Clock City

by Rebekah Dodson

  Book IV: Clock Face

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Innovators

  HAVE YOU EVER HAD THAT feeling where everything is going great – so great, as a matter of fact – that you forget that everything is just terrible?

  And then all those awesome, remarkable, absolutely wonderful feelings go poof and all you’re left with is a crushing, sickening, awful reality?

  It must have been the adrenaline or something after we escaped from the palace, but that was exactly how I felt.

  Edwin was dead, and Victor probably was, too. I had no way of knowing if either survived. My mother was still a prisoner. Everything was just falling apart, and we were no closer to defeating the Keeper, even though we had the key and the dagger. We were still back at square one.

  The wardrobe tunnel took us twisty and turning through a mucky, wet underground passage with slimy, muddy walls. It was terrible, humid, and stank of earthy rot. When it finally spit us out, we came up through a trap door right into Sebastian’s workshop, a secret cellar under Victor’s house. I asked if the guards would look for us here, but Sebastian explained it was the safest place in the city: a shield of his own design hid the entire house.

  “From the outside it looks like just a vacant part of the city, where a house should be but isn’t,” he explained. “No one will ever know.”

  I chuckled at that. “Ingenious.”

  The room wasn’t as big as the one under Bailia’s bakery, but it was a substantial size. Four workbenches lined the room in a U shape, each one stopped with tools, glass bottles, and an arrack of different materials. I didn’t really pay attention because after three days of the horrors I had all I wanted was a bed. Sebastian showed me to a little bedroom off the side of the workshop and I crashed, hard.

  For the first day, I slept, a lot, more than was normal, I was sure. When I wasn’t sleeping, I took to pacing, trying to brainstorm how to save the kingdom, all to no avail. And that was when I should have seen it coming. It was like the days that my father was sober: sure, they were great, but always the bad days returned without warning, and then they were extra bad.

  That night was my first nightmare. Not my first ever, but the first I had of the time in the dungeon.

  It broke the spell in Sebastian’s sanctuary that we would ever save Clock City.

  That night I found myself drowning.

  I was trapped in the bucket all over again. The water rushed across my head, and I thrashed wildly. My hands weren’t in the stocks this time, nor my feet. I was free.

  “Mistress,” Dinga’s voice came to me, partially ripping me from my dream. “Mistress, so sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  I struggled to sit up. A few drops of water ran down my chest and into the loose shirt I was wearing. Dinga sat beside me, holding a leather flask with a copper top. He fixed the top back on. “Master sent me here with water.” He held out the flask. “Maybe you should try, would do a better job than Dinga, and not spill.”

  I took the flask from him. Water. It had been days since I’d eaten, and my stomach felt like it was gnawing itself open. I looked around. Gladly, I was still in the baggy shirt and pants I had donned from the palace. I didn’t want to think about Dinga—or God forbid, Sebastian—dressing me. I was lying on a hard, small bed, with copper posts, in a mostly empty room. A few clothes were thrown over a nearby crimson padded chair, against a desk studded with silver bolts. The room was small, barely able to fit the three pieces of furniture.

  Dinga hopped off the bed. “Shall I get Master? He has a tray of food for you.”

  I nodded, taking another sip. Slow, I urged myself, I didn’t want to overdo it.

  Dinga disappeared from the room, shutting the wooden door softly behind him.

  My back still ached, my wrists and ankles burned from everything that had happened. Everything flooded back to me in a rush. Sebastian’s apparently fake betrayal, the rack, the barrels, the loss of Edwin and his father, Victor. The flask in my hand felt heavy, as if all the pain and anguish over the last few days was contained in the leather walls. I snapped on the lid and tossed it aside. It bounced off the end of the bed and landed on the chest at the footboard with a clink.

  Clink? Leather didn’t make that sound. I inched to the corner and looked over. There was my dagger, in a finely crafted and oiled leather sheath, with the key inserted in the hilt.

  Surely, Sebastian wouldn’t have left this if he hadn’t told the truth about who he was.

  I hugged my knees to my chest. I didn’t know if I was rocking or not. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the images to go away. When I opened them, my gaze was directly on the desk in the corner. There was an odd device sitting there. I had wondered about it for days, but now I was determined to ask Sebastian what it was.

  This brass machine looked like an old microscope from my biology labs in school, only this one had an elongated brass scope, with leather trimming, and not one but three magnifying glasses that looked like they rotated in and out.

  On this morning I threw my feet on the ground and examined it more closely. A silver switch at the bottom simply said, “on,” but it wasn’t plugged in. Did it run on its own power somehow?

  Why not? I flipped it.

  The gas lamps in the room extinguished, but the room wasn’t dark. The top of the scope lit up, and the glass pieces began to rotate on their own with a slow crank. The top one clicked twice and stopped, the middle one once, and the bottom one, under a silver plate, three times. The scope elongated, the light glowing brighter.

  Two more clicks, and the room exploded in a dazzling display of lights. Not lights, I saw as I turned in a slow circle, but stars. Stars that were white and yellow, orange and blue, and they were moving. Stars lined up into shapes as they spun around the room. I spotted the little dipper, but the rest of the constellations I didn’t recognize.

  What was this thing? And running without any sign of electricity? How was that even possible? I sat on the edge of the bed and watched the wall above the machine. The display of stars was amazing and beautiful. Bright and calming they swirled around me, as if I was the only sun in their universe.

  The door to the little room swung open, and the machine suddenly clicked off, all by itself. Sebastian stood there, a full grin on his face. “I see you found the Star Chart,” he was holding a silvery tray with biscuits, a tea pot, and a tray of crackers, which he sat on the desk next to the Star Chart.

  He poured the tea into a small cup and handed it to me. “Crackers?” He lifted a cracked, pink trimmed white plate toward me.

  I took a handful and washed them down with tea.

  “How long have you lived here?” I mumbled around a mouthful of crackers.

  “In my workshop?” He refilled the tea. “Since my father’s death, about six rells ago or so.”

  I must have looked alarmed, because he quickly added, “Don’t worry, we are safe down here. Remember I told you about my shield? Well, there’s a secret entrance from Victor’s house that only Victor and I knew about. He even kept it a secret from Edwin.”

  “I don’t think even he trusted him.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Let me guess,” I mused, “this secret palace also leads to the palace.”

  Sebastian threw me a sharp glance, his eyes wide. “How did you know that?”

  I held up my open palm. “One,” I ticked off my index finger, “we had to get here somehow without being seen.” I bent down the next finger. “Two, I’m thinking that’s how Victor got to the Palace to see my mother.”

  “Why would Victor sneak in to see the queen? Oh,” he trailed off when he saw my pointed look. “Well, he stopped around the time Edwin came to live with him. It was a year after Matthias took me in, and I was five at that time. Edwin is about two years younger, so he was very small.”

  “I still can’t believe my mother just left him here.”

  Sebastian frowned. “I hate to say this, but maybe she missed you.”

  “But why go ba
ck to my father, when Victor cared about her?”

  “Why did you go back?” Sebastian countered.

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  “Alayna, what happened in that room?” he asked softly after we ate in silence for a few minutes. “Edwin and Victor, are they really...?”

  “Dead? Edwin, most assuredly,” I said, staring at my hands in my lap. “But Victor, I don’t know. If the knights found him, what would happen?”

  Sebastian pressed his hand over mine. “Victor was unstable. A great man, but prone to anger. He was harsh with Edwin, harsher than Matthias was to me. They were so different, my father and Victor. Like light and darkness.”

  I nodded. A single tear rolled down my cheek. I put my other hand over the one Sebastian held and touched my forehead to his. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He turned his head and leaned in to kiss me. I let him. For a brief moment, there was no workshop, no evil Keeper, no children trapped in the mines. I leaned in to his shoulder, and he wrapped an arm around me.

  “What will we do?” he begged after a few minutes.

  “We have to find some way to get to the children,” I answered. “We have to find the Anual, we have to figure out what’s in the clock face, and somehow, get to the Keeper.”

  “A heavy list, princess.”

  I lifted my head to look at him. “Don’t call me that. I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t deserve it.”

  “You’re so brave and willing to fight for others. That’s qualities of a princess if you ask me.”

  “And pretty, too,” Dinga said from the doorway.

  I smiled at his interruption.

  Dinga continued, “Sorry, but the contraption, Master, it’s boiling or something. You need to attend to it.”

  Sebastian moaned and hurried out of the room, rolling his eyes at me. He stopped at the door and turned his head. “Come on, I want to show you what I’m working on.”

  The tray of food forgotten for the moment, I stood slowly, my legs a little shaky, and followed him out of the room.

  He turned, his hand on the knob, and went back to the bed. “I forgot, I wanted you to have this.” He picked up the dagger and handed it to me.

  I took it and ran my hand over the familiar hilt. “You realize, if you betray me again, I’ll slit your throat.”

  Those words must have surprised Sebastian more than they did me, because he stepped back with his hands up, palms out. “Alayna, I told you, I did what I had to do. That’s over. You have no reason to fear me.”

  I slipped the dagger into the belt on my pants. “I know, I’m just being careful.”

  “Let me show you my workshop, and you’ll see what I mean.”

  A workshop, okay, yeah. My dad had one in the garage when I was little. It was a bench against the back wall that used to hold wretches and hammers, a box of nails or two, and maybe his fishing pole. Most of my memories were of it stacked with beer cans and cigarette butts, the tools buried in there somewhere. When we first came in, I’d seen the benches and Sebastian’s tools, but I hadn’t really paid attention yesterday.

  I remembered Sebastian’s steam-powered car, the first day I came here. His workshop must not have been much bigger, maybe a few workbenches like my dad’s, or a workbench and a mechanic side. Yeah, it wouldn’t be too big, I told myself.

  I was so wrong.

  The “workshop” was huge. My own house could have easily fit into the wide room with a ceiling twice my height. I could tell we were underground, however. Above me, copper piping, easily five or six feet around, ran the length of the ceiling. Water dripped here and there, and I imagined they were the sewer lines for the entire town.

  The top half of the walls were leather, and the bottom a padded crimson red, separated with large silver bolts every few inches. On the left wall was a giant clock with the same gears I had seen on the clocks outside the city wall. The other wall held a weird variety of musical instruments in glass boxes, all mounted to the wall.

  Sebastian led me to the middle of the room, to a U-shaped bench. In the middle of the U a wooden stove was mounted into the counter, with a chimney reaching through the ceiling. The counters around it were cluttered with an array of round glass bottles with different colors of liquid, trays of utensils, and what looked like parts of a gun. There was a huge cast iron pot on the stove, with steam shooting into the air. Sebastian was trying desperately to stir it and kept blowing on the top.

  “Let me get this under control,” he said, “and I have some things I want to show you.”

  I passed the upper body of one of the robot horses I had seen on the drawbridge when I entered the city. It was propped on a metal pole, the prism eyes now a dull black, and missing the multi-colored tail. Propped next to it, was the metal lower half of some kind of animal, though whether it was dog or cat, I couldn’t tell.

  Dinga was perched on a stool next to the counter, chewing on something. It was the size of my fist and had antennae.

  “Ishies,” he held up a bright blue bug with the head nearly chewed off. “Master found them, he’s such a good master.”

  I shivered but looked. Gross.

  I stood next to Sebastian and tried to peer into the pot. “What is all this?” Then, the acrid smell of scalding milk hit my nose. “And for the love of God, what is that smell?”

  “I’m making cream sauce, but Bailia’s scribbled instructions were a little hard to follow.”

  “You know, back home we usually just look up recipes on our phones.”

  Sebastian frowned at me.

  “I think it’s burning,” I added with a shrug.

  “Biggie food is weird,” said Dinga, but we ignored him.

  “Take it off the heat.” I moved to I help Sebastian move the pot.

  When the steam subsided, there was barely any liquid in the caldron. Sebastian reached across me and grabbed two round bottles from the shelf: one pink, one green. He uncorked the pink one, and slowly tipped in one drop. A plume of pink smoke erupted, and I stepped back, coughing. Sebastian chuckled as he reached for the green one, liberally pouring. Spirals of smoke drifted up, but Sebastian silenced it with a heavy black lid.

  “What in the world is the cream sauce for?” I waved the smoke out of my face.

  “It’s poison.” Dinga was smiling wide. “For the Keeper.”

  “Shh, you’ll ruin the surprise,” Sebastian told him.

  I grabbed Sebastian’s shoulder. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes.” Sebastian threw me a look that was dead serious. “We don’t want to get close to him. He,” Sebastian shuddered, a shadow passing over his face, “is deadly.”

  “I got that feeling when he left me to die in the dungeon.”

  “As did I, mistress.” Dinga nodded solemnly.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Sebastian murmured.

  “So, how are we going to get it to him?” I inquired.

  “Bailia is taking some cream filled pastries up to the palace on the morrow,” said Sebastian, “and this cream will be reserved only for the Keeper’s special shipment.”

  I nodded. “So, will it kill him, or what?”

  Sebastian shrugged again. “I don’t know. I’m not an alchemist. But it will make him too sick to move, and we will have our chance—”

  “To rescue the Anual,” Dinga announced.

  “To find the clock face,” I said at the same time.

  Sebastian looked between us. “Well, we need a better plan, obviously.”

  “Agreed.”

  I looked around. Surely there was something we could use. With all this technology, wouldn’t there be wings? A rocket pack? A flying machine? I hesitated to ask Sebastian. Would he know what those things were? I touched the spinning piston on the counter next to the stove. “What’s this, Sebastian?”

  “That is my rain maker, or, at least what I call it.” He picked it up and examined it.

  “What does it do?”


  “It measures water in the air.”

  “Isn’t that called rain, master?” Dinga asked.

  “It’s a hydrometer,” I laughed. I had to think back to my science classes for a minute.

  Sebastian tried the word in his mouth. “Hydro, water from the Latin, but what is meter?”

  “Measures things,” I said, shrugging again.

  “Genius, Alayna, you are a genius,” Sebastian smiled. “I have to write that down!” On the other side of the counter were stacks of stray paper, some with words, most with drawings. From under the pile he pulled a quill with a yellow sunbird feather, touched the tip to his lips, and wrote fluidly across a blank page.

  He looked back up at me. “Come, I have other things I must show you. Maybe you have names for them in your world?”

  Before I could protest, Sebastian grabbed my hand and dragged me across the room. I was surprised, but glad to be away from Dinga and his bug diet. My stomach didn’t need any more coaxing at this point.

  At the back of the workshop, a huge contraption took up the entire back wall. A canvas tarp was strapped over it, but I could just make out the black wheels at the bottom. Just beyond it, two huge barn doors were fastened shut with a padlock covered in gears. That must be how he got it to the street, I figured.

  “Delilah?”

  He nodded. “She’s served me well.”

  “It was a nice car,” I continued, “wouldn’t pollute with gasoline.”

  “What’s gasoline?”

  I shook my head. I’d failed biology in school. I had no idea how to explain it. “Never mind.”

  Past the pad in the back of the workshop was a black and gray lined partition, which Sebastian folded back. Behind it was a simple marble counter, with a polished black rack. The feet were curled dragon talons, with a center piece of two dragon heads, frozen with jaws gaping.

  I’d seen plenty of guns before, my father had always kept his collection in his rack in the front room. He had a shotgun, two revolvers, and an ancient rifle he said belonged to his grandfather.

  What sat on this dragon pedestal looked like a combination of all three. The butt of a shotgun jutted from one side, but curled under, as it was meant to fit into a shoulder. It was followed by a long barrel with four test tubes, six levers, and a wheel that was free spinning, then another long, thin barrel attached, that spread into a webbed ray at the end.