Chapter 32
The Distribution Room was unlike anything I could have imagined. It was circular, big—maybe sixty feet across—with a domed ceiling that was the underside of the Great Clock itself.
Time’s Teeth, there was no ignoring that thought now. The Great Clock was really right over our heads.
Forget breathing. I was stuck looking up with my mouth wide open, trying not to feel like I was going to get squashed under like a bug any second now, to remind myself that this was the Great Clock.
Gravity didn’t work on it at all. It hovered in the air forever, and never once had it moved lower or higher in the history of the realm. It was safe.
But still, I could see the nightmare of exposed machinery from where I stood.
Gears the size of carriages turned above us behind a lattice of iron framework, their teeth—the smallest one the size of my body—interlocking with a heavy, relentless rhythm that shook dust from every surface.
No glass. No decoration. Just raw metal and stone and the workings of a machine that had been running for millennia without rest. The sound of them was everywhere, too—a grinding, ticking, rhythmic pulse that shook the floor.
Safe, I reminded myself, and March squeezed my hand and pulled me deeper into the room. I was safe, the Great Clock wasn’t going to fall on my head—and most importantly, I was not alone.
So, I breathed and I blinked and I lowered my head, decided to not look up at all for as long as I could help it, and focused on the Distribution Room.
The walls were rough stone, scorched black in wide, uneven patches, like the energy bursts had deliberately left their marks on them.
Blistered stone and warped metal brackets and sections where the wall had been repaired so many times the patchwork was visible, layer upon layer of different stone and mortar.
It almost looked like scar tissue on skin.
My fingers itched to pick up a pencil even now, to draw every shape and every line, every pipe that ran along the base of the walls. The air smelled of hot metal and something else underneath that I couldn’t quite name.
The floor was polished, but not intentionally, I didn’t think.
It was polished by force, by the bursts, if I had to guess.
There were places where it had worn the stone smooth as glass, and in a perfect circle for some reason.
Faint amber light pooled in the grooves and cracks here and there, pulsing weakly.
Maybe the leftovers of the burst that had just fired?
They looked like puddles of liquid gold, except they weren’t liquid.
They weren’t solid, either. Just pure, raw magic.
In the center of the room was the Distributor.
It was…a column. A massive brass column, maybe fifteen feet tall and wide enough that four people couldn’t link arms around it.
The surface was covered in plates, bolted on, riveted, welded.
Almost every single one of them was a slightly different color, a different metal, like each had been added in a different era.
Brass and copper and iron and steel, all patched together like armor.
Some plates were polished to a dull shine while others were green with corrosion and others black with burn marks, warped from the inside.
Nothing at all like what I expected or what I’d imagined before whenever we’d talked about this place in school or at home.
Around the top of the column was a thick metal band that jutted outward, extending maybe six feet in every direction.
The underside of it was lined with hundreds of small openings—nozzles, I thought at first, except they weren’t precise or uniform.
Some were round and some oval, and some were just cracks in the metal that had been widened and reinforced with brackets to keep them from spreading further.
Time’s Teeth, this was it.
This was where the bursts happened. Where our lives were guaranteed, in a way. That very column gathered the hour’s worth of temporal energy from the Great Clock above it, compressed it, held it—and then that ring expelled it outward at once, in every direction.
A shockwave of raw time blasting from the center of the room and out through the walls and all the way to the edges of the realm.
This was where life happened.
So difficult not to feel…small.
Others talked, whispered among themselves, but my eyes were still hungry to see more. The base of the column was wider than the rest, sitting directly on the polished floor. Panels covered its surface, each one bolted shut with heavy brass fittings.
They all looked about the same, except for one panel, larger than the rest, which had a gear-lock on it—this circular mechanism set into the metal, its brass teeth visible through a small glass window smudged with fingerprints and grime.
The glass was cracked right through the middle (surprised it had held through the bursts so far, to be honest), but the mechanism inside was still turning. Slowly, but it was turning.
And Master Talik was already in front of it with his Timekeeper Clock in his hand.
“Fifty-six minutes,” he said, and this I heard, if only because the room threw the sound back a million times. “Starting now.” And he kneeled in front of the panel.
He pulled out three tools from his belt and set them down on the floor near his knee. The first was the long hooked pick he’d used in the Horologist’s study, and he inserted it into a slot beneath the glass window and turned it slowly.
We all heard the mechanism click.
“First tumbler,” Master Talik murmured.
And Russ started to ask, “How many—”
But that’s as far as he went.
“Do not speak to me, boy.” We all closed our mouths. “If I’m talking out loud, be sure that I am not talking to any of you.”
No, he wasn’t. He was talking to himself—or his tools.
His eyes closed. His lips moved, this time in a whisper that we couldn’t hear if we tried.
Then he dropped his tool and raised his hand, and a tiny ribbon of teal slipped out his palm and disappeared into the gear-lock. Timekeeper magic.
After that, Master Talik pulled tool after tool from his belt—a second flat key of some sort, this thin glass rod filled with amber liquid I couldn’t identify, and then he used his magic again, this time the teal brighter.
“Psst! Guys, over here!” Erith called from behind us, and we all turned at the same time.
She’d wandered to the far side of the room while the rest of us had been focused on Master Talik, and she was standing near a section of the wall where the stone had crumbled.
Possibly years ago, if not decades, but it definitely didn’t look recent.
A good chunk of the outer wall had fallen away, leaving a gap roughly the size of a window.
A gasp escaped me when I looked through, and I wasn’t the only one.
Suddenly we were all pushing one another to get closer, to see better, drawn in by that broken wall like moths to lanterns. To see the realm.
The view was the closest thing to impossible my eyes had ever witnessed, so much more so than a talking, grinning cat.
Holy Hour, you could really see everything from the top of the Great Clock tower.
The Clockrealm spread out below us in every direction, lit by moonlight and the scattered glow of distant towns.
Neverwhen was directly below us, a cluster of lights, dense and bright, the streets and buildings and plazas laid out like a map drawn on a piece of paper. Very large paper.
Beyond it, the courts fanned outward, each one fading gradually from the brightness of the center to the dimness of the edges.
Then there was the Spill—where the world ended and the nothing began.
We couldn’t see the edges clearly—too far, too dark—but we all knew enough, and we’d seen pictures and drawings in school before to fill in the gaps.
I myself had tried to put the Spill on paper from what I knew about it, but I could never get it quite right.
This vast space full of nothing, and my mind didn’t quite comprehend the idea completely.
That’s why none of my drawings of it had turned out right.
“Time’s Trousers, that’s the whole world,” Russ breathed.
We were all pressed together, trying to see better, to see more. For those moments as our eyes roamed on the dark realm, nobody thought about where we were and what we’d come here to do. Even Silas was completely consumed by the view.
“It’s smaller than I thought, to be honest,” Mimi said. “The realm looks so small from up here.”
“It’s plenty big. It fits us all, doesn’t it?” Anika.
“I think it’s beautiful.” Erith.
“I think I could run all the way across it within the day.” Seth.
Mimi snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“It looks monstrous to me.” Russ.
“It looks like a living thing.” Levana.
“It looks like a machine,” Cook whispered. “A machine that the Great Clock keeps running.”
“Imagine if it would stop.” Anika.
“It did stop, remember? For two weeks,” I said absentmindedly.
“But that was different. If it stopped for real, everything would just end.” Russ.
“Exactly like a machine,” Erith breathed. “Without a source, it just…wouldn’t be.”
“So, what does that make us—gears?” Seth.
“More like players in games.” Cook. “The Clockrealm is one big, massive Labyrinth, and our lives are the games inside it.”
Holy Hour, that actually made sense, and…
Something in my chest moved. Shifted. Like a gear clicking into a new position—but it wasn’t quite new.
“Exactly. So, if the Great Clock were to stop, the games would end.” Levana.
“And the players would no longer be needed.” Seth. “We would all just…perish.”
Something about something about something about something…
“Wow. That thing really does keep us alive.” Anika—as if she was just now believing the fact for the first time.
I looked up at the gears of the Great Clock over our heads.
A game. A machine.
Just like the Labyrinth.