Chapter 29
We sat on the floor, all of us speechless for a good while, looking about at the silent hourglasses.
It had stopped. The Seventh Hour had stopped pouring timesand into the thirteenth, and all the hourglasses had gone dark and silent for the past few minutes.
“So…does that mean it’s over?” asked Helen.
“No. We’d have been shown outside by now,” Russ said.
“So what next? There’s timesand in the Thirteenth Hour, but we’re not dead yet.” A pause. “Right?” Mimi looked at us like she genuinely expected an answer—but how could I blame her? The way things went around here, it wouldn’t surprise me if we were, in fact, dead, and hadn’t realized it yet.
“We’re alive,” Silas said. “And we still have two more hourglasses to break. We just have to figure out which ones.”
“It’s impossible when the sequences keep rerouting,” Levana said. “First it was the Twelfth, then the Eleventh, then the Tenth—before it hopped back to the Seventh.”
She was right, it didn’t make much sense.
“We need to study whatever mechanism is making this happen,” said March, slamming a fist against the tiles he sat on. Whatever machinery was underneath us, we heard it moving and groaning all the time. It was unnerving.
I looked at him where he sat just a foot away from me. He’d come to stand right by me when he thought we were going to die, and that did…something to me. Something strange I couldn’t really point out.
All I knew was that it made me feel powerful.
“But what if it kills us halfway?” Erith wondered.
“It won’t,” said Reggie. “They wouldn’t kill us right away—they know we’ll need a moment to figure it out.” I really hoped he was right.
Then the First Hour lit up again.
This time, none of us moved. This time we held on tightly to our legs against our chests, and we watched with our breaths held as the colors changed, and the notes climbed higher and higher.
Some even closed their eyes, squeezed them shut when the Sixth Hour lit up, waiting for the Seventh. I tried to listen closely, tried to understand the sequence Levana and Cook spoke about but it all sounded nice to me. Just higher note after higher note after higher note…
Then the Seventh went dark and silent, and the Eighth Hour lit up.
The lid opened. The timesand flew right into the thirteenth.
We had to endure about fifteen seconds of that awful humming and that awful brown light that came from below the bulb. Once again, the thought that I was about to die any second consumed me completely—but I didn’t. I didn’t die.
The Thirteenth Hour took all the timesand it was going to take, then fell silent.
The entire room fell silent.
“It’s rerouting again,” Cook said, and this we already knew.
“Safe to say interruption at the right points is the only thing to stop this from lighting up,” said Levana, pointing at the broken hourglasses, then flinching at the one in the middle.
“That means we need to destroy more,” said Russ.
“Maybe we’re not supposed to be smashing the hourglasses,” said Seth. “I don’t see how destroying them is going to help with anything.”
“Destruction can be just as precise as creation if done right,” Silas said, his eyes calculating as they hopped from one hourglass to the next.
Cook suddenly stood up and started pacing around us. “It’s thirds—we know it’s thirds. So we should break the Seventh Hour first. Cut the chain earlier that way.”
“No—we break the sixth,” Levana said. “You break the center, the whole thing collapses.”
“Except if the whole thing collapses, so do we,” Mimi reminded her. “We can only break five of these.”
I thought about it for a second. “What if we break the First?” It seemed like a pretty good idea to me. “If the beginning never starts, how will the sequence finish?”
“The sequence doesn’t start at the First Hour, though,” said Reggie. “Right?”
“Right,” Cook said with a sigh.
Then the First Hour lit up again.
We held on tight. We watched with eyes wide open, flinches on our faces every time a new note filled our ears. Nobody made a single sound—we only watched and listened.
This time around, it was the Ninth Hour that poured timesand into the Thirteenth—which threw us off once more.
For those fifteen seconds while it groaned like a damn monster feeding on that sand, I kept my eyes closed and tried to control my breathing. Not going to die, not going to die, not going to die, I chanted to myself.
And I didn’t this time, either.
But there was a lot of sand inside the Thirteenth Hour now, grain by little grain slipping down to the bottom. How much more would it take before it killed us?
I really didn’t want to find out.
“There has to be a clear answer,” Anika shouted, slammed her hands against the floor. “You hear me? What’s the CLEAR ANSWER?!”
She screamed the words at the darkness above, even knowing there would be no answer. Still, I envied her for letting out some of the tension, at least.
“Did you hear that?” said Levana all of a sudden—and she was looking at Cook. A second later, she stood up, too—and she went to the Ninth Hour. “That wasn’t a completion. It was a substitute.”
Cook went closer with a frown, and the rest of us slowly began to stand up, too, go closer. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means the clock is…adjusting, most likely. Compensating for the broken hours,” Silas said, scratching his chin.
“We know this already—it’s rerouting the end,” said March.
“But it’s choosing the nearest intact option to compensate,” said Silas.
When I went closer, I saw how he was sweating. How his hands were shaking slightly.
All of them were the same, too—sweating, pale, panicked, about to be sick. Only natural, I assumed, since this really didn’t look like it would have a good ending for us so far, so of course they were stressed out.
Except me. Not entirely sure why. Not because of them, of course, but didn’t I care about what happened to me?
Not so much, apparently. Not nearly as much as I’d have thought.
Cook’s eyes widened. “That means if we break the Seventh—”
“It’ll shove the ending into the Eighth Hour,” Levana finished.
We paused, looked around.
“I feel like we’re thinking about this wrong,” Silas muttered. “If we break the Sixth, it will most likely activate the Ninth.”
“Can’t they just let us break the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth, too?!” Mimi said. “C’mon—we’re going to die here if we don’t break them!”
She, too, knew that shouting at the darkness over our heads wasn’t going to actually get us an answer—or a free pass out of this trial, but she still did it with all her strength.
“We’re trying to stop the sequences,” I said, fighting back the headache that was developing in my temples as I tried to wring my mind for ideas. “What if we don’t?”
“Yes,” Levana whispered. “What if we just stop them from finishing?”
“But how?” asked Cook. “All three of them are lighting up—how?”
As if on cue, the First Hour lit up again, and the melody started once more.
Mimi screamed in frustration. The rest of us were paralyzed in place, waiting, watching, listening.
This time, though, I focused more on the others than myself.
While the notes played, I thought about what they were thinking, how terrified they were, how they were just waiting to die—and it helped.
My muscles weren’t as clenched and my heart didn’t beat as fast.
Then the Seventh Hour lit up and fed the thirteenth more and more timesand, while the rest of us gritted our teeth and waited for it to be over.
It was. The Eighth Hour lit up, and the ninth—but there was no more silence in the room. Instead the Thirteenth Hour continued to hum lowly, the brown light coming from inside it just barely there.
It was indeed coming to life.
I swallowed hard. “If we break one, it completes the sequence through the other. There’s no winning here—it will just complete itself one way or the other.”
“Unless…” Silas said, eyes closed, his hand raised up as if he were testing the temperature in the air. “Unless we don’t break just one.”
“What do you mean?” asked Levana.
“We only have two more left to break,” March said.
Silas looked at the remaining hourglasses, then back at them. “We only have two left.”
“This clock isn’t linear,” Cook said.
“Exactly—it’s self-correcting! There’s no way to know the right answer,” said Levana, unshed tears glistening in her eyes.
“Just hear me out,” said Silas. “Breaking earlier hours makes it worse. I think this works like any Timekeeper Clock infused with magic. All systems are designed the same way—when damaged, they try to reroute.”
“Yes—when we broke the obvious choices, the system looked for the closest intact hour,” Levana said.
“Except…” Cook’s voice trailed off for a moment as he looked ahead at nothing, then he said, “The closest intact hour that belongs to the same sequence.”
Silence for a tick.
Then Levana screamed at the top of her lungs, and she jumped and kissed Cook’s cheek.
Suddenly all the blood in his body went to his face.
“Correct!” Levana cheered, the glistening in her eyes transformed now that she was smiling.
“It’s simple mathematics,” Silas said, breaking away from the group just as the First Hour lit up again.
My heart fell all the way to my heels. There was nothing simple about this. This is it, this is the last time! shouted a voice in my head.
I threw a look at the bulb of the Thirteenth Hour. A little more timesand, and it was going to flip to the other side, and then we—
No. I would not indulge in that thought. Not yet.
“Simple mathematics—breaking earlier hours will make it worse. What we need is to find the closest substitutes for each sequence,” Silas continued.
“The first was the third-sixth-ninth, and ended with the Twelfth Hour,” said Levana.
I went closer to the Tenth Hour, to its timesand that had spilled all over the floor, and I wrote the numbers on it with my finger, just in case we forgot.
“But I don’t think this clock wants the highest hour—Lev, you heard it, right?” Cook said. “It finishes with the last note that still matches.”
“I did, I did,” Levana said, nodding too many times.
“So…the Ninth Hour, then?” I wondered, because that seemed logical, considering.
Both of them shook their heads.
“If we break the Ninth, it will just force the system to compress downward again,” Cook said.
“It will make the Eighth the new finishing line, won’t it?”
Now my brain hurt. “But do all of them still match?”
“They do—the seventh, eighth and ninth lit up, and…” Levana turned, watched the Seventh Hour light up right that second, and…it didn’t give its sand to the Thirteenth Hour.
The Eighth did.
Holy Hour, they were really taking turns.
“Seventh and Eighth,” Silas said. “If we break the Ninth, the system resets. But the Ninth is isolated from above already…” he pointed at the three broken hourglasses.
“If we break the Eighth and the Seventh, the sequences can still begin, but they can’t complete.
Completion is what feeds the Thirteenth Hour. ”
The others looked just as clueless as me, but Cook and Levana seemed to get it.
“Makes sense. You’re right—it makes sense,” Cook said. “We basically break the last place the sequence can still finish.”
To me, it felt pretty counterintuitive, but I pulled my lips inside my mouth and kept quiet.
The First Hour lit up—this time right away. Right after the Thirteenth stopped taking the timesand of the Eighth.
“Guys, we don’t have time,” Mimi shouted. “Are you sure?! Absolutely, twelve-hours certain that this is the right answer?”
All eyes turned to the three of them.
“Silas?” Levana whispered, and I jumped to my feet, shaking.
Because this really was the last time before everything went to shit. Before the Thirteenth Hour came to life for good, and we all died. In here, surrounded by this darkness. It was it.
“Yes,” Silas choked, and you could see it written everywhere on his face that he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure. Nobody was. “Yes. The Seventh and Eighth Hour. I’m sure.”
Sweat on all our brows. The seconds ticked, and the Fifth Hour chimed, and the panic grew and grew.
Then Reggie said, “Let’s get to it, then. Red?”
“I’m in,” said March.
A blink, and they were both heading toward the hourglasses, March with that piece of wood in his hand that Anika had made, and Reggie with the bat.
The Sixth Hour lit up, and we all watched together as they went closer and closer, prayed they hurried and prayed they stalled—because what if it was the wrong answer?
What if, what if, what if?!
March and Reggie didn’t hesitate. Before the Sixth Hour stopped chiming, they both broke the glasses of the Seventh and Eighth Hour at the same time.
The sound of glass breaking took my breath away. I closed my eyes, pressed my hands over my ears. If this was really the end, I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to know.
Silence in the room.
A tick, then three and five.
The Ninth Hour lit up and sounded its note. It vibrated through my body like it was hoping to stick to my bones and possess me.
The Thirteenth Hour behind us fell silent.
I opened my eyes to find most of the others had closed theirs, too. Had wrapped their arms around their heads.
“Is it over yet?” Silas whispered from my side, face slick with sweat, eyes wide open.
“I don’t know,” I said, just as something moved in the distance, behind the hourglasses.
A light shone in the darkness like a beacon, and something heavy moved against the floor. Something that sounded like a door opening.
“Scratch that,” I said in half a whisper. “It is.”
Even so, I didn’t believe in my own words until we were all running together toward that light. Until we found ourselves under the blue sky again, and until the sound of the cheering crowd drowned out all my panic and all the voices in my head.