Danny woke to the smell of kippers. For a moment, he thought he was back home, his mother fixing up a full breakfast downstairs. The thought was so comforting that he smiled into his pillow. He would have a large breakfast with his parents, drop by Cassie’s place, then drive back to Enfield.
Enfield.
His eyes snapped open. He touched his aching elbow, where they had wrapped a new bandage.
Now he remembered.
“Ah, there you are. I thought some hot food would wake you.”
Danny sat up. He felt curiously hollow, as if all his insides had been scraped out. A woman sat in a chair beside his bed, one finger marking her place in the book she’d been reading.
She set it down and reached for the breakfast tray at her feet, placing it before him and settling back to assess his reaction. He looked her up and down. She was middle-aged, and looked quite fit. Her light brown hair had been tied into a simple chignon, revealing an angular face with hazel-green eyes.
“You need to eat, love,” she said. “They gave you a much higher dosage than was necessary, and you’ve been in and out for nearly two days. Poor thing, you’re too thin already.” She clucked her tongue. “Don’t worry, I gave them a tongue-lashing. Won’t happen again.”
Danny studied the tray. Tea, toast, kippers, mushrooms. His stomach rumbled, but he was too faint to reach for any of it.
“Who are you?” he croaked.
“Josephine Davis. Jo for short, if you like. I’m Zavier’s aunt.”
Danny blinked. Aunt?
“I’ll save you some questions and explain, but only if you start eating.” She pointed sternly at the tray. Danny slowly picked up the fork and speared a mushroom. It was chewy almost to the point of being rubbery, but the flavor flooded his mouth with an almost painful intensity.
“There’s a good lad. Now, let’s see. To start with, this is my husband’s ship. He passed away a few years ago, so for the moment, it’s unregistered. Zavier’s father passed from a mining accident when he was fifteen, and his mother, my sister, is—gone.” There was a curious lilt in her voice at the word gone. “He’s been with me ever since. He’s a good boy, if a bit narrow-sighted.
“I help pilot the ship. Zavier takes care of operations. It was just him and a few others at first—Ed and Liddy, if you met them; they’re his friends from back home—and they had to work to convince me to let them use the ship, but in the end they won me over.”
Danny forced down a bite of kipper. “I’m not planning to join—”
“I know, I know. That’s between you and Zavier.”
“Then why are you here, if not to recruit me?”
“To give you a proper welcome to the Prometheus. And to apologize for my nephew.”
Danny took a long sip of tea, wondering what to say. She didn’t make him anxious like the others did. There were no pretenses here, no masks, no suspicion.
“You actually believe in this cause?” he asked at last. “Destroying clock towers?”
“I do. Zavier has always known what he’s doing, and, by God, that boy is clever. I believe him about Aetas. About all of it.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure he’s told you about Oceana. It was like a dream, but we all saw her.” Jo’s eyes glazed over, as though recalling something far away, unreachable. “It’s a little hard to not believe in something you’ve seen with your own eyes.”
“You realize that you’re a terrorist.”
Jo smiled. “Call it what you will, but you can’t deny the world as we know it is changing. Nothing can ever stay exactly as it is. Best get on the wagon before it leaves you in the dust.” She picked up her book again. “Eat, love. Then I’ll take you to see Zavier.”
Danny’s stomach had shrunk while he slept, but he ate most of the breakfast, which appeased Jo enough that she was willing to give him his clothes back. She stood facing the wall as he dressed, then turned back to hand him a comb.
“You can have a bath today, if you like,” she said in a tone that plainly meant he needed one.
“Thank you.” He couldn’t believe he was thanking one of them, but she’d been decent, unlike the others. No jokes, no ultimatums, no handcuffs, and best of all, no needles.
She took him to Zavier’s office and, after a quick knock, opened the door.
“Danny’s awake. I’ve brought him to see you.”
Zavier had been talking to Dae, who took this as his cue to leave. The smith gave Danny a once-over as he passed.
“Please come in, Danny. Thank you, Aunt Jo.”
She gave him a pointed look before she closed the door, and then it was just Zavier and Danny and silence. Zavier had a metal, rod-like device in his hands. He turned it over in his fingers before setting it on the desk behind him. It looked new. Dae must have brought it to show him.
Zavier cleared his throat. “I apologize for what happened. We won’t resort to such methods again, provided you can remain calm. If not,” he said, touching the metal rod, “we have other methods. Less harmful, but still effective. Please don’t make us use them.”
Danny stared at the desk, eyes roaming over the strange rod and the papers Zavier had been reading. Even upside down, he could tell that one of the sheets was written in French. He saw the phrase “feu-de-joie” underlined three times.
“I won’t make you use them,” Danny said, voice cracking with weariness, “if you tell me what’s happened to Enfield.”
“I’ve already told you. Now, I’ve been thinking. Since you don’t believe us about Aetas, I thought we could show you, so you can better understand. We still have a little water left after Meerut and Lucknow.”
Danny’s heart began to pound painfully fast. “You’re going to destroy another tower?”
“Just a small one in Edava. It’s a town on the southern coast of India. The tower there is already falling apart.”
Danny thought of Colton’s tower, and how it had been falling apart from neglect when he’d first seen it. “You can’t just knock down a tower because of that!”
“Not because of that, Danny. Because we’re freeing time. We’ve tried using the water without resorting to this, but found the power wouldn’t take over until the influence of the clock was removed. We’re doing these people a favor. Instead of worrying about their tower Stopping, we’re liberating the people of Edava from the tower’s wretched hold on them.” Zavier’s eyes flashed. “You more than anyone should know what a liability a tower can be.”
There were too many words begging to be yelled, too many ways he wanted to smack the self-righteous look off Zavier’s face. Breathing hard through his nose, Danny said, “I won’t help you if you do this.”
Zavier examined him a moment. He took Colton’s small cog from his pocket, making sure Danny saw it. “If you really want to know what happened to Enfield, you’ll let us show you.”
Danny bared his teeth. Zavier took his silence as agreement and slipped the cog from sight.
A knock interrupted their icy standoff. The door opened to reveal Edmund.
“Za—oh, hullo there, Danny. Sorry about the whole … well.” When Danny only glared at him, he turned to Zavier. “The others have come back. When should we detonate?”
“In a moment.” He glanced at Danny. “Remember what I said.” He slipped the metal rod through his belt, and Danny swallowed.
At the observation deck, joined by a couple others, Danny’s stomach flipped. Before, his view had been an ocean of gray clouds. Now, he could see the sparkling azure of the Arabian Sea below, and where it met a rocky coastline crowded with palms. A town was nestled there. Quiet. Unsuspecting.
“Some of the others rigged up explosives we got from Dae,” Zavier explained as they took their places before the window. Danny was flanked by Zavier and Edmund, the others—Prema and the large Sikh man—positioned slightly behind, probably in case he tried to run again. His elbow throbbed, a painful reminder of how poorly that had ended for him last time.
“Dae found a way we can detonate the explosives from a distance, but we still have to be within ten miles for the transmitter to work.” Zavier held out a hand and Edmund passed him a metallic box. Zavier opened it to reveal a control panel inside.
A small aircraft suddenly flew out from below them, toward Edava. Danny hoped, if only for a moment, that it was someone else—someone who had seen the airship and was rushing to get help. But then he quickly realized it was the same aircraft that had rescued Zavier from the train. It must have been docked on the airship.
Danny held his breath as the plane circled the town in the distance, as the air beneath it began to shimmer.
“He’s dropping Aetas’s water over the tower,” Zavier explained. “It’ll soak up the time of Edava, rendering the tower obsolete.”
The plane turned and headed back for the Prometheus.
“Watch, Danny. This is the power of Aetas.”
“No,” he said quickly, even as Zavier reached for a button on the control panel. “No, you can’t! Stop!”
He tried to lunge at him, but the large Sikh man held him back. Zavier pressed the button, and at first, nothing happened. Then Danny saw a plume of wild smoke rising from the middle of the town. He lurched forward.
“You bastard!”
“Watch, Danny!”
Danny was let go, and he pressed his hands to the glass. He waited for a gray dome to block the town from the world, Stopping time the way Maldon had Stopped nearly four years ago, the way Enfield had Stopped the year before.
Nothing happened.
A ripple ran through him, through the very air, and he could have sworn even the airship shook. Sharp, crisp, just like Khurja.
Edava began to glow, faintly at first, and then brighter, brighter, until the glow disappeared with a blinding blink. People appeared along the coastline, pointing at the Prometheus. They were free. Time was still running.
And the Edava spirit was dead.
“We know you want to preserve the towers,” Zavier said softly. “But sometimes, you have to sacrifice what you want for what’s right. Surely you must understand. And if you don’t yet, you will.”
Danny didn’t realize he was crying until he saw his reflection in the glass. He closed his eyes and slid to the floor, weeping for a soul he had never known, and weeping for a soul he did know. One that these people were trying to erase from his life for good.