Chapter 22
It was easy.
The others who’d worked together had prepared the rest of the hourglasses, too, and we were all done within fifteen minutes, which was a miracle.
Seth and Anika were the last ones to harden the pieces of glass into a single bulb at the Seventh Hour, and then they were all fixed.
Not a single shard of glass remained on the ground, and not a single grain of timesand, either.
“That’s it,” said Russ. “That’s the last one. What now?”
As if the room had heard his question, something beneath the black tiles groaned. Something like gears shifting. Very big gears.
All at once the repaired bulbs inside the platforms turned upside down, and the timesand inside them began to pour down. The numbers that were engraved below lit up from within with all kinds of colors, and the room was suddenly alive.
The Hands clapped. Cheered. Laughed.
I was tempted to laugh, too—it was over. All the hourglasses were repaired, and the Thirteenth Hour remained dark, and the trial was already unwon. We’d undone whatever was required from us in the forward trial. It was over.
The gears beneath the floor groaned louder. The Hands hugged one another, hi-fived the people they’d worked with, and March looked at me from the other side of the thirteenth hourglass.
The urge to smile released me at once when I saw the suspicion in his eyes. When I saw his frown.
A second later, the bulbs moved, turned upside down at the same time without anybody touching them—and the melody began.
The laughing and the cheering and the clapping stopped, and we all watched in awe as the First Hour lit up with lights that must have been somewhere inside the platform.
Green and yellow and blue, they fell on the bulb while the sand slipped down, and the sound came from somewhere inside the base of the platform, too. A single note.
When it faded, the Second Hour lit up with pink and purple and red. The note that sounded from inside it was a little higher.
The Third Hour was next, the colors that brightened up the bulb the same as those of the first, but the note of it was higher still than the second.
Then the Fourth Hour lit up, and the fifth, and the sixth—and the Hands were laughing again, swinging to the melody of the notes.
It was working, indeed. The hourglasses were working, and the lights were so beautiful, I forgot all about the look on March’s face for a moment.
Only a moment.
Then the Seventh Hour lit up with green and yellow and blue, its note higher, a perfect continuation of the fifth and sixth.
But the sound that came after it made a few of the Hands scream.
It was low. It was wrong. It was doom wrapped up in sound—and it was coming straight from the larger platform of the Thirteenth Hour.
We watched in horror as the Seventh Hour began to vibrate, and then something at the top of it screeched. We couldn’t see all the way up there, but it sounded like a lid opening, and then the timesand that had been pouring down into the empty bulb began to move up, out the top of the platform.
It floated over our heads as we watched, and slipped right into the top of the Thirteenth Hour.
Brown light shone from the platform and onto the large bulb that was filling up with sand from the seventh, and that awful sound continued to make the entire floor vibrate.
The Thirteenth Hour had come alive right before our eyes.
“Stop it! Make it stop!” someone shouted at the top of their lungs.
Helen and Russ were already moving, one with the bat in his hand, Helen with the piece of wood just as long, and they slammed it onto the glass of the Thirteenth Hour at the same time.
The sound of it was deafening. I moved back with the rest of the Hands, my ears covered, my eyes wide open as I waited and waited for the glass to break—but it didn’t. No matter how hard they hit it, the glass of the Thirteenth Hour bulb did not break.
March took the bat from Russ next and tried, hit the glass with all his strength.
Not a scratch on the surface.
“It’s not working! It’s not working!”
Then Helen ran to the Seventh Hour and slammed the piece of wood on the bulb.
Glass broke. Sand spilled out. The lights of it died, and the sound from the Thirteenth Hour faded together with the light. No more timesand floated to it, only spilled on the floor.
“No—you shouldn’t have broken it, no!” Erith cried, trying to get the piece of wood out of Helen’s hands—but it wasn’t over yet.
No, nothing was over.
Instead, the Eighth Hour lit up, red and pink and purple, the sound of it kind to the ears again, a note higher than the previous one. The ninth followed, but nobody was laughing anymore. Instead, we were moving backward on instinct, waiting…
The Tenth Hour lit up. The note climbed higher.
The platform opened its lid, and the sand began to pour upward into the air as the Thirteenth Hour came to life again, sound and light and all.
Words popped in my head like they’d been hiding there all along: a sequence. A sound sequence activated it.
Helen screamed as she ran for the Tenth Hour now, wood in hand. Erith tried to call for her, but she didn't listen. Seth was already in front of the Tenth Hour, though, and he grabbed the narrow center where the bulbs constricted and the timesand funneled through—and he pulled.
The bulb came out of the platform with ease, and he fell back together with it because he’d pulled too hard.
Helen slowed down, stopped screaming. The timesand no longer floated into the Thirteenth Hour, and the lights of the tenth platform had faded.
Yet it continued.
The Eleventh Hour lit up, the sound sharper, purer. The Twelfth Hour followed. We waited with our breaths held. Seth was still on the floor hugging the bulb full of timesand that was almost as tall as him, and Helen still clung to that piece of wood, prepared…
But the Twelfth Hour didn’t activate the Thirteenth.
The First Hour did.
Helen was at it again, running, screaming, but March was faster. He grabbed the bulb with one hand and pulled it out in one movement.
The lights faded. The Thirteenth Hour remained dark, with only a handful of sand at the bottom of it.
The Second Hour lit up, and the rest followed. The seventh was broken, and the tenth was on Seth’s lap, the first on the floor by March’s feet.
All the hourglasses lit up in time, made their sounds, skipped the notes of the incomplete ones, then started again from the beginning.
The Thirteenth Hour didn’t activate again.
“Anybody have any clue how we’re going to assemble a working clock without awakening the Thirteenth Hour?” Erith asked after a while as she stood in front of the dark platform, breathing hard, hands on her hips.
Nobody had an answer.
“What are you thinking?”
March sat a couple feet to my side with his elbows over his knees and looked right at me. His voice was the only one that pulled me out of my trance—the others had been speaking until now, too, but it was easy not to pay attention.
When it came to him, though, it was like my body knew he was talking and snapped out of whatever hole I’d been falling down right away.
Others were looking at me, too. Confused. Pissed off. A little hopeful—as if they thought I might have an answer to this madness.
But I didn’t.
I knew what the hourglasses were doing even now—the light moving in a perfect rhythm, triggering the sound, moving on to the next. It was working, this makeshift clock made of timesand, but it was far from complete.
“I…” I stopped. Looked at March. “It’s a sound sequence that’s activating the Thirteenth Hour.” Which was something he could have figured out himself.
“I think it’s formed with a triad,” Cook, who was sitting on the other side of the room with his back against the platform of the Third Hour, said.
“Three notes in sequence activate the next hourglass, causing the timesand to pour into the Thirteenth Hour,” said Levana, looking up at the monstrous structure, the unbreakable glass of the dark bulb.
“Does it change?” asked Russ after a moment. “Do the same triads form the same sequences every time?”
“The hourglasses are still lighting up, still playing notes, yet that remains dead,” March said, nodded his head to the middle of the room. “I’d say it stays the same.”
He was right, too.
“But…it’s impossible,” Cook whispered. “If we fix that bulb, and if we put the hourglasses back in place, how are we going to stop the Thirteenth Hour from being activated?”
Silence in the room.
I looked around for a bit, at the darkness beyond the hourglasses. So all-consuming. You could get lost in it forever.
Or—you could find in it anything you could imagine.
Like…maybe a Cheshire Cat who spoke and grinned and gave you tips on how to unwin the trial.
Because Cook was right, it was impossible to make this clock without awakening the Thirteenth Hour.
And what was it that the speaker said before we entered?
You must beware the Thirteenth Hour, for should you awaken it, the trial will surely end…and so will you.
“The sound,” Levana said.
We all turned to look at where she sat crosslegged on the dusty floor, playing with her long, chestnut hair, swirling strands around her fingers so fast they turned to a blur.
“The sound is what activates the timesand to float toward the thirteenth.” Slowly, she stood up. My heart skipped a beat—she was absolutely right. “What if we…”
“Stop the sound?” Helen whispered with a wide smile on her face.
“Time’s Trousers. That’s why they took us to that mad Timekeeper’s workshop!” Russ shouted. “That’s why!”
Then we were all moving.
It made perfect sense. We’d taken lessons, though backward, on gears.
Fixing and finding problems in machines—and these platforms that held up the hourglass bulbs were most definitely machines.
I was willing to bet there were gears underneath the very floor, too.
Deactivating the sounds of the hourglasses meant no triads, and no triads meant no sequences, only soundless working hours.
I had a good feeling about it, we all did. And that’s the first time I didn’t mind working together to get out of this place faster.