23
We had to cut the metal at the back of the platforms, just below the opening where the hourglasses hung on thin metal holders you could only see when you pulled the bulbs out. It was no trouble. We had magic, and March magicked these sharp, gigantic scissors he said he always used back home. What for, I had no idea.
The square we cut on the metal sheet revealed the machinery of the platform—full of turning gears and cogs and pins, with oil dripping everywhere—and a single metal plate suspended in the middle horizontally.
They kept pushing me aside, each Hand trying to see better, so it took me a moment to see the three nearly invisible filaments that held the plate up, attached to something higher up the platform that we couldn’t see.
The plate was no bigger than the palm of my hand. I’d honestly thought it would be a bell. Its surface was worn smooth in the center, and darker at the edges. Tiny cracks ran through it on both sides, as if it had been struck way too many times. It was barely hanging on.
Below it, the striker was a slender arm anchored to apiece of metal as thick as my thumb. The tip of it was like a miniature hammerhead, smoothly polished.
First, March tried to break it off the piece of metal it was attached to, but it was impossible. There was barely any space between the gears to fit his hand, and the metal was sturdy. Then Russ tried to damage it with the tip of those scissors, but no matter how hard he struck, the hammerhead remained intact.
To use magic on it now would be stupid—Master Talik had made it very clear that to meddle with working magical machinery was the worst idea any of us could have because we had no clue how our magic would interact withitsmagic, so…
Cover it,I thought, the same moment Anika said the words out loud.
She offered Russ a piece of cloth—a silver napkin she’d folded in her pocket. Russ took it, wrapped it around the head of the hammer as tightly as he could. He then pushed the striker up with his finger to test it, and the best it made was a dull, muted sound.
It was still sound, though. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t as excited as the rest of them when they began to pick up the pieces of the broken glass in front of the Seventh Hour that Helen had broken again. They all worked together. Only Levana and I stayed farther back and watched.
The Seventh Hour was whole again just as the Second Hour lit up. We all stepped back, breaths held, eyes wide open.
Something’s off, something’s off,said that strange voice in my head, sometimes more like the Cheshire’s, sometimes less.
Never wrong, at least not so far.
The Third, Fourth, Fifth Hours lit up in a row, with theirpretty lights and their notes, creating a melody I’d thought was beautiful in the beginning.
Then the Sixth Hour sang. The seventh lit up.
Inside the platform, the striker moved, its hammerhead wrapped up in a napkin slamming against the metal plate. Barely any sound made it out.
Barely, but it was still there. The note still existed because the plate was still struck.
A tick went by, and another.
The groan of the Thirteenth Hour behind us made us all jump and scream. Timesand in the air, moving in a perfect arch from the seventh to the thirteenth hourglass.
It hadn’t worked. The triad still created the sequence.
Another scream, this one in pure frustration. Glass broke. We all turned to find Helen with the bat in her hands this time. The awful sound of the Thirteenth Hour faded as the timesand from the seventh poured all over the floor once more.
Nobody accused her of breaking the bulb. Time knew we all wanted to break something right now.
We just went back to sitting on the floor, defeated.
We tried removingthe striker again, all of us—even with magic. We figured it was worth the risk, but it still didn’t work. No magic that made it inside the platform survived—it was like the gears, the cogs, every little piece of metal inside them was magic-proof. We only ended up wasting minutes before we gave up trying to change anything in the machinery of the hourglasses.
So, Master Talik hadnotbeen preparing us for this trial, after all.
We tried puttingmorefabric between the hammerhead and the plate, even stuck layers onto the plate itself. It didn’t work. We knew it wouldn’t—it wasn’t just the actual sound that activated the sequence, but the turn, and the lights as well. We tried breaking them, too, but other than getting the glass that shielded them, we couldn’t reach the actual wires—they were too far into the platform beneath the metal holders.
With each new hour, the bulbs turned all on their own once all the timesand fell to their bottom.
Then it started all over again.
Six hours passed in a blink, and we opened every single one of the platforms, tried to manipulate each one in the same—and a slightly different way.
