Tess and Jaime gave him everything they had and he stuffed them into his own pockets. Then, he carefully put a foot on the first rung of the ladder. He pressed, testing, and then he placed his second foot on the rung and waited to see if the rung gave.

“To the Land of Kings!” Ono squeaked, seemingly impatient. The robot’s “face” and “body”—if you could call them his face and his body—were way up in the middle of the ladder. Just a couple of tiny boxes, one stacked on top of the other.

“I’m coming,” Theo said. The first few rungs were no problem. One foot after the other, he told himself, don’t look down. But the higher he got, the harder it was not to look down.

He looked down.

Oh no.

His calf muscles cramped, his hands locked around the rungs. He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to control his breathing. His ragged exhalations seemed to echo all around him, the marble floors and the metal arches and the shiny skylights bouncing them right back at him.

“You’re doing great,” Tess said. “Just a little more.”

Theo was not doing great.

And it was not just “a little more.”

But he willed himself to keep going. A little farther, and a little farther after that, and again and again. And then he bonked the clock with his head, and he almost fell off the ladder, his stomach feeling like it’d dropped somewhere around his feet.

Keeping one hand tight on the ladder, he stared into the face of the clock. A quiet but persistent tick-tick-tick emanated from it, like the chirp of some relentless insect. Theo tried opening the glass front of the clock. Didn’t work. He reached around to the back of the clock and found a latch. He opened the latch to expose the works. The ticking grew louder. Swallowing hard, Theo glanced down. None of the passengers roaming around seemed to be paying attention. He steeled himself and gingerly felt around the movement of the clock, his fingers brushing against gears and weights. A weight-driven clock that didn’t need to be wound, a weight-driven clock powered by . . . what? The light pouring in from the ceiling? The movement of the air? The energy of atoms spinning? The verse from the fore-edge painting ticked in his mind:

Stop the clock in dead of night

To wake what sleeps and stir their flight.

How was he to stop an unstoppable clock? Smash it with a hammer? Eviscerate it with a crowbar? And even if he could stop it, should he? The clue sounded ominous. The last time a clue sounded so ominous, he and Tess and Jaime managed to take down their whole building, and instead of stopping Slant, Slant was more powerful than ever. Not for the first time, Theo wondered exactly what the Morningstarrs really wanted, what the Cipher really wanted.