The Second Hour lit up, and the rest followed. The seventh was broken, and the tenth was on Seth’s lap, the first on the floor by March’s feet.
All the hourglasses lit up in time, made their sounds, skipped the notes of the incomplete ones, then started again from the beginning.
The Thirteenth Hour didn’t activate again.
“Anybody have any clue how we’re going to assemble a working clock without awakening the Thirteenth Hour?” Erith asked after a while as she stood in front of the dark platform, breathing hard, hands on her hips.
Nobody had an answer.
“What are you thinking?”
March sat a couple feet to my side with his elbows over his knees and looked right at me. His voice was the only one that pulled me out of my trance—the others had been speaking until now, too, but it was easy not to pay attention.
When it came to him, though, it was like my body knew he was talking and snapped out of whatever hole I’d been falling down right away.
Others were looking at me, too. Confused. Pissed off. A little hopeful—as if they thought I might have an answer to this madness.
But I didn’t.
I knew what the hourglasses were doing even now—the light moving in a perfect rhythm, triggering the sound,moving on to the next. It wasworking,this makeshift clock made of timesand, but it was far from complete.
“I…” I stopped. Looked at March. “It’s a sound sequence that’s activating the Thirteenth Hour.” Which was something he could have figured out himself.
“I think it’s formed with a triad,” Cook, who was sitting on the other side of the room with his back against the platform of the Third Hour, said.
“Three notes in sequence activate the next hourglass, causing the timesand to pour into the Thirteenth Hour,” said Levana, looking up at the monstrous structure, the unbreakable glass of the dark bulb.
“Does it change?” asked Russ after a moment. “Do the same triads form the same sequences every time?”
“The hourglasses are still lighting up, still playing notes, yetthatremains dead,” March said, nodded his head to the middle of the room. “I’d say it stays the same.”
He was right, too.
“But…it’s impossible,” Cook whispered. “If we fix that bulb, and if we put the hourglasses back in place, how are we going to stop the Thirteenth Hour from being activated?”
Silence in the room.
I looked around for a bit, at the darkness beyond the hourglasses. So all-consuming. You could get lost in it forever.
Or—you couldfindin it anything you could imagine. Like…maybe a Cheshire Cat who spoke and grinned and gave you tips on how to unwin the trial. Because Cook was right, itwasimpossible to make this clock without awakening the Thirteenth Hour. And what was it that the speaker said before we entered?
You must beware the Thirteenth Hour, for should you awaken it, the trial will surely end…and so will you.
“The sound,” Levana said.
We all turned to look at where she sat crosslegged on the dusty floor, playing with her long, chestnut hair, swirling strands around her fingers so fast they turned to a blur.
“The sound is what activates the timesand to float toward the thirteenth.” Slowly, she stood up. My heart skipped a beat—she was absolutely right. “What if we…”
“Stopthe sound?” Helen whispered with a wide smile on her face.
“Time’s Trousers.That’swhy they took us to that mad Timekeeper’s workshop!” Russ shouted. “That’s why!”
Then we were all moving.
It made perfect sense. We’d taken lessons, though backward, on gears. Fixing and finding problems in machines—and these platforms that held up the hourglass bulbs were most definitely machines. I was willing to bet there were gears underneath the very floor, too. Deactivating the sounds of the hourglasses meant no triads, and no triads meant no sequences, only soundless working hours.
I had a good feeling about it, we all did. And that’s the first time I didn’t mind working together to get out of this place faster.
