"It’s just... empty," Maya said, her eyes welling. "I worked so hard, and it’s just scrap now. It’s a complete let down."

Maya stood up, still sad, but with a different kind of intensity in her eyes. She took her coat.

Instead, Maya arrived at 9:00 AM empty-handed, her shoulders slumped under a heavy woolen coat. She didn’t look at him. She just went to her workbench, sat down, and stared at the empty space where the clock should be.

"You are trying to build a 'sleepwalking' clock," Elias said, handing it back to her. "But you are trying to make it while you are entirely too awake. You are obsessed with perfection, and perfection has no soul. It has no time for dreams." He walked to the window, watching the rain hit the glass.

"I tried to make that one perfectly silent. To hold the sound of nothing," Elias admitted. "It was the biggest failure of my youth. But I learned more about tension from that broken mechanism than from all the working ones combined."