“Things are about to getspicy,”he whispered to us as herushed back to his place in the first row, and Master Talik cleared his throat again.
“A timeometer is very different from a clock,” he started, speaking faster than usual, like he was in a rush. “As you can see, this is roughly the size of a human head, and it has no face or hands or gears, but instead is made of interlocking rings.” He pushed down a band and the entire circle moved, but didn’t. The illusion the smoothness created was indeed even more fascinating from afar.
“A clockcountstime,” said the Timekeeper, rising up the device a little. “Thislistensto it.”
“Except it isn’t real,” Silas said, while the rest of us were still trying to figure out the difference of what he was saying.
Counting time andlisteningto time were two different things? I could have sworn they weren’t.
And how would onelistento time, anyhour? Why?
“Timeometers don’t exist,” Silas continued after a beat. “In fact, it’s illegal to make one.”Illegal.“If I’m not mistaken.”
But he wasn’t, though. We all knew how Silas spoke, how he sounded when he said something he knew for certain, versus something he was guessing, or trying to figure out. This was definitely the first.
Meanwhile the rest of us hadn’t even heard the name once, if the way we were all exchanging looks was anything to go by.
“You’re not,” said Master Talik, giving him a look I couldn’t quite decipher. “However—this is not an actual timeometer, only a prototype of what the device could look like.”
“What exactly does it do, though?” I asked—couldn’t help myself. “What doeslistening to timemean? Isn’t that the same as counting the seconds?”
“You would think that, but no. A timeometer doesn’t measure time passing, but timeallocation. Have any of youlearned how the Great Clock emits the time it irons out for our realm?”
I blinked, racked my brain in search for the information, but I had nothing. Nobody did.
Except for Silas, of course.
“A pulse,” he said. “The Great Clock emits time in a steady, even pulse.”
“Precisely.” Master Talik smiled bigger than I’d ever seen him before, even as exhausted as he seemed. “A pulse, which should weaken evenly with distance.Thatis what the timeometer detect—the compression, the thinning, the flow and turbulence of time as it is allocated throughout the realm.”
“But isn’t that the job of the Great Clock, though?” Helen asked, scratching the back of her head.
“Not at all! The Great Clock delivers time to us with its regular pulses, but it doesn’t measure its distribution. Think of it as pressure in the air—that’s what unevenly distributed time behaves like.”
All those words had made a mess out of my mind, until March spoke.
“Right.” A word, and my head was wiped clean, and Ifelthim lying on top of me, kissing me, moving inside me.
How in the world did that feel like hours ago, andyears?
How did it feel like it had happened a million times, and alsoneverin the real world?
“Right, so…who would need a timeometer?” March continued, and I had to fist my hands and stick my nails into my palms to get myself under control. “Better yet, why would such a thing be illegal?”
“Laws,” said Master Talik. “And a timeometer would be very helpful in analyzing the allocation of time across the realm.”
“Yes, laws—butwhydo laws make it illegal? It seems like a pretty straightforward thing to me,” Reggie said.
“I believe the better question is, do we really need to analyze the allocation of time across our realm?” said Silas. “If yes, then is it because wedon’t trustthe Great Clock, or…”
His voice trailed off. Every set of eyes in the room was turned to him, but Silas only looked at Master Talik.
The Timekeeper didn’t move a single inch for a long moment.
Then said, “Yes, thatisthe better question.”
Behind us, the handle of the door moved. Someone was outside, trying to get in.
