“What in the Everstill…” March whispered as he pulled out a sword from the box nearest us. I reached in and grabbed a handle wrapped up in leather—a dagger with two tips, the middle of the blade as thick as my palm. Curved. Perfect.
“You guys, what…what is this?” someone asked from farther away as the others went through the boxes. All four carried weapons.
“A fight, maybe?”
“A fight withwhom?”
“Maybe each other?”
“You mean likesparring?” Cook asked, which would have made sense considering Asha and Hector had made us spar the past three days—and that was exactly why I knew thiswasn’tit. If something made sense in the Labyrinth, it couldn’t possibly be the right way.
I was proven right the next second.
The sound came first—like thunder in the distance. It came at us like a wave, and then the ground beneath our feet began to shake.
“Watch out!”someone called as we all instinctively gathered in the middle, each of us holding the weapons we’d gotten from those boxes, looking ahead at where the sound was coming from, and…
Footsteps.It was the sound of footsteps—the sound horses made when they galloped, when their hooves slammed fast and hard against the ground, except this somehow sounded worse.
When I first saw the silhouettes, I was tempted to believe my eyes were liars, but they weren’t.
What was in front of us, what was coming for us at full speed, wereclockbeasts.
Dream—illusion—not real, not real, not real!I’d take any other explanation other than what my eyes were telling me, because they couldn’t have possibly brought clockbeasts here.No way.
We’d learned about them in school. We’d seen pictures in the books. Just like timewraiths, they were chronovores, which meant they fed on time—except these were animals, mindless, and they liked to tear through flesh with teeth and claws to get to the time of a person. They were created on purpose to serve the Clockfolk, mostly the Diamonds for Sparetime harvesting.
They weren’t ordinary animals, though. Their biological makeup was altered either by intentional or natural magic, and clockbeasts could not die naturally. They could be starved off time, but never actually whither and die. That’s why the Timekeepers had created clocks specifically for them, to put them in their bodies to both control them and to give them an expiration date.
That was the only way to kill them, too. Through those clocks.
Easier said than done, though. If they bit you, if they sank those teeth into your skin, they could drain all your seconds and minutes and hours just as easily as they could bite your head off.
Clockbeasts—and they hadn’t disappeared yet. Which meant it wasn’t an illusion. Which meant they could very well be real.
Time’s Teeth, they’dreallybrought clockbeasts in this place together with us—and I was willing to bet anything that no matter how fast or how far we ran, we would never make it out of this forest. Not without fighting first.
So be it, I thought to myself, because my only options were to either sit and sob and wait for them to come kill me, or fight.
This was definitely not an illusion. It most likely wasn’t a dream, either. The panic and the fear would have to wait, because the beasts were coming, at least twenty of them, and I would rather go down swinging.
Something came over me. A scream ripped out of my throat, and I ran as if I wasn’t in charge of my own body at all. The dagger was in my hand, and when I jumped over one of the boxes and continued ahead, I wasn’t the only one. Others screamed and ran with me. Better to attack first, than to wait to be eaten, but?—
“No, don’t!” someone shouted, just as the first clockbeast jumped in the air and launched right at me.
It was Silas, but the sound of him was drowned out by the adrenaline rushing through my veins when I swung my dagger and cut a clean line on the side of the monster’s body.
Chaos.
All of a sudden, it was like we were thrust into a different world. The clockbeasts lunged at us with screams like metalrubbing against metal, so much worse than the sound of our sparring in the arena. I was fighting, moving, completely detached from myself, and I was thankful for it. My body knew what to do. All those hours training with my father had really done something for me—I didn’t pay attention to how I moved, couldn’t if I tried, yet I was somehow still alive.
The bodies of the clockbeasts folded and twisted at impossible angles. The dagger felt small in my hand and perfect all at once. I slid beneath the razor-sharp teeth of a coming clockbeast and drove the blade upward right into its gut—while someone continued to scream for us to stop.
How ridiculous.
Stop and let these beastseatus?
I kept on moving, aiming for the clocks on their bodies whenever I could. Around me, the others were fighting, too, screaming, shouting, cursing out loud. March was by my side, holding his own, swinging a sword in one hand, and an axe in the other.
