The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (32 page)

“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.

G
avin 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?”