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The thing beneath the ferry struck again.
Wood screamed. The deck pitched so sharply that Eve slammed shoulder-first into the cabin wall. A lantern tore loose from its hook and swung through the dark, throwing sickle-shaped light across Kieran’s face.
He was on one knee beside the engine hatch, one hand clamped over the wound beneath his ribs. Blood had soaked through his coat and dripped between his fingers in slow, black beads.
“Tell me that was the dock,” Eve said.
Kieran lifted his eyes to her. “The dock is behind us.”
A third impact rolled beneath the hull.
This time, something scraped along the keel.
The sound traveled through the ferry’s bones—a long, deliberate groan, like a fingernail drawn across a coffin lid.
Eve tightened her grip on the letter inside her coat. The paper had warmed against her skin, though the cabin was cold enough to turn every breath white. Her name was written across its face in her own hand.
EVE CALDER.
Below it, in the same slanted ink, waited the date of her death.
Tonight.
The ferry lurched again. Kieran caught the edge of the engine housing before he went over. His teeth clenched, but no sound escaped him.
That silence frightened her more than the blood.
“You’re going to die,” she said.
“Not before you do.”
“That isn’t reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
A pale glow pulsed beneath the floorboards. It came from below the ferry, deep under the black water. For one breath, Eve saw the shape of something enormous sliding beneath them—a ridge of armored hide, wide as a city street, studded with blue lights that opened and closed like eyes.
The countdown began again.
Numbers flared across the cabin windows in watery silver.
00:00:13.
Eve’s breath stopped.
The digits trembled, reflected in the glass and in Kieran’s pupils.
00:00:12.
“What is that?” she whispered.
Kieran pushed himself upright. The movement nearly folded him in half, but he forced his shoulders straight. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t look at the numbers.”
“Then what should I look at?”
“At me.”
The answer came too quickly. Too sharply. His gaze locked onto hers, and for an instant the ferry, the monster, the burning harbor—all of it narrowed to the space between them.
Then the windows flashed.
00:00:11.
Eve looked away first.
Something clicked beneath the floor.
Not the engine. Not the hull.
A lock.
Kieran’s hand dropped toward the pistol at his hip. Eve saw the motion and stepped between him and the hatch.
“You said there was no one else aboard.”
“I said I didn’t see anyone else.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No.” His mouth hardened. “It isn’t.”
00:00:10.
The engine coughed. The ferry slowed, its propeller churning uselessly against the tide.
A voice rose from beneath the boards.
“Eve Calder.”
It was a woman’s voice, soft and old-fashioned, the sort used in a church when asking the dead to stand.
“By authority of the Meridian Clock Assembly, you are ordered to surrender the hourglass and present yourself for correction.”
Eve’s fingers went numb.
Kieran glanced at her. “You know that name?”
“I’ve heard it.”
“Where?”
“In the letter.”
His expression changed—not surprise. Recognition.
The voice spoke again.
“Kieran Voss. You are authorized to exchange the courier for a full restoration of civic standing. Your crimes will be sealed. Your name will be returned to the registry.”
The words seemed to reach inside him and pull a wire taut.
Eve watched his face. The former enforcer had always carried himself like a man expecting a blow. Now, for the first time, he looked toward something he wanted.
“Full restoration,” she said quietly.
Kieran did not answer.
“Your name returned. Your record erased.”
“Stop.”
“Would they give you a uniform?”
His eyes flashed. “I said stop.”
00:00:09.
The hatch lock clicked again.
Kieran moved. Eve caught his sleeve.
He looked down at her hand, then at her face. Beneath the grime, his skin had gone gray.
“You can still trade me,” she said. “Maybe they’ll even make you captain.”
“You think I’m considering it?”
“I think you considered it the moment they offered.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “You know nothing about what they offered me before.”
“I know you were a city enforcer. I know your name is on my death letter. I know you had a clean shot at me in the alley and chose to take a blade through the ribs instead.”
Her voice faltered on the last sentence. She hated that it did.
“I know you shattered the hourglass to burn our escape route. Then you used it anyway.”
Kieran’s stare dropped to her coat, where the hourglass rested in its broken leather cradle. Seven grains of silver sand had become six. Or perhaps five. Every time she tried to count them, the number slipped sideways in her mind.
“And I know,” she continued, “that after the reversal, there was something you tried to tell me.”
The cabin seemed to contract around them.
“What did I say?” he asked.
“That’s the problem. I don’t remember.”
Neither did he. She saw it in the slight narrowing of his eyes, the way his thumb pressed against the seam of his glove.
Seven seconds stolen from the world.
Seven seconds stolen from them.
00:00:08.
A metal hook punched through the hatch.
Kieran drew his pistol.
Eve grabbed the first thing within reach—a rusted fire axe—and swung. The hook snapped sideways. A hand in a black glove rose through the gap.
Kieran fired.
The shot struck the wrist. The hand jerked back, but no blood spilled. Instead, a ribbon of black ink poured through the crack and crawled across the floorboards in branching lines.
Contract spirit.
Eve had seen one once, when she was thirteen. It had worn her father’s face and asked her to sign away a year of her life. She had run until her lungs bled.
The ink gathered into letters.
GIVE HER TO US.
Kieran aimed at the words and fired again. The bullet passed through the ink, punched a hole in the cabin wall, and vanished into the fog.
“Bullets won’t stop it,” Eve said.
“I noticed.”
00:00:07.
The ferry’s windows exploded inward.
Fog poured through the broken frames, thick and wet. Shapes moved inside it—men in brass masks, their coats marked with the three crossed hands of the Assembly. One climbed over the rail and landed on the deck without making a sound.
Another stepped onto the roof.
Kieran shoved Eve behind him.
The first masked agent raised a narrow blade. Its edge glowed with clockwork sigils.
“You have been warned,” the agent said.
Kieran fired once. The bullet struck the mask and sparked.
The agent kept coming.
Kieran met him at the cabin door. Steel flashed. Kieran’s wounded side twisted, and blood sprayed across the floor, but he caught the assassin’s wrist and drove an elbow beneath the mask.
The agent staggered.
Eve swung the fire axe into his knee.
Bone cracked.
He dropped. Kieran seized the back of his coat and hurled him through the broken window. The body disappeared into the fog without a splash.
A second blade came through the doorway.
Eve ducked. Kieran caught the attacker’s arm, but the cabin tilted beneath them. The monster below had turned, dragging the ferry sideways.
The assassin’s blade slipped free and cut across Kieran’s chest.
Eve saw the blood open his shirt.
Something inside her snapped.
She rammed the axe handle into the attacker’s throat. As he reeled, she drove her knee into his stomach and shoved him into the engine housing.
Kieran finished it with the butt of his pistol.
For one breath, they stood back-to-back, surrounded by fog, blood, and the ticking countdown.
00:00:06.
“Eve,” Kieran said.
“What?”
“If they take you, they won’t kill you.”
She turned her head. “That sounds like a lie.”
“They’ll correct you.”
The word crawled over her skin.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning they’ll cut out whatever part of you refuses to obey.”
A masked figure appeared behind him.
Eve saw the glint first.
“Kieran!”
She caught his coat and yanked him sideways. The blade meant for his spine carved through the wooden pillar instead. Kieran spun and shot the attacker beneath the jaw.
The recoil drove him to one knee.
00:00:05.
The black ink on the floor reached Eve’s boots.
Cold climbed through her soles. Letters wrapped around her ankles, tightening like chains.
Kieran grabbed her wrist and pulled. The ink stretched between them, forming a thin, shining cord.
“Don’t let go,” he said.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m aware.”
“Your hand is shaking.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
00:00:04.
The masked agents stopped attacking.
All at once, they turned toward the cabin’s center.
The fog parted.
A woman stepped through wearing a dress made of brass plates and black silk. Her face was hidden behind a porcelain clock mask, its hands fixed at thirteen minutes past midnight.
She carried no weapon. She didn’t need one.
“Kieran Voss,” she said. “You have one final opportunity.”
He stared at her.
“Speak the courier’s location. Surrender the hourglass. In return, the Assembly will restore your name.”
His grip on Eve tightened.
The woman tilted her head. “You have spent seven years pretending exile is repentance. It is not. You want absolution. We can give it.”
Eve felt the pulse in his wrist.
Fast. Uneven.
“Kieran,” she whispered.
His gaze shifted to her.
The letter pressed against her ribs. She pulled it free and held it between them. The paper fluttered in the damp air.
“Tell me,” she said. “Are you named in this because you’re going to kill me?”
His eyes fell to the line beneath her name.
KIERAN VOSS WILL BE THE HAND THAT CLOSES THE HOUR.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
The answer was quiet, but it struck harder than a shout.
00:00:03.
The woman in the clock mask raised one gloved hand.
Every agent on the ferry lifted a weapon.
“Then choose,” she said. “Your absolution, or her life.”
Kieran looked at the broken hourglass in Eve’s coat. Then at the blood beneath his hand. Then at Eve.
The sea thundered below them.
Eve realized what he was about to do.
“No,” she said.
“You don’t know what I’m choosing.”
“You’re going to use the hourglass again.”
“There aren’t enough grains.”
“Then don’t.”
His expression softened by a fraction. “You’re afraid of forgetting.”
“I’m afraid of forgetting you.”
The words escaped before she could stop them.
Kieran went still.
The countdown burned across the windows.
00:00:02.
The woman in the mask stepped closer. “Speak your true name, Kieran Voss. The Assembly is listening.”
The name seemed to echo from beneath the water.
Kieran’s face became unreadable. He released Eve’s wrist and reached inside his coat.
For one terrible second, she thought he had chosen the Assembly.
Then he drew the hourglass.
The glass was cracked from neck to base. One silver grain clung to the inner wall.
“One use,” he said. “One memory.”
“Whose?”
“Ours.”
00:00:01.
Eve stepped toward him.
The masked woman shouted something, but the ferry groaned, and the sound vanished beneath the rising roar of the sea.
Eve took Kieran’s hand.
His glove was slick with blood.
He stared at their joined fingers.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure you can’t spend it without me.”
The final grain fell.
00:00:00.
The world stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped.
Rain hung in the air as bright beads of glass. The agents froze with weapons raised. The woman’s mask reflected Eve’s face in thirteen fractured pieces.
Under the silence, something began to tick.
Once.
Twice.
Kieran’s fingers closed around hers.
“Eve Calder,” he said.
His voice was the only moving thing in the dead world.
She looked at him. “Is that your true name?”
“No.”
The ticking grew louder.
“My true name is Kieran Ash Voss.”
Heat detonated between their palms.
Eve cried out. A symbol burned into her skin—a small black hourglass surrounded by a ring of thorns. Across from it, the same mark flared on Kieran’s hand.
The pact seized them.
Pain raced up Eve’s arm and into her chest. Her heart stumbled, then beat in time with his. She felt his breath inside her lungs, his blood moving beneath his skin, the hard restraint he had built around years of rage.
Kieran staggered.
A second name rose in Eve’s mind, not spoken aloud but pressed into her like a brand.
Eve Mara Calder.
Her knees buckled.
The pact tightened.
A line of silver fire ran from her palm to his, binding bone to bone, pulse to pulse. The hourglass shattered completely in Kieran’s other hand.
The missing seven seconds rushed back—not as memory, but as fragments.
His mouth near her ear.
A warning.
A promise.
Someone calling her by a name she had never heard.
Then the fragments burned away.
Kieran screamed.
The stopped world lurched forward.
The sea exploded against the ferry. Masked agents flew across the deck. The woman in the clock mask vanished into a storm of brass filings. The monster below gave a sound like a bell cracking underwater.
Eve hit the floor hard.
Kieran fell beside her, their branded hands still locked together.
For several seconds, neither of them moved.
Then Eve dragged in a breath.
“Kieran?”
His eyes were open.
But he wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking through her.
The color drained from his face. His fingers convulsed around hers, and the pact mark pulsed once, hot enough to make Eve gasp.
“What do you see?” she asked.
Kieran’s lips parted.
The ferry disappeared from his eyes.
He saw a narrow alley washed in rain. He saw Eve lying on the stones, her coat spread around her like dark wings. Blood pooled beneath her body, bright as spilled wine, running into the gutters in thin red rivers.
He was kneeling beside her.
His hands were covered in blood.
One of them held a knife.
The other cradled the back of her dead head.
And his own voice, broken with grief, whispered into the rain.
“I’m sorry, Eve. I had to kill you twice.”
Kieran jerked back into the present with a strangled gasp.
Eve seized his shoulder. “What did you see?”
He looked at her branded hand.
Then at her living face.
His horror was answer enough.
“Tell me,” Eve said.
Kieran swallowed. Outside, beneath the ferry, the unseen creature began to count again.
Thirteen silver numbers appeared across the fogged glass.
He closed his fingers around hers.
“I saw you dead,” he whispered. “And I was the one holding the knife.”