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.
“Dr. Clef!” he shouted. “You’re my favorite German.”
“Very glad to see you are safe, my boy.”
Alice looked calm and unruffled, but Gavin read a symphony of strain holding her upright. “I don’t suppose,” she called up, “that you could provide a ladder?”
Seconds later, one end of a rope ladder tumbled down. Alice clambered up first, and Gavin followed with Click. The whirligig flew.
“We can still follow you,” Phipps shouted up at them. “We found you now, and we’ll find you again!”
Ignoring her, Gavin pulled himself over the edge to join Alice. His shoes came down on solid planking, and he felt some of the tension drain away. The airship, the Lady, was his place, his home. Wood and hemp made their familiar creak as the envelope strained against her ropes, trying to pull the ship higher while her lacy skeleton gleamed a magnificent azure blue. The generator that ran on paraffin oil muttered and mumbled to itself on the deck, emitting steam and feeding a steady stream of power to the Lady’s skeleton and to her propellers. Dr. Clef, a clockworker once captured by the Third Ward, had developed the alloy that pushed against gravity when it was electrified, but Gavin had been the one to put it into the envelope of a dirigible.
At the helm stood a stocky, sharp-faced Oriental dressed in a pirate shirt that suited him perfectly. He was just over eighteen. His trousers were tucked into his boots, and like Alice, he kept a glass cutlass sheathed at his belt. He saluted Gavin with a rakish grin that made him even more handsome than before.
“No, no,” Dr. Clef was calling down. He continued to aim his power cannon at the ground. “Don’t move, please. My finger trigger, it itches.”
“That’s trigger finger,” Gavin said. “And you let Feng pilot the Lady?”
“It was that or give him the cannon,” Dr. Clef replied mildly. “I did consider pulling apart the clicky kitty’s brain and using it to create a wireless device that would allow me to control the ship from a distance, but the young woman wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Bloody right.” Alice picked up Click and let the whirligig land on her shoulder. “Feng, get us out of here!”
“Which way?” said Feng Lung with a trace of China in his words.
“Any way, as long as it’s east,” Alice said.
Feng swung the helm around. The propellers on the Lady’s nacelles hanging from the outer hulls whirled to life, and she picked up speed, still trailing the rope. Alice set Click down and pulled it in.
“You slid all the way down that to get into the greenhouse and rescue me?” Gavin said. “I must be awfully special.”
“Indeed you are, Mr. Ennock.” Alice coiled the rope on the deck, then turned and collapsed into Gavin’s surprised arms. Her body shook against his, and wet, sloppy tears dampened his shirt. “Don’t you ever do that to me again, you… you cad.”
His own throat thickened and he held her, clumsily at first, then tightly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” After a moment, he added, “What did I do?”
Alice gave a hiccupping laugh and straightened. “Oh, Gavin. Dear God. You scared me half to death, that’s what.”
“So true,” Feng said from the helm. “After you went missing from the hotel, she went mad. Berserk. She would not sleep; she would not eat. When we tracked you to the greenhouse, she almost rammed it with the ship. I insisted to be pilot then.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said again. “Should I write letters in the sky to warn you when I’m going to be captured?”
“Certainly.” Alice pulled off her leather gloves, revealing a metal spider wrapping her left hand from forearm to fingers. Its legs ended in claws that tipped Alice’s own nails, and tubules running up and down the spider’s legs flowed scarlet with her blood. The dark iron gleamed, and the spider’s eyes glowed red, indicating that she had just touched someone infected with the clockwork plague—Gavin, in this case. It was another of the daily reminders that he was dying, and it was inextricably linked to the woman he loved. The thought made him both sad and angry, and he wanted to wrench the spider off her, even though he knew it wouldn’t work. The spider’s joints squeaked slightly as Alice fumbled at her sleeve for a handkerchief, and then she remembered she wasn’t wearing a woman’s blouse. She reached into her pocket for one instead and dabbed at her eyes. “I’ll kill the next one who captures you. I swear it.”
“There’s going to be a next one?”
Alice cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, then knelt in front of him to pull up his pant cuffs. “If Phipps has her way, there will be.”
“Uh… what are you doing?”
“I need to check your ankles. Those horrible chains Antoine kept you in couldn’t have been good for them. This will be easier if you sit down.”
He sank into a deck chair and let her pull off his shoes, wincing as the leather came away from swollen flesh. Alice made a low sound.
“I wish you’d been wearing your boots instead of just shoes,” she muttered. “They might have protected you better. Does this hurt?” She gently massaged his ankles.
“Yes,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “But don’t stop.”
She looked up at him, and he saw tenderness in her eyes. It melted the pain and relaxed every muscle in his body. He slumped in the chair, unable to move as her strong, careful fingers went over his feet and worked at the muscles.
“Oh my God, I love you,” he groaned. “Always and always.”
“And I love you always,” she replied. “Even when you blaspheme.”
“You blasphemed just a second—”
“Now you need to explain what happened, starting from the moment Antoine took you.”
“Not yet, Madam.” A mechanical man emerged from belowdecks. His features were only painted on, as was his black-and-white outfit, yet he carried himself as if he were starched and fully clothed. The only hint of expression lay in the flickering firefly lights that made up his eyes. He set a laden tea tray on a deck table beside the spot where Alice knelt. “You haven’t eaten since Sir was captured. And then you must have a massage yourself to ease the tension.”
“Wonderful, Kemp.” Dr. Clef rubbed his hands together. “Do you have any of those lacy sugar cookies? I have had quite a craving, and the patterns twist through dimensional rifts on golden wings.”
“You have had your tea, Doctor,” Kemp said. “I will make more if I have time, but I have more important concerns at the moment.”
The cake and sandwiches on the tray sent up smells that called to Gavin’s stomach, though he wasn’t yet willing to move away from Alice’s ministrations. “What time is it?” he asked, trying to get a glimpse of the sun around the envelope.
“Two fifteen,” Kemp replied. “Tuesday.”
Gavin bolted upright, and Alice released his foot. “Tuesday? How long was I—?”
“You’ve been missing for three days, darling.” Alice took a teacup, which rattled in her metallic hand. “It’s been hell.”
“Three days?” Gavin sank back onto the chair and bit into a ham sandwich without really paying attention to it. “I thought it was only a night.”
“Antoine has powerful sleep drugs,” Feng said.
Gavin stared past Alice at calm, blue infinity. He should feel safe, at home in the ship he had created with his own hands. She ignored gravity, soared silent currents, explored the limits of daylight. Set him free. But all he felt was violated, stripped of his clothes and then his skin. He wondered how long he had hung unconscious in Antoine’s greenhouse, a piece of meat in the hands of a twisted homunculus. His gorge rose, and then he was at the gunwale, the few bites of sandwich falling to the forest far below. The pieces seemed to fall slowly, pushing aside the billions of tiny bits that made up the air. The bits rubbed against the falling pieces and raised their temperature as they fell closer to hell.
“We could harvest the energy of the pieces,” he said. “The billions of bits would make a hellfire and cook twisted hunks of homunculus.”
“Sir?” Kemp handed him a cup of tea. Gavin swished and spat over the side. The tea spread in both droplets and a stream, both wave and particle. He watched it, an eternity caught in a split second. Then the tea vanished.
“Wave to particles,” he muttered. “Wave them away.”
Alice had had the good sense to keep her seat, though her face tightened as Gavin sat back down in his own chair. “You’re talking like a clockworker,” she said, her voice heavy with worry. “It’s already starting, isn’t it?”
“It’s all mixed up inside me, Alice.” He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to cheer up, but the violation and the fear dragged him down. “I’m sorry. Your aunt knocked me out, locked me in that tower of hers, and infected me with this plague. She treated me like a piece of meat. So did the pirates who captured the Juniper and made me fiddle for them. Now I learn Antoine held me for longer than I knew. He stole time from me, and I don’t have time to steal.”
She took his hand across the tea tray. “We’ll get to China. If anyone can cure clockworkers, they can.”
“The Dragon Men are very powerful,” Feng agreed from the helm. “They can do anything.”
“Hmm.” Dr. Clef opened a chest and unrolled an enormous chart on a table near the helm. “Peking is approximately seven thousand miles away, if we fly over Istanbul and the Gobi Desert. We could detour south into India, around the Himalayas, but that would add another four thousand miles or so. This ship’s top speed is fifty miles per hour. If we travel for twelve hours each day, the journey will take us approximately twelve days.”
“That’s all?” Alice said. “It doesn’t seem like—”
“This is also assuming,” Dr. Clef continued, “that the ship always travels at top speed—it cannot—and that we have the wind behind us—we do not—and that the engines or helium extractors never break down—they will—and that the sky never sends us any bad weather—it shall—or that any number of other delays do not delay us. I believe it will take closer to two months, perhaps three.”
“Oh.” Alice nibbled her sandwich as a cloud drifted past. “Well, that will still be plenty of time. He was infected last May. It’s only late August.”
“It is not much time,” said Dr. Clef. “He is already beginning to babble. You see things, don’t you, boy? Beautiful things. Like the universe is handing you its keys, one by one.”
Gavin thought about his vomit and the falling tea water. “Yes.”
“And you love and hate the tritones,” Dr. Clef continued. “Square root of two, lovely and deadly as infinity.”
Just the memory of that horrible, enticing number and the brain-bending sound that went with it made him shudder. He nodded.
“I shouldn’t be so far along,” Gavin said quietly.
Dr. Clef shrugged. “There is a range. Some clockworkers last only a few months, others last for two or three years. Edwina’s version of the plague was experimental, so who knows what it was like? You shouldn’t have become a clockworker, but you did. You should have shown no symptoms for several weeks, but you have. Losing yourself and talking about what you see is a sign of the final phase, where I am. You have about three months left. Four months if you are lucky. You will be a raving lunatic by the time we reach Peking, and then Alice will still have to find a Chinese clockworker who can cure you, and that assumes such a clockworker even exists. So you will die, my boy. But don’t worry.” He clapped Gavin on the shoulder. “They say once we clockworkers go completely mad, we do not even know what is happening, and we enjoy it. We can go mad together, yes?”
“Why did you bring him with you?” Feng asked.
“He jumped on board the ship while we were running away from the Third Ward headquarters,” Alice said dully. “Perhaps I should have kicked him off.”
“No.” Gavin straightened. “I’m not going to give in to this. We’ll find a way to get to Peking, and we’ll find a Chinese clockworker—”
“Dragon Man,” Feng interrupted. “We call them Dragon Men.”
“Dragon Man,” Gavin continued, “who has a cure. If we can’t find time, we’ll make time.”
An odd look came over Dr. Clef’s bulldog face. “Make time.”
“But we do have a more powerful problem.” Feng moved the Lady’s helm to adjust for a current. “This ship is very easy to see. Many airships fly, but none of them glow blue.”
“She’s very beautiful,” Gavin said, feeling defensive. The motor gave a pleased-sounding hiccup and went back to its normal quiet murmur.
“True. But beauty has its price,” Feng said. “Hers is that she attracts attention. Also, if Third Ward agents are spreading word and money to look for us, we have more trouble. How do they do it so quickly?”
“Several clockworkers in England and in Europe invented wireless communication devices,” Gavin said. “You can send messages at the speed of light to any other wireless device that listens to the same frequency. They’re better than a telegraph because you don’t need to raise poles or string wires.”
“We can’t outrun such a message,” Feng pointed out. “As it is, we lost three days when you were captured. I imagine that was what your Lieutenant Phipps wanted—to catch us up. It is fortunate she seems to have no airship.”
“Yeah. We’ll have to think of some way to hide better. I just wish we had more time.”
“You said that.” Alice set her cup down with a clink of metal on china and came around behind his chair to put her arms around his neck. The iron gauntlet was chilly. “And you’re right, darling. We’ll find a way. We’ll find time.”
Her touch made him feel better, despite the spider. Even though he was barely nineteen and she was twenty-three, he felt no difference in their ages. Alice had been initially put off by it. The gap had been one of the reasons she had resisted admitting she loved him.
Gavin touched Alice’s hand, letting himself drink in her steady presence. And she was so beautiful. Her deep brown eyes set off her honey-brown hair, and her triangle face and little nose and rounded curves all came together like the parts of an intricate fugue, compelling and hypnotic. He still found it hard to believe she was with him—and that it had taken her so long to break society’s rules and leave her horrible fiancé. She leaned down. Her scent wafted over him, and he kissed her softly in the free and open sky. The kiss intensified, and a thrill went through him. He could do this. He could conquer the whole damned world, as long as Alice Michaels stood beside him.
“Very sweet,” Feng said, breaking the moment. “But I have no idea where I am going.”
They broke away and Alice coughed, a bit flushed. “I’d help, but I never learned how to read a navigation chart.”
“Right.” Gavin got up and took the charts away from Dr. Clef, who was now staring into the distance.
“My Impossible Cube had time,” he muttered. “All of it. At once. But you destroyed it, my boy. My lovely, lovely Impossible Cube.”
“Not this again.” Alice sighed. “Click!”
Click jumped down from his vantage point on the gunwale and strolled over to rub against Dr. Clef’s shins. A mechanical purr drifted across the deck. Dr. Clef glanced down.
“Ah, you send me the clicky kitty as a distraction. It will not work. I am so very forlorn.” Still, he picked the cat up and stroked the metal ears. “It won’t work at all, will it, clicky kitty? It will not. It will not.”
“Germans are so good at despondent,” Gavin observed. He pored over the charts. “If we keep our current course, we’ll reach Luxembourg by tomorrow. I know the place—it gets a lot of airship traffic, and the Juniper stopped there several times.”
“Do you think the other airships will give us camouflage?” Alice asked.
“Honestly? No.” Gavin gestured at the softly glowing envelope. “She stands out, even among airships, and the envelope isn’t big enough to lift her without turning on the generator.”
“Then why did you build your ship this way?” Feng asked.
“You’re such a clicky kitty,” Dr. Clef cooed. “You are.”
Gavin’s stomach turned over. “Because I could. You don’t think about consequences when you’re in a… a clockwork fugue. You just build. I didn’t even know I was a clockworker when I built the Lady. I thought I just had insomnia.”
“Whatever the reason, we have a conspicuous ship,” Alice said, “and the Third Ward is spreading word of a generous reward for our capture.”
“Is the clicky kitty hungry? Would he like a saucer of arsenic?”
Gavin sighed and leaned over the gunwale, the fresh breeze on his face, solid wood beneath his bare feet. Forests and fields stretched to the horizon, emerald meeting azure, broken only by a railroad that ribboned through the green.
Alice joined him. “What are you thinking?”
“That you’re right. The ship is too conspicuous,” he said. “We’re too conspicuous. You have that gauntlet that won’t come off. Feng is Chinese. Dr. Clef is… Dr. Clef. And we have all these automatons. I mean, you can order Kemp to stay hidden—”
“We have to for at least a while,” Alice interrupted. “Human-seeming automatons are illegal on most of the Continent.”
“Only in the western part,” Gavin said, “where the Catholic Church is powerful. Once you get past the four French Kingdoms and the ten Prussian Kingdoms into Poland and the Ukrainian Empire, no one cares.”
“Oh.” Alice looked miffed that she hadn’t known this. “Kemp will be glad to hear that.”
“But I was saying that Click has a way of showing up wherever he wants,” Gavin continued. “We’re a very distinctive group, and you know Phipps has described us carefully.”
“Come, clicky kitty,” Dr. Clef said. “We will go below and you will watch me while I work. Would you like that? You would.”
“If I took such a tone with Click,” Feng said to no one in particular, “he would disembowel me. Why does he allow Dr. Clef the privilege?”
A train passed beneath them, puffing smoke and spurting steam. The whistle—a G, Gavin noted automatically—sounded high and thin up in the air. The locomotive was painted bright red, and the cars sported bright colors as well. It looked like a child’s toy. Something about it tugged at him, but he couldn’t say what.
“We’ll have to figure something out soon,” Gavin finished. “Luxembourg is the only place nearby where we can stock up on paraffin oil for the generator, and we have to stop there.”
“And the food stores are nearly nonexistent,” Kemp added. “Madam and everyone else were searching for Sir, and I was not allowed to shop.”
“That’s another worry,” Alice said. “Money. We don’t have much left. The Ward won’t be paying our salaries anytime soon, and I rather doubt Norbert would be willing to wire me any money now that I’ve left him.”
Gavin stared across the free sky as tension tightened his muscles again. Even here, on his own ship, problems weighed him down. He wanted—needed—to leap over the side and coast away with nothing but bright and flowing air beneath him. The clouds twisted in the air currents, droplets hovering like trillions of tiny spirits buoyed by—
Alice touched his arm. “You’ve been staring for a long time. Would you play for me?”
“A long time?” He blinked at her. “How long?”
“Over an hour.” She handed him his bow and fiddle. “Maybe this will focus you.”
Gavin looked around, bewildered. The sun had moved a considerable distance. Dr. Clef, Click, and Alice’s whirligig were nowhere to be seen. Only Feng remained, still at the helm. Gavin looked down at his fiddle. It had been his constant companion ever since he could remember. His inborn perfect pitch let him pick up songs almost instantly, which meant he was able to play street corners in Boston at an early age and bring the pennies home to his mother and siblings. He had secretly fantasized that one day he would play in a music hall or even in an orchestra. But later, on his twelfth birthday, Gramps had brought him down to the Boston shipyards and introduced him to Captain Felix Naismith of the Juniper. From that day on, cabin boy Gavin Ennock had barely touched the ground while he played for airmen and ran their errands. Then came the attack. In seconds, both Naismith and Gavin’s best friend were dead and Gavin was forced to perform for pirates. They had stranded him in London. Unable to find work on another airship, he’d gone back to playing the streets for pennies until Alice’s aunt had snatched him away and locked him in her tower. For three weeks, he’d had nothing to do but play the violin until Alice had appeared and rescued him. And then he had rescued her, and then she him, and so it went.
He drew his bow over the strings and was about to begin when Alice abruptly held up a hand. For a dreadful moment, he thought he’d made a mistake and she was stopping him. It was one of his secret fears—that he’d made a mistake while playing where someone could hear. His playing, like his pitch, needed to be perfect. It often felt as if someone were watching over him, waiting to pounce if he played wrong, though he couldn’t say why.
But Alice said only, “A moment. I want to try something first.”
From her pocket, she took a small bird made of gleaming silver. Sapphires made up its eyes and glowed softly at the tips of its claws.
“My nightingale,” Feng said. “Yours now, Gavin. I am glad Antoine did not get it.”
“I found it in the hotel.” Alice set the bird at Gavin’s feet and pressed its left eye. “Now, play.”
Gavin nodded and swung into a song familiar to all airmen. He played a verse, relieved when he got through it with no mistakes, then sang.
For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam, ten thousand miles I traveled
Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes to save her shoes from gravel.
Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys, bedlam boys are bonny
For they all go bare and they live by the air, and they want no drink nor money.
“Tom of Bedlam” was the unofficial song of airmen everywhere. The idea that men who lived by the air went naked and didn’t want for drink or money held immense appeal, and the song’s infinite verses were made for pounding out on wooden decks. Gavin started to sing the second verse when Alice jumped in herself:
No gypsy, slut, or clockwork shall win my mad Tom from me
I’ll weep all night, with stars I’ll fight, and the fray shall well become me.
Gavin laughed and joined in for the chorus.
Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys, bedlam boys are bonny
For they all go bare and they live by the air, and they want no drink nor money.
The orange sun sank to the horizon and shadows snaked among the trees below. The sputter and hum of the generator continued beneath Gavin’s music as he played and sang his way through “Bedlam” with Alice clapping her hands to the beat beside him. He caught Alice’s eye, letting her know the song was for her. Her face flushed, and he flung her a wide smile. The music cast itself out into the darkening void, sweet as wine, carrying Gavin’s spirit with it.
“That was wonderful,” Alice said softly. She picked up the nightingale and pressed its left eye again. Then she pressed the right eye. Instantly, the little bird opened its beak and the sound of Gavin’s fiddle trilled forth. It was a smaller sound, with a tinny undertone, but otherwise a perfect replica, a recording. Then Gavin’s voice joined the music, and “Tom of Bedlam” again floated across the deck. The sound struck Gavin. He had never heard his own voice before. It sounded different than it did in his own head, but also vaguely familiar. It made him uncomfortable. He tapped the nightingale to stop the music.
“I like the real thing better,” he said.
“I do, too.” Alice kissed him on the cheek, and he smiled again. “Where did you learn to play? You’ve never said.”
“Gramps—my grandfather—started me on the fiddle when I was five or six,” Gavin said. The strangeness of the nightingale’s reproduction stayed with him. “I mostly taught myself. It’s easier when you have perfect pitch like I do, and when you never forget a song after you’ve heard it, like I don’t.”
“So the fiddle was your grandfather’s?”
Gavin was all set to say yes, when something stopped him. For a moment, a tiny moment, he remembered something else. A man was handing him the fiddle, but it wasn’t Gramps. A much younger man, tall, broad-shouldered, with white-blond hair. The memory hovered in front of him like a reflection in a soap bubble, shiny and distorted.
“You can play just like Daddy. Would you like that?”
Gavin realized Alice was waiting for an answer. “I’m… I’m not sure,” he said. “Gramps used to have it, but…”
“Was Gramps your father’s mother or your mother’s father?”
“Hold the fiddle like this and the bow like this. They’re big now, but you’ll grow. Do it right.”
“My father’s.” Gavin’s voice grew distant. He felt strange, mixed up. “He lived with us, even though Dad… didn’t.”
“Didn’t? What happened to him?”
“This one is D, this one is G, this is A, and this is E.”
Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know. He left when I was very small. Ma refused to talk about him, and she became angry if anyone asked. After a while, I stopped wondering.”
“Good! Keep that up, and you’ll play ‘I See the Moon’ for your ma just like me.”
He raised the bow again. The horsehair was new, but the wood was old, burnished from hours of skin and sweat. He waved it, and the bubble burst, taking the memory with it.
“I’m sorry, darling.” Alice put an arm around his waist. “I didn’t mean to awaken painful memories.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It was a long time ago, and I don’t really remember. Though,” he added wistfully, “I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a dad. Gramps was there for me, of course, and Captain Naismith was kind of like a father, but… you know.”
“I know,” Alice said. “I find myself wondering what it would be like to have a mother. Mine died when I was so young.”
“Well, between us we had a full set of parents,” Gavin said with a small laugh to break the heavy mood, and Alice smiled. He buried his face in her hair and smelled her soft scent. “All I really need is you.”
Feng spoke up. “The romantic moment unfortunately will not keep me awake all night. We have to anchor ourselves.”
“I’ll take over.” Gavin took back the nightingale, stowed the fiddle in its case, and accepted the helm from Feng. “I don’t sleep much these days.”
Feng disappeared belowdecks. Alice stood beside Gavin for a moment, her presence warm and solid. Gavin steered with one hand so he could put an arm around her. “We’re alone for the first time in ages,” she said.
“Unless you count the Lady,” Gavin replied with a smile.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “I want more time with you, Gavin. I feel like we never have enough.”
“No one ever has enough time.” Gavin checked his heading on the compass set into the helm, visible thanks to the soft blue glow of the envelope, and corrected his course. “Especially not clockworkers.”
Eventually, Alice kissed him good night and went below herself, leaving Gavin alone on the deck. He felt her absence, even though she was only a few yards away.
In the morning, everything changed.