The Watchtower

lighting. I was so intent on the scene that I didn’t notice at first that the metal rings behind me had begun to revolve faster, but when the groan of metal drew my attention and I glanced back, I found that not only were the gears of Ruggieri’s contraption spinning, they were also glowing. The metal rings were collecting the light and energy of the storm and throwing them off in a great geyser of sparks that shot fifty feet into the air and then drifted down into the courtyard. Looking back down, I saw that the broken furniture and scraps of cloth had caught fire. Will had vanished. He must have reached the door. The other figure was still threading his way through the debris and smoke. Good, I thought, by the time he gets here, Will and I will be gone.
    I stepped tentatively into the metal cage, into the center of the glowing, revolving circles, and opened the timepiece. The watch gears were revolving and glowing just like the rings on the tower. The watch hands were spinning just as they had when I got lost in the Val sans Retour. The timepiece was working—but how did it work? How did I get it to take me and Will back to 2009?
    The door in the floor opened. I held my breath until I saw it was Will coming up the steps, then threw myself into his arms so hard he stumbled and nearly backed into the revolving wheels.
    “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it!” I cried.
    He looked down at me, his eyes flashing as green in the glow of the sparks as the Chartreuse I’d drunk at Madame La Pieuvre’s. “I was followed,” he said, his voice hoarse. “We have to move quickly. Do you have the timepiece?”
    I held it up for him. Another flash of lightning hit the top of the cage, and a thin filament traveled down and struck the timepiece. I felt a charge go through me that nearly made me drop the watch, but I held on to it with one hand while drawing the vial of Marduk’s blood out of my pocket with the other. “I have this, too. Do you want to drink it now?”
    He shook his head. “We’ll wait until we get to the future. We may need my strength right now.”
    I was surprised he wanted to wait, but I put the vial away and held up the spinning watch. “I’m not sure how to make it work.”
    “You’re the Watchtower. You only have to say where you want to go.”
    “Like Dorothy clicking her heels and saying there’s no place like home?”
    His fine, marble brow creased in confusion. “Doroth—,” he began, but then the trapdoor slammed open and another figure rose up. His face was covered by the hood of his cloak, shielding himself from the showering sparks, but then he flung the cloak aside when he saw us. It was Will—or at least someone with Will’s face.
    “It’s Marduk,” the man at my side whispered. “Changed to look like me!”
    I looked from face to face; they were identical. But then why hadn’t Will gotten my Wizard of Oz reference a moment ago when he himself had said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” back in Paimpont? I looked down at the hand that grasped my arm—at the ring on his finger. A black swan on silver—my ring—not the one that Will should be wearing.
    When I looked back up, I saw that his eyes were truly green—and malevolent. He snarled and, pushing me back, threw himself on my Will, who drew a sword and ran it straight through Marduk’s heart.
    Marduk screamed and clutched at the wound as Will withdrew the blade, the blood splashing Will’s shirt. Then, before he could attack again, Will planted his boot on Marduk’s chest and shoved him through the metal cage and over the edge of the tower.
    I ran to Will, who stood trembling at the edge of the metal cage, looking down at the body of Marduk lying between two crocodiles. “He’d better be dead this time,” Will said, spitting.
    “I think he is,” I said, looking down at the motionless body. “But we don’t have time to check. The storm is passing. We have to go now !”
    I pulled Will into the center of the cage and held up the timepiece. It was so hot now it was hard to hold. I closed my eyes and pictured twenty-first-century Paris—the round Bourse du Commerce instead of Catherine de Médicis’s palace, the metro stop, the Eiffel Tower. I pictured the people I knew in twenty-first-century Paris—Adele Weiss, Sarah, Becca, and Carrie, even the homeless people who sat in the Square Viviani and the accordion player at the Cluny metro stop. Then I threw in everybody I knew and loved in the