Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(2)

Danny tried to smile, but only achieved a grimace. “No thank you, sir. I’m sure the apprentice is waiting for me inside.”

He turned to the tower. The closer he drew, the harder the pressure grew in his chest, and he wondered if this was what Atlas would have felt had the world rested on his sternum rather than his shoulder. Opening the tower door, Danny’s foot nearly collided with the first step in a long flight of wooden stairs. The rest of the bottom floor was only shadowed corners and cobwebs.

Danny looked up the stairs. The memory of the last clock tower sat heavy on his mind, tightening the cords of his neck. He had ascended those stairs without a care, even swinging his key ring around one finger as he climbed. He grasped at that effortlessness now, desperate to mimic its stride. But it fell away like fog through his fingers.

He had fixed clock towers before, he told himself. He could do it again.

Danny climbed toward the belfry, each creaking step raising small clouds of dust. The tower smelled of moths and age, the scent of a forgotten memory. He counted fifty stairs until he reached the bells. The jack, a mechanical manikin, stood motionless with a hammer poised to strike the bells at the next hour. It had already mistakenly announced the hour of three.

Farther up, Danny reached the churning clockwork, the bronze wheels and gears that turned the hands around the face. Below his feet swung the pendulum that swayed diligently side to side, beating every two seconds.

As he watched the clockwork turn, the pressure returned and constricted his throat. His breaths came too fast and his vision darkened at the edges. This wasn’t just the tower’s effect on him. This was—it was panic. He was panicking. Again. He couldn’t, not now, not when he had so much at stake.

He wanted to run. He wanted to cover his ears and block the echoes of screeching metal, stop breathing in the ghost of smoke that followed him everywhere he went. It was worse inside the towers, this urge to fall to his knees and throw his arms over his head in defense.

One of the reasons he had volunteered for this assignment: to get over this reaction.

The room dipped beneath him as he took a quick step back. He closed his eyes and pushed the panic ruthlessly down, down, down. Tried to convince himself it didn’t exist. He was Danny Hart, and he was a clock mechanic.

A clock mechanic who was now afraid of clocks.

It won’t be like last time, he thought, touching the scar on his chin. It can’t be.

His pounding heart was not convinced.

But this wasn’t just about him. The tower was hurt in a way he could feel in his bones. A sharp twinge in his side, like a cracked rib. They were both in pain.

Danny hugged the parcel to his body and repeated what the doctors had told him to say over and over again: I was in an accident. I got out. I’m safe now.

Whirs and clanks and ticks echoed throughout the tower, a symphony both familiar and new. The sounds vibrated through the wooden floorboards, traveled through the soles of his boots, up his legs, to his heart. Strangely, they calmed him. They loosened his throat and slowed his breaths.

Each tower sounded different to him, like a voice. This one was curious, bright, unassuming. He listened to it speak, gathering his courage until his arms screamed a reminder that the package they held was rather heavy.

Danny climbed higher on unsteady legs and finally reached the clock room. It was cluttered with dusty boxes, better lit than the rest of the tower thanks to the windows cut into the side walls. Out of breath, he put the package down and studied the near side of the clock face. The hands made long shadows through the glass. One rested horizontally, the other diagonal on its journey around the circle.

He wondered who in their right mind would steal an hour from a clock tower. The twinge inside him was a physical warning, like the missing two o’clock demanded an hour of his life in compensation.

As his father used to say: anything was possible.

He looked around again and nearly jumped out of his skin. Someone sat on a box near the clock face. Danny could have sworn no one had been there a minute before.

“Oh,” he breathed as shock faded to annoyance. “You must be Brandon.” The Lead Mechanic had mentioned his new apprentice would be Brandon Summers, a name Danny had never heard before. That was fine with him; his apprentices never lasted very long anyway.

The apprentice turned from his examination of the clock face and examined Danny instead.

Danny tried to mask his surprise. He had expected a fourteen-year-old brat, not someone his own age. Brandon’s blond hair made a halo around his face, his skin a soft shade of bronze. Danny wondered if he came from one of the colonies. Australia, maybe. A break in the rain clouds resulted in a brief flare of sunlight that gilded the room around them, giving the apprentice a preternatural glow. The eye Danny could see was light brown, like amber. The other was shut tight.

They stared at each other. Danny wanted to stay annoyed, but couldn’t stop his own eyes from traveling over the apprentice’s face. The shape of his eyes, the slanted slope from his cheekbone to his jaw. The width of his shoulders and the straight line of his back.

Danny had never seen this apprentice at the office before. Then again, he’d been away for a while.

“Hello,” Danny said when the silence stretched on. His nerves hadn’t settled, and his face grew hot.

It might have been the way the apprentice looked at him, somber and curious, like Danny had spoken a foreign language.