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said, echoing Agent Meeks.
    "Oh, it's a she, all right. Under all those shiny parts is a heart of caged tears."
    "We didn't make this world, Addie. It don't play fair. But that don't mean we have to lie down," Josephine said.
    Colleen put the Enigma Apparatus in my hands, and a rush of excitement come over me when I felt all that cold metal. "Can you fix her?" she asked.
    I clicked a small piece into place. Something shifted inside me. "Ma'am, I'm sure gonna try."
    Colleen clapped a hand on my shoulder — they all did — and it might as well have been a brand. I'd just become one of the Glory Girls. When night come, I rolled up a tiny note, tucked it into the beak of a mechanical pigeon, and sent it back to the chief to let him know I were in.
     
    Master Crawford taught me about getting inside the clockworks, that you have to shut out the distractions till it's just you and the gears and you can hear the smooth click and tick like a baby's first breath. You can give lovers their moonrises off the Argonaut Peninsula or the wonder of a seeding ship with its silos pumping steam into the clouds, bringing on rain. To me, ain't nothing more beautiful than the order of parts. It's a world you can make run right.
    "There's some speculators what say time is as much an illusion as the Promised Land," Master Crawford told me once, when we was working, "and that if you want to find God, you must master time. Manipulate it. Get rid of the days and minutes, the measurements of our eventual end."
    I didn't quite cotton to what Master Crawford were saying. But that weren't unusual. "Well, sir, I wouldn't let the Right Reverend Jackson hear you talk like that."
    "The Right Reverend Jackson don't listen to me, so I reckon I'm safe." He winked, and in the magnifying glass, his eye was huge. "I saw it in a vision when they dipped me into the Pitch. I hadn't even whiskers and already I knew time was but another frontier to conquer. There'll come a messenger to deliver us, to impress upon us that our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite."
    "If'n you say so, sir. But I don't see what that has to do with Widow Jenkins's cuckoo clock."
    He patted my shoulder like a grandpappy might. "Quite right, Miss Addie. Quite right. Now. See if you can find an instrument with the slanted tip——"
    We got to working again, but Master Crawford's words had set my mind a-whirring with strange new thoughts. What if there were a way to best time, to crawl inside the ticks and tocks of it and press against it with both hands, stretching out the measures? Could you slide backward and forward, undo a day that had already been, or see what was comin' around the blind curve of the future? What if there weren't nothing ahead, nothing but a darkness as thick and forever seeming as your time under the Pitch? What if there weren't no One God at all and a body were only owing to herself, and none of it— the catechisms, the baptisms, the rules to keep you safe — none of it meant a dadburned thing? That set me a-shiver, and I made myself say my prayers of confession and absolution silently, to remind myself that there were a One God with a plan for me and the infinite, a One God who held time in His hands, and it weren't for the likes of me to know. I prayed myself into a kind of believing again and promised myself I wouldn't think more on such thoughts. Instead, I concentrated on the fit of gears. The bird pushed through the doors of the Widow Jenkins's clock and give us a cuckoo.
    Master Crawford beamed. "You're a right good watchmaker, Miss Addie. Better than I were at your age. The pupil will best the master soon enough, I reckon," he said, and I felt a sense of pride, though I knew that were a sin.
    The night Mam took sick, Master Crawford let me harness up his horse to ride for the doctor. Our two moons shone as bright as a bridegroom's pearled buttons. The wind come up cold, slapping my cheeks to chapped red squares by