Chapter 21
Ithought it was going to be easy. I thought we would go back where we came from and get to Kohen in no time.
But the way back was all wrong.
Not wrong like we’d taken a wrong turn, no—wrong like the tunnels and the rooms had changed.
The first corridor looked right. The walls, the pipes, the floor was as we’d left it. But when we went through the half open door that was supposed to lead us to the doll room, it wasn’t there.
Same door, same distance, same everything—yet the room was different.
This one was a long chamber with a vaulted ceiling made of dark metal, not glass. And the walls were lined with…
Birdcages. Dozens of them, hanging from hooks at different heights, and inside them were birds made of what looked like brass and copper. Mechanical birds.
Their wings were folded, their glass eyes dark. They hung perfectly still in their cages, and the only sound in there when the echo of our footsteps faded was the faint creak of the chains that held them.
“Guys…”
“This wasn’t here before.”
“Did we take a wrong turn?”
“There were no turns to take!”
I recognized the frustration in Levana’s voice because I felt it. I felt the exact same terror and panic and shock. My mind was trying to break itself searching for sense while the other bickered because this was senseless. It was absurd. It was the same door, same place, same—
“The Labyrinth shifts.” Silas’s voice pierced through the dark cloud in my head like an arrow and landed in the very center. He sounded exhausted, but he still continued, “The tunnels rearrange. The rooms move. It’s not...it doesn’t stay the same.”
Sentient, whispered a voice in my head.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t stay the same?!” asked the others almost in unison.
“The same way it caved that floor to take us away from the Timekeepers,” March said. “It wanted us to get away. To find Silas.”
Rotten, rotten seconds…
“So…does it want us to get out of here now?” asked Russ.
Silas didn’t have an answer.
“The seeker,” he said instead. “See if it still works.”
The device that was still firmly in my hand. I’d completely forgotten about it.
“It’s pointing…” left, I wanted to say first, but I looked to my left—to where March and Russ were holding Silas up—and realized “…at you.” It was pointing at Silas.
“But I thought Kohen said he couldn’t calibrate it to Silas,” Erith said in a shaky whisper.
“A basic seeker recognizes the biggest concentration of magic, which would be me in your midst,” Silas said, his eyes closed as he thought it through. “It won’t be much good until we’re close to Kohen and the others.”
“So, what now?” asked Seth. “Are we…are we stuck here?”
“No,” I said, as if I knew it for a fact, when I didn’t. “We keep going. Even if the rooms change, we can still get to the edge of the Labyrinth if we keep going.”
Silence for a moment, as we all waited to see if someone would either tell me I was wrong or offer a better idea.
Nobody did.
“Let’s keep moving then,” March said with a nod.
So, we did.
We went through the birdcage room quickly. We kept our eyes open, though, our ears strained. That’s why, as we passed, I could have sworn—I could have sworn that one of them turned its head a fraction of an inch as Seth walked beneath it. Just a fraction.
My breath caught. My step faltered. My mouth opened to scream or whisper or warn someone, but…
Nobody else noticed. Which made me think I’d imagined it. Made me hopeful.
I said nothing, only bit my tongue and kept going, wiping the sweat on my brow.
Memory said that the next room would be where the talking flowers were. The door to it looked the same, too, but now, it was something else entirely.
A workshop, if I had to guess.
Low ceiling made of glass this time, too, only it was dark above it, too dark to make out anything properly but some lanterns glowing with a dim orange light—and shelves. Lots of shelves with lots of things on them, things we only saw as shadows from down here. A dark room with no windows.
The floor was made out of stone, and ahead of us, long wooden tables were arranged in rows.
On the tables were clocks.
Hundreds of them—pocket clocks, wall clocks, grandfather clocks in miniature, clocks shaped like animals, clocks shaped like faces, clocks with no hands, clocks with too many.
All of them were silent. All of them were stopped at different times.
“What in Time’s Teacups…” Mimi whispered.
“Don’t touch anything,” Silas said.
“They’re just clocks,” said Erith. “We’ve seen worse. Those dolls…”
Yes, the dolls that were supposed to be miniature versions of Hands were indeed terrible, and they would remain in my memories forever, but…something about this room.
Something about all these clocks.
Silas removed his arms from around the boys’ shoulders. “Ora, the cane,” he said, limping on one foot, and I offered it to him—again, surprised to find it in my hand. It was like I was perfectly detached from my body in this place. I hardly felt my own limbs.
“It’ll be fine. Just don’t touch anything,” Silas said, stretching his neck as he eyed the clocks. “Whatever you do, don’t—”
Russ had moved back a little to give him space once he stood on his own, and his elbow caught a clock on the edge of the nearest table. A small one—brass, shaped like an egg, barely bigger than his fist.
It tumbled off the table and hit the stone floor with a sharp, clear chime that cut Silas off.
For a second that lasted hours, the silence was deafening, like a world of its own.
Then the room woke up.
It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
A blink, and then every clock on every table began to tick at the same time.
Not in unison but each at its own speed, its own rhythm, creating a wall of sound so dense and layered it felt physical.
The ticking filled the room and it kept rising, getting louder, faster.
There was no time to react, barely enough time to blink from one second to the next, so we couldn’t have possibly thought to run before it was too late.
Because the doors slammed shut at the same time.
Both of them—the one we’d come through and the one on the far side—swung closed with a force that shook dust from the ceiling and the walls.
The locks turned, the sound of them so heavy. Final.
“What is happening?!” someone screamed, and we were all instinctively moving closer to one another, and I had a hand around my arm pulling me back faster, which I knew belonged to March without having to look.
“This isn’t good, this isn’t good—”
“Why did the doors close?!”
“Is there somebody there?”
“HELLO!”
“The clock—put the clock back on the table, you fool!” shouted Seth, pointing his finger at Russ.
We all held our breaths as the Diamond scrambled for the egg-shaped clock on the floor, grabbed it, slammed it back on the table’s edge, all within the second.
Please, please, please—
Nothing stopped.
Instead, the ticking grew louder. The clocks on the tables were starting to vibrate now, rattling against the wood, some of them walking toward the edges like living things.
Yes, much creepier than the room full of dolls.
“It’s not stopping!” Russ shouted. “I put the clock back—it’s not stopping!”
“It’s the game,” Silas said, his face white as he looked about. “The game has started.”
My heart fell all the way to my heels.
“What game?” What the hell kind of a game was this, and how could it have started?!
Silas met my eyes for just a second. “I don’t know.”
“The doors. Get to the—” March started, but that’s as far as he made it.
The first clock fell off a table, cutting him off.
Then another. Then three more, tumbling to the floor in a cascade of brass and glass that spread across the stone like a wave.
And when they hit the ground, they didn’t just break—they opened.
Springs and gears and tiny metal components burst from their casings and began to move independently, skittering across the floor like insects. Small, fast, sharp-edged insects that caught the light as they scurried toward us.
Holy Hour, it was a miracle I was still standing.
“MOVE!” March shouted, pulling me to the side hard. “Get off the floor, now!”
Nobody needed to be told twice.
When he pulled me, I grabbed the edge of the nearest table and hauled myself up.
March was right behind me, helping Silas up on the other side.
Cook was already on another empty table, as all the clocks—every single one of them—were now on the floor.
Mimi and Seth scrambled onto a third, and the rest followed, climbing onto whatever surface they could reach while the floor below us came alive with tiny, clicking, crawling mechanical things.
There were no words for it in my mind, no way to think. The clocks had come apart right in front of our eyes and now the pieces of them were buzzing below us, but…
That wasn’t all they were doing.
I blinked and blinked and tried to understand their patterns, and they weren’t trying to attack us or anything. Instead, it looked like they were assembling. The pieces from the broken clocks were finding each other, connecting, building something on the floor between the tables.
Springs-linked to gears-linked to casings-linked to hands-linked to faces, and the shape they were forming was…
“Is that…a clock?” Levana whispered from her perch.
“Time’s Teeth, they’re building a clock!” Seth cried.
He was right.
I could hardly believe my eyes, but the scattered pieces were constructing a single large clock on the stone floor—a flat disc of interlocking components that grew wider with every piece that joined.
Little by little, the ticking in the room synchronized, too, all those different rhythms converging toward a single beat.
As they did, the clock on the floor began to spin.
Slowly, it spun—deliberately, the outer ring rotating in one direction and the inner ring in the other. The sound of it was a low, grinding hum that vibrated up through the table legs and into my very bones.