The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (29 page)

“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.

T
he 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?”