Chapter 3:12 the Timekeeper’s Keep

"Don't touch anything. You can't stay here." Ada says as she uses her shirt to clean her glasses. She's the keeper of the clocktower.

Inside is like being inside of a giant clock. Gears spinning and grinding. Different levers, buttons and spin-wheels that must constantly be maintained. However things are awry. Something is wrong.

Pendulums swing erratically. The arms of the clock on the wall spin out of control. Cuckoo clocks squawk randomly. Alarms constantly ring and Ada has to turn them off.

A spring shoots out of the wall. She hits it with a wrench. "Why. Won't. You. Work?!!"

Some hours and minutes fall out.

"Hand me those minutes." she tells Theo and he hands them back to her.

Mr. Bear touches a lever and gears crunch on the wall.

"And quit grinding my gears!" she shouts.

Mr. Bear jumps and runs to Maise.

"Thank you for helping us, Mr. Bear." Maise says, patting him and he smiles.

The clock tower is only a small piece of a gigantic mechanism. The gears and rods, trillions of them, go all the way down, stretching to the center of the planet, keeping it spinning.

"I don't care anymore." Ada says. "I don't know how this thing works." She plomps down on a chair. She was only here to visit her grandfather Enoch— not actually run time. Enoch's the real timekeeper. The one who built the thing. The only person who really knows how it works.

The locals called him Grandfather Time. When he was forgotten, time broke and now it's always just— now.

Whenever Ada gets frustrated she hits things. Enoch could always calm her down.

"Hey. You made a mistake. That's ok. Now try it again."

Now she feels like she's letting him down. The more she tries to fix things the worse they get. She doesn't want to do this anymore. She wants to be a normal teenager. She went to the inventor for ideas on how to fix it but he couldn't get any new ideas since his idea machine was broken.

"I wonder how he got the idea for an idea machine?" she wondered. She didn't ask.

When Oliver showed her Theo's watch she stared in amazement as it ticked in perfect rhythm.

"How?" she asks.

"I don't know." Oliver shrugs.

"Me and my sister need to get home." Theo says. "Can you help us?"

"The only person who would know is Enoch, but he's probably locked in a dungeon somewhere. If he's even still alive at all." she sighs.

"The dungeon of the old castle?" Oliver asks.

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Where the river meets the mountain there's a cave that they say leads down to the moat of the old castle."

"Yea right." Ada laughs.

"If it will help us get home we have to try." Theo says.

"What if we could get him back?" Oliver asks her. "What if we could get them all back?"