The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire by Steven Harper

either didn’t hear or didn’t care. The mechanical came after them with implacable determination. The horses were slowing, tired, allowing Glenda to make up the lost time. Gavin listened. The streets here were nearly empty and the calliope music was growing louder. He pulled the horses to a stop and jumped out of the cab.
    “Jump!” he said as Glenda brought both mechanical hands down. Feng and Alice leaped free as the mechanical smashed the cab to pieces. The panicked horses galloped away, dragging the remains with them. Glenda turned to face the trio, her expression stony.
    “What are you doing?” Feng demanded, but Gavin was already moving.
    “Come on!” He dashed down a side street, giving Alice and Feng no choice but to follow. There were still no people in evidence, but the narrow street was cluttered with front stoops, carts, piles of coal, and other street detritus. The trio leaped and twisted around it all, but Glenda was forced to slow a little.
    “I’ll catch you eventually,” she shouted. “You can’t keep running!”
    Gavin burst out onto a main street and into a crowd lining it. The calliope music leaped into full volume. Coming up the street was a man in a red top hat and a red-and-white striped shirt with garters just above the elbows. He wore a cloak flung back over his shoulders and he carried a silver-topped cane. Behind him lurched a great brass elephant, puffing steam from its tusks. Its gait was oddly uneven. Scarlet signs on the animal’s sides spelled out
Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles
in graceful, garish letters. Behind that came a horse wagon with an calliope on it played by an automaton, followed by the rest of the circus—clowns and acrobats and lion cages and girls on mechanical horses, all waving and smiling. The crowd that had gathered to watch stared, unsure if Gavin’s actions might be part of the show.
    Without a pause, Gavin shoved through the crowd and made for the ringmaster at the front of the parade. He snatched the man’s hat off, revealing sandy hair.
    “What the hell?” the ringmaster said, then blinked.
“Gavin?”
    “Great to see you, Dodd.” Gavin flicked the cloak free. “Just go with this and I’ll explain later.”
    “Gavin, what are you—?” Alice began, but heshoved the top hat on her head, tossed the cloak around her shoulders, and ran around the other side of the lurching elephant without looking to see if Feng and Alice followed him. They did, however, and that was fortunate. Glenda reached the mouth of the side street, but her view of her quarry was blocked by the elephant, who bumbled along as if the people didn’t exist. Up top, the mahout looked down at them warily.
    “Take off your goggles and scarf and your shirt,” Gavin whispered to Feng, keeping pace with the elephant. “The circus has Chinese. You’ll look like an acrobat. Give me the rucksack.”
    “What about you?” Alice buttoned the cloak and drew it around herself, hiding her body and Gavin’s fiddle case. “And how do you know these people?”
    Feng handed Gavin the rucksack, pulled off his shirt, and wrapped it around his head in a crude turban. He had a build that could pass for acrobatic, at a distance. Several people in the crowd had noticed Glenda’s mechanical, but they seemed to think it was part of the parade. They pointed and gasped with amazement. Glenda was momentarily stymied. She couldn’t move forward without crushing people or sweeping them aside and hurting them, which Gavin didn’t think she’d be willing to do.
    A clown in white makeup, orange wig, and blue nose hurried up with a broom and a bucket. “What are you three doing? Do you speak English?”
    “Bonzini!” Gavin said. “Remember me?”
    “Gavin?” the clown gasped. “What in—?”
    “I’m looking for two men and a woman!”
Glendaboomed from the mechanical.
“They just came this way. There’s a reward!”
    “That’s torn it,” Alice