The Impossible Cube

Danilo flew out of the mechanical and smacked the brick streets. He twitched once and lay still.

With her free hand, Alice gestured at the fat Cossack. “There! Go!”

The automatons skimmed over the mechanical with the shattered bubble. Alice caught a glimpse of Gavin hoisting himself with the incredible agility of a clockworker into the driver’s seat, where he took up the controls. Then her own automatons dropped her on the bubble of the fat Cossack. Click fell from her arms and she scrabbled a moment on the smooth glass before regaining her balance. Behind, the other Gontas were still trapped in the narrow street, and unlike their brother, seemed unwilling to fire on their own family, especially now that Gavin had shown the disastrous consequences of doing so. The fat Cossack in the mechanical looked up, surprised.

“Cut, Click!” Alice ordered.

Click extended hard claws and scrawled a wide circle in the glass just as he had done on the roof of L’Arbre Magnifique’s greenhouse. Alice stamped in the center, and the circle fell in, striking the Gonta on the head. He shouted at her in Ukrainian, but Alice was already giving orders to her little automatons. They zipped into the mechanical like hornets invading a beehive, snatched the fat Gonta up, and yanked him out into open air. He yelped, chins quivering. The automatons labored hard, and Alice tugged him upward as well, then kicked him over the side. He fell away, and the automatons let him go. Alice herself dropped into the opening and found herself sitting on a padded bench at the controls. Click leaped down to join her. Alice’s inborn talent with automatics let her see instantly what went where. Pedals for the legs, hand controls for the arms, a number of switches and dials for other functions. She spun the mechanical around to face the other Cossacks.

All this had happened in only a few seconds. The remaining Gontas hadn’t been expecting to be attacked. Their surprise combined with the confined space to render them helpless, but only for the moment. Already, rifles and launchers were clicking around to train on Alice. In a strategically placed mirror mounted on the controls, she could see Gavin behind her. The weapons were trained on him, too. A strange calm descended over her, as if she were sinking into a bath of ice water that sent all emotion into hibernation. Moving with care and deliberation, she made the mechanical scoop up the squawking fat Gonta in one metallic hand.

“You don’t want the circus,” Alice said into the mechanical’s speaking tube. Her voice boomed against the high gray buildings on either side of the street. “You want us. Gavin and me.”

“We will destroy you!” said one of the Cossacks. Alice couldn’t tell which, but she supposed it didn’t matter, when they spoke with one voice.

“Not today. Back up or I’ll kill him.”

“You risked your life to save dying children. You would not kill helpless man.”

That stymied Alice. The Cossack was right. She loathed the filthy Gonta-Zalizniak family, but the thought of crushing one of them in her hands, even mechanical hands, only brought up sickening memories of the dead girl. The weapons whined with power.

“Alice!” Gavin called behind her. “Duck!”

Immediately Alice dropped the mechanical into a crouch. Something flew over her head, but instead of striking any of the mechanicals, the object hit one of the nearby buildings. The thing exploded. Smoke and the sharp smell of gunpowder enveloped Alice, and Click hissed on the bench next to her. The building leaned precariously, then toppled into the street with rocky thunder. It was higher than the street was wide, so it smashed into the building across from it, creating a diagonal barrier. Alice felt the concussion thud against her very bones, and she was suddenly glad that the people had fled the surrounding structures.

The ruined building effectively blocked the street between Alice and the rest of the Cossacks and, incidentally, prevented both sides from firing at each other. Alice dropped the fat Gonta, who yelped and hobbled away on a sprained ankle.

“If you want us, come and get us,” Gavin’s voice taunted.

Alice took the cue. She and Gavin both turned their mechanicals and ran with the faint howls of Cossack outrage following behind.

“If you wanted to get them even angrier, you succeeded handily,” Alice called.

“At least they’ll be chasing us and not going after the circus,” Gavin called back. “We can’t— Shit!” He brought his mechanical up short, and Alice nearly crashed into him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s—?”

“Feng!”

A pang went through Alice. She spun her mechanical. Nearly half a block up the street, past where they had already run, stood Feng, exactly where she had left him. He was surrounded by her little mechanicals.

Feng, wait here with my spiders.

Idiot! She had ordered him to stay there, and now he couldn’t move. Even as she watched in horror, a Cossack projectile launched itself over the stony barrier blocking the street and described an arc that would carry it straight toward Feng. He looked up at it, his eyes wide despite the spider on his head.

Desperately, Alice looked at the controls of her mechanical. Her mind made quick connections, and she remembered something she had seen a mechanical guard do in the Gonta-Zalizniak house. Praying she had it right, Alice flipped two switches and yanked a lever. The projectile began to fall, whistling as it came down toward Feng. The right arm of Alice’s mechanical burst free of the main body and flew toward Feng, trailing a cable. The projectile dropped closer. Just as the mechanical’s hand hit Feng, Alice yanked back, killing the momentum and closing the fingers around Feng’s body. He made a hoik sound and Alice yanked. The spiders leaped aboard the fist right when it snatched Feng backward. The projectile hit the cobblestones and exploded, but Feng and the spiders were already well beyond its reach.

Alice held Feng up in front of her bubble. “Are you all right?”

“Do not put me through that again,” he said. “You—”

“—don’t need to save everyone. I know. Just… just shut it, Feng.” She dropped him into Gavin’s mechanical. “We have to find Dr. Clef.”

Alice ran with Gavin past the remains of the circus, hoping that the Cossacks would indeed follow them and leave the circus alone. There was nothing for it now if they didn’t—Alice and Gavin had to stop Dr. Clef. They had no time. Or, very soon, they would have an infinity of it.