The Undertick

Eli Voss kept time the way a gardener keeps soil: with patient hands and a feeling that small things mattered more than loud ones. Her workshop sat above a bookbinder and beneath the old clock tower that watched the town like a slow, careful eye. Mornings smelled of boiled leather and hot metal; afternoons were folded with the thin silver sound of escapements and the tinny laughter of the bell across the square. She learned to read a town by ear years before she learned to read a map. A gear's reluctance could tell her that a street had been swept, a bird's stray song that a child had been allowed to run farther than before. The simplest watch could hold a season in its tick if you listened properly.

She liked to call herself an apprentice to the city's rhythm rather than to any master. That morning she bent over a half-assembled pocket chronometer, her fingers smeared with oil and tea, while the light from the lane made a bar of honey across the workbench. A kettle hummed downstairs. Outside, a cart rumbled, brakes complaining like a throat gone dry. Mira, the baker, stuck her head into the shop below and sent up a paper parcel tied with string. "Warm buns," she said, ducking into the doorway like a bird into rain. "For your listening."

Eli smiled without looking up. "You know the sound it makes when it's exactly right," she said. "Like the sea on an old coin." Mira laughed and the lane accepted the noise like an old neighbor. Eli wound the chronometer with a careful thumb, feeling the familiar give of brass as if a secret had acknowledged her touch. There was a small, irregular cadence under the main tick, a second voice in the mechanism that made her eyes narrow. A watch could not be two things at once; it was either obedient or broken. This one was choosing to be both.

She set it in the wooden cradle and listened, letting the rhythm settle in her chest. The undertick became clearer, like footsteps beyond a wall. A sound like a whisper or the scrape of a sleeve. For a moment she suspected a draft. Then the bell in the tower—always punctual—struck once at nine, and beneath that bell the little second voice hummed: the cigarette breath of a laugh, a name clipped off by a closing door. Eli frowned and reached for her loupe.