“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 ofthe 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 wasthisman.
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 aworkshop.
But this could. Thiswas. 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 goingto 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 wordadvanced—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 wasstanding 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 notprodding—I just want to understand how this place works, that’s all.”
Suddenly, he lowered his head a little and his shouldersshook. 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.”
