Chapter 43
The game gave us our youth back. I’d have never noticed if I hadn’t seen the others simply snap back to the way they were before. And when I looked down at my hands, I found no more wrinkles on my skin. None.
Nobody was happy about it, though. Nobody even mentioned it because now was not the time.
So we ran.
Reggie was no longer shouting and the others were no longer crying.
I was no longer shaking, either, only focused on my legs, trying to get them to move faster so we could get out of that place for good. We’d baked the hour. The clocks had moved. Time was no longer stuck.
And the host was dead, swallowed by the forest floor.
Then we saw the boxes.
More light slipped through the canopy here. Maybe the sun had already climbed up in the sky all the way, because there was enough light for us to see the four wooden boxes abandoned there on the floor.
We’d started running back in the direction we’d come from when the clocks turned at the tea party.
Come to think of it, by now we should have been out in the arena, but we weren’t.
Instead these boxes were just…there.
“The second part,” said Levana in a shaky voice.
Realization hit me like a fist to the face. The White Queen had already told us that the fourth trial would have two parts. We were only done with the first.
“FUCK!” shouted Seth. “I don’t want another game! Let me out of here, you fuckers! Let us all out!”
I shared his sentiment, I really did. But things were as they were, and shouting at the canopy wasn’t going to get us anywhere, so I joined the others who’d gone to open the boxes to see what was inside.
I expected a lot of things.
Weapons was not one of them.
“What in the Everstill…” March whispered as he pulled out a sword from the box nearest us. I reached in and grabbed a handle wrapped up in leather—a dagger with two tips, the middle of the blade as thick as my palm. Curved. Perfect.
“You guys, what…what is this?” someone asked from farther away as the others went through the boxes. All four carried weapons.
“A fight, maybe?”
“A fight with whom?”
“Maybe each other?”
“You mean like sparring?” Cook asked, which would have made sense considering Asha and Hector had made us spar the past three days—and that was exactly why I knew this wasn’t it. If something made sense in the Labyrinth, it couldn’t possibly be the right way.
I was proven right the next second.
The sound came first—like thunder in the distance. It came at us like a wave, and then the ground beneath our feet began to shake.
“Watch out!” someone called as we all instinctively gathered in the middle, each of us holding the weapons we’d gotten from those boxes, looking ahead at where the sound was coming from, and…
Footsteps. It was the sound of footsteps—the sound horses made when they galloped, when their hooves slammed fast and hard against the ground, except this somehow sounded worse.
When I first saw the silhouettes, I was tempted to believe my eyes were liars, but they weren’t.
What was in front of us, what was coming for us at full speed, were clockbeasts.
Dream—illusion—not real, not real, not real! I’d take any other explanation other than what my eyes were telling me, because they couldn’t have possibly brought clockbeasts here. No way.
We’d learned about them in school. We’d seen pictures in the books.
Just like timewraiths, they were chronovores, which meant they fed on time—except these were animals, mindless, and they liked to tear through flesh with teeth and claws to get to the time of a person.
They were created on purpose to serve the Clockfolk, mostly the Diamonds for Sparetime harvesting.
They weren’t ordinary animals, though. Their biological makeup was altered either by intentional or natural magic, and clockbeasts could not die naturally.
They could be starved off time, but never actually whither and die.
That’s why the Timekeepers had created clocks specifically for them, to put them in their bodies to both control them and to give them an expiration date.
That was the only way to kill them, too. Through those clocks.
Easier said than done, though. If they bit you, if they sank those teeth into your skin, they could drain all your seconds and minutes and hours just as easily as they could bite your head off.
Clockbeasts—and they hadn’t disappeared yet. Which meant it wasn’t an illusion. Which meant they could very well be real.
Time’s Teeth, they’d really brought clockbeasts in this place together with us—and I was willing to bet anything that no matter how fast or how far we ran, we would never make it out of this forest. Not without fighting first.
So be it, I thought to myself, because my only options were to either sit and sob and wait for them to come kill me, or fight.
This was definitely not an illusion. It most likely wasn’t a dream, either. The panic and the fear would have to wait, because the beasts were coming, at least twenty of them, and I would rather go down swinging.
Something came over me. A scream ripped out of my throat, and I ran as if I wasn’t in charge of my own body at all.
The dagger was in my hand, and when I jumped over one of the boxes and continued ahead, I wasn’t the only one.
Others screamed and ran with me. Better to attack first, than to wait to be eaten, but—
“No, don’t!” someone shouted, just as the first clockbeast jumped in the air and launched right at me.
It was Silas, but the sound of him was drowned out by the adrenaline rushing through my veins when I swung my dagger and cut a clean line on the side of the monster’s body.
Chaos.
All of a sudden, it was like we were thrust into a different world.
The clockbeasts lunged at us with screams like metal rubbing against metal, so much worse than the sound of our sparring in the arena.
I was fighting, moving, completely detached from myself, and I was thankful for it.
My body knew what to do. All those hours training with my father had really done something for me—I didn’t pay attention to how I moved, couldn’t if I tried, yet I was somehow still alive.
The bodies of the clockbeasts folded and twisted at impossible angles. The dagger felt small in my hand and perfect all at once. I slid beneath the razor-sharp teeth of a coming clockbeast and drove the blade upward right into its gut—while someone continued to scream for us to stop.
How ridiculous.
Stop and let these beasts eat us?
I kept on moving, aiming for the clocks on their bodies whenever I could. Around me, the others were fighting, too, screaming, shouting, cursing out loud. March was by my side, holding his own, swinging a sword in one hand, and an axe in the other.
I realized I could use another weapon, too, so when I slammed the butt of the dagger’s handle onto the clock on the side of the clockbeast’s neck, I moved back. It fell on the floor, motionless. Dead.
But I only had another second to reach the boxes, to stick my hand in and grab anything I could reach, before another came at me from the side, jaws wide open.
A knife as big as my hand—that’s what I got.
It was more than enough when I twisted to the left and swung my arm back with all my strength.
The short, thin blade stabbed the clockbeast on the side of its head, and it wailed in pain.
I didn’t hesitate, slammed my elbow into its neck next, then jammed the back of the dagger onto the clock ticking right over its chest, at the base of its long neck.
The clockbeast collapsed into a wet, broken rattle. I was wet, too—with blood. Black blood that had come from the three I’d fought so far, two of them already dead.
No time to feel any kind of relief, though.
The next moment, I heard movement from the side but I turned too late.
Pain sliced a clean line across my thigh where something had grazed me—the sharp claws of a clockbeast that March had just slammed to the ground.
He didn’t hesitate before swinging his axe onto the beast’s face, breaking both its jaw and the clock on the top of its head at once, and—
“STOP!”
Bright blue-green light shot into the air, the kind I’d never seen before.
It was coming from Silas’s hands, shooting toward the canopy.
We all stopped. We all watched in shock, shaking, weapons in hands covered in black blood…
“Stop it—they’re animals! They were programmed. They’re being used—just stop killing! They don’t deserve to die!”
Except it was a bit too late for that. The carcasses of the clockbeasts were everywhere around us. None remained alive.
The scent of blood in the air brought bile up my throat. I looked down at my body, completely covered, and my boots, and the blades of grass that looked almost oiled up but weren’t. This was real grass, and real blood, and real darkness that was wrapped around us.
“But Sy, they were going to eat us,” Mimi whispered—and she was looking about herself as well. At the clockbeasts and their teeth. Their broken clocks. The blood-coated grass blades…
“They were programmed, they were…they were…” A little farther to the side, Silas fell on his knees on the ground.
That strange light was gone, though. His hands were dark again, and leaves, small and big, some with burned edges, fell slowly all around him from the canopy.
I went closer absentmindedly—why is your magic that color, Silas? What kind of magic did you just do?
“They’re being used, just like all of us,” Silas said, shaking his head at himself, looking down at his lap.
Reggie went closer, fell on one knee in front of him, and the others followed.
“Silas, it’s okay,” they said, but Silas kept shaking his head over and over.
“I should have never-ever-reven come here,” he whispered. “Time’s Truth, I should have never set foot in this place. I should have never—I should have never—I should have never…”
Something spread inside me, something bad. Something worse than all this black blood.
Pure, raw dread.