The Impossible Cube

—and saw that it was a woman. He knew her. He… had feelings for her. He struggled for a moment. She had broken his concentration, which made him angry, but she was also someone to be trusted, someone he didn’t want to be angry at. The contradictory feelings warred for a split second, equally matched.

Alice. Her name was Alice. The new fact tipped the balance, and in a flash he remembered that she wasn’t someone who deserved disdain. He twisted inside like a cat changing its mind in midleap and yanked back the retort.

“Alice?” he gasped, and realized he was panting. A trickle of sweat slid down his cheek. “What’s going on?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.” She had changed into trousers, which Gavin found strangely attractive on a woman. They accentuated her hips and showed her legs. She was wearing a tighter-fitting blouse as well, and it clung to her neck and breasts. Her braided hair caught the moon and held it. The silvery light shifted, moving in a shower of particles, then splashing as a wave, but doing both at the same time, just as the Impossible Cube had twisted and changed before his eyes. It was beautiful and terrible all at once, and Gavin couldn’t look away if he wanted to. For a moment it was hard to breathe.

“What is that?” she asked. “Did you make it?”

Gavin held up the object in question. An eight-foot braided lash trailed to the deck from a heavy brass handle, and the handle connected to a cord that ran to a backpack with a battery in it. Dr. Clef’s power cannon lay dead on the deck, its brass entrails scattered across the wood.

“It looks like a whip,” said Feng, who had also climbed up. He was dressed in what looked to Gavin like soft black pajamas from head to foot. “Show us, please.”

Gavin shook off the last of the clockwork daze. He shrugged into the backpack and flicked a switch on the handle. A low thrum—D-flat, he automatically noted—throbbed across his ears and pulsed against his palm. The metal lash glowed incandescent blue. The weight eased in his hand as the power pushed Dr. Clef’s alloy away from gravity. Gavin swung. The whip flicked through the air, quick as a demon’s tongue, and slashed at the barrel of the power cannon. The barrel didn’t move. For a moment, neither did anyone else. Then the barrel fell neatly into two halves that thudded to the deck.

There was a long, long pause.

“I watched someone called the Great Mordovo cut his assistant in half this afternoon,” Feng said at last. “I do not believe you should show this to him.”

Alice swallowed visibly and shifted her pack. “That took you all of half an hour to make?”

“I didn’t keep track of the time.” Gavin flicked the switch off. The glow vanished, and the whip grew heavy in his hand again. He coiled it and hung it on the right side of his belt, opposite his glass cutlass.

“You must be careful,” Dr. Clef admonished, approaching from his previously safe distance. “Every slash takes power, you know, and the battery does not last forever.”

“Then let’s go now,” Gavin said.

“I’ll carry your fiddle,” Alice said.

The three of them slipped away from the circus and hurried down the city streets. Gavin led the way, since he knew where they were going, and Feng brought up the rear, with Alice in the middle. The air that stole over Gavin was growing chilly and damp, with an early breath of autumn to it. In the distance, a church bell repeated a dark F that pressed lonely against his ears. A scattering of lights glowed in houses or shops, but most windows were dark, and the moon coasted through a field of stars like a bright airship through a cloud of fireflies. Even the public houses were closed at this time of night, and the trio had no good reason to be on the street, which meant any gendarme would stop them for questioning. Gavin slid into another shadow, trying to control his nervousness. The cutlass and whip lent him a whiff of power, but one pistol shot could bring him down, or worse, bring down Alice. Gavin didn’t know if Phipps intended to capture or kill at this point, but capture would mean transport back to England for hanging, so it didn’t make much difference. He kept one hand on the smooth whip handle.

A pair of horses clip-clopped from around the corner ahead of them. Gavin grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her into an alleyway. Her backpack clinked slightly, and the noise made Gavin’s heart jerk. Feng seemed to have disappeared. The riders rounded the corner and trotted down their street. Gavin pressed himself face-first against the rough alley wall, leaving the pack’s uneven shape sticking out. He could hear Alice’s butterfly breathing next to him, feel her body heat mingling with his. She clutched his fiddle case, and he felt oddly comforted that she held it. When the pirate captain had threatened to throw it off the Juniper, it had felt like the man’s filthy fingers were running over Gavin’s soul, but Alice’s touch made him feel that the fiddle was safe, even with danger only a few steps away.

The horses clopped past the mouth of the alley, and moonlight gleamed off pistols holstered at the riders’ belts. Gavin held his breath. He had turned his face away from the street so his fair skin wouldn’t catch a stray beam of light, and he was looking right into Alice’s eyes, just visible in the scattered wave of photons. They were wide and brown and beautiful, even when filled with unease.

One of the riders paused at the alley mouth and said something in French to his companion, who also paused. Fear made blood pulse in Gavin’s ears. Alice’s lips parted, and her breath came in short gasps, but she didn’t move. The man spoke again, every word as harsh as a drop of melted lead.

And then they were gone, their horses trotting away to fade in the distance. The weight of fear vanished so quickly, Gavin thought he might float away. The tension went out of Alice’s body as well. Gavin surprised himself by leaning in and kissing her. She stiffened again, then kissed back, her mouth warm on his. When they parted, he pressed his forehead against hers.

“Why were we scared?” Alice murmured. “You could have torn them in half with that whip.”

“I could have,” Gavin replied. “That’s exactly why I was scared.”

The street was still empty, no sign of Feng. A cough over Gavin’s head made him grab for the whip, but Alice put her hand on his arm. Feng was perched on a windowsill two stories above them. His dark clothing made him look like the shadow of a spider. Carefully but steadily, using rough bricks and other windowsills for footholds, he descended to the sidewalk.

“I’m impressed,” Alice asked.

“I have climbed in and out of a number of windows in my life,” Feng said. “More than once with a husband in hot pursuit. It is interesting how well one can climb with the correct motivation.”