Colton shook his head. The mirth of that morning was gone, as if his levity was a thing meant for open air and couldn’t survive once his feet touched ground. “No. I just don’t like seeing you go.”
Danny wanted to tell Colton he’d rather stay, too. Instead, he held out his hand. Colton didn’t hesitate to take it. That familiar spark flared between their skin, the acknowledgment of time. It grew stronger with every resonant tick of the clock, traveling deep into Danny’s chest and stilling the doubt he felt there.
“I’ll be back soon,” Danny said. “Wait for me.”
“I always do.”
As soon as Danny stepped into the Winchester, he scanned the late afternoon crowd for Daphne. Instead, he was surprised to see another familiar face.
“Brandon?”
The apprentice lifted his mug. “Danny.”
Danny slid into the sticky seat beside his former apprentice. Brandon was a tall black boy a couple years Danny’s junior, but well on his way to becoming a mechanic. Danny often wondered if Brandon would soon inherit the title of “youngest clock mechanic on record.”
“She summoned you, too?” Danny asked.
Brandon ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I reckon I know why.”
“Mind informing me, then?”
But at that moment, the orchestrator of their strange conference appeared, looking just as dour as the last time Danny had seen her. Daphne was tall and sturdily built, with long blond hair and sharp blue eyes. She wore trousers with a dark jacket and a blue kerchief tied at her throat. But the most curious thing about her appearance—other than the fact she was part Indian, yet had inherited her mother’s fair complexion—was the diamond-shaped tattoo beside her left eye. After all this time, Danny still had no clue what it stood for.
“Thank you for coming,” she said as she sat across from them, placing her motorbike helmet on the table.
Danny would normally have replied with a curt yet effective “Why am I here?” Instead, he said, “How are you, Daphne?”
She gave him a look, as if suspicious of his newfound manners. “Fine, I suppose.” They endured a long, torturous pause. Brandon quietly drank his beer. “And you?”
“All right.”
“As riveting as this small talk is,” Brandon drawled, “perhaps we should get on with it?”
“Yes. Of course. Brandon, you’ve heard the news about Rath, haven’t you?” The boy nodded. “Danny, your infuriatingly blank face tells me you haven’t.”
“All the time you spend whinging about what I don’t know is time you could be telling me what it is.”
Daphne took a deep breath. “A clock tower fell. In India.”
A beat passed. Two. Under the table, Danny’s hand curled into a fist.
“Fell?” he repeated, relieved that his voice came out steady. “Why? How?”
“They believe it was the result of explosives. It’s nothing more than a pile of rubble now. As for the why of it … no one knows.”
Explosives.
The air was close and humid around him, and Danny made a valiant effort not to touch the scar on his chin. Tried not to think of the shuddering mess of time when the mechanism he’d been repairing had exploded in his face. Tried not to think of another young mechanic who had lost his life in a similar accident, his chest impaled by a flying gear.
But the thoughts were like skipping stones across a pond. Even the briefest touch sent ripples across his mind, until he was devoured with dread.
Daphne had survived a targeted tower, too. He noticed her hands shaking on the tabletop.
“Danny,” she whispered, “do you think—?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It couldn’t be Matthias. How could he plan a tower bombing all the way in India from his cell?”
“Who knows what he was plotting before he was captured?”
“Matthias’s place was searched. According to his notes, he had no plans to leave England. I mean, of all places—India?”
Brandon cleared his throat. “You know they’re going to question him.”
“Yes, and he’ll know nothing. What then?” Danny didn’t know why he was being so protective of the man. Matthias had engineered the tower bombings that had caused the Mechanics Union so much grief the previous year. He’d nearly killed Colton and trapped Danny’s father in Maldon forever. Danny owed him nothing.
But what Daphne and Brandon were suggesting sounded absurd.
“Then the investigators will turn to someone else who knows an awful lot about tower bombings,” Daphne said. “You.”
Danny leaned back in his seat. “They wouldn’t—”
“Suspect you? No. But they’ll want your opinion. That’s why I asked you here, to tell you to watch for their call. Because they will call you, Danny. They might even ask you to investigate.”
In the summer months, pubs could become broiling in the crush of sweating bodies. Even so, a chill swept through him.
“In India?”
“Perhaps.”
As Danny mulled this over, Brandon spoke up. “Why did you ask me here, then? Am I to go as well?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Danny argued, but Daphne ignored him.
“In case I’m reassigned to Enfield in Danny’s absence, you’ll likely be my apprentice. I can help you prepare for your next assessment.”
“Cheers.”
Danny stood, chair legs shrieking across the floor. A few curious patrons looked over. “I’m not going anywhere! This is all speculation. I don’t know why the tower fell, but if it did, what do they expect me to do if the city’s Stopped?”
The other two stiffened, sharing a look Danny couldn’t decipher.
“Danny,” Daphne said, her tone a little gentler than before, “Rath isn’t Stopped.”
He glanced at Brandon, who studied the tabletop. “What?”
“Time is moving. The tower is gone, and time is moving.”
Slowly, Danny sat back down.
“That’s … not possible.”
“That’s what everyone else says. And yet, there it is all the same.”
“The clock—”
“Was ruined.”
Danny was having trouble breathing, strangled as he was by useless questions. How does one face the impossible? There was no rational explanation for this, nothing to prepare him for the difficult and daunting task of belief.
Magic, he thought, conjuring the image of Colton wreathed in golden threads, is not rational.
Finally, he found his voice again. “Even … Even if Rath isn’t Stopped, the Lead wouldn’t send me. My place is Enfield. He relocated me to get me out of his hair.”
“No offense, mate,” Brandon said, “but I don’t think anyone could ever get you out of their hair.”
Daphne shifted in her seat. “I wanted to warn you. Just in case.”
“There’s no point. I don’t want to go to India.”
“This isn’t about what you want,” Daphne said, eyes narrowed.
“I can’t leave Enfield.”
“Try telling that to the Lead when he calls. Because he will call.” She stood, grabbed her helmet, and left without so much as a goodbye for either of them.
He barely made it one foot in the door before his mother started fretting.
“Look how thin you are! What are those Enfield people feeding you? Are you sure you’re taking care of yourself?”
“Mum.”
“Well, we hardly see you,” she complained, straightening his collar as he stood frowning in the entryway.