Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(15)

“How many jobs have you been on?” Danny asked as they ran the cables down.

The apprentice looked up, as if the sky held the answer. “Just one.”

His hand slipped on the rope. “You mean that was your first job?” Brandon nodded. Danny cursed himself, wishing he’d handled the situation better, but it was much too late now.

“Hold on,” Danny said, “apprentices usually start at twelve or thirteen. Aren’t you a bit old to be starting on assignments?”

Brandon looked Danny up and down again. “Aren’t you a bit young to be a mechanic?”

Danny tried not to clench his jaw. Maybe this boy wasn’t so different from the others after all. “Is that what you think?”

“No. I’ve only ever seen older mechanics.”

“Apprentices can become mechanics by seventeen, if they know what they’re doing.”

“Well,” Brandon said, “you certainly know what you’re doing.”

Danny waited for the sarcasm to register, but it never did. He felt a curious lightness, momentarily driving away the pang of the damaged tower. Danny ducked his head and muttered a sheepish thanks.

He watched Brandon as they worked. He wasn’t using his left hand much. How had he held up the Roman numeral the last time? Danny tried to remember and found that he couldn’t.

“Are you ready?” Brandon asked, putting on his abseiling belt.

“Er, sure.” Danny couldn’t have sounded less certain if he’d tried. Biting his lip, he peered down at the scaffolding. Brandon glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.

“You look like you know interesting stories,” Brandon said suddenly. “Do you?”

“Do I … know stories? Make-believe ones, you mean? I think everyone knows at least one story.”

Brandon gave him a sly smile. “Tell me your one story, then.”

It was a strange request, but Danny racked his brain anyway, tiptoeing away from the cruder stories that Cassie knew by heart. Riffling through his childhood memories, he recalled the fairy tales his mother would read him from a green leather-bound book they still kept somewhere in the house. He snatched the first one that came to mind.

“Have you heard the story of Rapunzel?” Brandon shook his head. “I won’t tell it very well, just to warn you.” He cleared his throat. “There was once a witch who lived in a tower …”

As they scaled down the clock face, Danny told the story of Dame Gothel, who kept the girl Rapunzel in a tower until her hair had grown amazingly long. Then a prince heard her singing, and saw the way Rapunzel pulled the witch up with her hair. Thinking to try the same, he called for Rapunzel to lower her hair.

“And when she pulled him up and they met, they fell in love, and he came again and again to see her. He asked her to marry him, and they escaped the tower and were married in his kingdom.”

Brandon listened quietly the whole time. Danny realized they were already on the scaffolding, the minute hand resting heavily at their feet.

“What about the witch?” Brandon asked.

Danny had asked the same question when he was young, as his mother closed the book. She had paused to think for a moment.

“The witch never bothered them again,” she’d said, brushing back his hair to kiss his forehead. “Rapunzel and the prince were careful. And they were together. From there on out, the world was theirs.”

But Danny had gone back to read the ending for himself. Remembering it now, he took a deep breath.

“Rapunzel accidentally mentioned the prince, and the witch was furious, so she cut off all of Rapunzel’s hair and cast her away. When the prince came, the witch used Rapunzel’s hair to hoist him up. Then she dropped him onto a bed of thorns, blinding him.”

The apprentice barely blinked, so Danny continued. “The prince wandered for days until he heard Rapunzel singing. He followed the sound, and when they were reunited she was so happy that she wept, and her tears healed his blindness. How that happened, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a fairy tale. All sorts of strange things happen in fairy tales.”

“I see.” Brandon gazed solemnly at the clock face where the new Roman numeral II had been installed. “I’m glad they were together, at least. Although I feel bad for the witch.”

“What? Why?”

“She must have acted that way for a reason. She didn’t hate Rapunzel, or else she would have done something worse to her. Maybe she loved her. Maybe she felt betrayed. Rapunzel and the prince had a happy ending, but she didn’t.”

“She’s the villain. She’s not supposed to have a happy ending.”

“I know.” Brandon’s eyes were unfocused. “It just makes me wonder. If she’d done something different, she could have had a happy ending, too.”

Danny stared at him until a blast of wind slapped him back into the present. Shivering, he reached for the minute hand. “Can you hold onto this end, here?”

Together they aligned the end of the hand to the cannon pinion, Danny being careful to take most of the weight. He screwed in the industrial bolts, checking the ease of movement. All the while he explained what he was doing and why. Brandon listened as raptly as he had listened to the story.

When Danny fastened the hand, he closed his eyes and tried to grasp the time fibers that flowed around the clock. They weren’t frayed as they had been when the numeral was missing, but they were scattered. He gathered as many as he could, pulling them in tight. His fingers twitched as if he were knitting.