Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

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.

The 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?”

“Feng is in terrible trouble, we could be chopped into pieces at any moment, and the second we leave this lift, we’re going to be fighting our way through god-knows-what, but you’re thinking about the children.” He continued to smile. “You saved me back there, you know.”

She blinked. “Did I? I thought you were saving me.”