The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (34 page)

“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.

A
lice’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.