“How long have you been a mechanic?”
Brandon’s voice startled Danny, and his fingers skipped against the glass. The apprentice was looking at him the same way he had in the clock room, except now both eyes were open. They were amber in the daylight, bright and curious. His voice was light and smooth, flowing, like the well-oiled whirring of gears.
“And here I thought you were mute.” Danny’s own voice sounded low and clumsy in his ears. He began to put away his tools. “I was an apprentice at twelve. I’m seventeen now. Became a full mechanic seven months ago.”
“Only seven months?”
Danny wasn’t surprised by Brandon’s disappointment. Most people were convinced that someone so young shouldn’t even touch the clock towers, let alone fix them. But that didn’t change the rule that one could be a full mechanic by seventeen, if you worked hard enough.
Danny glanced up to find the apprentice’s expression hadn’t changed. “My father started teaching me when I was six.”
The small frown disappeared and Brandon’s almost-invisible eyebrows lifted. “He’s also a mechanic?”
“Was,” Danny corrected, the single word heavy in the air between them. Before Brandon could ask anything more, Danny stood and grabbed the cable attached to the scaffolding. “Let’s go up.”
They pulled in silence until they reached the wide door above, right as the clouds broke open and spilled their promised rain. Danny almost fell to his knees to kiss the solid wooden floorboards beneath him, still dizzy from the height and the touch of time.
“I need to head back to London before the rain gets worse,” he said. “What about you?” There were no other autos parked outside, and the Enfield railroad station had been demolished a few years before.
“I’ll be all right.”
Danny reached up to fix his hair. His hands were trembling. Brandon noticed and gave him a sympathetic smile.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he said, putting a secretive finger to his lips.
“Oh. Um …” Of course Brandon must have noticed his fear. Danny looked down. “Thank you. Look, I’m sorry for snapping. I didn’t mean to. I have a lot depending on this assignment, and I didn’t want to ruin it.”
“You didn’t,” Brandon assured him. “I’m sorry for not knowing what a micrometer was.”
“You did well with the numeral. Just study a little more, all right?”
He expected the apprentice to leave before him, but as he shrugged on his coat, Brandon hung back and watched the clock face.
“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.