Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(24)

“My father taught me to do it this way. The other mechanics haven’t been gentle?” Colton shook his head. “I’m sorry. Not all mechanics are careful, I’m afraid. A few aren’t even all that good. Just because someone’s born to sense time doesn’t mean they have any skill with it.”

“You’re a good mechanic,” Colton said. Their eyes met, and Danny fought to swallow. “I want you to be my mechanic.”

“Well, that’s not really my choice to …”

His voice died away as the spirit leaned down and kissed him.

Danny’s eyes widened. His chest rioted. Blond hair tickled his forehead, and he could see the curve of Colton’s closed eyelids, so close to his own. The spirit’s lips were surprisingly soft. It was difficult to remind himself that Colton wasn’t really made of flesh, that he was only a manifestation. He felt real enough.

The entire universe was flooding into his chest. Time hugged him, held him, warned him of its strength beyond the gentle touch of mouths.

Colton leaned back and their lips separated with a small noise. Danny stared at him, out of breath, feverish. He was unsure what to say now. “Thank you” didn’t seem like the proper response.

Colton’s eyes gleamed like sunshine on metal. “Will you come back?”

Danny remained kneeling by the clock’s turning heart, his own beating so hard that he would be shocked if Colton couldn’t hear it. The cogs seemed to listen and wait for his response.

But Matthias’s pained face flashed across his mind. He knew what happened to mechanics who got too close to the spirits.

Danny refused to turn Enfield into another Maldon.

“Yes,” he lied, giving a little nod to convince him. “Yes, I will.”





AETAS AND THE EARTH GODDESS



When the earth was quiet and the air was still, Aetas emerged from the ocean to discover land. He walked across red dust and desert weeds, craggy mountainsides and grass so soft he wondered if they rivaled his brother Caelum’s clouds in the sky. Time rolled over him, a second and a year, so that he traveled endlessly and within the blink of an eye.

The ocean beckoned to him. His sister, Oceana, was impatient for his return, so Aetas knelt in streams and cupped his hands in rivers to whisper of his adventures to the water. It trickled from his fingers and traveled back to Oceana, and she listened to the vesper of his stories, the breath of him under the calm, deep waters.

Aetas was wandering across a great plain of larkspur and blackthorn when he saw a young woman dancing. She twirled and turned into a shower of violets that dizzied on the breeze, then coalesced and returned back to a maiden’s form. Her hair was the color of laurel, her skin the shade of an old mahogany tree.

When Aetas approached, she stood still and let the wind play with the stalks of her hair. Aetas greeted his sister, Terra, she of the earth and living things. She asked after the ocean, and he asked after the sky.

“I’m glad you are here, Brother,” she said with the voice of the wind through bamboo reeds. “I’m in need of your assistance.”

She led him to a small settlement where humans toiled to build and plant and irrigate. A line of saplings stood as a border between the settlement and the wild hills to the east.

“These trees need to be big and strong,” said Terra, “for these humans to benefit from their fruit and their protection.”

“They will need time to grow,” Aetas replied.

“And that is what I am asking for, Brother. Time.”

He understood. Aetas spread his hands and felt the stir of time across his body, wisps and coils of golden light. They snaked around the saplings, twining through their thin branches, hugging their lean trunks. As they watched, the saplings grew and spread.

Time tugged him forward, and Aetas frowned. For even as the trees became large and strong and green, the settlement grew and grew and grew. People aged. Tombstones speckled the landscape beyond.

Aetas carefully pulled back until time reversed. The trees shrank and groveled toward the earth. The settlement contracted. The tombs gave up their dead.

“I cannot do what you ask, Sister,” Aetas said. “These trees need to grow on their own. Think of the repercussions that ripple of time will have on other living beings. The humans will all be dead before they can reap the benefits of the fully grown trees. It will cheat the trees out of many years of their long lives. Let them come into their own.”

Terra’s eyes were the grayish-green of uncut emeralds, shining as Aetas’s words opened a well of sadness within her.

He took her dark hand in his golden one. “Do not fret, Sister. The humans will grow up wise and strong like these trees. They will care for them. And when enough time passes, both will be better for it.”

For Aetas should have known that to play with time was to go against the wishes of Chronos, his creator, the originator of the power that flowed through Aetas’s body like veins of golden thread. He did not want the wrath of Chronos upon himself or upon his sister. He did not want to do something he would later come to regret.

Aetas said goodbye to Terra and resumed his travels until, weary, he walked back into the ocean to rejoin Oceana, where time was his to keep. Where each thread from his body could push in and out with the tide, touching every shore, running the world.