Since Lieutenant Li’s men already knew what was going on, Prince Kung had posted a handful of them at each of the exits, though whether to keep the foreigners safe or ensure they didn’t escape, Gavin wasn’t quite sure. They showed him a great deal of deference, however, and the salamander made strange weight around his ear. He tried not to think about the bit of machinery it had inserted into his brain or Cixi’s revelation about the clockwork plague, but it was difficult. He found the chopsticks becoming heavy in his hand, and his appetite faded.
The Lady of Liberty herself was partly dismantled. Gavin had arrived in the building to find Kung’s men had deflated her envelope and folded it neatly. The endoskeleton had been collapsed in on itself and rolled up, as it had been designed to do, and both endoskeleton and envelope lined the gunwale. The paraffin oil generator purred to itself and puffed steam. Gavin’s wing harness was attached to it. Now that they weren’t flying anywhere, he could use the generator to charge the battery. Not that he was going to fly anywhere in the near future. He saw a long line of devastating failures stretch out before him: Alice hadn’t been able to spread her cure as they had hoped; he had finished a pair of wings but barely used them; and, not least, he was dying of the clockwork plague.
Damn it, he hated this. He hated feeling unhappy (though who enjoyed it?), and he hated feeling so out of balance. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t him. It must be the clockwork plague. Or was it? Could he blame all his problems on the disease? It would certainly be convenient, a nice way of avoiding a depressing truth. He poked morosely at his food bowl, the chopsticks clumsy in his hands.
“Having trouble, darling? Here.” Alice plucked a bit of something from her bowl and held it out to Gavin, who wryly accepted it. Click, who was sitting on a stool of his own, watched with vague interest, then licked a paw with his steel wool tongue.
“Delicious,” Gavin pronounced.
“Feeding tidbits to your fiance.” Phipps set her own bowl aside. “I believe the term for that is twee.”
“What’s the point of having a fiance if one cannot indulge in his tweeness?” Alice said.
Gavin choked on the bit of food and coughed wildly. Phipps thumped his back with her brass arm. Alice sipped some tea with a perfectly straight face.
“What?” she said. “You know I’ve always admired your tweeness, Gavin. It’s so noticeable.”
Now even Phipps’s face was turning red. Gavin slapped the table, making the lantern jump and dishes rattle, his face contorted with suppressed laughter.
“You. . didn’t just. . say. .,” he gasped.
“Of course. Why, every woman knows she can judge a man’s worth by his tweeness.”
Gavin lost it. The laughter burst from him in small explosions. His fists pounded the table. Phipps joined in, and at last Alice smiled, then giggled, then laughed. The sound rose on wings to the rafters and disturbed the pigeons roosting above. Gavin felt lighter for it, and he touched Alice’s hand.
“This is quite the reversal,” she said. “Usually you’re the one who keeps my spirits up.”
“The world is upside-down,” he admitted. “Everything is backward.”
One of Alice’s little automatons, a whirligig, sputtered up from one of the hatchways carrying a brass spider. It flitted over to Alice and deposited the spider on the table in front of her. It twitched and tried to walk, but all four of its left legs weren’t working. The whirligig backed away and chittered.
“Now what happened to you?” Alice asked, turning the spider over. “Click, would you bring my tools, please?”
Click regarded her for a moment, then jumped down and trotted away. A moment later, he came back with a black bag in his mouth. Alice accepted it from him with thanks and extracted from it a roll of black velvet, which she unrolled across the table, revealing a set of small, intricate tools. The velvet was embroidered with Love, Aunt Edwina. Alice tried to select a tool with her left hand, but the corks on her fingertips got in the way.
“Bugger this,” she muttered, and pulled the corks off with little squeaking sounds. “No one will see in here.”
Gavin glanced around and lowered his voice. “You could start spreading the cure here, you know. It wouldn’t be difficult to pull one cork away and scratch a servant or two. The cure would spread fairly quickly through Peking after that.”
“That’s my intent.” Alice set the corks aside. “Though I can’t do it here. I’m sure any servant I scratch will let Prince Kung know immediately, and they’ll cut off his head or something equally horrible. I will wait until I can get into the city.”
“Doesn’t Lady Orchid want you to spread the cure?” Gavin said.
“Lady Orchid wants the throne,” Phipps corrected. “I don’t know that she wants Alice to destroy the future of Dragon Men. Lady Orchid promised only to find a cure for Gavin, not reopen the borders or bring Alice’s cure to China. Have you noticed she’s guarding us with men who have already had the plague and can’t spread the cure? Once she puts her son on the throne, she’ll probably want a steady supply of Dragon Men to ensure he stays there. I would. And that means Alice is a potential threat to her regency. She and Prince Kung will either have to send Alice home before she cures anyone. . or kill her.”
“The thought had occurred,” Alice agreed.
Gavin set his jaw against a wave of anger. “I’ll kill them myself first.”
“Thank you, darling,” Alice said, “and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but let’s hope that won’t be necessary.”
“That was. . bloodthirsty for a baroness,” Phipps opined.
“I long ago decided that it is better for me to live than for enemies to survive,” Alice said primly. “In any case, I do think we’ve decided on the best course-help Lady Orchid get her son on the throne so she can order the Dragon Men to cure Gavin, as she swore to do. Then we’ll flee as quickly as we can.”
She picked up a tool and used it to unfasten a trapdoor on the spider’s underside while the hovering whirligig looked on with concern.
“How do you do it?” Phipps asked. “I never had the chance to ask you, even when you were with the Ward.”
“I honestly don’t know, Lieutenant.” The spider went still as Alice extracted a number of tiny parts from the spider and laid them on the black velvet, where they stood out like little brass stars. Her hands moved gracefully, fluidly, with soft precision. Gavin automatically noted each part, how they went into the spider, the wear marks, the size and shape and weight, how they pressed sensually into the cloth. His heart rate increased, and a coppery tang came into his mouth. It was exciting to see Alice pull apart the little machine, and he felt himself falling into a delightful fugue again.
“Some clockworker inventions can be recreated by normal people,” Phipps was saying, oblivious to Gavin’s interest. “Babbage engines that let machines ‘think’ on a basic level, tempered glass for lightbulbs and cutlasses, dirigible designs. But truly intricate work such as automatons that understand human speech or Gavin’s wings or the Impossible Cube-only a clockworker can create them, even if the clockworker draws diagrams. The Third Ward tried for years even to made basic repairs on them, and we completely failed. But you-”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” Alice was absorbed in her work. She pulled the flywheel out of the spider and held it up with a pair of tweezers. “Off-center. No wonder its legs were paralyzed, poor thing.”
“How do you do it?” Phipps asked again. “You must have some idea.”
“None.” Alice ran her fingers deliciously over the flywheel, and Gavin felt it as if they were running over his own skin. Grasping the flywheel by the piston, she slid it back slowly into place with a click. The spider twitched and Gavin shuddered. “I look into a machine and just know.”