Nothing stopped.
Instead, the ticking grew louder. The clocks on the tables were starting to vibrate now, rattling against the wood, some of them walking toward the edges like living things.
Yes,muchcreepier than the room full of dolls.
“It’s not stopping!” Russ shouted. “I put the clock back—it’s not stopping!”
“It’s the game,” Silas said, his face white as he looked about. “The game has started.”
My heart fell all the way to my heels.
“What game?” What the hell kind of a game wasthis, and how could it have started?!
Silas met my eyes for just a second. “I don’t know.”
“The doors. Get to the—” March started, but that’s as far as he made it.
The first clock fell off a table, cutting him off.
Then another. Then three more, tumbling to the floor in a cascade of brass and glass that spread across the stone like a wave.
And when they hit the ground, they didn’t just break—theyopened.
Springs and gears and tiny metal components burst from their casings and began to move independently, skittering across the floor like insects. Small, fast, sharp-edged insects that caught the light as they scurried toward us.
Holy Hour, it was a miracle I was still standing.
“MOVE!” March shouted, pulling me to the side hard. “Get off the floor, now!”
Nobody needed to be told twice.
When he pulled me, I grabbed the edge of the nearest table and hauled myself up. March was right behind me, helping Silas up on the other side. Cook was already on another empty table, asallthe clocks—every single one of them—were now on the floor. Mimi and Seth scrambled onto a third, and the rest followed, climbing onto whatever surface they could reach while the floor below us came alive with tiny, clicking, crawling mechanical things.
There were no words for it in my mind, no way to think. The clocks had come apart right in front of our eyes and now the pieces of them werebuzzingbelow us, but…
That wasn’t all they were doing.
I blinked and blinked and tried to understand their patterns, and they weren’t trying to attackus or anything. Instead, it looked like they wereassembling. The pieces from the broken clocks were finding each other, connecting, building something on the floor between the tables.
Springs-linked to gears-linked to casings-linked to hands-linked to faces, and the shape they were forming was…
“Is that…a clock?” Levana whispered from her perch.
“Time’s Teeth, they’re building a clock!” Seth cried.
He was right.
I could hardly believe my eyes, but the scattered pieces were constructing a single large clock on the stone floor—a flat disc of interlocking components that grew wider with every piece that joined. Little by little, the ticking in the room synchronized, too, all those different rhythms converging toward a single beat.
As they did, the clock on the floor began to spin.
Slowly, it spun—deliberately,the outer ring rotating in one direction and the inner ring in the other. The sound of it was a low, grinding hum that vibrated up through the table legs and into my very bones.
March’s hand was in mine and I squeezed and squeezed, held on tight to the seeker with the other as if he and it were the only things holding me together. If I let go, I’d become undone.
Then…
“The doors!” Cook shouted from across the room. “Look at the doors!”
