Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“Well,” Gavin said, setting his rucksack on the floor and opening the top, “if you want Alice to reach China, I suppose that means we should be on our way. If you’ll just open that gate…”

“We said baroness must reach China,” Ivana agreed. “You, on other hand, are quite different. We need advanced clockworkers. You will join Gontas.”

“Or Zalizniaks,” said the old man.

Gavin had been expecting something like this, but the actual words still chilled him. Alice, meanwhile, had her traveling tools out, the ones rolled up in black velvet embroidered with Love, Aunt Edwina in gold thread. Ivana manipulated her console. A pair of long metal arms extended from the ceiling. They held a copper collar. Another pair of arms reached down with them, intending to grab Gavin and hold him.

“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.