Just like Kinesthesia.
But now she wondered what had happened to him—to that mechanic. Rob. The name resurfaced suddenly. She was shocked that she had carried it with her all this time.
“I think it would be easier if we just went our separate ways,” Luc said softly. But his voice told her the opposite. His voice said I want to go with you, and Corinthe felt, suddenly, as if the whole shifting, spinning mechanism of Kinesthesia, as if the heartbeat of the whole universe, paused for just an instant.
“We’re going to the same place,” Corinthe said. “We cannot go separate ways. Our destinies are intertwined.” And it was true—she knew it was true. But exactly how they’d been twisted together, and for what purpose, she didn’t know.
Luc sighed and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. His dark T-shirt was torn and she got a glimpse of his stomach, the pattern of his ribs. It made her throat go dry. She wanted to touch him, to heal him.
Luc reached into his pocket and extracted the locket. Then he offered it to her.
“Why are you giving it back?” She hesitated for only a second before she slipped it over her head and tucked it safely under her shirt.
Luc looked sheepish. “I couldn’t figure out how the damn thing worked,” he admitted. “I jumped into the river, and the current nearly took me down. I pulled myself into this place.”
“So you do need me after all.” It gave her a stupid amount of joy to say it and to know it was true.
Before Luc could reply, a series of shuddering bangs and shrill whistles sounded in the air. Luc cried out, and Corinthe covered her ears. The gears of the clock began to shift. Pendulums swung wildly; cogs rolled loose, spinning frantically, letting off a volley of sparks.
“Watch out!” Luc shouted.
Corinthe whirled around and saw an enormous cog bearing down on them; its steely sharp edges lit up in the flickering spray of sparks. She was temporarily stunned, frozen, and the word flashed in her head, huge, like a roar of black: death.
Luc yanked her out of the way seconds before she would have been flattened.
“What the hell?” He had to shout over the noise. “What’s happening?”
“I—I don’t know!” Corinthe shouted back. This was all wrong. Kinesthesia was a place of order, of equilibrium.
Angry blue and yellow sparks began shooting from the machinery like fireworks and a loud, steely groan shook the ground under their feet. Smoke clotted the air. Pieces of the tower came tumbling down on them, hurtling through the air like giant pieces of shrapnel, severing the wires below.
A tall spray of bright orange sparks showered up in front of them. Corinthe ducked, just barely.
The giant cog screeched and shuddered, then, with an audible snap, broke free from its anchor. Something slammed into her back and she went sprawling onto the metal floor. Luc rolled out of the way. When she pushed to her feet, she saw her knife wedged into a section of steel grating right behind them.
The floor shifted, and Corinthe fought to stay upright. The smoke grew thicker and blacker. The rhythmic ticking of the clock stuttered, then became irregular, like a malfunctioning heart.
“We have to get out of here!” Luc shouted. He jumped over a writhing live wire and grabbed the knife handle, dislodging it from the grate. “Do you know where the gateway is?”
“No, but we can’t stay down here!” The base of the clock was the least safe place to be, considering all the pieces of fiery metal falling on them. There were copper stairs spiraling along the inside walls of the clock, and they scrambled toward them.
Luc grabbed her arm and yanked her forward several feet just as a beam crashed through the grid where she’d been standing. She didn’t have time to thank him.
They ran to the stairs, dodging electrified wires and crashing metal, and began to climb. Lucas took the lead. She watched him jump up several steps, over a fallen piece of bent steel, but before she could follow, a torn wire flipped into her way. There was no way around it. She turned back, only to find herself trapped by the spitting wire.
Lucas shouted her name and she saw him through the thickening smoke, climbing over the bent beam. The walls shook and the stairs became detached from the sides of the tower. She gripped the railing and then ran up, dodging the lethal end of the wire to jump over it. She landed with a jarring thump, but she made it over. Luc raced to her side and dragged his sweatshirt off her shoulders. He whipped the shirt away from them. Flames licked at the material, growing until they engulfed the entire thing. Corinthe watched, wide-eyed.
The tower shook violently, slamming her against Lucas. He held her tight against his chest, covering her head. A large gear broke free above them and crashed down, embedding itself into the stairs.
All around them, Kinesthesia was collapsing. Metal twisted and groaned under the chaotic mess. Live wires zapped and crackled like witches laughing with glee.
This place was the pulse of the universe, keeping everything outside it regulated and connected, and it was falling apart. All the worlds were intertwined, feeding off each other to keep balance in all. Corinthe shuddered to think of the consequences that would ripple outward because of this.
They fought their way to the top of the clock tower, where there was a narrow platform below the back of the face. The stairs came up to the platform from underneath, but the trapdoor wouldn’t open. Debris had fallen onto it. Finally, Lucas managed to shove it open, and they clambered up onto the narrow ledge of grated steel.
“Now what?” he screamed over the chaos.
The air was heavy with black, acrid smoke. Corinthe’s eyes stung, and she pulled the neck of her shirt up over her mouth. The smoke burned her lungs, made her cough uncontrollably.
“What are we looking for?” Luc asked. He had the crook of his arm covering the lower half of his face and black smudges marked his skin. There was an angry-looking gash just above his wrist.
“Anomalies. Disruptions in the pattern!” she shouted. Like the clothes that stayed frozen in the wind. The tree with blue leaves. Or the river that flowed two ways …
But as they looked around, they could see no element that seemed incongruous. For a second, Corinthe thought she could make out a figure, moving beneath the grating on which they stood … but then an explosion shook the entire tower again and Luc was knocked onto his back on the narrow landing, and Corinthe focused only on him. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up, just as a thick black wire danced through the air from above, writhing like a snake, spitting sparks and lighting tiny fires across dark pools of oil.
They backed up against the clock face. And that was when she saw it: the giant screw holding the hour and minute hands to the clock face did not have normal ridges—instead, the screw had a shape in its top like a keyhole.
Corinthe remembered the key Miranda had given her. “This has to be it.”
She yanked the key from around her neck, but her palms were sweating and it fell to the floor. She dove after it, groping blindly through the sparks and smoke. Her heart beat wildly, and she pushed aside the pain of metal digging into her knees and elbows. Luc yelled something she couldn’t make out over the noise.
Stay calm, Corinthe told herself. Blinking away the smoke, eyes stinging, she ran her hand blindly across the grating and felt something slip underneath her fingers. At that instant, her vision cleared. She watched the chain jerk down through the grating—quickly, violently, as if it had been pulled from down below.
Until she realized that the key was, miraculously, still clutched in her right fist. It must have become detached from the chain. She stood, her hand shaking so badly she failed the first two times she attempted to insert it into the lock. Luc put his hand over hers, steadying it. Together, they turned it.