Alice understood. He could take the Cube away from the earth. Up there, he could deal with it, detonate it or destroy it or—
The words Monsignor Adames had spoken to Gavin came back to her. “You will cure the world, and Alice . . . Alice must let go.”
She met Gavin’s eyes. She knew, and he knew. If she let him go, if she released him from the Jade Hand, he could take the Cube away, stop it from destroying the world. But releasing all that power would kill him. The sword became a heavy weight in her hand. She tried to think. There had to be a way around this.
“Gavin,” she said softly.
He managed a tiny nod. Emotion swelled, and tears pricked at her eyes. She remembered the moment she’d met him, when he’d given her a cheerful wave from high up in the tower where Aunt Edwina had imprisoned him. He was always bright and merry, and his music and his voice made her heart soar. How could she ever let him go? He was the one person who loved her as deeply as she loved him. The thought of a world without him made her want to lie down and die herself.
“I can’t,” she said. “Gavin, I just can’t.”
The Cube deepened from yellow to green. The tremors strengthened. More cracks began to appear in the walls around the Forbidden City. Alice felt the tension in her feet. Lightning blasted the air above them both. Phipps tried to get to her feet and fell back again. Li lay beside her.
“Please . . .” The sound of Gavin’s voice was barely audible. He was fighting the Jade Hand’s control. “Alice . . .”
It would be so easy, so simple to refuse. Gavin was going to die no matter what. What would it matter if she and everything else vanished as well? No one would know she had failed, because they’d all be dead, too. How many times had doomsday weapons come close to destroying the world? Maybe it was time for one to succeed.
The Cube shifted to bright blue. A great crack opened up in the courtyard. Some of the smaller buildings in the Imperial City collapsed, and the great pavilion behind Alice swayed noticeably. Over the noise, Alice heard screams and cries rising from Peking.
What was she doing? She couldn’t condemn millions to death, no matter how much pain it might cause her. With a scream of her own, Alice, Lady Michaels, lashed down with her sword and sliced off the Jade Hand.
Chapter Seventeen
Gavin’s muscles unlocked and he nearly stumbled. The Impossible Cube, bright blue in his hands, glowed with so much power, it felt both hot as the sun and cold as the void of space. He could feel it lashing out, gripping gravity and pulling at it, tearing at the roots of the planet itself. It would tilt the planet and bring the water. Su Shun had ordered him to push it into the Ebony Chamber and create the ultimate weapon, one that would let him command China, conquer Britain, control the world. But nothing could command, conquer, or control this.
The Jade Hand lay limp on the cracked stairs. More beautiful than a warrior queen, Alice Michaels stood over Su Shun’s unconscious form, the quivering sword in one hand, gauntlet shielding the other. Tearing wind blew her hair around her head. The Impossible Cube lay in his hands between them. His world moved around her, but he had to leave her to save it. Fatigue pulled at him, and the Cube was oddly heavy. His wings pulled at his aching back. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t leave her alone again. What was the point? He wanted nothing more than to hold Alice and wait for it all to end.
“Go!” Alice shouted. “It’s your time, Gavin! Go now!”
He shook his head. “I left you once, Alice. I won’t do it again. I’m tired, Alice. I’m tired of fighting the plague and fighting for the world. Eventually one of these stupid weapons we make will succeed. Why not let this one do it and get it over with so we can be together?”
Alice looked stricken. Tears stood in her eyes. “You can’t, Gavin. You have to go. Take the Cube away.”
He kissed her. “No. I’m finished, Alice. I’ve gone through hell once. I’m not doing it again.”
“Oh, Gavin.” She dropped the sword and put her hands on his wrists. More lightning sundered the sky. “Gavin, please. I don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this.”
“Do what?”
Her voice was measured, but there was a catch in it. “Don’t you see it, darling? Look at the sky. Look at the clouds, the mist, the air.” She was crying now, tears flowing in twin streams down her face. “And the Cube. The patterns on its back, its middle, its front. The patterns move and shift, move and glow. Aren’t they fascinating? It’s a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. Regularity inside regularity, infinite inside infinite.”
Her voice, still audible over the shaking earth and growling thunder, reached inside him. He knew what she was doing, but still he couldn’t stop it. The plague roared to life. The patterns she had mentioned were obvious now. He could see fractals in the clouds, patterns made of smaller patterns that repeated endlessly downward. The Cube was doing the same thing, creating more and more patterns. He couldn’t stop looking at them. Now that she had pointed them out, he didn’t want to.
“You want to have a closer look,” she said. “You can fly, glide, soar, and examine, scrutinize, inspect.”
“Alice . . . ,” he whispered, and then took off with great sweeps of his mechanical wings. She spiraled down beneath him, and he caught “I love you always” as he flew away.
The Impossible Cube glowed a deep indigo as he clawed for altitude. The battery indicator on his wrist said he was running low, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had plenty of height, that he could reach the clouds. His ears popped, and he swallowed. An enormous lightning bolt zipped past him, missing him by only a hundred yards and filling his nose with ozone. Thunder boomed. Then the air grew cold and quiet, and damp mist closed in all about him, though it also felt heavy. The perfect crystalline chime kept him aloft and free, nothing holding him down, nothing holding him back. He rose above the cloud layer, trailing bits of mist. The clouds spread in all directions beneath a perfect silver moon. Flashes of red and blue light rushed about beneath his feet, and the Impossible Cube sent out its terrible, beautiful indigo glow. The patterns were so enticing. He stared at them, lost and thrilled. This was what he had been born for, and Alice had let him go.
He stared down at the Cube, rushing in and down now as he had rushed out and up before, finding the designs that made up designs, tiny particles made of particles made up of particles. And there they were, caught in the dance—the little pairs. The Impossible Cube had them, too. They turned and moved together. What one did, the other did. They were all connected. Particle and particle. Void and solid. Water and fire. Air and earth. China and England. Clockworker and Dragon Man. Cube and Chamber.
The Cube’s countless particles had all changed color. He could see it now. They were supposed to be paired with the particles in the Ebony Chamber, but they weren’t. They were pairing with particles in the earth, with particles that stabilized matter and made up gravity and affected time. When the Cube’s particles turned, so did the ones in the earth, and when enough of them turned, the planet would tilt.
But Gavin could see it now. If the Cube’s particles paired with something else, the Cube’s grip on the earth would relax, and nothing would happen. All he had to do was redirect the pairing. He could do that if he understood the particles and became one with them so they answered his touch. He had to go down farther again, as he had almost done before.
The Cube’s glow shifted again. It was a deep violet now, and the storm below Gavin’s feet was growing more intense. The battery gauge on his wrist gave him only a few minutes more power as well. All this he was aware of 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 could do it. He had only to achieve perfection and the balance would be his. Perfection was the key to—
Uri’s voice came to him as if from a book of wisdom. “Perfection doesn’
t exist, kid. One mistake doesn’t ruin the entire song any more than a single ripple ruins an entire stream.”
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 changed. They paired with countless trillions of particles hidden away in millions of human bodies all across the planet.
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. He was cured. And he was still alive and well. The prophecy had been wrong. The storm at his feet rumbled and flickered. He glanced at the battery dial. A few seconds left. He could make it back to Earth if he hurried. The young man dove through the clouds.
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 face on her filthy sleeve. “What next?”
“I don’t know,” Phipps replied. “This didn’t come out anything like we’d planned. If only—”
The sound silenced them all. The purest, most beautiful sound Alice had ever heard reached through her, stil
ling all her fears like a gentle hand calming stormy water. The sweetness of it made her heart ache to bursting. It touched every part of her and filled her with love and peace and serenity. And most of all, the sound was utterly familiar.
“Gavin,” she whispered.
He had done this once before, but on a smaller scale, beneath the headquarters of the Third Ward. His voice and the Impossible Cube had lifted her and cleansed her, washed her clean. Now it was happening everywhere, to everyone.
The entrancing sound rang on and on. Looks of peace and happiness crossed the faces of Susan and Li and Lady Orchid and Cricket and the soldiers and the Dragon Men. The sound continued for countless moments, filling the entire world, and Alice couldn’t imagine how anything so wonderful could possibly end. But then it did, and she wept again, feeling the deep loss of love and beauty.
“Oh, Gavin,” she called to the sky, “what did you do?”
There was a soft meow. Click was sitting next to the Ebony Chamber, looking at Alice with quizzical green eyes.
“Click?” Alice said. “Where did you—?”
Lightning flicked across the sky and thunder crashed. A strange feeling went through her left forearm and her hand. With a series of soft clinks, the iron spider that had burrowed into her flesh and drunk her blood all those months ago released itself. Quietly, and without pain, it slid off her arm and thumped to the ground next to the Jade Hand. The glowing eyes went dark.
Alice held up her lightened arm and hand in wonder. It felt as if the limb might float away.
“Are you all right?” Phipps asked. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s so strange. Why did it let go now?”
All around the courtyard, the Dragon Men put their hands to their ears. The salamanders came away. They flung them aside or dropped them or crushed them in their hands with yells of joy.
“They are cured,” said Lady Orchid, with Li translating a moment later. “I think the blessing of dragons is gone.”
The Dragon Men Page 27