his shoulder and follows Dorian.
As they reach the Heart the cause of the clanking sound is clear: The clockwork universe has collapsed, its pendulum swinging freely and tangling around large loops of metal, something above futilely attempting to move them and they rise and fall at irregular intervals, hammering against the floor, smashing already cracked tiles into dust. The golden hands are intact but one now tilts toward the cracking tile below and the other points accusingly at the pile of rock where the door to the elevator used to be.
The shouting grows louder, coming from the Keeper’s office. Dorian stares up at the collapsing clockwork and Zachary realizes Dorian never got to see the Heart the way it was and everything unfolding around them feels acutely unfair and upsetting and for a moment—just a moment—he wishes they had never come here.
The Keeper’s voice is the first one that becomes distinguishable.
“I did not allow anything,” he says—no, yells—at someone Zachary cannot see. “I understand—”
“You don’t understand,” a voice interrupts and Zachary recognizes it more because Dorian freezes beside him than he actually recalls what Allegra sounds like. “I understand because I have seen where this will lead and I will not let it happen,” Allegra says and then she appears in the office doorway in her fur coat, facing them with her red lipstick twisted into a grimace. The Keeper follows her, his robes covered in dust.
“I see you are still alive, Mister Rawlins,” Allegra remarks calmly, casually, as though she were not yelling a moment before, as though they are not standing amongst broken, clanking metal and fluttering pages liberated from their bindings. “I know someone who would be pleased about that.”
“What?” Zachary says even though he means who and the question is muffled by the din behind him and Allegra doesn’t answer.
For a second her eyes flick back and forth between him and Dorian, the one blue eye brighter than Zachary remembered, and he has an impression of being looked at, being truly seen for the first time, and then it is gone.
“You don’t even know,” she says and Zachary cannot tell if she’s speaking to him or to Dorian. “You have no idea why you’re here.” Or both, Zachary thinks, as she turns her attention squarely on Dorian. “You and I have unfinished business.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Dorian tells her. The universe punctuates his statement with a clanging thud on the tiled floor.
“What makes you think I want to talk?” Allegra asks. She walks toward Dorian and only when they are almost face-to-face does Zachary see the gun in her hand, partially obscured by the fur cuff of her coat.
The Keeper reacts before Zachary can process what’s happening. He grabs Allegra’s wrist and pulls her arm back, taking the revolver from her hand but not before she pulls the trigger. The bullet travels upward instead of where it had been aimed, directly at Dorian’s heart.
The shot ricochets off one of the golden hands hanging above them, sending it swinging, twisting backward, and smashing into the gears.
The bullet comes to rest in the tiled wall, in the center of a mural that was once a depiction of a prison cell with a girl on one side of the bars and a pirate on the other but it has cracked and faded and the damage added by the small piece of metal is indistinguishable from the damage done by time.
Above, the mechanism swinging the planets strikes down again and this time the tiled floor succumbs to its pressure, cracking the stone below the tiles in a fissure that opens not into another book-filled hall as Zachary expects but into a cave, a gaping cavern of rock that stretches farther down, much, much farther down into shadows and darkness.
You forget that we are underground, the voice in his head remarks. You forget what that means, it continues and Zachary is no longer certain the voice is in his head after all.
The pendulum breaks free from the tangled metal and plummets.
Zachary listens for it to hit the bottom, remembering Mirabel’s champagne bottle, but hears nothing.
The fissure moves from crack to rift to chasm quickly, pulling stone and tiles and planets and broken chandeliers and books with it, approaching the spot where they stand like a wave.
Zachary takes a step back, into the office doorway. The Keeper puts a hand on his arm to steady him and it feels like everything that follows happens slowly though in