The smell of the trench clung to them.
Even though they were back in the humid, wax-scented air of the school gym, Lila could still smell the sulfur and the rotting earth. She looked down at her hands. The thick, freezing mud was real. It was caked under her fingernails and smeared across the knees of her jeans.
“We were just...” Jack started, cracking. He stared at his mud-soaked sneakers, his chest heaving, and couldn’t make the rest of the sentence come out.
“In a war,” Marcus finished for him. His voice was flat, and his right hand hadn’t come out of his jacket pocket since they’d landed. “We were just in a war.”
Emma was sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chest, rocking slightly back and forth. Her ruined binder lay forgotten beside her. “Statistically,” she whispered, her face pale and unfocused, “the mortality rate in a frontline trench during an active artillery bombardment is... it’s...”
“Emma, stop,” Lila said gently, kneeling beside her. She reached out, her muddy hand hovering over Emma’s shoulder before she pulled it back. “We’re okay. We’re back.”
“I understood him,” Lila said suddenly. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “The boy. Marcus’s boy. He wasn’t speaking English and I understood every word.”
That got Emma’s head up. Even wrecked, even shaking, some part of her couldn’t leave a puzzle alone. “You’re sure? Not — guessing from context, filling in gaps?”
“I understood him the way I understand you,” Lila said. “Immediate. I didn’t translate it. It just already meant something.”
“The tether,” Emma said slowly, testing the idea as she said it. “If it’s attached to us the way the scientist said — maybe it doesn’t just move us through time. Maybe it does something to how we take in what we find there. So we can function.” She frowned. “I don’t have enough data. But it would explain it.”
“It didn’t work for the men who found us,” Tyler said. Everyone looked at him. He shrugged, like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “The ones with the light. I couldn’t understand them. Only him.”
Nobody had an answer for that. Lila filed it away next to all the other things she didn’t understand yet, in the growing pile that was starting to feel less like a mystery and more like a job.
Marcus hadn’t said anything since the two of them had scrambled back through the gap. He was sitting slightly apart from the others, his knees pulled up, his hand still buried in his jacket pocket. Lila watched him press his thumb against something inside it, over and over, the same small motion, like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.
She didn’t ask. Not yet. She had a feeling that whatever he was holding onto in there, it would come out on its own time, and pushing would only make him fold tighter around it.
“For how long?” Tyler asked.
The question hung in the air, heavier than the humidity.
Tyler was still standing, his hood pushed back now, revealing messy dark hair and eyes that looked far too old for his face. He was staring at his wrist.
“What time is it?” Marcus asked, the words clipped short. “1:03 AM,” Tyler said. “And thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds,” Jack repeated, letting out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “We
have thirty seconds until it happens again. Until we get sent to... to where?
The Titanic? The Black Plague?”
“The scientist said ‘don’t break the hour,’” Lila said, her mind racing as she tried to piece the puzzle together. “He said we were five watchers. One moment.”
“What moment?” Marcus demanded. “We didn’t do anything! We just sat in a hole in the mud!”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Emma said, her rocking slowing down as her analytical brain began to override her panic. She looked up, her eyes locking onto Lila’s. “Think about it. The first jump was to the future. The white room. The second jump was to the past. The trench.”
“So?” Jack asked.
“So, the tether is bouncing,” Emma explained, her hands moving as she visualized the concept. “Like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Future, past, future, past. But the swings are getting wider. Or narrower. I don’t have enough data points to calculate the trajectory.”
“We don’t need a trajectory, Wikipedia,” Marcus snapped — too loud, too fast, the kind of anger that was easier to hold than the other thing underneath it. “We need a way to stop it!”
“We can’t stop it,” Tyler said quietly. He held up his wrist.
1:03:50 AM.
“Ten seconds,” Tyler said.
“No,” Jack said, backing away, his hands raised as if he could physically push the time away. “No, I’m not doing this again. I’m not going back there.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Lila said, her pulse pounding. She looked at the four of them— these strangers she had been bound to by a freak accident of physics. “Whatever happens, we have to stay together. Do you understand? We stay together.”
Marcus nodded once, his jaw clenched. Emma grabbed Lila’s hand, her grip surprisingly strong. Jack squeezed his eyes shut, and Tyler just watched the numbers change.
1:03:57.
1:03:58.
1:03:59.
The air vanished.
The heavy humidity of the gym was sucked away, replaced by a blast of heat so intense it felt like opening an oven door.
CRACK.
The green lightning struck, blinding and silent. The wave of static rushed over them, and the gym dissolved into a swirling, bottomless void.
Lila was falling.
She hit the ground hard, but it wasn’t metal, and it wasn’t mud. It was sand.
Fine, burning hot sand that immediately scorched the palms of her hands.
Lila gasped, her lungs pulling in air that was bone-dry and smelled of dust and baked stone. The howling wind of the trench was gone, replaced by a deafening, oppressive silence, broken only by the sound of shifting sand.
She pushed herself up, squinting against a light so bright it made her eyes water.
It wasn’t the pale moonlight of the trench or the dim orange glow of the gym. It was the brutal, unforgiving glare of a midday sun.
“Oh, man,” Jack groaned, spitting sand out of his mouth. He pushed himself up onto his knees, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Where are we now? The Sahara?”
Lila stood up, brushing the hot sand off her jeans. The mud from the trench was already drying and cracking in the intense heat.
She looked around, and her breath caught in her throat.
They were standing on a towering dune of golden sand. The sky above them was a brilliant, cloudless blue, stretching out forever.
But it wasn’t the desert that made Lila freeze. It was what lay below them.
Stretching out across the horizon was a sprawling, ancient city made of sun-baked mudbrick and gleaming white limestone. Towering temples rose above the flat-roofed houses on columns as wide as tree trunks. A wide, glittering river cut through the center of the city, its banks lined with lush green palm trees and fields of crops.
And rising in the distance, dominating the skyline, were three enormous, perfectly geometric structures.
Pyramids.
But they weren’t the weathered, stepped ruins Lila had seen in history books. They were pristine. Their sides were smooth and covered in gleaming white casing stones that reflected the sun like mirrors. The very top of the largest pyramid was capped with a metal that shone like pure gold.
“Emma,” Marcus said, his voice hushed with awe. He was standing beside Lila, staring at the impossible city. “Tell me you know where we are.”
Emma slowly stood up, her mouth slightly open behind her glasses. She looked at the river, the temples, and the gleaming pyramids.
“The architecture is unmistakable,” Emma whispered, hushed, fear and wonder tangled together in it. “The smooth casing stones on the pyramids... the proximity to the Nile...”
“Where, Emma?” Jack asked, his sarcasm completely gone.
“Egypt,” Emma said. “Ancient Egypt. Specifically, the Old Kingdom.
During the construction of the Giza complex.”
“Ancient Egypt,” Lila repeated, the words feeling heavy and unreal in her mouth.
“Look,” Tyler said quietly.
He was pointing down the dune.
A group of people was moving up the slope toward them. They were dressed in simple white linen kilts, their skin deeply tanned by the sun. They carried long wooden spears with bronze tips, and they were pointing directly at the five kids standing on the crest of the dune.
They were shouting in a language Lila didn’t understand, but the tone was universal.
It was a warning.
“They see us,” Marcus said, his fists clenching instinctively.
“Tyler,” Lila said, her voice careful with panic. “The watch. How much time?”
Tyler looked down at his wrist. The green numbers were barely visible in the glaring sunlight.
“1:04:05 AM,” Tyler said.
“Five seconds,” Jack groaned. “We have to survive here for a whole minute?” “If the dilation is the same as the trench,” Emma said, her voice rising in
pitch, “a minute here could be hours. Or days.”
The guards were getting closer, their spears raised.
“We can’t fight them,” Lila said, grabbing Marcus’s arm before he could do something stupid. “We have to run.”
“Run where?” Jack asked, gesturing wildly at the endless desert behind them. “There’s nothing out there!”
“Then we run to the city,” Lila said, her mind making a split-second decision. “We lose them in the streets. Come on!”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned and sprinted down the side of the dune, her sneakers sinking deep into the burning sand.
Behind her, she heard the others scramble to follow.
The guards shouted louder, their voices carrying across the hot air.
Lila ran, the dry heat searing her lungs, the gleaming white pyramids looming in the distance.
The hour wasn’t over yet. And the Clock Watchers Club had just made their first move.