The Doomsday Vault

“Believe me, Miss Michaels, we’ve had many discussions about that over the decades. Some devices are too dangerous to destroy. Other devices might turn out to be useful later. Another clockworker might invent a safeguard, for example, that makes the original device highly useful. In the end, Her Majesty decreed that we keep everything, just in case.”

“How do they create these inventions, Lieutenant?” Alice asked. “And how far can they go?”

“That’s the question that gives me nightmares, Miss Michaels. We used to think that clockworkers were bound by the laws of physics, and they could do something only if it were physically possible and they had enough money and the right equipment. But now the clockworkers are discovering that the boundaries of these physical laws are. . porous. I hear them use phrases such as gravity sinkhole and extra-temporal commutation. I think that last term has something to do with traveling in time. I’ve had two-two-clockworkers tell me that matter and energy are the same thing, and another one said he could see entire universes that occupy the same space as this one. I thought he had reached the complete lunatic point in his illness, but then he turned up with three parallel versions of himself, and it was only with great difficulty that we persuaded him to send them back. The world is very lucky that they need extensive and expensive equipment to create their most powerful inventions, or Earth would have been destroyed long ago. They create with great glee and don’t think about the repercussions, which is why the Third Ward has to search them out and bring them here, where we can keep their work in check.”

She took them to a particular door, selected a strange-looking key from a ring on her belt, and tapped it near the lock. The key rang-it was actually a tuning fork.

“C-sharp,” Gavin said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Phipps said. The lock clicked, and she pushed the door open. “This is the sound laboratory, and we need you here, Mr. Ennock.”

“Gavin!” Simon d’Arco rose from a marble worktable. “Glad you arrived. And nice to see you again, Miss Michaels.”

“It’s been only a few minutes, Mr. d’Arco,” Alice said.

“‘Simon,’ please. I said we’re very informal in the Ward.”

“Do you call the lieutenant ‘Susan’?” Alice asked, genuinely curious.

“No,” Phipps said.

“And this”-Simon gestured to another man-“is Gabriel Stark, but he prefers to be known as Doctor Clef.”

A shortish, balding man in coveralls, goggles, and a stained white coat looked up from the strange object he was working on. The object appeared to be a wire framework, but it twisted Alice’s eye. The lines of the cube came together… wrong. The more she looked at it, the more the front of the lattice seemed to fade into the back, or maybe the back was coming into the front. The man pushed his goggles onto his high forehead, revealing watery blue eyes set into a round face. “Good day,” he said in the broad, loopy tones of a north German.

“What is that thing?” Alice asked.

“Do you like it?” Dr. Clef said. “It is a cube, and it is quite impossible. Watch this.” He reached for a machine mounted on his desk. A wire led from the machine to the Impossible Cube, and when Dr. Clef spun a crank on the machine, the wires in the cube sparked and glowed blue. As Alice watched, the cube trembled, then rose a good inch above the table.

“It can fly!” Gavin gasped.

“Good heavens!” Alice said. “Is it a magician’s trick?”

“No, no.” Dr. Clef stopped cranking, and the cube dropped back to the table. “It is an alloy of my own design. When the electricity goes through the metal, it ignores gravity a little. It allows the Impossible Cube to do what it must do.”

“And what is that?” Alice asked.

Dr. Clef blinked at her. “How can I know? It is not yet finished.”

“It can fly,” Gavin muttered. “Fly!”

“Doctor Clef is one of our more prolific clockworkers,” Simon told them. “His work is currently at a delicate stage, and he didn’t want to stop, so-”

“Go on, go on.” Dr. Clef made shooing motions with his screwdriver. “Do not mind me. I make no sound.”

“So come in,” Simon said. “The laboratory awaits.”

The sound laboratory was a brightly lit stone room filled with equipment Alice didn’t recognize, some of it small, some of it large, and Alice’s fingers itched to take every piece apart and examine them from the inside. One wall was taken up by a variety of musical instruments-harp, drum, piano, violin, cello, flute, bugle, trumpet, and more. Another wall was filled with bookcases and books. Simon led Gavin to the instrument wall.

“Do you know why we’re excited to have you, Gavin?” he asked.

Gavin shook his head. He was still staring at the Impossible Cube.

“We suspect you have a musical talent of a type that appears perhaps once a generation,” Simon explained. “Or even less often.”

“How did you know he has such a musical talent?” Alice interrupted.

“Our agents heard him play in Hyde Park, and we suspected,” Phipps said. “But before we could move to find out more, he inexplicably vanished. We couldn’t find him anywhere. You can imagine our reaction when Agent Teasdale got your letter and he turned up at your home, Miss Michaels, especially since we’ve been investigating your aunt.”

“Have you?” Alice said in a chilly tone.

“Of course. She falls under our jurisdiction. We learned of your aunt’s condition several weeks ago and sent agents to investigate. When our people arrived, they found her house in a difficult state. A trap near her front door instantly killed one of my people. His name was Franklin Mayweather, and he had a wife and two children.”

Alice remembered the puddle of dried blood on the floor. Guilt stabbed her stomach, even though she’d had nothing to do with the trap or Franklin Mayweather’s death.

“My people tried to capture the woman Edwina,” Phipps continued, “but she eluded them and vanished. Her house was heavily trapped, and after some investigation, they decided the place was too dangerous for further exploration, so they left.”

“Then who demolished her laboratory?” Alice asked.

“I couldn’t say. However, apprehending Edwina is still a high priority. She has already killed Franklin Mayweather, and we need to stop her before someone else pays the same price. In addition, the clockworker who controlled those plague zombies and wreaked havoc the night of the Greenfellow ball is still at large, and we have a number of cases on the Continent we’re overseeing. In other words, we need all the agents we can lay hands on.”

“And musical talents such as Gavin’s are useful in the extreme.” Simon sat at the piano and played a single key. “What note is this?”

“B,” Gavin said, tearing his gaze away from Dr. Clef’s cube. “I have perfect pitch. You don’t need to test that.”

“Indulge me.” Simon played several notes, all of which Gavin named perfectly. Then he played chords, and Gavin named those as well. Occasionally he played one chord with one hand and another chord with the other, which Gavin helpfully pointed out. “Good, good.”

“This young man is pleasing to me,” Dr. Clef called from his worktable. “How well do you remember the music?”

“I learn fast,” Gavin said, taking out his fiddle and tuning it quickly. Alice leaned forward on her stool.

“How fast?” Dr. Clef asked.

“I’m running the tests, Doctor Clef,” Simon said. “I thought you had work to do.”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Dr. Clef bent studiously over his cube, though Alice could see him peering at Gavin, despite his goggles.

“Play something,” Gavin said.

Simon played in a minor key. Gavin listened through one verse and one chorus. Simon stopped playing, and Gavin played it through perfectly. Simon joined back in again, and Gavin played harmony. They played other songs back and forth, songs Alice couldn’t identify. Gavin’s fiddle swooped and spun, though every note echoed off hard stone. Dr. Clef gave up all pretense of working and listened. Alice heard a quiet longing in the music, a wish for