Corin Vale had never seen the sun.
He had seen pictures of it, of course. Engravings in old books, gold leaf on the ceilings of churches, the painted disc on the Observatory's great dome, bright as a coin. He had seen the light it left behind, too — the long amber dusk that lay over Meridia from morning to night, never rising, never falling, the color of honey held up to a lamp. The Astronomers called it the Long Light, and they said it was a mercy. The city had traded its daylight away three hundred years ago, and in return it had been given this: a dusk that never ended, and nights that never quite came.
Corin did not believe it was a mercy. But he was a clockmaker, and clockmakers did not argue with the sky. They fixed what could be fixed, and they kept their heads down, and they did not ask where the hours went.
Every morning Corin performed the same ritual, the one Anselm had taught him on his first day as an apprentice. He unlocked the shop, wound the regulator on the back wall, and set each clock in the window by it — the tall ones, the small ones, the brass carriage clocks and the painted wooden ones, all ticking together like a choir that had rehearsed the same hymn for a hundred years. Then he stood in the doorway and listened for the Observatory bells, which rang the hour across the whole city at the same moment, so that every citizen of Meridia heard the same note at the same time and knew that time itself was still under control.
It was a good ritual. It was a quiet ritual. It was the ritual of a man who had decided, at fourteen, that the world was a machine, and that machines could be understood, and that a man who understood machines would never be afraid of them. Anselm had encouraged that belief. Anselm had said that a clockmaker's job was to keep the world turning smoothly, and that the Observatory kept the sky, and the clockmakers kept the hours, and between them the city ran as it had always run.
But Anselm had also said something else, once, late at night, when the shop was dark and the two of them were sharing a bottle of something that burned going down. He had said, "A clock that disagrees with the Observatory is a clock that dies, boy. Remember that. And remember that the Observatory is not always right about time — it is only always obeyed." Corin had laughed at the time. He had been seventeen, and he had thought his master was joking. He had not laughed since, because in the eleven months since Anselm died, he had thought about those words a hundred times, and each time they had sounded less like a joke and more like a warning.
He was twenty-four years old, and he had kept the shop on Lantern Row for eleven months, ever since Master Anselm had died. The shop was small and narrow, smelling of oil and brass and old paper, with a window full of clocks that all told the same time, because in Meridia all clocks told the same time. That was the law. The Observatory set the hour, and every clock in the city obeyed it, and any clock that disagreed was taken away and melted down.
Corin was bent over his bench, fitting a new balance spring into a lady's mantel clock, when the bell over the door rang and a woman came in.
She was veiled — not the thin fashionable veils the ladies of the upper quarters wore, but a heavy dark veil that covered her face entirely, like a curtain. Her coat was plain and travel-worn. Her gloves were black. She moved like someone who was used to not being noticed, and she set a small cloth-wrapped bundle on the counter with great care, as if it might break, or bite.
"I need it repaired," she said. Her voice was low and steady. "It belonged to my father. It has stopped."
Corin wiped his hands on his apron and unwrapped the bundle. Inside was a pocket watch.
It was an ordinary thing, at first glance. Brass, a little tarnished, the size of a plum, with a plain white face and black Roman numerals. The chain was missing. The glass was scratched. It was the sort of watch a clerk might carry, or a sailor, or a man who needed to know the hour and did not care how the knowing looked.
But when Corin turned it over, he stopped.
On the back, engraved in small careful letters, was his master's mark: a tiny star inside a circle, the mark of Anselm's shop. And beneath the mark, in letters so small he had to hold the watch up to the lamp, were words he had never seen on any watch before.
*For the hour they stole.*
Corin's hands went very still. Master Anselm had been dead for eleven months. He had died in his bed, the physician said, of a weak heart. He had been sixty-one years old. He had taught Corin everything — how to file a tooth, how to true a wheel, how to listen to a movement and hear what was wrong with it the way other men listened to music. He had never once mentioned a stolen hour.
"Where did you get this?" Corin asked.
"My father carried it," the woman said. "He is dead now. It stopped the night he died."
Corin opened the back of the watch. The movement inside was like nothing he had ever seen. There were two of them, layered one atop the other like the pages of a book — an ordinary going-train on top, and beneath it, smaller and finer and made of a metal that was not brass and not steel but something dark and blue as a bruise, a second movement, with its own tiny balance wheel, its own hair-thin spring, and its own dial, hidden behind the first.
He lifted the top movement aside with his tweezers, and he saw the second dial.
It had thirteen hours on it.
Corin had been a clockmaker for ten years, and he knew every kind of dial there was — twelve hours, twenty-four hours, decimal dials, astronomical dials, dials with moons and tides and saints' days. He had never seen a dial with thirteen hours. There was no thirteenth hour. There could not be a thirteenth hour. The Observatory had said so, and the Observatory was never wrong about time.
And yet there it was, engraved in fine black script: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII — and then, between XII and I, a narrow sliver of a number, squeezed in like a secret.
XIII.
"What is your name?" Corin asked, and his voice came out hoarser than he meant it to.
"Maren," the woman said. "Maren Holt. My father was a lamplighter, in the lower quarters. He kept this watch in a box under his floor for forty years. He told me that if it ever stopped, I was to bring it to the clockmaker on Lantern Row, and to no one else. He said the man who made it would know what to do."
"The man who made it is dead," Corin said.
"Then his apprentice will have to do," Maren said. "Will you repair it?"
Corin looked at the watch. The top movement was simple enough — a broken mainspring, a bent tooth on the center wheel. An hour's work, no more. But the second movement, the hidden one, the one with thirteen hours — he did not know what was wrong with it, or what it was for, or what would happen if he wound it.
He should have said no. He should have wrapped the watch back up in its cloth and given it to her and told her to take it to the Observatory, where the Astronomers kept all the strange things, and let them deal with it. That was what a sensible clockmaker would have done. That was what a clockmaker who wanted to live to be twenty-five would have done.
Instead he said, "Leave it with me. Come back tomorrow."
Maren nodded. She turned to go, and then she stopped at the door, and without turning around she said, "Clockmaker. If anyone from the Observatory comes asking about a watch — anyone at all — you have never seen it. Do you understand?"
"I understand," Corin said, though he did not understand at all.
She left. The bell over the door rang, and the shop was quiet again, and Corin was alone with the watch and its thirteen hours and the words on its back: *For the hour they stole.*
He worked on the top movement first, because that was the work he knew. He replaced the mainspring. He straightened the bent tooth. He oiled the pivots. He put the movement back together, and he wound it, and it began to tick — a good clean tick, steady as a heartbeat.
Then he looked at the second movement, the hidden one, and he did what he had been trained never to do to a watch he did not understand.
He wound it, too.
For a moment, nothing happened. The balance wheel turned. The tiny hands on the hidden dial moved — and then, all at once, the light in the shop changed.
It was not a lamp going out. It was not a cloud passing over. It was the Long Light itself, the amber dusk that had lain over Meridia for three hundred years, lifting — just for a heartbeat, just for the space of a single breath — and in that heartbeat Corin saw, through the window of his shop, something he had never seen in his life.
He saw the sun.
It was low and white and blinding, hanging over the rooftops of the lower quarters like a coin held up to the sky, and the whole city was gold, and the shadows were sharp as knives, and Corin stood at his bench with the watch ticking in his hand and tears running down his face, and he did not know whether he was weeping because it was beautiful or because it was gone again before he could even raise his hand to shade his eyes.
The dusk came back. The Long Light settled over the city like a lid on a pot. The watch in his hand gave a soft click, and the hidden balance wheel stopped, and the thirteenth hour on the hidden dial stood still at XIII, as if it were waiting.
Corin put the watch down on the bench. His hands were shaking. He had just done something the Observatory would call a crime, and he did not even know what the crime was. He had wound a watch, and the sun had risen, and then it had set again, and the whole thing had lasted less than a second, and no one could possibly have seen it.
Except that someone had. He knew that, because at that exact moment, from the street outside, came the sound he had feared all his life without ever knowing why he feared it.
Bells. Not church bells. The deep iron bells of the Observatory, ringing the alarm — and beneath the bells, closer, louder, the sound of boots on cobblestones, marching in step, coming up Lantern Row toward his shop.
The Wardens were coming. And they were coming for the watch.
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