Chapter 21
The panic attack was coming. I felt it simmering under the surface of my deepest, darkest thoughts, and I tried to think about everything and anything else, but it wasn’t working.
We were in front of the gates to the coming trial, and our own bodies trapped us here.
Our own bodies would walk through those gates when they opened, and they wouldn’t care about our will at all.
A few of the Hands cried.
I wished I could let it all out with tears, too, but instead my hands were shaking and sweaty; my eyes barely blinked, dry; all the voices around us came at me like an echo; my lips were perfectly numb, and no matter how hard I breathed, my lungs never filled as they should.
There was not enough air in the world today.
I think I’m going to be dead.
Reggie’s face made everything worse, and then Silas was there, too, right next to his. My mind was not my own, just like my body.
And the people kept applauding.
We were in the arena again, right where we had been last time, except today there was no forest here. All the trees had disappeared, and in their stead were these large golden gates with only raw darkness behind them, and that’s where they were going to force us to go.
In there, in that darkness.
Elida the Royal Timekeeper was the only one with us today. No White Queen, and we couldn’t see through the shimmery veil that hid away the box where the Red Queen had been standing the last time.
No soldiers brought us weapons, either.
Someone spoke—that booming voice enhanced by magic so that I felt it vibrating in my very bones.
Time’s Temper, I was sweating like a pig.
“Hear, hear—welcome, Your High Timenesses, our lovely guests! And welcome to your second Backward Turning Trial, Hands! It is your pleasure, as it is ours, to be here this fine day!”
More applause. More cheering. I swallowed hard and looked back at the crowd of people.
Had they any idea what really went on here? What lies were they told? Did they know what we couldn’t even call out to them, that we couldn’t refuse to enter the trial?
Did they even care?
Had Mother and Father made an effort to come here and see me themselves?
My eyes searched the blurry faces, though I knew two things for certain—they were too far away to see with any clarity, and the answer to my last question was no.
“Your second trial begins at the turn of this breath, and the grains are already falling,” said the speaker—and next I tried to figure out where he was sitting, too. Who was speaking? And why was his voice so irritating?
Too far. Everything was too far away, except Elida, who might be shaking worse than us as she stood there with her back turned to the gates, a plastic smile on her face, and bloodshot eyes that moved far too fast from one side of the arena to the other.
“You’ll surely find scattered remains of time in this trial, fragments of hours that no longer belong to anyone, and in appearance, your task is quite simple, dearest Hands.”
I held my breath, listened together with all the others. Down the line, March looked at me for a second where he stood with his hands fisted and his chin up.
“Assemble a working clock before the final grain drops—but I am so happy to say that that is not all.”
I licked my lips and released a long breath. Assemble a working clock. Easy. I’d done it a hundred times before.
And then the speaker said, “You must beware the Thirteenth Hour, though. You must tiptoe around it—careful, careful, slow!” The sound of boos from the audience. “For should you awaken it, the trial will surely end…and so will you.”
Laughter.
Cheers.
Applause.
I was going to be sick.
“Precision is your downfall, overconfidence is your ally—or was it the other way around? Ha-ha-ha,” the voice shouted, and I swallowed down the bile as fast as I could.
“I must warn you, though: mind your fingers and your fear—both have been lost here before,” the booming voice claimed. “The Labyrinth remembers every mistake you make within these walls. Work swiftly. Work wisely. Time is your material, your weapon, and your judge. And now…”
A lock turned somewhere ahead. Metal ground as gears shifted underneath our feet.
This is it, this is it, this is it…
“You may enter, Hands. Enter, and do us proud! Every man, woman and child in our realm today wishes you good-timing.”
Screams from the other Hands, but nobody heard from the applause and the cheering.
“Keep your composure! Keep your composure!” Elida cried as she clapped her hands furiously and stepped to the side. “I will see you when you’re done. Be brave!”
Screams—Helen, Russ, Anika. They called for the White Queen, they called for Time, they called for someone to stop this at once!
Nobody did. Nobody cared.
The gates were wide open, and trumpets sounded in the distance. Our legs moved, even though none of us wanted them to. Together, we took one step after the other into the darkness beyond the gates, wondering where the trees went, where the forest was, where all those clockbeasts had gone.
Where Reggie had ended up if the tea party was no longer taking place here…
Tears in my eyes but they didn’t spill. My teeth were gritted and my hands in fists, my ears full of cheers and applause.
Sparetime save me, I thought as I inched closer and closer to the darkness like it was the mouth of a gigantic monster.
A moment later, it swallowed me whole.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…
Hands turned somewhere in the distance, two seconds fast, another three far too slow to be considered a second.
The sound of my footsteps echoed together with it, sharp, precise.
There was only darkness, and only one way to go—ahead.
The sun had been shining outside, the time a little before four, but the sunlight didn’t reach through these thick dark clouds, it seemed.
Then I saw something pulsating in the distance.
No cheering or applauding made it through to my ears anymore. The other Hands had disappeared, too. March was gone. I was all alone.
It made sense to go for the pulsating light, so that’s where I went. Shaking, sweating, swallowing bile, I made it closer and closer until the darkness began to fade away little by little.
Until I saw the silhouettes of the two other Hands who’d made it out of the dark clouds and onto the black tiles underneath our feet.
“What in the Everstill is that?” Helen asked, finger pointed at the small round lights that pulsed like a beating heart or a ticking clock.
Below them, there were thirteen large hourglasses on the tiled floor, five of them broken.
The others came through the darkness in the next minute, eyes wide open, on the lights. We had all followed them, and now we were in the middle of nowhere.
“There are no walls,” Seth said from farther to my right as he stepped closer to the hourglasses.
“No—there are. They’re just hiding in the dark,” said March, his voice vibrating throughout me as if his lips were against my skin.
Red velvet, my mind whispered, and my cheeks heated up.
Luckily, there was no time for silly thoughts here. They were all approaching the hourglasses, and I reluctantly followed. The sooner we were done with this trial, the sooner we’d get out. There was no other way out but through.
March could be right. Behind those hourglasses that were set in a perfect oval shape, there was only darkness—a black, all-consuming cloud that could very well be hiding the walls, just like it had hidden us from one another until we came out the other side.
But the walls didn’t matter—we couldn’t break them if we tried.
“It’s a clock,” Erith said as she looked around. “It’s a twelve-hour clock.”
Not exactly—because we could all see the hourglass in the very middle of the room, the one that was whole, but empty.
“The Thirteenth Hour,” someone whispered, and the words echoed to eternity.
The Thirteenth Hour was a myth, something each and every one of us had heard about as children from our parents or siblings to get us to behave.
It was the hour that didn’t belong on any clock, the extra slice of time that existed only when something went terribly, terribly wrong.
If we stayed up late or touched things we weren’t supposed to, the hidden hour would open like a mouth and swallow us together with all the seconds and minutes and memories of our lives.
We grew out of it when we grew up, of course. There was no such a thing as the Thirteenth Hour. The Great White Rabbit had ordered time into twelve hours for a reason.
Except here, apparently. There were thirteen hourglasses in this endless room set with shadows and dark tiles, and no matter how many times we counted the hourglasses, the number didn’t change.
“How strange,” said one or the other, as we all walked around to inspect the structures.
It was strange, indeed. The bulbs stood on platforms made of black stone, identical to the tiles underneath our feet.
Dust on the floor so that our footprints remained everywhere we walked.
Cobwebs between the platforms, attached to the glass of the bulbs.
There was a large bat and a long piece of wood discarded on the floor.
The blinking lights overhead were threatening to give me a headache, but I tried to focus as best as I could.
There were numbers engraved on the platforms below the bulbs, which reached a bit higher than my knees.
The bulbs themselves were full of timesand at the bottom, and the tip of them reached over my head.
The numbers marked the hours, and the one in the middle clearly said 13.
The hours that were broken were 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12.
I had no idea what that meant, but the glass of the bulbs was in pieces, and the sand had spilled out of the platform and onto the floor.
I went closer to inspect it as the timesand shimmered slightly under the lights.