They stood in melancholy silence for a long moment. Then Alice said, “Do you know what I miss? I miss Kemp.”
“Kemp?”
“Right about now, when I’m feeling unhappy-when
“He was good, wasn’t he?”
“I know he was only an automaton, but. .”
“Yeah. I know.”
Gavin peered forward into the darkness, though the only light was the soft blue glow of the
Alice’s arm slid around his waist. She was still wearing the voluminous Turkmen dress, and the cloth whispered against his white leathers. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said quietly. “And we’re doing the right thing.”
“How do you know?” A lump formed in Gavin’s throat, and the words came out sounding harsher than he intended.
“Because I can’t imagine a world without you in it,” she said. “Because I don’t want to live in such a world, and because I’m quite comfortable risking my life to extend yours.”
“What if we get to China and they kill you?” His arm was still around her shoulders, and he pulled her closer while he stared fiercely ahead. “I can’t live knowing I caused your death. I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“It’s my decision, darling.” Alice leaned into him, and he held tightly to her. The eyes on her spider gauntlet glowed red between them. The clockwork plague was always there.
After a moment, she said, “Play for me?”
Gavin couldn’t have refused her request any more than rain could refuse to fall. Alice took the helm while he retrieved his fiddle from his cabin and tuned it.
“Something quick,” she said. “If you play something slow, I’ll melt. I just know it.”
With a small smile, Gavin took out his fiddle, tuned up, and played the first song that came to mind. His voice rang off the ropes and bounced off the envelope:
“Tom o’ Bedlam” was the unofficial anthem of all airmen. The endless verses and a tune made for pounding out on a wooden deck teamed with the idea that airmen were handsome, a little bit crazy, and never wanted for drink or money. It created immense appeal, so much so that the ritual for a cabin boy becoming a true airman at age eighteen involved his climbing in his underwear from the lowest deck below to the highest point of the envelope above-going bare and living by the air. Pirates had attacked Gavin’s ship the
He shook his head and kept singing, the fiddle his accompaniment.
Alice was tapping her hands on the helm to the song, and even though Gavin had played the song a thousand times, he became nervous about making a mistake. He always felt this way when he played for an audience, no matter how sympathetic. It always seemed as if the listeners were waiting for him to make an error, ready to laugh or pounce.
For a flicker of a moment Gavin was in a different place. A tall, tall man was standing over him, a man with pale hair and broad shoulders and strong hands. Gavin’s fingers felt tiny on the strings; the bow grew larger.
The memories were little more than shades, but he could almost touch them. For years Gavin had thought he had no memories of his father, but after he had been infected with the clockwork plague, some of them had come back. His father had left long ago, leaving a hole in Gavin’s life. He wanted to know what his father was like, who he had been.
Why he had left.
A deep ache made his ribs hurt. He knew he must have done something terrible to drive his father away. Ma never spoke of him. Gavin didn’t even know his name. It was ridiculous to miss someone he had never really known, and yet he did. The music was a gift left behind by a faceless angel, a man dead and gone.
But a circus fortune-teller named Madam Fabry had told Gavin with absolute certainty that not only was his father still alive, but that their paths would cross soon. He still remembered every detail of the card she had shown him, the fair-haired king holding a cup while water flowed all around him. Gavin didn’t much believe fortune-tellers, but everything else Madam Fabry had predicted had come true. He found he was hoping and dreading at the same time-hoping because he wanted to talk to his father before the plague took him, yet dreading because he knew that finding out the truth about his father’s leaving would hurt in some way.
The song ended. He lowered the bow.
“Thank you, darling,” Alice said. “You saw your father, didn’t you?”
“How do you always know?” he asked, half in complaint.
“I remember what Madam Fabry said, too,” she said, ignoring the question. “If you believe in that nonsense. Which I don’t.”
“Linda’s usually right,” Gavin reminded her. “And Monsignor Adames said flood and plague will destroy us if I don’t cure the world, and he said you have to let me go or the world will die.”
“Now, you see?” Alice sighed. “This is exactly what I mean. I’m the one carrying the cure, not you, and it’s not as if you’re my prisoner to release. Prophecies and fortunes work only in storybooks.”
“God, I hope so. The thought that you and I could be responsible for saving-or destroying-the world-”
“Again,” Alice put in.
