“No,” Master Talik said, raising his shaking hand as he looked at the plaques on the floor. “No—the plaques haven’t been changed since before I was born. Long before the queens were crowned. They are stored here in the tower, in the storage rooms below, but we have no use for the old ones. We need the ones that were supposed to be here.” Every word he said was like a needle piercing my skin.
“They took them,” I whispered and most flinched. “They…they took the records.”
“Of course she did,” Silas said in a whisper, and his shaking head dropped. “She’s always two steps ahead of everyone, right? Of course she would make the proof disappear.”
A tick of silence.
Then Silas said, “The timeometer, Master Talik. We need the timeometer.”
My mind went blank once more.
What in Time’s Teeth was atimeometer?
I was going to ask, but?—
“No.” Master Talik shook his head. “I no longer have it.”
“Whereis it?” Silas demanded.
“Destroyed. I destroyed it. The queen was coming for it. She sent everyone to look, and she wouldn’t have stopped,” the old Timekeeper said, and the need to ask disappeared together with my curiosity. I was sure the others felt the same—if it was destroyed, who caredwhatit was and if it could help us?
“So…what now?” Mimi breathed.
“Now we take these. They’ll have to do,” said March and made for the plaques. There were only seven of them, and he carried them under his arm with ease.
“I don’t…I don’t understand, I don’t…” Master Talik kept whispering to himself, shaking his head.
Silas did the same a little to his side. “We should have foreseen this. We should have known…”
“Let’s just go. We can talk about it down there. We have these—they will be enough,” said March, but I knew what the old Timekeeper would say just by the way he looked up at him.
“But theywon’t.They might be enough to show that something’s wrong,maybe, but not enough to prove the scope of it.”
“Not enough to bring down a queen,” Silas said through gritted teeth.
Seven plaques were not enough proof.
The silence that followed his words tasted likedefeat. We’d climbed the tower, risked our lives, broken into the belly of the most powerful machine in the Clockrealm—and the proof we needed for the decades of stolen time was gone.Removed,just like that.
Then March said, “It’s still better than nothing. It will get someone to start searching for the missing plaques, at least.”
I nodded, just to try to get myself to pretend that I believed him. That I hadhope.
Master Talik sighed. “Very well. We only have thirty minutes left, anyway. Let’s go.”
With one last, lingering look out the makeshift window on the other side, we all made for the door.
33
When we walked out of the room, we saw that the platform wasn’t there anymore. My legs near gave until Master Talik told us to follow him a little to the right where a stairway was, half hidden in the corner of the stone wall. Apparently, the platform went back down on its own when it was left up there for too long. Nothing to worry about, he said, so I didn’t.
The stairs were old, half broken, but they were wide enough so it didn’t feel like suffocating. Every step we took echoed in my ears, though—like a warning. But I only realized why when we were two or three floors down, and Master Talik stopped.
He froze mid-step, one hand on the rusty railing, his body going rigid in a way that made everyone behind him stumble to a halt.
“What—” Anika started, but Master Talik threw a look back at her that clearly saidshut upanddon’t move.
Then we heard it, too.
