I looked.
We all looked.
The door on my left, the one we needed to go through to get out of here, now had something above it, something that most definitely hadn’t been there before. A clock face. Large,mounted over the frame, a single hand pointing straight down at six.
And as the clock on the floor spun, the hand above the door moved, toward the twelve.
What is that—are we going to die?—is the ceiling going to collapse?—somebody do something!—if we scream will somebody hear us?!
Then Silas said, “It’s most likely a timer,” and he sounded so much calmer than everyone that we all stopped to listen. “It’s just a timer for the door to open.”
“When?” I asked with half a heart.
He flinched, his eyes moving fast, perfectly focused on the makeshift clock slowly spinning on the floor, and the one that had appeared out of thin air over the door (or had pieces of those clocksclimbedover the frame while we were too busy panicking?)
“I don’t know. Maybe…maybe when it reaches twelve,” Silas said, except he didn’t sound sure in the least.
“And what if wedon’twait?” March asked.
“I doubt we can open those doors with brute force,” Seth said.
“I amnotgoing anywhere near those moving pieces. Tick that—I am staying right here!”
“They couldeat us!”
“They look like insects! Ugh—disgusting!”
“Not spiders, not spiders, not spiders, not spiders?—”
“Then we have to stay here until the doors just…open?”
“How long will it be?!”
“Could be minutes,” I whispered. “I think…look at the speed of the hand on the door clock. It’s moving with the way this one spins.” I pointed at the clock on the floor, at the smaller pieces near the edges that were still rushing and rolling and spinning to assemble, to spread out until they had most of the floor completely covered.
“But we don’t have minutes,” Russ said. “You heard the Timekeeper—they could be…” He shook his head. “Someonecould be coming.”
“Exactly. Every second down here is a second closer to being found,” said March, making the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention.
“What if the door isn’t really locked? What if wetryto open it, anyway?” Seth said.
“I wouldn’t,” said Silas. “This is the Labyrinth.”
We all looked at him. Even though we’d been in the Labyrinth for a whole day before, it seemed he was the only one who knew this place for what it really was. The only one who…understood.
“Look, even if we can break the door somehow, if you break a game’s mechanism, the Labyrinth could lock down the whole section. We could be trapped here for days.”
Days.
“But what if it doesn’t?” Cook wondered, swallowing hard as he eyed the door.
“Are you willing to risk it, Spade?” Erith asked.
Cook said nothing.
“So, we just sit here and wait?” Levana’s voice could have cut glass.
“I don’t see another way,” Silas muttered, almost to himself. His eyes were on the spinning clock, watching the last of the pieces assemble, watching the hand above the door crawl up the clock. “This isn’t the trials so the games can’t beplayedto get them to finish faster, but if they’re activated, they would need to complete a cycle.”
