We looked at one another, more terrified, more confused.What in Time’s Temper is happening?!
“There!”
March’s voice was like magic pulling my eyes to him. He had his spear pointed forward, toward the trees, and he was a few steps ahead of the rest of us.
I moved, too. Got closer, deeper into the forest, until I began to see what he was pointing at—the metal shining under the lanterns half hidden behind leaves.
“I’ll be damned…” someone said when we came into a clearing, less illuminated because there were no branches to hold those lanterns above it, only the dark sky and the few stars scattered across it.
There was still plenty of light to see the bodies, though.
Bile rose up my throat.Teeth, blood, grass.I let go of one knife and brought my hand to my mouth just in time before I threw up in front of all of them.
Clockbeasts.
Bodies of clockbeasts were sprawled all over the forest floor, their dark bloodfreshas if it had just been spilled. I turned around, eyes squeezed shut, swallowed and swallowed until I didn’t feel like I might throw up my entire being out my mouth by accident.
The flashes—they had been real.
Sparetime save me, it wasall real.
“Eyes ahead,” a voice called, the only one that could make me turn to look. March continued, “They’re…dead. All of them. None are moving.”
“How many?”asked someone.
“How big!”
“What killed them?”
“So much blood…”
A lot of dead clockbeasts were here in this clearing, though I couldn’t tell you the exact number. They looked just like we’d learned in school, scarier than the scary bedtime stories Father used to tell me and Jinx when Mother wasn’t around to hear.
They were chronovores—one of two creatures in the entire realm that fed on time, magic-ridden animals whose biological makeup had been altered, either by a spell or by natural magic sources. They could not die naturally. In order to control them—and to give them an expiration date—the Timekeepers built special clocks and put them in their bodies to tie their time to their hands.
Father told us stories about evil men and women who raised armies of clockbeasts to try to eat all the time in the Great Clock, but in the real world, these beasts were mostly used by Diamonds to help with Sparetime harvesting. They could carry a lot of weight, and with the Timekeeper Clocks on their bodies, they were tame and easy to control.
But if whoever made those clocks didn’t want them tame and didn’t want them controlled…
The most important question fell from Helen’s lips a second later: “What now? They’re already dead.”
And Mimi said in a shaking voice, “Did we…didwedo this?”
My eyes found those of March as if his were a magnet. Whatever he wasalmostthinking, I wasalmostthinking it, too. A second too early, or too late, but never on time.
“We did,” Russ said, going closer to the beasts, touching one with the tip of his sword. “We must have. We all know how to do it.”
ExceptIdidn’t. I’d never killed anything before. Jinxrefused to even let me kill the flies trapped in our room—she held the window open and sang for them until they flew out.
“So…” Again, Helen shook her head. “What now?”
“Simple,” March said. “Now, weunkillthem.”
We looked at him, all of us this time. “Unkill clockbeasts? Are you serious?” Erith shrieked.
“You heard the speaker,” Russ said reluctantly.
“But what if they attack us?!” Mimi said. She’d strapped on more weapons than anyone, and she seemed to be able to carry them without breaking a sweat, even though her frame was even more petite than mine. She was a Club, after all, and Father once told me they sparred for five hours every single day. It was one of their preferred ways to keep moving.
