The Impossible Cube

monocle. “He has a very interesting jar in one hand and a pistol in the other, but he won’t fire, either because he’s too cowardly or because I’m not attacking you right now. Which is it, boy?”

Feng, wherever he was, didn’t answer. Phipps threw two more pieces, shattering two more priceless panes.

“Stop it!” Alice said. “It’s senseless!”

“Let God stop me. If He cares.” She threw more and more pieces, and each one blacked out a piece of glass. “I could hit you easily enough, you know.”

“No,” Gavin said. He had dropped the backpack and snatched up the cutlass again. His hands were steady as icicles. “You couldn’t.”

“You’re probably right. Clockworker reflexes.” Toss. Smash. “Those reflexes and that strength come at a price, you know. The plague burning through your body’s resources.” Toss. Smash. “How does it feel, Ennock, knowing that the plague is devouring your brain from the inside out? How does it feel to know you won’t last the year with your lady love?” Toss, smash. “How does it feel to know that she’ll cry over your grave for a while and move on to someone else? She already left one man.”

Her words were light as pebbles, but they slammed Gavin with the force of cannonballs. His grip on the cutlass loosened, and he only just remembered to keep it ready. “You’re just… trying to make me feel bad.”

“Of course,” Phipps replied conversationally. Toss. Smash. “I want you to feel bad about what you’re doing, Gavin, because it is bad. You’ve done wrong. You are doing wrong.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Alice gasped from the safety of her mechanical barricade. The rush that had carried her through the fight was wearing off, and it was clear she was struggling to stay conscious.

Phipps flicked a rock in her direction, but Alice ducked into the mechanical, and it pinged off metal. Gavin’s anger started up again. Phipps interrupted it. “You know I’m right, Gavin. It’s bloody scary out here. Chaotic. Difficult. Imperfect. So many choices, so many paths, so many roads, and no resources to help with them. You always miss the mark.”

“Silence!” Feng called from the shadows. “Or I shoot.”

“If you were going to shoot, you would have,” Phipps countered. “You’re a coward, Feng. Otherwise you would have stood up to your father when he said he planned to send you home in disgrace. But you know that, don’t you, Feng? It’s why you’re slinking home like a castrated dog with his tail tucked between his legs. The longer you stay with these people, the worse it will become, you know. They don’t appreciate you. They’re bringing you home to your doom.”

“Quiet!” Alice was trying to shout, but the words came out in a harsh whisper that spun through the room and wrapped themselves around the Consolatrix. Feng didn’t respond, but Gavin thought he heard a choked sound from the shadows.

Toss, smash. Phipps turned back to Gavin. “You can build whatever you want at the Ward, Gavin. It’s calm there. Quiet. Patterned. Perfect. Every day, every room, every meal. No chaos, no confusion, no disorder. Come back to us. You won’t hang for treason, not if you’re a clockworker. We like you, want you, need you.”

Her words, her tone, her ideas were hypnotic as music. He remembered the underground rooms where the clockworkers lived and worked at Third Ward headquarters, their regular stonework walls, the patterns, the perfect schedule. When he was training as an agent, he’d found the required regularity difficult, even stifling, but now it sounded attractive, even alluring. The world would make sense there. Gavin realized he had sheathed the cutlass and taken a step toward Phipps.

“Gavin!” Alice croaked. “Don’t!”

“It’s beautiful down there now,” Phipps cooed. “We’ve already made repairs after what you did, after what you hurt, after what you destroyed. We made it pretty and patterned and perfect. Patterns within patterns, spirals within spirals. No worries, no troubles, no cares. No fear, no dread, no fright. Just the machines. Orderly, mannerly, heavenly machines.”

Her words wrapped him in warm velvet. It would be so fine to have a place where he didn’t have to think and plan all the time, where worries evaporated, where patterns ruled. What had he been thinking, running away from all that in the first place?

He was vaguely aware of someone, another woman, shouting something at him, and the shadowy figure of a man stepping out of the darkness, but Phipps, beautiful, kind Phipps, flipped a stone at the man, and he retreated. Phipps always hit her mark. The shouting woman’s words washed past him like tiny waves, easily ignored. He took another step.

“We can give you a cure, you know,” Phipps said. “I told you before we had more cures than the one Edwina created in the Doomsday Vault. We can cure clockworkers, too.”

This jolted Gavin. The perfection cracked, the velvet vanished, and he realized he was nearly face-to-face with Phipps. “Cure? There is no cure for clockworkers.”

Too late Phipps saw her mistake. Her single eye blinked rapidly. “Of course not, of course not. What I meant was that you can look for a cure. The Ward has resources, anything you need to find one, seek one, look for—”

“You’re very good,” Gavin said quietly. “Distract, pacify, capture, right? That’s the pattern. We do it with Dr. Clef all the time, except we use Click.”

Phipps narrowed her eye. “I’ll take you now, boy.”

“No, you won’t. Without Glenda and Simon, you’re outnumbered and outmatched, and if you touch me, Feng really will shoot. You wanted me to go with you on my own. I won’t, Susan. You’ll put my head in a noose.”

“I want justice, boy,” she hissed. “I want what’s right. You destroyed my empire and even now you hurt Simon and Glenda.”

“Leave, Susan,” Gavin told her. “You let me walk away from the Doomsday Vault, so I’ll let you do the same here. Next time I’ll probably change my mind.”

“Because you’ll be completely mad?”