Danny lingered, hoping Brandon would change his mind. When it became clear he was on his own, he reached for his coat.
He heard his name and turned around. Brandon still sat there, hands on his knees. Danny had to look twice; his left hand was now identical to the right. Unmarred. Whole.
Then what the hell had he seen? A trick of the light?
“What is it?” Danny asked when Brandon remained silent, heart beating a little faster. He willed him to change his mind. To jump up and say that drinks were a good idea after all. To explain his damned hand.
The apprentice chewed his lips and shook his head again. Disappointed, Danny slung his bag over his shoulder.
“’Bye, then.” He started down the stairs feeling Brandon’s eyes on his back. It wasn’t until he reached the bottom that he realized something.
He had been too busy reciting the story of Rapunzel to focus on his fear of the scaffolding—or his fear of the clock.
Danny gripped the steering wheel so tightly his hands looked bloodless. Every exhalation rattled from his chest.
“Calm down,” he whispered. “It won’t happen again.”
He was parked outside of Shere. He’d suffered nightmare after nightmare about this place. Now that he was back, the first time since the incident, he realized what a horrible, stupid, idiotic idea this was.
No one had given him an assignment. No one had forced him to come. He was here on his own, because he had questions.
Swallowing painfully, Danny untangled himself from the steering wheel and walked into the village, the roads too narrow for his auto. The buildings were old, but in a way his mother would call “charming.” Ivy grew up the sides of houses, and the steeple of the church roof was wet after the recent rainfall. Children laughed nearby, playing a game with hoops.
He wanted to run.
He stopped in front of a statue and leaned against it. The stone was cold and made him shiver, but its solidness was reassuring. He focused on breathing as he stared first at the ground, then at the statue. After a moment he realized it was a shrine.
It was common to see relics of the Gaian gods following in small towns and villages. Some probably still held fast to the old religion, but Danny had yet to meet anyone who actively prayed to the lost gods. Even some of the clock mechanics rolled their eyes at the mention of Aetas.
Danny himself wasn’t sure if they had ever existed, despite his father’s stories. Sometimes a story was simply a way to put the extraordinary into perspective. To embellish a truth so much that it became nothing but fabrication.
The goddess he was using as a prop was Terra, of the earth. Of course—Shere was surrounded by farmland. Farmers would sacrifice livestock as offerings to Terra in ancient times. Danny certainly hoped that practice had died out.
Terra sat cross-legged, her weatherworn hands pressed to the ground. Her face had long since eroded, but it was tilted up as if receiving strength from the sun. Her long hair fanned over her shoulders, stone strands chipped and pockmarked. Ivy snaked around one of Terra’s arms.
Danny patted her shoulder in awkward apology and stepped away from the shrine. He turned toward the village square where the clock tower stood in the center, gray stone stretching up to a white face. The ivy had even found its way here, the whole village choked with it, creeping up the tower walls. It looked more like a grave marker than a clock.
The bomb had done the most damage inside, blasting apart the clockwork and breaking wooden beams. Nothing permanent; nothing that a few replacement parts and some carpentry couldn’t fix. The central cog—the most important part of all—had remained intact.
If it hadn’t, he would have never made it out.
Danny didn’t trust himself to draw any nearer, as if getting too close would make the clockwork explode all over again. Instead, he forced himself to approach the people around the square. Luckily, no one recognized him.
A woman bounced a baby on her hip as Danny asked about the tower. “Missing parts?” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t see anything strange beforehand? A lost numeral, perhaps? Or something wrong with the hands?”
“Not that I recall.”
He asked a few others, but they all said the same: everything had been running smoothly until the bomb went off. No one could remember seeing a suspicious person, not even when Danny described the Enfield ironworker.
“There was a mechanic who came before the bombing,” a man with long sideburns said. “A big man with a strange walk.”
Danny recognized the description of Tom Hawthorne, one of the older mechanics. He had worked on the Shere tower a week before Danny, and had been the first suspect. After an inquiry, the authorities had declared him innocent.
The clock struck three. The pealing of the bells shook Danny’s heart.
He hurried back to his auto, breaths fast and shallow. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he closed his eyes as sweat rolled down his temples. He swore he heard the clock ticking even from here.
I was in an accident. I got out. I’m safe now.
Twenty minutes passed before he could drive home.