The Seventh Hour Read online

  The Seventh Hour

  By Tracey Ward

  The Seventh Hour

  By Tracey Ward

  Text Copyright © 2015 Tracey Ward

  All Rights Reserved

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  Change doesn’t happen overnight.

  That’s what they used to say. I bet it used to be true.

  Now it’s an idiom, a phrase we use out of six hundred year old habit that has no literal meaning anymore. Not since the world changed and everything was forced to change with it. The people, the animals. The weather and the landscape. The very nature of the Earth shifted, taking all of us with it.

  And no, it didn’t happen overnight.

  It was painfully slow. The rotation of the Earth took its time grinding to a halt. It spent over a hundred years losing momentum until finally it leveled off, but the damage was done. We revolved around the sun the same way we always had, but the Earth’s spin had all but stopped, and humanity’s concept of time stopped right along with it.

  What used to take twenty-four hours now took a year to complete, the Earth’s revolution around the sun our only true movement. Dawn to dusk lasted six of those months. Over one hundred and eighty days of burning, unrelenting sunlight that scorched the earth and killed every living thing in its path. Rivers and lakes dried up, plants and crops burned alive, temperatures soared to sweltering heights.

  Then the night would come. Dusk to dawn lasting another six months. The baked landscape cooled and froze over. What the sun didn’t kill the cold would finish off, and it did it in the dark. Thousands of hours of living nightmare, one you couldn’t wake up from.

  It was even worse when the storms rolled in. When the animals woke up.

  We adapted or we died, and if there was one good thing about the slowing of the Earth it was that it gave us time. Time to learn, time to prep, time to adjust. Time to save what technology we needed to survive and cast the rest aside. To build cities to withstand the bitter cold and the blistering heat.

  Some people burrowed into the mountains, building their homes and cities under the ground. They hid from the elements and they waited out the summers. The winters. The hours.

  Others refused to hide. As the oceans pooled to the north and south, burying the old world and raising a new supercontinent that circled the Earth like a ring, they took to the sea. They built boats, set sail, and left the frigid night and burning day behind. They stay in the hours in between, in the half-light. That perfect hour. The golden hour.

  The Seventh hour.

  Chapter One

  Liv

  I imagine swimming is a lot like flying. You’re weightless and diving, soaring. It’s exhilarating. Quiet. Just you and the elements, the water and the air, speaking to you in a language you can’t understand, urging you to fly higher, to dive deeper, and maybe they’re going to get you killed but for just a moment you’re more alive than you’ve ever been before. You’ve broken free of man’s middle plain, the space between, and you’ll never be the same again.

  Yes, I imagine flying is a lot like swimming.

  And I can do neither.

  I look down to the frothing water below me, my bare feet dangling on either side of the thick bowsprit jutting out from the front of our ship. The skirts of my dress billow in the wind like thin red sails that have lost their lines. Like wings beating, trying desperately to fly, but they can’t. They never learned how. They buffet against my legs that are growing cold, and I wonder if it isn’t time to come in. It’s probably too late. I’m sure I’ve already been spotted and once word gets back to him, I’m sunk. As surely as if I slid off this mast and into the sea right now.

  “Do I even want to know the logic behind this?”

  I don’t turn. I’m not surprised to hear Gav’s voice behind me. I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long for him to show up.

  “Behind what?” I call over my shoulder.

  “Behind you hanging out on the front of the boat like a figurehead.”

  “Do you know what the figurehead on this ship is?”

  “An angst-ridden seventeen year old girl?”

  I grin faintly. “Close. A blond mermaid with boobs bigger than my head.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  “On the other ships are a lion, an angel, and a unicorn.”

  “That’s only four.”

  “The fifth Dasher doesn’t have one.”

  “Why do you know this? Have you sat on the front of all of the ships like this?”

  “No. This is a first.”

  “Do you want to tell me why you’re out there?” Metal jingles together lightly behind me, like discordant, dented bells. “Or why your shoes and necklace are in a pile on the ground?”

  I shake my head without a word. My eyes brim with cold tears, the sting of the wind flooding them, sending salt down my cheeks in rolling tracks of ice. I don’t know where the emotion is coming from. It hits me hard out of nowhere the way the claustrophobic feeling hit me on the deck twenty minutes ago when I tore the heavy jeweled necklace from my throat and freed my feet from the painful confines of my shoes. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see. Like I’d be sick there on the deck, and before I knew it I was climbing. I was on the bowsprit in the wind with the waves splashing underneath me. It felt a little bit like flying, or as close as I’ll ever come to it. I pushed farther and farther out on the beam until the ship was behind me. Forgotten. It felt like the entire ocean, the entire sky, was all that surrounded me. It was an incredible feeling.

  And now it’s over.

  “They’re too tight,” I tell Gav, carefully keeping my voice steady.

  “Your shoes are too tight?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you kicked them off
and climbed out onto the front of the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your dinner dress?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he agrees quietly. “Alright.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” I scold sharply.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy, Liv.”

  I laugh incredulously, the sound shaky even to my own ears. I quickly wipe away a tear trailing down my cheek.

  “I don’t,” he insists. “But I am worried about you. You haven’t been yourself lately.”

  “I don’t even know who ‘myself’ is.”

  “I do. I know you, and this isn’t you. You’re stronger than this.”

  “Stronger than what?”

  “Than whatever it is that’s crushing you.”

  I take a shallow breath. “Lemons.”

  He chuckles, the sound deep and full. Rich in a way I can’t remember how to be. “Lemons are crushing you?”

  I nod my head, my long brown hair rippling behind me.

  “How?” Gav pushes gently.

  I swallow, trying to steel myself, praying my voice is stronger than my spirit. “When I was eight Dad took me to the city for the first time. We took the headless Dasher to the big ship, just him and me.”

  I glance to my right, to the south where the massive ocean liner pushes violently through the waves. It’s home to the majority of our tribe. Three thousand people aboard it, including herds of animals and long lengths of hydroponic farmland. A hospital, schools, and a library to make the history of mankind jealous.

  “He took me to see the animals,” I continue. “The kitchens, the orchards. They gave me fresh cherries and apples, and then I saw the lemons. They looked like sunshine, they were so yellow. He cut one open for me and the smell knocked me backwards. I loved it. Everything about it. It was my favorite thing in the world for so long.” I turn my head to look over my shoulder at him. “Do you know what I smell like?”

  His face twists in a look of confusion, his dark eyebrows forming a hard V on his brow. “I’m not in the habit of sniffing my sister.”

  “I smell like lemons.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “My clothes do too. It’s in my soaps, in my laundry. They put lemon on my fish and in my drinks. I swear to you, I sweat the scent. Since I was eight I have smelled, tasted, and touched lemon almost every minute of every day, and do you know what?”

  “You’re sick of it,” he guesses correctly.

  “I can’t stand to look at it. I loved it, but now I can’t get away from it. That’s what happens when you give people a piece of yourself. They define you by it. Box you inside it until you can’t see your way out.”

  When he doesn’t respond I get nervous. I’m anxious that he doesn’t understand, that I haven’t been clear enough, but what I want to say is nothing I can say out loud. Not easily, not even to him; the one person on the entire planet that I trust.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I ask hesitantly.

  “Yes.”

  My heart is in my throat, hoping I’ve been heard. Praying he’ll say the words for me that I’m terrified to voice. “What am I saying?”

  “You’re saying that you want lemon custard for dessert.”

  I don’t laugh. I don’t do anything but stare and sink, fall and flounder as my hopes dash against the front of the ship that neatly slices through the water. I drop my words unspoken into the sea where they’re cut in two, the severed pieces sinking in a swirl of white water. Garbled and irredeemable.

  I turn ahead to the horizon. To the waning sun. The clouds roll over it, fading its brilliant pink hues and yoke yellow glow until they’re all but washed away. Dulled and dimmed to ghostly remembrances of what they should be. It’s distant, slipping farther from our bow every minute. We’re deep in the Seventh hour, creeping into the cold of the Eighth, and if we’re not very careful we’ll go too far. We slowed to stay out of the storms but now they’re brewing behind us too. The rolling sky of the horizon ahead and the crackling brightness of the clouds behind make me uneasy, and my maudlin mood shifts even deeper down inside me.

  “Never mind,” I mutter numbly.

  I’m not sure he’s heard me. The wind might have taken my words and sent them west into the night where no one will find them. Where they’re meaningless, unheard and lost in the darkness, and I feel my chest tighten at the thought. At the truth.

  We fall into a silence that the world doesn’t join. The wind keeps on howling in my ears, the chop of the ship through the water crashes at my feet. I can feel the vibration of the engines under my hands on the bowsprit, eternal and relentless. How they keep up all day, every day year after year makes my mind ache to try and understand. The sheer monotony of it is more numbing than the icy spray on the soles of my feet.

  “You need to come down from there,” Gav warns me gently.

  “I know.”

  “If Father sees you—“

  “He probably already has.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  He leaves me be for a moment longer, letting the decision be mine. It’s not, though. It’s not mine and it’s not his. Nothing ever is.

  “I’m coming down,” I finally surrender reluctantly.

  I spin deftly, swinging my leg up and over the large wooden beam until I’m sitting on it sideways. My hair is blinding me, whipping in my face with the force of the ship driving relentlessly forward. I can’t see what I’m doing but I don’t care. I was agile enough to get out here, I’m agile enough to get back.

  I slide toward the ship, Gav’s eyes on me as I go. The boat rises and falls gently against the waves making each movement dangerous. Throwing me off balance with every lunge.

  “Liv, be careful,” Gav murmurs, his voice anxious.

  “Talking to me while I’m concentrating isn’t exactly smart, Gav.”

  “Alright, but just—mmm.”

  I grin as he bites his tongue, his eyes heavy on me while I make my way slowly back toward safety. I’m nearly there. Just a few more inches…

  “Livandra!”

  My mother’s panicked shout cuts through my brain like a hot knife through fresh butter. It startles me, severing my concentration.

  I feel my right hand slip first, then my left loses its tenuous grip on the smooth beam. I begin to topple sideways.

  There’s nothing to grab onto.

  “No!” she screams.

  My last coherent thought as I fall is that my mother has got to stop screaming.

  My last frantic, terror laden thought is that I’m actually going to die.

  And it’s going to hurt.

  Chapter Two

  Gray

  The Posher ships are passing. It’s a sure sign that the night is coming. As if the dark rolling in on the horizon wasn’t signal enough.

  They’re late this year. They’re practically in the Eighth hour, somewhere I’ve never seen them. Standing on the high ridge on the outside of our mountain I can see the clouds colliding with them, closing in on them. They must have been sailing slow to avoid them, but it’s pushing their ships into the darkness, into the night where more storms are brewing.

  It’s a no-win situation, but life is like that. Maybe it didn’t used to be, but it is now. Now we have nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. You have to weather the storm, come hell or high water.

  “Gray!”

  Karina is coming up over the eastern edge of the ridge, the evening sky behind her. Her dark hair disappears like ink on black paper, her white skin startling in contrast. She looks almost ghostly, her walk too lithe to be real. Her face too perfect to believe.

  I feel my stomach clench hard at the sight of her, a weird mixture of joy and annoyance coursing through my veins. I grip tightly to the handful of rocks I’ve been rolling in my palm.

  “Hey, Rina,” I call back.

  “Are you up here t
o watch the Poshers on parade?”

  “And to say goodbye to the sky.”

  “Blech,” she groans in disgust. “Don’t remind me. I’m nearly crying watching it go. I can’t believe we have to go on lockdown in a week.”

  “Two if you bundle up.”

  “I do not. Thank you.”

  I grin at her curt tone. Her undying hatred for the cold. “Then you’ve got a week.”

  She reaches the end of the trail where I’m standing, her face flushed pink with exertion. She smiles softly. “Well then I better make the most of it, shouldn’t I?”

  “I’d start now. We might not get as much daylight as we should.” I jut my chin toward the sea. “There’s a storm circling the Eventide ships. Looks like it’s going to roll inland.”

  “Really?” She squints into the horizon. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

  “It’s been building. We’re all going to get wet for sure.”

  “They’ll hate that.”

  I smirk. “They better get used to it ‘cause it’s happening.”

  “They’re late this year.”

  I nod in agreement. It’s the same thing every Gaian has been saying for the last week. Our entire village has been buzzing about the lateness of the Eventide since the Seventh hour began and there’d been no sign of them. “After Porton and Ambrios they’ve still gotta sail south down around the peninsula. That’ll take ‘em at least two weeks.”

  “It’ll be totally dark.”

  “If they don’t make up the time, yeah.”

  I toss one of the rocks out toward the ocean, aiming at the ships. Of course it lands well short of the mark but I imagine it hitting the hull of one of their honey colored ships, pinging noisily off the side. Maybe startling some Posher out of their sleep.

  Karina pushes her long hair out of her eyes. She pauses for just a second, but I know what she’s thinking. I know what she’s going to ask before she opens her mouth.

  “Is your brother back yet?”

  There’s the clench in my gut again. The annoyance. “No. Easton isn’t back yet. None of them are. They were supposed to be back three days ago.”