I leaned down to try to see better. Had he put it under the table somewhere? Maybe there was one of those boxes full of tools he always had around him?
“Master Talik—what’s that thing you were working on? Can I have it?” Reggie.
The panic in the old Timekeeper’s eyes was evident.
“Settle down, Reggor. We’ll begin shortly,” he said.
“But what is it? I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Reggie insisted. “I’d love to keep it—as a souvenir from the Labyrinth.” Of course, he was joking. Reggie was always joking, always grinning.
Except that night.
“No.” Master Talik’s voice was sharp, final, veryunlikeMaster Talik’s voice. Even Reggie was taken aback. “We may begin in a moment.”
The Timekeeper went to the other end of the table, to the boxes on the built-in shelf in this shallow alcove at the corner where the wall pressed inward.
“Fine. I only asked,” Reggie muttered and settled back on the bench.
That’s when March turned to throw me a look that said everything, and nothing at all. A look you could give a stranger, a friend, or a foe.
I was neither to him, as he was neither to me. Maybe that’s why I was so uneasy.
What a day, what a day, what a strange, strange day.
“What’s up with the Timekeeper?” Erith asked. “He seems off.”
“No idea,” Anika said. “But they do say Timekeepers operate on their own times.”
A tick of silence.
“What’s up withyou?”Erith was staring at me now. “You look…different. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“She does, right?” said Anika, like she was just noticing, as she leaned back a little to see me better. Meanwhile March leaned back on his bench and I could have sworn his shoulders shook a little. I could have sworn he was stopping himself fromlaughing.
Heat on my cheeks. “Nothing. I didn’t sleep much last night, that’s all,” I muttered to the girls.
“No, that’s not it,” said Anika. “Ididn’t sleep much last night, either, but?—”
“All right, everyone.” Master Talik.
Master Talik was standing in front of his table again, looking at us, and he probably had no idea that he practically just saved my life. I wouldn’t die of embarrassment, at least not today.
“Where were you, Master Talik? I didn’t know you ever left the workshop,” Mimi asked from the second row.
“Yeah. I was pretty sure youlivein this room,” said Russ.
“And that you never sleep,” said Levana with a nod.
“I was called away to help with some adjustments,” Master Talik said, and Erith and Anika were invested enough that they didn’t even look at me again. “The Labyrinth is a big machine. It requires assistance often.”
“Notthatoften, though,” Silas said from the front. “At least not from a Royal Timekeeper.” Master Talik looked at him with his lips pressed. “Unless…something’swrong.”
“Things are always wrong with devices,” the man said. “Especially ones like this place.”
“How does it do it, anyway?” asked Cook from Silas’s other side. “How does the Labyrinth actually do what it does? What kind of fixing does it even need?”
It was a question I’d thought about myself a lot of times—and nowIwas invested, too. Enough to ask, “Is there a reason why it was built so close to the Great Clock, Master Talik?”
The man’s mouth fell open. He looked from Cook to me to Silas and to everyone, and he shook his head only slightly before he turned to the front of the room. To where Calren sat.
