“Four minutes,” he said, without needing to check his clock at all. Like maybe he was actuallycountingthe seconds in his head when he closed his eyes every once in a while and pressed his thumbs to his fingers regularly.
Four minutes.
We stood on that landing, pressed against the walls, gripping pipes and brackets and each other—and we waited. March and I were on the right of the door. He had an arm wrapped around the pipe, and the other around my body, while I held onto the same pipe with both my hands. We were as secure as we were going to get.
Those four minutes passed incredibly fast and agonizingly slowly at the same time. There was no time to think aboutanythingat all, to even try to get myself together—and I also remembered everything that had ever happened to me since my first-ever memory when I was four years old.
The hum built. The air thickened. My hair began to risefrom my scalp—slowly, strand by strand, lifting away from my head as if gravity had lost interest and it no longer cared about keeping me grounded.
Then the metal door in front of us started to vibrate.
It might have been the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth so that I couldn’t even speak if I tried. Not that I was trying—all I could do was hold on.
The others were the same. Our hair was in the air, floating, and the edges of our clothes had turned upward, too, and our entire bodies were turning lighter and lighter, and…
The buildingscreamed.
That’s what it sounded like to me. A scream so deep and vast it wasn’t just sound, but a force. A pressure wave that slammed through the tower from top to bottom, shaking the walls, shaking the floor, shaking every single bone inside my body.
For a fraction of a second, the air turned to fire going down my lungs—and then it was over.
Just like that, it was done. My body weight felt normal, my hair fell around my shoulders and I didn’t feel like I needed to hold onto that pipe to make sure I wouldn’t float toward the ceiling anymore.
March and I looked at one another, breathing heavily, still unsure of what to expect from the next second, whether we should hold on or let go.
Silence in the landing.
Maybe notsilenceper se, but the building was no longer roaring or screaming, and that felt like silence by comparison. The door no longer vibrated. The air was cool as it went down my throat.
In theory, I knew what that meant—the burst had fired. The Great Clock had ironed out an hour for our realm.
Everything was going to remain calm for the next fifty or so minutes.
Master Talik was the first to move, to let go of the pipes he’d been holding onto, right next to the door. His skin was slick with sweat, his hair standing in all directions still, even though gravity had remembered how it worked once more.
His shaking hand closed around the handle of the big door. He said, “Don’t touch anything unless I tell you to.” And he pushed the door open.
32
The Distribution Room was unlike anything I could have imagined. It was circular,big—maybe sixty feet across—with a domed ceiling that was the underside of the Great Clock itself.
Time’s Teeth, there was no ignoring that thought now. The Great Clock wasreallyright over our heads.
Forget breathing. I was stuck looking up with my mouth wide open, trying not to feel like I was going to get squashed under like a bug any second now, to remind myself that this wasthe Great Clock.Gravity didn’t work on it at all. It hovered in the air forever, and never once had it moved lower or higher in the history of the realm. It wassafe.
But still,I could see thenightmareof exposed machinery from where I stood. Gears the size of carriages turned above us behind a lattice of iron framework, their teeth—the smallest one the size of my body—interlocking with a heavy, relentless rhythm that shook dust from every surface. No glass. No decoration. Just raw metal and stone and the workings of a machine that had been running for millenniawithout rest. The sound of them was everywhere, too—a grinding, ticking, rhythmic pulse that shook the floor.
Safe,I reminded myself, and March squeezed my hand and pulled me deeper into the room. I was safe, the Great Clock wasn’t going to fall on my head—and most importantly, I wasnotalone.
So, I breathed and I blinked and I lowered my head, decided to not look up at all for as long as I could help it, and focused on the Distribution Room.
The walls were rough stone, scorched black in wide, uneven patches, like the energy bursts had deliberately left their marks on them. Blistered stone and warped metal brackets and sections where the wall had been repaired so many times the patchwork was visible, layer upon layer of different stone and mortar. It almost looked like scar tissue on skin.
My fingers itched to pick up a pencil even now, to draw every shape and every line, every pipe that ran along the base of the walls. The air smelled of hot metal and something else underneath that I couldn’t quite name.
The floor was polished, but not intentionally, I didn’t think. It was polished by force, by the bursts, if I had to guess. There were places where it had worn the stone smooth as glass, and in a perfect circle for some reason. Faint amber light pooled in the grooves and cracks here and there, pulsing weakly. Maybe the leftovers of the burst that had just fired? They looked like puddles of liquid gold, except they weren’t liquid. They weren’t solid, either. Just pure, raw magic.
In the center of the room was the Distributor.
