His parents sat staring at the papers on the kitchen table like they would rear up and attack at any moment. Danny had slid the file containing information about his trip across the wooden surface to them: Agra, lifestyle at the cantonment where he’d be staying, some words in an Indian language he’d butchered the pronunciations of. When he had finished, they’d entered this uneasy silence.
Danny fiddled with the small cog in his pocket. His father’s eyebrows were drawn together, but he wasn’t angry; Danny could tell because the small vein on his forehead was still. His mother’s lips, however, were pursed more tightly than usual.
“I already told the Lead I would go,” Danny said. “I’m not changing my mind.”
“But India?” Leila said, finally roused from her stupor. “Good Lord, who knows what you’ll find there! Highway robbers and snakes and cholera—”
“Pretty sure we have all those here,” Danny mumbled.
“He’s eighteen,” Christopher reminded her. “He can decide for himself.”
“But it’s absurd! The Lead Mechanic shouldn’t be putting his problems on the shoulders of a boy.”
“He’s not a boy,” Christopher argued. “He’s already a young man, and making a fine name for himself as a clock mechanic. At this rate, he has a good chance of being named Lead one day.”
Danny had forgotten how much he missed his father’s praise. Christopher saw his grateful expression and winked.
“It’ll only be a few weeks,” Danny assured his mother. “And there are a lot of soldiers in Agra. I’ll be safe.”
Leila opened her mouth at the same time the telephone rang in the hall. Seeing that his wife would not budge, Christopher rose to answer it. “Don’t harry our son until I get back.”
But as soon as they heard his “Hello?” from the other room, that’s exactly what she did. “Danny, this is ridiculous. I know this opportunity seems new and romantic, but you’ve just been through something harrowing.”
“That was months ago, Mum.”
“You still have nightmares.”
He winced. He’d forgotten that when he slept in his room upstairs, it was easy for his parents to hear him wake up screaming. Leila hadn’t mentioned it in the past. That she acknowledged it now was proof she was still trying to mend the cracks that had formed between them.
Last year, he would have traded anything for her concern. Now he wanted to be as far from it as possible.
“I can take care of myself,” he said to the tabletop.
“But it’s so very far away, and what if something happens? What if—” Her voice caught, and Danny had to look away. She had already faced unbearable loss when Christopher had been trapped in Maldon. He couldn’t blame her for fearing that she might go through it all again.
“I couldn’t bear it,” Leila whispered. “I couldn’t, Danny.”
“Mum,” he said, his voice softer, “I promise I’ll be all right.” He reached for her hand, and she seized it both of her own, clinging to it like she would drown if she didn’t keep hold. “There’ll be all sorts of people looking after us, and it won’t take long.”
Leila was quiet a moment. The low murmur of Christopher on the telephone drifted into the kitchen.
“What’ll happen to him if you’re gone?” she finally asked.
“Dad’s the one who says I should go.”
“I mean Colton.”
Danny frowned. “He’ll stay in his tower, of course. He’ll be fine.”
“But what will happen to him if something happens to you?”
Danny hadn’t given the scenario much thought, but he supposed his mother had a right to ask. When Matthias had been exiled from Maldon, the tower’s spirit had dismantled her clock, Stopping the town. Danny had once made Colton promise never to do the same.
“I really don’t think Colton would do what Evaline did.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I just am.” He stood, frustrated. “I wish you’d stop being so suspicious of every little thing. If Colton promised he wouldn’t hurt himself or Enfield, then he won’t.”
Leila rose, color staining her cheeks. “I’m trying to be practical. I’m sure Matthias never expected Evaline to act as she did.”
“Evaline isn’t Colton! How can you stand there and accuse him of things he hasn’t even done? Why are you being this way?”
“Because you’re in love with a bloody clock spirit!”
The air suddenly shifted, and mother and son stood staring at each other, accusation turning to apprehension. They turned slowly to the kitchen door, where Christopher stood. He looked between them, confused.
“What?” When there was no answer, he stepped into the kitchen. “What did you say?”
“Christopher …” Leila glanced at Danny, eyes wide. “What you heard …”
“You said he’s in love with a clock spirit. Danny?” Christopher looked to him, but Danny couldn’t meet his eyes. “Is this true?”
Danny remained silent. He didn’t know what he could possibly say to erase his mother’s blurted words, painted on the kitchen walls for anyone to read. He began to shake, one hand clutching his stomach. A foundation had formed at the base of his lungs over the last few months, a steadying mixture of routine and contentment as he built his life in Enfield, as he learned at last to breathe. Now that foundation began to crumble, and he struggled for air.
“It’s that boy spirit,” Christopher murmured to himself. “The one in Enfield.”
“Christopher, wait,” Leila said. “You have to know the whole story before—”
“What were you thinking?” he demanded, the vein on his forehead jumping. “You know full well that kind of relationship is forbidden. And after what happened with Matthias!”
“Dad, please don’t report me.” Danny cringed at the sound of his own voice, helpless and young.
Christopher clenched and unclenched his hands as he considered the situation. “If you weren’t my son, I most certainly would. But I want you to have a promising career. To not end up like he did. You’ll leave Enfield when you return from India.”
Leila clasped her hands together, tight enough for her knuckles to turn white. “Christopher, please just listen. Danny would never—”
“I’m not worried about him. But you can’t predict what clock spirits will do. They’re not human, and they don’t think like we do.”
Danny still couldn’t get a full breath. Christopher noticed and tried to calm himself. “Danny, please tell me you understand. It’s not right.”
“You just said he’s a young man who could make his own choices,” Leila reminded him, the hypocrisy of her words lost on her.
“This is different. Danny, tell me you understand. You know why you must leave Enfield.”
Danny couldn’t get a breath.
“Danny. Ticker, please.”
Couldn’t—
“Daniel!”
Danny grabbed the file with all its loose papers and ran for the door. His parents shouted after him, but they might as well have been calling from the top of some distant mountain. He hurried to his auto, slammed the door, and started the engine with shaking hands.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he kept whispering as the auto jerked into motion and he sped down the street. “Shit.”
He hadn’t wanted the truth to come out this way. He’d wanted his father to meet Colton, to like him, see that his friendship with Danny was beneficial. Then Danny would have explained everything. But now his father would never see them as anything but another possible Maldon.
Wouldn’t see Danny as anything but another possible Matthias.
Danny pulled the auto over and rubbed a sleeve over his eyes, shoulders shaking under the weight of his suppressed sobs. He took a minute to gather himself, choking over his own breaths, tangled in the thorny vines of panic and guilt.
When he was calmer, he slipped out of the driver’s seat and walked toward a house with a green door, picked up a few pebbles, and tossed them at the window on the second story. He’d done this so many times before that he hardly ever missed. After a couple of taps, Cassie’s face peered out. She waved and disappeared.
He leaned against his new auto as Cassie trotted out to meet him. Her smile faded when she got a good look at his face.
“What’s happened?”
Danny told her everything. About Colton, India, his father. By the time he finished, his voice was low and flat, as though all his emotions had leaked out of him like air from a tire.
Cassie had raised a hand to her throat, but now she reached out to touch his arm. “Dan, I’m so sorry.”
“I couldn’t even stay to pack my things. Most of my stuff’s in Enfield anyway, but”— he cleared his throat—“I couldn’t stay.”
Cassie’s blue eyes were fixed on one of his waistcoat buttons. “You’re really going to India, then?”
“I’ll be safe. People travel from England to India and back all the time.”
“I know.” She bit her lower lip, and Danny knew he owed her this moment. She’d never used to worry so much, but ever since her older brother, William, got into a fatal auto accident, her world had been tinted a little darker and a little more dangerous.
“There will be soldiers,” Danny added.
“Oh. Well, that’s good, at least.” Still, her next breath was strained. “You’ll have to tell me all about it when you come home,” she said, thumping a fist against his chest.
He thought again of that mysterious letter, lying crumpled in the drawer in his bedroom. We’ll be watching.
“Cassie, just in case something happens—”
“No,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that! You will come back.”
“Cassie, listen.” He took her wrist. “Just in case, you have to make sure Colton will be all right. Check on him for me. Make sure he’s safe. And if anything happens to me, or if I come back and they exile me from Enfield … Please promise you’ll talk to him.” Colton liked Cassie. He would listen to her.
She grimaced, and he shook her arm.
“Cassie.”
“Yes, all right. I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you.”
They stood together another minute, Danny listening to the autos passing up and down the street, the nearby whistle of a bird on a telephone wire. London seemed too familiar to leave. When he returned from India, he wondered if it would be the same: the autos coming and going, the birds singing. He wondered if his father would change his mind.
“I should be go—”
Cassie threw her arms around his neck, choking off his words. “Can’t I at least see you off, when you go?”
“Yes. I’ll be back in London on Monday.”
She kissed his cheek. “Drive safely.”
As he started up the auto, she leaned in through the open window. “I’ll talk to your dad when you’re gone. If it’ll help.”
“I don’t think it will.”
“I can always use this,” she said, pulling a wrench from her pocket.
To his amazement, a weak laugh escaped him. “Cass …” There was no way to tell her how much she meant to him. That she was the only person who could coax that laugh out of him when his world was on the brink of collapse. “Thank you.”
She backed away and he drove down the street, toward Enfield.
“You have to close your eyes,” Danny insisted.
Colton rolled them instead. “I already know what it is.”
“If you keep mouthing off, I won’t give it to you.”
Colton shut his eyes at once, and Danny grinned. It felt odd to smile after his father’s anger the previous day. But after telling Colton about the assignment and the argument, some of the weight had lifted, mostly because Colton’s reaction to the whole situation had been so simple.
“I may be similar to Evaline, but I’m not her. I won’t hurt myself while you’re gone.”
“I know you won’t, but my father—”
“Should come here.”
“What?”
“Here, to my tower. I’d like to speak with him.”
The idea seemed absurd at first, but his father would be more likely to understand if he spoke to Colton. Strangely, the conversation had made him feel better. Perhaps he’d been overreacting to something that had an easy solution.
Still, he had no idea what he would find when he returned from India.
Now, standing in the clock room, Danny watched Colton waiting, his blond eyelashes quivering impatiently against his cheeks. Danny’s chest tightened with the urge to say so many things—things that went beyond language, things that felt the way the shape of Colton’s name felt. But every other word remained cramped and messy inside his head.
He took Colton’s hand and placed the object on his palm. Colton’s eyes shot open and widened in delight. It was a photograph of Danny from the shoulders up, taken with a camera box Danny had borrowed from a friend of his mother’s. In the photo, Danny was looking at the camera, barely smiling. His hair had actually been somewhat tame that day.
“I hope you like it, because that’s the best one of the lot,” Danny said. Cassie had wanted to take more, but Danny had been exhausted after an hour of posing.
“I love it. Although I wish you were truly smiling. You look so nice when you smile and it shows in your eyes.”
Danny blushed. “It was the best I could do.”
Colton examined the photo for a while, then put it carefully in his pocket. “What about the one you took of me?”
“It didn’t come out,” Danny sighed. “I didn’t expect it would. It was all blurry and out of focus.” He took his sketchbook and a pencil from his bag. “Since the photograph didn’t work, I’d like to draw you. If … If that’s all right.”
Colton, always fond of watching Danny sketch, nodded eagerly.
Danny directed Colton to sit on a box near the clock face—Danny had cleared most of them from the room, but had left a few to use as seats—and positioned him just so. Thankfully, clock spirits could sit still for a long time, so Danny didn’t have to bark at him about moving around. The clock tower bells rang four o’clock as he sketched. He tossed away the first attempt and focused more on the second, but it was difficult to concentrate when those amber eyes were taking in Danny just as thoroughly as he was taking in Colton.
Danny carefully penciled in the tiny nuances of Colton’s face, the way his hair fell in a clockwise whorl, the small shadow of his nose against his cheek. Colton’s gaze never strayed from his own. Danny tried to capture those eyes, innocent and old and warm, but couldn’t quite manage it. He struggled to find the source behind what made those eyes so special.
It’s the way he looks at me, he realized. Like nothing the world had to offer could compare to what sat before him in that moment.
Each tiny stroke with his pencil was a plea. Don’t forget me. Don’t change the way you look at me. Please be here when I return.
When he was finished, he showed the sketch to Colton. The clock spirit examined his own face and smiled softly.
“Is that really what I look like?”
“Yes.” In my eyes.
They sat in the fading sunlight. Danny leaned beside Colton’s box, putting his head on the spirit’s thigh; he smelled of sunshine and winter mornings. Colton threaded his fingers through Danny’s hair.
“I’ll miss you.”
Neither was sure who said it first.