It made sense to go for the pulsating light, so that’s where I went. Shaking, sweating, swallowing bile, I made it closer and closer until the darkness began to fade away little by little.
Until I saw the silhouettes of the two other Hands who’d made it out of the dark clouds and onto the black tiles underneath our feet.
“What in the Everstill isthat?” Helen asked, finger pointed at the small round lights that pulsed like a beating heart or a ticking clock.
Below them, there were thirteen large hourglasses on the tiled floor, five of them broken.
The others came through the darkness in the next minute, eyes wide open, on the lights. We had all followed them, and now we were in the middle of nowhere.
“There are no walls,” Seth said from farther to my right as he stepped closer to the hourglasses.
“No—there are. They’re just hiding in the dark,” said March, his voice vibrating throughout me as if his lips were against my skin.
Red velvet,my mind whispered, and my cheeks heated up.
Luckily, there was no time for silly thoughts here. They were all approaching the hourglasses, and I reluctantly followed. The sooner we were done with this trial, the sooner we’d get out. There was no other way out but through.
March could be right. Behind those hourglasses that wereset in a perfect oval shape, there was only darkness—a black, all-consuming cloud that could very well be hiding the walls, just like it had hidden us from one another until we came out the other side. But the walls didn’t matter—we couldn’t break them if we tried.
“It’s a clock,” Erith said as she looked around. “It’s a twelve-hour clock.”
Not exactly—because we could all see the hourglass in the very middle of the room, the one that was whole, but empty.
“The Thirteenth Hour,” someone whispered, and the words echoed to eternity.
The Thirteenth Hour was a myth, something each and every one of us had heard about as children from our parents or siblings to get us to behave. It was the hour that didn’t belong on any clock, the extra slice of time that existed only when something went terribly, terribly wrong. If we stayed up late or touched things we weren’t supposed to, the hidden hour would open like a mouth and swallow us together with all the seconds and minutes and memories of our lives.
We grew out of it when we grew up, of course. There was no such a thing as the Thirteenth Hour. The Great White Rabbit had ordered time intotwelvehours for a reason.
Except here, apparently. There were thirteen hourglasses in this endless room set with shadows and dark tiles, and no matter how many times we counted the hourglasses, the number didn’t change.
“How strange,” said one or the other, as we all walked around to inspect the structures. It was strange, indeed. The bulbs stood on platforms made of black stone, identical to the tiles underneath our feet. Dust on the floor so that our footprints remained everywhere we walked. Cobwebs between the platforms, attached to the glass of the bulbs. There was a large bat and a long piece of wood discarded on the floor. The blinking lights overhead werethreatening to give me a headache, but I tried to focus as best as I could.
There were numbers engraved on the platforms below the bulbs, which reached a bit higher than my knees. The bulbs themselves were full of timesand at the bottom, and the tip of them reached over my head. The numbers marked the hours, and the one in the middle clearly said13.The hours that were broken were7, 8, 10, 11,and12.I had no idea what that meant, but the glass of the bulbs was in pieces, and the sand had spilled out of the platform and onto the floor.
I went closer to inspect it as the timesand shimmered slightly under the lights.
“What kind of a savage would do this? Why would anyonebreakthese things?” Seth asked from the other side of the room, and I kneeled close to the biggest pile of timesand in front of hours 10, 11 and 12. It looked like it had been a long time since someone had been here, but I could have sworn that something waswrittenthere in the sand in front of hour 10. I could have sworn I saw3-6-9and then an arrow, and?—
“Whatcha looking at there?”
Levana stepped right onto the sand and sent it flying in the air, straight into my face.
Coughing, I stood up and tried to wipe it from my eyes and tongue while she grinned.
“Sorry.” She wasn’t—she had absolutely done that on purpose. “Anything interesting in these broken pieces?”
So many words at the tip of my tongue.
I wanted to make her cry. I knew I could.
Instead, I forced myself to turn around and walk away because wasting energy insulting Hands wasnotthe way to get to the end of this sooner. My time would come.
“Guys, look!”
We all turned to find Mimi kneeling in front of theThirteenth Hour, her hand raised, a black spider walking along the palm of her hand—and she was smiling.
I flinched, and so did most of the others.
