Free Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times by Emma Trevayne

children, but they hadn’t loved her, and so Lorcan, who Jack had known asMr. Havelock, had come to steal Jack away. Jack pressed his hands to his eyes.
    Dr. Snailwater pushed himself slowly from his chair, gathering cups, hanging their handles from his strange fingers. “If Lorcan could get to this London of yours, there’s a way back through. Off to sleep with you, and tomorrow we’ll find it.”
    •  •  •
    “Why, though?” Jack asked the following morning. Dr. Snailwater looked at him over the top of an oozing boiled egg. “Why must I go home?”
    The doctor considered this. “Your mother and father will be missing you, surely?”
    Jack was not entirely convinced. “It’s interesting here. London is boring, and I want to learn about all the clockwork and things. I’m good with that sort of stuff.”
    The egg sucked gloopily at the spoon. It wobbled as the doctor raised it to his mouth. “Interesting comes at a price, dear boy. You cannot fathom what you are asking.”
    “Then tell me,” said Jack in a tone that would have earned him a hiding from Mrs. Pond, but got only a raised, bushy eyebrow from Dr. Snailwater.
    “The glory of the Empire of Clouds,” he said, almost to himself. “Look around you, lad. Do you want to end up as one of us?” He raised his metal hand. “Lives lost,sickness, for the privilege of industry. I must put new lungs into infants before they might draw their first breath. Give them eyes so they can see.”
    Better than a wig and a robe , thought Jack, or an office among stacks of paper, choking with dust and sums. But he did not say so. Something told him Dr. Snailwater wouldn’t agree.
    “There is no hope in Londinium, nor in all of the Empire. Even the fanciful comforts people once invented to give them solace have been forgotten, not that it ever existed at all. It is not safe for you here. You are as much of a curiosity to us as our faeries and clockwork birds must be to you. And if Sir Lorcan discovers that you followed him, well, I should say that’s a thing we don’t want to happen.”
    “I’ll be careful,” said Jack, thinking of the motorcars turning sharp corners, the evil-looking machine in the room below that would bite off a finger without hesitation.
    “If only it were that simple—”
    “If only what were that simple?” Beth asked, skipping into the room.
    “Now, dear, we’ve talked about interrupting. Your friend here wishes to stay.”
    Beth turned her strange, seeing glass eyes to Jack. “Oh, yes!”
    “No.” The doctor’s voice was firm. “I’ve things to see to. Go amuse yourselves, the pair of you, and leave the crystal ball alone.”
    Jack still hadn’t told either of them about the thing inside the ball that made it break. It felt like his alone, somehow, if indeed he hadn’t imagined it entirely. And in any case, it made him feel better to have a secret, certain as he was that Dr. Snailwater and Beth were still not telling him everything.
    Beth showed him how to direct the tiny people on and off the train and to control the engine by means of an odd box with buttons that glowed when pressed. Together they made it stop at every bookshelf, alongside one of the bars of the chandelier, and trapped it in a tunnel set into the wall until they heard tiny, tinny screams from within.
    They could not make him leave.
    The bird in the ball was not Jack’s only secret. For he had told Beth and Dr. Snailwater of following Lorcan through the door, but not precisely how he had come to do so. Not that the man had waited, eyes hidden behind his dark spectacles, for the clock in its famous tower to chime precisely twelve o’clock. That it might be just as simple to get home again.
    Another clock, cloaked in a bell of pink glass, stoodon the mantel. Jack waited, pushed buttons with Beth, watched the little people with their satchels and shopping dart around thick, leather-bound tomes that would surely crush them if they were to tip over. The