“Now what?” Gavin asked, setting Alice down. “You do have a plan, right?”
She took his hand. “Yes: run!”
A rutted dirt road twisted through the woods ahead of them, and they sprinted down it. The late-summer breeze should have been uncomfortably warm, but it felt refreshing after the hot, still air of the greenhouse. Behind them, glass smashed and tinkled as the trees hit the side of the greenhouse, but they were tangling up with one another, and they were further hampered by the fact that all of them were making the exact same motions under Antoine’s control. Gavin, Alice, and the two little machines rounded a bend in the road, leaving the greenhouse and its howling inhabitant behind.
“Why didn’t you have Click cut an exit at ground level instead of coming in through the ceiling?” Gavin puffed.
“The glass is thicker at the base to support weight,” Alice pointed out. “It’s thin on the roof.”
“So where are Dr. Clef and the Lady? Shouldn’t they be—?”
A crackling crash brought them up short. From out of the trees beside the road about fifteen feet ahead of them burst a pair of mechanicals. They were nearly two stories tall, with squat, round builds, heavy legs, long arms, and gleaming brass skin. A glass bubble enclosed the top of each. Inside one rode a young man with dark, curly hair that peeked out from around his hat, and inside the other sat a woman in a long skirt, puffy white blouse, and fashionably small hat. The man pointed one of his mechanical’s arms at Gavin, and the hand ended in an impressively large gun barrel.
“Aw, no,” Gavin groaned. “Simon, Glenda—you aren’t serious.”
“Surrender, Gavin. You too, Alice,” said Simon d’Arco into a speaking tube. His voice, carried outside the bubble, sounded tinny and distant.
“We’ve got you,” the woman added in a similarly tinny voice. “And you know it.”
“I know nothing of the sort, Glenda,” Alice shot back.
“What if we tell you to piss off, Simon?” Gavin said. “Are you going to shoot me? Squash me? We were partners in the Ward for months.” And you were half in love with me, he added silently.
“You destroyed the Ward, Gavin,” Simon said. “It’s gone now. The Queen herself disbanded it. Our last mission is to arrest you for treason and bring you back for trial.”
“Now that you’ve released that cure,” Glenda added, “we’ll have no more clockworkers to hunt down. The few we have are dead or dying.”
“And millions of other people will live,” Alice replied hotly. “I don’t regret it for a moment.”
“You thought of nothing but yourselves,” Glenda snapped, showing some agitation. “Nothing! The Ward was everything to me, Alice. I gave you a chance with the Ward and with Gavin, and this is how you repay me?”
“We’re not going back to England, Simon,” Gavin said. “So are you ready to shoot me?”
“He doesn’t have to shoot you,” said a voice that made Gavin stiffen. “He only has to delay you. Just like Antoine did, and admirably.” From the trees stepped a second woman. Her black hair, only slightly streaked with silver, was pulled into a twist. She wore a blue uniform with hat, boots, and epaulets. The coat was cut to show her left arm, which was entirely mechanical. It also had six fingers. Her name was Lieutenant Susan Phipps.
“In the name of Her Royal Majesty and the Third Ward,” Phipps said, “I place you both under arrest for sedition, treason, and attempted murder.”
“No,” Gavin said, though some of the bravado had left him. Phipps by herself was more imposing than even two agents in mechanicals. He made himself stand upright, though he was sweating under his arms. “Sorry, Lieutenant—Susan—but we all know that Glenda and Simon aren’t going to hurt us. We saved you from that doomsday invention Alice’s aunt dropped on headquarters. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but it wasn’t very smart to bring those two. You should have brought someone who doesn’t know us.”
“They’re loyal,” Phipps said, unruffled, “and won’t disappoint me. Unlike some.”
Gavin couldn’t help flinching at that. When Gavin was only seventeen and stranded in London, Phipps had offered him a position as an agent of the Third Ward. She had seen him through his training, encouraged him, opened doors for him. She had lifted him out of the gutter and handed him the keys to the world, and he had betrayed her.
“I’m… sorry, ma’am,” Gavin said. “Look, I’m not happy about what I—”
“Oh, shut it, Gavin,” Alice interrupted. “We learned the Empire had been keeping the cure locked away to ensure the plague continues creating clockwork geniuses. You let thousands of people die excruciating deaths, Phipps, and have no right to debate morality.”
“Thousands more will die because you released the cure,” Phipps said. “Because of you, China will have clockworkers for much longer than we, easily long enough to take over the world, and that conflict will cost countless British lives. So come quietly, or come noisily. It makes no difference.”
“Noisily?” Gavin said. “What do you mean by—?”
Phipps reached into her pockets with both hands and came up with a pair of tuning forks. Gavin’s eye automatically measured their length and thickness with clockwork precision. When struck, they would produce the notes D and A-flat. For the second time that day, his blood chilled.
“Run!” Alice screamed, but it was too late. Phipps clanged the forks together. The two notes rang down the road. Dual vibrations tore ugly ripples through the air faster than Gavin could react, and the discordant interval, a tritone, slammed into his brain. The noise made its own string of numbers inside his head, and they spun around him, refusing to coalesce into anything that made sense. A tritone has, at its base, the square root of two, and it is the only musical interval that is expressed as an irrational number, a number that does not truly exist, and yet at that moment it did exist in the sound Gavin was hearing. The paradox that he could hear so clearly tore at his mind and made his head dizzy with pain. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the sound was too loud to shut out.
He was vaguely aware of Alice shouting something, and he heard clunky mechanical footsteps. Hard metal hands scooped him up. The tritone began to fade, then clanged again, and Gavin cried out in fresh pain as an explosion rocked his body.
Chapter Two
Gavin landed hard. The terrible tritone faded, and the mind-numbing pain and dizziness went with it. Dust clogged his mouth and nose. Coughing and spitting, he levered himself upright. A great hole, perhaps ten feet across, had appeared in the road. Gavin lay on one side with Alice and Click and the little whirligig. Phipps and the two Ward agents were on the other. Glenda’s mechanical was sitting down like a toddler who had lost its balance and landed on its backside. Phipps had kept her feet, but she had lost one of the tuning forks. That was one good thing, at least.
“That is called a warning shot,” bellowed a voice from above. “I believe my energy cannon can manage another. The boom may not be so large or exciting, but it will suffice.”
Over the road and just above the trees hovered a familiar dirigible the size of a generous cottage. A gondola shaped like an unmasted sailing ship hung from a cigar-shaped envelope that was clearly too small to provide enough lift for such a mass. A lacy blue endoskeleton Gavin had forged and bent himself glowed like captured sky beneath the envelope’s thin skin, and a long rope dangled from the stern, which sported the words The Lady of Liberty. Leaning over the gunwale was a portly man in a white coat and heavy goggles over a bulldog face. He was pointing a small cannon down at the road. Phipps, Glenda, and Simon didn’t move. A river of relief swept over Gavin.