But it beat standing there and waiting for the thirteenth to come alive again, and so most of us were already doing the same, searching with our eyes, walking around the hourglasses.
There was nothing there.
“It’s doing it again!”someone shouted.
My heart about exploded in my chest. I was running, searching for a solution, but my senses were overwhelmed with the pulsating lights and the sound that came from each hourglass, and I knew exactly what happened at the end.
The Thirteenth Hour groaned, lit up, hummed that awful, distorted sound.
The timesand from the Tenth Hour poured into it slowly, like it had all the time in the world.
“Break it—break itnow!” shouted Helen, and at the same time Silas said, “No, don’t!”
But Russ and Anika were at it already, and the glass of the Tenth Hour broke to pieces.
Glass and sand all over the floor, and the Thirteenth Hour fell dark and silent.
March strode over to the Diamonds and grabbed their weapons, the bat and the piece of wood, and threw them to the side. “Five,”he shouted, raising up five fingers. “We can only break five hourglasses.Stop!”
Holy Hour, he was right. The speaker said so—we were only allowed to take five hours, no more.
“Thenhow?!”Mimi demanded. “How are we going to stop this—it’s coming on again and again!”
“It’s a sequence,” Cook said, and all of us turned to look at him.
The next second, the First Hour lit up again.
Shivers crawled down my back.Make it stop—make it stop—make it stop…
“What sequence?” asked one or the other as Cook came closer, eyes on the hourglasses.
“It’s a sound sequence. The first time around, the notes of Hour Three, Six, Nine and Twelve were in perfect sync,” he said. “The second time, when the Twelfth Hour broke, it was Hours Two, Five, Eight and Eleven.”
“He’s right.” Levana’s eyes were closed as she tried to tune out the note of the Third Hour that was now chiming again— “I know music, too. Those notes aligned perfectly. They belong in the same flow, and…”
She opened her eyes, and raised her hand toward the hourglasses as they continued to light up and make that melody.
“It’s rerouting,” Cook said. “Now that those hourglasses are broken, the sound is rerouting.”
“It’s a third-step,” Levana whispered. “The sequences are building by stepping three hours forward.”
I shook my head—I didn’t know anything about music. Jinx had. She’d loved the piano, had played it relentlessly every single day, had always been on stage for every school celebration—but I’d never even had an ear for it. I liked my lead and my paper. I understood it.ThisI had no clue about.
“So what now?” I asked. “How do we know which sequence will be building next?!”
“There!” Cook said, pointing both hands at the Seventh Hour as it lit up.
“It still has two more hours to go,” Erith said—but it didn’t.
The lid of the seventh opened, and the sand began to climb out of it, and straight into the Thirteenth Hour.
“Do notbreak the seventh!” Silas shouted, running to get to the front of it. “Everybody—stand down!”
They all shouted their complaints—and I was tempted to argue, too.
“The Thirteenth Hour is filling up!”
“If it awakens, we all die! Didn’t you hear the Timekeeper?”
