Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(62)
The guard scowled. “’Course you are, and I’m a ballerina.” He pointed sternly at the auto. “Out.”
“You don’t believe me?” Danny shoved the badge in the guard’s face again. “I’m a bloody mechanic. It says so right here.”
It was his age again. The guard had taken one look and dismissed them as children.
The man pursed his thick lips in irritation. Cassie plucked Danny’s sleeve and they turned back toward her auto.
“What, you’re just going to give up after driving all the way here?” Danny demanded.
“No, I have an idea.”
He didn’t like the look in her eyes. “Cassandra …”
“Daniel.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You’ll see, my chuckaboo. Wait here.”
She hopped into the auto and started the engine. With a wink at him, she sped off. Toward the barricade.
“Cass!”
The auto hit the edge of a canvas divider and dragged it several feet, creating a wide opening. Guards shouted and ran after Cassie as she drove in circles. Danny caught a glimpse of her face and laughed. She was enjoying the hell out of this.
Before anyone could see him, he ducked through the gap.
When he laid eyes on what was left of the tower, his breath caught. He wasn’t prepared for the reality of the tower’s destruction that now spread before him.
Rubble was everywhere. The base of the tower was intact, but stood sadly empty, the rest of the structure lying in jagged pieces like a neglected puzzle. He walked through the debris, kicking up mortar dust that stung his eyes.
“God,” he whispered as he sank to his knees. He touched a loose brick and shivered. What if this had been Colton’s tower? Pressing the back of a hand against his mouth, Danny closed his eyes and fought the rising panic within him.
When he’d composed himself, he pawed through the rubble searching for something helpful. Wooden beams jutted up from the base, broken and skeletal. Shards of metal glinted in the sun. Danny found a small gear and picked it up.
A sensation rippled up his arm, there and gone too quickly to process. It was almost like how the air warped when he touched Colton, subtle but powerful. In this case, it was barely detectable. The air smelled sharp and metallic, the scent before a lightning storm. His scalp prickled.
Had the tower worked, then?
He remembered when he’d accidentally cut his thumb in Colton’s tower. He thought about Lucas in this tower, a gear slicing into his chest, spilling his blood. His own blood seeping onto the floor of the Shere tower, time flickering around him.
Danny dropped the gear.
What does it mean?
“All right, you’ve had your fun.” A guard grabbed his elbow and dragged him out of the enclosure. Fish Lips had a hand wrapped around Cassie’s arm outside.
“Hand over your identification without fuss,” Fish Lips growled. “We’ll be informing your parents about this little adventure of yours.” Cassie groaned.
“Be thankful we’re not hauling you off to the jailhouse,” Danny’s guard said. “We see you here again, you’ll have more than the Lead Mechanic to answer to.”
Cassie met Danny’s eyes and shrugged in apology.
But he had found something, even if that something only meant more questions.
Danny used the mechanics’ library to hide from the world and think. The room was dim and crowded with shelves, perfect for secreting himself away. He found a table in a chilly corner and barricaded it with books. Books he’d already read, books he’d studied for classes, books he hadn’t even touched yet.
He scoured them all, fingertip edging down the pages, but he found nothing useful. Nothing about what he had felt at the Maldon ruins or what had happened when he nicked his thumb in Enfield. There was a list of Stopped towns and cities around the world: Sorell, Yangzhou, Kaplice. None of it explained how to free them.
There was one book, written by clock enthusiast Phoebe Archer, that he pored over the most. She had written about Aetas, detailing the fall of the Gaian gods from modern religion, and how he had been killed by his own creator. How the clock towers had produced not only time, but an increasing demand for technology, feeding into a long and prosperous Industrial Revolution. She described the clock towers being tied to the composition of the human physique. Maybe she meant the spirits. Maybe she meant something else.
No closer to an answer, Danny closed the book with a loud thud.
There were no protesters when he left the office and boarded an omnibus. There had been no demonstrating at all, in fact, since the fall of the new Maldon tower. Now that they’d gotten what they wanted, maybe there was nothing left for them to do. Maybe they were scared to come back and face the wrath of the mechanics.
When Danny got off the bus a little ways from his house, something compelled him to look across the street just as his mother disembarked her own omnibus.
He ducked behind a letter box. He had no idea why; he would see her at home. Yet the thought of meeting her in the street was odd to him.
Part of him, a stupid, childlike part, still yearned for his mother. The old Leila—not this new, hollow one. A Leila who thought her son could do no wrong. Who had once made him feel safe. In another life, he could have gone to her about Colton. He could have confided in her how each senseless bombing set off an earthquake in his chest.