Lieutenant,” Danilo said. “It will happen. We want it to happen.”

“Why would you want that?” Simon burst out. His voice was hoarse with stress. “It would destroy your family. Already, Alice is spreading the cure through your city. Who will become the next generation of clockworkers?”

“Is nothing, nothing,” said an old man who sported a set of steel teeth. “We have our own supplies of plague. You are truly stupid man if you think that we Gontas and Zalizniaks could not manipulate plague when it started here, in our own city.”

“You can cure the plague?” Alice gasped. She grabbed Gavin’s hand with her bare one. “But I’d heard you couldn’t.”

“Of course we can,” said the old man. “It is our secret. And we can infect people with it, and we have ways of increasing chances that victim will become clockworker. Is why we need children.”

“Can you cure clockworkers?” Alice blurted before Gavin could ask the same question.

Ivana gave her a scornful look. “Why would we look into such things? Stupid English. Even if we wanted to destroy our clockworker family, plague changes itself when it makes clockworker and becomes quite incurable. Waste of time.”

“Enough discussion,” Phipps said. “I will take my prisoners and leave now.”

“Nah, nah,” said Ivana. “If lovely baroness fails to reach China, Chinese Emperor will rule most of world, and probably hurt Ukraine. This is bad for Gontas and Zalizniaks. Lovely baroness must reach China to spread cure more quickly and destroy Chinese Empire as well. We have agreed.”

Gavin gasped. The Gontas and Zalizniaks were on their side?

“But we still think curing China is a bad idea!” Danilo Zalizniak protested. “We think that baroness must not reach China. Britain’s weakness will let Ukraine expand west.”

Ivana touched a button on her collar. Danilo cried out and clutched at his own collar with both hands, his face a rictus of pain. “We believe we came to agreement,” she said mildly as Danilo rocked in his chair. “Is this not so? Speak English for benefit of our guests.”

“No!” Danilo howled. “No! We— You are wrong! You Gontas are—”

Ivana touched a button on her collar again, and Danilo screamed. Alice put a hand over her mouth. Gavin stared, both sickened and transfixed. The other clockworkers watched in complete silence, though some of them—presumably Zalizniaks—looked unhappy or angry. Phipps sat in the center of them all, clearly trying to swallow her outrage. Gavin suppressed a mean smile. For once, she had miscalculated, overplayed her ability to persuade clockworkers.

“Baroness must reach China,” Ivana said. Her tone was quiet and kind. “Do we agree, brother?”

“Yes,” Danilo whimpered.

“And we should give her all aid necessary. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

Another tap on Ivana’s collar, and Danilo’s face instantly relaxed. He slumped down in his chair. Glenda and Simon exchanged startled looks.

“What did we agree, brother?” Ivana asked, her finger still hovering over the copper at her throat.

“That… that the baroness should reach China,” Danilo whispered. “And we should help her.”

“Just so.” Ivana touched a different button on her collar, and Danilo arched his back with a great gasp, but this time the expression on his face read pure pleasure instead of pain. His mouth fell open, and he groaned. Ivana released her collar, and Danilo relaxed.

“There we are,” she said. “We may clean ourselves up and change into different trousers, if we desire.”

“We are grateful, sister.” Tears streamed down Danilo’s face. “Grateful.” He got up and stumbled out of the observation area.

“We are sorry you had to see that,” Ivana called down to Gavin and Alice. “This is why experiment with Oriental boy is so important. If it works, we have no more arguments.”

“Well,” Gavin said, setting his rucksack on the floor and opening the top, “if you want Alice to reach China, I suppose that means we should be on our way. If you’ll just open that gate…”

“We said baroness must reach China,” Ivana agreed. “You, on other hand, are quite different. We need advanced clockworkers. You will join Gontas.”

“Or Zalizniaks,” said the old man.

Gavin had been expecting something like this, but the actual words still chilled him. Alice, meanwhile, had her traveling tools out, the ones rolled up in black velvet embroidered with Love, Aunt Edwina in gold thread. Ivana manipulated her console. A pair of long metal arms extended from the ceiling. They held a copper collar. Another pair of arms reached down with them, intending to grab Gavin and hold him.

“Don’t fight us,” the steel-toothed clockworker said. “It will go easier. Believe us.”

“No!” Phipps rose. “He belongs to me!”

“Sit!” Ivana barked, and grabbed Phipps’s metal hand. Two other clockworkers grabbed Simon and Glenda before the Third Ward agents could react, and handcuffed them to their chairs. Glenda shrieked in outrage. Simon kicked at his captor, who easily dodged away. The metal hands snatched at Gavin.

“Gavin!” Alice cried. She had a set of lock picks in her hands.

“Get Feng!” Gavin shouted, and the plague slowed time. He dodged the set of grasping arms and snatched the collar from the other set. Angles and trajectories drew themselves in the air for him. He moved his arm a precise two degrees to the left and half a degree down, and threw the collar. The gleaming discus spun through the air and hit the first lever on Ivana’s console, the one she had been holding when the gate crashed down and the lights came up. The lever deployed, and gate cranked upward.

“What are you doing?” Ivana howled. She was still holding Phipps’s arm. “How dare you?”

She reached for the lever, but Gavin raised his wristband. More angles, more trajectories. The magnetic polarizer sent a tiny gear spinning toward her, and it pinged off a button on her collar. Instantly, every clockworker in the gallery, including Ivana, screamed in pain. They clutched at their throats and howled. Phipps, her metal arm still caught in Ivana’s grip, jumped and jigged in place as well, though she retained enough self-control to send Gavin a look of pure venom. The mechanical arms reaching into the cell went limp. Glenda and Simon struggled against their handcuffs, but to no avail.

“Hurry!” Gavin said to Alice. “Before the electricity stops!”

Alice already had the cold cage unlocked. She yanked it open, but Feng didn’t move. “Feng!” she said. “Come on!”

At her words, Feng left the cage. Gavin snatched the set of ear protectors from his pack, put them on, and dashed out the doorway behind them. The three of them pounded down the long corridor, Gavin clutching the rucksack in front of him. They ran down the steps to the great room, and Gavin headed for the spiral staircase leading up to the main house, but Alice turned, towing Feng with her.

“What are you doing?” he asked, pulling one ear protector aside so he could hear her.

“I’m not leaving these children behind,” she said.

He sighed. “I knew you were going to say that. And I agree with you. Let’s go.”

Alice’s cure had already spread to all the children, thanks to the close quarters of the cages, and they looked healthier, more alert. She bent over the lock on the first cage, and the whistle hanging around her neck clattered against the bars. The child inside backed away from her.

“It’s the same kind of lock they had on Feng’s cage,” she said. “I can open it almost as fast as with a key by now.”

“They’ll come any minute,” Gavin said.

Alice didn’t respond. In seconds, she had the door open, but the ragged little boy inside refused to come out. “Feng, can you tell him we’re here to take him away?”

Feng didn’t respond. He simply stood near the cage, the spider plastered across half his face.

“Feng!” Alice said.

And then Gavin had it. “Feng,” he said, “tell the children in Ukrainian we’ve come to take them out of here. Tell them we’ve come to take them home.”

Feng spoke musical Cyrillic syllables. The boy looked doubtful even as Alice unlocked the second cage. “Why does Feng listen to you?” she asked.

“You have to give him a direct order,” Gavin said. “It’s what the Gontas were working on—absolute obedience.”

Alice looked sick. “That’s horrible!”

“We’ll figure it out later,” Gavin said. “Open the cages before the Gontas recover.”

The second and third children were more eager to leave their cages, which convinced the first child. Alice had just freed the tenth and final child when a horde of gibbering, angry Gontas appeared at the entrance of the hallway leading back to the operating theater. Ivana was at the forefront. They quickly spotted Gavin, Alice, and Feng. With a shout, they ran down the stairs. They had paused long enough to arm themselves, for they bristled with weapons—energy pistols, thunder rifles, vibration knives, quantum swords. They boiled down the steps, bounding with plague-enhanced speed, and rushed toward the three escapees and the children, who cowered in fear. Their demonic howls echoed off stone walls, and spittle sprayed from their mouths. Phipps was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps the electric shock affected her more because of her metal parts. Simon and Glenda were no doubt still in handcuffs.

Alice’s lips moved, but Gavin had put the ear protectors back on and he could no longer hear her. Feng looked unfazed, but adrenaline zinged through Gavin’s arteries. The Gontas and Zalizniaks weren’t going to capture now. They intended to kill. Praying his plan would work, Gavin let the rucksack fall to the floor, revealing the paradox generator. He pointed the speaking trumpet toward the pack of screeching clockworkers and spun the crank hard.

This time, even through the ear protectors, he heard the faint sliding sound of the tritone paradox. It simultaneously climbed and dropped, spinning and swirling. The gaps between the intervals were all tritones, an auditory square root of two that itself stretched out into infinity, but each tritone was paired with a mirror of itself, a parallel. Instead of being painful, the sound became perfection. The sound twisted the universe into new shapes, teased the ear the way a star’s gravity teased a comet. Gavin heard only a tiny part of it, and he felt a singular joy.

The effect on the clockworkers was electric. They stopped dead in their tracks, dropped their weapons, fell to their knees with the backs of their hands dragging on the floor. Every one of them stared at the generator with an open mouth. Most of them drooled like half-dead demons.

“Get the children,” Gavin said, though it was difficult to speak. “We’ll have to take the lift.”

Alice mouthed something at Feng, who immediately herded the children toward the lift with Alice coming behind. Gavin stayed to keep the paradox generator going.

And then Danilo Gonta appeared at the top of the steps in his bloodstained white coat. He was wearing ear protectors. Gavin tensed.

“Shit,” he muttered. He hadn’t noticed Danilo wasn’t among the crowd of Gontas he held captive with the generator, or remembered that Danilo hadn’t returned after Ivana had sent him from the operating theater. Both of Gavin’s hands were occupied with the generator, and Alice and Feng were already halfway to the lift with the children.

Danilo bounded down the stairs and stopped just a few steps away from Gavin. He didn’t have a weapon, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed. Gavin took an uncertain step backward, still cranking the generator. The faint but perfect beauty of the tritone paradox was a constant distraction.

The clockworker reached into his pocket. Gavin tensed again, and Danilo pulled out a metal stylus with a glass bulb on the end. A wire ran from the other end of the stylus and disappeared up Danilo’s sleeve. He moved the stylus across the air, and it left a trail of light. Gavin stared in fascination, and he almost forgot to crank the generator.

We can hear this sound a little, Danilo wrote in glowing letters. It creates unity! It is perfection! Name price.

Gavin shook his head. Alice and the others were almost to the lift now.

Danilo waved the stylus and the words vanished. He started over. We will let you and children go. We will send you on special train to China. We will stop Phipps.

Where was Phipps, anyway? Gavin had a hard time believing she had been incapacitated for long.

“No,” Gavin said, his voice muffled in his own ears. “You’ll use it to control each other and other clockworkers and God only knows what else.”

Danilo’s face hardened in clockworker anger. Then we destroy you and your circus and take friends for test subjects.

Feng opened the gate to the lift and Alice herded the children aboard. She gestured at Gavin to come. He thought about an army of Cossack clockworkers and their weapons tearing through the Kalakos Circus, of Dodd and Nathan and Linda and Charlie and all the others being carted down here, infected with the clockwork plague or strapped to a table and cut open like Feng. Was that worth an invention he had intended to destroy in the first place? His hand slowed on the crank.

“You have to promise to let everyone go,” Gavin said.

Done, Danilo wrote over the heads of his drooling family.

“And to arrange for that special train.”

Danilo underlined the word done. His lips also moved as he muttered to himself, and Gavin, used to reading lips on windy airships that often swept sound away, saw him add Ivana and other words he assumed were Ukrainian. The clockwork plague helped him make lightning connections in Gavin’s mind. Realizations snapped and clicked together, and Gavin’s blood went cold. Danilo was lying. He had no intention of letting anyone go. He—they—wanted to use the generator as a weapon against the Gonta clockworkers, and Danilo Zalizniak would do or say anything to get his hands on it. The Cossacks, who had already broken a compact with Phipps, would have no compunctions about breaking one with Gavin.

He sped up the crank. “No!” he shouted. “I’ll see you in hell first.”

Danilo leaped at him with a snarl, smearing golden letters. But Gavin’s combat training with the Third Ward took over. He jumped straight up and caught Danilo in the chest with a snap kick that barely interrupted the generator’s lovely drone. Danilo fell back and slammed into Ivana, who toppled over without caring. One side of Danilo’s ear protectors came off, exposing him to the tritone paradox, and a look of ecstasy descended on his face. He sprawled across Ivana’s plump body, already drooling.

“Your second orgasm of the day,” Gavin said, and kicked him in the crotch. “That’s for Feng and the children, you son of a bitch.”

The thud as his boot connected felt good. For a moment, Danilo’s face vanished, and it was replaced by Madoc Blue, the pirate who had cornered Gavin on the Juniper and tried to take his trousers down. He was the first mate who had sliced the flesh on Gavin’s back with a whip. Gavin hadn’t had a normal night’s sleep since. Nightmares made the dark restless, and every morning, Gavin jerked awake, his heart pounding. This terrible man drooling on the floor before him was the symbol of everything that was wrong in this world, everything that had gone wrong in Gavin’s life. And he was helpless.

It occurred to Gavin with terrible certainty that he could end the entire problem here and now. It would be child’s play to kill every Gonta in the room, even with the generator occupying his hands. He could knock the Gontas over, one by one, and stand on their disgusting throats until they suffocated, or break each of their loathsome necks with well-placed kicks. And all the while they would thank him for the lovely, deadly music. He and Alice and Feng and the children could walk out of the house, free and clear. How sweet that would be.

He planted himself, aimed the first kick that would snap a Cossack neck. And then a touch on his shoulder brought him around. Alice was there.

Come on! she mouthed. Hurry!

Gavin hesitated. Alice. Beautiful, practical Alice. She was standing beside him, in the same place, in the same danger, and yet it never even occurred to her to execute the Gontas.

She plucked at his sleeve. Why the wait? she mouthed. Come!

How would she react if he killed a group of helpless people, no matter how filthy and foul? And… how would he react later? Only a few days ago, the thought of killing a man with his energy whip had filled him with fear and disgust. Now he was calmly considering destroying a roomful of people. What was he becoming? What was this city turning him into? His skin crawled even as his hand continued to turn the generator. He wouldn’t let himself become their sort of demon.

“Let’s go,” he said. Still playing, he turned his back on the Gontas and let Alice lead him to the lift.

Chapter Twelve

The lift gate clanged shut and Gavin stopped cranking the strange machine in his hands. Instantly the eerie, nail-biting noise ended, and Alice breathed a sigh of relief. Gavin popped the protectors off his ears and hung them around his neck.

“They’ll stay in that stupor for a few minutes longer,” he said. “We need to hurry.”

The lift was crowded with the ten children, Gavin, Alice, and Feng. Feng, with the dreadful spider sprawled across half his face like a brass scar. It made Alice sick with guilt to see it and the scars that puckered his chest and torso. She felt bad enough after seeing Feng, and the thought of leaving the children behind in those cages… well, that was quite impossible, no matter what the risk to her own safety might be.

Alice spun the crank on the lift control and moved the lever, unable to read the Cyrillic characters but hoping UP and DOWN would be in the same places as an English lift. The lift jerked upward, making the children gasp in fear. They shied away from Feng and clustered around Alice likes chicks around a hen. Two of them clutched her hands, despite the iron spider on her left. This was, strangely, her first prolonged contact with children, and she couldn’t decide whether the odd circumstances of the occasion should make her laugh at the ridiculousness of it or howl with outrage at the injustice.

“Are you all right, Gavin?” she asked instead as the lift continued to rise.

“I’m fine.” He held up the generator. “Danilo Zalizniak offered the earth for this.”

“What in heaven’s name for?”

“So the Zalizniaks could get the upper hand on the Gontas and—I’m guessing—expand their empire.”

“Good heavens,” Alice said. “I hadn’t thought of that. The moment we get the children to safety, we must destroy that thing.” She paused, still holding the slightly sweaty hands of the two children. Gavin was grinning at her, and the wide, handsome smile was still enough to make her breath stop, especially when it was aimed at her. “What is it?”

“Feng is in terrible trouble, we could be chopped into pieces at any moment, and the second we leave this lift, we’re going to be fighting our way through god-knows-what, but you’re thinking about the children.” He continued to smile. “You saved me back there, you know.”

She blinked. “Did I? I thought you were saving me.”

“Not at all,” he said seriously. “You led me into hell, Alice, and now I know you’re going to lead me back out.”

The lift slammed to a halt, and for a horrible moment Alice thought the Cossacks had stopped them, but through the gate she could see the main floor of the great house. “Feng,” she said, “open the lift.”

Feng leaped forward like a puppet on strings and slammed the iron gate aside with the sound of a death bell. Alice felt sick again at the way his scarred body obeyed, but made herself focus. Right now, they had to get out of the Gonta-Zalizniak house intact, and if success required her to bark orders at Feng, she would do it.

Kemp was waiting for them in the marble foyer. The surreal sight of his familiar head on a different body gave Alice a turn, even though she’d been prepared for it. “I see Madam and Sir were successful in their attempt,” he said. “Excellent work, if I may be so bold.”

“Thank you, Kemp,” Alice said. She herded the children out of the lift. They were gaining confidence in her now, seemed to understand that she was there to help, and they were more willing to follow her. They were fearful, innocent, and trusting, children who had lived through things no child should dream of, let alone experience. She felt a deep need to ensure their safety and was quite sure she would die to protect them. For a moment, she wondered if this was what it was like to have children of her own, though she didn’t think that she would want to start off—or even finish—with ten of them. She did a quick head count and led everyone toward the front door, her parasol at the ready. Feng and Kemp took up the rear, with Gavin among the children. He looked like a rather distracted young father on an outing, and Alice pushed the thought away to examine later.

The house seemed to be in confusion. Human servants rushed about or stood uncertainly in corners. A smell of burned food hung in the air. Alice put on the air of a lady and strode confidently, ignoring everyone around her. No one would dare challenge her; it would never occur to her that someone might. Keep moving, keep moving. Check the children, ensure none had wandered away. Push past the handwringing housekeeper who babbled at her in Ukrainian. Thread through the maze of rooms. Nearly at the exit. Keep moving, keep moving.

She found herself in the middle of an enormous two-storied room with red marble floors and pillars. A grand staircase swept up to a balcony that ran around the entire chamber. High arched windows provided light, and ten-foot-high double doors stood opposite her. A patch of floor in front of the doors gleamed like a diamond. Alice glanced around, halted in confusion. It was the wrong room. She had taken a bad turn somewhere.

“This is the entry foyer,” Kemp said helpfully. “The front doors are straight ahead of Madam.”

Alice hesitated and fingered the whistle on its chain around her neck. “I think we should find a side door. I don’t want to walk out onto the front steps and into the middle of that party.”

“Ivana Gonta sent everyone home some time after Madam and Sir took the lift down,” Kemp sniffed. “According to the servants, she was quite rude about it, even by Cossack standards. It is why everyone is in such a panic. The circus left, except for the elephant, which won’t obey orders from anyone. Perhaps it has broken down.”

“So the entire banquet existed only to lure us here,” Alice said.

“Who cares?” Gavin said. “We have a clear sky. Let’s go!”

A door up on the balcony slammed open and a stream of mechanical guards, all dressed in red uniforms, stormed down the stairs. Faster than any human, they lined up in ranks in front of the main doors. The other doors in the great room crashed shut and locks clicked. The children clustered around Gavin and Alice, whimpering in fear. Alice spread her arms to embrace and reassure as many of them as she could, though her own heart was racing.

“Madam!” Kemp cried. “Madam!”

His body marched over to join the automatic army, his arms and legs stiff, his head turning left and right. Alice started to go after him, but Gavin took her shoulder.

“Wait,” he cautioned. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”

“Good advice,” said all the automatons at the same time, in the same voice. Even Kemp. The absolute unity of the sound made Alice’s skin crawl. “We are masters here. You will not leave.”

“Madam!” Kemp added.

“Who is this?” Alice demanded as she turned the handle of her parasol.

“We are Gonta-Zalizniak,” said the automatons. All of them, including Kemp, drew swords.

“You couldn’t get out of the basement in time to stop us, so you took over your guards. Is one of you controlling all of them,” Alice asked, not really caring but trying to stall so she could think, “or do each of you control one automaton?”

“You will not leave.” The swords vibrated with a sound like a pack of snarling dogs.

“Madam! I am trying to change the memory wheels, but I cannot. Help me, Madam!”

“Where are Phipps and Glenda and Simon?” Alice asked.

The automatons and Kemp took a step forward in unison. “You will not leave.”

“Stop us.” Gavin shoved the ear protectors back over his ears and cranked the generator again. The eerie sound rippled through the red marble room. All the automatons and Kemp jerked their heads in unison, then laughed together. Gavin stopped playing in confusion.

“Siren song is very beautiful,” the automatons said, “but not so enticing when we hear through metallic ears. Alice will exit and go to China. Gavin and pretty Oriental boy will come back downstairs with children. But first we will slice one or two open while you watch.”

“What?” Alice cried. “Why?”

“To punish you and Gavin, little baroness. To show that you are not in charge here. If you behave well after that, we promise to use nitrous oxide on Gavin and children before more experiments, though little baroness will have to take our word on that.”

Feng was trembling and his torso was sheathed in sweat, though his spidery face stayed impassive and he remained where he was at the back of the group of children. Alice glanced at Kemp, then back at the children. Damn it. She twisted her parasol handle again, and the high-pitched whine shrilled. Her hands shook.

“Madam, what are you doing?” Kemp asked. “Madam, please don’t!”

“I’m sorry, Kemp,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And she fired a bolt of electricity. The children cried out and scrambled backward. The crackling bolt struck the center automaton square on and spread to the others, including Kemp. Alice bit her lip, but held her grip firm. All the hair on the back of her neck stood up, and the smell of ozone tanged the air.

The automatons stood still for a moment. Then they laughed again, even Kemp. One of the automatons extended a hand. Its forearm separated from its upper arm and shot across the room, still connected to the body by a stiff cable. The move caught Alice off guard, and the automaton’s hand was able to snatch the parasol from her hand and haul it back. It snapped the weapon in two and flung it aside. “No, no, no. We know about electric umbrella. We saw it work.”

“They’re standing on glass flooring,” Gavin said. “They aren’t grounded.”

“Good heavens,” Alice whispered, staring at the gleaming patch of floor. Kemp remained silent.

“You have no weapons now,” the automatons said. “You belong to us.”

The little clockwork army, including Kemp, spread out into a semicircle and stormed forward, their terrible growling swords at the ready. Before Alice could react, a bolt of red energy slashed through the air and punched through the chest of one of the automatons. It keeled over backward. Its sword went still. Alice spun. On the balcony behind and above them all stood Susan Phipps in her scarlet uniform with a large rifle in her hands and a battery pack on her back. Her brass monocle stared coldly down into the stone foyer. Beside her, also armed, were Simon d’Arco in black and Glenda Teasdale in yellow.

“Sorry it took so long to get here,” Phipps said. “We had to raid the Gonta armory first.”

“Oh God,” Gavin muttered.

“Fire!” Phipps ordered. Glenda and Simon obeyed. The air crackled with energies Alice couldn’t name. Gavin dropped the paradox generator, and they pushed the children to the floor while terrible thunder boomed overhead. The smell of hot metal filled Alice’s nose. It went on and on. Several of the children began to cry. Heat pressed on Alice’s back.

And then it stopped. Alice raised her head and slowly got to her feet. Smoke choked the air and it took some time to make out the warped figures of the automatons scattered about the floor, arms and legs skewed at odd angles, bodies and heads half melted. The marble floor was pitted and scorched, and the glass plate in front of the door had shattered into a thousand pieces. The children coughed and continued to cry. The sound wrenched Alice’s heart, but she forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

“Madam,” said Kemp’s voice from among the wreckage. “Madam. Madam. Madam.”

Alice gasped upon hearing this, heartened at this small bit of mechanical life among the strange carnage. Beside her, Gavin got to his feet. Feng remained upright. No one had told him to duck.

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

Phipps came down the stairs, followed by Glenda and Simon. The brass barrel of the energy rifle glowed a soft red. “That was satisfying,” she said. “I imagine the Cossacks themselves will come upstairs eventually, but we should have time. And my shackles are rather more effective than the ones those disgusting clockworkers used.”

Glenda put a hand to her ear, which had a metal cup over it. “I have access to the memory engines that run the house, Lieutenant. The Gontas have abandoned the automaton controls and are coming now.”

The smoke caught in Alice’s throat, and she had to cough before she could speak. “Susan—Lieutenant—I can’t go back with you.”

“I’m not offering a choice.”

In that moment, all the frustration and anger and fear she’d been keeping under control got away from her. “Why are you doing this?” she burst out. “What do you have to gain? The plague in England is dead. There are no more clockworkers. The Third Ward’s purpose is no more!”

Phipps strode forward and grabbed Alice by the front of her blouse in a metal fist. Her breath smelled of stale bread and long-forgotten wine. Alice grabbed Phipps’s wrist with her own metal gauntlet, but Phipps was stronger by far. “You endanger the world. You diminish me. You destroyed my reason to exist.”

“Let her go, Phipps!” Gavin barked, but Simon pointed his rifle at him, and he went still. The paradox generator sat uselessly at his feet like a half-dead flower.

“So now you’ve replaced your purpose with an obsession to destroy me?” Alice countered. “Is it worth the cost? You’ve dragged Simon and Glenda into hell, and these children are paying the price as well. Let us go to China, Susan, and we’ll restore balance to the world. It won’t be the balance you remember, but it’ll be balance nonetheless.”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

Phipps’s six-fingered hand tightened on the white cloth at Alice’s throat, and Alice found it a bit hard to breathe. “Balance is restored only through justice. I will have justice.”

“The Gontas will be here in two minutes, Lieutenant,” said Glenda from behind her rifle.

“Susan,” Gavin said evenly, “we shouldn’t be talking about this here. These children need our help, our assistance, our aid. Isn’t that also your duty, your responsibility, your obligation?”

“A fine try, Ennock,” Phipps said. “But I’m not a clockworker.”

“Listen to me, Lieutenant.” The words came out half-choked, and Alice could barely draw breath through the iron grip at her throat. She fumbled for the whistle on its chain, but couldn’t get to it. “You have a chance here to build instead of destroy. You can save these children and thousands like them. Just let us go.”

Phipps stared at Alice, her ice-blue eyes meeting Alice’s brown ones. She wavered. The grip at Alice’s throat relaxed and she could breathe freely again. Relief made Alice relax. Everything was going to be fine. The children continued to huddle around Gavin, and she wanted to tell them it would be all right now, but she had no way to—

“No!” Phipps snarled. Her grip tightened again. “No! No! No! I will have justice! Glenda, chain them both. Simon, keep them covered. If they move wrong, shoot to kill. Alice first. That’ll keep Gavin in line.”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

“We have barely sixty seconds,” Glenda reported, setting her rifle aside and producing a set of heavy handcuffs.

“Feng!” Alice cried in desperation. “Attack Phipps!”

Feng instantly launched himself at Phipps. The move caught Phipps off guard and he slammed into her, knocking her down. Alice went down, too, but Phipps released her grip and she was able to roll free. Gavin’s wristbands snapped a cog at Glenda, who ducked by reflex. Gavin shoved through the crying group of children and swept the rifle from Glenda’s hands with a hook kick. It hit the floor and slid away. Simon spun and aimed his weapon straight at Gavin. The tip glowed red.

Feng and Phipps rolled across the floor, trading and blocking blows faster than Alice could track. “No!” Phipps chanted. “No! No! No! No!” Feng was getting tired, and Phipps landed several choice hits on him. Alice struggled to her feet, fumbling for the whistle.

Gavin faced Simon across the glowing rifle barrel. Simon’s eyes were sunken, his hair disheveled, his black coat torn. “Are you going to shoot me, Simon?” Gavin said. “Simon Peter d’Arco, the man who killed his friend and partner?”

“I have my orders,” he said hoarsely.

“What orders come from your soul?” Gavin asked. “You once gave up happiness to give me Alice. I can’t imagine that someone so unselfish would kill for shallow reasons.”

“You never wanted me,” Simon said. “So I found someone else, and Phipps ripped me away from him to follow you. It always comes back to you, Gavin. You!”

“I’m sorry,” Gavin admitted. “I know you’re angry. But is anger worth my life, or the lives of these children?”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

Glenda was moving toward her lost rifle. Simon twisted a lever, and the red barrel glowed scarlet. Alice froze, the whistle at her mouth, as Simon fired. The energy beam shot past Gavin and hit Glenda’s rifle. It leaped away, a molten mass. Glenda swore and jumped back.

“You traitorous bastard!” Phipps leaped to her feet, dark hair wild. Feng staggered upright, still trying to attack but not possessing the coordination. “I’ll see you court-martialed, d’Arco!”

The door at the top of the balcony burst open, and clockworker Cossacks boiled into the room. Ivana was at the forefront. She waved a sword that would have looked ridiculous with her pink tea gown if the vibrating blade hadn’t sheared a marble bust in half as she passed. The other Gontas bore similar weapons, including a number of projectile arms.

“Shit,” said Simon and Gavin together.

Alice blew the whistle. It shrilled high and loud, like a baby chick crying for its mother. There was a small moment of silence when everyone in the giant room paused, as if startled that Alice would do something so ridiculous. Alice stood in the middle of the frozen chaos. The children huddled together, frightened and without a protector. Feng staggered about, still trying to obey orders and attack Phipps, but betrayed by his battered body. Kemp’s head droned sorrowfully to itself. Gavin and Simon remained side by side, dark and light, newly become brothers. Even the Gontas and Zalizniaks paused momentarily in their charge.

And then an angry trumpeting answered the whistle. A faint rumble grew stronger, and the front doors smashed open. They wrenched off their hinges, and Alice ducked as one door flew over her head and crashed at the foot the stairs just as Ivana and two of her siblings arrived there. Ivana’s dying scream was buried under six inches of solid oak. The mechanical elephant stampeded over the remains of the automaton army, trumpeted again, and came to a halt near Alice. It made a formidable wall of brass between her and Phipps.

“Get aboard!” Alice barked. “Feng, get the children on the elephant!”

But Gavin and Simon were now halfway across the room from Alice and the mechanical animal. Gavin snatched up the paradox generator and the two of them ran for the elephant, but one of the Gontas on the staircase lobbed a small device that landed in the space between Gavin and the elephant. It exploded with a strange pop that only rocked Alice but knocked both Gavin and Simon sprawling. Gavin slid backward across the smooth floor, away from the elephant and toward the staircase. Alice shouted his name.

Gavin managed to regain his feet. By a miracle, he hadn’t lost his hold on the paradox generator. Simon, meanwhile, flew in a different direction entirely and fetched up against one of the walls. He pulled himself upright, rifle in hand. The Cossacks laughed and tried to clamber over the wreckage at the foot of the stairs. One of them gave it up and turned to aim a large, multibarreled rifle in the elephant’s general direction.

“Go, Alice!” Gavin shouted. “Take the kids and go!”

“No!” Alice cried, horrified at the idea. “I can’t leave you!” But the space between them was wide, and the Gontas were already aiming a number of other weapons. The air would turn deadly in seconds. The children were climbing up the elephant and into the brass gondola, using handholds welded onto its hide for just this purpose. Feng urged them along, but they were slow, and there was no way to get them all in before the Gontas started their barrage.

Gavin held up the paradox generator and grabbed the crank. Of course! The Cossacks couldn’t resist it. All he had to do was freeze them in place long enough for—

Alice’s eye fell upon Gavin’s ear protectors lying on the floor some distance away. The bomb had flung them from their place around his neck. Her stomach clenched with terror. In that moment, she knew what he intended to do.

“Gavin, don’t!” she screamed. “You can’t!”

I love you always, he mouthed and gave her that heart-stopping grin. Then he turned the crank. The unearthly sound of the tritone paradox sighed through the room. Most of the Gontas and Zalizniaks, those who hadn’t been crushed by the door, froze. A look of pure bliss descended on their faces. Their weapons thudded to the stairs. Gavin mirrored their expression. His handsome features passed into an ecstasy only he could understand as he mindlessly cranked the handle, transporting himself and his fellow clockworkers into rapture. Alice hated the filthy sound, and tears streamed down her face. She couldn’t reach him, he couldn’t reach her, and he would play until he dropped from exhaustion or a Cossack killed him.

And just as Alice feared, three Gontas had had the foresight to throw together ear protectors of their own, and they shoved past their entranced brethren. Two aimed rifles straight at Gavin.

“No, you don’t!” Simon fired his own weapon. Red energy spat from the tip and shattered part of the stone banister. The Gontas ducked. Alice cried out.

“Gavin’s bought us time!” Simon shouted at her, still firing. “Don’t waste it! Glenda, stay where you are. Alice, get those children aboard!”

At that moment, Phipps dashed around the elephant. She had taken advantage of the confusion to retrieve her rifle, and she aimed it at Alice, but Alice made an infuriated gesture, and the elephant swung its trunk round and slapped Phipps aside like a fly. Phipps went tail-over-teakettle and landed hard. The rifle arced away, far out of reach.

“Leave, Susan!” Alice shouted above the noise of the rifle fire and the paradox generator. “I don’t have time for your pettiness. If you want justice later, run now.”

Simon continued to fire. His expert marksmanship kept the three Cossack clockworkers pinned down, but Alice wondered how long the rifle’s energy would last. The moment Simon stopped his attack, the Cossacks would turn their fire on Gavin, and Alice had no way to save him. Gavin played his perfect tritones, forever beyond her reach. In moments, he would be dead. Alice felt sick and helpless as the final two children climbed aboard the elephant.

“Come on, Lieutenant!” Glenda cried near the gaping front doors.

Phipps looked torn for a moment. Then she dashed outside. Glenda went after her.

Simon fired another volley at the Gontas, but the rifle’s power was already weaker. “Go!” he shouted. “We’re out of time!”

Alice gestured, and the elephant curled its trunk so Alice could step aboard it. “I won’t leave without Gavin!”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

“There’s no choice!” Simon said. “You have to let him go.”

Ice washed through Alice’s veins at those words. “I… I…”

“Let him go!”

At that moment, Simon’s rifle ran out of power. The room fell silent except for the ghostly sighs of the tritone paradox. The protected Cossacks, who were hiding behind the stone banister, raised their heads above the rail. Their own rifles came up. Something inside Alice snapped. The world went into a blur, and she was only half aware of what she was doing. A scream tore itself from her throat, and the elephant thundered forward with Feng and the children clinging to the gondola on its back. And then the mechanical beast was standing between Gavin and the Gontas. Rifle fire, some of it energy, some of it projectile, pinged and hissed off the elephant’s brass hide. Alice leaped down, yanked the generator out of Gavin’s hands, and slapped him sharply across the face. Weapons fire continued to pock and snarl on the other side of the elephant.

“Wha—?” Gavin said.

“Move!” she shouted.

He moved. In seconds, he was in the gondola. Alice hurled herself back onto the elephant’s trunk and ordered the beast to turn and run. It obeyed with a lurch as the Cossacks continued to fire, though the elephant still provided protection as it picked up speed. The smell of scorched brass filled the room and a chunk of metal peeled off the mechanical’s side, exposing mesh and gears like muscle and bone. Machinery squealed as if it were in actual pain. The other Cossacks remained in their trance, but that wouldn’t last long. Above Alice, children cried and screamed. The elephant was limping badly, and Alice could hear the pistons labor. More than one was bent or misaligned, though it was still able to speed along faster than a man could run. Alice clung grimly to its trunk, praying it wouldn’t break down. Simon ran lightly along the wall, heading for the door as well, but the Cossacks were concentrating their fire on the elephant instead of him. He arrived at the door and bent down to scoop up Kemp’s head just as the elephant reached him. With a quick move, he tossed the head up to Gavin in the gondola, then grabbed a handhold as the elephant thundered past and swung himself up.

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

The elephant bolted onto the portico outside and down the front steps to the deserted courtyard. The banquet tables, still bearing the remains of the feast, stood between the elephant and the gate, which by a miracle stood open, no doubt from when the rest of the circus left. The elephant smashed the tables to flinders and charged into the street. The rifle fire died away.

A number of emotions tried to push their way into Alice’s head and heart—fear, relief, pride, anger—but she forced herself to stay focused on the task at hand. Reach safe distance from the Gontas. Guide the elephant safely through the street. Bring the children back to the circus. Would the Gontas pursue? Alice had no idea. Right now, she had to get back to the circus, where there was help.

“Alice!” Gavin called from above. “Alice!”

His voice brought back the wave of sentiment. She ignored it, and him. Now that he was safe, she needed to deal with practical matters. Once they were back at the circus, they could talk. The elephant ran.

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

“Alice!” Gavin shouted again.

The journey was its own version of hell. Alice was terrified the Gontas were following, and she didn’t dare slow down, but neither did she want to trample anyone, and the dirty, narrow streets were difficult to navigate. Thank God she knew where she was going. People and traffic leaped out of the elephant’s way, some meekly, others with angry shouts. The elephant’s feet thudded unevenly on the cobblestones. Alice turned it one way, then another, always heading for the Dnepro River and the circus. The circus became a goal unto itself, a haven she had to reach at all costs.

The elephant slowed, lurching more and more. A loud hissing started in one of the little boilers inside its chest. But Alice could see the Tilt between the buildings.

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

And then they were there. The circus was in something of a mess. People dashed in a number of directions, working and shouting and unhitching horses from wagons. Animals bellowed and screeched in their cages. And then Alice remembered that they had been rudely dismissed from the Gonta-Zalizniak house and must have only just returned.

“Alice!” Gavin called again. “God, Alice. Get up here!”

This time Alice listened. She quickly climbed up to the gondola, cursing the difficulty of doing so in a skirt. Simon helped her in. Feng stood in one corner of the gondola, his scarred face impassive, Kemp’s head at his feet. Nine of the children lay or sat on the floor, some of them crying softly, most of them numb. Gavin knelt, cradling the tenth, the little girl in the ragged gray dress. It was the girl Alice had first cured. Gavin’s jaw was trembling, and then Alice saw that the front of the girl’s dress was stained with blood. All the strength went out of her and she dropped to the floor of the gondola beside the child.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no. Is she—?”

“Dead,” Simon said. “Rifle fire hit her when you went back.”

Guilt and horror crushed Alice to the gondola floor. Tears welled in her eyes and her throat closed. She took the little body from Simon and cradled it. The little girl’s body lay in her arms like a warm rag doll. Her mouth lolled open. Alice wept. This child would never see her parents or play house or bite a slice of bread or kiss a boy or breathe spring air. All her hopes and memories had vanished like fog in sunlight, as if they had never existed. A month ago, when she had eaten breakfast with her family, she’d had no idea that one day her corpse would lay in the arms of a stranger on the back of a mechanical monster. And it was Alice’s doing. Alice wished desperately that she could change places with her, but God was never so kind.

Gavin touched her shoulder and Alice wanted to bury herself in his arms, but she wouldn’t let herself. What solace did this girl have? Her family?

“You couldn’t let go,” Simon said in a flat voice. “She died because you went back for Gavin.”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

“Simon,” Gavin said dangerously, “be—”

The words landed on her like stones. “No. He’s right. I’m so sorry. She died because of me.”

“You’re not being fair to yourself, Alice,” Gavin told her quietly. “The Cossacks gave her the clockwork plague, and if you hadn’t stepped in—”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.” Alice wiped her eyes. “Damn it. There’s too much to do. We need to take care of the other children and we need to destroy that generator.”

“Alice—,” Gavin began.

“Not now, Gavin.” She got up, still holding the girl’s body. The other children stared, both fearful and uncertain. “Feng, get the children down to the ground, please. Simon, help him.”

When the surviving children were safe on the ground, Alice climbed down herself, the girl’s body slung over her shoulder. She refused to let Gavin take it down for her. Blood smeared Alice’s blouse. Disorder continued to simmer through the circus and a curious crowd had gathered to watch, though as before they stayed outside the marked boundaries. Just as Alice reached the ground, Dodd trotted up to them, his collar undone and his hat askew. He was so agitated, he didn’t even notice Simon and Feng.

“What the hell did you do?” he demanded. “Jesus and God and Mary. Everything was fine until you got involved.”

“What do you mean?” Gavin asked.

“Ivana threw us out, and without paying me the rest of what she promised,” Dodd growled. “And what the bloody hell happened to the elephant? What happened to you?”

“It’s complicated,” Gavin said. He shot a glance over his shoulder at the streets leading back to the Gonta-Zalizniak house. “The short version of the story is that Ivana Gonta captured Feng and all these children. We had to rescue them, but we found out it was all a trick to… Well, never mind.”

He wet his lips. Alice understood his nervousness. Even as they spoke, the Gonta-Zalizniaks were pouring paraffin oil into their deadly mechanicals and moving them up from underground.

“Look,” he finished, “we have to get out of here. All of us. You, too. The whole circus.”

“I don’t understand.” Dodd looked puzzled.

Gavin looked ready to shake him. “Weren’t you listening? The whole thing—the invitation to perform, Ivana pretending to want you there—was just a trick to get me and Alice into that house. Except we escaped, and now they’re angry. They’re going to destroy the circus in revenge, and they’re on the way right now.”

Dodd stared, then turned and bellowed, “Scarper! Now, now, now! Scarper! Scarper!”

The word rippled through the circus. At first there was a sense of disbelief. The Kalakos Circus was enormous and well respected, not some gypsy sideshow, and most of the performers hadn’t been run out of a town in a dozen years or more. The idea that it could happen now caught them off guard. Once it sank in that the order was real, the general disorder from before blew into full-blown chaos as people tried to gather family, snatch belongings, and decide whether or not to leave beloved animals—both living and mechanical—behind.

Dodd started to run off, but Gavin caught his arm. “We need to find Harry. He speaks Ukrainian, and he can help us find the children’s—”

“I don’t know where Harry is,” Dodd snapped. “I’m glad you got these children out of the Gontas’ house, really I am, but right now I’m more worried that my own people will end up in it.”

“Why don’t you put everyone on the train? It’s faster,” Gavin asked.

“The boilers are stone cold,” Dodd snapped. “We’d never get everything heated up in time. Though I’m going to try, for the sake of the animals. Everyone else will have to run on foot or horseback and hope for the best. Maybe if we scatter in different directions, the Cossacks won’t catch many of us. Oh!” He put his hands to his head. “Charlie! He can’t run! Linda will have to hitch up her wagon. I have to find Nathan. Perhaps he can help her.”

“Good heavens.” Alice’s knees felt weak and she leaned against the elephant’s pitted side with the dead girl in her arms. The elephant felt uncomfortably warm, and it sighed steam. This was too much to take in. “I’m sorry, Dodd. I didn’t know this would happen.”

“Sorry? Sorry?” Dodd was nearly shouting. “You destroyed this circus. You destroyed our lives. Thank you, Baroness, for bringing my people into all this.”

He whirled and stomped away.

Gabriel Stark, called Dr. Clef, stood on the deck of The Lady of Liberty and stared through a spyglass at the mechanical elephant. Time jerked and jumped. Some moments rushed ahead so quickly that his limbs moved like glaciers. Other moments slowed, froze even the daylight into clear, sweet ice. In those slow moments, he could see the entire world, perhaps the entire universe, caught in a single painting. When nothing moved, Dr. Clef saw every secret of the physical world, of time and matter and energy, as plain as an artist’s brush stroke. Then the universe jerked back into motion, and an ocean of paint splashed over what he saw, obliterating it. Even his memory of it vanished. He only knew that he had known. Some flotsam did stay with him, however. Stray numbers, unified concepts, vibrating strings, the final piece of an irrational number. Concepts no sane mind could grasp. Fortunately, his mind was falling apart, and this allowed him to hold a few secrets together.

Another thing he held on to was the mission. The boy needed more time. That became plainer with every passing, precious moment. The boy’s movements as he climbed down from the elephant betrayed this need. The clockwork plague altered his gait, his gestures. Only someone as brilliant as Dr. Clef could see the pattern of the plague’s progression toward madness, dissolution, and death. Although Dr. Clef calculated a decent 62.438 percent chance that China’s Dragon Men could cure a clockworker, he gave the boy only a 19.672 percent chance of living long enough to see it, and the largest problem came from the fact that he wouldn’t have enough time.

Steam curled from the elephant’s tusks, and Dr. Clef simultaneously saw the droplets both condense and evaporate. He hadn’t yet gotten around to naming the minuscule particles that made up matter. He himself hadn’t had the time, and he was running out. The plague was eating at his body even as it sharpened his mind. But there was a remedy to his problem and to the boy’s.

A wave of affection swept over him. The dear, dear boy. The son he’d never had. Or perhaps he did have a son, or even a dozen. He didn’t know for certain. Dr. Clef’s memories of his own past grew more and more hazy every hour. He had vague recollections of fishing in a blue river with another boy while it rained, and another of kissing a pretty girl in a blue dress, and both colors were the same electric blue as his beautiful Impossible Cube. He remembered working in his stone laboratory in the Third Ward, but couldn’t recall how he’d come to be there in the first place. He recalled the boy, whose eyes were the same electric blue as Dr. Clef’s beautiful Impossible Cube, and how the boy had held the Cube and sung his way through solid stone. But then the Cube had vanished. Every day when Dr. Clef rose, he felt the pain of its loss, like a man who loses a leg might still feel pain in his missing foot. It was impossible to re-create the Cube’s perfection. There was only one in all the universes and all the time they contained.

And then the dear, dear boy with the electric-blue eyes had handed him that lovely paradox generator, with its audible, irrational, and intoxicating double square root of two. Paired with his own alloy, which cycled the thrilling new power of electricity back and forth between the square root of two, the generator would give him his Cube back, and once he had both Cube and generator, he could give the boy all the time he needed. Dr. Clef needed only an enormous amount of electricity at the right frequency. And for that…

Dr. Clef turned the spyglass upriver. The dam strained against the current, tamed it, forced uncounted trillions of droplets around turbines and rotors. He could feel the magnets moving within their coils, changing the flow of water to a flow of electricity. Exciting! Thrilling! The key to the universe lay within the grasp of these little people, and instead of taking advantage, they scurried about gathering up foolish possessions, clumps of matter that mattered not at all. Their current existence had no point, and only Dr. Clef could change it. He would change it. If only…

He swung the spyglass back to the elephant. The girl seemed upset by the dead child in her arms, and the boy seemed upset that the girl was upset. He made the connection easily enough. The child had died because of something the girl had done, most likely save the boy, and now she was upset. Foolish. The boy offered the world quite a lot more than a stray child. But the fact that both of them were upset meant that they had probably…

Yes. The paradox generator was still on board the elephant, forgotten by everyone.

Except Dr. Clef.

Chapter Thirteen

Gavin stood in the center of chaos beside the hissing elephant and amid a whimpering crowd of children. Feng was deformed, Alice was upset, Simon was a turncoat, Kemp was beheaded, one of the children was dead, and he had no idea what to do next. He wanted to crawl under a blanket and let someone else handle everything. Even the clockwork plague seemed to have abandoned him. Irrationally, he wished for Captain Naismith’s presence. The captain would know what to do and would tell Gavin how to go about doing it. Gavin wouldn’t have to plan, think, or worry. Unfortunately, Felix Naismith was gone, leaving no one but a former cabin boy in command. That was always the way of it. Father, captain, mentor—it didn’t matter. They always abandoned you. He squared his shoulders.

“All right,” he said. “Alice, where are your little automatons?”

“Still on the ship.” She was looking at the face of the dead girl in her arms.

“We need them to reassemble the—”

“Papa!” one of the children, a boy, shrieked. “Papa!”

A dozen yards away, a man in the crowd turned, and the boy flew toward him across the stones, arms outstretched. The man stared incredulously, surprise and disbelief writ all over his face. Then he cried “Pietka!” and opened his arms wide. Pietka leaped into his father’s embrace, and the man rocked when the boy slammed into him. The man held his son tightly. Tears streamed down both their faces and mingled together as the father pressed his cheek to his son’s. “Pietka,” he said. “Mi Pietka.”

“Papa,” Pietka snuffled.

Gavin discovered tears were leaking from his own eyes, and he wiped at them with his fingers.

“Well,” Simon said beside him. “Well.”

Pietka said something to his father, and the man trotted over to Gavin with Pietka still in his arms. Alice stepped back with the dead girl in hers, creating a tragic mirror image. The man said something to Gavin in Ukrainian, but Gavin could only shake his head.

“He wants to know if you’re the one who rescued his son,” said Harry, who came up at that moment. “Hello, Gavin. You’ve caused quite a fuss, quite a fuss.”

“Tell him we all rescued Pietka,” Gavin said.

Harry translated, and the man abruptly snatched Gavin into a rough one-armed embrace, tangling him with Pietka for a moment. Then he backed away, looking embarrassed.

“You’re welcome,” Gavin said, also feeling embarrassed.

The man spoke again, and Harry said, “He’s asking about the other children. He wants to know if you need help finding their families. He doesn’t know the Gontas and Zalizniaks are coming.”

“Tell him yes,” Gavin said. “Harry, can you—?”

“Yes, I’ll go along to translate,” Harry said, before Gavin could make the request. “I’m used to moving about on my own, and a few people in Kiev owe me a favor, so I can scarper off. I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll go with them, too,” Simon said. “And then I think I’ll disappear myself.”

“We could use your help, Simon,” Gavin said. “You saved us once in there.”

Simon shook his head. “You don’t need me. And frankly, my friend, it’s too difficult being near you.”

“Oh.” Gavin nodded. “Where are you going?”

“The least said, the better,” Simon replied, “in case Phipps gets her hooks into you. I won’t be welcome in England, but the world is wide.” He stuck out his hand. “Good-bye.”

Gavin shook his hand, then suddenly pulled Simon into a hard embrace. “I’m glad I knew you.”

When they parted, Simon wiped surreptitiously at his eyes. There was nothing else to say.

The children, meanwhile, seemed eager to follow Harry, Pietka, and his father, once explanations were made. Since Pietka had found his father, they seemed eager to believe they would find their own parents. Gavin turned to Alice.

“They should take… her, too,” he said gently. “Her parents will want her body back.”

Alice clutched the little girl to her. For a moment Gavin thought she would refuse to give her up, and he wondered if she was going mad. Then Alice nodded. Simon took the girl and wrapped her in his jacket.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Alice.

Several of the children solemnly hugged Gavin and Alice, and Gavin was afraid he would cry again. Pietka’s father led the group away. Pietka was already chattering in his father’s arms.

“I’m sorry, too,” Alice whispered. “I couldn’t let go.”

Gavin put his arm around her. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t come back.”

“But that little girl would be.” She buried her face in his shoulder for a moment. “Oh God—I don’t know how to feel right now, Gavin.”

Circus people continued to rush about. Some were packing suitcases and wagons; others simply flung sacks over their shoulders and fled. Performing horses were drafted into service towing wagons. Almost everyone was heading toward a bridge over the Dnepro some distance downstream, since that road led out of town. Urgency drove their movements, and the ashy air was thick with fear. Most of the performers refused to look at Gavin or Alice. The few that did sent hard glares. Gavin felt very small, and very strange. A few minutes ago, he had been ready to die, a sacrifice to hell so that the children could live. But Alice had wrenched him around and led him out. And then it had happened, the very thing he had been trying to prevent. A stray bullet had penetrated the gondola and killed that little girl. Gavin had held her while the life slipped from her eyes. It was as if God had decided the two of them should trade places. He wanted to be angry with Alice, but he couldn’t find it in himself. Instead, he felt glad to be alive, and also guilty that he felt glad, which contributed to that feeling that he was indeed a tiny, tiny man.

“We have some time yet,” he said, “and we need to get to the ship. The stuff onboard is too dangerous to hand to the Gontas.”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.” Kemp’s head was lying on the ground near Feng’s feet, where Simon had left it.

Alice nodded. “Feng, please bring Kemp and follow us.”

The trio hurried toward the train. Along the way, they encountered Linda high up on her brightly painted wagon. She was driving a pair of horses toward the bridge over the Dnepro. “Hello, honey!” she called down cheerfully.

“Linda!” Gavin called up to her. “Are you and Charlie all right?”

“Just fine. Charlie’s in the back. I tried to warn everyone that this was coming, but no one listened. Circus folk are more cynical than most when it comes to fortune-telling.” She popped a butterscotch into her mouth. “I feel like Cassandra at Troy.”

“You knew?” Alice said.

“Of course, sweetie. You haven’t learned to let go yet, so this was inevitable. Besides, I drew the three of swords not long after Dodd got the invitation from Ivana Gonta. It means a disaster, but a necessary one. It teaches a lesson and relieves built-up tension so the journeyer can move forward. Good gracious—what happened to your friends?”

“Madam. Madam. Madam,” said Kemp’s head in Feng’s hands.

“Too long to explain,” Gavin said.

“Well, I’m sure it’ll turn out all right in the end.”

“Was that a prediction?” Alice asked.

“An assurance,” Linda corrected. “I won’t see you again, honey. You’re on your own.” She clucked to the horses, who hauled the wagon away.

“Was I supposed to let you die?” Alice burst out as Linda left. “Gavin, I couldn’t—”

“Listen, now.” Gavin pulled her to him. She burst into tears, hiding her face in his shoulder. It was the first time he had seen her cry, and it made him feel strangely old. Everyone said women were supposed to cry a lot, though now that he thought about it, he didn’t see it happen very often. His mother had never cried that he remembered. He patted Alice awkwardly on the shoulder. “Didn’t Monsignor Adames say I was supposed to save the world?”

“Yes,” she sobbed while Feng stood quietly by with Kemp’s head.

“I can’t save the world if I’m dead. I was an idiot for trying to sacrifice myself like that. You had to come back for me. It was the right thing to do.”

“How can it be the right thing to let a child die? It’s my fault she died, Gavin.”

“That’s strange. I thought it was the fault of the Cossack who fired the rifle.”

“That makes sense,” she snuffled. “My head agrees with you, but my soul scourges me with fiery whips.”

“It’ll pass.”

“I don’t know if I want it to.”

“Madam. Madam. Madam.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so instead they headed for the train. It was partly abandoned. Several boxcars gaped open, revealing dead space within. Other cars were shut tight, and yet others hung half open. Animal cages had been shoved every which way into some of them in the vain hope that the engine boiler might heat up quickly enough to move the train before the Cossacks arrived. Dodd and Nathan themselves were working with the engineer, trying to coax enough heat out of the boiler to get the train going. The Lady still sat at the rear disguised as a car. Gavin, Alice, and Feng climbed up to the deck. Gavin immediately felt more at ease, more in control. This was his ship. It was home.

“I wish I knew how much time we had,” Alice said as Gavin helped her off the ladder.

“It’ll take them at least an hour to get all those mechanicals fired up, and then another twenty minutes or so to get here,” Gavin said. “Considering how much time has already passed, I think that gives about forty minutes. Not long enough for Dodd to start the engine, unless he knows something I don’t.”

“Madam. Madam. Madam,” Kemp said. His voice was growing fainter in Feng’s hands.

“Give him to me, Feng.” Alice accepted the head sadly and did something to it. The light went out of Kemp’s eyes and he fell silent. “We’ll get him a new body and fix him somehow. And you, Feng. What about you? In all the fuss, we haven’t had a moment to figure out what happened.” She touched his cheek. “I’m so sorry we didn’t arrive in time.”

Feng remained mute. The spider on his head twitched a little, and the scars on his torso scribbled ugly tracks across his skin.

“What did they do to you, Feng?” Gavin asked. “Please answer.”

“Ivana placed this spider on my head and it drilled into my skull and spine,” he said promptly. “She forced Danilo to help. It was painful. They put me in a cage until you came and brought me out.”

His voice was clipped and precise, completely unlike his more usual free, lackadaisical tone. Gavin ached for him.

“What does the spider do?” he asked.

Feng remained silent until Gavin added, “Please answer.”

“I do not know.”

“It’s obvious,” Alice said. “The spider makes him tractable. He does nothing he isn’t told to do, and he follows orders from anyone who speaks to him. Isn’t that right, Feng? Please answer.”

“I do not know,” Feng said, “but that sounds true.”

“That’s… awful,” Gavin said. “Can we take it off? Or shut it down?”

“It would take some study,” Alice replied. “However, I am forced to admit that I’m not well versed in biology, and this device combines automatics with that science. Good heavens, why would they do such a thing?”

“The Gontas are trying to dominate the Zalizniaks permanently,” Gavin said. “This is an experiment in that area. Feng can still think and act, but is perfectly obedient.” And would never chase pretty girls again, he added silently. Not unless he was ordered to.

Alice thought a moment. “Feng,” she said, “obey your own orders. Think for yourself and do as you wish.”

Feng’s entire body twitched as if he’d been jolted by electricity. His face contorted and he made a small sound. His hands flew up to the spider. The sound he made grew louder and louder, and the facial contortions showed pain.

“Never you mind, Feng!” Alice cried. “Obey me now! Go back to the way you were!”

Feng instantly calmed and went still.

“Sit down, Feng,” Gavin said. “You look tired.”

Feng sat on the deck and looked grateful.

“I wonder if we can have him ask for something,” Alice mused.

Gavin squatted next to the exhausted Feng. He wanted to put an arm around Feng, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch the puckered flesh or the evil spider. “I’m sorry,” was all he could say. “We’ll find a way to help you once everything calms down.”

“Speak for yourself, if you wish,” Alice said. “Say whatever you think you should say.”

“Alice!” Gavin said. “No!”

“Speaking is different from acting or thinking,” Alice said.

Feng had already opened his mouth. “Wha… Wha… ,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Alice said. “Say what you want when you please.”

“Why did you come back for me?” Feng burst out. “What possessed you?”

This took Gavin completely by surprise. He floundered a response. Finally Alice said in a small voice, “We had to save you.”

“So you believe.” Feng’s face was set like rock.

“I don’t understand,” Gavin said. “You’d rather we left you there?”

“Look at me!” he spat. “How do you think my family will receive me now? I already live in disgrace, and now I’m a living wreck.”

“We couldn’t leave you there,” Alice replied stubbornly. “It was our fault you were captured, and it was our duty to save you.”

“Not everyone wants to be saved, Alice!” Feng cried. “Did you ever consider that?”

Alice said, “You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I? The Cossacks are coming to kill everyone in the circus because you saved me. If you had simply walked away, none of this would be happening.”

“And those children would still be in cages,” Gavin shot back.

“You could have taken them away without coming for me,” Feng said. “The Cossacks became truly upset only when you used that… that music thing. Now they want it, and they are angry at you because you could not let me go.”

Gavin took a step backward at that. He had never mentioned the words that Adames had spoken or the cards Linda had drawn to Feng. He looked at Alice.

“I am not discussing this,” she said firmly, but Gavin recognized the stress in her voice and in the set of her mouth. “We need to find Dr. Clef and my little automatons so we can gather some things and evacuate. The Cossacks will be here any moment.”

Her words hit Gavin hard. He looked about the Lady, the graceful, comfortable ship he had built with his own hands. They couldn’t reassemble and inflate the envelope in time to fly her out of Kiev, which meant that in less than an hour she would be in the hands of the Gonta family. The thought made him sick.

“Let’s look for Dr. Clef below,” Alice said. “Feng, you too.”

Feng checked Dr. Clef’s stateroom while Alice went to her own room carrying Kemp’s head. Gavin headed for the laboratory. It was a snowstorm of papers—diagrams and equations pinned to the walls and to the workbench like captured snowflakes. Gavin stared. The diagrams consistently portrayed two objects: Dr. Clef’s eye-twisting Impossible Cube, and pieces of Gavin’s paradox generator. Several equations, many done in purple crayon, tugged at his eye. The plague stirred, then roared to life. He dove into the equations and guzzled them down. The square root of two. Matter and energy. Parallel particles locked together. Vibrating strings. Electricity that cycled around an irrational number. And he knew what Dr. Clef wanted. A chill dropped through him, freezing him from scalp to instep.

“He’s not anywhere on the ship,” Alice said. She held Click in her arms, and a flock of little automatons hovered around her and perched on her shoulders. Feng came up behind her. The lab was almost too crowded to move. “Feng didn’t find him, either. Do you have any ideas?”

Before Gavin could answer, a faint rumble crept up through his boots, then died away. Another rumble that died, then another. A second chill followed the first.

“Can you feel that?” Gavin said. “Footsteps.”

“Is that what it is?” Alice whispered. “Good heavens.”

“What makes them?” Feng asked. He had found a shirt, which covered the scars on his chest and torso, though the spider on his face and neck still gave him a sinister appearance. He also seemed to have calmed down from his earlier rant. At least he could still speak freely.

“The Cossack mechanicals. They’re coming.” Gavin listened, let the vibrations shake through his body, and his brain worked out more math. “Eighteen minutes, twenty seconds.”

“We need to leave,” said Alice in a no-nonsense voice that was nonetheless filled with tension. “Where would Dr. Clef have gone?”

Gavin gestured at the diagrams. A strange calm came over him, and the words fell from his mouth like lead lumps. “The Cossacks are the least of our worries, Alice. Dr. Clef wants the dam.”

“The dam? What for?”

“He’s found a way to get back the Impossible Cube,” said Gavin, “and I think he’s going destroy the universe.”

There was a long, long pause.

“What?” Feng said at last.

“What?” said Alice at the same time.

“He’s going to destroy the universe,” Gavin repeated. “With the Impossible Cube.”

Feng put a hand on the spider scrawled across his face. “I do not understand.”

“Nor do I,” Alice said. A little automaton buzzed too close to her face and she brushed it away. “He told me himself that re-creating the Impossible Cube was… well, impossible.”

“He isn’t going to re-create it,” Gavin said, trying not to get more upset. “The Cube still exists. Or it will, very soon.”

“I am still not following this,” Feng said.

They didn’t share his fear because they didn’t understand. Gavin tried to keep his voice steady to explain, but ideas formed and rushed out of him like water bursting from a dam.

“Dr. Clef has been working on a project he wouldn’t tell us about, remember? And my paradox generator… and the cycles in electric power… and the alloy that warps gravity when electricity powers it… and his proof that time changes depending on local gravity… Come on!”

He pushed past them, through the flock of automatons, and ran up to the main deck. The others followed. Gavin was hoping he was wrong, praying with every fiber of his being that he had misinterpreted what he’d seen in the laboratory, but the pieces continued to thud into place like granite weights. He swore and pointed at the roll of alloy wire that had once been the endoskeleton for the ship’s helium envelope and provided extra lift. The roll still lay on the deck where Alice’s automatons had placed it, but one end was missing a noticeable piece.

“He needed a bit of that?” Alice said. “What’s going on?”

“Not just a bit of that. He was making more in the Black Tent. I was using some of it, but he kept the rest,” Gavin said. “He needs a lot of it.”

“But what for?” Alice demanded. “I still don’t— Oh! Oh! Good heavens! I understand now.”

“What?” Feng ran a hand over the spider on his face. “What does he plan?”

Alice’s expression grew agitated, and her spiders danced around her feet, mimicking her mood. Click sat nearby and washed a paw. “When Gavin last used the Impossible Cube in the Doomsday Vault, it disappeared and we assumed it had been destroyed. But Gavin thinks the reason it disappeared is that it went through time.”

“Not quite,” Gavin said. “The Cube is a constant, which means it didn’t move. It actually twisted time around itself, and since we’re in the stream of time, it appeared to us that—”

“Does that matter?” Alice cried, and several of her automatons squeaked in alarm. “Gavin! He’s going to reach through time to snatch the Impossible Cube out of the past at the moment you destroyed it. Feng, listen—the alloy cycles electricity at frequencies of power that match the sounds made by Gavin’s paradox generator. Those frequencies are the same—the square root of two. The Impossible Cube itself is built around that very number. If Dr. Clef pumps enough electricity through Gavin’s generator at the right intervals, he could, I believe, create a sort of opening into the past that would allow him to bring the Impossible Cube into the present.”

“Why is this bad?” Feng said. “The Impossible Cube has enormous power, does it not? We could destroy the Cossack clockworkers with a single blow.” His voice became grim. “I will do it myself.”

Gavin wanted to shake Feng. The other man didn’t understand. Gavin remembered with clockwork clarity that awful night he had held the Impossible Cube in his own hands in the dungeons beneath Third Ward headquarters, how the Cube crackled with energy between his palms as he sang one note that the Cube twisted into pure power that pounded through stone and ripped away rock.

“Dr. Clef doesn’t want to destroy the Gontas and Zalizniaks,” Gavin said carefully. “He’s obsessed with time.”

“His calculations,” Alice said. “When he was talking about clocks orbiting the earth and gravity changing time. It was nonsense, I thought.”

“No,” Gavin told her. “Look, I nearly destroyed the entire Third Ward with the Cube and the finite power of a single note from my voice. Another note made the Cube travel through time. Yet another destroyed all the visible light energy within a hundred yards of the Cube. When you feed it a single note, it affects mere energy, but what do you think would happen if Dr. Clef played the infinite sound of my paradox generator into it?”

“Good heavens.” Alice put a pale hand to her mouth as another set of footsteps shook the ship.

Gavin nodded, unhappy that she was afraid, but glad she understood. “The paradox generator makes an infinite sound based on an irrational number: the square root of two. The Impossible Cube is a singular object, and it twists an infinite amount of time and space around itself using the square root of two as the basis for everything it does. If Dr. Clef feeds that infinite sound into the Impossible Cube, he’ll have the power to stop time. Everywhere. Forever.”

Now Feng went pale around the spider and his voice fell into a whisper. “Would he do such a thing?”

“Of course he would,” Alice replied faintly. “He thinks he’s helping us. We don’t have enough time to do everything we need, and his own time in this world is growing shorter. This is his way of giving us more time. An infinite amount.”

“I see.” Feng paused, and the ship shook yet again. Gavin automatically calculated: ten minutes, five seconds before they arrived. “Except there should be no problem. He does not have your paradox generator.”

Gavin blinked and relief made his muscles go limp. “That’s true,” he said. “I had it in the Gonta-Zalizniak house.”

“Oh, thank goodness.” Alice ran her hand over her face and sighed heavily. “We’re saved. Where is the generator right now, then?”

He paused. “I… that is…”

“Gavin.” Alice’s face went tight again. “Where is it?”

Gavin bit his lip and his heart started a snare drumbeat again. He had to think for a moment. Everything had gotten so busy, and there was the little girl’s death and the boy’s reunion with his father and the argument with Dodd. The generator hadn’t seemed important. What had happened to it? The heavy footsteps continued to shake the ship.

“I think I left it on the elephant,” he said at last.

“And if Dr. Clef is not on the ship… ,” Feng began.

They all traded horrified looks, then bolted for the ladder. In seconds, Gavin, Feng, Alice, Click, and the automatons were all racing back toward the elephant. People still rushed around the circus grounds. A number of the performers had vanished into Kiev, but those who had children or who couldn’t travel easily or who were unwilling to abandon wagons were still busy. Trash and a tent or two littered the square around the Tilt. The train stood still, though a curl of smoke drifted up from the engine’s smokestack. The watching crowd had vanished, scattered by the sound of mechanical footsteps. They knew what was coming. A line of circus wagons and horses moved down the street toward the stone bridge and the road out of town. Upriver, the dam housed its spinning turbines even as it held back countless tons of water beneath a cloudy sky. The sheer power in it made Gavin’s fingers tingle.

A few blocks away, between the buildings, Gavin caught a glimpse of metal. The Cossack mechanicals. His stomach tightened as he saw the distance left for the circus to travel to the bridge.

“Where is the elephant?” Alice asked.

The elephant was gone.

“Bastard!” Gavin snarled. The clockwork plague thundered through him. Dr. Clef had thwarted him, deliberately disobeyed his order to destroy the paradox generator and now he had stolen it for himself. “He was waiting for us to leave it. He’s got the elephant and my paradox generator!”

“What do we do now?” Feng asked. He seemed surprisingly calm.

Numbers clicked and spun in Gavin’s head. “These people aren’t going to make it. They need more time.”

“We have to warn them.” Alice looked increasingly desperate. “They need to abandon everything and run.”

“We cannot run fast enough to warn them, either,” Feng said.

Gavin glanced about. If they made for the dam, the Gontas would kill everyone in the circus, including Dodd and Nathan and Linda and Charlie. If they warned the circus, Dr. Clef would be able to stop time forever. Save a few people, or save the universe. More numbers ran through his mind, painting new realities behind them. The choice was obvious.

“Come on, Alice,” Gavin said. “I’ll need your help.” And he ran straight toward the Cossack mechanicals.

Chapter Fourteen

Alice’s heart stopped. The plague’s driven him completely mad, she thought. Now what do I do?

“Come on, Feng!” she shouted, and ran after Gavin. Feng twitched once and followed with Alice’s automatons. Gavin had a decent head start, however, and he wasn’t wearing a skirt, so he kept his lead.

“Gavin!” she yelled. “What are you doing?”

But he ignored her. The narrow street that led into the square was packed with a single-file line of large mechanicals, the same ones Alice had seen in the dungeon below the Gonta house. She remembered counting forty, and it appeared that nearly so many thumped down this street, cracking the cobblestones with the sound of angry gods. The smallest was twice as high as she was, and most of them were at least two stories tall. All of them bristled with weaponry—swords and launchers and rifles and objects she couldn’t discern. Alice remembered the clockwork revolution headed by the Gontas and the Zalizniaks that had ended the Russian and Polish occupation of Ukraine, and she began to understand why the occupiers hadn’t stood a chance. Most of the mechanicals were topped by a glass bubble, and in each sat a Gonta. The machinery spewed ashy clouds of smoke and fumes. The streets were only wide enough to allow one mechanical at a time to pass, which was why they came in a deadly single file, heading for the circus. Once they reached the square, they could spread out and follow the river. Dodd’s little collection of automatons and fragile wagons wouldn’t stand a chance, and when the Gontas crushed them into meat and metal matchsticks, it would be Alice’s fault for bringing them here. More death on her head.

Gavin ran lightly up the street to the lead mechanical, which was close to eighteen feet tall. Danilo Gonta sat in the bubble, his expression cool and calm, his white lab coat stained with blood. Then he saw Gavin, and his face twisted into an animal snarl.

“That’s right, Danilo!” Gavin shouted. “You want me, not them!”

Inside the bubble, Danilo spun something, and a rifle on the shoulder of his mechanical turned. It fired a burst of bullets, but Gavin was already moving, diving away from the gunfire and toward the mechanical. He shouldn’t have been able to dodge the hail, but the plague was clearly working on him, and he flicked around almost faster than Alice could follow. Her heart climbed into her throat, and she desperately cast about for something—anything—she could do to help him.

Gavin reached Danilo’s mechanical, which had stopped in its tracks to fire at him and thereby blocked the progress of the other Gontas behind it. They stomped their feet, and a few of them made BEEP sounds Alice had never heard before. People from the surrounding buildings fled into the streets and away. Clearly they’d seen altercations before.

Alice stayed close to a brick wall with Feng, Click, and her automatons and forced herself to remain calm, to think as frightened people streamed past her. Even from here, she could trace the workings of the lead mechanical, see the way it moved and how it fit together. Was there a weak spot she could exploit? If only she could figure out what Gavin was—

Gavin jumped onto one of the mechanical’s broad feet and climbed like a monkey. In a flash, Alice understood what was going on. Brilliant! She hoped it was Gavin’s idea, and not something dreamed up by the clockwork plague. She very much wanted to feel pride for his intelligence instead of fear for his sanity. With a quick motion, Alice snatched up Click and turned to the whirligig mechanicals hovering behind her.

“You carried Aunt Edwina when she tried to steal the giant war machine outside London last summer,” she said to them. “Can you carry me?”

They squeaked and bobbed up and down in midair with obvious enthusiasm.

“Feng,” she said without thinking, “wait here with my spiders. You, you, you, and you,” she continued, pointing to different whirligigs, “carry me to that mechanical. Quick!”

The whirligigs took Alice firmly by the shoulders and back of her dress and lifted. Their propellers spun madly only inches away from Alice’s face, but they lifted her handily from the ground.

“Wait!” Feng cried. “Alice, I cannot—”

But Alice was already rushing toward the big mechanical with Click in her arms. The sensation of flight swooped through her, filling her with exhilaration despite the danger. Why had she never tried this with her automatons before? Gavin had managed to skitter up to Danilo’s bubble. The Gontas behind them were becoming angrier and angrier, but they were still hemmed in by the narrow street and unable to do anything. Gavin clambered up to the very top of Danilo’s bubble. One of Danilo’s hands swiped at him. Gavin leaped over it. When he landed, he made a face at the Gonta behind Danilo, a plump man in brown leather.

“Good thing I killed Ivana!” Gavin shouted at him. “They can feed China now! She had more rolls than a bakery!”

Alice held her breath. Danilo swiped at him again, like a man swatting at a fly, but Gavin nimbly leaped away. The Cossack behind Danilo was getting angry. Alice could see him turn red and purple, and it would have been funny if Gavin hadn’t been dancing with death. She was almost there.

“You could stand to lose a few pounds yourself,” Gavin taunted him. “Gain any more weight, and planets will orbit you.”

The arm of the mechanical behind Danilo tracked around and its fingers revealed themselves to be rifle barrels.

“You don’t have the guts,” Gavin yelled. “It’s all lard!”

Too late Danilo realized what was going on. “Ni!” he shouted into the speaking tube, but his fat brother Cossack had already fired. Gavin dropped down to the chest piece of Danilo’s mechanical and hung there by his fingertips just as the fat Gonta’s ammunition slammed into Danilo’s bubble. The glass exploded. Danilo flew out of the mechanical and smacked the brick streets. He twitched once and lay still.

With her free hand, Alice gestured at the fat Cossack. “There! Go!”

The automatons skimmed over the mechanical with the shattered bubble. Alice caught a glimpse of Gavin hoisting himself with the incredible agility of a clockworker into the driver’s seat, where he took up the controls. Then her own automatons dropped her on the bubble of the fat Cossack. Click fell from her arms and she scrabbled a moment on the smooth glass before regaining her balance. Behind, the other Gontas were still trapped in the narrow street, and unlike their brother, seemed unwilling to fire on their own family, especially now that Gavin had shown the disastrous consequences of doing so. The fat Cossack in the mechanical looked up, surprised.

“Cut, Click!” Alice ordered.

Click extended hard claws and scrawled a wide circle in the glass just as he had done on the roof of L’Arbre Magnifique’s greenhouse. Alice stamped in the center, and the circle fell in, striking the Gonta on the head. He shouted at her in Ukrainian, but Alice was already giving orders to her little automatons. They zipped into the mechanical like hornets invading a beehive, snatched the fat Gonta up, and yanked him out into open air. He yelped, chins quivering. The automatons labored hard, and Alice tugged him upward as well, then kicked him over the side. He fell away, and the automatons let him go. Alice herself dropped into the opening and found herself sitting on a padded bench at the controls. Click leaped down to join her. Alice’s inborn talent with automatics let her see instantly what went where. Pedals for the legs, hand controls for the arms, a number of switches and dials for other functions. She spun the mechanical around to face the other Cossacks.

All this had happened in only a few seconds. The remaining Gontas hadn’t been expecting to be attacked. Their surprise combined with the confined space to render them helpless, but only for the moment. Already, rifles and launchers were clicking around to train on Alice. In a strategically placed mirror mounted on the controls, she could see Gavin behind her. The weapons were trained on him, too. A strange calm descended over her, as if she were sinking into a bath of ice water that sent all emotion into hibernation. Moving with care and deliberation, she made the mechanical scoop up the squawking fat Gonta in one metallic hand.

“You don’t want the circus,” Alice said into the mechanical’s speaking tube. Her voice boomed against the high gray buildings on either side of the street. “You want us. Gavin and me.”

“We will destroy you!” said one of the Cossacks. Alice couldn’t tell which, but she supposed it didn’t matter, when they spoke with one voice.

“Not today. Back up or I’ll kill him.”

“You risked your life to save dying children. You would not kill helpless man.”

That stymied Alice. The Cossack was right. She loathed the filthy Gonta-Zalizniak family, but the thought of crushing one of them in her hands, even mechanical hands, only brought up sickening memories of the dead girl. The weapons whined with power.

“Alice!” Gavin called behind her. “Duck!”

Immediately Alice dropped the mechanical into a crouch. Something flew over her head, but instead of striking any of the mechanicals, the object hit one of the nearby buildings. The thing exploded. Smoke and the sharp smell of gunpowder enveloped Alice, and Click hissed on the bench next to her. The building leaned precariously, then toppled into the street with rocky thunder. It was higher than the street was wide, so it smashed into the building across from it, creating a diagonal barrier. Alice felt the concussion thud against her very bones, and she was suddenly glad that the people had fled the surrounding structures.

The ruined building effectively blocked the street between Alice and the rest of the Cossacks and, incidentally, prevented both sides from firing at each other. Alice dropped the fat Gonta, who yelped and hobbled away on a sprained ankle.

“If you want us, come and get us,” Gavin’s voice taunted.

Alice took the cue. She and Gavin both turned their mechanicals and ran with the faint howls of Cossack outrage following behind.

“If you wanted to get them even angrier, you succeeded handily,” Alice called.

“At least they’ll be chasing us and not going after the circus,” Gavin called back. “We can’t— Shit!” He brought his mechanical up short, and Alice nearly crashed into him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s—?”

“Feng!”

A pang went through Alice. She spun her mechanical. Nearly half a block up the street, past where they had already run, stood Feng, exactly where she had left him. He was surrounded by her little mechanicals.

Feng, wait here with my spiders.

Idiot! She had ordered him to stay there, and now he couldn’t move. Even as she watched in horror, a Cossack projectile launched itself over the stony barrier blocking the street and described an arc that would carry it straight toward Feng. He looked up at it, his eyes wide despite the spider on his head.

Desperately, Alice looked at the controls of her mechanical. Her mind made quick connections, and she remembered something she had seen a mechanical guard do in the Gonta-Zalizniak house. Praying she had it right, Alice flipped two switches and yanked a lever. The projectile began to fall, whistling as it came down toward Feng. The right arm of Alice’s mechanical burst free of the main body and flew toward Feng, trailing a cable. The projectile dropped closer. Just as the mechanical’s hand hit Feng, Alice yanked back, killing the momentum and closing the fingers around Feng’s body. He made a hoik sound and Alice yanked. The spiders leaped aboard the fist right when it snatched Feng backward. The projectile hit the cobblestones and exploded, but Feng and the spiders were already well beyond its reach.

Alice held Feng up in front of her bubble. “Are you all right?”

“Do not put me through that again,” he said. “You—”

“—don’t need to save everyone. I know. Just… just shut it, Feng.” She dropped him into Gavin’s mechanical. “We have to find Dr. Clef.”

Alice ran with Gavin past the remains of the circus, hoping that the Cossacks would indeed follow them and leave the circus alone. There was nothing for it now if they didn’t—Alice and Gavin had to stop Dr. Clef. They had no time. Or, very soon, they would have an infinity of it.

The mechanical ran beside the gray water as fast as Alice could make it go. Half a mile upriver, the heavy dam seemed to glower down at the city. If Dr. Clef managed to stop time for the entire universe, would she even know? Would she and everyone else simply freeze like fireflies trapped in amber, aware but unable to act? Or would she simply cease to exist, along with everything else? Ice ran through her veins, and the Cossacks coming behind her suddenly didn’t seem like such a big problem.

They arrived at the bottom of the dam. It made a wall four or five stories tall. Angry water boiled and roared at the base, and a number of stone buildings huddled around it. A network of heavy cables led from the dam to a snarl of iron towers on the bank. Near the entrance to one of the buildings stood the half-wrecked elephant.

“He’s here!” Alice shouted to Gavin over the roaring water. “But where did he end up? I don’t know a thing about dams.”

“I don’t, either.” Gavin looked stricken. “I didn’t think of that.”

A faint vibration shivered up the mechanical though Alice’s body. More mechanical footsteps.

Gavin felt it, too. “Fourteen minutes,” he said. “At least they didn’t stop to destroy the circus.”

Alice cast about, looking for something, anything that might tell her where to—

“Click!” she exclaimed. The cat looked up at her quizzically from the padded bench. Alice made the mechanical kneel, popped the bubble, and climbed down. Click followed, as did the spiders and whirligigs.

“What are you doing?” Gavin called from his own mechanical. Feng sat pale next to him. Alice paused a moment to look at the elephant. Her practiced eye told her the pistons had seized and its memory wheels had frozen. The poor thing would never move again. She patted it once in sorrow. She didn’t believe that living animals, let alone mechanical ones, had souls, but she hoped that somehow, somewhere, some piece of this magnificent beast survived.

“Alice?” Gavin said.

Good heavens! This was no time for philosophical rumination. She turned to the mechanical cat. “Click!” she said. “Find Dr. Clef!”

The cat cocked his head, but didn’t move. Finally, he sat down.

“You’re asking the cat?” Gavin said. “He won’t—”

Alice cut him off with a gesture. “Shush! Click, go!”

Click stood up again, stretched, and with studied nonchalance, wandered toward one of the buildings. It was just occurring to Alice that a power production factory must employ a large number of people, and they should be here somewhere, when the large doors that Click seemed to have chosen burst open and a horde of men in work clothes stampeded into the street. Click and Alice only barely dodged aside. The men looked wild-eyed and fearful as they ran for it, scattering in a dozen different directions. Gavin and Feng watched from the safety of the mechanical.

“What on earth?” Alice asked when they passed.

“I do not wish to know what frightened them so badly,” Feng said.

Alice ignored him. Click was already heading for the open doors. She followed him with her spiders and whirligigs.

“Come on, Feng.” Gavin clambered down from his mechanical with Feng as a reluctant shadow.

They found themselves in a wide, long room that seemed to be a receiving area. Alice sniffed the air. Ozone, hot steel, and… something else. A chemical smell she couldn’t identify, but one that made her heart beat unaccountably faster and brought a hint of fear to her chest. She glanced at Gavin and Feng. Were they feeling it too? Click seemed unbothered. He took them through another doorway and down a set of stairs. Their footsteps echoed off metal and stone. The spiders’ feet clicked across the floor, and the whirligigs’ propellers made a sound like hummingbird wings.

“Did you hear something?” Gavin said hoarsely. “I thought I heard something.”

“We’re just… nervous,” Alice replied. Her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking. “Good heavens, I’m so nervous. I don’t understand.”

“I am not,” Feng said.

The chemical smell was stronger down here. Alice sniffed again, and her heart lurched. “It’s that smell.”

“A gas,” Gavin said. “Some sort of airborne chemical that causes a fear reaction. Dr. Clef must have created it to frighten the workers away. It doesn’t bother Click or the little automatons because they’re mechanical.”

“And Feng is…” Alice trailed off.

Feng touched his own spider. “Yes.”

“At least the worst of it has cleared out,” Gavin continued quickly. “Or I think we’d be running, too. Where’s Click gotten to?”

They found him waiting at the bottom of the stairs. A whining, humming noise came from the other side of a heavy door, which was marked with Cyrillic writing.

“I believe it says Power Production,” Feng translated.

“And that’s where we’ll find Dr. Clef.” Alice flung the door open with her iron hand.

Chapter Fifteen

The soft whine burst into full volume. The room beyond the door was long and high, fully the size of a dirigible hangar. Five turbines, nearly flush with the floor, occupied most of the space. They looked to Gavin like giant coiled seashells of segmented metal, each thirty feet across. Automatically he tried to calculate diameter and radius, but he kept running into pi, a number nearly as bad as the square root of two, and he forced himself to stop. A covered shaft in the center of each turbine was connected to an electrical generator. The shafts spun at a dizzying 180 revolutions per minute. Under Gavin’s feet, he felt water rushing through the turbines and sensed immense kinetic power barely held in check by the sturdy walls of the dam. It was at the same time intoxicating and intimidating.

Near the third turbine stood an arc of lacy metal just high enough for a man to walk under. At the spot in the arc normally occupied by the keystone was Gavin’s paradox generator. A table filled with a snarl of equipment sat next to the arc.

In the middle of the long floor near the pile of equipment was the plump form of Dr. Clef. He wore dark goggles over his eyes. A snarl of cables connected the central turbine’s generator to the machinery, and a smell of solder in the air said Dr. Clef had been welding. He looked up and pulled his goggles off when Alice shoved the door open. His face burst into a cheerful grin.

“I thought you all might arrive soon,” he called over the turbine whine. “And you brought my clicky kitty. So kind of you.”

“Doctor, you have to stop,” Gavin called back. “You don’t want to do this.”

He looked genuinely perplexed. “But I’m doing this for you, my boy. Everything is calculated and calibrated. In a moment, you’ll have all the time in the universe. You can save the world at last.”

Before any of them could respond to this, or even move, Dr. Clef threw a switch. The whine increased, and power snaked up the cable, through the machinery, and into the delicate arc. All the turbines slowed as the generators engaged and the arc drained their power. The arc glowed an electric blue, and the space within filled with light, first red, then orange, then yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Gavin’s mind flicked back to a moment in the stone corridors beneath the Third Ward, a moment when he dropped the Impossible Cube and it changed colors as it fell in exactly the reverse order he was seeing now.

“Don’t!” Alice cried. She ran toward him. Gavin grabbed Feng’s arm and ran as well, though they were a good hundred feet away. Dr. Clef smiled beatifically and struck a large tuning fork on the table. A pure A rang through the room, and Gavin remembered that he had sung that same note in the same octave on the night he had caressed Alice with his voice and made the Cube vanish in the Doomsday Vault. It was the same note Dr. Clef had struck the day he had completed the Impossible Cube in his laboratory at the Third Ward and accidentally made the Cube disappear through time. Gavin had struck the fork again to bring the Cube back. A. The first note. The pure tone that rang through time and space and called the Cube to itself.

Dr. Clef pressed the handle of the fork to the arc, and the arc’s light became a white so beautiful, it made Gavin’s heart ache. They weren’t even halfway to him when Dr. Clef reached into the opening. It snapped and growled as it swallowed his hand. Gavin stared in fascination even as horror crawled over his skin. His steps faltered. The machines were hypnotic, thrilling. He was watching the most brilliant clockworker the world had ever seen bend time itself to his will with a unique machine. He was also watching the most powerful act of destruction in the history of the universe.

“He cannot.” Feng tugged at his arm now, trying to hurry him forward. “He will not.”

Dr. Clef whipped his hand out of the arc. The metal glowed bright as the sun. Alice, who was several paces ahead of Gavin, stopped in her tracks and threw up her arm to protect her eyes. Her little automatons squeaked in fear, and Click hissed. The glow faded a little, and when Gavin’s vision cleared, he saw Dr. Clef was holding the Impossible Cube.

“Shit,” Gavin whispered.

“My Cube,” Dr. Clef crooned. “Mein liebes, schönes Kübchen.”

The Cube was just as Gavin remembered it. It was only the size of a hatbox, but its intricate metal lattice twisted the eye. The back seemed to shift to the front, or perhaps the front was fading into the back. One of the bottom struts crossed impossibly over the top. It shouldn’t have existed, but it did. Behind it, the arc continued to glow with holy fire.

Gavin shook off the fascination and started forward again with Feng. Alice did the same. He was in a dream, running through tar and molasses. Dr. Clef popped a pair of protectors over his ears and flipped another switch. The paradox generator atop the arc cranked to life, and the double tritone rippled through the chamber like demons and angels at war, amplified by the arc’s power so that the noise was clear even over the turbine whine. Gavin dropped to his knees at the terrible perfection of it.

Alice and Feng kept running. They had nearly reached Dr. Clef’s table, with Click and Alice’s automatons following in an angry brass cloud. Gavin admired her determination and tenacity, her beauty and power. Dr. Clef picked up another fork, and the small part of Gavin’s brain that wasn’t enthralled by the perfect, rapturous sound of his own generator noted the length of the prongs. D-sharp. Alice gathered herself to leap at him.

“Nicht,” said Dr. Clef, though the word was barely audible over the turbines and tritones. He struck the fork and pressed it to the side of the Cube. Instantly a cone of sound blasted from the Cube and through the fork. It hit Alice and shoved her backward into Feng. The two of them toppled to the ground. The little automatons were scattered in all directions, rotors and legs bent and laboring. Click bowled over backward. A piece of Gavin’s awareness flashed hot anger at Alice’s injury, but the rest of him remained consumed by the tritone paradox. Then an edge of the cone caught him. It simultaneously dampened the tritone paradox and slapped him in the face. His ears rang. Abruptly, the sound was no longer so hypnotic. Gavin leaped to his feet and automatically ran toward Alice.

“I’m fine!” she gasped. “Stop him!”

“Help her, Feng,” Gavin said. “Help us! Do whatever it takes to help!” And without waiting for an answer, he ran toward Dr. Clef’s table. Another cable ran from the paradox generator. It ended in a clip that Dr. Clef was ready to connect to the Impossible Cube. But now Gavin was close enough. He raised his wristband, aimed fast, and fired. The cog spun through the air and knocked Dr. Clef’s hand aside. He yelped but didn’t drop the clip. The ringing in Gavin’s ears continued to muffle the tritones, though he heard enough for it to be a distraction.

Dr. Clef blinked at Gavin, who was already aiming another cog. There was only one left, and there was only one choice of what to do with it. Grimly, he cranked the magnetic power as high as it would go. Flung at full strength, a spinning cog would slice through flesh and bone like butter. Dr. Clef glanced at the wristband, his brilliant mind making instant connections, and Gavin saw the understanding in the eyes of his mentor, a man who, despite a few arguments, had never been anything but kind and helpful to Gavin, who wanted only to help him now. Gavin’s legs trembled, but his aim remained firm.

“You won’t,” Dr. Clef said, though Gavin was more reading his lips than hearing his voice.

“I have to,” Gavin said, and started to move his finger.

“I can show you your father,” Dr. Clef said.

Gavin froze.

“Yes. The Cube and the arc can see through time. I can show you your father as he was. You can see where he went—and where he is now.”

“He really is alive?” The idea rocked Gavin harder than the tritone paradox. The vague memory of his father’s voice sang softly in his head.

I had a ship, my ship must flee

Sailing o’er the clouds and on the silver sea.

He longed to hear that voice again, learn where his own voice had come from.

Learn why his father had left.

“Did he go away because of me?” Gavin whispered. “Was it because I wasn’t as good at music as he was? Was I a bad son?”

“Gavin!” Alice cried. “Stop him!”

“We can look,” Dr. Clef mouthed. “We can seek. We can find. It is easy, Gavin. You will discover, uncover, ascertain.”

Ice slid down Gavin’s spine. “No. You’re lying! It’s a lie!”

Gavin fired, and the entire world slowed for him. The cog spun lazily through the air, teeth catching light and splitting it into a trillion particles that scattered like drops of syrup. Dr. Clef, with inhuman reflexes, snapped the clip connecting the paradox generator to the Impossible Cube. A blue rose of a spark bloomed and just as quickly flickered into death. The cog continued its long, slow spin. The paradox generator fell silent as all its energy drained into the Cube. Dr. Clef’s facial muscles stretched toward a smile. The cog whirled, heating the air an infinitesimal amount as it passed, and smashed into the paradox generator.

Utter silence fell over the entire chamber. Then a terrible, discordant sound boomed through the room. Time snapped back to its normal pace. The light within the arc flickered and spun like the eye of a hurricane. A terrible red light poured into the turbine room. Within the eye of the arc, Gavin saw gently flowing water, blue and calm, as if he were looking up from the bottom of a pool or river. His mind leaped from connection to connection, and he realized he was looking at a hole that punched through a dozen dimensions and opened into the past, into a number of time periods in the past, and he could see where the river had once flowed through this spot.

At that moment, a force very much like gravity pulled him toward the arc. He resisted and turned to flee, but it grew stronger with every passing second. It was like running through water. Two of Alice’s little automatons were sucked squeaking toward the arc. They struggled against the force that pulled at them, but their propellers had been damaged by the Impossible Cube and in the end they were dragged through the arc. The automatons sheered and shredded and vanished with a human-sounding scream. On the other side, the water bubbled and boiled like a cauldron, though it stayed on the other side. The Impossible Cube sat perfectly still on the table.

Dr. Clef managed to wrap his arms around one of the table legs and hold on. Gavin, now on hands and knees, made it back to Alice, who was still lying on the ground. She had braced her feet against an outcrop of brick on the floor and had caught hold of Feng’s wrist with her iron-bound hand. The spider’s eyes glowed green. How were they going to get out? Gavin felt himself being dragged backward. Alice’s hair was drawn forward over her face. Fear for himself and for Alice and Feng made Gavin’s heart beat against his spine. The force abruptly strengthened, and it lifted Feng bodily from the ground. Wind roared through the turbine room.

“Hang on, Feng!” Alice cried. “Don’t let go!”

And then Gavin lost his grip on the floor and tumbled backward toward the arc.

Susan Phipps felt the strange pull even on the staircase, and she nearly lost her balance. So did Glenda, who only saved herself by clutching at the handrail.

“What the bloody hell?” Glenda said.

“It’s that clockworker,” Phipps replied. “If I read those notes we found on the train correctly, he’s planning to do something with time. Michaels and Ennock must be helping him.”

Her fury grew. It felt like she had been chasing Alice Michaels and Gavin Ennock for most of her life. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had a good night’s sleep or actually enjoyed a meal or simply sat and rested. Michaels and Ennock had become her entire world, and when had that happened?

A sudden urge overcame her, an overwhelming desire to simply turn and walk away. No one would know except Glenda, and she would keep her mouth shut if ordered. It would be so easy.

Then an image of her father standing on the front steps with the carpet bags at his feet sprang into her mind. Justice and fairness, always. They had gotten her where she was now. It was impossible to give them up just because it was inconvenient. She firmed her jaw and continued more carefully down the stairs, ready to do what was right.

And if her current path was wrong? Even… unjust? She paused for a long moment, caught between balanced concepts.

“Lieutenant?” Glenda asked behind her.

Phipps abruptly straightened her back. “I’m fine,” she said sharply. “Let’s keep going.”

At the bottom, she found the door already open, and beyond lay an enormous room filled with giant metal snail shells, strange machinery, and the very people she’d been chasing all this time. A metal arc glowed an evil red and seemed to be sucking everything greedily into itself, gaining power with every passing moment. Even as she watched, two of Alice’s little automatons were sucked into it and destroyed. The other automatons, including that stupid cat Click, managed to limp around to the back of one of the turbines and cling there as Alice braced herself against a line of bricks on the floor. The force reached outward and pulled at Phipps even more strongly.

“What’s happening?” Glenda said.

“Run up and grab that rope from the top of the stairwell.” Phipps drew a multiple coil dispersal pistol that she had snatched from the Cossack armory and twisted the charging unit. It whined with eager power. “We’re going to end this.”

Alice saw Gavin go by. Without thinking, she flung out her right hand and actually managed to catch his arm. Her shoulders burned. She was holding two men now, with her feet braced against the brick outcrop as wind tore past her face and hair. Her eyes met Gavin’s. Oh God—her grip was slipping, and it felt like her arms were coming out of their sockets. Feng clutched her forearm with the power she had ordered him to use. She couldn’t keep this up.

The dreadful force increased again. Alice screamed, still holding on.

“Let go!” Feng shouted. His words came out framed by the horrible spider on his face. “Alice, let me go! If you don’t, we’ll all die!”

The idea was unthinkable. Guilt overwhelmed her. It was her fault Feng was in this position in the first place. She could save him. She would save him. Both him and Gavin.

“No!” she shouted back. “I won’t let you die!”

“You can’t save us both,” he said. “Some people don’t want to be saved. Let go!”

Her arms burned like lava and her fingers quivered. Dr. Clef huddled at the table, able to use his arms and legs to resist the power of the arc. Alice swallowed. She had been forced to give up her mother, her brother, and her father. Why should she give up her friend?

“Let me go, Alice!” Feng shouted. “I can help!”

A tear formed in her eye and leaped across the room into the boiling water of the arc. She didn’t have the strength to save them both, to save everyone. Either a few would die, or everyone would die. It wasn’t fair, but it would be even worse to let everyone perish because she couldn’t let go. She looked at Gavin again, and he nodded. With a scream of agony and anger, she let Feng go.

Feng flew backward, straight toward the arc. But as he fell, he angled his body so that he struck the table. Even over the wind, Alice heard bone snap, though Feng’s face remained stoic. He bounced sideways and managed to latch on to Dr. Clef.

“Was, denn?” Dr. Clef sputtered.

Feng snap-punched him twice. Dr. Clef’s eyes glazed over, and he let go of the table. Together Feng and Dr. Clef fell toward the arc and hit the eye. Alice wanted to look away, but couldn’t. When the two men struck the eye, flesh and bone shredded as if forced through a sieve made of razors. A cloud of blood and meat misted before the arc, hung for a tiny moment, and was sucked into the boiling water beyond. Alice cried out again.

Do whatever it takes to help! Gavin had ordered. Feng had done exactly that and gotten just what he had wanted. Alice felt only heart-wrenching sorrow.

Gavin grabbed hold of Alice’s free hand, the one with the spider on it, and the spider’s eyes glowed red. It was easier to hold on to one person, though she couldn’t do it indefinitely, and whatever force was pulling them toward the arc showed no signs of abating. Her desperation grew, as did the fear on Gavin’s face.

“What do we do?” she shouted.

He shook his head. His feet were trying to find purchase on the brick floor, but they were continually drawn out from under him. His hand slipped, and Alice forced herself to grab harder, though she was growing more and more tired.

“You have the cure,” he yelled. “Let me go and save yourself!”

A cold fist clutched her heart and her breath came hard. “Not you. Never you!”

“Alice—”

And then Susan Phipps was there. A rope was wrapped around her waist and she was playing it out with her mechanical hand like a mountain climber. Her silver-streaked hair streamed out like Alice’s. The sight was so surprising, it took Alice a moment to understand what—who—she was looking at.

“You’re both idiots,” Phipps shouted. From a holster at her waist, she drew a fat pistol.

Alice’s heart sank, though she didn’t dare loosen her grip on Gavin to defend herself. Still, it was too much. “Damn you!” she shouted back. “Kill us, then! See if it makes you feel better.”

“Phipps!” Gavin cried. “Don’t!”

Phipps fired—straight at the top of the turbine. A red beam lanced through the air and struck the spot where the shaft met the generator. Smoke formed and was pulled into the boiling arc. Then the generator shaft jumped away from the turbine shaft with a terrible grinding noise. Deprived of its energy source, the generator powered down. The arc’s glow faded, the eye and the boiling water vanished. Gavin dropped on top of Alice as the force abruptly ceased. The Impossible Cube trembled for a moment, went still, then released a burst of red energy. Alice braced herself for another slamming, but the energy went through her with only a strange sensation, as if something briefly crawled over all her bones at once. The Cube darkened, though it continued to give off a faint phosphorescent blue light.

Alice lay panting beneath Gavin. His weight was both welcome and crushing at the same time. Her arms had the strength of wet string, and she couldn’t even summon the energy to ask him to move. At last he heaved himself aside and dragged himself upright on trembling limbs to face Phipps, who was calmly untying the rope from around her waist and winding her hair back into a twist.

“If you had done that from the start, none of this would have happened,” Phipps said. “For all your talent, you’re still a rookie, Agent Ennock.”

“Why?” Gavin gasped, echoing Alice’s thoughts.

“I don’t answer to you,” Phipps replied coolly. “And you are welcome.”

“Er… thank you.” Alice felt like an admonished schoolgirl.

“We shouldn’t stay,” Phipps added. “I don’t think it’s safe.”

Alice summoned the strength to sit up. “Oh, come now! After everything you put us through, you owe us an explanation and you damned well know it!”

Phipps sighed and thawed a little. “If I can make the great Alice, Baroness Michaels, curse, I suppose I can offer an explanation.” She looked away for a moment. “Into the Doomsday Vault, I’ve put clockworker inventions that could uproot islands, let people move instantly from place to place, and make the human race immortal. But an invention that would stop time…” She shook her head. “I was so worried about justice itself that I lost sight of whom justice was for. What justice is there in letting clockworkers seize destiny from mankind? The time of the clockworker needs to end, and it needs to end now.”

“What does that mean to us?” Gavin was weaving, but kept his feet.

“It means, Mr. Ennock, that I am personally going to escort you and the baroness to China to spread her cure. It is fair.”

“Goddamn you, Lieutenant!” Glenda Teasdale appeared in the door to the stairwell with a pistol of her own. “After all this, you turn out like Simon? I’ll see you in hell!”

“Agent Teasdale!” Phipps barked. “Lower your weapon!”

“Michaels stole everything from me!” Glenda moved farther into the room, her pistol still trained on Alice. “She stole my profession and my life! She has to pay.”

“It would not be just, Agent Teasdale,” Phipps said. “She’s already paid, and paid, and paid. And so have we. It’s time to stop. For both of us.”

Glenda was breathing fast. Alice was so tired, she could barely move, but from somewhere she found a reserve of strength that let her come to her feet. “Glenda,” she said, “you’ve done so much for me. You were an exemplar to me, and without you, I would never have struck out on my own. I did a terrible thing to you in return. I’m sorry for what I did to you. I wish I could take it back. If you want to shoot, I’ll understand.”

And she moved in front of Phipps. Gavin tried to stop her, but she shook him off. She stood there, unarmed but for her iron spider, her arms spread wide. Too many people had died for her. She could die for someone else now.

Glenda took aim. Alice held her breath but refused to close her eyes. Glenda lowered the pistol.

“Goddamn you,” she said again, but this time to Alice.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said, and was surprised at how disappointed she was that Glenda hadn’t pulled the trigger.

“What am I to do with my life?” Glenda asked bitterly.

“If you can control your impulse to curse,” Phipps said, “perhaps you should go into politics. I can give you a letter of introduction that will go over quite well with the Hats-On Committee in Parliament.”

Gavin, meanwhile, staggered over to the table where the arc stood. Silently, he picked up the Impossible Cube. A lump formed in Alice’s throat. She joined Gavin and took his hand. Click clicked across the floor as well and sat at Alice’s feet. He looked at the arc as if waiting for something. Alice’s remaining automatons limped over to her and crawled into her skirts or fluttered to her shoulders. They all stood in a moment of silence before the arc, now a gateway to the world of the dead. Alice fought back tears.

“Feng gave his life to save ours,” Alice said. “I hope that will be enough for his father—and his family.”

“The plague took Dr. Clef,” Gavin said. “I knew it would happen, knew he’d leave, but I didn’t think he’d try to kill us.” He sighed heavily and wiped at his eyes. “In his own twisted way, he was like a father to me, and now he’s gone. He and Feng both.”

Alice embraced him and let her own tears wet his shoulder. They both wept for loss and unfairness while Glenda, Phipps, and the mechanical stood by in mute sympathy. At last Alice stepped away and fished in her pocket for a handkerchief.

Gavin said in a heavy voice, “His remains went into the past, you know, to a time before the dam was built. Did you see the water boil?”

“Oh!” A shock of realization went through Alice and she put her metal hand to her mouth. The Dnepro River boiled in the center of Kiev and the plague rose up like a dragon and devoured the city. “Do you think… Did Dr. Clef start the clockwork plague?”

“I don’t know,” Gavin admitted. “Clockworkers don’t spread the plague, but Dr. Clef was pulverized and his blood was dragged into several places in the past. Maybe that did something to the disease.”

“Good heavens. Good heavens,” was all Alice could say. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief in her metal hand.

An alarm blared, and red lights flashed all over the room. Click jumped straight up. Alice started as well, and her automatons jerked.

“Oh no,” Gavin said.

“We need to leave,” Phipps said. “Now.”

“What—?” Glenda began.

Gavin was turning the Impossible Cube over and over in his hands so quickly it made Alice dizzy to look at it. “I think that last burst of energy from the Cube did something. Didn’t you feel it? The way it dragged over your bones.”

“I did feel it,” Phipps said. “Singularly unpleasant, too.”

“The Cube was connected to the dam, and it wrenched something inside. Deep down within the stones. At the level of… of the tiny things.” Alice could see Gavin was floundering for words. “The bits aren’t holding together anymore. Can you see the cracks?”

“No,” Glenda said nervously, glancing around.

“I can.” Gavin tapped his forehead. “They’re small, but spreading fast. The structure isn’t sound.”

Fear stabbed Alice as the implications hit her. “How much time before it fails?”

“Less than an hour, I think. It’ll destroy a good part of lower Kiev.”

“How do we stop it?” Glenda asked.

“We can’t. Not in an hour,” he said. “We have to evacuate everyone we can.”

They ran for the stairs—or tried to. Gavin and Alice could manage only a fast walk. Alice winced at the pain in her shoulders and her thighs, but she grimly kept going. It got better the more she moved. Gavin’s jaw was also set with pain. Alice thought about having her automatons carry her, but the thought of being lifted by her arms made her shudder, and in any case, most of her automatons were as bent as she was.

Somehow, they made it up the stairs and out the main doors, where they found the wrecked elephant still standing by the two mechanicals Alice and Gavin had stolen from the Gonta-Zalizniaks. Near them, however, also stood the Gonta-Zalizniaks themselves. Nearly forty of them. All in mechanicals.

“Good lord,” Phipps said.

A hundred weapons clacked, whined, and chattered as they trained on the little group.

Chapter Sixteen

“Give us sound generator,” boomed one of the Cossacks. “And then we kill you.”

“Shouldn’t that be or we kill you?” Glenda shouted back.

“No.”

The alarms continued to blare discordant notes in a mocking parody of the paradox generator’s siren song. It was a day for loss. Gavin had destroyed his own invention, his pinnacle of perfection, and then watched his mentor and his friend die painful deaths. He had lost a chance to find out what had happened to his father, and nearly died himself. He looked at the Cossack mechanicals, and a terrible calm came over him.

“I don’t have time for you,” he said. “The dam is failing. You need to save your people, the ones you took responsibility to rule. If you don’t, I will destroy you. This is your only warning.”

The Gonta-Zalizniaks laughed as one, and the sound echoed over the warning sirens. Then their voices merged into an eerie unity. “You think we are fools. Now you die.”

The weapons moved. Gavin placed one hand on top of the faintly glowing Impossible Cube. It looked heavy, but felt light and springy. Gavin opened his mouth and sang. A clear D-sharp reverberated in the air. The Cube glowed electric blue, and it amplified Gavin’s voice to a rumble, a boom, a half-tone detonation. The cone of sound flattened the mechanicals like tin soldiers. Several of them fell into the river with spectacular splashes and sank from sight. The sound poured from Gavin, shattering windows and smashing doors on both sides of the river. The mechanicals twitched and shuddered. Glass bubbles cracked and broke. The Cossack clockworkers within clapped hands to bleeding ears and screamed in pain. Alice finally jerked Gavin’s hand from the Cube, and the note died, leaving groaning, half-conscious Cossacks in its wake. The Cube darkened completely.

“Enough,” Alice said. “They’re down. The rest of their fate is up to them.”

“You’re more merciful than I,” Phipps observed. “They did experiment on children, after all.”

“And you sided with them,” Alice said.

“That was before I knew. Can you still drive that mechanical? We’re in a bit of a rush.”

“How are we going to evacuate everyone?” Glenda said. “There’s just the four of us.”

A booming crack thudded against Gavin’s ears. Gavin’s stomach tightened. The dam was failing faster than he had originally calculated. Once it gave, the river would smash through the lower city. Most of Kiev was built on hills, but the lower sector past the dam would be wiped out, including the square that housed the Kalakos Circus.

The circus.

“I have an idea,” Gavin said. “Lieutenant, can you drive a mechanical?”

Phipps gave him a withering stare.

“All right, good. You take this one. Alice, if you and Glenda can use the other one to run ahead and tell Dodd we’re coming, I think we can save the people. But you’ll have to hurry.”

“What do you intend to do?” Glenda asked.

“You’ll see. Just go!”

“You drive,” Alice said to Glenda. “I don’t think my arms are up to the task.”

In moments, Glenda and Alice had run off, picking their way through the tumbled army of Cossack mechanicals. Some of the Gonta-Zalizniaks were groaning softly in their shattered bubbles, but Gavin spared them little pity. He had given them every chance, and he had other worries.

“Let’s move, Lieutenant,” he said, and hoisted himself into the mechanical he had stolen from Danilo Zalizniak. Lieutenant Phipps followed, and took up a position next to him. It was distinctly odd sitting near Phipps on a padded bench instead of facing her across a desk—or the barrel of a gun. Inside the machine, Gavin pulled part of the control panel apart until he located a rubber-coated live wire. He yanked the wire loose and jammed the business end against the darkened Cube. Instantly, it glowed electric blow.

“Go!” he said. “Walking speed.”

Phipps put the mechanical into a stately march upriver, toward the circus. Gavin put his hand on the Impossible Cube and sang. This time, the note was a G, blue and pure and clean. The Cube glowed, and the note flowed out like liquid silver, washing over the streets and into the factories and houses and shops. The people, who had hidden inside the moment the mechanical army had marched past, emerged and blinked beneath sooty clouds. They listened to the wondrous sound and, unable to resist, followed it. On both sides of the river, people followed it. They poured out of the city and followed. Those who could walk helped those who couldn’t. And they were happy. They laughed and chattered among themselves and pointed at Gavin, pale blond and blue-eyed as he sang on the marching mechanical.

And then the plague zombies came. They slid out of the shadows and into the street by the river, unbothered by the dim sunlight. The people didn’t seem to notice or care. In the world’s strangest parade created by the world’s strangest music, everyone moved without panic, without fear, down the river toward the circus.

“How long can you keep this up?” Phipps asked. She seemed unaffected by the note, perhaps because of the amount of machinery in her nature.

Gavin shrugged, took a quick breath, and kept on singing. He was already tired from the events down by the turbines, and now the Cube was taking more energy from him. He felt like a water glass with a hole in the bottom, but he kept singing. The crowd followed along. It wasn’t the entire city, thank heavens—only those who could hear the note, the ones who were in danger of the impending deluge. When they encountered a bridge, the people on the far side of the river crossed over to Gavin’s side. Gavin was becoming seriously tired now, and the intervals between breaths were growing shorter. He forced himself to keep up the volume, and Cube glowed like captured sky in his hands.

A booming crack in the distance behind them, louder than thunder from an angry god, told Gavin the dam was beginning to fail now. Cracks were racing through its structure. Once it went, a swath of downriver Kiev would be washed away, and his clockwork was automatically calculating the path, volume, and velocity of the water. His voice wavered, tainting the purity of the note. The Cube’s glow dimmed, and a wave of fear swept through the crowd. They heard the thunder and saw the plague zombies in their midst. Screams and knots of panic broke out. Sweating, Gavin forced his voice back to the G. The Cube’s blue glow steadied. The crowd calmed and continued. Phipps shot him a worried look, but she didn’t dare speed up and outpace the crowd.

Gavin’s body was starting to shake from the effort now. Every bit of concentration he had poured into holding that single, silver note. The vague memories of his father loomed up. He had to hold the note perfectly, with absolute precision, or Dad would—

No. It was nothing to do with his father. He needed perfection in this time and in this place because these people needed it to live, and he would do it. He would be the voice they needed. For them. Not his father.

A new strength came over him, and he sang and sang and sang. The note held steady—and perfect. The crowd came quickly and happily and in an orderly fashion.

And he realized the mechanical was kneeling beside the circus train. Alice and Glenda were in the engine compartment wearing ear protectors, and a wave of relief swept over Gavin when he saw a healthy cloud of smoke puffing from the stack. Dodd had said he would try to get the boilers going, and Alice had warned him not to stop. The circus people who hadn’t managed to flee joined the crowd, their expressions also happy and calm. Linda wasn’t among them, but Nathan and Dodd were, to Gavin’s relief. Click and the little automatons were perched on the engine’s roof, not bothered by the heat of the boilers.

Gavin kept up the note, though he could feel his voice starting to fail. An explosion upriver boomed against his bones and startled the crowd, but set off no panic. Instead, they piled into the train, into passenger sections and boxcars. They climbed onto the roofs and clung to the sides. They boarded the Lady and sat on the deck. They packed themselves in with calm, ordered care because Gavin’s voice led them and kept them from understanding that the river carried their deaths.

Finally everyone was on board. People clung to every surface, inside and out. Phipps disconnected the Cube from the mechanical and helped Gavin up into the engine compartment with Alice and Glenda. He hoped it would retain enough power. His tired mind tried to run the formulas to find out and failed. Alice gave him a concerned look and moved toward him, but Gavin shook his head violently. She gave a tight nod and turned back to the boilers. Gavin kept singing, barely. His legs and arms shook with exhaustion. The tiny room was crowded, so Phipps stood back, near the coal carrier. Alice, who had certainly never driven a train before in her life but whose talent with machines let her understand them quickly, pulled levers and spun wheels, giving instructions to Glenda with gestures. The engineer was part of the crowd in the back, enthralled by Gavin’s voice.

A soft wind whispered over them, created by tons of unchained water pushing the air ahead of it. The train jerked forward. Wheels spun in place, caught for a moment, spun again, and caught for good. Slowly, the train moved ahead, gaining speed. The deadly flood thundered toward them, smashing stone buildings and washing away bridges.

Gavin’s strength gave out. The note ended. He dropped the Cube and would have fallen if Phipps hadn’t stepped forward and caught him. Glenda snatched up the Cube before it hit the ground, handed it to him, and went back to work.

“Are you all right?” Phipps asked.

Gavin felt like a sack of wet sand. He could only give a small nod. Phipps helped him slide to the metal floor, though he could see out through the space between the coal carrier and the engine, the Impossible Cube in his lap. Without his voice to keep things steady, fear swept the people on the train. Demonic howls and screams trailed behind them, and some of the people clinging to the sides and top fell off. The train rocked, but Alice didn’t slow. Gavin didn’t have the strength to feel sorrow for the ones they had lost. The river roared behind them, reaching for them with watery dragon hands. The train gained speed. Buildings rushed past them, then were devoured by the river. Despite the train’s speed, the river was gaining on them, eating the tracks behind them.

“It’s hard,” Alice said, her ear protectors now around her neck. “Everyone’s panicking and rocking the train. It slows us down.”

Glenda looked out the window and back. “The river’s getting closer, nearly to your ship.”

Coal dust smudged Alice’s lovely face. She looked at Gavin, and he could see the reluctance. “Darling, can you… ?”

He didn’t have the power. He couldn’t even lift his arms. But Gavin met her brown eyes. This woman had led him into hell and changed him and now she was leading him back out. She needed him. With a groan, he lifted a leaden hand and dropped it on top of the Impossible Cube, let his mouth fall open, and whispered a note.

Nothing happened. The river thundered toward them. The train rocked again as people screamed and thrashed against one another, crushing and beating one another against the walls of the cars. Gavin swallowed, took a breath. He was Gavin Ennock. He could do this.

Gavin breathed out and sang. The G came through, crystalline blue. The Impossible Cube flickered, then glowed and the sound pulsed back over the train. The people instantly calmed. The train stopped rocking and picked up speed. Alice and Glenda, who had put their ear protectors back on, worked at the engines, while Phipps hovered over Gavin. He sang and sang while the train puffed faster and faster. The water receded behind them, and then the train took a curve that brought it uphill. It lost speed, but it went away from the water. Gavin’s hand was sliding away from the Cube, and Phipps reached down to press it back into place. The Cube was losing its glow, running out of the electricity it had taken from the mechanical. Half a mile flashed by, and they were at the top of the hill. Alice slowed the engine and let the train coast. It was drifting to a stop near a station.

“We did it,” Alice said, but her words came from far away. “Darling, you did it!”

The Cube went black. Gavin tumbled into darkness.

He was lying on a cloud, a soft, fluffy cloud. It was so restful and fine. Delightful not having to move. He had only a tiny moment to enjoy the sensation. Abruptly, he jerked fully awake as he always did, his heart beating at the back of his throat.

The room was spacious and white. Thick rugs covered polished wood floors. A large wardrobe of pale birch took up one corner, and an icon of the Virgin Mary hung in one ceiling corner, draped with white bunting embroidered with a red design. A table and easy chairs occupied another corner. The generous bed was also white, with fine linen sheets, a feather-filled duvet, and plump pillows. Where was he, and how had he come here?

He sat up and groaned as fire tore through every muscle. Aching and sore, he forced his feet around to the edge of the bed and realized he was naked. And clean. Hissing with every movement, he found a chamber pot under the bed, used it, and replaced it. The fiery ache continued when he stood up. A soft white dressing gown hung from the door, and he gingerly tied it on, which made him feel a little more secure. To his immense relief, he found his fiddle case next to the door. Carefully, he picked it up and opened it on the bed. The fiddle inside gleamed at him, undamaged. He sighed heavily.

A quick knock made him turn. The knock repeated.

“Uh… hello?” he called. “Who is it?”

The door burst open and Alice rushed in with a tray of food. Click trotted in behind her. “You’re awake! Thank God!”

She set the tray on the table and caught Gavin in a hug that made him howl. She instantly released him. “I’m so sorry! I should have realized—when I stopped moving, everything started to hurt worse, too, and you’ve been asleep for a long time.”

He hobbled to an easy chair next to the table and, gritting his teeth, eased himself into it. Alice hovered over him, offering help, but he waved her away. Click jumped onto the bed and settled into a pillow, his phosphorescent eyes gleaming green.

“How long was I asleep?” Gavin asked.

“You were unconscious, not asleep.” Alice took up the chair opposite his. She wore a white blouse, a pale blue skirt, and a straw hat with peacock feathers on it. All of it made her look free and bright, and Gavin was so glad to see her. “It’s been three full days. I was so worried. I thought the smell of food might bring you out.”

The mention of the food brought his head around to it. There was tea and some kind of dumpling in a cream sauce and peppered roast pork and dark bread and cucumbers with onions. Gavin was ravenous, and, ignoring the pain, pulled the tray toward him so he could eat. The dumplings were stuffed with soft cheese, and the tender pork was seasoned perfectly. Alice took a paper packet from her pocket and handed him two pills from it.

“Take these,” she said. “They’ll help with the pain.”

He swallowed them and kept eating. “Where are we?”

“The mayor’s house. So much has happened, I don’t know where to begin.”

“The last thing I remember is singing on the train.”

She nodded. “Part of the dam held, so the river destroyed less than we feared—a section a quarter of a mile wide and about five miles long. We got nearly everyone within that zone to safety. We lost some people, but… almost everyone survived. Except the Gonta-Zalizniaks. They’re all missing, presumed dead. Their house was at the bottom of the valley, you know, and it’s completely underwater now. The river is returning to its original bed. Some of the city will be flooded permanently, but most of it can be reclaimed. We’re being hailed as heroes.”

“We are?” Gavin paused with a fork halfway to his mouth. “We destroyed the dam and killed a bunch of people.”

“That’s not the way the Ukrainians see it,” Alice said. “The dam fed power to their hated Cossack rulers, you see. We, on the other hand, rescued their children, led the Cossacks down to the horrible dam, blew it up, and swept them away forever. The mayor—his name is Serhiy Hrushevsky—has taken over the city. He’s a very nice man who used to be a professor at the Kiev Ecclesiastical Seminary but became mayor because he wanted to soften what the Cossacks were doing. His son Mykhailo is extremely intelligent as well and will probably succeed him in politics, and— Oh! I’m babbling. I’m just so relieved that you’re all right, darling.”

“I’m happy to see you, too,” he said. “But what next?”

“Well, once the whole story came out, Mayor Hrushevsky brought us here to rest and recover as honored guests. I cured the rest of the plague zombies in the city, which only made everyone even happier, and they want to have a city-wide ball in our honor.”

The medicine Alice had given him started to work, and Gavin’s muscles relaxed. “I’ve never been a hero before. I don’t know how to react.”

“I don’t either, to be honest. I’m letting Phipps handle most of it.”

“Phipps! I’d forgotten all about her. She’s still with us?”

“Oh yes.” Alice folded her arms. “She insists upon coming to China with us. Glenda has already slipped off, back for London. We haven’t heard from Simon, either.”

“And we won’t.” Gavin drained his teacup, then paused. “I have to say… I was hoping…”

Alice grew more serious. “For what?”

“That we might be able to search the laboratory in the Gonta-Zalizniak house. To see if they had found… you know.”

“I do know.” She reached across the table and took his flesh hand in her metal one. “We’ll find a cure. You have time yet, no matter what Dr. Clef thought. We will cure you, we will get married”—her voice began to choke—“and we will have lots of children who will get very, very tired of hearing the same stories of their parents’ adventures over and over again.”

“‘Aw, Dad, not that boring story about Feng at the dam again,’” Gavin said, trying to lighten the mood by imitating a child, except his own voice grew thick. “‘We’ve heard it a million times.’”

“Will they speak with an American accent, do you think? Or a proper English one?”

“Hey! There’s nothing wrong with a good Boston accent,” Gavin said, laughing now. Click raised his head. “Don’t forget that we perfected baked beans so you beefeaters could put them on toast.”

Alice was laughing too, and she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Good heavens. I haven’t even told you the best part.”

“There’s more?”

“The paraffin refineries are nowhere near the dam and weren’t touched. Mayor Hrushevsky is insisting we take all the oil we need. The Lady has been restored by his own men, and she is ready to fly when we are.”

Gavin spent three more days recovering. He tired easily and slept a great deal, though he insisted on spending as much time as possible on the Lady, which was tethered just above the mayor’s modest house. It was easier to rest amid the familiar, homey creak of wood and hemp. It also seemed to Gavin that the Lady was pleased to see him. The ship appeared to float more freely, hold herself more steadily when Gavin was aboard, though he didn’t say anything about this to Alice.

When Gavin checked the Lady’s workshop, he was gratified to find the metal project he’d been working on had been moved there from the train, and he spent some time fiddling with it. It was nice to work on something that wasn’t a weapon. The Impossible Cube was locked away in a cupboard. Alice, Gavin, and Phipps didn’t see any need to tell anyone else the particulars of how they had led everyone out of danger. The paradox generator, of course, had been destroyed along with the dam, though Gavin still felt a small twinge at its loss.

Dr. Clef’s notes about the danger of time, space, and energy were also gone, burned by Phipps. Gavin didn’t have the heart to tell her that he had read them and, with a clockworker’s precision, memorized every numeral and symbol. He didn’t intend to use the information, of course. After everything that had happened, it would be foolish in the extreme. Much more interesting to work on his little project.

Now that Gavin was out of danger, Alice set about playing the part of the baroness to the hilt, making speeches and attending parties. Phipps attended most of these events as well, moving easily among the people, pointedly making friends and contacts. Once Gavin had recovered sufficiently to travel—and appear in public—Mayor Hrushevsky declared an entire day of celebration for their send-off to China. He presented Gavin with a new outfit—white airman’s leathers. Gavin found he couldn’t speak.

The ball was both plain and lavish, all at once. Mayor Hrushevsky, a great shaggy man with a long dark beard, insisted that the party be held outdoors in the streets, so it was more like an all-day festival than a ball. The pall of Gonta-Zalizniak rule had lifted, and the people appeared brighter, more cheerful. Even the weather cooperated, granting them a bright, balmy day. Gavin heard Ukrainian music for the first time, and he was enchanted. Street bands and musicians played at nearly every street corner. The mayor opened up the city coffers, and free food was available from stalls every few feet. The electric lights had gone out with the dam, of course, but after sunset people put out lanterns of glass and of colored paper, tinting the city with a hundred lively hues. Alice and Gavin and Phipps wandered about the city, greeted with cheers and laughter wherever they went. They danced to the music, and Gavin held Alice tightly as they whirled through the evening streets.

“Who knew that a cabin boy from Boston would travel so far?” he said to her. “I love you always.”

“And I love you always,” she replied.

When it was time to go, Gavin, Alice, and Phipps returned to the square in front of the mayor’s house and listened to a speech they didn’t understand in the slightest. They smiled and waved to the cheering crowd, Gavin in his new whites, Phipps in her formal reds, and Alice in a Ukrainian-style blouse and skirt, heavily embroidered with tiny cogs and wheels, made just for her by a dozen grateful Kievite women. Click and the automatons, repaired and shined for the occasion, made an honor guard as the trio ascended the ladder to the hovering Lady. The envelope’s curly endoskeleton glowed blue with power from the generator and its generous supply of paraffin oil. The cheers and applause buoyed them up to the starry sky, lifting Gavin’s spirit with every step. When they arrived on the deck, Gavin took the helm and Alice increased power to the generator. The glow intensified, and the ship ascended, higher and higher, until the city became flecks of color on black velvet. A cool breeze washed over him, mixing the scent of purity with the smell of paraffin exhaust. Click took up his usual spot, peering over the side of one gunwale, and the little automatons perched on the ropes or skittered about near Alice. Phipps folded her arms and watched. It was a thrill to be back in his rightful place, back in the air where he belonged.

And yet…

Once they established a heading east and the nacelle propellers were pushing them along, Gavin asked Phipps to take the helm for a moment. She arched a questioning eyebrow.

“I need to show Alice something below,” he said.

He led Alice down to the laboratory. She looked apprehensive. “It’s not anything bad,” he reassured her.

“You’re not going to propose again, are you?” she said. “I don’t really need—”

“It’s not that, either. I’m just… This is important to me, and I want you to be the first to see.”

Now she looked mystified. “All right.”

The little laboratory had been tidied up in preparation for the trip. Most of the floor space was taken up by a large, bulky object covered in a white cloth. Kemp’s head, the eyes still dark, sat on the worktable. Gavin hoped to figure out a way to restore him, but that wasn’t why he had brought Alice down. His heart was beating fast, and his palms were sweaty, though he couldn’t say why.

“I’ve finished it,” he said lamely. “It’s all done.”

It took her a moment to understand. Then she got it. “The project you started in the circus? That’s wonderful! I’m honored you want to show me, darling. Let’s see it.”

Gavin took a breath and whipped the cloth away. Alice gasped. The framework he had created spread out something like a kite. A battery pack with buckles and straps took up the center. The thousands of alloy rings he wound into a cloak now hung over the framework in waterfall ripples. When extended, they would stretch more than ten feet both left and right.

“Gavin!” Alice breathed. “Are those wings?”

AFTERWORD

The fun of writing semihistorical fiction is the ability to pick and choose interesting pieces of history while ignoring or altering anything that doesn’t suit the story. I will no doubt be excoriated by historians both amateur and professional who want to point out that the incandescent lightbulb wasn’t widely used until at least 1885, nearly thirty years after The Doomsday Vault and The Impossible Cube, or that the first paraffin oil (kerosene) refinery was constructed in Poland in 1859, not in Ukraine by 1858. Of course, such people ignore semi-intelligent windup cats, talking mechanical valets, and artificial limbs made of brass.

For the record, the Consolatrix Afflictorum is a real statue of the Virgin Mary in Luxembourg, and local legend has it that she fell out of a tree trunk in 1624, right around the time the bubonic plague struck the region. The stories say her touch cured a number of the afflicted, and so many people came to visit her shrine outside the city that in the late 1790s, the statue was moved to the Church of Our Lady (Notre Dame) inside the city walls.

Also in reality, Nicolas Adames was made vicar of that church in 1863. Gavin and Alice visit Vicar Adames in 1858, so perhaps in our fictional reality, Adames’s predecessor died of the clockwork plague and granted him an early promotion.

In the historical 1870, Adames was named Bishop of Luxembourg, and the Church of Our Lady became Notre Dame Cathedral. I like to think it happened in fiction, too.

Ukraine has a long and sad history. Her rich farmlands made her a target for emperors who wanted to feed their armies, and she has at various times been overrun by Russians, Poles, Mongols, and Germans. In the 1700s, in both reality and in this work of fiction, Ukraine was divided in half by Russia and Poland. (Many modern people have forgotten—or never knew—that Poland was once a world-class military power.) Russia and Poland were far from kind in their rule, and in 1768, Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Gonta led a Cossack rebellion against their oppressors. In history, they slaughtered the Poles and took over right-bank (western) Ukraine right handily. Afraid that the rebellion would spread to left-bank (eastern) Ukraine, Empress Catherine of Russia flooded the area with troops. Ivan Gonta was captured and chopped into fourteen pieces so his remains could be displayed in fourteen different towns as a deterrent to further uprisings. Maksym Zalizniak was captured and tortured but managed to escape with fifty-one of his men. He vanished, and his final fate remains unknown. Both men became national heroes, the subject of numerous Ukrainian folktales and songs.

In my fictional world, the clockwork plague arrived just before the rebellion, thanks to Dr. Clef and the Impossible Cube, so Ivan Gonta and Maksym Zalizniak were rather more successful. Although it would have been easy to have the downtrodden Ukrainians create a utopia for themselves, I was forced to remember that the rebellion was fomented by eighteenth-century Cossacks, who weren’t known for their tolerance or compassion. Fortunately, Ukraine has at last regained her independence, both in modern reality and in my semihistorical fiction, and with it, perhaps she can regain her former glory as well.

—Steven Harper

Read on for an excerpt from the next

thrilling novel of the Clockwork Empire,

THE DRAGON MEN

Coming November 2012 from Roc

“I still think this is a terrible idea,” said Alice.

Gavin spread his mechanical wings, furled them, and spread them again. He shrugged at Alice’s words and shot a glance across the deck at Susan Phipps, who set her jaw and tightened her grip on the helm. Her brass hand, the one with six fingers, gleamed in the afternoon sun and a stray flicker of light caught Gavin in the face. The world slowed, shaving time into transparent slices, and for one of them he felt trillions of photons ricochet off his skin and carom away in rainbow arcs. His mind automatically tried to calculate trajectory for them, and the numbers spun and swirled in an enticing whirlpool. He bit his lip and forced himself out of it. There were more important—more exciting—issues at hand.

“I completely agree,” Phipps said. “But he’s the captain of the ship, and he can do as he likes, even if it’s idiotic.”

“Captains are supposed to listen to common sense,” Alice replied in tart British tones. “Especially when the common sense comes from someone with a decent amount of intelligence.”

At that Gavin had to smile. A soft breeze spun itself across the Caspian Sea, winding across the deck of the Lady of Liberty to stir his pale blond hair. He started to count the strands that flicked across his field of vision, note the way each one was lifted by the teamwork of gas particles, then bit his lip again. Damn it, he was getting more and more distractible by minutiae. More and more individual details of the world around him beckoned—the drag of the harness on his back, the creak of the airship’s wooden deck, the borders of the shadow cast by her bulbous silk envelope high overhead, the sharp smell of the exhaust exuded from the generator that puffed and purred on the decking, the gentle thrumming of the propellered nacelles that pushed the Lady smoothly ahead, the shifting frequency of the blue light reflected by the Caspian Sea gliding past only a few yards beneath the Lady’s hull. Sometimes it felt like the world was a jigsaw puzzle of exquisite jewels, and he needed to examine each piece in exacting detail.

“Gavin?” Alice’s worried voice came to him from far away, and yanked him back to the ship. “Are you there?”

Damn it. He forced his grin back to full power. “Yeah. Sure. Look, I’ll be fine. Everything’ll work. I’ve been over the machinery a thousand times, and I’ve made no mistakes.”

“Of course not.” Alice’s expression was tight. “Clockworkers never make mistakes with their inventions.”

Gavin’s grin faltered again and he shifted within the harness. She was worried about him, and that thrilled and shamed him both. It was difficult to stand next to her and not touch her, even to brush against her. Just looking at her made him want to sweep her into his arms, something she allowed him to do only sporadically.

“Alice, will you marry me?” he blurted out.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Will you marry me?” Words poured out of him. “I started to ask you back in Kiev, but we got interrupted, and what with one thing and another, I never got the chance to ask again, and now there’s a small chance I’ll be dead, or at least seriously wounded, in the next ten minutes, so I want to know: Will you marry me?”

“Oh, good Lord,” Phipps muttered from the helm.

“I… I… Oh, Gavin, this isn’t the time,” Alice stammered.

He took both her hands in his. Adrenaline thrummed his nerves like cello strings. Alice’s left hand was covered by an iron spider that wrapped around her forearm, hand, and fingers to create a strange metal gauntlet, and the spider’s eyes glowed red at his touch. Gavin had his own machinery to contend with—the pair of metal wings harnessed to his back. They flared again when he shifted his weight.

“The universe will never give us the right time.” Gavin’s voice was low and light. “We have to make our own.”

“Dr. Clef tried to make time,” Alice said, “and look where it got him.”

“He wanted to keep it for himself.” Gavin looked into Alice’s eyes. They were brown as good, clean earth, and just as deep. “We’ll share it with the world. I can’t offer you more than the open sky and every tune my fiddle will play, but will you marry me?”

“There’s no minister. Not even a priest!”

“So you’re saying you don’t want to.”

She flushed. “Oh, Gavin. I do, yes, I do. But—”

“No!” He held up a hand. “No yes, but. Just yes. And only if you mean it.”

“Ah. Very well.” Alice, Lady Michaels, took a deep breath. Her dress, a piece of sky pinned by the breeze, swirled about her. “Yes, Gavin. I will marry you.”

With a shout of glee, Gavin leaped over the edge.

Air tore past his ears and his stomach dropped. The Lady’s hull blurred past him, and perhaps two dozen yards below, the calm Caspian Sea shimmered hard and sharp and a little angry. Gavin spread his arms, moved his shoulders, and the wires attached to his body harness drew on tiny pulleys. The wings snapped open. The battery pack between his shoulder blades pulsed power, and blue light coruscated across the wings with a soft chime like that of a wet finger sliding over a crystal goblet. A matching blue light current glowed through a lacy endoskeleton underneath the Lady’s envelope above, giving her a delicate, elegant air. The endoskeleton and the wings were fashioned from the same alloy, though the wings consisted of tiny interwoven links of metal, much like chain mail. And when electricity pulsed through the alloy—

Gavin dove toward the water a moment longer, until the glow and the chime reached the very tips of his wings. In that moment, the alloy pushed against gravity itself, and abruptly he was swooping back up, up, and up; by God, he was rising, climbing, ascending, flying and the wind pushed him higher with an invisible hand and the deck with Alice and Phipps upon it flashed by so fast, Gavin barely had time to register their surprised expressions and then the Lady’s curli-blue envelope plunged toward him like a whale falling onto a minnow and the wind tore his surprised yell away as a sacrifice, giving him just enough time to twist his body and turn the unfamiliar flapping wings—God, yes, they were wings—so that he skimmed up the side of the envelope so close his belly brushed the cloth and with dizzying speed he was above the ship, looking down at her sleek envelope and her little rudder at the back and the fine net of ropes that cradled the ship like soft fingers and his body stretched in all directions with nothing below or above him. Every bit of his spirit rushed with exhilaration, flooded with absolute freedom. His legs in white leather and his feet in white boots hung beneath him, deliciously useless. His muscles moved, and the wings, made of azure light, flapped in response, lifting him into the cool, damp air, with bright Brother Sun calling to him, lifting body and soul. A rainbow of power gushed through him, and he was part of the heavens themselves, a whole note streaking through infinity, cleansed by wind and mist and shedding worries like grace notes. Gavin yelled and whooped, and his voice thundered across distant clouds as if it might split them in two. This was what he’d been born for. This was home.

He hung in the blue nothing for a tiny moment. His wings glowed and sang softly behind him. The clouds spread a cottony pasture far away, and he could almost—almost—see gods and angels striding across them. A calm stole over him. It didn’t matter how many trillions of particles held him aloft or how gravity failed to function. It didn’t matter that a disease was coursing through his body and killing him bit by bit. There was blessed nothing. His mind slowed and joined the stillness. The wind sighed and Gavin hummed a soft note in response as the breeze curled about his white-clad body. Harmony. Peace. How perfect it was there.

A shadow below caught his eye. The Lady was still hovering just above the surface of the calm Caspian Sea. This was at Phipps’s insistence—if Gavin’s wings had failed, he wouldn’t have fallen far, and the ocean would have provided a more pleasant landing than hard ground. Perhaps five miles ahead of the ship lay a sliver of an island, and just beyond that, a rocky coast. The shadow was moving beneath the water, growing larger and larger beneath the Lady as whatever cast it moved up from the bottom of the sea. The thing was nothing natural. Unease bloomed quickly into concern and fear. Gavin tucked and dove, his wings pulled in tightly. He didn’t dare dive too quickly—he didn’t know how much the harness could take, even though his mind was automatically calculating foot pounds and stress levels. He shouted a warning to Alice and Phipps and felt the vibration of his vocal cords, sensed the compression of air, knew the sound would scatter helplessly long before it reached Alice’s eardrums, and still he shouted.

Half a mile below him, a pair of enormous black tentacles rose up from the shadow and broke the surface of the water. At seven or eight feet thick, they easily looped themselves up and around the Lady with incredible speed, even though she was the size of a decent cottage. Fear chased Gavin’s heart out of his rib cage as he dove closer. He could hear Alice shrieking and Phipps yelling in thin, tinny voices that were ballooning into full volume. Air burned his cheeks as he dove past the envelope, now wrapped in suckered black flesh, and he caught the rank smell of ocean depths and old fish.

Instinct rushed him ahead. He had to reach Alice. No other thought but to reach her, to get her to safety. Even the Lady’s distress didn’t matter.

Below and just behind the ship, a black island rose from the waves. Eight other tentacles trailed in oily shadows beneath the ship, and a wicked horned beak large enough to crack an oak tree snapped open and shut. A single eye the size of a stagecoach stared up at Gavin, and he caught his own reflection in the dark iris. Inside Gavin a monster equal to the one below roared its anger. For a mad moment, he wondered if he could dive into the eye, punch both fists straight through cornea into vitreous goo and force the creature away. Grimly, he ended that line of thought, as it was foolish. Instead he made himself fling his wings open and end the dive with a sharp jerk that sent a red web of pain down his back and into his groin, where the flight harness was strapped to his lower body. He skimmed through a gap in the tentacles and the rope web that supported the Lady’s hull, twisting his body in ways that were already becoming reflexive, until he could drop to the deck. His wings folded back into a metallic cloak that dragged at his back and shoulders once the blue glow faded and the chime stopped.

Susan Phipps had drawn a cutlass of tempered glass—only fools used sparking metal on an airship—and was hacking at one of the loops of tentacle that encircled the ship in a rubbery tunnel. Her mouth was set in a hard line and her graying black hair was coming loose from under her hat and spilling over her blue lieutenant’s uniform. The blade gleamed liquid in the sun and it distorted the black tentacle as Phipps slashed again and again, but the edge made only shallow cuts in the rubbery surface, and if the creature noticed, it gave no indication.

Alice, meanwhile, kicked open a hatchway on deck, and a finger of relief threaded through Gavin’s anger when he saw she wasn’t injured.

“Are you all right?” he demanded.

“I’m fine,” she barked, then shouted into the hatchway, “Out! Out out out!”

From belowdecks burst a cloud of little brass automatons. Some skittered on spider legs, others flew on whirligig propellers. They sported arms and legs and other limbs of varying sizes and shapes, but most had points, and a little pride fluttered in Gavin’s chest at the way they obeyed Alice. She pointed at the tentacle above Phipps’s head with her gauntleted hand. “Attack!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Harper Piziks was born in Saginaw, Michigan, but he moved around a lot and has lived in Wisconsin, in Germany, and briefly in Ukraine. Currently he lives with his three sons in southeast Michigan.

His novels include In the Company of Mind and Corporate Mentality, both science fiction published by Baen Books. He has produced the Silent Empire series for Roc and Writing the Paranormal Novel for Writer’s Digest. He’s also written novels based on Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and The Ghost Whisperer.

Mr. Piziks currently teaches high school English in southeast Michigan. His students think he’s hysterical, which isn’t the same as thinking he’s hilarious. When not writing, he plays the folk harp, dabbles in oral storytelling, and spends more time online than is probably good for him. Visit his Web page at www.theclockworkempire.com, and his Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/stevenpiziks.