Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“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.