CyKid and the Time Machine

CyKid stood on a stool in Grandfather's workshop, trying to count twelve chimes without yawning. The tall clock struck its last note. He opened his mouth to say good night.

Another note rang out. It was so deep that a teaspoon walked off the workbench.

“Thirteen,” he said.

At the other end of the room, CyLuna caught a brass wheel rolling out from under the tall clock. Around its edge were little windows for the days of the month. Every window held a number except one. Its edges were bright, as if someone had pulled a piece out recently.

Grandfather had gone up to the weather station before supper. He had asked them to leave the clocks alone until he returned. At the time, this had seemed an easy thing to promise.

CyDog put his nose to the outside door and whined. Across the river, the bakery bell was ringing. CyKid could hear it more clearly than usual.

They stepped out into the night. The lamps beside the river were burning, and the baker's upstairs window shone across the water. But the bridge that should have stood between the two banks was gone.

CyDog ran to the stone steps. His feet stopped at the very edge. He looked back at CyLuna, stepped forward once more, and barked at the water. Yesterday he had trotted across those steps to beg for a piece of crust.

A woman walking home from the bakery passed them with a ferry ticket in her glove. “Last boat's gone,” she said. “There's another at dawn.”

“What happened to the bridge?” CyKid asked.

She looked puzzled. “There has never been a bridge here.”

CyLuna knelt at the top step. The stone still had a shallow dent where a gatepost once fitted. She could put her finger in it. The woman remembered a ferry. CyLuna remembered a gate. The dent was the first thing that seemed to remember both.

Back in the workshop, CyBot swept a beam over the brass wheel. A second wheel, almost identical, was carved into the floor beneath the rug. When CyKid fitted the loose wheel into the carving, the rug lifted at one corner.

Under it was a hatch with two handles. CyKid and CyLuna pulled together. The hatch rose, and warm air smelling of oil and rain came up between them.

On a platform below stood a brass machine with two red seats, a tall clock dial, and a pair of rails like the runners of a sled. CyUni leaned over the opening. Her horn lit a row of small glass cups around the dial. There were thirteen.

CyBot projected the dates from the wheel onto a wall. One square stayed dark.

“Look at the floor,” CyLuna said. Grandfather had worn a deep path between the steps and the machine. He had been down here many times. The path also went the other way.

CyLuna found a little paper ticket caught beneath the hatch hinge. It was for the old river ferry. On the front was a date from a hundred years ago, the same date that should have been in the empty window of the wheel.

On the back, someone had drawn a bridge with three arches. Beneath the drawing was tomorrow's date, in handwriting that looked like her own.

CyKid held the ticket by the corners. “Which date do we believe?”

“Both, until we find out why they're there.”

In the notebook beside the machine, Grandfather had left a diagram of the thirteen cups. An arrow pointed toward the last cup, where he had written: RETURN BEFORE THE FINAL STROKE. Underneath, in smaller writing: A DATE NEEDS A WITNESS. BRING SOMETHING THAT WAS THERE.

The ticket fitted the outline beside the dial. It did not fit all the way in. CyLuna tucked it into her coat and promised to keep it dry.

CyKid wanted to jump in and turn every handle at once. CyLuna asked him to read the notebook out loud while she checked what each handle actually did.

The seat belts latched with two satisfying clicks. CyBot folded himself into the footwell. CyDog curled under CyLuna's seat, and CyUni stepped onto the platform beside them. A guard rail rose around them all.

CyKid set the dial to the date on the front of the ticket. The first glass cup went dark before he touched the lever.

“We've already started spending time,” CyLuna said.

Outside, a ferry oar hit the water with a hollow knock. Then the same knock came a second time, much farther away. The workbench stretched into a golden line. The workshop walls vanished, and beyond the wheels of the machine CyKid saw a grassy riverbank rushing up to meet them.

They landed in a boatyard that smelled of pine shavings. A man was singing inside an upside-down boat. A horse shook water from its mane. On the opposite bank, where the bakery should have been, a field of yellow flowers ran all the way down to the river.

CyBot checked the dial. Twelve cups were still lit. As they watched, one flickered, then steadied.

They rolled the machine into a disused boat shed and covered it with a canvas. It had left two bright tracks in the grass. CyUni brushed them away with her tail, which would have worked perfectly if her tail had not left its own trail of glitter.

CyKid had expected the past to look faded, like an old photograph. It was louder and greener than home. It was also full of people who had no idea that their choices would matter to a child standing here a hundred years later.

A crowd had gathered beneath the red clock tower. In the middle stood the town engineer, Ada Vale, with a long roll of paper. She unrolled it across a table and weighted the corners with stones.

A bridge appeared on the paper. Three arches. Stone steps. A gatepost that would fit the dent CyLuna had touched.

CyKid was about to call out that he knew the bridge. CyLuna pulled him behind a cart. The plan was familiar, but the little red mark on the riverbank was in a different place from the gate he remembered.

Ada explained that the road to the hospital took forty minutes by ferry on a rough day. The new bridge would cut it to five. The crowd cheered. Only one boy near the table kept looking at the red mark. When Ada turned to answer a question, he slid one of the weights aside.

The boy rolled the plans and tucked them under his arm. He slipped between a cart of bread and a man carrying a ladder. By the time Ada turned back, only three corner weights remained.

“That's the day going missing,” CyKid said. “We stop him and the bridge comes back.”

He ran after the boy. CyLuna followed, but she had seen something CyKid had missed. The boy's fingers were shaking. He held the roll against his chest as if he were trying to keep it from getting hurt.

He ducked under an arch and disappeared behind the market. CyKid found a muddy cap hanging on a nail and thought he had caught him. Then he saw six other muddy caps hanging beside it.

CyDog sniffed the pavement. A trail of white flour ran between the cobblestones. It ended at a door marked with a picture of a millstone.

Inside the mill, the boy was sitting behind a row of sacks. His name, he told them after a long silence, was Tomas. He was Ada's apprentice. He was supposed to keep the tools clean and copy survey figures. He had been the one to draw the little red mark.

CyKid held out his hand. “Give us the plan and we'll help you put it back.”

Tomas hugged it tighter. “I tried telling her the bank had changed. She said we'd look after the meeting. They're taking the stakes out before the meeting is even over.”

CyLuna sat down on a sack. She thought of how quickly they had decided the boy was the problem. “Show us what you saw.”

Tomas glanced toward the door. If they went down to the bank, everyone would know who had taken the plans. He had spent the whole morning trying to avoid exactly that.

Tomas led them along a dry path above the river. From the path, the red stake looked perfectly firm. It was planted in a flat patch of grass, with plenty of ground between it and the water.

“Look underneath,” he said.

From farther downstream they could see a dark hollow under the grass. The river had cut away the soil from below. A narrow shelf of roots was holding up the ground where the red stake stood. CyBot sent a beam into the hollow. A few grains of sand fell out, then a small stone.

CyKid had been ready to put the plans back without changing a single line. Now he pictured a whole bridge resting on that shelf. He could almost hear the first cart crossing.

Tomas had hidden the paper because it was the only thing he knew how to stop. CyLuna began to wonder what else they could stop without stealing anything.

The river bent around the red stake. CyLuna laid one twig in a shallow pool on the inside of the bend. CyKid let a second twig go from a dry ledge on the outer side, using a long stick to place it safely. The first twig turned lazily. The second shot around the bend and out of sight.

They tried again. Tomas drew little arrows in his notebook, longer ones on the side where the water carried the twig faster.

“One twig could get lucky,” CyLuna said. “Two tries are better. Can we see what happens when it rains?”

A drop landed on Tomas's drawing and blurred the longest arrow. Looking upriver, they could see the hills turning grey. They did not need the whole storm to tell them the river was changing, but they did need evidence Ada could see from somewhere safe.

CyBot offered to find out how high the river had risen in earlier years.

Above the archive door, a narrow stair led to a room packed with old maps. The clerk said they could look at anything if they did not unroll it near a candle.

CyBot shone his light over a water-stained map. It showed the river bending differently in Grandfather's great-grandfather's day. CyLuna laid Tomas's sketch over it. The current bank sat inside the old river channel.

CyKid found a small brass line on the window frame. The clerk told him it marked the highest flood the building had seen. They were standing a floor above the street. CyKid turned to the window, imagined water level with his hands, and quietly stepped back.

The clerk lent them a copy of the map. CyLuna wrapped it in cloth. She was starting to collect proof. What she still lacked was a way to make a busy adult stop long enough to look.

They found Ada on the square, checking the count of wagons. Tomas unfolded his sketch. “The water is cutting under the bank, and if we—”

A wagon driver wanted to know where to unload. Another wanted Ada to sign a bill. Someone had brought the wrong length of timber and wanted her to pay for it anyway.

“Leave the sketch with me,” Ada said, without looking up.

Tomas folded it again. CyKid watched him tuck it away and felt something hot rise into his throat. He could have shouted. In another moment he might have. Then he noticed that the boy was looking at the engineer's hands. Ada had been holding three jobs together since dawn. She still had not looked down at the paper.

“We need to make the river come to her,” CyKid said. “Something she can watch happen.”

Rain rattled against the roof of the ferry shelter. On the low landing, a boat tugged at its mooring. CyUni bent her horn toward the water. In its light, CyLuna saw a knot sliding along a wet post.

She called to the ferrymen from the dry path. One man threw a second rope. The other wrapped it around a higher post. They hauled the boat in just as the first knot came free.

A child waiting under the shelter asked whether the boat would take her home. The ferryman shook his head. The river was closing for the night. The girl sat down with her basket and started pulling the handle back and forth between her fingers.

CyKid remembered the forty-minute trip Ada had talked about. With the ferry stopped, it could take all night. The town needed a bridge. The question was where it could build one that would stay.

The rain drove them back to the boat shed. Inside, seven of the machine's glass cups had gone dark. CyKid put his hand on the dial. He could see the line of the rim through the tips of two fingers.

He pulled his hand away. The fingers looked solid again, though the tips stayed cold.

CyBot measured the machine's power. It still had enough to take them home. The trouble was where home would be. If the day failed to settle into the calendar, the machine would follow whichever version of the date the wheel held when they left.

CyLuna took out the ferry ticket. The drawing on the back was fading, arch by arch.

She laid a finger on the last visible arch. “What has to happen today for the bridge to exist tomorrow?”

Tomas knew the answer. The council had agreed to one crossing. Before dusk, Ada needed a new plan and a marker set in the ground.

In the boatyard shelter, the man who had been singing lent them a tray, some sand, and two leftover blocks of wood. Tomas shaped a bend like the one around the red stake. CyKid pushed a block into the sand for a bridge support.

CyLuna poured a little water at the top of the tray. It spread in all directions. The model told them nothing.

They tried again with a deeper channel. This time the water followed the curve, but it ran too quickly because CyKid had propped the tray at an angle. He lowered his end until the water moved at a pace they could watch.

The sand washed away under the outer block. After a while it leaned, then dropped.

CyLuna moved a second block to the straight part of the model river. She gave Tomas the jug. If the test worked again, he could be the one to show it.

They carried the tray into the square under a sailcloth. CyKid set it where the wagon drivers could see. Ada came over to ask what they were building.

“A small version of our river,” CyLuna said. “Will you watch one cup of water?”

Ada put down her tally sheet. Tomas poured. A trickle became a little brown stream. The block at the bend leaned toward the water. The block in the straight section stayed where Tomas had put it.

Ada asked them to run the test again with both blocks buried equally deep. CyKid packed the sand down while CyLuna held the tray level. The outside block fell again.

Ada lifted the fallen block from the tray and turned it in her hands. “You saw something like that on the bank?”

He nodded. This time there was room for him to finish his sentence.

Tomas set the rolled plan on the table. “I took it,” he said. “I thought if nobody could find it, nobody could build there.”

The wagon drivers stopped talking. Ada was quiet for long enough that CyKid began to think she might walk away.

Then she took one of the stones from the tray and placed it on the plan to hold it open. “You were right about the bank. And if I'd lost the measurements, we'd have to start over in the rain. Next time, bring me something I can see.”

“I did bring a sketch,” Tomas said.

Ada looked at the fold in his notebook. “You did. I should have stopped.”

She laid a ruler across a straighter reach of the river. The road would bend a little farther around the mill. She needed to know what lay under the grass before she could move the red mark.

They took the high path to the new crossing. From there the water moved past in broad, even bands. The outer bend was behind them. Ada tapped the ground with a survey rod and heard something firmer than mud.

CyDog started digging beside a flat tussock. After a few scrapes he uncovered the edge of a stone that ran under the grass. CyUni held her light low. The stone was part of a continuous ledge, wide enough for Ada to trace along the bank.

Ada checked several places before she smiled. One good stone would not have been enough. A continuous shelf of rock, with solid ground above it, was a different matter.

Tomas opened his notebook and drew a line for the new approach. He made it longer than the first one. The bridge would take more stone to reach, and a little more work to build. It could still be started today.

Ada spread a fresh copy of the plan on a table by the new crossing. Tomas marked the rock shelf, CyLuna held a ruler straight, and CyKid drew the turn in the approach road. For the first time all afternoon, the bridge looked like a thing they could build.

A gust lifted the old drawing from beneath its stone. It sailed straight toward the river. CyKid lunged and caught a loose corner. The paper ripped. The torn piece in his hand held only the red mark at the old site.

He turned, expecting Ada to be angry. She was pressing the revised drawing flat with both palms. Before coming down to the bank, she had copied the measurements onto a second sheet and pinned it beneath the first.

CyKid looked at the scrap he had saved. A copy had taken Ada two minutes to make. It had just saved them a day.

The crew brought the first marker to the rock shelf. It was too heavy to lift by hand, so they set a long lever across a timber support. Ada put two people at the far end. They pulled, and the lever moved a finger's width. Then it stuck.

CyBot swept a beam underneath. A loose stone was wedged where the lever needed to swing. Tomas used a pole to nudge it away from the dry side while CyLuna held the light. When the lever moved again, the marker rose cleanly.

They could almost set it. Then a driver called down from the path. The ferrymen had tied their boats at the new crossing for shelter. If the crew raised the marker now, a rope would be trapped under it.

Tomas was the first to say stop. This time the people holding the lever stopped.

CyLuna pressed the ferry ticket into CyKid's hand. “Check how long we have,” she said. He ran back to the shed. The machine's dial showed two cups of light. In his pocket, the ferry ticket felt as thin as a dry leaf. When he unfolded it, the bridge drawing had almost gone. Tomorrow's date was still there.

He could leave while the machine still had a clear path home. For one second he wanted nothing more than to hear a familiar clock and find Grandfather making tea.

Through the shed door, he saw Tomas standing with the crew in the rain. The boy had put the plans back and shown Ada what the river did. Now he was trying to persuade a man twice his size to move a boat he did not own.

CyKid folded the ticket and went out again. He could leave in time if he ran. He could also stay long enough to help Tomas make himself heard.

Tomas said there was a bell in the tower that everyone knew. If it rang twice, the ferry workers came to the square. He had been told never to touch it without the engineer's permission.

Ada called from the bank, “You have it.”

Tomas ran up the spiral stair. Halfway up he looked down. CyLuna was at the foot of the tower, holding a lamp above her head. CyKid was beside her, watching the empty crossing.

The rope was wet where it hung by the open arch. Tomas gripped it with both hands and rang once. He let the bell go quiet before ringing again, so there was no mistake. At the square below, faces turned up toward him. Then the ferrymen grabbed their coats and started down to the water.

The ferrymen untied the boats and moved them higher up the bank. The crew lowered the marker into place while Ada checked it against the revised plan. The point scraped once on stone, slid into the prepared hole, and stopped.

Tomas tried to wobble it. It did not move.

CyLuna held the lamp while CyKid drew the marker and the new bend in the road. Ada took his pencil and added the little flight of steps where the bridge would meet the bank. There was room for a gatepost after all.

“Tomorrow we bring the first stones,” Ada said.

On the old ticket, the first arch returned. Then the second, and the third. CyKid showed Tomas just long enough for him to see it. Across the square, the red clock tower began to strike. They had to run.

They reached the shed with water in their shoes. The last cup held a light the size of a pinhead. CyUni was already at the platform. CyDog jumped into the footwell without waiting to be asked.

Tomas stopped in the doorway. He held out the pencil sketch CyKid had made at the bank. He had drawn a handprint beside the new marker.

“My hand's too small for the stonework,” he said. “Maybe they can carve it on a plaque.”

CyKid took the sketch and climbed into his seat. CyLuna locked the rail. Through the rain he saw Tomas lift the same small hand in farewell.

CyKid pulled the lever. Nothing happened. The machine was waiting for the witness to the day. It needed the ferry ticket, and the ticket was in CyKid's pocket with the sketch and a great deal of rainwater.

Two views of the river opened in the air above the machine. In one, a ferry crossed between muddy banks. In the other, a bridge stood in morning light. The clock dial swung between them.

CyKid found the ticket. The ink had run. He could no longer read which side belonged to the earlier date.

CyLuna held it against the glowing outline. One corner had a notch, like the old ferry tickets the woman had carried. She turned that corner toward the mark in Grandfather's diagram. The ticket slid into the slot.

For a breath the two rivers hung together. Then the ferry kept sailing down one river, and the other river filled the workshop window. The little light in the final cup went out. CyKid held the sketch flat between his hands as the room spun around him.

The clockmaker's workshop came back one detail at a time. The stool was still beside the tall clock. The teaspoon lay where it had fallen. Grandfather's old kettle rattled in its place by the wall.

CyBot's light came on. He said he could see all of CyKid's fingers. CyKid counted them twice.

The brass date wheel had a number in every window. CyLuna tried to turn it, but the missing date was now locked into the mechanism. From the road outside, a cart wheel made a familiar rumble. It was travelling over something solid.

CyDog raced to the door and barked. Nobody told him to wait. The town was waking up, and the light over the river looked exactly like the light they had seen through the machine.

At dawn, the bridge was there. It stood a little farther along the bank than the one CyKid had remembered. The old road bent to meet it, exactly as Tomas had drawn.

They walked across slowly. CyDog stopped only to sniff a crust. On the far wall, a small bronze plaque carried a child's handprint. There was also a second name beside Ada's. Tomas had stayed with the work. The town remembered him.

CyKid put his own hand over the print. It was almost the same size. That felt stranger than seeing the past. A boy whose hand was just like his had helped decide where a bridge stood for a hundred years.

CyLuna found the dent in the first stone step. It now held a gatepost. She touched the stone once before following CyDog toward the bakery.

Back at the workshop, CyLuna hung Tomas's sketch beside a photograph of Grandfather at the bridge. In the photograph, the handprint was already there. She wondered how many times she had looked straight at it.

CyKid was about to make tea when he saw a pale edge sticking out from under the door. An envelope had been slid in from the street. Its flap was stamped with a silver bird, one wing folded and the other raised.

He opened the door. There was nobody outside. On the doorstep, a single silver feather gleamed. It had a hinge where the quill should have been.

CyLuna turned the envelope over. It was addressed to both of them. The letters leaned to the right in just the way hers did when she wrote in a hurry.

The letter was dated one hundred years in the future. CyLuna knew her handwriting before she reached the signature. She also knew the dot she always left at the end of her name, even when a full stop was unnecessary.

There was one sentence inside.

“When you get here, don't let him fix tomorrow.”

CyKid read it again. “Who's him?”

A soft clicking came from the window. In its glass, beyond the reflection of their own faces, a silver city stood where the bakery ought to be. A mechanical bird balanced on the tallest roof. As CyLuna watched, it spread both wings and turned its head directly toward her.

CyKid shut the workshop door. CyLuna took Grandfather's notebook off its hook and opened to a fresh page.

They both heard the clock begin to strike.