Once things had been settled to a point, and Jonas had eventually promised not to try to run away again, Quay took Jonas back to his room and left Twist alone to rest. Quay sent for some food to be brought to Twist's room, but Twist wasn't very interested. Instead, he sat on the couch and turned the watch over slowly in his hands.
He could still sense the memories of his home within it. After everything that he had been through, after all the miles he'd traveled, the quiet moment that he'd locked inside the watch hadn't changed in the slightest. He could still hear the rain falling softly on the thick windows. He could still sense the slightest aroma of a snuffed-out candle, metal polish, and damp wood. The gentle, constant ticking of all his clocks still pulsed in time with the beating of the watch's own clockwork heart. Even the thin, gray light falling through the soot-stained sky was still reflected in the silence between tick and tock.
The door opened suddenly when the serving girl entered with another tray, the items on it clinking together noisily. Twist was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he jumped at the sudden sound of her entrance and the watch slipped through his fingers. He tried to catch the chain as it fell, but missed. The watch fell to the wooden floor with a wretched crack, its delicate inner workings jolted violently.
Twist gasped in the moment that the damage rushed to his awareness. Just as suddenly, the watch was in his hands once again, undamaged and perfect, and he was alone in the room. He looked around quickly, searching for some explanation for this. He had no memory of picking the watch up again, or of the serving girl leaving. He absently wrapped the chain around his hand as he struggled to figure out what had just happened.
The next moment, the door opened again and the serving girl entered with a tray, the items on it clinking together just as noisily as before. Twist was on his feet in an instant, turning to watch as she entered. The girl started slightly at his quick motion, but when he said nothing she walked around him to place the tray down on the table. Twist looked down to the watch, as it still ticked away softly, safe in his grip.
“Did you just come in, a moment ago?” Twist asked her hesitantly.
She looked to him quietly.
“I know it sounds mad, but...” he began, not yet sure how to finish the sentence.
“Shen ma?” she said softly to him.
“What?” Twist asked.
The girl shook her head, the beads hanging in her hair tinkling softly as she did. “No ... English,” she said stiffly, with a thick accent and an apologetic smile.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” Twist said quickly, putting on an apologetic smile of his own. “Never mind,” he said, waving his hands dismissively.
The girl nodded and turned to leave with no further response than the soft sound of her pink silk dress brushing the floor as she walked. With the door closed again, Twist fell back into his seat and held his head in one hand as he stared at his own confusion.
“That's it,” he said to no one. “I'm losing my mind now. I suppose it was bound to happen eventually, with all the madness in my life these days.”
Though he didn’t feel hungry, he looked over the meal that the girl had brought him. Small pieces of meat and vegetables were drowned in a thick sauce on one small dish beside a bowl of broth-like soup, while another bowl held nothing but simple white rice. There were also a few rolled tubes that appeared to be fried, along with a few tiny dishes of sauces in varying bright colors. There was a spoon placed on the tray beside two long pointed sticks, but Twist found no knife or fork with them.
After much deliberation, Twist hesitantly plucked a piece of the meat out of its thick sauce with his fingertips and gave it a sniff before placing it in his mouth. Succulent and tender, drowned in a tangy, smooth, buttery sauce, the morsel pleased his tongue just as much as the strangely colored food in Baku had. As he swallowed the first bite he also came to realize that he was actually quite hungry indeed. Once the tray was all but licked clean, Twist leaned back on the couch and let out a happy sigh.
“Remember that, Twist,” he said to the ceiling, “China has great food.”
“Do you always talk to yourself?” asked a man’s voice from close behind him.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Twist turned quickly to find a woman also standing not a foot away from him. Twist had not heard her enter, nor the man who stood behind her. The woman was not tall, but her body was very slender and wrapped totally in sapphire-blue cloth—loose trousers that gathered at her ankles and waist, with a tunic not unlike Vane’s that had tightly wrapped long sleeves, and a collar that crossed low over her breastbone. Her black hair was cut very short for a woman, and was in such a sharp style that it seemed like it could cut the bright amber skin at her throat. Her face reminded Twist instantly of the serving girl’s, but the woman appeared to be twice her age. She looked down at him through cool eyes, as narrow and judgmental as a wild beast’s.
Glancing to the man behind her, Twist leaped to his feet and backed away almost to the wall. “You made that mist in Nepal!” he said, pointing at the man.
The man’s face was pure, snowy white and covered in black lines that wove together and up over his bare scalp. He wore a long, white cotton coat of a European design, buttoned tightly over white trousers, and there were spats over his shining black shoes. Though his clothes looked to be Western, his features and his solid, muscular build were wholly foreign to Twist: the man seemed to be made of nothing but sharp angles that only accentuated a sense of power in his form. Certainly the most striking thing about him, however, were his eyes. They were fully gold, with no whites in them.
“You saw me?” he asked, grinning with a mouthful of gold teeth. His deep, dark voice was colored with an accent not unlike Twist had heard in Baku.
“How did you get in here?” Twist asked. “I didn’t even hear you open the door.”
“We didn’t use the door,” the man said with a shrug, while the woman simply watched Twist silently. “My friend Jiran, here, is a shadow assassin, and I am not human at all,” he offered as clarification. Twist decided to pick his questions carefully.
“What do you want?” Twist asked slowly.
“To ask you about this,” the man said, holding out one pure-white hand. To Twist's amazement, sourceless smoke pooled in his open palm and shaped itself quickly into the solid form of Myra's cracked crystal. “As far as I can tell,” the man said, examining the crystal as he spoke, “this is a critical piece of that clockwork puppet. I assume that it is meant to vibrate correctly to allow the ghost to control the rest of the puppet. Of course,” he said, smiling at Twist for a moment, “I'm no expert in these things.”
“That is generally the idea,” Twist said, still trying to figure out how he'd manifested the crystal in his hand in the first place.
“Is there any way to fix this?” he asked Twist.
“No, it has to be replaced.”
“Ah, I see,” the man said looking to the crystal again. “Well, this appears to be a cave crystal from somewhere in south east Asia. It's lucky Quay decided to come here to Hong Kong. We shouldn't be far away from the place where this crystal once grew.”
“How could you know that, just looking at it?” Twist asked.
The man smiled at him, his unnerving, golden eyes gleaming in the lantern light. “I'm a magical being. I understand magic.”
“Who are you?” Twist asked, finally unable to hold the question back any longer.
“You may call me Idris,” he said pleasantly. “To answer what I'm sure is your next question, I'm an earthbound djinn. And to answer your next question, no, I will not grant you any wishes unless they sound like fun.”
“Wait...” Twist said, grasping at the loose threads of his understanding. “Do you mean, like a genie? Aladdin and his magical lamp, sort of genie?”
“Whatever,” Idris said, looking somewhat disappointed at the sound of Aladdin's name.
“But that's just a story,” Twist said, desperate for some sense of reality.
“Weren't you the one to pluck this out of a fairytale princess's chest, not two days ago?” Idris asked, gesturing with the crystal. “Your real problem is that you don't believe the stories.”
Twist gave a sigh and shook his head before he looked to the still-silent Jiran. “And what about you?” he asked her. “A 'shadow assassin,' was it? Then are you a magical shadow creature of some kind?”
She smiled slightly and shook her head.
“She is human,” Idris said. “Perhaps you've heard the term 'ninja' at some point?”
“Oh, of course,” Twist said spitefully, crossing his arms. “Pirates, vampires, people made of clockwork, shape-shifting foxes, a genie, and now a ninja. I should have guessed. What shall we have next? Creatures from outer space? A mermaid or a flying horse perhaps? No! I have it,” he said, snapping his fingers. “We need a dragon! A proper fire-breathing one.”
Idris looked at him with a concerned expression. “Are you all right?”
“No. I'm going mad, obviously,” Twist said irritably. “I'm sure I'll be chasing after white rabbits and playing croquet with flamingos in no time at all.”
“Perhaps we should leave you to rest,” Idris said slowly. Jiran nodded silently. “Thank you for helping me to understand this,” he said, closing his hand over the crystal until it ceased to be in his hand at all. “I'll tell Quay, and we should be able to head out to find a replacement as early as tomorrow.”
“Whatever,” Twist said, rubbing at a new pain between his eyebrows. When he opened his eyes again a moment later, Idris and Jiran were both gone, though he had not heard a single sound of their departure.
