Chapter 29 #2
When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, more controlled, like a man explaining to children why they shouldn’t jump off a cliff.
“The Great Clock makes time,” he said. “Every hour, the machinery processes raw temporal energy—refines it, measures it, portions it—and then expels it outward in a single burst. This happens in the Distribution Room, which is at the very top of the tower.” He opened his eyes and looked at each of us in turn, as if he wanted to make sure we were all listening.
“It gets the name from the machine in the center of the room—the Distributor, which, when the hour completes, is charged with enough temporal energy to power the entire realm for sixty minutes. The charge takes roughly three minutes.” He raised three shaking fingers.
“During those three minutes, the air in the room becomes lethal.” Another pause.
I hardly even breathed. “Then the burst happens. The Distributor fires and the energy leaves the tower and spreads out toward the courts. The force of it would strip the time from your body in a fraction of a second. You wouldn’t age to death or explode or anything like it, no—you’d simply be undone. No body left to bury.”
He spoke and, in my mind, I saw all of it to the best of my imagination’s ability.
Silence. Complete, airless silence in the room for a tick and three and five…
“This happens every hour,” Master Talik said. “On the hour. Without fail. Without exception. It has happened every hour for three thousand years, and it will continue to happen every hour until Time wills it to stop.”
“So, what you’re saying is…” Cook started, cleared his throat. “We’d have to be in and out within an hour.”
Yes—it sounded about right to me.
Master Talik looked at him like he was thinking some very unpleasant things about Cook right now.
His jaw tightened in rhythm with his fists.
“No,” he said. “I’m saying you’d have to be in and out within fifty-seven minutes.
The last three minutes of every hour are the charging phase.
If you’re still in the Distribution Room when the charge begins, you’re dead before the burst even fires. ”
Fifty-seven minutes.
It was time.
It was plenty of time…wasn’t it?
Silas said, “That’s nearly an hour. Enough time to—”
“Do what, exactly?” Master Talik cut him off and laughed. A short, bitter laugh as he fell back on his chair with such force he nearly knocked himself over.
“Get to the records…” Again, I spoke as if my body was being handled by somebody else. “Right?”
“Do you even know what the records are?” Master Talik was not amused.
“No,” I breathed, like I was terrified he might jump me any second, but… “Do you?” I asked, anyway.
His eyes closed. He sighed deeply.
Kohen said, “He does. He’s been up there.”
Master Talik flinched.
“Well?” Mimi said. “What are they like?”
I genuinely didn’t think Master Talik would answer, but when he opened his eyes, he was looking right at Silas, except he didn’t look as pissed off as a moment ago.
“The records you think you can get to are etched onto allocation plaques—metal sheets that are about this big.” He held his hands apart, roughly the size of a large book.
“The Distributor inscribes them as the energy fires. They carry everything, the exact allocation, down to the second. Date, time, portion—all of it is carved into the surface in temporal script that cannot be forged or altered because the Distributor’s own mechanism does the writing. No human hand touches it.”
A tick of silence.
“And where exactly are they kept?” March asked, his voice calmer now, too.
“Inside the Distributor’s base. I’ve never seen inside it, but one of my mentors when I was a boy said they were filed inside it like books on a shelf.”
Master Talik as a boy. I don’t know why I had such a hard time imagining it.
“And just to quench my curiosity…how heavy are they?” Seth asked.
Master Talik looked at him. “About the weight of a dinner plate, maybe.”
A dinner plate. Not heavy, was it?
“Hypothetically speaking,” Silas said, licked his lips, cleared his throat. “How many would one need to look at to discover…irregularities in the records?”
A bitter smile on the old Timekeeper lips. “A single plaque is proof of one cycle,” he said. “But one cycle proves nothing. It can be claimed as an error. To prove a pattern, one would need”—his eyes closed like he was counting in his head—“two dozen, at least. Ideally more, spanning years.”
“If my calculations are correct,” said Mimi. “If they really weigh about a dinner plate, one person could carry ten under an arm without much trouble. Which means two people could take twenty. Three people, thirty.”
That, too, sounded about right. I looked down at my arms, and the numbers turned in my head, and if my calculations were correct, we could get eighty plaques out of there easily.
“Fifty-seven minutes,” I whispered absentmindedly.
Yes, I could see us grabbing eighty plaques within fifty-seven minutes.
“Less than that,” Master Talik said. “You need time to climb. Time to open the vault. Time to descend. The actual window for pulling plaques is closer to thirty minutes—and that’s assuming everything goes perfectly.
And it won’t. There are Timekeepers. Soldiers.
Doors keyed to specific magic sequences. Impossible,” he repeated.
Except in my mind the math worked. The plaques were real, and they were physical, and we were capable of carrying them out.
All we really needed, even if we had just a few minutes of time, was two dozen plaques etched by a machine that couldn’t lie, to prove that time was indeed being stolen.
Really—it worked in my head. All we had to do was get to them.
“We’re still speaking hypothetically,” Silas said. “But if someone were to plan to get into the tower, what exactly would they be looking at?”
Shivers down my back, raising goose bumps on my arms. I had plenty of energy to stand now, go closer to the table, close to March. A few of the others did the same, all our eyes on Master Talik.
He thought and thought, opened his mouth and closed it, scratched his chin and pushed back his hair, and eventually, he continued.
“The tower has guards. Maintenance crews. Checkpoints. The only people allowed above the third level are senior Timekeepers with authorization from the crown. The stairway to the Distribution Room is locked with a seal that requires a Royal Timekeeper signature to open.”
“Which you have, as a Royal Timekeeper,” said Silas.
Master Talik said nothing. His silence was an answer—he was.
“When is the safest time to try? Hypothetically speaking, of course,” March asked.
“Don’t ask me that, boy,” the Timekeeper whispered.
“I am, though,” March insisted.
“So am I,” I said.
“And so am I…” Russ and Anika and Mimi.
Master Talik’s hands curled into fists on the table. I watched the war on his face—the part of him that was reasonable, that knew exactly what we were asking under the guise of a hypothesis, fighting the part that had been waiting years and years for bravery—or stupidity—to act.
“Three m.b.” The words sounded like they’d been ripped from him. “The overnight maintenance shift is the smallest. Fewer guards. Fewer eyes. The queens are asleep.” He closed his eyes, breathed deeply.
Then Kohen said, “And the burst at three m.b. is historically the weakest of the cycle. Nighttime allocation is lower than daytime—the courts need less energy while people sleep. The burst is smaller. The charging phase is slightly shorter.” He looked at Master Talik. “Right, old friend?”
The look the other Timekeeper gave him… “Right,” he spat. “Maybe they’ll have an extra thirty seconds.”
“Oh, wow—thirty whole seconds,” said Levana with a roll of her eyes.
“That changes nothing at all,” said Master Talik, as if he hadn’t caught her sarcasm at all. “It’s still an impossible feat.”
“Except on paper, it sounds very possible,” said Cook.
“Assuming we want to die, we could totally do it.” Levana, her voice still dripping with sarcasm.
“We don’t want to die—we just want our memories back,” said Mimi.
“Well, our memories aren’t hiding at the top of the tower, are they?” Seth.
“No—but the proof that would hold the queens accountable for what they’ve done is there,” said Silas slowly. “And…correct me if I’m wrong, but with the proof, you can force the Red Queen to do anything. If she’s in prison, she will have no choice but to give you back your memories.”
Why, yes, that was exactly what I was thinking, too. If the Red Queen was caught, if we had proof of what she and her sister were doing, they’d lose their power. They’d be thrown in prison. They’d have no choice but to give us the memories they stole.
After all, this was their doing. It was the White Queen who’d risked the entire realm by pulling time to move backward, just so Silas’s curse to reveal her true nature didn’t come full circle.
She’d risked everything, every single person in the realm.
The people would want to know about that.
They would want to know who their queens were.
Silence in the room.
Nobody moved or blinked too often or even breathed loudly. We were all suspended in the same second, with the same thought.
To go into the tower below the Great Clock—what madness.
To steal records and to accuse queens—madness, I tell you.
Except…weren’t we living in something even worse already? Hadn’t we gone through the impossible, and come out the other side half?
We were the ones who’d paid the ultimate price. We’d lost two of our own, too. Our memories. We’d lost ourselves in those four weeks.
It was only fair that we’d get to be the ones to do something about it, wouldn’t it?
“It’s dangerous,” Cook whispered.
“It’s doable,” said Silas. “It’s what the Underclock has been trying to do for decades. What my father—”
“Your father paid the ultimate price for trying to make changes,” Master Talik cut him off. “Do you think it was worth it? Losing his son—his life? Was it worth it?!”