After getting over her initial shock, Meena acted as a translator between Danny and the annoyed spirit, occasionally interjecting her own responses. The spirit’s name, like her tower, was Aditi.
“She says she has been the guardian of this tower for too many years to count,” Meena said, her eyes never leaving the golden woman. The spirit stood with her chin up, as if she enjoyed the attention. “She does not like that you forced her to come out. What did you do?” That last question was solely Meena.
“Uh.” The wrist wound had clotted, and he hid it behind his back. “I can explain later. Please ask her about the intruder.”
What followed was a long conversation in Hindi that Danny could barely understand. The women glanced at him a couple of times.
Meena switched to English. “She says she doesn’t know. She remembers someone on the roof of her tower, but by the time she went up to confront the intruder, they were gone.”
“And there’s nothing altered in her tower? Nothing out of place?”
Another exchange, and Aditi shook her head.
“Odd.” Danny rubbed a hand over his thigh, thinking. The other two carried on without him. He was happy to let them, until he heard his name.
“She wants to know how you knew she was here,” Meena said. Judging by her narrowed eyes, she wanted to know the same thing.
“Tell her—” What could he say? “Tell her that I’ve spoken with others of her kind. Maaf kijiye,” he said again to the spirit.
“She says it is all right,” Meena translated under Aditi’s words, “but that you should show more respect in her tower.” Meena arched an eyebrow at him, and he shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Fair enough. Ask her again about the trespasser. Any idea of what they were doing on the roof?”
They went around in circles until Aditi grew tired of them and made a shooing gesture. Meena asked if they could come back, and Aditi agreed, but only if they gave her an offering.
“An offering to a clock,” Meena murmured as they left. “How strange.” She stopped Danny before they walked through the door. “You owe me answers.”
He swallowed. “When we’re back at headquarters.”
They reported to Captain Harris that they had seen nothing amiss. He asked the question running through their own minds: If time still ran strong through Aditi’s tower, why were they here?
A diversion, maybe? Danny’s stomach began to squirm as he thought about Daphne farther south.
Harris reminded the pair to take an escort if they decided to roam around the city. Danny just wanted to lie down, but Meena’s persistence kept him from his desired nap. She came to his door barely five minutes after he had returned to his room.
“Can’t I get a half hour to myself?” Danny complained. “Concussion, remember?”
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Meena whispered. “You just knew she was there. You knew how to make her come out. How?”
He sighed and gestured to a chair. Meena took the seat, but didn’t take her eyes off him.
Danny sat on the edge of his bed and clasped his hands together. “Like I said, I know a few clock spirits back home.”
“How many have you spoken to?”
“Three.”
“Are they all like her?”
“No, not really. They all look different, and have different personalities. One is a man, another is a woman, and … another is a boy. About as old as me.”
Meena studied his face, and he worried what she saw there. “Tell me about them.”
He told her about Big Ben in London, and about Evaline and the disaster involving his father in Maldon. By the time he described Colton, Meena sat mesmerized, her mouth slightly parted.
“I’ve mostly spent time with Colton, the spirit of the tower I watch over back home. He’s always curious, and asks a lot of questions. Not like—” He nodded in the direction of Aditi’s tower. “I don’t think any two spirits are the same.”
Meena played with a fold in her sari. “I always thought the spirits were just stories. Something the older ghadi wallahs told the young ones for fun.”
“I thought the same, once. Colton was the first spirit I ever saw. Well, I saw Big Ben when I was younger, but I didn’t know he was a spirit until later. But Colton decided to show himself to me.” Danny stared at his fingers. “I was grateful that he trusted me enough. That he spoke to me like he cared about my life.”
After an uncomfortable silence, Danny looked up and met Meena’s eyes. Her face no longer held wonder, but suspicion.
“Danny,” she said slowly, taking something from her satchel, “you admitted there is a boy you love back home.” She unfolded the paper in her hands. “Is this boy also a clock spirit?”
Danny’s heart sank as Meena held up the drawing of Colton.
“You dropped it in Aditi’s tower,” she said.
Damn it. She stared at him, waiting for an answer.
“What would you do if I said yes?” he asked softly.
Meena stood and dusted off her sari, then pierced him again with dark, intelligent eyes. “I am not Danny Hart, so I cannot make decisions for you. But if I were you, I would stop this. I may have only just learned about the spirits, but I know enough that they should not be tampered with.”
“It’s not tampering—”
“This sort of union cannot end happily. You must see that. And if you can’t, then I will pray until you do.”
“Meena …”
She waited to hear what he had to say, but he had no words to offer, no defense to build around himself. He knew the consequences; knew them better than she did. He thought of the way time altered when Colton felt too much—felt because of him. If Harris worried about being selfish with Partha, he didn’t want to know what the captain would think of this.
It reminded him unpleasantly of what his father had said before he left: his warning that Danny putting Colton before all else would only lead to disaster. That the barrier between want and need was hard and unforgiving.
Danny lowered his eyes to the floor, where they caught a glimpse of black. He blinked, but the spindly leg he saw peeking from under the chair disappeared with a faint whir.
Meena sighed and put the picture on the table. “We should focus on one problem at a time. First, this spirit. Then you can worry about your own.”
She didn’t realize that he never stopped worrying.
They visited Aditi several more times in the next week. Every day, Danny grew more and more convinced that something wasn’t right in Meerut. Each night ended with uncertainty and each morning dawned with anxiety. He was missing something, he was sure of it.
And he had heard that whirring, clicking sound again. He’d searched all over his room, even told Captain Harris about it, but not even the soldiers could find the source of the sound.
He remembered the mechanical spider he’d seen at the Taj and shuddered.
Danny and Meena’s visits to the clock tower provided only more frustrating clues. The scaffolding Danny originally thought was missing actually lay broken at the bottom of the tower. They asked what had happened to it as they performed routine maintenance on the clock.
“She doesn’t know,” Meena translated. “There are blank spots in her memory, as she sometimes focuses on other places in Meerut besides her tower. One day, the scaffolding was beside the clock face, and the next, it was broken. The ghadi wallahs made a fuss, saying someone needed to pay for the repairs, but no one came forward.”
Danny combed the tower for clues, but there was nothing to suggest a stranger had been there. Aditi was of little help; she liked to gossip with Meena while Danny prowled around. Their laughter was grating, and once Aditi even pinched his cheek. Meena insisted it was an act of fondness.
“She says you are too thin. You need to eat more.”
“I eat plenty.” He sat cross-legged in front of the clockwork. Sunlight shone through the clock face and turned the platform a bright emerald.
Aditi said something, and Meena called down, “She would like to know where the small cog in your pocket comes from.”
He hesitated. “Tell her another of her kind gave it to me. As a gift.”
Meena’s eyebrows rose. Blushing, Danny turned back to the clockwork. He thought of his father and how much Christopher would have loved to be in this tower with him, comparing Indian and English designs.
As the other two prattled on, Danny carefully reached for the time fibers around him. Bright and steady, as they had been every day so far. Once in a while, he caught a tiny tremor. He followed the anomaly to the central cog, to the spot his blood had touched.
He so vividly remembered that day at Enfield, using his blood to control time, how the pattern had shifted just for him. In some way, that was what had happened in Khurja, too. Time had unraveled and then reformed into a new, more complicated pattern. Something abnormal, and yet … familiar.
“Danny,” Meena said, “Aditi has been having dreams, and wonders if this other spirit you know has them as well.”
He turned around and edged out of the green-tinted sunlight. “Dreams?” He thought of his past conversations with Colton. “No, I don’t think they’re capable of having dreams. They don’t even sleep. Can she explain them?”
Aditi unleashed a long stream of Hindi. “Let me see if I can translate all of this,” Meena said. “She says that in the dreams, she’s like you and me. She walks around the city, but it’s not how it is today. It’s older, with fewer buildings and people. In one dream, she’s buying a goat. In another, she’s in a hut preparing milk for butter. She rides in a cart, and she knows she’s traveling south, toward the sea.
“But the strangest one she’s had so far is of men screaming in the street, yelling about finding a solution to something. She can’t tell what they’re talking about, and because she’s scared, she tries to run and find a man—” Aditi interrupted, and Meena nodded. “She tries to find a man she calls her husband to ask him what’s happening. And then the dream ends.”
Danny tried to imagine the dreams as Meena described them. “I might know what it is.”
Meena looked surprised. “You do?”
“Colton—rather, spirits in general—have different senses. They can see and hear things all over their towns and cities. They get to see thousands, if not millions, of people during the years. It could be that she’s remembering others’ lives.”
Though Colton had never had visions like these, so far as Danny knew. Now he suddenly burned to ask him more.
Meena’s brows gently furrowed, framing the red bindi between them. “I’m not sure, Danny. This doesn’t sound the same.”
The door to the tower opened below. Danny looked up, but Meena was now alone on the upper platform.
A ghadi wallah climbed the stone steps and gave them a cool stare when he reached the top. He said something to Meena. She replied in a tone even frostier than his. It wasn’t unusual to be sent away if the ghadi wallahs thought they were taking too much time in the tower. Danny figured they had a right to be suspicious.
But the quiet, to him, was even more troubling.
Too anxious to be on his own one afternoon, Danny decided to ask Meena if she fancied a walk. They had made it a habit to discuss theories as they wandered the city. Once, they had found a snake charmer near the temple. Danny’s eyes had followed the swaying head of the cobra, hypnotized by the charmer’s music.
Danny felt very much like that snake, ensnared by a force he couldn’t understand.
He knocked on her door and heard her faint “Come in!” He pulled up short when he saw the small handgun she’d used on the train lying on the bed’s counterpane, sunlight glinting innocently against its steel casing.
“Does it frighten you?” she asked, noticing where his eyes had landed.
“No.” He closed the door halfway behind him. “Maybe a little.”
“It scares me, too. But Akash makes me carry it.”
“Why? Does he have one, too?”
“I think he does, although he’s never shown me. As for why …” She touched the gun. “He worries.”
Danny knew better than to ask questions. “I suppose it did come in handy.”
Meena stored her handgun away in its secret pocket in her salwar. He wondered if she ever worried about accidentally shooting herself in the backside. “Let’s walk.”
They asked a sepoy to escort them. He had won against Danny in cards the night before, so he was willing to make up for it by trailing behind the two mechanics. People stared wherever they went, but other British settlers were given the same treatment, so Danny didn’t take it personally. Still, it didn’t help his nerves that people here were painfully aware of his existence when he was so used to being invisible in a London crowd.
It could have been worse. One day he’d noticed a sign above a dining establishment that read NO INDIANS OR DOGS ALLOWED. He had inhaled sharply at the implication of it, but if Meena had seen, she’d pretended she hadn’t. By some unspoken agreement, they had not walked down that street since.
They barely realized they were walking in the direction of Aditi’s tower until they saw the top of the spire over the nearest rooftop. By impulse or resignation, they turned toward it.
“There’s still something I don’t understand,” Meena said, voice low so that no one could overhear. The sepoy loped a few paces behind, squinting against the last rays of sun. “When we first arrived, you did something to Aditi’s cog that upset her. What was it?”
“Oh, that.” His heart beat a little faster. “It was just an experiment.”
Meena would have asked more, but as they walked into the circular clearing where Aditi’s tower stood, something pricked against Danny’s senses. The air felt … sharp. It warped around him, and his skin broke out in gooseflesh. He could see it, a distortion in the air like heat rays in summer.
Looking down, he realized the cobblestones under his feet were dark with water.
“Meena,” he whispered. She saw the water and gasped.
“Where are the guards?” She ran into the clearing, but no one was there.
The sepoy, sensing their distress, rushed forward. “What’s wrong?”
Danny spun in a tight circle, not sure what he was looking for. And then he found it. A black line ran up the side of the tower, toward the clock face. It was smoking.
Hickory dickory dock.
The smoke rose higher.
The mouse ran up the clock.
As he followed the spark with his eyes, he noticed a figure beyond the thick glass of the clock face. The spirit banged on the green barrier, yelling soundlessly, trapped.
The clock struck one—
“Meena, get away from there!” he shouted.
The tower exploded.