by Tara Sim
He cast the threads out. They traveled from his body into the depths of the world. They snaked over Oceana’s waters. They ran through Caelum’s sky. They climbed over Terra’s mountains.
They struck humans, twining around bodies strong enough to carry them. Those humans felt a great movement within them, apart from them, in the oceans and the sky and the mountains. In the depths of Aetas’s heart.
When enough threads had been siphoned off, Aetas cut them from his body and they continued to thrive, to pulse, to glow. Time went on. He held the rest of them, the smaller number of threads he could maintain on his own.
“Hold these threads to you,” Aetas told his followers. “Protect them. Feed them into the world. Ensure time continues to unfold. If you grow weak, come to me where I stay with my sister beneath the water. I will give you what strength I can.”
His followers flocked to the shore. They cupped their hands in the water and whispered their hopes and fears to Aetas, who smiled at them from below.
Several years passed in this way. Time servants visited the shores and prayed to Aetas, and fed their energy into time. Every second, every minute, every hour of every day was a blink and a breath to them, necessary and instinctive.
Then the sky began to darken, a rumble deep and building, and lightning sliced into Caelum’s domain like a serpent’s tongue.
Oceana knew it was Chronos. “He is waking up,” she told Aetas. “He must know what you have done.”
Aetas knew this, and knew he could not run from Chronos’s wrath. He had done what was necessary to make certain the earth would be well kept. If he was to be punished for his care, so be it.
The sky growled and lightning bit. The waters boiled. The earth shook.
Aetas stood on the ocean floor as the water above him parted, revealing a storm dark and looming. He told his sister Oceana to run, to find shelter from their creator.
On this spot, he waited for Chronos to descend.
Danny played with the cog in his pocket as he walked through Hyde Park. After Colton had given it to him, he had polished the cog until it shone. He would often take it out to spin it with his fingers, or roll it around his palm, but never in public in case anyone happened to see.
But as he walked through the park, taking in the couples strolling together, he reached into his pocket for its comfort.
He was on his way to see Matthias. Danny had been furious when he learned that Matthias had suggested taking Danny off the Enfield assignments, but after some thought—and after losing his job—he realized his bruised feelings were the least of his problems. He needed someone to talk to. He needed his friend back.
It was time to tell Matthias about Colton.
Matthias would help him. He had been down this uncertain road, had faced the possibility of losing everything. Hopefully they could prevent history from repeating itself.
But when Danny knocked on the door of the white and blue house, no one answered.
Danny fiddled with the cog as he stared at the park, wondering if he could go to Enfield. But the Lead might be tracking his movements now, making sure Danny never stepped foot in a clock tower again. The reality struck low and hard, winding him. No more clock towers. No more time fibers winding through his fingers.
No more Colton.
“Damn it,” he whispered, putting his head in his hands.
He really was losing everything.
The door’s lock scraped, and Danny started. But it wasn’t Matthias behind the faded blue door. A woman peered out from the shadowed crack, narrowing her eyes against the brightness outside.
“Oh. Hullo.” Danny checked that he had the right house. “Is Matthias in?”
She stood a little straighter and shook her head. Danny shifted on the step, wondering how to make a polite getaway. But the woman leaned forward suddenly, scrutinizing his face, and then waved a small white hand at him.
“You may come in and wait.”
“Will he be long?”
“Not long.”
Danny stepped inside and thanked the woman as she closed the door behind him. She wasn’t dressed like a maid, and she couldn’t be Matthias’s housemate. To avoid staring at her, he looked around the house with a sudden thrill. He had never been inside before.
The hallway was narrow and painted almost the same shade of blue as the door. The stairs on his left were dark-stained wood, and a blue carpet runner stretched from the front door to a sitting room at the back of the house. The woman showed him to this room before she disappeared into the kitchen.
Danny was slightly disappointed; it wasn’t how he’d imagined the inside of Matthias’s home. For one thing, the man had grossly exaggerated the state of the house’s disrepair. Danny didn’t notice a single thing out of place. He examined paintings of seaside landscapes that hung along the hallway, all quite similar to one another, before he passed a few framed sketches of a clock tower. Matthias’s signature darkened the bottom right corners.
In the sitting room, Danny lowered himself onto a settee and waited for the woman to return. Or does she mean to leave me here? His leg bounced up and down as he eyed the trinkets on the bookshelves and read the spines of the many books collected there. Matthias and his father had loved collecting books. He saw a tome of classical mythology and touched the cog again. It could have been his imagination, but he swore that the small clock on the mantel ticked louder.
He turned and noticed the woman was standing in the doorway, staring at him. She held a tea tray in her hands, her head cocked slightly to one side. The pose tickled something in Danny’s memory, but he couldn’t think what.
“Tea,” she announced with a small smile.
He stood politely when she walked into the room and set the tray down on the low, wooden table in front of the settee. He could see now that she was a tall, willowy woman, with golden hair and sallow skin. Her eyes were a very light brown.
She sank gracefully into the armchair behind her, and he sat as well. The woman was wearing a lavender dress that fell to her ankles, but with no stockings or shoes. Her bare feet were graceful, like a dancer’s. Since she made no move to pour her own cup, Danny sat forward to pour it for her; it was what his mother would tell him to do. The woman leaned forward to accept the offered cup.
“Thank you for the tea,” Danny said. “Are you, um—are you Matthias’s housemate?” She nodded. “I know you’ve been living with Matthias for a while. I had no idea you were a … I mean, I thought Matthias lived with another man. Are you his … companion?”
She smiled, but he couldn’t tell if it was out of amusement or politeness. “I’m a bit of both.”
“Oh.” Danny furtively glanced at her chest. Why would Matthias say “he”?
This was also the first Danny had heard of Matthias having a lover. It shocked him, to be honest. For years Danny had seen the quiet, longing sorrow that dogged Matthias like a second shadow. When had this woman come into his life?
Silence filled the room as they sipped their tea. The clock ticked on in the background. Looking more closely, Danny saw that the woman wasn’t well. Her eyes were sunken, her skin pale like she hadn’t seen the sun in some time. No one saw the sun for long stretches of time in London, but this seemed a different sort of pale, more gray than blue.
“Are you Danny?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Matthias talks about you. He’s very fond of you.”
Danny smiled. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m fond of him as well.”
“I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’m glad I finally have the chance.” The words struck Danny as odd, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.
Her gaze trailed over his chest and paused on the timepiece chain hanging out of his left pocket. Her eyes flitted to the right pocket.
“You have something there,” she murmured.
Startled, Danny put his hand over the slight lump where the cog rested. Unsettled by her gaze, he drew it out and he
ld it on his palm.
“Are you a mechanic?” Danny asked. “How did you know I had this?”
“Did you steal it from a clock?” she demanded.
He leaned back at her sudden change in tone. “No. The clock … gave it to me.”
It sounded ridiculous, but it was the truth. For some reason, he had no urge to lie to her.
The woman stared at him, then at the cog, then back at his face.
“Why did the clock give it to you?”
Danny wrapped a protective hand around the cog and put it back in his pocket before she could snatch it away. “Because he wanted me to have it.”
He must have sounded defensive, for she eased back in her chair. “I see. That’s all right, then.” She returned to her tea, sipping daintily, as if they had just spoken of crocheting rather than the gifts of clock spirits.
But then, as he watched her, an awareness slid into place. At first Danny dismissed it as impossible, but the thought came creeping back, begging to be looked at. The more the idea took root in his mind, the harder it was to breathe. His skin prickled, the hairs on his arms lifting as if he were about to be struck by lightning.
Danny lined up the pieces: the louder ticking of the clock in her presence, her golden features, the way her voice sounded like slow gears in need of oiling. The way she regarded things, tilting her head in innocent curiosity. He had seen all of that before. In Colton.
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?”
Yes, why hadn’t Matthias told her? He had been questioned extensively, had said he knew nothing about Maldon Stopping. And yet for three years, he had hidden the spirit of Evaline Tower in his own home.
“How could you not know the town Stopped when you left?” Danny asked. “Didn’t you feel it happening?”
“I thought they would install another central cog, and another spirit could live in the tower. That’s what Matthias told me.”
“We tried that, in a way,” Danny said, thinking of the new Maldon tower. “It didn’t work. There was no spirit in the tower.” Who would ever think a tower would need a figure believed to only exist in fairy tales?
She opened her mouth, then closed it, thinking something over. “Being outside of my tower has weakened me,” she said eventually. “So, for the last three years, Matthias has been trying to find a new one for me. He’s been exiled from Maldon; there’s no chance of going back there. But if he installs me in another tower, then we could be together without hiding. The search hasn’t been going well, though.”
Danny frowned, trying to make sense of the idea. It didn’t seem possible. There were no abandoned clock towers, only broken ones, and those were locked within Stopped towns. If Matthias wanted to install her somewhere else …
A cold realization yawned open within him.
No.
And yet, Danny could see the effect of those three years before him. Evaline was vulnerable without her tower, and likely getting weaker every day. Her grayish skin, her slow voice, the weariness in her eyes—all rungs in the ladder that could lead to Matthias’s desperation.
This time he let her pull her hands away. Danny leaned against the armchair as Evaline covered her face with her hands. She could have been a statue for Lucas’s grave. Danny was just wondering how long they would stay like this when Evaline stood and slowly left the room, as if sleepwalking. It all felt like a dream, like a twisting nightmare that wouldn’t let them wake up.
Danny paced the room, his breath deafening in his ears. Matthias had held the key to freeing his father all this time. This entire time.
Three.
Whole.
Years.
How could he? How could he?
Danny snatched a teacup from the table and hurled it against the wall, where it shattered into a dozen pieces. The second one joined it, splashing tea against the sun-bleached wallpaper. Danny choked on his fury, throwing books off the shelves, barely looking at the things he broke before they joined the mess.
He slumped against the wall and covered his mouth with a shaking hand. When Evaline returned, she paused, taking in the damage. She was carrying a cog. Her central cog.
“He lied to you as well,” she said. Danny nodded. Looking down, Evaline lifted the cog before her. “I took this when I left. It’s the only thing keeping me stable. This, and the energy of the London clock tower. If I walk into Maldon holding this, the town will be restored?”
Danny dropped his hand. “I believe so. Humans can’t pass through the barrier, but you did. The central cog needs to be reinstalled, and you can bring it back. The clock has to run for the town’s time to restart. My father will be able to help.” He moved toward her. “Please, you have to go. We all thought you were destroyed, but you’re here, and—and something can be done. Please, I’m begging you.”
Her eyes widened, as if amazed by the rawness in his voice, and perhaps at her own ignorance. She looked at the cog in her hands.
“I’ll speak to Matthias when he returns,” she said. “I don’t know why he would let those people suffer, but there has to be a reason. I can’t just leave without saying a word. We’ll figure this out together.”