“Shit, Huey!” Zeke said. “Warn a guy before you start flashing that around!”

“It’s perfectly safe … for the moment,” he added, bouncing it gently in his hands. “Nothing to spark it off. You wouldn’t want to go playing catch with it, but it won’t blow us up,” he said with a grin.

Rector eyed the dynamite bundle with a mixture of horror and curiosity. “Is that … is that a clock you got tied to it?”

“Yes! Here,” he said, placing the odd contraption on the desk, beside its box. “It has an alarm—you can set it to strike at a certain time.”

“Like … to wake you up? I’ve heard of those,” Rector said.

“To wake you up, to tell you to go to work … it doesn’t matter. The point is, it strikes.”

“And what’s that thing next to it?” Zeke asked, pointing at a strange little device about the size of two thumbs pressed together.

“It’s a dry cell battery.”

Rector didn’t have a clue what that meant, and a shared glance with Zeke told him he wasn’t alone. “Why’s it stuck on that board?”

The alarm clock and the battery were fastened to each other by a copper wire. A piece of brass was affixed to the clock’s alarm key, and all of the pieces were mounted with screws and bolts to a board which was a bit smaller than a loaf of bread.

“I don’t get it,” Zeke confessed.

“It’s … these, you see…” Houjin pointed at various spots on the board, settling on the two bits of brass. “These are the contact points, you understand? When the alarm rings, it sends an electrical current from the clock to the battery, just like the current in a hand-pump trigger.”

Zeke eyed the clock with suspicion. “The alarm’s not going to ring, is it?”

“The clock’s wound down. It couldn’t strike if it tried.”

Rector stared at the board and its weird components, then considered the dynamite, and the clock—and he thought of the enormous grandfather clock at the orphan’s home, and how it’d chime as told, every hour on the hour. And just like the spark that would jump between the connectors, the answer flickered between his ears.

He said, “This means you can tell the dynamite when to blow up.”

“Yes!” Houjin exclaimed. “That’s it exactly! We can tell the dynamite to explode at five o’clock, or eleven o’clock, or whenever we like—but it explodes when we’re a long ways away from it. We’re going to surprise those tower men out of their skins! They’ll never know what hit them. If any of them survive, they’ll come looking for us—but we won’t be anywhere they can reach us, not by then.”

“That’s … that’s genius,” Zeke said with naked awe.