“O-oh, well, yes, of course. ’Course it is, sir.”
The Lead sighed. “Very well. Please leave that on my desk and follow your escort out.”
Once the ironworker left in the company of the policeman who had been waiting outside, Danny turned to the Lead. “He has to know something.”
“He doesn’t, Daniel. There was even a witness who saw him find the numeral down the street from the tower. His story seems sound, although I’m sure he must have realized it was a numeral at some point.”
“If it can still be called one.” Danny picked up the lump of metal, wincing. It felt wrong. Warped. “If it wasn’t the ironworker, then what happened? What could have done this to a piece of time?”
The Lead frowned at the ruined numeral, then shook his head. “Perhaps time itself will tell.”
“Blazes, what did you do? Feed it gin?”
Danny crossed his arms and glared at the auto bonnet, which his friend Cassie had peeled open to reveal the steam engine underneath. The boiler was rusting in places, forming patches of brownish orange like diseased flowers. With months away from work, he didn’t have the funds to replace it yet.
“The pressure’s off,” Cassie muttered to herself as she knelt before the boiler. Her frizzy auburn hair was tied back, and it gleamed in the watery sunshine. “Have you been forcing it to go on low temp?”
“I don’t drive it cold,” he said. “It’s old, that’s all. My father bought it years ago. One of the very first models.”
Cassie hummed in reply and leaned forward to tamper with something on the side of the boiler, one hand absently twirling a wrench as she worked. He had no idea how she knew all of this. For her, it was like reciting the alphabet. He preferred the familiarity of a clock, the mechanics of which made Cassie cross-eyed.
She turned those blue eyes on him, a smudge of dirt on her freckled nose. “Have you thought about installing a condenser?”
“A what?” He used a sleeve to wipe away the dirt, and she wrinkled her nose at him.
“They’ve just patented it, and it saves you the trouble of the feedwater. It’s a lot more weight for the auto to take on, but it’s useful.”
“How much does it cost?”
She shrugged. “Twenty quid?”
“Twenty pounds? I’ll take my chances.”
Her face fell a little. “A condenser would be safer. Or even a new model. This old thing won’t be around much longer.” She patted the door as she would a dog.
“Don’t talk about it that way.”
“What, you’re allowed to whinge about it and I’m not?” Her tone had been joking, but seeing his face, Cassie stood and wrapped an arm around his waist. “Calm down, Dan, it’s just an auto.”
“You know it isn’t.” He slipped away from her and leaned against the auto door as Cassie leaned on the fence surrounding the Harts’ dying front garden. Danny had thought about maintaining the garden during his time off, but one spider bite had driven him away from it forever.
“What’s happened, then?” Cassie asked.
The neighbor’s tabby slinked around the corner and rubbed itself against Danny’s legs. Wanting to avoid Cassie’s eyes, he bent down and scratched behind the cat’s ears, burying his fingers in its soft fur.
“You and your mum had a row?” Cassie guessed.
“Not quite.” Unless you considered three years of resentment a row. Leila had grown distant after what had happened to his father, so wrapped up in her loss that she didn’t have the capacity to comfort him in his. Now they could barely last two minutes together.
He had never told Cassie the reason why. It sat like an unmovable stone in the pit of his stomach. If he tried to pull it free, if he even brushed against its sharp edges, he would be cut open and his shame would pour out.
The cat took off in pursuit of a pigeon down the road. Danny stood and decided he couldn’t touch that stone. Not yet.
He turned to another problem instead, one Cassie already knew. “Things have just been odd. Ever since I told her …”
He trailed off, and Cassie nodded. It still made him uncomfortable to say it out loud, but Cassie, his friend since childhood, never needed words to understand him.
A few months ago—before the disastrous job that had given him his scar and his nightmares—Danny had finally announced what he had known since he was eleven: that he preferred boys over girls. It used to be a capital offense, punishable by hanging or worse, but that law had been abolished in the last decade. While the rural parts of England were still offended by the notion, more civilized areas such as London accepted it with barely a “good heavens.”
But much like the protesters condemning the clock towers, that didn’t prevent some from thinking it was unnatural.