The Impossible Cube

“Go, Susan. You won’t get your justice today.”

For a long moment, she stared at him. Then she tossed one final bit of column at the stained glass, turned on her heel, and stalked out.

Heart tight with worry, Gavin ran over to Alice. She had slumped over inside the mechanical wreckage, looking pale and delicate as paper with the spider gauntlet weighing her down, but she blinked up at him when he leaned into the machinery. Simon sprawled beside her, unconscious but breathing. Thank God they were all right. The thought of Alice getting hurt made him cold inside and out, and Simon… well, even now he still thought of Simon as a friend.

“Can you walk, Alice?” Gavin said. “We shouldn’t stay.”

“I think I can manage for a bit,” she replied. “Those last few moments took a lot out of me.”

“You were magnificent,” he blurted. “Incredible!”

“Funny,” she said softly, “I was going to say the same, Mr. Ennock.”

“Your little friend will live,” Feng called from Glenda’s mechanical. “But she will have a dragon’s headache when she wakes up. Should we tie them up?”

“With what?” Gavin helped Alice out of the mechanical. “How’s the priest?”

But Berta had already arrived and was helping Monsignor Adames to his feet. He held his side and his face was pinched with pain.

“Two of your ribs are cracked and it is possible a third is broken,” Berta said, and her mechanized voice managed to sound concerned. “You must come downstairs so I can wrap them.”

Adames waved her off. “Not yet.” His breath came in gasps. “Alice and Gavin have to know. I saw… I saw… the world coming to an end in flood and plague.” He panted with the effort of speaking. “Dear God, the pain.”

“Your ribs,” Berta began.

“Not my pain,” he gasped. “The world’s. So many people will die if you fail, Alice. Millions upon millions.”

Alice struggled to more alertness. “Me?”

“You must not fail,” Adames said. “God has shown me. Oh, He has. I’m so sorry.”

Something in his tone made Gavin uneasy. “Sorry?”

“Your trials aren’t over, my children.” He was leaning heavily on Berta now. “Flood and plague will destroy us if you don’t cure the world.”

“That’s my intent,” Alice said, holding up her gauntleted hand.

Adames shook his head. “Not you. Gavin.”

“Me?” Gavin started. “But Alice has the spider, and her aunt made the fireflies.”

“That’s not what God showed me,” Adames repeated stubbornly. “You will cure the world, and Alice… Alice must let go.”

“Let go?” Alice asked. “Let go of what?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s not… it’s not like looking in a picture. It’s a dream that I know is real. Oh, Alice. Your love destroyed an empire. Now it will destroy the world as well.”

Gavin’s mouth went dry. Alice froze. “No,” she whispered.

“You have to let him go, Alice,” Adames gasped out. “You have to release him or the world will die.”

A crowd was gathering outside the enormous church, summoned by the noise. They pointed and stared at the shattered windows, but seemed unsure whether they should go inside or not. Gavin carried Alice, who was too weak to stand, and tried to blend in. He’d been forced to leave the depowered backpack behind, but he kept the lash and his cutlass and had stuffed his fiddle into Alice’s pack. Feng had the firefly jar. Alice felt disturbingly light in Gavin’s arms as he worked his way toward the back of the crowd around the church, and the spider gauntlet lay inert in her lap, though its eyes glowed red when it brushed against Gavin’s chest.

Flood and plague will destroy us if you don’t cure the world. What the hell did that mean? Gavin had never been particularly religious, and minister and priest were really no different than musician, really. Their words spun people into other worlds just like music did. Priests has no more power than Gavin himself. Yet Monsignor Adames’s words chased after him.

Your love has destroyed an empire. Now it will destroy the world.

He looked down at her in the near darkness as they moved through the bewildered people with Feng close by him. Those last words chilled him. Neither Gavin nor Alice had mentioned the Doomsday Vault or how the cure would eventually destroy the British Empire to Adames, and Phipps had said something only after Glenda had knocked Adames unconscious. He couldn’t have known, but he did know. What did that mean for the rest of his words? The crowd pressed tighter around them, pointing and staring.

“We must bring her back to the circus,” Feng said in his ear.

“It’s all about destruction,” Gavin muttered, pulling Alice tighter to him. It was getting harder to move. “Never creation. Even when we create, we destroy.”

“Gavin,” Feng said.

He shook his head. “I know, I know. I’m not… fugueing. Just thinking out—”

“No.” Feng pointed. “Look.”

Feng, and most of the other people in the heavy crowd, were pointing at the stained glass windows at the back of the nave, the panes Phipps had flung casual stones at. The broken panes formed a pattern, one Gavin hadn’t noticed backward, inside the church. Outside, the broken glass formed a clear symbol: v2.