“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.
&nb
sp; “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 ne
ed 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.
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