His mouth opened, and he was distantly surprised to hear words come out of it. “You’re a clock spirit.”
The woman peered at him over her teacup. She carefully put the cup and saucer down on the table. He could see now she hadn’t drunk a drop. After all, her kind didn’t need food and drink. She must have had a lot of practice at pretending.
“Yes,” she said.
He gripped the edge of the settee as the clock’s overly loud ticks stabbed him. “Your name?”
“Evaline.”
The world darkened. When it came back as color and shapes, Danny was still sitting on the settee, still staring at the woman who stared back, unruffled.
“You can’t be,” he rasped. “Evaline is the name of the clock tower in Maldon.”
“It was,” she agreed sadly. “But no longer. Evaline is here, now.”
Danny put his head between his knees, as his grammar school nurse had instructed him to do when dizzy. “That can’t be,” he whispered to the floor. “You can’t be Evaline.”
“Why not?”
He lifted his head. “Because the clockwork fell apart!”
She kept her hands in her lap, her fingers rubbing nervously over her knuckles. “That’s not quite what happened.”
Words were difficult to come by as the world unraveled around him, but he tried anyway. “Then tell me what did happen. Please.”
“I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have even brought you in here, but …”
Danny found another painful similarity to Colton in her eyes, a certain shade of loneliness. Not a prisoner in a tower, maybe, but stuck in this house while Matthias was gone for hours at a time, with no one to talk to.
“I can leave if you want me to,” Danny said slowly, hating himself when he saw the distress on her face. “Unless you’d like to tell me what actually happened to Maldon.”
Evaline bit her lower lip. She looked around the room, as if for inspiration. “Matthias was my mechanic,” she began softly, dreamily, like Matthias used to do when Danny was younger. “He seemed sad, and I wanted to know why, so I showed myself to him. We talked about everything. I was so fascinated by his stories, especially those about London. He said he wished he could take me there, if I wasn’t bound to the tower.
“He told me about his late wife and how she had died. The poor man had been lonely for so long. All I wanted to do was make him smile. I tried so hard, until one day I saw it. That smile lit up the whole world. I made him feel something he said he hadn’t felt in years.”
Her eyes were inwardly drawn to that golden, faraway moment. Though Danny didn’t want to, he thought of Colton. Had his sadness been the reason Colton had shown himself? Had Colton, like Evaline, only wanted to make him smile? Danny dug his fingers harder into the settee’s cushions.
Evaline’s expression slowly hardened. “Matthias said that mechanics were not allowed to be with our kind. He and I, we didn’t care. We were happy. But we were also reckless. Another mechanic saw us, and reported us.
“I didn’t see Matthias for a while. Then that other mechanic came and told me what had happened to him. That he was exiled. I was … devastated.” He watched as her memory turned from that golden moment to this gray one, and Danny could imagine the same terror of abandonment in Colton, the drastic urge to break and rip himself apart instead of facing that gaping loneliness again.
“I took apart my clockwork and walked to London to find him.” A small smile, perhaps unbidden, curved her mouth upward. As if she was proud of herself. “Matthias had a bit of a shock, but he’s been happy to have me here. I miss Maldon every day. But I would miss him far more.” She looked Danny in the eye, daring him to say otherwise.
Danny sat there, stunned, the word TRAITOR bold and stark before him like a newspaper headline.
He jumped to his feet and knocked over his empty teacup, spilling the dregs. Evaline tensed as he kneeled before her and took her cold hands in his. Time didn’t shiver the way it did with Colton, but it jumped, like the static shock of touching a fingertip to metal.
“Youcan’tstayhere,” he said.
“What?”
“You. Can’t. Stay. Here. You have to go back to Maldon.”
She tried to pull her hands away, but he held on tighter. “What do you mean?”
The words wanted to tumble from his mouth. It took all his strength to get them out in the right order. “Do you know what a Stopped town is?”
She shook her head.
Fighting another wave of panic, Danny explained what her disappearance had done to the town she’d left behind. “Because you left, the town is Stopped. Time is frozen and can’t move forward. My father—and all those people—are trapped inside Maldon.”
Evaline had gone as gray as the clouds outside. She gripped Danny’s hands so tightly he worried his fingers would break.
“That can’t be right,” she whispered. “Matthias would have told me. Why didn’t Matthias tell me?”