The Impossible Cube

by Steven Harper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Gavin!” Alice croaked. “Don’t!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Because you’ll be completely mad?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Your ribs,” Berta began.

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

  Alice struggled to more alertness. “Me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Gavin,” Feng said.

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

  “No.” Feng pointed. “Look.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No!” he whispered.

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

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

  Interlude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Hm,” said Glenda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Seven

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

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