Chapter 28 #2
The sound of the audience cheering and clapping didn’t reach us here, either. It was like we’d walked into a different world altogether, but the darkness didn’t last as long as I expected. Soon, I saw the light ahead, and my legs carried me forward faster on instinct.
Before I knew it, the strangest room I’d ever seen was in front of me, and it was walled in by those same shadows, nothing else.
“Holy Hour. What is this place?” Helen.
Half the others had made it out the darkness, too, and the rest weren’t far behind. It looked like we were going to play this game together, after all.
I tried not to feel relief—I was better off on my own, wasn’t I?—but I failed. Considering what the first and second trials had been, I was glad I wouldn’t have to go through this alone.
This being a room set with big and shiny black tiles, four lanterns at the top of these thin lampposts—and hourglasses bigger than my body.
I stepped in closer with the rest of the Hands.
Thirteen hourglasses were around us, set in a perfect oval shape—except the biggest one, which stood in the very middle.
“A twelve-hour clock,” said Erith, and her voice echoed a little in the darkness.
“There’s thirteen of them,” said Seth, and most of us were looking at the hourglass in the very middle, the only one that was empty. The others all had cream-colored timesand in the bulbs, but this one didn’t.
“The Thirteenth Hour,” March said, and the sound of his voice sent shivers all over my body. Good thing the suit covered me completely so nobody could see. That way I could pretend it didn’t happen, too.
But he was right—the hourglass in the middle, the biggest one of all, was supposed to be the Thirteenth Hour in this place, and according to Johnny the speaker, our job was to not awaken it, however it worked.
The bulbs stood on platforms made of black stone that were the same as the tiles on the floor. Cut precisely, polished to a sheen. Numbers were engraved on the surface, right below the bulbs, about level with my thighs. They marked the hours, and the one in the middle clearly said 13.
“Okay, so…what now?” Mimi asked. “What—”
The sound that suddenly came from underneath our feet cut her off.
Most of us screamed as we jumped back, as the sound of something moving under the floor became louder—wheels turning and gears shifting.
“Time’s Trousers—what is happening?!” someone shouted.
Then the bulbs moved, all twelve at once. They turned over, and the timesand in them began to fall down, grain by little grain—but that wasn’t all. Bright colors, green, yellow and blue, lit up the First Hour to our right from somewhere inside the stone platform below the bulb.
With light came the sound, too. A single note—something like a chime but different.
We waited, hearts in our throats, and when it faded, pink and purple and red lit up the Second Hour, and the note that came from it was slightly higher.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Surrounded by the darkness, it was absolutely breathtaking the way the lights fell on the hourglasses, the way the melody began to shape itself, rising higher still with the Third Hour.
The other Hands laughed. We all watched in awe as the hourglasses lit up one after the other, and the notes followed, creating such a beautiful melody. They were all smiling, eyes glazed over—except March.
He was standing there with his back turned to the Thirteenth Hour, the suspicion thick in his eyes—like he was just waiting for the ground to break and swallow us.
But the ground didn’t break.
Instead, when the Twelfth Hour lit up, everything changed.
The high note rang in my ears, and it ended with a sudden screeching sound—of metal sliding over metal. Of something being pulled open.
It was coming from the top of the Twelfth Hour that we could not see—but we did see it when the timesand inside the bulb began to rise in the air.
Nobody laughed anymore. Nobody even smiled as we watched the timesand move from the Twelfth Hour, travel in the air over our heads, and to the middle of the room—like each grain was being pulled by invisible strings.
It went straight into the top of the Thirteenth Hour.
Its top must have been open, too, because the timesand poured right into the bulb, and the grains began to fall to the bottom.
A loud noise made us all fall back, and the Thirteenth Hour lit up with a deep brown color. The note of it was wrong. A low hum, dark and twisted—so damn wrong.
There was no doubt in my mind of what that meant. It was awake. The Thirteenth Hour was very much awake.
“Stop it! Somebody stop it!” one of the girls shouted, and then someone was running.
Seth—and he had a bat in his hands I’d never seen before, and he screamed at the top of his lungs before he slammed it to the bulb of the Twelfth Hour with all his strength.
The sound of glass breaking shook me to my core. It was like a slap to my face, pulling me into reality, because it felt like I had been struck in a dream just now.
Glass broke, and that awful humming stopped, and no more timesand floated into the air anymore.
All that had been in the Twelfth Hour was now on the floor, and Seth was running with his bat raised toward the Thirteenth Hour, too, except when he hit the bulb, it didn’t break.
The bat simply bounced back like the thing wasn’t made out of glass at all.
Again and again, Seth hit it, until March went to take the bat out of his hands.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough—it’s not going to break.”
Seth stepped back, breathing like he’d been racing for hours, face covered in sweat.
Silence for a tick.
“Is it over?” Russ asked.
A full second didn’t pass before the First Hour lit up again.
We all had gathered away from the thirteenth, close to the sixth, on instinct. Our eyes moved in unison, and nobody found the melody or the colors beautiful anymore as they changed from one hourglass to the next—until the Eleventh Hour lit up.
Whatever machine was underneath the tiles groaned a little louder.
The timesand from the Eleventh Hour started climbing up in the air, and pouring right into the Thirteenth.
This time it was Anika who ran, and I barely saw a flash of white in her hands before a long piece of wood appeared in her fists. Not a bat but just as long and just as thick.
“Anika—no!” Silas shouted, but she was already slamming the wood onto the bulb of the Eleventh Hour, and it broke just as easily as the Twelfth.
The Thirteenth Hour had just lit up with brown, had started humming that awful sound that made my gut twist, when it stopped again.
No more timesand in the air.
It was all happening way too fast, and too slow for me at the same time. My thoughts were scattered, my heart slamming against my ribcage, and I had no idea what to expect from the next second.
Time’s Teeth, it felt like I was suffocating on thin air and I wasn’t even realizing it.
“Guys, this is bad,” Seth said.
“What in the world are they trying to do—kill us for real?!” Erith.
“Why are the other hourglasses filling up the Thirteenth? How are we going to break this thing?!”
Mimi had Seth’s bat in her hands as she went for the bulb again, and Anika joined her. They both screamed and slammed their weapons onto the glass, and I’ll admit I was a little hopeful that it would break.
I’ll admit I was a little hopeful that it would be easy, that all this panic that had built up in me was silly.
It wasn’t, though.
Not a scratch on the bulb’s surface, no matter how many times the girls hit it. It was definitely not made of mere glass.
“Stop it,” Silas then said. “Breaking that bulb isn’t how we win the game. We have to focus. We have to think.”
“Except there’s no time,” March said, just as the First Hour lit up again, and the sound of it made us all flinch. “There’s no time—they’re doing it again!”
“Think, everyone—think!” Levana urged us, pacing ahead toward the Twelfth Hour, looking about as if she really thought the answer would be hiding somewhere nearby.
But it beat standing there and waiting for the thirteenth to come alive again, and so most of us were already doing the same, searching with our eyes, walking around the hourglasses.
There was nothing there.
“It’s doing it again!” someone shouted.
My heart about exploded in my chest. I was running, searching for a solution, but my senses were overwhelmed with the pulsating lights and the sound that came from each hourglass, and I knew exactly what happened at the end.
The Thirteenth Hour groaned, lit up, hummed that awful, distorted sound.
The timesand from the Tenth Hour poured into it slowly, like it had all the time in the world.
“Break it—break it now!” shouted Helen, and at the same time Silas said, “No, don’t!”
But Russ and Anika were at it already, and the glass of the Tenth Hour broke to pieces.
Glass and sand all over the floor, and the Thirteenth Hour fell dark and silent.
March strode over to the Diamonds and grabbed their weapons, the bat and the piece of wood, and threw them to the side. “Five,” he shouted, raising up five fingers. “We can only break five hourglasses. Stop!”
Holy Hour, he was right. The speaker said so—we were only allowed to take five hours, no more.
“Then how?!” Mimi demanded. “How are we going to stop this—it’s coming on again and again!”
“It’s a sequence,” Cook said, and all of us turned to look at him.
The next second, the First Hour lit up again.
Shivers crawled down my back. Make it stop—make it stop—make it stop…
“What sequence?” asked one or the other as Cook came closer, eyes on the hourglasses.
“It’s a sound sequence. The first time around, the notes of Hour Three, Six, Nine and Twelve were in perfect sync,” he said. “The second time, when the Twelfth Hour broke, it was Hours Two, Five, Eight and Eleven.”
“He’s right.” Levana’s eyes were closed as she tried to tune out the note of the Third Hour that was now chiming again— “I know music, too. Those notes aligned perfectly. They belong in the same flow, and…”
She opened her eyes, and raised her hand toward the hourglasses as they continued to light up and make that melody.
“It’s rerouting,” Cook said. “Now that those hourglasses are broken, the sound is rerouting.”
“It’s a third-step,” Levana whispered. “The sequences are building by stepping three hours forward.”
I shook my head—I didn’t know anything about music. Jinx had. She’d loved the piano, had played it relentlessly every single day, had always been on stage for every school celebration—but I’d never even had an ear for it. I liked my lead and my paper. I understood it. This I had no clue about.
“So what now?” I asked. “How do we know which sequence will be building next?!”
“There!” Cook said, pointing both hands at the Seventh Hour as it lit up.
“It still has two more hours to go,” Erith said—but it didn’t.
The lid of the seventh opened, and the sand began to climb out of it, and straight into the Thirteenth Hour.
“Do not break the seventh!” Silas shouted, running to get to the front of it. “Everybody—stand down!”
They all shouted their complaints—and I was tempted to argue, too.
“The Thirteenth Hour is filling up!”
“If it awakens, we all die! Didn’t you hear the Timekeeper?”
“How else are we going to stop the timesand?”
“What if it kills us all right now?!”
“We won’t know unless we see how the sequences are being built,” Silas insisted. “We won’t know unless we pay attention! Listen—wasn’t that what Johnny said, too? Listen closely!”
He had, in fact. Sound here has been arranged with care—listen closely—those had been the speaker’s words.
We all stopped as we replayed the memory in our minds. It was the sounds, indeed. Levana and Cook were right—it was all a sound sequence.
Which sucked, because I saw no way out of this. I was completely hopeless as I watched the timesand float with such precision from the Seventh Hour and into the Thirteenth.
There was no doubt in my mind in those moments—I was going to die. The Thirteenth Hour was indeed going to be the death of me, like I’d genuinely believed when I was four or five years old, and I first heard of it from Jinx.
In the back of my mind, this annoying voice claimed that she would have known what to do if she were in my place. If her time hadn’t been cut short. If her heart hadn’t just rushed so fucking much to get to the finish line.
If Jinx were here, she would have been all right.
My eyes closed. I felt a presence just there at my side, and I knew it was March, even though I wasn’t looking. I knew how he felt, the space he took. Maybe I’d spent more time analyzing him than I’d realized, but I knew he was right beside me.
“Guys…” someone whispered—couldn’t tell who, but we all felt the same way she sounded. We were all waiting to die.
Then the Thirteenth Hour stopped humming.