The Hierophant said, gently, “There is so much coiled time inside of you, stranger. You alone are not yet affected. I can give you what it is you need. I can give you time.”

He moved his fingers in a complicated gesture. The Stranger felt the tingle of substance in his nostrils. The town faded, and for a moment he was standing in a clinically white room, where a large machine burped and hummed, two tiny legs sticking out from its cylinder. The boy was very brave to endure the procedure. What must he be thinking, trapped inside the scanner, seeing nothing but white walls?

Then it was gone. The Stranger shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not enough.”

“You seek a cure,” the Hierophant said. ”But time is running out. I can give you that much. I can offer you the time to wait.”

But the Stranger could not abide waiting. He could not abide the smell of hospitals and the shuffle of slow feet, the awful sense of time dripping away. He could not stand being helpless. He turned his gun and he fired, but not at the Hierophant.

He shot the Kid.

The shot merely grazed the Kid’s arm. It ripped through the sleeve and left an angry red welt on the skin, drawing blood. The Kid yelled and dropped the sack he carried. Animation returned to his eyes with the pain. At his feet, the sack opened. The clocks within shuddered and undulated as they tried to crawl away across the ground. The Kid looked wildly this way and that. The other workers turned as one and faced him. They took one step forward, and then another.

“Run, Kid!” the Stranger said. But the Kid didn’t need advice.

They chased him. They moved like automatons but they gathered speed. They seemed to the Stranger like a flock of dirty-grey seagulls. The Kid ran and the passengers followed. Bowler hats blew in the wind. The Hierophant, Zebulon, merely watched. The Kid ran until he was at the base of the clock tower, and when he saw they were almost upon him, he began to climb.

The Hierophant looked at the Stranger and made that little gesture with his fingers again. “I built this place,” he said. “To find that which was buried. I waited, and they came, those who were lost, those who had nothing left but the waiting. And you would take this from them?”

The Stranger did not reply. The Kid was climbing faster now. The clock tower seemed to elongate into the sky, as though its dimensions were not quite right, and it reached higher and higher into the grey heavens. A wind howled from nowhere, snatching at the Kid, bellowing at his hair and clothes. Down below, the passengers attempted a climb but continued to fall down as others took their place.

The Hierophant advanced on the Stranger.