Chapter 7 · Into the Stolen Thirteen

The platform beneath Nacre City had no clock.

That was the first thing Eve noticed.

Every station in the city wore one—brass-faced, pendulum-driven, jeweled with the Assembly’s blue seal. Even the abandoned platforms kept dead clocks bolted above their arches, their hands frozen at the hour the city had stopped caring. But Platform Thirteen had nothing except a black iron arch and a strip of wet stone shining under the gas lamps.

No clock. No timetable. No sign that a train had ever passed through.

Sora Bell stood beneath the arch with one hand pressed to her bleeding temple. Her clerk’s coat was torn at the shoulder, and ink-black contract ash clung to her sleeves. She kept glancing up the tunnel as though expecting the walls to grow teeth.

“It comes at midnight,” she whispered.

Eve looked at the brass watch chained inside her coat. The minute hand trembled over eleven fifty-nine.

“Everything comes at midnight,” Kieran said.

He was leaning against a pillar, one hand braced over the bandage at his ribs. Blood had soaked through the linen again.