“The Great Clockmakestime,” he said. “Every hour, themachinery processes raw temporal energy—refines it, measures it, portions it—and then expels it outward in a single burst. This happens in the Distribution Room, which is at the very top of the tower.” He opened his eyes and looked at each of us in turn, as if he wanted to make sure we were all listening.
“It gets the name from the machine in the center of the room—the Distributor, which, when the hour completes, is charged with enough temporal energy to power the entire realm for sixty minutes. The charge takes roughly three minutes.” He raised three shaking fingers. “During those three minutes, the air in the room becomes lethal.” Another pause. I hardly even breathed. “Then the burst happens. The Distributor fires and the energy leaves the tower and spreads out toward the courts. The force of it would strip the time from your body in a fraction of a second. You wouldn’t age to death or explode or anything like it, no—you’d simply be undone. No body left to bury.”
He spoke and, in my mind, Isawall of it to the best of my imagination’s ability.
Silence. Complete, airless silence in the room for a tick and three and five…
“This happens every hour,” Master Talik said. “On the hour. Without fail. Without exception. It has happened every hour for three thousand years, and it will continue to happen every hour until Time wills it to stop.”
“So, what you’re saying is…” Cook started, cleared his throat. “We’d have to be in and out within an hour.”
Yes—it sounded about right to me.
Master Talik looked at him like he was thinking someveryunpleasant things about Cook right now. His jaw tightened in rhythm with his fists. “No,” he said. “I’m saying you’d have to be in and out within fifty-seven minutes. The last three minutes of every hour are the charging phase. If you’restill in the Distribution Room when the charge begins, you’re dead before the burst even fires.”
Fifty-seven minutes.
It was time.
It was plenty of time…wasn’t it?
Silas said, “That’s nearly an hour. Enough time to?—”
“Dowhat, exactly?” Master Talik cut him off and laughed. A short, bitter laugh as he fell back on his chair with such force he nearly knocked himself over.
“Get to the records…” Again, I spoke as if my body was being handled by somebody else. “Right?”
“Do you even know what the recordsare?” Master Talik was not amused.
“No,” I breathed, like I was terrified he might jump me any second, but… “Do you?” I asked, anyway.
His eyes closed. He sighed deeply.
Kohen said, “He does. He’s been up there.”
Master Talik flinched.
“Well?” Mimi said. “What are they like?”
I genuinely didn’t think Master Talik would answer, but when he opened his eyes, he was looking right at Silas, except he didn’t look as pissed off as a moment ago.
“The records youthinkyou can get to are etched onto allocation plaques—metal sheets that are about this big.” He held his hands apart, roughly the size of a large book. “The Distributor inscribes them as the energy fires. They carry everything, the exact allocation, down to the second. Date, time, portion—all of it is carved into the surface in temporal script that cannot be forged or altered because the Distributor’s own mechanism does the writing. No human hand touches it.”
A tick of silence.
“And where exactly are they kept?” March asked, his voice calmer now, too.
“Inside the Distributor’s base. I’ve never seen inside it, but one of my mentors when I was a boy said they were filed inside it like books on a shelf.”
Master Talik as a boy. I don’t know why I had such a hard time imagining it.
“And just to quench my curiosity…how heavy are they?” Seth asked.
Master Talik looked at him. “About the weight of a dinner plate, maybe.”
A dinner plate. Not heavy, was it?
“Hypothetically speaking,” Silas said, licked his lips, cleared his throat. “How many would one need to look at to discover…irregularitiesin the records?”
