“It’s a singular talent.” Phipps crossed her arms, brass over flesh. Her monocle gleamed in the phosphorescent glow of the lanterns. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It makes me a little nervous, to tell the truth, Lieutenant.” She replaced more gears and screws with slow, deft twists. Gavin was unable to take his eyes off the muscles and tendons in her hands. His chest ached. “When I was defusing Aunt Edwina’s bomb in the basement of the Doomsday Vault, it occurred to me that my little talent is a version of the clockwork plague-not deadly enough to be plague zombie, not powerful enough to be clockworker. My entire family died of the plague-my mother and brother died of it right away, and it killed my father slowly. Aunt Edwina became a clockworker, of course. So it’s rather difficult to believe that I didn’t contract it.”
“Do you think you contracted some different version?”
“I sometimes wonder,” Alice said. “Aunt Edwina was the world’s greatest expert on the clockwork plague. Did she try an early version of her cure on me when I was young? One that worked only partway? Is that the reason she chose me to carry her final cure?” She held up her spidery hand with its burbling tubules. The spider gauntlet had a surface temperature of ninety-six point five degrees, weighed three pounds, two ounces, and carried two drams of blood, Gavin noted. “It would explain a great deal, including why my talent won’t let me take this spider off. Edwina might have known how to create something even I can’t dissect.”
“Do you want to take it off?” Phipps asked, surprised.
“Well, no,” Alice admitted. “It’s. . dug in. It moves as I do, and those tubules are like my own arteries and veins by now. I don’t know what would happen if I tried to take it apart. And if I did, I wouldn’t be able to cure anyone.”
She finished putting the spider back together, gave it a few quick winds with the key on the chain around her neck, and set it back down again. It quivered, then leaped off the table and skittered away. The whirligig chirped in alarm and swooped after it. Gavin watched the air currents in its wake, how the propeller chopped them into tiny streams that twisted one around the other. He could feel their silky smoothness, see how they intertwined, sense the soft temperature differences between them. He looked closer, examining each eddy’s individual particles. They vibrated and buzzed like invisible bees. The particles themselves were made of smaller particles that were both there and not there, puzzle pieces in shells that twisted through tiny pockets of the universe, refusing to exist, refusing to vanish, and those particles were made of even smaller particles that came in pairs or trios.
“Gavin!”
He tried to shut out the voice and concentrate on the fascinating parade. Each set of particles was carefully balanced. Even as Gavin watched, one particle sent a bit of energy to its partner. For the tiniest breath of time, a seed of the energy lived in both particles, and then they. . changed. He couldn’t put his finger on how, but they did. It was as if two red flowers existed side by side until a bit of pollen blew from one to the other and both flowers became green. It happened with breathtaking precision, a trillion times a trillion times every microsecond, with no guiding hand to ensure it went right. It was entrancing. Exquisite!
But that wasn’t the end of it. Those tiny particles were made of-
“Gavin!”
“The tiny bees exchange pollen and make the flowers change color,” he muttered. “Red becomes green, and each has a piece of the other.”
“No, darling, no. Please come back.”
There was a sharp jerk. Gavin blinked. He was sitting at the table again. Alice was holding his face in both her hands, and her claws pricked his cheeks. Her brown eyes were both frightened and worried. He felt her breath on his chin.
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“The plague pulled you under again.” Alice let him go and returned to her own seat. “That’s your second fugue today, darling.”
He shook his head. The particles were important; he could feel it. If only he could look at them more closely, watch their patterns and come to an understanding. But when he looked at the path the whirligig had taken, all he saw was empty air.
“Gavin!”
“My second?” he said.
“The painting was your first.”
“I don’t remember,” he said, still staring after the whirligig.
“The Chinese woman by the stream. She held a fan. There was Chinese writing.”
Alice’s voice sounded desperate, but Gavin, still hoping to catch the parade of particles again, couldn’t bring himself to look in her direction. Still, her tone called for some response. “Oh. Right. Yes, now I remember,” he said vaguely, lying. “She held a fan.”
“It’s getting worse,” Phipps said. “You told me a month ago that Dr. Clef said he had two months, perhaps three. But that was an optimistic estimation. It looks like we need to be pessimistic.”
“I refuse to believe we came all this way for nothing, Lieutenant.” Alice pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and when she did, the little silver nightingale encrusted with gems fell out. Alice picked it up and pressed one of the eyes. The little bird said in Gavin’s voice, “I love you always.”
This cleared Gavin’s head of the half trance he was in. “I. . Hello.”
“Welcome back, darling,” Alice said. “Where were you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I can explain it in words. But I can see why Dr. Clef and the others went there. It’s beautiful.”
“Don’t speak that way!” She grabbed his hand. “It frightens me when you do. I’m losing more and more of you every day.”
He looked at her concerned, beautiful face, trying to etch every feature into his mind so he wouldn’t forget her, no matter how much of his mind the plague burned away-her honey brown hair and her small nose and her pointed chin and her warm eyes. He couldn’t possibly forget any of it. Could he? He fingered the salamander that circled his ear and felt a sorrow that threatened to crush him. He had learned of his status as a clockworker only a few months ago, but it felt as if a lifetime had passed, as if he couldn’t remember a time before it. His back ached where the pirate’s whip had left deep, ropy scars after the attack on the Juniper.
“I’m trying to stop,” he said. “I am. It’s very hard to stay aloft.”
“Would you play, then?” She pointed at his fiddle case, which was lying on the deck near his wing harness. “Perhaps it’ll keep you focused. Certainly it gives me pleasure.”
“I wouldn’t mind, either,” Phipps said, “and I’m not in love with you.”
Gavin flashed a smile at that. He set bow to strings and played “The Wild Hunt,” letting the music slide and soar. The song rushed and roared about the deck, pushing at the ropes and rebounding from the envelope. Alice closed her eyes and Phipps tapped her feet. Gavin’s smile widened. He loved getting a listener lost in the music, towing someone along and sharing the beauty. Provided he didn’t make a mistake and spoil the loveliness. A faint hot draft wafted over him, whispering over black silk, and for a moment he was in another place. Cobblestones, clopping horses, and the smell of open sewers. A man with pale hair played flawless fiddle, his fingers flying over the neck. He grinned down at Gavin and started to say something. Then the memory was gone. The song ended, and Gavin lowered the fiddle.
“You were thinking of your father again,” Alice said, not quite accusingly.
“More and more often,” Gavin admitted. His back still ached. For a moment, the spot where the mechanical nightingale had pecked him itched, and he scratched it idly. “When I’m not thinking of you.”
“You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you use flattery, Gavin Ennock,” Phipps said, and Alice laughed.