Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(5)
“Are you sure you don’t need a ride?”
The apprentice smiled and shook his head. Danny hesitated. He wondered if he should offer him a drink as an apology, even if the idea made him shake worse than the thought of jumping back onto the scaffolding. He opened his mouth to ask.
“Goodbye,” he mumbled instead. Coward.
He headed for the stairs, shoulders hunched.
Brandon stayed in the same spot, staring at the clock face.
When Danny looked over his shoulder, the apprentice was gone.
The auto acted up as soon as Danny reached London, the frame jerking until it puttered up to the Mechanics Affairs building across from Parliament Square. It would be a miracle if he reached home before nightfall.
The angry drone of men and women assaulted his ears as soon as he stepped foot outside. They blocked the entrance of the tall stone Affairs building like watchdogs, an odd assortment of middle-class men with canes and working-class boys with threadbare caps, women in taffeta walking dresses and girls with coal smudges on their faces. Whenever someone walked in or out of the building they shouted:
“No support for the unnatural!”
“Take it down!”
“Stop construction now!”
The protesters had become a regular fixture over the last couple of months, their presence just as jarring as the first time they’d gathered. Their cause had been gaining momentum lately, much to the Lead Mechanic’s alarm.
Danny supposed anyone would be nervous about the construction of a brand new clock tower.
Clenching one hand into a fist, he headed for the mob. They identified him as a mechanic by the badge clipped to his belt.
“Stop construction!”
“The mechanics can’t control us all!”
“No monopolization of time!”
The mob didn’t reach out to grab him—didn’t touch him at all—but he felt phantom hands at his clothes, his arms, his throat. Their glaring eyes strangled him.
The raised voices cut off when the doors closed behind him. Danny leaned against the nearest column and closed his eyes for a moment, willing his heart to stop beating so fast.
Monopolizing time, he thought with a scoff.
It was true that mechanics kept the specifics of clock towers away from the public, but it was for their own good. They wouldn’t understand, not when they didn’t have the ability to touch time the way mechanics did. Without the mechanics, the towers wouldn’t function. Without the towers, the world wouldn’t function.
The very thing they protested was the thing they needed most.
He shook off the thought and walked into the atrium. The wide marble floor shone, reflecting light from the crystal chandelier above. It hung suspended from a glass dome in the epicenter of the curved roof, which branched out into plaster moldings depicting the four seasons, one in each corner. Danny spotted a couple of mechanics leaning against the railing of the mezzanine above. Their laughter echoed across the atrium.
Danny climbed the long, winding flight of stairs that led to the first-floor offices. He bypassed them as the stairs curved again, away from the atrium, toward the back of the building where the classrooms were. The hallways here were long and wide, painted a shade of citrine the older mechanics insisted was once gold.
He passed murals and framed paintings, classrooms full of chattering apprentices and lecturing professors, before he climbed one more flight of stairs and found himself at the Lead Mechanic’s door.
The secretary saw him and waggled her fingers toward the office. “Go on in,” she said. “He’ll be along shortly.”
In the Lead’s office, Danny sat tapping his fingers against his knees. He told himself not to be nervous, that he was just submitting the assignment report. They were normally turned in to the secretary, but the Lead had requested this particular report in person.
Danny hoped he had done enough.
The Lead’s desk was wide and cluttered. One corner was occupied by a kinetic toy that dangled four metal balls from cords. Danny’s chair groaned as he leaned forward and lifted the ball farthest on the right, then let it fall. He watched them bounce back and forth until the door opened behind him.
“Hello, Daniel.” The Lead was short but broad, with a dark mustache and a balding head. He looked like the sort of man who would wish you a good morning whether you were an acquaintance or a stranger.
The Lead tossed a pile of papers onto his desk, glanced at the source of the clicking noise, and wrapped his hand around the metal balls to make them stop.
“Was it all that bad?” the Lead asked.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Your face gives away everything. It always has.” The man settled at his desk. Behind him stretched a wide window painted with the colors of approaching dusk. “Tell me what happened.”
Danny gave a verbal report as he handed over the written one. It had come out to only one page, hastily scrawled on crumpled parchment he’d found at the bottom of his bag. He hadn’t had time to find real paper; he was much too anxious to find out what the Lead had to say.
The Lead skimmed the report with a critical eye, then set it down. “It sounds as if everything went well.” Danny wondered if he caught a hint of surprise beneath the words.
“I suppose it did.”
“Don’t be modest, Daniel. This was a medium-risk assignment, and you pulled it off. That’s something to be proud of.” He smiled, and Danny started to smile, too. Before, he had never questioned praise. Now, it sat tepid and uncertain at the bottom of his rib cage, afraid to rise too high lest it pop like a bubble under atmospheric pressure.