He stopped to eat lunch and told Colton more stories. He read about Cinderella—the spirit enjoyed the part about the clock striking midnight—and Sleeping Beauty. During the latter, Colton kept asking about the time dimensions used to make everyone in the kingdom sleep for a hundred years.
As Danny finished the last bit of his sandwich, he looked up and started. A brown mouse was perched on Colton’s shoulder.
“Uh …”
Colton looked at where Danny was staring. “Hallo. You’re probably hungry.” The mouse’s ears trembled.
“Is this normal?” Danny asked, watching the mouse. Its whiskers twitched, nose sniffing the air. “You being friends with the tower mice?”
“No one else to talk to.”
Danny winced. Keeping his eyes on the mouse, he broke off a piece of bread and leaned forward. The mouse grabbed it with tiny paws and began nibbling at once, spilling crumbs down Colton’s shirt.
Danny laughed. “I feel like I’m in my own fairy tale.”
Colton smiled.
The larger gears couldn’t be handled without assistance from at least two other people, so Danny reluctantly used the ladder to reach the higher ones and wiped them off as they moved. He attacked between the spokes with his brush and dust and grit flew off, making him sneeze.
Finally, Danny turned to the main structure of the clockwork. He watched the central cog turn for some time until he knelt to wipe it with an alcohol-soaked cloth. Streaks of grime peeled away, revealing a bright copper surface underneath.
As he dusted off the spokes, he sensed Colton standing at his back. He was silent, but Danny felt his tension like a pulled bowstring. He would be rather nervous himself if someone were laying their hands upon his heart.
“No one’s treated me this gently in a long time,” the spirit said.
Danny looked up at him. Colton’s face was grave, the fairy tales now reduced to nothing but a childish distraction.
“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.”