The lid opened. The timesand flew right into the thirteenth.
We had to endure about fifteen seconds of that awful humming and that awful brown light that came from below the bulb. Once again, the thought that I was about to die any second consumed me completely—but I didn’t. I didn’t die.
The Thirteenth Hour took all the timesand it was going to take, then fell silent.
The entire room fell silent.
“It’s rerouting again,” Cook said, and this we already knew.
“Safe to say interruption at the right points is the only thing to stop this from lighting up,” said Levana, pointing at the broken hourglasses, then flinching at the one in the middle.
“That means we need to destroy more,” said Russ.
“Maybe we’re not supposed to be smashing the hourglasses,” said Seth. “I don’t see how destroying them is going to help with anything.”
“Destruction can be just as precise as creation if done right,” Silas said, his eyes calculating as they hopped from one hourglass to the next.
Cook suddenly stood up and started pacing around us. “It’s thirds—we know it’sthirds. So we should break the Seventh Hour first. Cut the chain earlier that way.”
“No—we break the sixth,” Levana said. “You break the center, the whole thing collapses.”
“Except if the whole thing collapses, so dowe,” Mimi reminded her. “We can only break five of these.”
I thought about it for a second. “What if we break the First?” It seemed like a pretty good idea to me. “If the beginning never starts, how will the sequence finish?”
“The sequence doesn’t start at the First Hour, though,” said Reggie. “Right?”
“Right,” Cook said with a sigh.
Then the First Hour lit up again.
We held on tight. We watched with eyes wide open, flinches on our faces every time a new note filled our ears. Nobody made a single sound—we only watched and listened.
This time around, it was the Ninth Hour that poured timesand into the Thirteenth—which threw us off once more.
For those fifteen seconds while it groaned like a damnmonster feeding on that sand, I kept my eyes closed and tried to control my breathing.Not going to die, not going to die, not going to die,I chanted to myself.
And I didn’t this time, either.
But there was a lot of sand inside the Thirteenth Hour now, grain by little grain slipping down to the bottom. How much more would it take before it killed us?
Ireallydidn’t want to find out.
“There has to be a clear answer,” Anika shouted, slammed her hands against the floor. “You hear me? What’s the CLEAR ANSWER?!”
She screamed the words at the darkness above, even knowing there would be no answer. Still, I envied her for letting out some of the tension, at least.
“Did you hear that?” said Levana all of a sudden—and she was looking at Cook. A second later, she stood up, too—and she went to the Ninth Hour. “That wasn’t a completion. It was asubstitute.”
Cook went closer with a frown, and the rest of us slowly began to stand up, too, go closer. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means the clock is…adjusting, most likely. Compensating for the broken hours,” Silas said, scratching his chin.
“We know this already—it’s rerouting the end,” said March.
“But it’s choosing the nearest intact option to compensate,” said Silas.
When I went closer, I saw how he was sweating. How his hands were shaking slightly.
