Tel shared a look with Grund, and then they both looked at the watches.

“We didn’t even turn them on,” Grund said softly, then seemed to shake the thought out of his head and turned back to Lena. “The Tailcoats? Here? You’re sure?”

“They’re cutting through the front door as we speak. We got lucky and spotted a dozen of them and their groupies coming down the path and got the main door closed in time, but it won’t hold them for long. Their swords…” she trailed off, leaning heavily against the wall.

“Yes. Their swords will make relatively short work of even that door. A dozen you say?” Grund asked and waited for Lena to nod.

Still, even after the confirmation, Grund seemed lost in thought, and instead of sitting around doing nothing, Tel stood, folded up his tool kit, and slid it into one of his many pockets. If the Tailcoats were there, well, there was only one real outcome possible – they were all going to be executed for their heresy. If that was going to happen anyway, he might as well die with a tidy workbench.

Methodically turning off the light and putting the segmented magnifying glass mechanism back in its waiting position, where the least strain was put on the arms, Tel quietly straightened up his workspace. The stopwatches he left where they lay; perhaps Grund would want to turn them on after all, since getting found didn’t really matter at this point.

The desk complete, everything back where it belonged, Tel slid the stool in and turned his attention to straightening the watches hanging on the wall behind. A shame all the clocks and watches would be taken, not to mention the treasures in the vault. Centuries of lost and outlawed knowledge, and the Tailcoats would destroy every single piece of it. Destroying; that’s all they were good at. All they knew.

“Tsk,” Tel said quietly before he could censor himself.

“Tel,” Grund said, “You have to leave.”

“I’m almost finished,” Tel said, adjusting a chain so the watch hung from exactly three inches of chain, just like all the others. “I know they will just tear it all down, but I refuse to…”

“Tel, look at me,” Grund said more forcefully, and Tel turned his head to look at the older man while his fingers nimbly looped the chain over the hook on the wall. “You need to leave. Not this room. You need to leave the enclave, and you need to go now, before the Tailcoats get in.”

“What are you…?” Tel started, but Grund grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around, the sudden jerk pulling the watch clean off the wall and out of Tel’s fingers.

The metal casing clattered to the floor, but Grund didn’t even spare it a glance. “A resonance. Take the two stopwatches and go to the vault. You remember the old path I told you about? The one we used to bring everything into the vault? I’m sure the Tailcoats don’t know about it. It hasn’t been used in more than twenty years, it has to be grown over and little more than a memory now. Save what you can in the vault and then take that path. Get as far away from here as you can.”

Tel considered before answering. “If the path hasn’t been used in so long, how can we be sure the doors will open?”

“Tel, if there is one thing we’re good at in this mountain, it’s making sure stuff works. The doors will open, and more importantly, if the Tailcoats don’t know where to look, the doors will be practically invisible once closed,” Grund said, letting go of Tel and sweeping the stopwatches off the workbench. “Save as much as you can, including yourself,” he said, and reverently placed the two timepieces in Tel’s palms.

“You’re asking me to leave you to die,” Tel said, an unexpected catch in his throat. He’d never been close to any of the other Clocksmiths, but they were familiar. Comfortable, even.

Grund shook his head. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you,” he said, throwing his arm over Tel’s shoulder and leading him out of the room. “You can get to the vault before the Tailcoats do. Lena and I will set up a distraction to get their attention to buy you some extra time.”

“We will?” Lena asked.

“Yes,” Grund said and turned to the woman. “Down on the third floor, that old Grandfather in Workshop three-A, go turn it on and bar the door. They’ll sense it, but that door is almost as strong as the vault, and they’ll assume something is going on in there, and it’ll take time to get in.”

“Never thought Jord’s stupid safety door would prove useful,” Lena said, but she took a deep breath and pushed off from where she leaned against the wall. “And you?”

“I’m going to do the same up on the seventh,” Grund said. “Between those two clocks, the Tailcoats will be in enough of a tizzy they won’t even notice Tel inside the vault.”

“Good plan,” Lena said and came over to put her hand on Tel’s shoulder. A squeeze, a nod, and then she turned and jogged down the hall back towards the staircase.

“Nobody says tizzy anymore,” Tel said quietly. “And I shouldn’t leave you.”

“Tel,” Grund said, turning Tel and pulling him along the hall towards the vault. “You have to survive. You have to.”

“Why?” Tel asked, letting Grund lead him along.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Three reasons, Tel, one of them being simple math. You’re young still. The rest of us, we’ve lived good, long lives. None of us have more than a few years left ahead of us, even in the best of circumstances. You though, you’ve hardly scratched the surface.

“Two, I know about your ‘secret’ project and what brought you to us in the first place,” Grund said, and that stopped Tel in his tracks.

“You…do?” he asked.

“Yes, and I want you to complete it,” Grund said, gently pulling on Tel’s arm until he was moving again. “I know you didn’t find the parts you were looking for in our vault, but I think the enclave in Bastion might have them.”

Tel’s head snapped in Grund’s direction. Did the man really know what Tel was working on? No, he couldn’t know. Tel had carefully let hints slip he was working on something, the people in the enclave were too smart not to notice, and he needed the parts, but even they wouldn’t be so understanding if they knew the whole truth. Still, a real lead on rare parts? Bastion…

“And the third reason is what I told you before,” Grund said, getting to an intersection in the hall. Right would lead to stairs up to the seventh floor, while left would lead to the catwalk over the main lobby and straight to the vault. “You need to save what you can from the vault and get out of here. Anything you can rescue from the Tailcoats’ hands is a small victory for us.

“Can you do it, Tel? Can you survive for us?” Grund asked, looking Tel straight in the eye.

“I…” Tel started, but something heavy crashed down below them, the weight of it sending a vibration through the whole mountain complex.

“We’re out of time, Tel. That was the door. Go, take what you can carry from the vault and trade it to the enclave in Bastion for the parts you need. Then, maybe get outside and see the sun a bit. You’re pale, boy,” Grund said with a forced smile and stared at Tel’s face like he was memorizing it.

Tel nodded as a new sound echoed through the bowels of the enclave – screams. The Tailcoats were inside, and they were doing what they did best.

Without another word, Tel and Grund turned from each other and jogged in opposite directions. Grund’s plan would buy Tel time, Lena should be down to the workshop on the third floor already, but the Tailcoats were exceptionally adept at what they did. If they caught sight of him, or where he was going, a Tailcoat in the Trance wouldn’t take long to catch him.

Could one jump the six stories from the lobby floor to the catwalk leading to the vault? Actually, had anybody ever measured the Trance’s limits?

Tel actually chuckled as he rounded the next corner; of course nobody had measured anything. Maybe if he survived long enough to…

Another scream cut off that line of thinking with sobering severity. Surviving was what he needed to focus on, so he slowed his jog, already out of breath, and crept up to the edge of the catwalk. Simple in its design, the metal catwalk extended the fifty feet across the main lobby, and the entrance, of the mountain enclave. A handrail was the only guide on each side, Tel had often complained it was a falling hazard, or at least a dropping-things-off-the-side-and-onto-people-in-the-lobby hazard, but they’ve never changed it. And now, anybody looking up from the lobby would clearly see him if he wasn’t careful.

Crouching down, Tel peeked around the wall where the catwalk met the hallway, and down into the lobby below, bile immediately rising in his throat. Bodies lay strewn across the stone floor, wide pools of red spreading and connecting to each other so that the entire floor looked like a lake of blood with the corpses of his colleagues floating in it.

Faces he recognized, people he knew, stared lifelessly up at him. Gil, the enclave’s cook who couldn’t even boil water properly, lay in two pieces right in front of the door. Behind him and to the left, Hally, grandmotherly and deaf as a stone, leaned up against the wall like she’d fallen asleep, other than the spreading stain of crimson underneath her. Bernadot and her brother Bernie had fallen hand in hand in the center of the lobby, Caley and Vilolily not far from them. Body after body, person after person, lost life after lost life, spread across the floor. And where Tel could see their faces, their dead eyes bored into him, accusing him for following Grund’s suggestion he should live while they die.

He started to count the corpses, but immediately stopped before one of the Tailcoats sensed the minor creation or Order, and in turn chaos. He had to…block it out, somehow, and just move on.

“The vault, get to the vault,” he whispered to himself and forced his head to turn away from the carnage below. There, just past the catwalk, was the heavy door, sitting slightly open. All he had to do was get in and pull it closed behind him, and even the Tailcoats’ swords would take an hour to get through.

Getting down to his hands and knees, Tel fought the urge to look over the side again, and started crawling across the middle of the catwalk. If he kept low, there was no way anybody below would have the angle to see him. He just had to keep quiet, and not drop anything over the side – stupid railing hazards – and he was home free.

A groan from somewhere below him, followed by a chuckle and a strangled cry, and Tel’s body grew wooden and slow. Fear. Fear like he hadn’t felt since he’d spent his days hiding in the corner of the old barn at the orphanage. Hiding. Hoping. Wishing they wouldn’t find him.

But they always did.

The door in his mind cracked open, children’s hands reaching around the frame and their mocking laughter echoing out to set his whole body shaking. Just like that, he was back there, fingers wrapping through his hair and dragging him out of the safety of his hiding spot. Pulling him through the dust while the heels of his feet kicked against the old floorboards, the dull thudding of his struggle ignored by the bigger boys.

Outside, the bright sun overhead stung his eyes, but they didn’t stop hauling him away until they got him to their favorite spot. The old oak tree with the rope hanging from the branch and a too-short stool below loomed tall and menacing to Tel’s eyes as tears ran down his cheeks.

He’d tried pleading. Begging. Offering every little thing he owned, as worthless as it all was. It’d never worked. All they wanted from him was his suffering. All they wanted was for him to…

“Aaaaaargh,” another scream followed by another chuckle, and Tel was back on the catwalk.

His breath caught in his throat, and he brought his hand to his neck, the old scars burning underneath the scarf he wore. Tears pooled on the metal catwalk where they’d fallen from his eyes, but Tel forced the door to his memories closed again, leaning on it until the children’s laughter stopped.

Chest heaving, he forced his hand away from his throat, the burning there all in his head, and pulled himself forward. Then again. And again. The past couldn’t hurt him, but the Tailcoats sure could if they found him. All he had to do was get to…

THUNK, the catwalk vibrated gently behind him, and Tel slowly craned his neck around, each inch of movement coming like his head was on worn gears.

“What have we here?” a voice said, and Tel finally turned his head far enough to see the perfectly-pressed black tuxedo, crisp white shirt and cummerbund, top hat, and – most importantly – the unnaturally thin sword pointed right at him.

Well, that answered one question – a Tailcoat could most certainly jump six stories.