And I knew why. We all knew why he wouldn’t leave. Reggie was in that game still.
No, Silas wasn’t going anywhere, and how couldIwhen I made that unfulfillable promise?
I reached for the pocket of my coat and touched the petals of the rose to try to get my thoughts in order—and it did help a little.
“We tried?—”
“Wehaven’ttried everything.” Silas’s voice shot through the air like an arrow, cutting Kohen off.
All eyes in the room were on him now. Even March had stopped popping his teeth.
Then Silas raised his head and looked at me. “We had a talk, you and I one morning, Ora. Before. About a dream,” he whispered, and it was like he ripped my very bones out of my body, broke them, and put them back inside me like that.
Dream-talk.We had a dream-talk.
“In my dream, you asked questions, and when you didn’t like the answers, you decided to look at numbers next because numbers never lie.”
Numbers never lie.The words just kept echoing in my head, over and over again. I wrapped my fingers around the step of the rose…
“You asked about who sees the Great Clock while it works, too,” Silas said.
“Careful, boy…” Master Talik said from where he stood on the other side of the table.
But Silas was still looking at me. “You asked a lot of questions in the dream, Ora.”
“And did you answer me, Silas?” I breathed. “In the dream.”
My heart beat and beat and beat so frantically, so out of rhythm.
“No. But you decided where to go looking next.” His every wordfellon me as if from the ceiling.
“The Great Clock,” I breathed, like the words had been there under my tongue all along, just waiting for that moment to come out, reveal themselves to the world.
The Great Clock—and at first, I didn’t even realize why I would say that myself, but a tick later, it clicked. Numbers. Records. That’s where they were all kept, and?—
“No.”
The word was so final, falling from Master Talik’s lips.
“No,what?” March asked, but he was looking at me. “What about the Great Clock?”
My mouth opened, but I didn’t have the answer he was looking for.
Silas did. “All records of where every second of time from the Great Clock goes are kept inside it. In the tower, just—” he said, but Master Talik cut him off.
“No. No, a million times no—it is insane that you would even consider?—”
“What’s insane is that youwon’t—” Silas said, but Master Talik kept on going.
“The most dangerous thing—and not only because of anyone at all—it’sinsanity!” He slammed both hands on the edge of the table, and most of us jumped from the sudden sound, but all that did for Silas was make him stand up so fast that the back of his knees pushed the chair right to the floor with a deafening sound.
“It’s theonlyoption—” Silas shouted, but Master Talik kept talking at the same time.
“That it would even occur to you that such a thingcanbe done?—”
“We’ve cowered back for long enough and I refuse to let them?—”
“…that you would hope to survive long enough to get to the top?—”
