Timekeeper

by Tara Sim

  Danny didn’t want words, he wanted action—to push her out the door, steal the cog, throw her over his shoulder and run to Maldon. But he could do nothing except shake in the shadow of three long years of despair and guilt.

  “When Matthias returns,” she repeated, almost to herself. “Then we’ll sort this out.”

  Danny went to the office. He had to. He felt outside himself, existing above his skin, mouth dry and heart made of paper. Nothing seemed real, even when he touched his fingertips to the wall. Every breath etched hairline cracks into his lungs.

  The secretary told him the Lead wasn’t in.

  The air blew out of him and his paper heart crumpled.

  What was he supposed to do now?

  Danny searched the building top to bottom, hoping to find the Lead, Matthias … someone. But no one was there. No one he could trust.

  Which was how he ended up at the Winchester, nursing a drink.

  He rested his forehead on the sticky tabletop and moaned quietly to himself. Twitches had taken over his body, his legs jumping up and down. He needed to do something, but what? He couldn’t go to Enfield; Cassie had his auto at the shop overnight. She wanted to install her new safety device, some sort of seat holster.

  He could try going back to the office and camping in front of the Lead’s door until the man showed up. But maybe he shouldn’t, not until Matthias spoke to his …

  “His clock spirit.” An unhinged laugh escaped him, verging on mania. “Oh, damn. What’ll I tell Mum?”

  “What are you telling her?”

  Danny sat up and blinked at Brandon Summers. He stood beside the table, mug in hand.

  “What are you doing here?” Danny asked.

  “A crime to get a pint, is it?”

  Danny rubbed the back of his neck and pushed out a chair, silently inviting Brandon to sit. The apprentice settled down.

  “You look a right mess,” Brandon observed, blunt as ever. “What happened, girl get tired of you? Er, boy?” Danny felt the return of his mania and ruthlessly pushed it down.

  “Rough day.” Danny held his nearly empty glass between his palms and thought about how Matthias would react to the chaos in his sitting room. His stomach squirmed.

  Brandon quietly drank for a couple of minutes. “Do you fancy going to Enfield tomorrow?”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’ve got my first assessment coming up. I wondered if you’d give me some advice.”

  Danny’s anxiety scooted over to make room for flattered surprise. An apprentice had to undergo three separate assessments before becoming a full-fledged mechanic. If this was his first, that meant Brandon was aiming to become a novice mechanic soon.

  He probably didn’t know that Danny had been sacked.

  Danny thought he should stay in London, find the Lead or Matthias as soon as he could. But fear seeped into the cracks in his lungs. He wanted to speak with Colton. To clear his mind, to explain everything that had happened. He was someone Danny could trust.

  Danny sighed. “Where can I pick you up?”

  The day dawned cold and bleak, and soot hung in the morning sky from coal fires. Danny had tossed and turned the entire night, and the weather did little to improve his spirits. It was bad enough being tired and miserable and full of nervous energy; even worse would be having to drive this way.

  As his mother waited for her interview results that morning, Danny couldn’t bring himself to tell her about being sacked. Or about Evaline. The latter still felt too dreamlike to have been real, and Danny didn’t want to raise his mother’s hopes—and his own—until he understood the situation entirely.

  He felt a similar frustration as he waited for a call from Matthias that never came. Both members of the Hart household stared intently at the telephone that vexed them with its silence.

  On his way to Enfield, he occasionally glanced at Brandon, who had taken to complaining about the auto every two minutes. It sputtered crankily despite the new boiler. Cassie had dropped it off that morning and showed him the new leather holster, demonstrating how it rested diagonally across his chest and attached to a mechanical seal by his hip. He’d barely paid attention, but thanked her when she was done. It cut into his chest now, and he felt a bit ridiculous.

  “Careful, mate!”

  Danny narrowly avoided the bump in the road he always managed to forget.

  Brandon cursed at his side. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”

  “I’m sorry,” Danny said. “Look, the town’s just there. I promise your life’s in good hands.” Brandon didn’t seem convinced.

  Since Brandon looked ready to leap from the auto rather than stay in it another minute, Danny parked on the outskirts of Enfield. Danny removed his goggles and followed his tall apprentice toward the green. The weather had driven nearly everyone inside, and the abandoned look of the place didn’t make Danny feel any better.

  “What can you show me that’ll be on the assessment?” Brandon asked once they’d climbed the tower steps. Danny unbuttoned his coat and thought about what would take the least amount of time.

  “How about I show you a trick with the mainspring?”

  Danny felt Colton’s eyes as they worked. He sometimes looked over his shoulder and saw the spirit leaning on the wall directly behind him with arms crossed, or sitting far above them on a beam. Danny explained the procedure as best he could, but he could barely hear his own words.

  “Rather than directing time, you have to listen to it. It’ll tell you where the rift is, or where it’s torn. Time’s like threads woven into a pattern. It’s your job to understand the pattern and make sure you patch it up right. Some mechanics think you can control time, but that’s not how I see it. Time is in control of you. You just have to know how to let it guide you. How to feel it.”

  Brandon had always seemed intelligent, but Danny knew from the look in his dark eyes that he understood exactly what he was saying. Brandon would pass his assessment easily.

  Brandon insisted they go to the pub for lunch, but Danny saw Colton’s impatient face over his apprentice’s shoulder and felt his own matching tug of frustration.

  “In a minute. I’m going to take a quick walk to clear my head.”

  Danny waited until Brandon was gone before walking down the stairs. He sensed more than saw Colton follow him, barely noticing when Colton held up his coat so he could push his arms through the sleeves.

  He stepped outside and shivered, his face already raw from the wind. Colton, at his side, probably didn’t feel a thing in his billowing shirt. The spirit met Danny’s eyes with a small shrug, as if asking, “What now?”

  Not wanting to stray too far from the tower, Danny took Colton’s hand and steered him toward the hedge. No one would see them there.

  Danny wasn’t quite sure where to begin, so he asked, “How’ve you been?” It felt stupid, but as automatic as putting a teaspoon of sugar in his afternoon tea.

  “The same as I ever am.”

  They turned the corner, heading in the direction of the Aetas statue. “Something’s troubling you,” Colton said as they slowed to a stop. “Can you tell me?”

  Danny nodded and took a deep breath. It came in starts and stops, many of his words half-formed. He told Colton everything he’d learned: that Matthias had been lying to him—to everyone—and that the Maldon clock spirit was not destroyed, but in London.

  Colton’s eyes were wide when Danny finished. “If she’s alive, she can fix her clock. You can free your father!”

  Danny remained silent, and Colton’s elated smile began to fade.

  “You can’t?”

  “I don’t know.” Danny turned away. “The thing is, I trusted Matthias. I went to him when I missed my father, when I needed someone to tell me what the right thing to do was. He was always there for me, even when I didn’t want him to be. To find out he was … all this time, he was hiding this …”

  Danny’s voice began to shake, and he coughed to hide it. “If Evaline can’t
convince him to let her leave London, what can I do? How do I even speak to him?”

  Colton put his hands on Danny’s shoulders. The air shivered around him, soft and comforting, like a cat’s vibrating purr against skin.

  “From what you’ve told me, Matthias sounds like a good man. Even if he’s done this, there has to be a reason.”

  “Yes,” Danny said, voice low. “He loves that spirit. He loves her so much he would sacrifice an entire town for her.” More than one town? his mind whispered, but he shoved the idea away. “That’s not being good. That’s being bloody selfish.”

  He turned and ripped off the nearest clump of honeysuckle. He thought, coldly, that love was simply that—a handful of bruised flower petals. Beautiful and terrible and fleeting. Too easily snatched away, too easily ruined.

  “Danny, stop.” Colton took the crushed flowers from his fingers. His eyes were pinched and his voice sounded a little slower. “You’ll find a way to solve this, I know you will. And I’ll help. What can I do?”

  Danny ran his hands through his hair until it stuck up in the back. He was wasting the time he had with Colton to complain instead of focusing on his next steps.

  “I know what you can do.” He brushed his thumb across Colton’s jaw. “You can keep telling me what an idiot I’m being.”

  “You’re not an idiot,” Colton said. “You’re upset. What’s your plan for when you go back?”

  Danny lifted his arms, like the Lead did when stumped. “Try to speak to Matthias, I suppose. If he won’t listen, I’ll have to tell the authorities, and I really don’t want—What’s the matter?”

  Colton had suddenly convulsed, and shock overtook his face. His eyes grew pale and distant. He reached for Danny, but as soon as his fingers touched his shirt he jolted again and fell to the ground with a scream.

  “Colton!” Danny fell to his knees beside him. Colton writhed against the ground, clutching at his chest. His eyes rolled toward the back of his skull.

  Danny froze when he felt it. Not the pleasant shiver he experienced at Colton’s touch, but a terrible shudder that jarred him to his marrow. Not a skip in time, but a total plunge into nothingness.

  He looked up as a gray mantle spread across the sky, forming an unnatural veil that hid Enfield from the rest of the world. A concealing web of time.

  I was in an accident.

  Brandon came hurtling down the lane.

  I got out.

  Townspeople ran from their houses, staring up at the sky or looking toward the clock tower.

  I’m safe now.

  The lie drowned under the thundering of his heart as Danny struggled to lift Colton from the ground. He fumbled with the tower door and fell through the entrance when time looped, and he fell over and over until he was finally able to stumble inside. Brandon ran in after him, his eyes so large they were more white than brown.

  “What happened?” Brandon demanded. “Who the hell is that?”

  Danny held Colton protectively to his chest. But the truth couldn’t be hidden now. With a creeping sense of dread, Danny explained the truth about the limp boy in his arms.

  He didn’t think Brandon’s eyes could get any bigger. “You—this thing—he’s been here the whole time?”

  Colton feebly stirred, trying to say Danny’s name. He pointed at the stairs, or at least attempted to. Danny bounded up, Brandon following close behind.

  “How long’ve you been keeping this from me? How come I’ve never seen him?”

  Danny stopped in front of the clockwork. He took a few leaden steps toward the mechanism and sank to his knees, laying Colton gently on the floor sank to his knees, laying Colton gently on the floor. The spirit opened his eyes long enough to see what Danny saw: the stopped gears and cogs, and the empty space where the central cog normally turned.

  Colton groaned and closed his eyes.

  Danny didn’t bother to check his timepiece. There was no point.

  The town had officially Stopped.

  If time were still a moving thing, Danny would have said that with each second the crowd outside got bigger as Colton grew paler.

  The clock had come to a complete standstill, and the town sat like a frozen gray bubble in the English countryside. Just like the moment when Shere had Stopped. Just like Maldon.

  Danny could hear the frenzied townspeople beyond the door. He had brought Colton downstairs and lingered inside the tower with Brandon, trying to figure out what to do. With the buzz of the terrified people and Colton’s strange shivering, it proved difficult.

  “We can’t just ignore them,” Brandon hissed. “They have to know.”

  “They don’t have to see him,” Danny said, gesturing at Colton, who sat slumped on the stairs. He could barely keep his head up. “What’ll they think? Most of them probably don’t even believe he exists!”

  “What do you plan on doing with him, then? Keep him here?”

  That would not do at all. Colton couldn’t be left on his own right now. Danny chewed his lower lip, frustrated that while the finer points of clock repair came so easily to him, he was woefully uncreative in a crisis.

  Someone had to have stolen the central cog. Was the culprit still in Enfield, unable to run from the scene of his own crime? Or had he already left? Evaline had been able to escape a Stopped town, crossing the time barrier to the outside world. Was it because she was a spirit, or because she had been holding her cog? Yet the people in other Stopped towns, no doubt with access to their tower’s central cog, had never been able to escape.

  Danny clutched his head and groaned. He didn’t know.

  Time warbled and they found themselves by the clockwork again, then everything tilted and they were back downstairs.

  When he recovered, Brandon glanced at the door. “Maybe one of this lot stole it and now he’s blending into the crowd. You know, to avoid suspicion? It’s what I would do, if I’d done it.”

  “And did you do it?”

  Brandon lifted his arms. “Search me all you like, but I don’t have it.”

  Danny had seen Brandon run from the direction of the pub, not the tower. Danny looked at Colton, whose eyelids flinched in pain. He rubbed at his chest as if his heart was bothering him. In a sense, it was.

  “All right,” Danny said, “I think I know what to do. Brandon, do you trust me?”

  The apprentice hesitated. “I suppose.”

  “You have to carry Colton to the outskirts of town. Right to the edge of the barrier. Wait there for me while I try to explain what’s going on.”

  Brandon nodded. He bent to pick up Colton, but the spirit tried to push himself away.

  “Colton, let him carry you. I promise I’ll be right behind you.”

  Their eyes met, Colton’s once-bright amber irises now dull. The spirit slumped, allowing Brandon to scoop him up, one arm under his legs, the other supporting his shoulders. Danny opened the side door and watched as Brandon slipped behind the hedge.

  He gathered his courage and walked in the opposite direction, toward the raised voices. When the townspeople saw him, they immediately swarmed, as frantic as rats on a sinking ship.

  “What’s happening? Where’s the time gone?”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Are we trapped here are we trapped here are we trapped here are we—”

  The questions kept repeating, and people winked in and out of view just as Colton did in his tower. One blink

  here, another blink

  there.

  Danny held up his hands to ask for silence and miraculously received it, except for the one man who couldn’t pull out of his “are we trapped here” shouting loop. Clearing his throat, Danny touched his pocket where he could feel the indent of the small cog. It gave him resolve to speak.

  “I know this is a frightening situation, and you want to know what’s going on. The truth is, I can’t tell you. I came here to check the clock, stepped out a moment, and came back to find the central cog missing.” A few dismayed groans rose
from the crowd. Mayor Aldridge started wringing his hands. “Whoever took the cog may still be in town. Everyone should be on the lookout for the thief and the central cog. When you find them, bring them here. My apprentice will know what to do.”

  The crowd split at once, like children on Easter morning to find eggs hidden around the yard. Danny slipped away.

  He couldn’t stay here. He needed answers, needed to confront Matthias. He also needed Colton in order to cross the barrier, yet the farther Colton was from his cog, the weaker he would become, and Danny didn’t know—didn’t want to find out—what happened to a clock when separated too long from its life force.

  But in London, where time ran smooth and strong, Danny might have a better chance. The energy of Big Ben alone could power three clock towers, and Evaline had said it was a great help to her. If Evaline could survive with her cog and Big Ben nearby, surely Colton could feed off of the clock’s power until his own was restored.

  Danny’s walk to the outskirts was warped. He sensed himself walking forward, then passing the same house three times, crossed the village green then not recalling when he crossed the village green. The time fibers were frozen, gray, dead. He checked his timepiece. Time had Stopped at 11:14 in the morning. No matter how much time passed outside, in Enfield it would remain 11:14 until the cog was replaced.

  Brandon waited just beyond the town line, where Enfield Chase became Greater London and the two time zones met. The border was divided by that strange gray wall. Colton lay on the ground, his skin now the shade of Danny’s own.

  Danny knelt beside him and swept his hair back, afraid for a moment that Colton wouldn’t stir. But the spirit’s eyes fluttered open, searching frantically for him. Danny tried to smile, and Colton’s lips twitched in a heartbreaking attempt to return it.

  “I know this’ll make no sense,” Danny said, loud enough so Brandon could hear as well, “but I have to take you out of Enfield.”