even as he examined particles so small and so fast, they barely seemed to exist at all.
He reached down and in with his clumsy musician’s fingers. The particles scattered before him. He had to do this, find the balance. He
Uri’s voice came to him as if from a book of wisdom.
But that wasn’t true. It was entirely possible to play the perfect song, build the perfect ship.
Be the perfect husband.
Perfect lover.
Perfect son.
But perfection was impossible, and anything that was impossible was therefore flawed. Perfection was therefore imperfect. It was a strange symmetry, an odd balance. Gavin shook with the implications.
Secrets whispered at him, pulled his mind in a thousand directions, pulled him away from the particles. But away was also toward. Out was in. No matter which direction he went, it would be the right one. He let himself go, released his hold on everything, and let a universe of particles and atoms and molecules and lattices and planets and quarks and stars and galaxies all rush through him all at once. He was a river, one piece that nonetheless flowed from beginning to end. He let go of Gavin Ennock.
An explosion rushed through him. He felt himself everywhere and nowhere, light and darkness, separate and together. He was himself and he was the universe because they were both the same thing. A calm ecstasy filled him. There was nothing more he needed now.
He found himself pulled toward a single particle. With negligent ease, he pulled himself toward it and looked inside, even though he already knew what was in it. He found himself looking at the entire universe again from the top down. And within that universe was a galaxy, and within that galaxy was a star, and around that star orbited a planet, and above that planet hovered a young man who didn’t need a name anymore, for a name only served to separate him.
The Impossible Cube was fading, shifting into a spectrum of light not visible to the naked eye. But the young man could still feel the Cube in his hands. In fact, he could feel his entire body, every organ and cell and neuron and protein and molecule of water. He saw the microscopic plants clinging to his brain cells, and he saw another balance-plague and cure. Yes.
The Impossible Cube had warped time and sent the clockwork plague from the tortured present into the innocent past. The plague had then created clockworkers and a society that loved and feared them. One of those early clockworkers had created the Ebony Chamber, a balance for the future Impossible Cube. Or perhaps the Ebony Chamber had forced the creation of the Impossible Cube as a balance for itself. And then one day, a clockworker had created the Impossible Cube, which had warped time and sent the plague into the past.
The plague itself was destroying the world because the plague had no balance. Alice’s cure wasn’t powerful enough. The world-the universe-needed something bigger to correct itself.
The young man reached into the disappearing Cube. There was the energy, and there were the particles pairing up with the wrong partners. The battery indicator on his wrist gave him only a minute of wing power, but he wasn’t watching that. He reached down and felt a single person, a man walking through the streets of Peking below with newfound strength. The young man above looked into the older man below and saw Alice’s touch there; he noted how the cure devoured the plague, how the particles spun and danced. He saw the vibrations; he used his perfect pitch to match the frequency. Thanks to her, he could see exactly what needed to be done. He took a deep breath, filling every sac in his lungs, and-
He.
SANG.
The long note rang like a trumpet, a thousand orchestras of brass, so powerful and sweet, it reached every corner of the world. It slid over mountains and caressed the forests. It stilled oceans and hushed deserts. Everywhere on Earth, people stopped what they were doing and looked up at the sky, entranced by the force and beauty of that one note. Later, no one was able to agree on what the sound was or where it came from, only that it made the heart ache with longing. People wept in houses and streets and factories and farms and fields as if they had awoken from the sweetest dream and only now realized what they had lost.
The Cube took the sound and twisted it. The note, sung with the absolute precision of one who understood the universe from the ground up and the stars down, changed the Cube. Its particles
They paired with the particles that made up the clockwork plague.
The little particles. . shifted. As one, they made a quarter turn and changed color. A fundamental change took place. All across the world, the microscopic plants that clung to human tissue and created the clockwork plague cracked and fell into their component parts. The young man saw it happen in his own brain; he watched the disease dissolve and disappear.
Power streamed out of the Cube as the young man sang the plague away. The Cube’s glow faded. It turned dark, and still the young man sang. There were still pockets of plague here and there in the world, and he tracked them down, singing them into oblivion with the voice of creation. The Cube cracked. The lattices Dr. Clef had painstakingly constructed fell apart as the young man drained the power that held them together. The Cube crumbled, and still the young man sang, directing the power safely away from the Cube and into the plague. As the last bit of the disease vanished and died, the Cube dissolved into a fine dust that blew away on the wind. The salamander in his ear pulled painlessly away and fell into the dark cloud.
The young man hung there a moment. It was over. The plague was gone. The world was cured.
A lightning bolt struck him full on. It cracked through his body and sizzled and scorched. The wing harness shattered, scattering glowing blue rings in all directions. Energized by the electricity and still defying gravity, they hung like water droplets while the young man plunged to the ground.
Chapter Eighteen
Alice watched Gavin vanish into the sky, trailing blue light as he went. It was the last she would ever see of him. The trembling Earth dragged at her, weighing down every bone and muscle. Her heart was an aching black hole in her chest. He was gone. Gavin was gone, and she would never see him, never touch him, never hear his musical voice. How could she go on without him? The world was dead.
Lady Orchid and Cricket, still dripping wet, arrived at the bottom of the steps. Phipps and Li also finally regained their feet. They all climbed up to Alice.
“What happened?” Phipps said, but Alice couldn’t speak. She could only look to the sky. Phipps followed her gaze and then looked at Su Shun and the Jade Hand and the Ebony Chamber and seemed to work out what was going on.
“I’m so sorry, Alice,” she said softly. “We’ll see that he’s remembered forever.”
It all crashed in at once-months of travel, weeks of stress, days of holding herself together, and all for nothing. After a lifetime of foiling the impossible, Alice did one thing it never occurred to her she might do: She collapsed, weeping, into the arms of Lieutenant Susan Phipps. Startled, Phipps froze a moment, then held her tight, patting her back and making soothing sounds.
“He’s gone, Susan,” Alice cried. “I pushed him away, and now he’s gone.”
“You had to do it. He knows you had to do it,” she murmured. “He loves you, and he knows.”
Lady Orchid, meanwhile, was cradling her wrist stump and examining the Jade Hand without touching it. Su Shun still lay unconscious on the steps next to it in his lacquered armor. More tremors shook the courtyard, forcing everyone to stagger for balance. Cricket clung to his mother.
Alice stood upright again. Her eyes felt hot and puffy. She had no handkerchief and was forced to wipe her
