Steven Harper: The Impossible Cube

We include this section as a courtesy for new readers who did not have the opportunity to peruse The Doomsday Vault , the most excellent first volume in this series. The information may also prove useful to experienced readers who require a bit of a refresher, or who lack a mechanized cranial implant with fully realized library. Thoroughly experienced readers are encouraged to leaf their way over to Chapter One, where they will find Gavin Ennock in awkward and perilous circumstances.

The year is 1857.

Nearly one hundred years earlier, a new disease ravaged the world. The plague causes rotting of flesh, and also invades the host’s nervous system, causing motor dysfunction, dementia, and photosensitivity. Victims lurching through the late stages inevitably became known as plague zombies. However, a handful of victims end up with neural synapses that, for a brief time, fall together instead of apart. Advanced mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry become as toys to them. But as the virus slowly destroys their brains, they eventually lose their grip on reality. Their attachment to mechanical inventions and their detachment from normal human emotion earned them the name clockwork geniuses or clockworkers, and the disease itself became the clockwork plague.

Two nations-England and China-built opposing empires using the fantastic inventions supplied by captive clockworkers, and only the delicate balance of power holds the two empires in check.

In The Doomsday Vault , we encountered Alice Michaels, an impoverished woman of quality who had finally caught the eye of wealthy industrialist Norbert Williamson. Norbert promised to pay Alice’s family’s debts if she married him and provided their eventual child with a title. Alice reluctantly agreed. Mere hours later, she rescued from great danger a handsome young street musician named Gavin Ennock.

Before Gavin met Alice, he served aboard the American airship Juniper. An unfortunate encounter with pirates left him stranded in London with no means of employment save playing the fiddle on street corners. After Alice’s dramatic rescue, Gavin found himself attracted to her, and she to him, but her circumstances and his social standing didn’t allow for a romance.

A great many adventures followed. Alice’s aunt Edwina turned out to be a clockworker. Plague zombies attacked London. A great mechanical beast kidnapped Alice, and Gavin rescued her with the help of a mutated walking tree designed by another clockworker. Gavin and Alice learned of a shadowy organization called the Third Ward. The Ward, led by Lieutenant Susan Phipps, has been charged by Queen Victoria herself to scour the world for clockworkers and bring them back to London, where they build inventions for the good of the Crown-and the detriment of the Orient.

Aunt Edwina’s diseased mind created a pair of cures for the clockwork plague, but such cures would upset the careful balance of power between the British and the Chinese, so the Third Ward locked Edwina’s work in the Doomsday Vault, which houses only the most dangerous of inventions. Infuriated, Edwina infected Gavin with the plague in hopes of forcing Alice to retrieve the cure and, in the process, kill everyone in the Third Ward. Edwina’s plan worked-almost. Alice and Gavin stole the cures, but stopped short of murder.

Aunt Edwina did not survive the release of her own airborne cure, and Alice found herself the disconcerted owner of a mechanical gauntlet that can cure the clockwork plague with a scratch. Unfortunately, neither of Edwina’s cures helps clockwork geniuses; they only cure people in danger of becoming ordinary plague zombies.

Alice left her betrothed and declared her love for Gavin. She attempted to cure Gavin of the plague and failed; Gavin was becoming a clockworker.

Alice and Gavin fled London in a small airship, with Lieutenant Phipps hot on their heels. Joining them are Gabriel Stark (a clockworker who calls himself “Dr. Clef”), Feng Lung (the son of China’s ambassador to England), Kemp (Alice’s mechanical valet), and Click (Alice’s windup clockwork cat). They are heading for China, which has its own supply of clockworkers, and may have a more powerful cure that can restore Gavin’s fading sanity and save his life.

Gavin Ennock snapped awake. His temples pounded, his feet ached, and his arms flopped uselessly above his head. Far above him lay green grass strewn with twigs. It took him several moments to understand he was hanging upside down by his ankles. At least he wasn’t naked this time.

“Hello?” he called.

Below him, nothing moved. He shifted in confusion, and the iron shackles around his ankles clinked like little ghosts. How the hell-? The last thing he remembered was walking back to the inn from a much-needed trip to the bathhouse and someone had called his name. Now he was hanging head-down amid a bunch of trees. Most were little more than saplings, but a few were full-sized. Gavin didn’t know trees, but these certainly didn’t seem… normal. Their branches twisted as if with arthritis, and the leaves looked papery. Two or three bloomed with bright blue flowers, and bees bumbled among them.

The forest itself was contained within a domed greenhouse, three or four stories tall. Gavin’s head hung fully two of those stories above the ground. Glass walls broken into geometric designs magnified and heated angry summer sunlight. The whole place smelled green. Water trickled somewhere, and humidity made the air heavy. Breathing felt almost the same as drinking.

Poison ivy vines of fear took root and grew in Gavin’s stomach. “Hey!” Blood throbbed in his head, and his voice shook more than a little. “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?”

From around one of the trees limped a man. His back was twisted, and his sparse brown hair clumped unevenly against his skull. This and his scarred, gnarled hands gave the initial impression that he was old, but Gavin, who wasn’t yet twenty, quickly realized the man was barely older than he was himself. The man was a clockworker, and the plague had left him with physical and mental scars both.

“Shit,” Gavin muttered.

“Is he awake?” The man had a French accent. “Yes, he is awake.”

“I’m an agent of the Third Ward,” Gavin called down to him, lying. “When I don’t report in, they’ll send a team to see what happened to me. You don’t want that. Let me go, and-”

The twisted man threw a lever Gavin hadn’t noticed before, and Gavin dropped. The ground rushed up at him. His stomach lurched, and Gavin yelled. At the last moment, the twisted man threw the lever again and Gavin jerked to a stop five feet above the ground. His ankles burned with pain, and the headache sloshed hot lead inside his skull.

“I think he has no idea who I am.” The twisted clockworker pressed a scarred hand to Gavin’s upturned cheek in a strangely tender caress. The gesture created an odd convergence of opposites. Gavin’s captor stood firmly on the ground. His body was as twisted and warped as his trees, his face was scarred beneath greasy, sparse hair, and he wore a filthy robe that looked like it had once belonged to a monk. Muddy hazel eyes peered at his captive. Gavin had even features, white-blond hair, and blue eyes. His black shirt and trousers contrasted sharply with his fair skin and hair, and his fingers were straight and strong.

The clockworker cocked his head, as if hearing a voice-or voices. “Then maybe he should look around and try to remember who I am. Maybe he should.”

Gavin considered socking the clockworker, but discarded the idea-bad leverage, and even if he managed to knock the other man unconscious, he would still be trapped in the shackles. His earlier fear gnawed at him again, mingling with the pain.