When Maja and Tom slip into an old clockmaker's shop, a strange clock pulls them into another era. The way back is already slipping away, and the next choice could trap them there.
Rain drummed against the cracked panes of the old building on Time Street as Maja and Tom slipped through the rusty gate. The crooked sign above the door should have scared them off: Clockmaker - repairing every time. Instead, it made the place feel even more impossible.
"Are we really doing this?" Maja asked, tightening her fingers around her grandfather's battered watch.
Tom swallowed and pushed the door open. A bell chimed somewhere in the dark. Inside, the shop smelled of dust, metal, and rain-soaked wood. Clocks covered every wall. Grandfather clocks leaned in the corners. Pocket watches hung from hooks like tiny silver eyes. Some ticked normally. Others seemed to be keeping time with one another, in a rhythm Maja could feel under her skin.
At the back of the room sat an old man with silver hair and careful hands. He did not look up from the gears he was polishing.
"You came for time," he said.
Maja stepped closer and held out the watch. "Can you fix it?"
The watchmaker took it, turned it once in his palm, and met her gaze with a smile that made no sense at all.
"Time does not break," he said. "It opens."
Before Maja could ask what that meant, he moved behind the counter. A door stood there a second ago; now it was suddenly there, half hidden in shadow. He opened it and motioned them forward.
The corridor beyond was too narrow for comfort, bending sharply as if it had been built inside a clock. Tom brushed the wall and pulled his hand back at once.
"This is wrong," he whispered.
At the end of the corridor was a room packed with chests, pendulums, and glass cases filled with hands, springs, and tiny brass parts. In the middle stood a huge clock carved with intricate patterns. Its face showed no hour Maja recognized. The hands moved, stopped, then jumped ahead again.
"Every minute is a different world," the watchmaker said softly. "Choose carefully."
He turned a key in the clock's lock.
The floor lurched. Wind rushed past Maja's ears. The room blurred, colours folding over one another until Tom's hand was the only solid thing left in the spinning dark.
Then everything snapped still.
Maja stared at the street in front of her and forgot how to breathe. It looked like their city, but not the one she knew. The buildings were fresh and ornate, the road was crowded with carriages, and people in long coats and bonnets hurried past as if nothing in the world was strange.
"Tom..." she whispered. "Where are we?"
He was still looking at the clock in her hand. The second hand was spinning too fast to follow, flickering like a trapped spark.
Then a voice cut through the noise of the street.
"Maja! Tom!"
It came from everywhere at once.
Maja turned. At the end of the street, two paths split in opposite directions. One disappeared between bright stone houses and lantern light. The other led into a narrower lane full of fog and shadows. The clock in her palm flashed once, hard and white, and the watchmaker's voice seemed to echo from inside it:
"Choose now."