This Monstrous Thing(77)

The flash was so bright and strong I threw my hands up over my face. All the Clock Breakers were flung backward as the electric pulse hit them—some off the bridge, some down the ladder, some just blasted off their feet and crumpled like broken toys, their circuits overwhelmed by the current.

Then darkness fell into place again. The weight began to rise, and Clémence’s arms dropped away from it. Her body slumped backward, landed softly on the bridge, and curled like a feather of cooling ash.

“Clémence!” I scrambled to the edge of the platform and screamed her name over the noise of the gears, hoping, praying, willing her to leap to her feet and smirk at me. To sit up. To just bleeding open her eyes. “Clémence! Clémence!”

She didn’t move.

My vision flinched and for a moment I couldn’t see anything clearly, like I was looking through frosted glass. I pressed a hand against my eyes and let them burn, but even behind my lids all I could see was her body, so small and still, and that flash of light. I didn’t want to leave her there, crumpled on the clock tower bridge. I was here because of her. I was alive because of her.

But I could feel the tower throbbing around me, the charged air trembling as each second left before the explosives detonated passed. Somewhere above me, I knew, Oliver was waiting, ready to take the city down with him. I had to find him.

I gave myself ten seconds—counted them backward in time with the ticking clock—then opened my eyes again and looked up into the tower at the glowing silver face high above me.

A rope ladder with wooden rungs stretched between the glockenspiel and the clock face. I had to jump to catch the bottom and then pull myself up, arms shaking with the effort. I managed to loop my leg around the last rung and began to climb, hand over hand, until the glockenspiel below me shrank, its clockwork figures as small as the windup toys we sold in the shop. The ladder wobbled, swaying as the tower shook with the strength of the gears, but I clung on, arms wrapped around the rungs.

The ladder ended at another walkway, similar to the bridge from below but shorter and leading to a semicircular platform beneath the luminescent clock face. On the other side of the glass, the black hands loomed, seconds running like water through my fingers. Somewhere nearby, I heard a cog kick into place. A weight dropped. Then the black hands shuddered, one step closer.

Thirteen minutes to go.




The platform below the clock face had been Geisler’s workshop before he was caught, and it looked almost the same as it did in my memories of when I resurrected Oliver on it. The workbench was still there, and the cabinets, and Geisler’s green leather chair with a bookcase at its arm. But everything was empty—the shelves were bare, the workbench stripped of tools and beakers and bell jars. As I crossed the bridge, the moonlight shifted so that the clock face shone semitransparent like the frozen surface of the lake. This close, I could see the faint lines where the cracks had been patched over, veins and seams like scars left behind.

Oliver was sitting on the platform with his back against the spot where the shards met. His knees were pulled up to his chest, face buried in his arms and shoulders shaking. It was a moment before I realized that he was crying. I’d never seen him cry.

I stepped off the bridge and onto the workshop platform. The metal wailed beneath my feet, and Oliver looked up. He didn’t try to pretend he hadn’t been crying—just swiped his face with the heel of his good hand and said, “Tell me what happened. What really happened. No more lies.”

“No more lies,” I repeated, but I stayed silent. I let Oliver ask again, to be certain he wanted to know.

“Tell me,” he said.

I took a breath, so deep I thought it might burst my rib cage. “The night you died,” I said, “was the night Geisler escaped Geneva. That part was true. You and I saw him from the flat to the river—I don’t know what the plan was after that, but that was our role. But before we left, Geisler pulled me aside and he told me his journals were still in the clock tower. He asked me if I’d find them, and keep them safe for him, and I said yes. I was so proud he asked me. Me and not you. I thought maybe he was starting to notice me, and if I found them, it’d impress him, and he’d want me as his student instead of you.” I closed my eyes for a moment and let the memory spread through me like wet watercolor, released at last. “So on our way back home I begged you to bring me here. I told you it was so we could nick some things from the workshop before the police cleared it out, because I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you it was about the journals.” I pointed to a spot just over his shoulder. Oliver didn’t look. “There’s a panel in the rim around the clock that comes away. They were hidden there.”

We stared at each other hard for a second. I kept waiting for him to stop me, but he didn’t.

So I went on.

“I found the journals,” I said. “But you saw me with them, and when I told you I wanted to give them back to Geisler, you said it was wicked work, and if I wanted any part in it”—something tore inside my throat like paper, but I pressed through it—“then I was wicked too. And I was so angry about that. I was so angry about so much. That you were Geisler’s apprentice and you were going to Ingolstadt. That you thought his work was mad. That you knew Mary was engaged and you didn’t tell me. And I’d pushed it all down for so long, but something about what you said . . . I just let it all go.”