REN WAS RIGHT.

The research they'd salvaged from the warehouse amounted to little more than a high-level overview of the theory and some potential starting points. When Ren had said he'd have to figure it out for himself, she might as well have said rediscover the entire thing.

Mori sat cross-legged in front of a pile of gears. The floor was strewn with half-assembled timepieces, tools and cogs, so it was easy to forage for parts. Mori had been disassembling timepieces for the last half an hour, hoping the repetitive work would coax an answer from his mind.

"So, uh..." Mori said, unscrewing a top plate from one of the broken watches. "Who's Bashko?"

Argent glanced over at him. He'd elected to stay in the Tower of Storms with Mori, which surprised him. He'd been so used to Ren giving him tasks and disappearing shortly after.

"He was the old clockmaker of Dysis," Argent said. "My master."

Mori nodded; he'd suspected as much. "What happened to him?"

"He died." Argent spoke with complete disaffect, absently spinning a golden timepiece on the desk. "Here in this tower, as a matter of fact."

"Oh," Mori said. Maybe I shouldn't have asked. He glanced up at Argent. His attention was focused on the timepiece, a look of indifference on his face. It didn't look like the fact affected him, or perhaps it had been long enough ago that he'd gotten over it. "Is that why you don't come up here?"

A wry smile tugged at Argent's mouth. "Perhaps. This tower's full of ghosts."

Mori rolled a gear along the floor. "We can head back if you don't want to be in here."

Argent shrugged. "It's okay. It's not too bad with someone else here." He looked up at Mori and grinned. "Besides, I'm very invested in this whole 'building a tower' enterprise."

So Argent stayed in the workshop with him, leaning back in the chair with his feet propped up on the desk. Mori had never worked with company before and worried at first that having someone around him would necessitate casual conversation, when he really just wanted to focus on his work. But Argent seemed preoccupied with the golden timepiece, and quickly Mori zoned him out.

As the night blurred into early morning, and the misty sunrise started creeping across the floorboards, his brain began searching for a distraction. Mori glanced up at the desk Argent was sitting at, only to realise he'd been staring at him.

Mori glanced back down at the gears. "What?"

"Nothing," Argent said, yawning. "I was just thinking about something. How's the condenser going?"

"Well..." Mori sighed. "It'll get done at some point. I think."

Argent smiled a little. "Ren's right, you know. It's too much work for just one person. You'll be building this tower for years."

Mori shrugged. "I don't mind the work," he said. "If anything, it's better this way — having something to work for. I couldn't stand hanging around here with nothing to do."

"It's really not that bad," Argent said, with a wry grin. "I've been doing it for years, so I speak from experience."

"I don't know. I —" Mori wrapped his arms around his knees. "My parents — they died when I was a kid. I spent most of my time just wandering around Arkos for years, no idea what I was doing except for finding a place to eat and sleep. If Ren hadn't found me, I would probably be still doing that today. So I guess...when I don't have anything to do, it makes me feel like I'm back there, on my own in the streets."

Mori realised what he was saying and broke off, looking down at his hands. He'd never spoken these thoughts out loud before, never spoken about himself for this long. He knew Argent wouldn't be interested in this.

Scrambling for something to change the subject, Mori pointed at the timepiece Argent had been studying. "What's that?"

"What, this?" Argent said. "It's a horologion — a model of the grand system." He eased off his chair and set it down on the ground in front of Mori. "I've just managed to get it working. Look."

He twisted the outer rim of the watch. Mori watched in fascination as an intricate, multi-layered system of gears, cogs and jewels unfolded from clock face. Overlapping wheels and dials, supported by narrow poles, extended almost a foot upwards from the watch face.

"The gears in the Tower of Clouds form only a part of the whole system," Argent explained. He gestured to the lowermost section of the model, at a cluster of tiny iron gears. Mori leaned forward to examine it. The structure of the system was indeed broadly similar to how he remembered it on Arkos.

"Interesting," he said.

Argent nodded. "You can see the configuration on Dysis, is slightly different." He moved his finger up to the section above, made from a slightly shinier grey metal. "Same for Hesperis, and all the way up the system. It's the reason your timepieces won't work on different worlds — the clock towers are all different, so the mechanisms don't line up."

Considering the state he'd left the clock tower in, Argent had a surprisingly methodical way of explaining things. He took Mori through the tower's specifications, then disassembled and reassembled a timepiece he had in his pocket to show Mori how they were put together. Mori listened with the pencil pressed against his mouth. He'd been nervous about asking questions at first, but Argent didn't seem to mind it, and gradually Mori grew more confident to ask all the questions he'd had about the system, the ones Ren had never been around to answer.

A weight loosened from his chest as he talked, as if holding them to himself for so long had started to drag him down. Mori didn't know what to think. He couldn't understand how Argent could steal that man's memories so callously, and not be affected by it at all. The experience left an awful taste in his mouth, a lingering unease whenever he was around.

But Mori had never had a chance to learn like this. Everything he knew about the tower he'd had to find out himself. It felt good to finally have someone to voice his uncertainties to instead of suppress them and blindly hope for the best. Even now, while Ren was out, he'd chosen to stay here with Mori, to listen to what he had to say. He knew Argent didn't have much else to do, but after a year of avoiding people, it was nice to have someone to talk to.

"What's this world?" Mori pointed at a section in the middle of the model that had been bothering him for some time. Unlike the others, which rotated at varying speeds along the length of the tower, the fourth section stood almost still. The silvery gears seemed dull in the light, and the white jewel at its centre had cracked along its centre.

"Noticed it as well, have you?" Argent said. "This is Elete. Something seems off about it, but I can't figure out what from this alone." He curled a finger against his chin. "Come to think of it, I haven't heard from Iver in a long time. But he was quite a withdrawn person, from what I remember, so perhaps that's to be expected..."

Mori looked at him with a frown. "You sound like you know them well."

"Hm? What do you mean?"

"The other clockmakers," Mori explained. "You said we couldn't move between worlds. But you talk like you've met them before."

Argent leaned back against the wall and clasped his fingers together. "We did meet, once. A couple of years ago." He looked at Mori. "But you're right, it shouldn't have happened. We called it the cataclysm — a distortion in the system, letting in unstable energy from the void. For about a month, anyone who entered the clock towers, regardless of which world they were on, ended up trapped in some kind of empty space between the planes."

Mori winced. "How long were you there for?"

"I was there for a couple of weeks. I think Terza was trapped for about a month. But once Ren and Suria were down there together, they managed to work together and reverse it within a few days." He shook his head. "The way they did it was something else. Even the long-running clockmakers couldn't make sense of it."

He stared at the gears on the floor for a while, apparently deep in thought. "I don't suppose Ren mentioned anything about it in that notebook?"

Mori shook his head. "It was only about Arkos," he said. "Why, do you think she has something to do with it?"

"Given how close she is with the traveller, and how much work she's been doing on the system..." Argent curled a finger against his lips. "I'd be surprised if she didn't know something." He let out a gentle laugh. "Not that it matters, of course. Even if she did, she wouldn't tell me. I suppose I'll have to figure something out."

"I could ask her for you, if you'd like," Mori said.

Argent looked up. "It would certainly be nice if you could," he said. "Although I wouldn't get your hopes up too much."