As soon as Danny stepped into the Winchester, he scanned the late afternoon crowd for Daphne. Instead, he was surprised to see another familiar face.
“Brandon?”
The apprentice lifted his mug. “Danny.”
Danny slid into the sticky seat beside his former apprentice. Brandon was a tall black boy a couple years Danny’s junior, but well on his way to becoming a mechanic. Danny often wondered if Brandon would soon inherit the title of “youngest clock mechanic on record.”
“She summoned you, too?” Danny asked.
Brandon ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I reckon I know why.”
“Mind informing me, then?”
But at that moment, the orchestrator of their strange conference appeared, looking just as dour as the last time Danny had seen her. Daphne was tall and sturdily built, with long blond hair and sharp blue eyes. She wore trousers with a dark jacket and a blue kerchief tied at her throat. But the most curious thing about her appearance—other than the fact she was part Indian, yet had inherited her mother’s fair complexion—was the diamond-shaped tattoo beside her left eye. After all this time, Danny still had no clue what it stood for.
“Thank you for coming,” she said as she sat across from them, placing her motorbike helmet on the table.
Danny would normally have replied with a curt yet effective “Why am I here?” Instead, he said, “How are you, Daphne?”
She gave him a look, as if suspicious of his newfound manners. “Fine, I suppose.” They endured a long, torturous pause. Brandon quietly drank his beer. “And you?”
“All right.”
“As riveting as this small talk is,” Brandon drawled, “perhaps we should get on with it?”
“Yes. Of course. Brandon, you’ve heard the news about Rath, haven’t you?” The boy nodded. “Danny, your infuriatingly blank face tells me you haven’t.”
“All the time you spend whinging about what I don’t know is time you could be telling me what it is.”
Daphne took a deep breath. “A clock tower fell. In India.”
A beat passed. Two. Under the table, Danny’s hand curled into a fist.
“Fell?” he repeated, relieved that his voice came out steady. “Why? How?”
“They believe it was the result of explosives. It’s nothing more than a pile of rubble now. As for the why of it … no one knows.”
Explosives.
The air was close and humid around him, and Danny made a valiant effort not to touch the scar on his chin. Tried not to think of the shuddering mess of time when the mechanism he’d been repairing had exploded in his face. Tried not to think of another young mechanic who had lost his life in a similar accident, his chest impaled by a flying gear.
But the thoughts were like skipping stones across a pond. Even the briefest touch sent ripples across his mind, until he was devoured with dread.
Daphne had survived a targeted tower, too. He noticed her hands shaking on the tabletop.
“Danny,” she whispered, “do you think—?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It couldn’t be Matthias. How could he plan a tower bombing all the way in India from his cell?”
“Who knows what he was plotting before he was captured?”
“Matthias’s place was searched. According to his notes, he had no plans to leave England. I mean, of all places—India?”
Brandon cleared his throat. “You know they’re going to question him.”
“Yes, and he’ll know nothing. What then?” Danny didn’t know why he was being so protective of the man. Matthias had engineered the tower bombings that had caused the Mechanics Union so much grief the previous year. He’d nearly killed Colton and trapped Danny’s father in Maldon forever. Danny owed him nothing.
But what Daphne and Brandon were suggesting sounded absurd.
“Then the investigators will turn to someone else who knows an awful lot about tower bombings,” Daphne said. “You.”
Danny leaned back in his seat. “They wouldn’t—”
“Suspect you? No. But they’ll want your opinion. That’s why I asked you here, to tell you to watch for their call. Because they will call you, Danny. They might even ask you to investigate.”
In the summer months, pubs could become broiling in the crush of sweating bodies. Even so, a chill swept through him.
“In India?”
“Perhaps.”
As Danny mulled this over, Brandon spoke up. “Why did you ask me here, then? Am I to go as well?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Danny argued, but Daphne ignored him.
“In case I’m reassigned to Enfield in Danny’s absence, you’ll likely be my apprentice. I can help you prepare for your next assessment.”
“Cheers.”
Danny stood, chair legs shrieking across the floor. A few curious patrons looked over. “I’m not going anywhere! This is all speculation. I don’t know why the tower fell, but if it did, what do they expect me to do if the city’s Stopped?”
The other two stiffened, sharing a look Danny couldn’t decipher.
“Danny,” Daphne said, her tone a little gentler than before, “Rath isn’t Stopped.”
He glanced at Brandon, who studied the tabletop. “What?”
“Time is moving. The tower is gone, and time is moving.”
Slowly, Danny sat back down.
“That’s … not possible.”
“That’s what everyone else says. And yet, there it is all the same.”
“The clock—”
“Was ruined.”
Danny was having trouble breathing, strangled as he was by useless questions. How does one face the impossible? There was no rational explanation for this, nothing to prepare him for the difficult and daunting task of belief.
Magic, he thought, conjuring the image of Colton wreathed in golden threads, is not rational.
Finally, he found his voice again. “Even … Even if Rath isn’t Stopped, the Lead wouldn’t send me. My place is Enfield. He relocated me to get me out of his hair.”
“No offense, mate,” Brandon said, “but I don’t think anyone could ever get you out of their hair.”
Daphne shifted in her seat. “I wanted to warn you. Just in case.”
“There’s no point. I don’t want to go to India.”
“This isn’t about what you want,” Daphne said, eyes narrowed.
“I can’t leave Enfield.”
“Try telling that to the Lead when he calls. Because he will call.” She stood, grabbed her helmet, and left without so much as a goodbye for either of them.
He barely made it one foot in the door before his mother started fretting.
“Look how thin you are! What are those Enfield people feeding you? Are you sure you’re taking care of yourself?”
“Mum.”
“Well, we hardly see you,” she complained, straightening his collar as he stood frowning in the entryway.
“I was here last week!”
“Leave the boy alone, Leila.” Christopher ducked out of the kitchen into the hall. Like Danny, he had long limbs, green eyes, and unruly hair. “Can’t you see he’s tired?”
“I am, actually,” Danny said. “I had to clean the tower this morning.” The soreness in his limbs was a muzzy weight that would only grow worse by tomorrow.
“Come into the kitchen, then. Supper’s nearly on.”
He asked if it would be all right to invite Cassie, which of course it was. Cassie often complained her mother couldn’t cook worth a fig.
She showed up within five minutes, still wearing her work coveralls and a streak of oil in her auburn hair. She was just as obsessed with auto mechanisms as Danny was with clockwork.
“You’re a savior, Dan.”
“I figured you’d want an excuse to leave the house.”
Cassie groaned. “You try living with two sisters and two brothers and not lose your blooming mind. Mum and Dad have no idea that I’m planning to find a place of my own soon.” Danny caught the look on his mother’s face that screamed, What, without a husband?
Surrounded by light and the smell of sizzling sausage and the voices of those he loved, Danny couldn’t help but be amazed. If someone had told him a year ago that he would be here now, eating a meal with both his parents, he would have scoffed. Such a notion had been impossible, once.
A testament to just how difficult belief truly was.
Christopher told Cassie a joke that made her laugh so hard she nearly choked. As Leila admonished her husband, Danny studied his father’s face. He was still in his early forties, near the same age he’d been three years before, when he’d left to fix the tower in Maldon. Leila had aged ahead of him—it showed in the worry lines around her eyes and the threads of white in her hair.
Despite those years apart, they were just as devoted, just as capable of exchanging wordless conversations. Even when his mother needed her quiet healing days, when she was too wan and withdrawn to handle the world around her, Christopher need only put a hand on her shoulder. Danny had once thought he would never be capable of such a bond.
And then he’d met Colton.
Danny reached into his pocket and touched the small cog Colton had given him, a castoff from his clockwork that had been replaced long before. When Danny touched it, he felt sunshine on metal, heard the hum of gears and the soft chime of Colton’s laugh. He sensed a world within and apart from himself, reserved only for the two of them.
His mother knew about Colton. Though it was dangerous, she’d come to accept—with a fair amount of resignation—that her son could not choose whom he loved.
But his father still didn’t know. Christopher had been the one to tell the Lead about Matthias and Evaline. If he ever caught on that Danny’s relationship with Colton was anything other than professional …
“Danny, eat up,” his mother scolded. “Your food’s gone cold.”
After supper, Danny and Cassie lounged in the sitting room at the back of the narrow house. Well, Cassie lounged; Danny perused the cramped bookshelves. He’d already taken a few books to Enfield, including the green leather-bound collection of fairy tales and the book of Greek myths Colton so loved.
Cassie was sprawled on the worn couch behind him, and hummed curiously when he told her about Daphne’s warning.
“She seems fairly sure of herself,” Cassie remarked.
“I dunno, Cass. What if they do want me to go?”
“Would you say yes?”
Danny paused, crouched before the bottom shelf. Despite telling Daphne he didn’t want to go, he was searching for any book that mentioned India. “I’m not sure. I don’t want to leave Enfield.”
“You mean you don’t want to leave Colton.”
“It’s the same thing.” He worried out a slim book packed in tightly among the others and added it to his pile. “We’ve only just managed to find something that feels halfway ordinary. If I leave …”
Danny wasn’t only concerned about Enfield and the clock tower. He worried that if he was gone too long, Colton would forget him, or that his feelings for Danny would somehow fade with time. Danny had no idea how the heart of a clock spirit functioned, other than mechanically.
“Take it a step at a time,” Cassie said, running a hand through his hair. “The Union will likely send others first. No need to fret just yet.”
“That’s true.”
“Now that’s out of the way,” Cassie said coyly, “tell me about you and Colton.”
Danny glanced at the door, but his parents were still talking in the kitchen. “Would you stop asking about that?” he hissed. “I can’t—do that with a clock spirit.” He paused. “I don’t think.”
He started to wonder about Matthias and Evaline, then waved away the image with a sound of disgust. He did not want to think about that.
Cassie ignored his outburst. “Well, what’s the rest of it like?”
He returned to a memory of just the other day, when he and Colton had been in the clock room. Somehow, they’d ended up on the floor—nice and clean, thanks to Danny’s efforts—and Colton had wrapped a hand around his hip. That little movement in itself wasn’t much, but Danny had shuddered all the same, keenly aware of that hand as they kissed. Colton’s fingertips had reached up ever so slightly, between the buttons of his shirt, burning his skin.
“You’re redder than a baboon’s bum,” Cassie said cheerfully. Danny grabbed the nearest pillow and whacked her with it. She yelped and grabbed her own, and then it was an all-out war. For a blessed moment, clock towers were the last thing on Danny’s mind.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Danny held a wad of crumpled paper in his hand. The creases were soft, the paper having been unfurled and refolded many times. He was about to flatten it out when there was a knock at the door.
“Danny? It’s me.”
He shoved the paper in his pocket. “Come in.”
His father eased the door open, wearing his I want to talk to you smile. “All right, Ticker?”
He hadn’t heard his father use that name in years. Hearing it now, he wanted to cringe—or cry.
“All right, Dad. How are you?”
Christopher settled beside him, dipping the mattress even more. “Well, let’s see. I have a brilliant job, a beautiful wife, and an incredible son. How did I ever get so lucky?”
Shame bloomed hot and deep in Danny’s chest. His father wouldn’t say such a thing if he knew the truth.
“I am troubled by the news, though,” his father went on.
“Do you mean the tower in Rath?”
Christopher’s expression darkened. “I was wondering if you’d heard. It’s been flying around the office since yesterday. The Lead’s thinking of sending a few mechanics out to investigate.”
Danny’s heart beat a little harder. “Do you know who?”
“A couple of the senior mechanics, I’d imagine.”
Danny’s shoulders sagged a bit in relief, but there was a strange quiver deep inside him that faintly resembled disappointment.
“It’s bad enough the tower fell,” Christopher said, “but the fact that time is still moving? What on earth could make that happen?”
Danny shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”
Christopher nervously scratched his knee. “You don’t think … Matthias … ?”
So that was why his father was here. “No. I really don’t think he’d be able to.”
Christopher nodded. “I don’t think so, either. But, then again, I didn’t think he’d be capable of what he did.” He sighed. “It’s over now, at any rate. Just goes to show you can never truly know someone. Still, I miss him.”
“I know. I miss him, too.”
They shared a quiet moment together until Christopher stood. “Good night, Ticker. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“’Night, Dad.”
When the door closed, he drew the wad of paper from his pocket again. Slowly, he flattened it against his thigh to reveal the familiar message scrawled in heavy black ink:
Do not think this is finished.
You know something.
We’ll be watching.
He stared at the words until they blended together, serpentine tracks leading to some unfathomable distance.
You know something.
No, this was not Matthias’s work. This was something well beyond the machinations of a middle-aged, washed-up clock mechanic. Something Danny wanted no part of.
That night, he dreamt of crumbling towers and cogs slicing through the air. They ripped open his body, and Colton watched as he bled.