Séverin lifted his head. “What did you say?”
“I said the clock may or may not be made of bone.”
“Bone.”
Hypnos muttered, “I could use a quick one.”
Enrique ignored him. “Could that fit? As an answer?”
“‘I have been with you all your life,’” read Hypnos aloud. “True. Or that’d be deadly terrifying. Though some people, I honestly believe, are born without spines. And next we have, ‘though I appear only in strife.’ What? I don’t think that fits.”
Enrique fell quiet. The strife bit had thrown him off too, at first. Bones didn’tappearin strife, floating before someone like ghosts. Butthey certainly showed. He had seen it in the Philippines, when he accompanied his father on rides through the provinces of Capiz and Cavite to check on the rice production of the paddies they owned. On the road, leaned up against whitewashed churches and houses that looked like a strong breeze might make them fold over in defeat, crouched the beggars. Young and old, it didn’t matter. Their eyes were all the same: flat and vacant. The faces of those whose hope had hardened and shrunk from too much of life. There, he saw the children with their too-sharp ribs ridging their shirts. Knobbed elbows stained with dirt. Eyes unsettlingly wide in faces sculpted by starvation.
“I think ‘bone’ fits,” he said quietly.
Hypnos cast him a strange look. Enrique had no desire to be the focus of that attention, so he said, “The last two lines fit as well. We know that the Fallen House had some macabre interests. It’s possible that meant using bone. In which case, that line, ‘all this world was meant to be,’ might fit with their own interests and not all humans’ everywhere. Which leaves the second-to-last line—‘my quantity will let you see’—as the final hint. Maybe it means the number of bones found in a human body. How many are there, anyway?”
“Two hundred and six,” said Séverin instantly.
Enrique frowned. “Do I want to know why you had that answer immediately?”
Séverin’s smile gleamed wolflike. “I doubt it.”
“But how do we get 206 to show up on a clock?”
Séverin let out a soft laugh. As if he were remembering something. “Six minutes past two. Two-oh-six. Two hundred and six.”
The three of them stared at the clock. Some crackling energy that had not been there before now wafted out of it. Enrique had the bizarre notion the clock could now sense that they knew how to drag out its secrets.
Slowly, Enrique pushed the hour and minute hand. Hypnos andSéverin had moved closer without him noticing. He saw the scene, suddenly, in his mind’s eye, as if from afar: three boys kneeling around a clock made of bone, the light behind them rendering them sharp shadows brought to life, and he felt that thread of hunger sewing them all together in the moment, so that when it came right down to it, perhaps their souls would have been indistinguishable.
Enrique waited.
He waited for the Forging power to unravel into the air, to push back. But he felt nothing.
“It’s not working,” said Hypnos. “Did we get it wrong?”
Enrique’s heart seized. He hoped not, but then—
“We didn’t follow directions,” said Séverin, pointing to the little script on the clock’s crescent:nocte. Midnight.
“But midnight is hours away!”
Séverin’s gaze shuddered. He rubbed the scar on his palm, then reached for his tin of cloves. He chewed one thoughtfully, ignoring the tension building up with everyone else.
“At least by then, the girls will be back.”
Séverin left not long after that to attend to L’Eden business, which left Enrique and Hypnos alone in the stargazing room. Enrique wasn’t sure what he should do. In the end, both of them returned to what they had been doing before—poring over the shredded documents of the Fallen House. Searching for clues in the detritus. The shadow of evening stretched over them. Food had been called up and eaten without either of them lifting a head from their research. Always, the bone clock stared back. Waiting. Smug. When Enrique looked at the room, he saw the strange pall over it. The cushions upturned. Tristan’s pillow shoved under a chair so no one could sit in it.
“Why are you helping us?” Enrique realized the words were out of his mouth before he could even think them.
Hypnos looked up, his face unguarded. “Is it so strange to think I might have reasons of my own for wanting the Babel Ring found?” he asked.
“That’s not an answer. You could be doing this work from home. I’ve heard the House Nyx library is the envy of scholars. You don’t have to be here.”
Hypnos was quiet for a moment, and then he folded his hands on his lap. “If I had someone on my side… someone of equal standing to me, then maybe life in the Order would be… easier.”
Enrique processed this. “YouwantSéverin to become a patriarch?”
