Chapter 23
We had to cut the metal at the back of the platforms, just below the opening where the hourglasses hung on thin metal holders you could only see when you pulled the bulbs out.
It was no trouble. We had magic, and March magicked these sharp, gigantic scissors he said he always used back home. What for, I had no idea.
The square we cut on the metal sheet revealed the machinery of the platform—full of turning gears and cogs and pins, with oil dripping everywhere—and a single metal plate suspended in the middle horizontally.
They kept pushing me aside, each Hand trying to see better, so it took me a moment to see the three nearly invisible filaments that held the plate up, attached to something higher up the platform that we couldn’t see.
The plate was no bigger than the palm of my hand. I’d honestly thought it would be a bell. Its surface was worn smooth in the center, and darker at the edges. Tiny cracks ran through it on both sides, as if it had been struck way too many times. It was barely hanging on.
Below it, the striker was a slender arm anchored to a piece of metal as thick as my thumb. The tip of it was like a miniature hammerhead, smoothly polished.
First, March tried to break it off the piece of metal it was attached to, but it was impossible.
There was barely any space between the gears to fit his hand, and the metal was sturdy.
Then Russ tried to damage it with the tip of those scissors, but no matter how hard he struck, the hammerhead remained intact.
To use magic on it now would be stupid—Master Talik had made it very clear that to meddle with working magical machinery was the worst idea any of us could have because we had no clue how our magic would interact with its magic, so…
Cover it, I thought, the same moment Anika said the words out loud.
She offered Russ a piece of cloth—a silver napkin she’d folded in her pocket. Russ took it, wrapped it around the head of the hammer as tightly as he could. He then pushed the striker up with his finger to test it, and the best it made was a dull, muted sound.
It was still sound, though. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t as excited as the rest of them when they began to pick up the pieces of the broken glass in front of the Seventh Hour that Helen had broken again. They all worked together. Only Levana and I stayed farther back and watched.
The Seventh Hour was whole again just as the Second Hour lit up. We all stepped back, breaths held, eyes wide open.
Something’s off, something’s off, said that strange voice in my head, sometimes more like the Cheshire’s, sometimes less.
Never wrong, at least not so far.
The Third, Fourth, Fifth Hours lit up in a row, with their pretty lights and their notes, creating a melody I’d thought was beautiful in the beginning.
Then the Sixth Hour sang. The seventh lit up.
Inside the platform, the striker moved, its hammerhead wrapped up in a napkin slamming against the metal plate. Barely any sound made it out.
Barely, but it was still there. The note still existed because the plate was still struck.
A tick went by, and another.
The groan of the Thirteenth Hour behind us made us all jump and scream. Timesand in the air, moving in a perfect arch from the seventh to the thirteenth hourglass.
It hadn’t worked. The triad still created the sequence.
Another scream, this one in pure frustration. Glass broke. We all turned to find Helen with the bat in her hands this time. The awful sound of the Thirteenth Hour faded as the timesand from the seventh poured all over the floor once more.
Nobody accused her of breaking the bulb. Time knew we all wanted to break something right now.
We just went back to sitting on the floor, defeated.
We tried removing the striker again, all of us—even with magic.
We figured it was worth the risk, but it still didn’t work.
No magic that made it inside the platform survived—it was like the gears, the cogs, every little piece of metal inside them was magic-proof.
We only ended up wasting minutes before we gave up trying to change anything in the machinery of the hourglasses.
So, Master Talik had not been preparing us for this trial, after all.
We tried putting more fabric between the hammerhead and the plate, even stuck layers onto the plate itself.
It didn’t work. We knew it wouldn’t—it wasn’t just the actual sound that activated the sequence, but the turn, and the lights as well.
We tried breaking them, too, but other than getting the glass that shielded them, we couldn’t reach the actual wires—they were too far into the platform beneath the metal holders.
With each new hour, the bulbs turned all on their own once all the timesand fell to their bottom.
Then it started all over again.
Six hours passed in a blink, and we opened every single one of the platforms, tried to manipulate each one in the same—and a slightly different way.
We tried switching up any gear we could, but nothing ever worked. Every time we put the hourglasses in place, the triad would trigger the sound sequence, and the Thirteenth Hour would be activated.
So, we went back to sitting on the floor.
At one point Erith even slept.
At one point Levana sang three songs in a row, and her voice was smoother than silk. It coaxed my eyes to close, and I could have sworn I’d heard it before. That same voice and that same song.
At one point four of them at a time played a game with their hands that I didn’t much care to understand, but they laughed and they screamed and they seemed to be having a good time.
No Cheshire came to my rescue.
I sat in front of the Eighth Hour, back against the base of the platform, and I’d come to enjoy the vibration against my back every time it played its note.
March moved from one side to the other, and he would look at me for minutes at a time, but we didn’t speak.
We were hungry. We were tired. We were pissed off because we seemed to have been given an impossible task for real now.
And it was evident that no help was coming.
Another hour.
Most were lying on the floor on their backs, staring away at the darkness beyond. Some had their eyes closed. Some hummed with the tunes of the hourglasses under their breaths.
I fell in and out of consciousness constantly—because it wasn’t sleep.
Sleep didn’t feel like falling, and I was always falling down a tunnel, that hole in the ground, the strangest hole I’d ever seen.
Shelves and teapots and books and flowers, mirrors, lamps, empty cages—you could find anything on the walls of that hole, and it never seemed to end.
Any time it claimed me, I was forever falling.
Then I woke up, hoping against hope that something had changed, that someone had received a clue, that we were going to get out of here soon.
But no. We’d fixed the Seventh Hour again, and now the three bulbs of the hourglasses that activated the Thirteenth were each outside their platforms. Number Seven was right there next to me. I could touch the glass if I reached out my fingers.
Sometimes I did. Sometimes I hoped it would give me a memory, like March had done when he’d grabbed me by the wrist.
When it didn’t, I’d stand up and walk and walk around the hourglass in the middle, then take my place again. The Eighth Hour had become mine. Nobody else sat near me, and I preferred it.
I thought about March often. I watched him way more than I wanted to admit to my own self. I tried to think back to when he’d worn short sleeves, if I’d noticed scars on his skin where that knife had gone right through his forearm.
The truth was that I couldn’t remember. I’d been busy with…other things.
Not ideal to be turned on in a room surrounded by darkness, trapped with eight other people who weren’t March, waiting to just…what was going to happen to us if we couldn’t unwin this, exactly?
Would we die of hunger? Of thirst? Would somebody send help?
And the Great Clock—what would happen to it if we didn’t get out of here eventually?
Another hour.
My thoughts were turning dark.
That’s why I dragged myself to the side of the platform to reach a patch of thicker dust on the floor nobody had stepped on yet, and I began to draw the platform and the bulb of the Eighth Hour.
It was something to keep my mind busy, something to do. I was wide awake, focused on every line my fingers and nails could draw, but I could still hear the others singing, humming, cursing, talking…
Seth said, “I’ll believe it. This feels exactly like an actual Thirteenth Hour. Bravo, whoever made this bullshit game—bravo!” And he clapped his hands furiously.
Someone laughed.
“I would kill for bread,” Mimi said from farther to his side. “I don’t even think that’s metaphorical. I think I would actually kill one of you.”
“Pfft. Tick off, you wouldn’t,” Erith said with a wave.
“You say that at least every hour. Tick off,” said Cook, eyes half closed like he was half asleep for real.
“Maybe I could try some timesand. I bet it tastes like bread…” Mimi.
“Why would anybody eat sand?” Helen wondered.
“Because they’re hungry?” offered Russ.
Levana: “We’ve been having the same argument for the fifth time.”
“Not fifth—third,” said Helen.
“At least thirteenth,” said Anika.
Erith wrinkled her nose. “That’s a dirty word.”
I was actually kind of entertained. It was so much better than the conversations in my head, so I listened some more.
“You’ve said that…thirteen times already,” Levana told her, and you could just hear her grin.
“Tick off, Heart,” said Erith, and in my mind, I saw her rolling her eyes.
“I wonder how much time has really passed out there,” said Cook again with that same slow voice.
Erith: “I swear, if one more person says thirteen again—”
“Thirteen!” Russ, Anika and Mimi said at the same time, then burst out laughing when Erith groaned.
I stifled my smile.
Then March said, “Okay, new rule. No one says the dirty word anymore.”