Chainbreaker (Timekeeper)

by Tara Sim

  “I am a very prestigious clock mechanic in London,” Danny reminded them both.

  “I know, Danny.” But Colton couldn’t hide his puckish smile.

  A slow, grueling hour of work followed, and Danny was sore and sunburned by the end of it. Colton followed his progress down, leaving his perch on the roof to hang from the ladder rungs instead. The wind rippled his loose white shirt, and Danny could see hints of his back whenever he looked up.

  “Back to join the humble ground-dwellers?” the lead maintenance worker joked as Danny’s foot met sweet, solid earth.

  “Hopefully for good,” Danny replied. “Are the others finished?”

  “Half an hour ago.” Danny groaned, and the man laughed again. “You’re handy with the clock, and that’s what matters.” The man nodded to Colton, who was now standing beside Danny. “Good work, son.”

  Colton waited for the man to walk away before he asked Danny, “Why does he call me son when I’m not his son?”

  “It’s just an expression. It means he likes you. They all do.”

  The Enfield folk had taken a great interest in their clock spirit once they’d learned he was more than a myth. There had been such a steady stream of visitors that first month that Danny had irritably asked Mayor Aldridge to make a rule: no one could enter the tower without Danny’s say-so.

  Besides, what if someone accidentally walked into the tower while he and Colton were … not cleaning?

  “Your face is getting red,” Colton observed.

  “Well, your hair is a mess.”

  “So’s yours.”

  Just as Danny reached up to fix Colton’s fringe, he noticed a young woman jogging their way. Danny quickly dropped his hand. The young woman’s skirt swished in agitation as she stopped before them.

  “Sorry … Danny … but … telephone.”

  “Hold on, catch your breath.”

  She nodded and fanned her face with one hand. Jane, the mayor’s assistant, tended to handle her duties with an intensity that often made Danny worry after her health.

  “Hello, Jane.” Colton smiled.

  She returned it with a faint blush. “Hello, Colton. Your tower looks lovely.”

  “Thank you. I helped clean it.”

  “What about the telephone?” Danny cut in before they got lost in pleasantries.

  “The hub telephone rang for you. It’s not the London office, though—I checked. The caller is waiting now.”

  Telephones were expensive and worked poorly in smaller towns like Enfield, which was why they had just the communal one located at the mayor’s office. His parents didn’t make it a habit to call him, as he frequently visited them in London. Cassie would only call in an emergency, and Brandon knew to ring him at his parents’ house.

  “I’d best see what it is,” Danny said to Colton. “Go enjoy your clean tower.”

  Colton wanted to say something; Danny could see it in his eyes. But he only nodded and watched as Danny followed after Jane.

  In the mayor’s office, Danny closed the door to the telephone room. Picking up the receiver, he leaned toward the mouthpiece.

  “Hullo?”

  “Danny? It’s Daphne.”

  He swallowed a curse. He hadn’t spoken to Daphne Richards in months, and for good reason.

  “Oh. Hello, Miss Ri—Daphne.”

  “Your father gave me the number. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.” He shifted on the bench, nervously tapping his fingers on the tabletop. “I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you calling?”

  They weren’t exactly chums, but neither were they enemies—not anymore. After the mayhem of last year, when Matthias had tricked Daphne into stealing Colton’s central cog, things had been awkward at best.

  The line went silent. Danny started counting in his head, and when he reached seven, she spoke: “I need to talk to you. In person. Have you heard the news?”

  “What news?”

  “You haven’t, then. Come to London. Meet me at the Winchester.”

  “Daphne, I have things to do.”

  “It’s important.” Then, softer: “Please.”

  Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fine. Give me two hours.” He hung up.

  “You’re leaving?” Colton demanded when Danny stopped by the tower afterward. The spirit sat on the steps beside the clock face. “I thought you weren’t going to London for a few more days.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Why, is something the matter?”

  Colton shook his head. The mirth of that morning was gone, as if his levity was a thing meant for open air and couldn’t survive once his feet touched ground. “No. I just don’t like seeing you go.”

  Danny wanted to tell Colton he’d rather stay, too. Instead, he held out his hand. Colton didn’t hesitate to take it. That familiar spark flared between their skin, the acknowledgment of time. It grew stronger with every resonant tick of the clock, traveling deep into Danny’s chest and stilling the doubt he felt there.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Danny said. “Wait for me.”

  “I always do.”

  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 wi
th 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.