Chapter 6
Real.
It was all real, and I was here now, in the forest, no longer bothering to try to move back.
I couldn’t. My body was being controlled by something else, it seemed.
Whatever kind of magic it was, it was perfectly undetectable, and I couldn’t even feel it to try to fight against it. The best thing to do was give in.
So, I did.
Trees around me, dark, but not that dark. There were lanterns hidden between the branches, fires that brightened up the leaves without burning them. The sound of the audience was gone, swallowed by the silence that reigned between these trees.
I looked up, and the canopy was too thick to see the Great Clock at all.
Suddenly, it was like we’d entered another realm altogether.
“Guys,” someone whispered. “Let’s stick together, okay?”
No, was my first instinct. I fought better alone. It was easier to hide alone. It was easier to disappear alone.
“We will. How else will we know how to do this?” said someone else—Reggie, if I had to guess.
I didn’t look to the sides at all, only ahead. The lights did more damage than good, it seemed, because the shadows of the trees and branches and leaves were scarier than the dark. They looked like monsters with hooks for hands coming to tear us wide open.
It’s the Turning Trials, I reminded myself. There would be no monsters with hooks for hands here. It was just a game.
“How will we know how we did this in the first place? How can we un something we don’t remember doing?!” Anika said, her voice higher, sharper. She sounded pissed—and I was, too.
Not because I was here, or because some invisible force had relieved me of control over my own body—but because I’d chosen to come here. I’d chosen to apply. I’d chosen to take the test, to do my best to prove that I was fit for the trials. That I was worthy.
Too late now. The clock was ticking.
No…the clocks were ticking, plural.
“Do you…hear that?” Cook whispered—the first time I’d heard him speak since he said his name at the dining table.
And, yes, we did. All of us.
“Guys, what in Time’s Teeth…”
I closed my eyes, focused on my ears. It was not clocks ticking like I thought—it was footfalls. Someone was running, and they were running fast, and they were getting closer and closer, and—
“Here they come!” someone shouted.
My eyes were open, my knives raised. Whatever was coming, I was ready for it. For teeth and claws, I was as ready as the next second.
And then it came.
The sound.
No more air in my lungs. The sound of those footfalls rushed right through us, and beyond. Just the sound without the actual creatures. Just the sound that faded away somewhere outside the forest.
We looked at one another, more terrified, more confused. What in Time’s Temper is happening?!
“There!”
March’s voice was like magic pulling my eyes to him. He had his spear pointed forward, toward the trees, and he was a few steps ahead of the rest of us.
I moved, too. Got closer, deeper into the forest, until I began to see what he was pointing at—the metal shining under the lanterns half hidden behind leaves.
“I’ll be damned…” someone said when we came into a clearing, less illuminated because there were no branches to hold those lanterns above it, only the dark sky and the few stars scattered across it.
There was still plenty of light to see the bodies, though.
Bile rose up my throat. Teeth, blood, grass. I let go of one knife and brought my hand to my mouth just in time before I threw up in front of all of them.
Clockbeasts.
Bodies of clockbeasts were sprawled all over the forest floor, their dark blood fresh as if it had just been spilled. I turned around, eyes squeezed shut, swallowed and swallowed until I didn’t feel like I might throw up my entire being out my mouth by accident.
The flashes—they had been real.
Sparetime save me, it was all real.
“Eyes ahead,” a voice called, the only one that could make me turn to look. March continued, “They’re…dead. All of them. None are moving.”
“How many?” asked someone.
“How big!”
“What killed them?”
“So much blood…”
A lot of dead clockbeasts were here in this clearing, though I couldn’t tell you the exact number. They looked just like we’d learned in school, scarier than the scary bedtime stories Father used to tell me and Jinx when Mother wasn’t around to hear.
They were chronovores—one of two creatures in the entire realm that fed on time, magic-ridden animals whose biological makeup had been altered, either by a spell or by natural magic sources.
They could not die naturally. In order to control them—and to give them an expiration date—the Timekeepers built special clocks and put them in their bodies to tie their time to their hands.
Father told us stories about evil men and women who raised armies of clockbeasts to try to eat all the time in the Great Clock, but in the real world, these beasts were mostly used by Diamonds to help with Sparetime harvesting.
They could carry a lot of weight, and with the Timekeeper Clocks on their bodies, they were tame and easy to control.
But if whoever made those clocks didn’t want them tame and didn’t want them controlled…
The most important question fell from Helen’s lips a second later: “What now? They’re already dead.”
And Mimi said in a shaking voice, “Did we…did we do this?”
My eyes found those of March as if his were a magnet. Whatever he was almost thinking, I was almost thinking it, too. A second too early, or too late, but never on time.
“We did,” Russ said, going closer to the beasts, touching one with the tip of his sword. “We must have. We all know how to do it.”
Except I didn’t. I’d never killed anything before. Jinx refused to even let me kill the flies trapped in our room—she held the window open and sang for them until they flew out.
“So…” Again, Helen shook her head. “What now?”
“Simple,” March said. “Now, we unkill them.”
We looked at him, all of us this time. “Unkill clockbeasts? Are you serious?” Erith shrieked.
“You heard the speaker,” Russ said reluctantly.
“But what if they attack us?!” Mimi said.
She’d strapped on more weapons than anyone, and she seemed to be able to carry them without breaking a sweat, even though her frame was even more petite than mine.
She was a Club, after all, and Father once told me they sparred for five hours every single day.
It was one of their preferred ways to keep moving.
“They won’t,” said Reggie. “Otherwise, there would be no other option. March is right—they have obviously been killed. Look at the blood.” Blood, blood, blood—except in my head I saw another image, of all that blood on me, too.
Not just the grass, but my hands, my chest, my legs, my face—everywhere, blood.
“If we won the trial, that means we killed them, and the speaker said we have to un everything. So, we unkill them.” He fidgeted with the back of his suit for a second, then pulled out a small leather pouch—his was green.
“You guys got one of these, didn’t you?”
We were all moving, putting our weapons away and reaching for the leather pouches. Inside, there was a screwdriver set, a round loupe, tweezers, a wrench, and a spring bar tool with a built-in ruler.
Everything one would need to fix any kind of a clock—with a bit of magic, of course.
“So, we fix them,” Helen said, looking at her red pouch.
“We fix them,” Reggie repeated with a nod.
“And the wounds?” Mimi wondered.
“They don’t die from wounds. Only broken clocks,” I said before I could help myself. It was a thought—my father’s words slipping through my lips by accident.
“Right,” she said, nodding her head too many times. “So, we…fix the clocks, and unkill them, and…”
“We unwin the trial, most likely,” Russ said. “Come on, let’s get on with it. Tick-tock.”
He fell on his knees in front of the closest clockbeast, with his pouch open there by his side, then stopped again.
“I can’t see anything.”
“Try magicking light,” Anika said, moving closer. “I tried it in the bedroom yesterday—look.”
She raised her hand and a blink later, silver smoke rose from her skin and revealed a white light burning in the center of her palm—which impressed the others a great deal.
“How? I thought you said you’re eighteen!” Erith said, smiling widely as she watched the light.
“I am! It’s this place,” Anika said. “It’s the Life Clocks.”
Now that was certainly curious.
“You’re joking,” Russ said, and immediately reached for his Life Clock.
Magic use spent time—nothing new there. All Clockfolk could do magic, use the time in a chronobank as energy—after we finished the two-year program in the School of Magic.
Some people could do basic tricks long before they were of age, some couldn’t.
Jinx could, but never me. I felt my magic like a presence, a buzzing in my chest, and Mother and Father had tried to teach me at home plenty of times, but I could never get it to work as it should.
It’s why we had chronobanks in the first place, and why Sparetime was so important—if not for it, we had to use our own time, our own life to do magic, and we obviously couldn’t do that. With the way the Clockfolk liked their magic tricks, nobody would live past a week.
“Holy Hour, look at that!”
Both Russ and Erith had white light in the palms of their hands now, too.
My blood rushed, the excitement mixed in with the fear.
“It works! Our magic works!”
“Try it, guys, c’mon!”
“It’s easy, like I’ve done this a million times before!” The smile on Anika’s face left no room for doubt.
Diamonds manipulated light with ease. It’s how they were able to compress Sparetime into the crystals used in chronobanks—but these three of them were far too young to master it quite so seamlessly.
And the others, too.