Avery leaned back, clenching his hands over his stomach almost in prayer. He stared at the stone ceiling. “Unlikely…” he repeated.
They say time heals all wounds, but it wasn’t as true as this: time, most often, runs out.
Avery was thinking that then, as he leaned his chin into both hands beside the Tailor’s grand, grinning machine. He stayed there, bowed, for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was muffled by his fingers. “Then how…?”
The Tailor had never granted a request. Had, in fact, attempted to make sure he was in no position to hear them.
But now, stalled in his work, he couldn’t not consider John Avery and that cheerful girl with the sunlit grin who looked directly from the photograph like she might leap from its shallow page.
“Bring her here?” said the Tailor.
But here there were no dragonflies, no spoke rattles, no mud. And could such a small girl travel the whispers and rumours it had taken Avery just to reach here?
No. The only way to do it was to stall the globe. And not just any globe. What they needed was to stall the globe that was in use, the one determining time at that very moment.
The Tailor reached out a hand to Avery, but hesitated, uncertain, and said instead, “I will help you, John Avery. Somehow.”
For Bella, with the smile like daylight.
Avery stood to leave, the plan agreed. On a good day, when Bella could breathe without help, he would send word.
“You’ll know,” said Avery, cutting off the Tailor’s next question. “And Tailor—”
“Welcome,” nodded the Tailor. “You’re welcome.”
He left the way he’d arrived.
The Tailor returned to his sewing as best he could. His focus was gone and he was aware of the dull throb of his injured finger, and how the injury made him cautious now, lest he wreck some other part of him in the maul of the machine.
Almost at once the machine hit a snag and ran rough temporarily, and he was forced to reach for the pouch of tools in his pocket, to poke and prod it open and check its gears and screws, discover a loose one and right it, then return to his work. This he did as required while he waited.
Also while he waited, he drew in several of the tyros at a time, their bald heads shining in the light of the machine, and he lead them through what to do and how to clothe the globes.
Just in case there was ever another Tailor needed.
The word from Avery, when it arrived, was a whisper carried on whispers. It breached the room, starting with the tyro nearest the window and working its way around to where the Tailor sat ready.
“This is the best way to tell you that today is a good day for spoke rattles and dragonflies, dear Tailor,” whispered the nearest tyro.
“Time,” replied the Tailor, “has come.”
He rose from his machine and watched as his training took effect. The tyros shuffled into position, two of them dragging the swathes of cloth up to the machine; another two feeding it through.
Unsentimentally he left them to it, straightening his spine with effort and pausing a moment to savour the release of standing upright. He crossed to the tracks where the globes travelled and climbed, unsteadily at first, but with increasing assurance. He pushed out a gap in the line and pulled himself along, nose bumping the sheathed globe in front while the ones behind caught at his toes. He crawled, hands gripping hard to the track, knees pressing painfully.
The window caught him on each shoulder and threatened to dislodge him. He had to back up and remove his cloak and thick shirt, then clamber forward again naked to the waist, skin trembling from the effort, elbows alternatively locking then shaking.
When he breached the other room he took a moment to get his bearings. There was a passage, the track snaking across to exit another window just as small as the first, light glowing messily from the other side. He approached and squeezed through, scraping his upper arms, awkwardly pinning his wrist under him and wrenching it enough that it ached.
After the second window was daylight and a sheer drop over which the tracks meandered in confused circuits.
What a crazed, hellish design he’d found. What singularly unfriendly efforts had been spent constructing this track and the struts that suffered its support. And then affixing the lot to a cliff at angles and heights that sent the senses spinning.
But of course this was exactly the point, he realised. The maker of the machines did not want for interference. The Engineer built monsters so others would think twice about abuse or ownership. She made them unfriendly with all the purpose and intent possible.
He thought again of those blank eyes and the unsmiling fixture of her mouth, and none of it surprised him after that.
He took a shuddering breath and then another. He kept his chin high so he wouldn’t be tempted to look down.
The globes here had stalled. To move forward, he would have to climb over the top of them. He clasped each one in turn, pulling it into the shadow of his belly and then pushing it back between his thighs to where it washed against its followers. The soft thud and glub of the waterlogged spheres behind calmed him.
Still, he cursed his newfound friend more than once and then cursed the crazed mind of the Engineer who’d built this thing. But he couldn’t go back on his word. If he failed, the memory would nag and fill him up and leave no room for anything else. He had, as he saw it, no choice.
He gripped hard, chin between shoulders, forcing himself to breathe, to squeeze his eyes shut against the inertia that dragged at him. He focused on stilling the tremble in his arms and isolating the ache in his knees, willing both into ignorance.
Only then did he find the focus to look ahead for his quarry, the globe that determined the current day. And there it was—that had to be it—a globe that stood alone on a plinth, lit from above and below, held steady and rotating methodically.
The lights made it look as though it floated. It rotated slowly, already shifting from a pleasant pink dusk to a throaty, overcast day. He didn’t remember sewing that one. It hadn’t seemed special in his machine, nor had the cloth inspired him as he ran it through his hands. And yet, here it was. The day John Avery had deemed a good day.
He crawled forward, slow but sure, traversing the track in-between. He passed another globe and another, closing in on his prey shining with the bliss of its being.
One final globe and at last he was there. Now all he had to do was stall it. He needed to wedge something into the mechanism to hold it steady. This way he would give John Avery those hours he’d asked for.
The Tailor stood upright on the tracks with the gaping void on either side of his feet. His ankle shook and nearly gave way, and he had to wave his arms out straight on either side of his body to keep himself right.
He stabilised, and let out a slow breath that was too passionate for a sigh.
The globe, by now, was rotating closer and closer to night. Soon it would slip its mooring and sail off along the track to where the other used-up days sat, their coats faded from the harshness of the spotlights. Soon, soon the day would be done, and the Tailor’s promised unaddressed. And he had come so far, climbed so far, was even now perched precariously above the sheer drop that emptied out to nothing but a grey horizon.
In his pockets were all manner of implements and needles and miniature tools to mend the machine. His pockets, however, were all in the coat he’d left on the floor of his room.
He took a moment to curse.
Then he leaned over the globe and found the tiny mechanical catch that kept it isolated, and he wedged his thumb against it—that lean, learned thumb that had been used to pinch and hold and size the demands of thousands of years of sewing.