Chapter 15
Ifound Master Talik’s workshop on the first try, which was not expected, as I hadn’t been paying that much attention to where Elida took us in the evening.
When I saw the door, I was genuinely surprised that it was still there. Even more so when I knocked, pulled it open, and found it unlocked.
But it didn’t surprise me to find Master Talik hunched over a small device on the main table, his side turned to me.
“Hello.”
My voice echoed in the high ceiling of the workshop that looked even less like a classroom right now.
The metal seats and benches were pushed to the side, all the way to the wall, and there were far more things, mostly made of metal, all over the wooden floor.
A large green board was in front of the wall where the diagrams had been drawn earlier, and it stood on four large wheels.
It was covered in chalk—numbers and letters, circles and squares, drawings of all kinds of things, big and small.
Master Talik didn’t even raise his head or acknowledge me in any way. Instead, when I stepped closer to the end of the room, I began to hear the hum of a melody that followed the ticks of a clock, coming from a music box shaped like a pocket watch just at the edge of the table.
The smell of oil filled my nostrils, but I didn’t mind. It was just him here, no other Hand or Timekeeper or trainer.
I had a good reason to have wanted to come here tonight: if there was one person here who could help me figure out how to trick the Labyrinth, it was this man.
But now that I was here, I could admit to myself that I was excited.
Building things had always interested me.
That’s why I’d cried every single morning to go to work with Mother when she worked as an assistant to a train engine builder.
I’d loved the workshop, the gears, the way one could make things work with pieces of metal cut in just the right way.
No need for magic. No need for make-believe or to spend a single extra second—just work, intelligence, and patience.
It had been years since Mother quit that job, and I didn’t see the inside of a workshop again. The one in our school where we learned to build and fix clocks didn’t count—it could hardly be called a workshop.
But this could. This was. Definitely not a classroom.
That’s why I was taking my time, picking things from the floor, analyzing the strange-looking devices on the racks mounted on the walls, trying to figure out what was what, and what served which purpose.
That past evening, Master Talik had tried to teach us how to disable and assemble a specific kind of clock, one that used magic directly from a larger source—like a really big chronobank—to create continuously on its own.
That’s how he described it, and I wanted to think that he was talking about the Labyrinth.
It probably took energy from a large chronobank somewhere in the area—how else was it going to have all that magic to make the trials possible, forward or backward?
Naturally, neither of us had had any clue what we were doing.
Elida wasn’t kidding when she used the word advanced—this stuff was meant for engineers, not for someone fresh out of school.
Russ, Erith and Anika were better at dismantling their little gears, being as they were Diamonds, and Diamonds were good engineers, too. They had to be, to harvest Sparetime.
But even they couldn’t put the devices together right away. We’d have to go through a lot of training on much simpler things to get there, and I saw no logic in trying to teach us these things backward, but nobody was going to listen to me.
Unless Master Talik did.
I stepped closer to the other side of the table, hoping to give him space when he noticed that I was here.
I put the things I’d gathered from the floor—screwdrivers, gear spikes, hooks, pulse mallets—at the edge of the table and watched him working a gear on a dustlace, which I recognized from back home, though the one in our house was much simpler than this version.
It was basically a copper mesh used to filter impurities from the air entering mechanical systems. His loupe was thick, stuck between his cheek and brow bone.
His hair was disheveled, gray in most places, a light ginger just up the base of his neck.
His focus was as unwavering as it had been in the evening.
I wondered how many hours he worked, or if he ever slept. Did Timekeepers need sleep like the rest of us? I couldn’t really remember hearing anything about it before.
Then he spoke.
“I’d leave your questions for tomorrow, if I were you.”
His voice was soft, slow, but it still made my heart skip a beat. I knew he’d seen me—pretty obvious since I was standing four feet away from him by the table, but he just looked like his whole being was invested in what he was doing, and the world outside of his mind didn’t exist.
“How do you know I have questions?” I asked, just to say something. I don’t know why I was so caught by surprise.
Master Talik stopped for a second, turned his head only slightly and looked at me. The loupe stuck in front of his right eye made it look gigantic compared to his left.
He licked his thin lips. “You stink of questions.”
Without really meaning to, I raised my arm to my face as casually as I could and sniffed. I smelled like flowers—whatever soap the people here used. The tunic was clean—I’d picked it up from the wardrobe myself. I didn’t stink like anything, but what did I know about the scent of questions?
“What kind of questions do I smell like?” I asked instead, because maybe Timekeepers had a different sense of smell from ours. I wouldn’t know.
Master Talik nudged a cog with the end of a thin metal tool I doubted I’d ever seen before, and it rolled in a slow arc inside the dustlace.
There were plenty of other devices near him on the table for me to explore, if only I’d had the time.
A threadfinder lens, a gearbone—which was reinforced glass that separated secondary gears in pocket watches—and he even had a gloam box there, which Spades used all the time—a wooden case to lock away unstable seconds and minutes to later be stabilized by our magic.
“The impossible kind,” Master Talik finally answered, though he didn’t stop working to even throw me a glance.
“Actually, I just want to learn about the Labyrinth.”
“Well, the Labyrinth doesn’t much like to be prodded at this hour.”
“I’m not prodding—I just want to understand how this place works, that’s all.”
Suddenly, he lowered his head a little and his shoulders shook. He was chuckling, which was odder than if he’d burst into tears. The sound was not unkind.
“You want what everyone wants—a way out.”
Yes, yes—a way out is exactly what I want. I swallowed hard and said, “Is there one?”
“Oh, several.” His fingers traced a spinning gear. “None you can use, I’m afraid.”
There went my hope, out the window and down a hole in the ground that never ended. “Why not?”
He slowly loosened a pin from a piece of metal, and it hissed, and it steamed. He didn’t even move his head away.
“Did you know that we are no different than machinery, Miss Reese?” I didn’t even know he knew my name, but I said nothing.
“In here, we are.” He looked at me then, studied me that way he’d studied the gears that evening, like he could see so much more with his eyes than we did.
“Pieces missing. Edges filed down. A few screws rattling in the wrong place. Broken in the weak places.”
My ears heated up suddenly, and I took a step back, suddenly self-conscious, like maybe my soul was on display and I hadn’t even realized it. “I’m not broken,” I said—again, just to say something.
“Hmm.” Master Talik returned to his work. “Incomplete, then.”
Incomplete.
Strange word. But I was whole, wasn’t I? Two arms, two legs, a head on my shoulders.
“The trials take, Miss Reese. They take and take and take. That’s why they work so well.
That’s why they produce so much Sparetime.
” He dropped his tools, turned his back to me and went to a bigger box before he started pushing metal pieces to the sides, searching.
Whatever it was, it took him a long time to find, and I was left staring after him, waiting uncomfortably for the noise to stop.
When it finally did, the words were at the tip of my tongue. “What did it take from me?”
He looked at me once. “How should I know?”
“Well, how do you know I’m incomplete, then?”
“Because you don’t know what you want.”
Frustrating.
I gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “I want out.” It’s what everybody should want when in such an absurd position.
“You want freedom, yes, but you haven’t even found yourself yet.”
“What does that mean?!” I demanded, but if he cared, Master Talik didn’t show it.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out when the time is right, Miss Reese.”
By then I wanted to explode. I wanted to scream and shout, demand a normal, straightforward answer right now.
Instead, I forced myself to calm down, to breathe, because I couldn’t really make this Timekeeper tell me anything he didn’t want to tell me. But maybe, if I kept my calm, maybe…
There were devices all over the table. I touched a few, then moved to the other side, across from Master Talik, and I continued to explore in an attempt to calm my mind and my heart.
It worked better than I’d expected.
A slipdial, a whispercoil, a strange round shape that looked like a ball made of sheets of metal in all shades of gray. I reached my hand for it, when—
“Don’t.” Master Talik was looking at me from under his lashes. “Don’t touch that yet.”
I moved to a half-assembled device—a spindle with razor-thin blades that I couldn’t figure out the use of for the life of me, but I still tried.
For a while, I let him work. Not terribly difficult to do, to be honest. The way he moved his hands, the way he sometimes hummed to the melody coming from the music box that strangely never needed to be wound.
If I had a place to lay down, or even sit, I was sure I’d be sleeping by then—it was so calming.
Master Talik guided a slender metal rod through the dustlace, coaxing its loose gears into a slow, deliberate rotation as if he was trying to teach them how to move.
With his other hand, he adjusted a tiny screw that made the entire mechanism breathe.
It gave a soft, pulsing click, like a heartbeat. So incredibly satisfying, that sound.
Eventually, I spoke. “Is this really real? Has the Great Clock really stopped?”
“Have you eyes?”
“I do.”
“Then you’ve seen the answer.”
Yes. The Great Clock had really stopped.
“They teach us in school that it only takes a couple of weeks for time to go out of order if the Great Clock stops.” Every child in the Clockrealm learned this just as soon as we learned how to walk.
Except Clubs. They learned how to run before walking.
“It does,” he said softly.
I don’t know why I was tempted to smile just now—because of how absurd the words preparing themselves to come out of me were?
“Are we all going to die, Master Talik?”
He stopped. Looked at me. His enlarged eye through his loupe had become normal to me by now.
“There are worse things than dying to worry about first.”
I flinched. What kind of an answer was that?
“Time moving backward has repercussions, Miss Reese. You don’t see it here, but it does.”
Repercussions. I’d never thought about that.
Suddenly March’s face appeared before me, how he accused me of being a traitor. I wasn’t, though—was I? I don’t know why I had this need to just run, be away from here, but I wasn’t a traitor. I just…hadn’t thought to think.
“Like what?” I asked, no real hope of getting an answer, which is why I was surprised to get one anyway.
“Small things, here and there. Echoed sounds, Miss Reese, tell more than people realize. Soft echoes a second before or after the real thing. Doors creaking twice. Most will think they imagined it,” said Master Talik.
“Lilies no longer wait for night before they close. Shadows lag—a split second is enough.” He nudged a gear into place.
“These are things to worry about first, small as they may seem.”
I turned absentmindedly and looked at my shadow behind me, raised my hand to see if it would follow. If it lagged, I didn’t catch it. It seemed to follow my movement like it was supposed to.
“It’s not your shadow you should be concerned about right now, Miss Reese. You’re a Hand. You’re one of the few people left who can right this wrong, I’m afraid.” He dropped a screwdriver, picked up a smaller one. Shook his head. “A terrible burden to bear.”
And now my knees buckled underneath the burden that became real—not because he named it, but because he made it make sense.
What was the world out there now while I was stuck in this palace, in these trials?
“I don’t…I don’t know how, Master Talik. I’m missing…something. But I don’t know what.” All I felt was the emptiness it had left behind—that’s it. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“There’s plenty you could do,” he said, and he moved to the other side, searching again for whatever it was that he needed, and my hands hovered over that metal ball he told me not to touch earlier.
Time’s Teeth, I’d come here to get answers, not more weight for my shoulders.
Not more unfinished thoughts for my already chaotic mind.
“But I’d say, keep reaching in the dark—first and foremost, and always,” Master Talik continued, and my fingertips itched to touch that small ball so badly. Couldn’t even tell you why.
“And most importantly, Miss Reese, you must always be aware when you’re being watched.”
I looked up. “What?”
The pad of my finger gently touched the cold metal of the ball.
It happened so fast I could have very well imagined it, but the ball opened up, the metal plates nailed to it like petals on a flower—and then one of them broke away from its bed, and shot forward, fast as lightning.
The end where it broke from the rest of the device had a pointy tip, and it was very sharp.
Sharp enough to break through and bury itself into a thick piece of wood.
I knew this because it had done just that, had made it across the room and into the wood of the door—right next to March’s face, who was looking at it with his eyes wide and mouth open.
My heart beat and beat and beat. March slowly turned his head to look at me, pale as a sheet.
Master Talik chuckled. “Exactly the right time. I’d say you’re in sync, Miss Reese.”