“How else are we going to stop the timesand?”
“What if it kills us all right now?!”
“We won’t know unless we see how the sequences are being built,” Silas insisted. “We won’t know unless we pay attention!Listen—wasn’t that what Johnny said, too?Listen closely!”
He had, in fact.Sound here has been arranged with care—listen closely—those had been the speaker’s words.
We all stopped as we replayed the memory in our minds. It was the sounds, indeed. Levana and Cook were right—it was all a sound sequence.
Which sucked, because I saw no wayout of this. I was completely hopeless as I watched the timesand float with such precision from the Seventh Hour and into the Thirteenth.
There was no doubt in my mind in those moments—I was going to die. The Thirteenth Hour was indeed going to be the death of me, like I’d genuinely believed when I was four or five years old, and I first heard of it from Jinx.
In the back of my mind, this annoying voice claimed thatshewould have known what to do if she were in my place. If her time hadn’t been cut short. If her heart hadn’t justrushedso fucking much to get to the finish line.
If Jinx were here, she would have been all right.
My eyes closed. I felt a presence just there at my side, and I knew it was March, even though I wasn’t looking. I knew how he felt, the space he took. Maybe I’d spent more time analyzing him than I’d realized, but I knew he was right beside me.
“Guys…”someone whispered—couldn’t tell who, but we all felt the same way she sounded. We were all waiting to die.
Then the Thirteenth Hour stopped humming.
29
We sat on the floor, all of us speechless for a good while, looking about at the silent hourglasses.
It had stopped. The Seventh Hour had stopped pouring timesand into the thirteenth, and all the hourglasses had gone dark and silent for the past few minutes.
“So…does that mean it’s over?” asked Helen.
“No. We’d have been shown outside by now,” Russ said.
“So what next? There’s timesand in the Thirteenth Hour, but we’re not dead yet.” A pause. “Right?” Mimi looked at us like she genuinely expected an answer—but how could I blame her? The way things went around here, it wouldn’t surprise me if we were, in fact, dead, and hadn’t realized it yet.
“We’re alive,” Silas said. “And we still have two more hourglasses to break. We just have to figure out which ones.”
“It’s impossible when the sequences keep rerouting,” Levana said. “First it was the Twelfth, then the Eleventh, then the Tenth—before it hopped back to the Seventh.”
She was right, it didn’t make much sense.
“We need to study whatever mechanism is making this happen,” said March, slamming a fist against the tiles he sat on. Whatever machinery was underneath us, we heard it moving and groaning all the time. It was unnerving.
I looked at him where he sat just a foot away from me. He’d come to stand right by me when he thought we were going to die, and that did…somethingto me. Something strange I couldn’t really point out.
All I knew was that it made me feel powerful.
“But what if it kills us halfway?” Erith wondered.
“It won’t,” said Reggie. “They wouldn’t kill usright away—they know we’ll need a moment to figure it out.” I really hoped he was right.
Then the First Hour lit up again.
This time, none of us moved. This time we held on tightly to our legs against our chests, and we watched with our breaths held as the colors changed, and the notes climbed higher and higher.
Some even closed their eyes, squeezed them shut when the Sixth Hour lit up, waiting for the Seventh. I tried to listen closely, tried to understand the sequence Levana and Cook spoke about but it all soundedniceto me. Just higher note after higher note after higher note…
Then the Seventh went dark and silent, and theEighthHour lit up.
