Piercing.

That was the only word Hyunae could use to describe her awakening that Monday morning. The vexing sound of waking up to the precision that her alarm clock possessed never failed to bring a crease to her brow.

“Time never seems to escape my view, does it?” Hyunae questioned, staring at the black box on her nightstand; it’s bright red numbers burning bright into her irises.

What an irrelevant thing it is. Time. They are just numbers sprawled onto different surfaces and yet we revolve our life around it, she thought. Hyunae knew better than to disparage the system developed by the Society. People in the past who belittled their organization and the regulations they put on Dosec did exist, though.

They were never able to be found afterwards. Everyone noticed the missing, but no one spoke about their absence.

Reviewing the bent corners of her flawed city made Hyunae cringe. Shivers were sent down her spine and not even the warmth of the blanket enveloping her could chase the icy bumps forming on her skin away.

Should her mom not have called out to her, she would have faded back into her jaded sleep.

“Hyunae, you’re going to be late again. And you know what your teacher said about your tardiness,” her mother nagged. Hyunae replied back to her mom nothing but a simple “Okay.”

Her mom was on the slightly paranoid side of the city; the very idea of time being slightly out of place sent her straight into a state of turmoil. Because of that, Hyunae tried to be as prompt as humanly possible. But today was different.

 

Today her time was going to reach zero again.

 

She looked down to her wrist, and stared at the space enclosed between the two creases in her skin. The numbers read “03.21.15.” Three hours was all that stood between her and her predetermined “fate.”

Hyunae slowly crept out from under her covers and placed her feet carefully on the floor beside her. The feeling of the cold wood panels against her bare feet sent a jolt up her spine, making her eyes bolt open and her blood chill.

She quickly slipped on the slippers that her mother passed down to her and meandered her way down the narrow halls to the kitchen where her mother awaited her.

“I packed your lunch for you and put your breakfast in this bag so that you can eat on the move. Hurry along now!” Mrs. Woo spoke as she rushed her daughter out the door, her eyes radiating a subtle fear that if Hyunae was a stranger, she wouldn’t have noticed it.

She barely got all her belongings together before she was outside on the front porch of her house. Hyunae turned to say thanks to her mom, only to be met with the cold hard white door staring her straight in the face. She let out a sigh and muttered a small thank you before walking to the edge of the house to get her bike.

It wasn’t the newest; it was honestly not the most appealing, either. Nonetheless, it was one of two things that Hyunae’s dad gave her before he died. The second item was a ring that Hyunae wore on a metal chain around her neck. Needless to say she cherished both immensely.

She rested both of her hands on the handlebars and steered the bike from off her residence to the perfectly paved street and hopped onto the dark leather seat. Hyunae looked down to her wrist one more before pushing down on the pedal with her utmost force.

03.05.56. The numbers replayed themselves in her mind. With every second that passed, that number became more and more irrelevant. Relevant or not, today it was going to happen.

 But what that “it” was, the possibilities were endless.

 

 

She arrived at school minutes before the final bell rang and reached her class seconds before the teacher walked in.

Hyunae wasn’t sure if that class being a study hall was a help or harm to her. There was nothing preventing her from thinking about her time running out.  The dark black numbers engraved their every change into the recesses her mind.

02.39.34. 02.39.33. 02.39.32.

Time was ticking.

She stood from her chair rather abruptly, earning her stares from many of the others in the room. Most looked away shortly after she raised her head to meet their eyes. The gazes faded and she ventured outside of her class. Her eyes searched the halls, as if looking for a piece of sanity for her to hold onto before the numbers reached the end of their sequence.

Instead of a piece of sanity, she instead found a place of solace.

Hyunae pulled open the grand doors of the library and was greeted with the smell of musty pages and cracked covers. The vast amount of shelves impeded her vision from seeing the bare walls of the high-ceilinged room. She stepped into the room slowly and let the doors softly click shut behind her.

She walked over to her favorite table, which was placed by the far back wall, right under the libraries skylight. Hyunae ran her fingers over the edges of the table and took a deep breath, trying to take in as much of the euphoric room as she could. She sat down as she exhaled the air that may have stayed in her system for perhaps a second too long. But that didn’t matter to her; she was finally relaxed.

And for that matter, maybe slightly too relaxed. She placed her head down into the cushion created by folding her arms together on top of the cold wooden table and started to drift off into a deep, deep sleep.

 

By the time Hyunae awakened, her second period was already over. Her still tired eyes scanned the room for a form of time. Eventually she found it. She started to slowly walk towards the old grandfather clock placed against the far wall, not that far from where she was originally; it read somewhere around 10:50. Her eyes, which couldn’t read the time properly, moved from the face of the grandfather clock down to the time-engraved part of her body.

00.00.15. 00:00:14. 00:00:13.

Hyunae’s eyes went wide. “Oh no,” she whispered, almost frantically. As if by instinct, she bolted towards the doors.

00:00:11. 00:00:10. 00:00:09.

Time was ticking. Things were going to change.

She ran even harder. Never had the library seemed as incredibly enormous as it did in those last few seconds. It seemed as if every table and chair had moved out of their way only to block her path towards the door.

00:00:07. 00:00:06. 00:00:05.

Time was ticking. Things were going to change.

Hyunae finally reached the door. She hurriedly placed her hand on the handle of the doors only to have them be stuck in place.

Am I locked in? She thought, on the brink of panicking. She pressed down as hard as she could, and rammed her shoulder into the crack between the two wooden doors.

Her eyes, in their panic, glanced down at her wrist.

 00:00:01.

Hyunae snapped her head up and looked around the empty hallways. Her eyes darted around, trying to find any sort of indication as to why her time ran out when it did.

But there was nothing. And more importantly no one.

 

Or so she thought.

 

The sound of rustling papers startled Hyunae and made her turn to face the source of the noise. A boy with silky brown hair and beautifully crafted eyes looked up to meet her stare from behind the opened library door.

 They sat in silence. Neither said a word as if it would scare the other away.

The boy was the first to break the gaze the pair shared. He turned his head down to start picking up his papers, which were now scattered across the tiles of the school floor. Hyunae realized that it was her fault for the papers being strewn across the cold ground of the hallway when she burst the doors of the library open, probably hitting him, which made him drop his papers.

“Sorry about that,” she apologized, “I was in a bit of a rush.” As she spoke her words seemed to fade off into the distance. She reached her hand forward to pick up some of his papers and couldn’t help but notice the lack of movement from the numbers on her wrist.

 

It was frozen at 00:00:01.

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Hey guys! I hope you liked this.

I will probably be updating once or twice a week.

I hope you enjoyed the story so far! ^__^