hk47-b4r2 (@hk47b4r2)

Chapter 2 (c) Perhaps anyone standing in the right place at the right fraction of a second could fall between the ticks. The idea lasted less than a minute. Daniel rejected it. If that were true, there should be other people moving. There were not He was alone. He continued walking until he reached the clock tower again. The pendulum was slowing. That frightened him more than anything else. It had been swinging when he first found it, but now each arc was shorter than the last. The great brass mechanism above him was losing motion as the rest of the world did. Daniel approached the pendulum and placed his hand against it. The metal felt warm. For a moment nothing happened Then Daniel felt a faint vibration beneath his palm. The same strange almost-tick he had heard from the clock in his kitchen. He closed his eyes. Something clicked inside the tower. The pendulum stopped. The world stopped with it. Daniel opened his eyes. The difference was immediate. There was no rain falling anymore, but there was no sensation of suspended motion either. Everything had become perfectly, absolutely still. Daniel took his hand away from the pendulum. The silence was enormous. He stood there for several minutes, listening to nothing. Then he looked up at the clock. The hands were no longer displaying a time. The hour hand was between numbers. The minute hand was between marks. The second hand was somewhere that no clockmaker had ever intended it to be. Daniel reached up and gently touched the face of the clock. The glass was warm beneath his fingers. A thought came to him, so simple that it frightened him with its implications. Perhaps he had been thinking about clocks all wrong. A clock did not measure time. A clock divided reality into moments. The tick was not the passage of time. The tick was the boundary between one state of existence and the next. And somehow, Daniel had found the place where the boundary itself existed. He looked at the motionless city outside the tower. For the first time, he understood that he had not been trapped between ticks by accident. Something about him belonged there. He just had no idea what. Then the second hand of the clock moved. Only once. A tiny fraction. Daniel watched it carefully. The rest of the world remained still. The hand moved again. Daniel felt a smile begin to form. The clock was moving because he was touching it. He had discovered the first rule. Now he needed to find the others. Chapter 3 next - maybe?