Amazon Arrow: Madame Metronome (Patreon)

The clocks of Winter Falls had been disappearing for a week. First the four-faced tower clock above the Merchants’ Exchange vanished overnight. Then the grandfather clock from the mayor’s office. Then the antique timepieces from the Hollister Museum, the station clock from Union Terminal, and every wristwatch in the window of Feldman’s Jewelers. Each time, the thieves left a single calling card: a brass pendulum, still swinging when the police arrived. Each one swung at exactly sixty beats per minute. Each one was engraved with the same flourish of a signature: M.M.

Madame Metronome had once been Margaret Mercer, a brilliant horologist who repaired the city’s great public clocks. She had also been a woman who could not bear the smallest imprecision. A train that left twenty seconds late would send her into a fury. A dinner guest arriving early was, to her, as bad as one arriving late. When the city council voted to replace her hand-wound tower clocks with electric ones, she snapped. Her first crime spree had nearly frozen the city’s traffic signals at a single moment forever. Amazon Arrow had stopped her then, and she had sworn, on her way into the paddy wagon, that she would “settle the account, to the second.”

Now she was back and Amazon Arrow wouldn’t rest until Madame Metronome was doing time once again.

The abandoned Chronos Toy Factory sat at the end of Pier Nine, its windows painted over. Inside, Amazon Arrow slipped through a vent and dropped onto a catwalk overlooking a colorful scene from a bizarre dream.

The stolen clocks hung everywhere. The Merchants’ Exchange faces had been bolted to the walls among gears the size of wagon wheels, painted red, yellow, and blue. Two enormous golden pendulums swung from the rafters, ticking in perfect unison. Below them, banks of control consoles flashed with colored lights, and cables snaked across the floor toward a single towering device in the corner: a brass machine shaped like an hourglass, humming.

Four henchmen bustled about in bowler hats, each hat fitted with a small alarm clock on the brim. They wore black domino masks and the cheap sport coats of traveling salesmen.

“Tick, check the regulators,” barked a voice. “Tock, calibrate the escapement. Hickory, Dickory, stop slouching. Slouching wastes time!”

Madame Metronome strode into view. She wore a skintight suit of gold and black stripes, white boots, and white gloves, and on her chest gleamed a great round clock face, its hands moving in precise unison with those around her. Her top hat, gold and gleaming, bore its own small clock. In her hand was a golden scepter crowned with a ticking dial.

“In eleven minutes,” she announced, “at precisely one o’clock, the Temporal Arrestor will broadcast its signal through every clock and timer in Winter Falls. Every traffic light, every bank vault lock, every factory whistle will freeze at one o’clock and stay there. The city will be mine, and it will be perfectly, beautifully, permanently on time.”

“Uh, boss,” said the henchman called Dickory. “If it’s always one o’clock, how do we know when it’s payday?”

Madame Metronome rapped him on the bowler with her scepter. “Every moment will be payday, you dolt. Now, positions.”

Amazon Arrow had heard enough. She vaulted from the catwalk, flipped once in midair, and landed in the center of the floor, gloved fists raised.

“Sorry to interrupt the countdown, Margaret. Your time’s up.”

The henchmen spun around. Madame Metronome’s eyes narrowed beneath her golden brim.

“Amazon Arrow. You’re early.”

“I’m right on time.”

“You are four minutes early,” the villainess snapped. “I had budgeted for your arrival at twelve fifty-three. Tick! Tock! Hickory! Dickory! Seize her!”

The four henchmen closed in from both sides, crouching low with their hands out like wrestlers. Amazon Arrow let the first one, Tick, lunge. She sidestepped, caught his wrist, and sent him tumbling into a console that burst into a shower of sparks. Tock came next, swinging a wrench. She ducked under it, swept his legs, and he landed flat on his back with his hat clock ringing.

Hickory and Dickory charged together. Amazon Arrow jumped, caught the swinging arm of one of the ceiling-mounted pendulums, and rode its arc across the room. At the bottom of the swing she kicked out with both boots, and the two henchmen collided with a sound like a pair of dropped cymbals.

But as she dropped back to the floor, Madame Metronome was waiting. The villainess thrust her scepter forward, and a pulse of crackling energy leapt from its dial. Amazon Arrow threw herself aside. The blast struck a red gear behind her, and the gear simply stopped, frozen in place, a ripple of shimmering air hanging around it.

“My Chrono-Scepter halts anything it touches,” Madame Metronome purred. “Imagine yourself suspended in one single second for all eternity. How very tidy you would be.”

She fired again and again. Amazon Arrow rolled, sprang, and cartwheeled across the factory floor, each blast freezing whatever stood behind her: a falling wrench hanging in the air, a spray of sparks stuck like a starburst.

Amazon Arrow ducked behind a console, breathing hard. The scepter was too fast to outrun forever. And the great wall clock across the room read twelve fifty-four.

Six minutes.

She thought of the woman she had fought years ago. The way Margaret Mercer would stop in the middle of a getaway to straighten a crooked clock. The way she had once abandoned a stolen payroll because a bank’s lobby clock was running slow and she couldn’t leave it that way. She thought of the pendulums left at every crime scene, swinging at sixty beats per minute, exactly. Not fifty-nine. Not sixty-one.

Amazon Arrow smiled.

Madame Metronome’s weakness wasn’t her scepter or her machine. It was that she couldn’t bear time being wrong.

From the quiver one her back, Amazon Arrow unfolded her cybernetic bow and drew a single arrow tipped with a magnetic head. She rose, drew, and fired, not at the villainess, but at the great Merchants’ Exchange clock on the wall.

The arrow struck just beside the clock’s center. The magnet seized the minute hand and dragged it forward with a clank. The clock now read twelve fifty-nine.

Madame Metronome stopped in her tracks. “That’s... that’s incorrect!”

Amazon Arrow fired again. A second clock lurched backward to twelve thirty. A third arrow sent another to quarter past two. Then she aimed at one of the great swinging pendulums and fired a weighted arrow that wrapped its line around the brass bob, adding just enough weight to throw its rhythm out of step with its twin.

Tick... tock. Tock-tick. Tick... tock.

The two pendulums started to beat against each other in a lopsided, stumbling rhythm.

Madame Metronome clutched her head. “This is barbaric! Stop! Stop this at once!”

“Better fix them, Margaret,” Amazon Arrow called. “Your Temporal Arrestor will broadcast at one o’clock exactly. But according to which clock?”

The villainess spun from wall to wall, her eyes darting between faces. “Twelve fifty-nine. Twelve thirty. Two fifteen. No. No. It must be precise. The broadcast must be precise!” She pointed her scepter at the nearest clock and fired, freezing it, then realized she’d frozen it at the wrong time and shrieked in frustration.

“Tick! Fetch my calibration tools! Tock, the reference chronometer!”

But Tick and Tock were still groaning on the floor, and Hickory and Dickory were frozen in mid-collapse. Madame Metronome was alone, surrounded by clocks that disagreed, and it was more than she could stand. She stalked to the nearest one and began cranking its hands back into place with her gloved fingers, muttering numbers under her breath.

That was all the opening Amazon Arrow needed.

She sprinted across the floor, leapt the tangle of cables, and caught the Chrono-Scepter by its shaft. Madame Metronome whirled, too late. Amazon Arrow twisted, wrenched the scepter free, and turned it around.

“Wait,” the villainess gasped. “You wouldn’t dare. I am not to be defeated until the last minute, which is precisely twelve fifty-nine!”

“It’s close enough,” said Amazon Arrow, and squeezed the trigger.

The blast caught Madame Metronome mid-step, one hand raised, her mouth gasping in protest. She froze solid, a gold-and-black statue shimmering in suspended time.

Amazon Arrow walked over to the hourglass machine. The wall clock nearest it read twelve fifty-nine and fifty seconds. She found the main power lever and pulled it down. The humming died. The colored lights on the consoles flickered and went dark.

Somewhere outside, a ship’s bell rang one o’clock across the harbor. The traffic lights changed. The city kept moving.

When the police arrived, they found four dazed henchmen tied together and a villainess still frozen in place.

“How long will she stay like that?” asked the sergeant.

Amazon Arrow examined the scepter’s dial. “About an hour. Long enough to get her back into a jail cell.”

“Did she say anything before you froze her?”

Amazon Arrow considered the question, glancing at the wall of stolen clocks, all still crooked, all still disagreeing.

“She said I was early,” she replied. “But I think I got here just in the nick of time.”