“Uriel? Your name is Uri?” The revelations were coming thick and fast, which was probably why Gavin couldn’t help but focus on small, foolish details.
“Yep.”
“All right.”
Heavy silence dropped over them. There was so much to say, so much to ask, and Gavin didn’t know where to start. His entire life was a tangle of threads, and he couldn’t find an end to pull. He felt tense and strange. Uri, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease. The quiet, serene expression never left his face.
“So,” Uri said, “I’ve sorta lost track of time. How old are you now?”
“I turned nineteen this last summer.” Gavin held up the Impossible Cube. “Though if you look at it another way, you could say I’m twenty-two.”
Uri let that pass. “How’s your ma? And your brothers and sisters?”
This raised some hackles again. “I haven’t heard from them in a while. Jenny’s married and probably has a kid by now. Harry works as a drover, but he drinks. Ma was able to send Patrick to school some with the money I sent her after I joined the Third Ward, but that was a while ago, so I don’t know what he’s up to now. Violet’s working in a factory, I think. You’d know all this if you were home.”
“But I ain’t home, so I don’t know. That’s the way it is.”
It was on the tip of Gavin’s tongue to ask why, but the words wouldn’t come. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
Uri set his hands on his knees. “Your feelings are jumbled up. You wanna talk to me, but you don’t know how.”
“How do I talk to a father who was never there?” Gavin shot back.
“I’m here now. Or maybe you’re here now.” Uri stroked the bird on his shoulder. “It wasn’t easy to make that happen, kid.”
“Yeah? How did you make it happen?”
“Those birds. I invented them a long time ago, when I first got to China,” Uri said in his quiet, absent voice. “They grabbed the emperor’s attention, and he wanted a whole flock of them for a weapon. The Jade Hand ordered me to make them, so I did.”
Uri pointed to his ear, and for the first time, Gavin noticed the salamander curled around it. A strange hope swirled inside him.
“You’ve lived a long time as a Dragon Man,” he said in a tight voice. “I don’t understand how.”
“Nah. You wouldn’t. Not yet.” Uri rose and got two cups of tea from the table. He gave one to Gavin. “But I’m telling this story out of order, aren’t I? It’s because time means somethin’. . different in this place.”
Gavin accepted the cup but twisted it in his fingers, too distracted to think of drinking. Everything was so damned strange. He wanted to hate his father, but he also wanted to please him. He was caught on the edge of a square, unable to tell which way he would tip.
“I was an airman, you know,” Uri said.
“Yeah. Me, too.” He paused, still hanging on the edge of the square. “Are you glad?” Proud?
Uri waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Your own path has to make you glad or not. Another guy’s opinion matters much as wind matters to a mountain. But,” he added thoughtfully, “being an airman is a damned good path.”
It was the right thing to say, and Gavin felt himself relax a bit. “So how did you end up in China?”
“I was on a run to San Francisco, and I pulled down the clockwork plague.”
Gavin breathed out. He knew this was the case, but it was hard to hear it said aloud. “And?”
“I thought I was going to die. I was sick bad, but no one would help me or even let me come close to them. One night I fell asleep in a stinking alley, and my fever broke. I still remember how it felt, like something snapped inside me. It jerked me awake, and the entire universe swallowed me. It was incredible. I was a clockworker, and I wasn’t sick anymore.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Gavin demanded, angry again. “Why didn’t you write or telegram? Or come home?”
Uri remained serene. “I was a different man then, Gav. I didn’t always think right. That’s not an excuse. It just is. Maybe I thought I was sparing you the pain of hearing I was sick. And later, I was sparing you the pain of having a clockworker in the family.”
“Yeah, well, you were wrong.”
“Can’t argue with you. There’s no way to make up for it. I would if I could. All I can do is say I’m sorry.”
Gavin shifted on the hard stone. Suddenly he realized that he hadn’t touched this man, his father, except to hit him. He set the cold cup down and reached out to put a hand on Uri’s shoulder. It was heavy and warm. Gavin’s throat thickened, and he dropped his hand.
“Anyway,” Uri said, “I woke up in Peking after a fugue. Looked like I’d stolen a boat, fitted it with a new engine I built, and zipped all the way across the Pacific just for the hell of it. The Chinese realized I was a clockworker-Dragon Man-and they brought me to the Forbidden City. In there, the eunuchs stuck me with a salamander like yours, and for months I invented for the emperor. I built birds. Wings. I was always good at wings.”
Gavin flexed his own. “It runs in the family.”
“Those,” Uri said, “are fucking genius, and I want to look at them. I was never able to fly myself.”
“Not enough lift, right?”
“Yep, yep. Even Chinese kites don’t give enough.”
“It’s the alloy. The wings push against-” He stopped. “No. I want to hear about you. What happened then?”
“I invented birds that recorded messages and flew to the last person they touched. The emperor loved them, and he gave them to his family. Later, they became the big thing for running messages between lovers.”
Dad had built the silver nightingale that recorded voices? Gavin felt in his pocket, but it was empty. Alice still had theirs.
“Then the emperor told me to make my birds into weapons because he wanted something that would patrol the borders. I didn’t want to, but when the Jade Hand talks, you listen. I made two, just enough to shut the Hand up. But what the emperor didn’t know was that I also had added somethin’ to the design. Somethin’ the Hand didn’t ask for. It didn’t say I couldn’t, you know? See, I added a bit that put the birds on the lookout for my kids. They all look for you kids, just in case you might come to China.”
“How the hell would they do that?”
“We’re all made up of tiny bits that copy themselves over and over, and half of those bits come from our moms and half from our dads. Maybe one day we’ll be able to tell exactly who is born to who, and the emperor won’t need to hide his concubines behind red walls. But my birds look for people who are half like me. My kids. My son.”
“Why?”
His gaze went far away again. “Time is all one piece, Gavin. It’s a river with a beginning and an end, but it’s still all one piece, and everything happens all at once. You can be sucked into it, or you can stand outside it, but it all stays one piece.”
“So you’re saying you saw that I was going to come, and you arranged for the bird to tell you when I crossed the border.”
“Kind of. I knew about you because it was also happening when I first arrived. And it’s still happening now. I couldn’t avoid creating the bird to find you, and you can’t avoid singing the moon song. It had already happened, and it was happening, and it will happen again. That’s why you came, you know. You couldn’t avoid it any more than I could avoid sending the bird. Yep, yep.”
“So we have no choice?” Gavin interrupted. “We’re little automatons that follow the rules?”
“Not what I said. You’ve already made all the choices, the ones that make the river’s course. Us guys who step outside the river can see them; that’s all. It’s better to accept what has happened and what will happen.”
Gavin’s head was beginning to swim. “How does it all end, then? Can you see that?”
Uri ignored the question. “Once I finished the emperor’s command, I was. . unhappy. I didn’t want to create more weapons, no sir. But I heard rumors about a place where Dragon Men could go, a place where they could invent and study in peace until their time came. A place called the Blessed Monastery of the Azure Water. When I finished the two birds, the Jade Hand stopped commanding me, so I created a spinning device that mesmerized the eunuchs. That let me sneak out of the Forbidden City. Took me a few weeks of searching, but I found this place. It looks like an ordinary monastery, and the emperor leaves it alone, but there’s a lot more to it than he knows.”