Len pulled his silver-cased pocket watch from his vest pocket with his sound right hand, popping the hinged front cover with his thumb.
The white enamel face gleamed beneath the emerald glow of the overhead lantern. The blued steel hands pointed to twenty-three hours, thirty minutes, and twelve seconds.
Beside it on the zinc table, Doma Reel’s cast-iron kitchen timer—a squat, round clockwork gearwork salvage-harvested from a passenger dining car ten years earlier—read twenty-three hours, twenty-nine minutes, and fifty-four seconds. Against the brick foundation pillar, the heavy brass swinging weight of the tram dispatch control valve swung through its slow, two-foot arc with a dry, metal rhythm that shook in the soles of their boots: shhh-clack, shhh-clack.
Eighteen seconds of drift separated the three gears. Over twenty-four hours of nonstop ticking in the freezing dampness of the shed, that gap had not swelled or tightened by a fraction of a heartbeat.
The second midnight inside Rookvale was thirty minutes away.
Len sat back on his bench, resting the heel of his right hand against his thigh. Beneath his wool coat, the linen wrap on his left forearm felt stiff and tight. He smelled of pine resin, dried carbolic, and blood. The eight horsehair stitches pulled whenever his chest swelled. But the throbbing heat had cooled into a steady, dull ache that he could tuck away into the back of his mind under the discipline of Long Breath.
