The Impossible Cube

Alice made a low sound.

“I wish you’d been wearing your boots instead of just shoes,” she muttered. “They might have protected you better. Does this hurt?” She gently massaged his ankles.

“Yes,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “But don’t stop.”

She looked up at him, and he saw tenderness in her eyes. It melted the pain and relaxed every muscle in his body. He slumped in the chair, unable to move as her strong, careful fingers went over his feet and worked at the muscles.

“Oh my God, I love you,” he groaned. “Always and always.”

“And I love you always,” she replied. “Even when you blaspheme.”

“You blasphemed just a second—”

“Now you need to explain what happened, starting from the moment Antoine took you.”

“Not yet, Madam.” A mechanical man emerged from belowdecks. His features were only painted on, as was his black-and-white outfit, yet he carried himself as if he were starched and fully clothed. The only hint of expression lay in the flickering firefly lights that made up his eyes. He set a laden tea tray on a deck table beside the spot where Alice knelt. “You haven’t eaten since Sir was captured. And then you must have a massage yourself to ease the tension.”

“Wonderful, Kemp.” Dr. Clef rubbed his hands together. “Do you have any of those lacy sugar cookies? I have had quite a craving, and the patterns twist through dimensional rifts on golden wings.”

“You have had your tea, Doctor,” Kemp said. “I will make more if I have time, but I have more important concerns at the moment.”

The cake and sandwiches on the tray sent up smells that called to Gavin’s stomach, though he wasn’t yet willing to move away from Alice’s ministrations. “What time is it?” he asked, trying to get a glimpse of the sun around the envelope.

“Two fifteen,” Kemp replied. “Tuesday.”

Gavin bolted upright, and Alice released his foot. “Tuesday? How long was I—?”

“You’ve been missing for three days, darling.” Alice took a teacup, which rattled in her metallic hand. “It’s been hell.”

“Three days?” Gavin sank back onto the chair and bit into a ham sandwich without really paying attention to it. “I thought it was only a night.”

“Antoine has powerful sleep drugs,” Feng said.

Gavin stared past Alice at calm, blue infinity. He should feel safe, at home in the ship he had created with his own hands. She ignored gravity, soared silent currents, explored the limits of daylight. Set him free. But all he felt was violated, stripped of his clothes and then his skin. He wondered how long he had hung unconscious in Antoine’s greenhouse, a piece of meat in the hands of a twisted homunculus. His gorge rose, and then he was at the gunwale, the few bites of sandwich falling to the forest far below. The pieces seemed to fall slowly, pushing aside the billions of tiny bits that made up the air. The bits rubbed against the falling pieces and raised their temperature as they fell closer to hell.

“We could harvest the energy of the pieces,” he said. “The billions of bits would make a hellfire and cook twisted hunks of homunculus.”

“Sir?” Kemp handed him a cup of tea. Gavin swished and spat over the side. The tea spread in both droplets and a stream, both wave and particle. He watched it, an eternity caught in a split second. Then the tea vanished.

“Wave to particles,” he muttered. “Wave them away.”

Alice had had the good sense to keep her seat, though her face tightened as Gavin sat back down in his own chair. “You’re talking like a clockworker,” she said, her voice heavy with worry. “It’s already starting, isn’t it?”

“It’s all mixed up inside me, Alice.” He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to cheer up, but the violation and the fear dragged him down. “I’m sorry. Your aunt knocked me out, locked me in that tower of hers, and infected me with this plague. She treated me like a piece of meat. So did the pirates who captured the Juniper and made me fiddle for them. Now I learn Antoine held me for longer than I knew. He stole time from me, and I don’t have time to steal.”

She took his hand across the tea tray. “We’ll get to China. If anyone can cure clockworkers, they can.”

“The Dragon Men are very powerful,” Feng agreed from the helm. “They can do anything.”

“Hmm.” Dr. Clef opened a chest and unrolled an enormous chart on a table near the helm. “Peking is approximately seven thousand miles away, if we fly over Istanbul and the Gobi Desert. We could detour south into India, around the Himalayas, but that would add another four thousand miles or so. This ship’s top speed is fifty miles per hour. If we travel for twelve hours each day, the journey will take us approximately twelve days.”

“That’s all?” Alice said. “It doesn’t seem like—”

“This is also assuming,” Dr. Clef continued, “that the ship always travels at top speed—it cannot—and that we have the wind behind us—we do not—and that the engines or helium extractors never break down—they will—and that the sky never sends us any bad weather—it shall—or that any number of other delays do not delay us. I believe it will take closer to two months, perhaps three.”

“Oh.” Alice nibbled her sandwich as a cloud drifted past. “Well, that will still be plenty of time. He was infected last May. It’s only late August.”

“It is not much time,” said Dr. Clef. “He is already beginning to babble. You see things, don’t you, boy? Beautiful things. Like the universe is handing you its keys, one by one.”

Gavin thought about his vomit and the falling tea water. “Yes.”

“And you love and hate the tritones,” Dr. Clef continued. “Square root of two, lovely and deadly as infinity.”