“I will shoot,” the Stranger said. He took a step back.

The Hierophant smiled.

“If you have to shoot, shoot,” he said. “Don’t talk.”

He took another step forward. The Stranger took another step back. Overhead the Kid climbed ever more desperately. When he reached the next level his fingers grasped for purchase and for a moment it seemed he would fall. He flailed helplessly for balance.

The Stranger pulled the trigger of his gun.

The gun clicked with a dry sound like an apologetic cough. No bullet emerged. The Hierophant made that gesture with his fingers. He took another step, and then another.

“. . . waiting.”

No one was chasing the Kid now. He was almost at the top when he looked down. He must have realised there was nowhere to run. His foot slipped and pebbles of broken stone fell down to the ground. He shouted, and just when it seemed he would fall he took one last, desperate jump, and caught hold of the minute hand of the clock.

He hung there, suspended from the big clock above the town.

Tick, tick, tick, tick,

ti—

They were on the Stranger now, the passengers holding him helpless as the Hierophant bore down on him, and the man’s fingers pressed against the Stranger’s throat as the Stranger’s useless gun pressed into the Hierophant’s belly. . . .

That useless bullet, trapped inside.

The long, graceful fingers moving on the Stranger’s throat, pressing painfully on his windpipe, choking the air out of him.

The Kid, hanging from the minute hand of the clock, the wind lashing savagely at his face.

He cried, “Help me!”

The Hierophant’s grimace of savage satisfaction. It would be the last thing the Stranger would ever see, that and the Kid’s feet, dangling, high in the air.

A gust of wind blew in from the plains. It snatched a bowler hat off one of the passengers and tossed it skyward. It stirred the grey-brown dust and it tousled Mrs. Lazarus’s hair. Overhead, the second hand battled against the stuck minute hand. Tick, tick, tick, tick, ti—

ck.

The Stranger was choking. The Escapement came and went around him, fading in waves. He saw that other place and that other man who was there. A machine hummed in a white room. The patient table slid out, slowly, the boy emerging feet first. A doctor said, We’ll have to run more tests—

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Ti—

Something had to give. Ancient gears solidified by disuse with rust and dirt, jammed against each other, struggled under this new-found strain, the drop of weight exerting pressure on the mechanism. Something had to give. The clockwork creaked—

Down below, the Hierophant’s hands slackened on the Stranger’s throat.

The trapped bullet travelled an inch down the barrel of the gun, and stopped.

The Kid’s fingers, raw and bloodied, held on but he felt them slipping, slipping . . .