“The man who lives here knows a good deal about the university and what is happening here. He also garners information from throughout the city.”
“If Father has been seen . . .”
“He’ll know.”
“What should I do?” I ask.
“Listen. This man . . . doesn’t have much reason to like me.”
He pounds on the door again, harder. When we hear slow footsteps from inside, Elliott shifts from one foot to the other. A completely unexpected emotion crosses his face. He’s nervous.
The door begins to open, and for a moment I see my father standing on the threshold. But of course the person inside the apartment isn’t my father, just an older gentleman with a white beard.
“The prince’s nephew,” the man says, sounding neither surprised nor pleased. But Elliott braces himself, throwing his shoulders back before he pushes me into the room and closes the door behind us.
The room is sparsely furnished with a cheap desk, a couple of rickety chairs, and a doorway leading to what might be a bedroom, or possibly a kitchen.
I study the occupant’s lined face, but he hardly seems threatening. What makes Elliott so nervous?
“So you’re following your uncle’s footsteps, taking over cities?” he asks.
Elliott nods. This is the first time since we’ve reentered the city that he hasn’t seemed proud of his role.
“Have you abandoned your writing? I’d always hoped to read your account of the day you and I met. But then I heard you’d burned everything you left.”
“As usual, you heard correctly. I’m . . . fighting for the city. Things will be better when I’m in control.” His usual arrogance is starting to seep back in.
“Your uncle did train you to continue his work.”
“We both know what my uncle did,” Elliott says. “Let’s go downstairs.”
“The girl stays up here.” The man eyes me with distrust.
“I go where he goes,” I say.
I expect an argument, but the man just turns and leads us downstairs. Elliott looks pained, as if the man’s rapid acquiescence hurts him.
“You will have to unlock the door to the workshop,” the man says, and he turns to Elliott and holds up his hands. My gasp is loud in this small subterranean antechamber. His hands are not really hands at all—rather a formless mass, as if he doesn’t have any bones beneath the scarred flesh.
Elliott jerks away as though he’s been punched. In fact, he looks worse than when Will actually did hit him yesterday. When he finds his voice, he gets out only a strangled “Of course.”
Elliott turns a series of locks and opens the door gingerly. The man leads us across his cellar to another, narrower doorway with the muffled noises of movement on the other side. When he opens the door, the cellar floods with light from rows upon rows of gas bulbs in the room beyond. It is lined with clocks, and there are tables covered with cogs and gears of all sizes and shades of shiny metal. The clocks are ticking and their parts are turning. As we step in, I realize with amazement that they are all set to the exact same time, that the thousands of parts are all moving together. It’s astounding.
“I make clocks,” the man says with a half smile. “Or he does.” A boy sits at a low table, putting gears together with nimble fingers.
A wide table sits against the wall opposite the clocks, with an assortment of mismatched chairs. This would have been a wonderful place for students to congregate before the plague.
“The domain of artists, scholars, and poets.” Elliott sounds wistful.
“They still meet here. The group that you started,” the clockmaker says.
But we have no time for nostalgia. The clocks tick, and it’s getting late. We told Will we’d be back in an hour.
“Have you heard anything about Dr. Phineas Worth?” I ask, since it’s the point of our visit. “The scientist who invented the masks?”
“I’ve heard many things about him,” the clockmaker replies, and I feel ill, waiting for him to tell me whether my father is dead.
“But nothing recent. The last I heard he was chased off campus about a week ago by Prospero’s soldiers.”
Elliott and I exchange a look. That was the last time we saw my father. Elliott called off the soldiers, but one was loyal to his uncle and shot at Father anyway.
“Dr. Worth is in hiding. I need you to organize a few spies to scour the campus. They will be compensated for their efforts, rewarded if they find the man.” Elliott picks up one of the gears from a table and toys with it.
The clockmaker inclines his head. “I’ll arrange a full-fledged search. If he’s on campus, we’ll find him.” The boy looks up at us, drawing his master’s attention. “The others will search. You need to keep working,” he says, and then to Elliott, “He’s my only trained apprentice, and we have a large commission. From your uncle.”
The gear falls from Elliott’s hand, hitting the wooden table with a loud thunk.
“The prince wants a great clock. The biggest I’ve ever built. And he wants it soon.” The clockmaker gestures to the wooden body of what will be an enormous ebony grandfather clock. It’s beautifully crafted, but the dark wood and austere lines are imposing.
“Why?”
“Prince Prospero doesn’t deign to tell a clockmaker why he wants a clock,” the man answers.
“Is it for his party?” Elliott asks. “Does it do anything besides mark the hour?” He walks over to the clock and puts his hands on the wood of the casing. “Are there weapons inside? Does it dispense poisonous gas?”
“If he wants to install instruments of torture, he’ll have to do that himself. I only design the clockwork.”
“My uncle loves oddities,” Elliott murmurs. “But a huge clock?” He looks over the cabinet one last time. “I thought you swore never to make anything for him again.”
“The boy is making it.”
I clear my throat. This cryptic conversation isn’t going to find my father.
The clockmaker turns to me. His eyes are piercing. He studies me while asking Elliott, “Does she love you?” Even after the audacity of the question, he doesn’t look back at Elliott. My face burns at the personal question, and my anger builds at being discussed this way. Still, I wait to hear Elliott’s answer.
“Not yet,” Elliott says. “But she will. Araby’s used to loving people who’ve done terrible things.”
I frown. “I wouldn’t count on it,” I say quietly, and I don’t bother to look at Elliott either. If all he can do is ignore me or talk for me, he doesn’t deserve any better.
The clockmaker smiles, as if my words amuse him. “Shall we test her?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he holds up his mangled hands. “Elliott did this,” he says.
The shock of it is like the time Finn jumped on my chest and knocked the air out of me.
“He wasn’t much older than my apprentice,” the clockmaker says. “Though his hands were less steady. This boy is well trained.”
“So was I.” Elliott’s face is drained of color, and his voice is hoarse.
Many emotions cross the clockmaker’s face. Hatred for Elliott, remorse, worry.
“My wife and my children died of the plague very early,” he says. “The prince never had an opportunity to hurt them. Be careful, my dear.”
“I’m through being careful,” I say. I’m sorry for his pain, and I’m sorry for Elliott’s guilt. But none of this is helping me save April. I step back toward the corridor and notice a small, nearly concealed door.
“How is Prospero paying you?” Elliott asks the clockmaker.
“Clockwork parts. Scrap metal from his storerooms. And this.” The clockmaker goes to a cabinet and pushes the door open with his wrist. He has just enough movement in his thumb that he can clumsily pick up a thick envelope. It’s an invitation to the prince’s ball.
“Why would you ever want to return to the palace?” Elliott asks.
While they are occupied, I take a few steps closer to the small door. When I lived with Father and Finn in the cellar, there was a door like this in the room Father adopted as his laboratory. He always kept it blocked with heavy boxes and a wardrobe.
“I never thought I would, but if things get worse here, I may seek sanctuary there.”
“Sanctuary?” Elliott’s eyebrows shoot up, truly surprised.
“The invitation is for two. I could save the boy. Better for him to live among evil men than die of the Red Death.”
I reach out to the door and turn a green-tinged brass knob. Neither Elliott nor the clockmaker notice my movement, though the little apprentice looks up for a moment.
“You won’t have to go,” Elliott says. “I’m working to make the city safe.”
“We’ll see.”
Elliott starts to say something and then stops, shaking his head. “I have something else to ask, and it’s important.”
I’m edging closer to the little door, but the urgency in his voice makes me pause.
“Tell me about the device that is supposed to hold back the swamp.”
The clockmaker’s gaze shoots up. “People have talked about it for years. The commonly accepted belief is that it never existed.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
The clockmaker smiles. “No. I don’t. I know that it existed, because I made parts for it.”
Elliott strides forward. The clockmaker falls back, nearly cowering. But Elliott doesn’t apologize, not now. “Where?” he demands. “Where is it?”
“That is the mystery. I never saw it assembled. The scientists who built it have either died or disappeared into your uncle’s dungeons. All I can tell you is that there are two keys. They look like watch keys, but bigger. To begin the machine, both keys have to be turned simultaneously.”
“And where are these keys?”
“They’re in Prospero’s throne room,” I hear myself say. Both Elliott and the clockmaker spin to face me. I remember seeing them during the terrible visit Elliott and I paid to the castle only a few weeks ago. They were on a table under a green glass window. Two gold keys among the instruments of torture that covered the table.
“Which means that Prospero must have found the device and destroyed it. He enjoys destruction.” The clockmaker stares at his hands. “The minutes are ticking away, and I do have a clock to design.”
I nearly reach out to Elliott, he looks so stricken, but I’m not close enough. Instead, I try to lessen the tension between the two of them. “Where does this lead?” I gesture to the small door, and as if the movement of my hand is magical, it creaks opens just a hair. I push it the rest of the way and peer into the darkness. A rough stone stairway leads down into the murk.
“It’s a passage into a network of earthen tunnels.” Elliott has crossed the room and is directly behind me. “Many of the older buildings have access to them.”
“The tunnels Malcontent has taken over?”