Lune Ashenveil had spent three days in the library searching for one word about the Tictocs, and had found nothing. She sat at a reading table on the fourth floor, surrounded by open books that told her only what she already knew. A brass gear on her sleeve caught the lamplight. She had stitched it there last winter, along with all the others she'd found while chasing ticking sounds through ruins and market alleys. None of the books explained where the gears came from. None explained why the ticking calmed her when nothing else did. She was about to close another useless volume when she heard it. Tick. Tick. Tic-toc. Faint, from somewhere below the floor. Her hand stilled on the page. The sound was steady, patient, waiting for her to notice. "You look like you've found a ghost." The assistant archivist, Mira Bellflower, set a stack of returns on the table. Her glasses were crooked. A pencil was stuck in her bun. She had been kind to Lune all week, fetching texts nobody had asked for in a century. "Or a nap. Both are allowed, technically." "Do you hear that?" Lune asked. Mira tilted her head. "Hear what?" Lune stood. The ticking pulled her toward the west wall, where a shelf of astronomy volumes met the floor at an odd angle. She ran her fingers along the wood until she felt a seam. A latch. The shelf swung inward on silent hinges. Mira dropped her pencil. "That is definitely not on the map." Stone steps spiraled down into black. Lune took them without waiting. The ticking grew louder with each turn. After a while an amber glow began to warm the walls. She rounded the last curve and stopped. A tree stood in the center of a domed chamber. Its trunk was polished wood banded with brass. Its leaves were tiny panes of glass, each one lit from within. Gears turned slowly where branches met the trunk. Fruit-shaped lamps hung from the boughs and dropped soft golden light onto the flagstones. The whole tree ticked, thousands of small movements keeping one enormous rhythm. At its base sat a small figure. Round head. Blue-glass eyes. A body of gears and springs that clicked as it lifted its face to her. A Tictoc. A living one. Boots scraped the stairs behind her. A man stepped into the amber light, older, grey at the temples, dressed like a scholar who had walked a long way to get here. "So you found it," Elian Voss said. He did not sound surprised. He sounded relieved. "I have been waiting seventeen years for someone the tree would wake for." The small Tictoc stood up. It walked to Lune and touched her coat, right where the first brass gear was stitched. The gear on her sleeve began, softly, to turn.

The gear on Lune's sleeve turned once, then again, matching the slow rhythm of the tree above her. She held her breath. The small Tictoc at her side tilted its round head, blue-glass eyes catching the amber light. Behind her, Elian Voss stayed on the last stair, watching without moving, as if any sound from him might break something fragile. The tree brightened. Its glass leaves shifted from gold to a warmer amber, and the ticking in the chamber softened, one layer at a time, until only a single steady beat remained. Lune felt it under her ribs. It matched her pulse. The Tictoc stepped closer. Its little hands clicked open. In its palms sat a seed the size of a walnut, dark bronze on the outside, glowing amber through fine cracks in its shell. The Tictoc lifted the seed toward her. Lune knelt. She cupped her gloved hands and let the Tictoc place the seed in them. The warmth traveled up her wrists and into her chest. Nothing she had ever carried had felt like this. Not the gears she had stitched onto her coat. Not the ticking she had chased for years. This was the sound she had been walking toward. "Steady," Voss said quietly. "Just hold it." The seed pulsed. A hairline root pushed through the shell and curled around her thumb. A green stem rose from the top, then a second, then a ring of pale lavender petals unfolded like a slow breath. Brass filigree crept up the stem as it grew, wrapping the leaves in tiny gears that ticked in time with the tree. At the center of the flower, a small glass bulb bloomed and lit with a soft amber glow. Lune stared at the light in her hands. The chamber was silent now. Even the Tictoc had stopped clicking. "Seventeen years," Voss said. His voice was steady, but his hands were not. "The tree has never given anything to anyone. Not once." Lune looked at him for the first time since he had come down the stairs. "What is it?" "A compass, I think. Or a key. I only know what the old notes call it." He came down the last step. "They called it a bloom that points the way home." Lune turned the flower slowly. The bulb dimmed on one side and brightened on the other, then held steady when its light faced the far wall of the chamber. Not up toward the library. Down. Through the stone, into somewhere deeper. The small Tictoc walked to the wall and pressed a hand flat against it. A seam of amber light traced itself across the flagstones and ended at a low arch she had not seen before. Lune stood. The flower warmed in her grip. The ticking she had followed her whole life had a direction now, and the direction went further down.