Lena finds an impossible clock in her attic and is pulled into a mist-shrouded city where strangers are already waiting for her.
Rain battered the roof of the old house while Lena pushed aside boxes in the attic, hunting for the books her grandmother swore were hidden somewhere under the rafters. Dust clung to her sleeves, cobwebs brushed her cheek, and then she saw it: a huge brass clock half-buried behind a stack of cracked trunks.
It was unlike anything she had ever seen. Two dials. Filigree curling around the case. Gears visible through glass that should have been cloudy with age, yet still seemed to twitch as if the thing were breathing. Lena knelt beside it, wiping away a film of dust with her sleeve. The metal was cold enough to sting.
She was about to touch the hands when something inside the clock gave a sharp, electric crackle. A deep blue light flared behind the glass, pulsing once, twice. Lena jerked back, but the second hand had already begun to race. The attic tilted. The floor dropped away. Blue and silver blurred around her until the rain, the beams, the boxes, everything vanished.
When Lena could see again, she was standing on stone pavement under a grey, mist-heavy sky. A city rose around her, enclosed by towering walls she knew from history books and never expected to see in front of her. Men and women in old-fashioned clothes moved through the streets. Somewhere nearby, wheels rattled over cobblestones. Lena looked down at the clock in her hands.
The second hand had stopped at twelve.
Then a boy in a dark cloak stumbled around the corner, clutching a clock almost identical to hers. He froze when he saw her, eyes wide with recognition and alarm. "You came through too," he said.
Before Lena could answer, the bells in the tower above them began to ring, hard and urgent. One by one, people in the street turned toward the sound. Several of them were carrying clocks.
And all of them were looking straight at Lena.