Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(12)

“Danny Boy.” Matthias grinned. “How was your assignment? We heard about the missing numeral.”

Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Could’ve been worse. How are you, Matthias?”

“Could be worse,” he echoed. “What happened?” Danny told him about the melted numeral and how it had been found.

Matthias whistled. “And it just happened to be found by a man who melts iron for a living?”

“It’s fishy, isn’t it?” Danny sat on top of a wooden desk in the front row. “Now there’s a report that the minute hand’s been bent. I still think it’s the ironworker, but the Lead doesn’t suspect him.”

Matthias started erasing the clockwork sketch. “You’ve been reading too many detective books.”

“Says the man who got me to read them in the first place.”

Matthias shrugged in mock guilt.

“Do you think I should do something? About the ironworker.”

“If the Lead doesn’t suspect him, I doubt there’s anything you can do. Just complete the assignment as best you can.”

Not quite the answer Danny wanted. If it hadn’t been the ironworker, then who could have stolen the numeral? He thought about the protesters outside and his shoulders tightened. He thought also about the mechanics who had been at the Shere tower before him, who would have had plenty of time to hide a bomb within the clockwork.

Someone had carved the initials E.B. into the desk on which he sat. He traced the letters with his fingertip, trying not to think about his scar, where the clock had carved its own initials into his skin.

Matthias noticed the shift in Danny’s mood. “Was the assignment hard for you, after what happened?”

“It wasn’t hard at all,” he lied. “It’s my job.”

“Danny.”

He sighed. “Yes, it was hard. Would you be surprised if it wasn’t?”

“I don’t blame you for being scared.” Matthias sat on the professor’s desk, facing him. “It’s only been a few months since the accident. Your mother says you’re still having nightmares.”

Of course his mother heard him screaming at night. Not like she would bother asking him about it in the morning.

Matthias frowned. “We’re worried, Danny.”

“Look at me. I’m fine.”

Matthias studied him a moment, then stood and walked up to Danny with his little finger extended. “You’ll swear on it?”

It was a custom Matthias had learned in China when he’d visited as a much younger man. He had taught it to Danny a long time ago.

“Matthias,” he groaned. “I’m too old for that sort of thing.”

“You’re never too old to tell the truth.”

Danny rolled his eyes and held up his own little finger to entwine it with the man’s thicker one. They shook.

Matthias lightly cuffed his head. “You should be off. You have menacing ironworkers to question and clocks to save.”

Danny noted the rings of exhaustion under Matthias’s eyes. The man had had a scare when he heard of Danny’s accident. Matthias didn’t have many people in his life to fuss over, which meant Danny got the brunt of his protectiveness.

But maybe he looked tired for another reason. Danny wondered if the apprentices had been talking about Matthias behind his back again.

“Go on,” Matthias urged with a shooing motion. Danny slipped off the desk and wondered if there would ever come a time when adults stopped treating him like a fragile object.

He needed to go downstairs and wait for the new minute hand. Trying to distract himself from wondering what the protesters would do if they saw the part in his arms, Danny walked down the hall and glanced at the paintings as he went. He slowed to a stop when he came to the one he knew best. His father’s favorite.

It depicted a storm-tossed sea in grays and blues and greens, the water parted to reveal a dark ocean floor. In that waterless cavity stood two large figures, one red and one gold. They faced each other, prepared for a difficult fight. Lightning forked above their heads.

Danny touched his fingers to the golden figure and thought of the golden tower in Enfield. The more he focused on it, the heavier his body grew. What if these incidents meant more? What if they were a prelude to something else?

Away from Matthias’s calming presence, Danny’s stomach twisted into knots again. Sometimes clocks fell apart with age. It was to be expected when the towers had been maintaining time for hundreds of years.

But this was not the same thing. A numeral had been melted. A hand had been bent.

What was strong enough to tamper with time?





Danny’s mother and Matthias had told him stories when he was younger, but his father had kept a few up his sleeve as well. The first time Danny remembered seeing Big Ben, really seeing it and feeling it for what it was, he’d asked his father how the clocks ran in the first place.

“Don’t you know?” Christopher had asked, feigning shock. “How on earth will you be a clock mechanic if you don’t know your origins, Ticker?”

Every story originated from myth. Different cultures had their own gods. Their world had both.

Chronos was the father of time. After the world was shaped, he awoke within the cosmos, wrapped within galaxies and energy. He saw the earth and how wild and untamed it had become. How it needed to be maintained. So he created time out of the restless power within him, a tiny stream that became a raging flood as it spun the earth on its axis. Men and women aged, trees grew, plants withered. Time moved all things. Killed all things.