“His clock spirit.” An unhinged laugh escaped him, verging on mania. “Oh, damn. What’ll I tell Mum?”
“What are you telling her?”
Danny sat up and blinked at Brandon Summers. He stood beside the table, mug in hand.
“What are you doing here?” Danny asked.
“A crime to get a pint, is it?”
Danny rubbed the back of his neck and pushed out a chair, silently inviting Brandon to sit. The apprentice settled down.
“You look a right mess,” Brandon observed, blunt as ever. “What happened, girl get tired of you? Er, boy?” Danny felt the return of his mania and ruthlessly pushed it down.
“Rough day.” Danny held his nearly empty glass between his palms and thought about how Matthias would react to the chaos in his sitting room. His stomach squirmed.
Brandon quietly drank for a couple of minutes. “Do you fancy going to Enfield tomorrow?”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve got my first assessment coming up. I wondered if you’d give me some advice.”
Danny’s anxiety scooted over to make room for flattered surprise. An apprentice had to undergo three separate assessments before becoming a full-fledged mechanic. If this was his first, that meant Brandon was aiming to become a novice mechanic soon.
He probably didn’t know that Danny had been sacked.
Danny thought he should stay in London, find the Lead or Matthias as soon as he could. But fear seeped into the cracks in his lungs. He wanted to speak with Colton. To clear his mind, to explain everything that had happened. He was someone Danny could trust.
Danny sighed. “Where can I pick you up?”
The day dawned cold and bleak, and soot hung in the morning sky from coal fires. Danny had tossed and turned the entire night, and the weather did little to improve his spirits. It was bad enough being tired and miserable and full of nervous energy; even worse would be having to drive this way.
As his mother waited for her interview results that morning, Danny couldn’t bring himself to tell her about being sacked. Or about Evaline. The latter still felt too dreamlike to have been real, and Danny didn’t want to raise his mother’s hopes—and his own—until he understood the situation entirely.
He felt a similar frustration as he waited for a call from Matthias that never came. Both members of the Hart household stared intently at the telephone that vexed them with its silence.
On his way to Enfield, he occasionally glanced at Brandon, who had taken to complaining about the auto every two minutes. It sputtered crankily despite the new boiler. Cassie had dropped it off that morning and showed him the new leather holster, demonstrating how it rested diagonally across his chest and attached to a mechanical seal by his hip. He’d barely paid attention, but thanked her when she was done. It cut into his chest now, and he felt a bit ridiculous.
“Careful, mate!”
Danny narrowly avoided the bump in the road he always managed to forget.
Brandon cursed at his side. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “Look, the town’s just there. I promise your life’s in good hands.” Brandon didn’t seem convinced.
Since Brandon looked ready to leap from the auto rather than stay in it another minute, Danny parked on the outskirts of Enfield. Danny removed his goggles and followed his tall apprentice toward the green. The weather had driven nearly everyone inside, and the abandoned look of the place didn’t make Danny feel any better.
“What can you show me that’ll be on the assessment?” Brandon asked once they’d climbed the tower steps. Danny unbuttoned his coat and thought about what would take the least amount of time.
“How about I show you a trick with the mainspring?”
Danny felt Colton’s eyes as they worked. He sometimes looked over his shoulder and saw the spirit leaning on the wall directly behind him with arms crossed, or sitting far above them on a beam. Danny explained the procedure as best he could, but he could barely hear his own words.
“Rather than directing time, you have to listen to it. It’ll tell you where the rift is, or where it’s torn. Time’s like threads woven into a pattern. It’s your job to understand the pattern and make sure you patch it up right. Some mechanics think you can control time, but that’s not how I see it. Time is in control of you. You just have to know how to let it guide you. How to feel it.”
Brandon had always seemed intelligent, but Danny knew from the look in his dark eyes that he understood exactly what he was saying. Brandon would pass his assessment easily.
Brandon insisted they go to the pub for lunch, but Danny saw Colton’s impatient face over his apprentice’s shoulder and felt his own matching tug of frustration.
“In a minute. I’m going to take a quick walk to clear my head.”