At exactly zero five fifty-eight and zero seconds in the morning, the second hands on all three clockwork timepieces touched the twelve in total, timed together perfection.
From his litter against the dark rock wall of the backup station, Len Vey didn’t need to look at the dials.
He felt the arrival of the minute through the structure of the room itself. Across nine days of darkness, flight, and heavy-duty sabotage, Len had learned to read time not by the sun, but by the clockwork friction of moving gears and the body ache of his own battered tissues. On the pine survey bench three paces to his right, three separate chronometers completed their nine-day convergence.
Doma Reel’s clockwork kitchen timer—salvaged from the flour bins of the Tram Ward depot after the court guards raided the kitchens—let out its heavy, deliberate clockwork stroke. The brass swinging weight swung through its final leftward arc. Its gear catch dropped into the holding detent with a bone-shaking, fine china-sharp click.
Beside it sat Deren Vey’s silver pocket watch, its blued-steel second hand clicking onto the top of the minute with the rapid, tinny chattering of a northern postal gear catch that had counted out river crossings for twenty years.
