Clockwork Zero Novels & Stories

Thump-thump. This is it. The moment my mother prepared me for. I reach out. My fingers hover over the keys. Zero. Four. Two. Two. My birth time. I press the buttons. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. For a second, nothing happens. The silence is deafening. It presses against my eardrums. Then, a heavy mechanical clunk echoes through the room. The steel wheel in the center of the door begins to spin. It spins slowly, then stops.

The ultimate terror of a countdown isn't the mechanical ticking of a clock ticking toward zero; it is the sudden, freezing realization that the corporate empire you built to protect your future is about to be handed over to a fraud, while you sit fifty yards away in the dark, matching the ticking second for second with a handwritten log of their destruction.

But the warmth was a lie, or at least, it felt like one. He reached into his pocket and his fingers brushed the cold, shattered face of the pocket watch. **Tick. Tick. Tick.** The sound wasn't coming from gears or springs. It was coming from the air itself. It was a countdown that had no visible numbers, a heartbeat of a machine that refused to stay dead. "Rowan?"

This was a clockwork mechanism—a 1940s-era shortwave relay that used the house's iron-ore foundation as an antenna. "He built a 'Dark-Net' before the internet even existed," I whispered. Enzo gripped the crank. "If I turn this, what happens?" "We broadcast," I said. "But not to the web. We broadcast a 'Ping' to every 'Quiet One' listed in this book. Every man who owes the Cavallo family a debt of silence. Every soldier the Weaver doesn't know exists." Enzo looked at me, his eyes reflecting the flickering kerosene flame. "And it also tells the Weaver exactly where we are."

In a feverish haze, I heard the doorbell ring. The delivery guy called out, "Delivery for Mr. Hendrick." I smiled as I took it from the delivery guy and thanked him. I was going to laugh at James for being childish. After all, before falling asleep, I had only mentioned that I had a fever. Yet he had already ordered medicine for me. However, when I opened the delivery bag and saw what was inside, my expression froze. Condoms and lubricant were right there in plain sight, and even the toy in my hand made my head spin. Just as I took out my phone, ready to demand an explanation from my husband, a text message suddenly popped up. "This is Sangland Resortworld. Dear Mr. Hendrick, we are de

And though his state of surprise had faded, he was still very much interested in what he was seeing. “And this,” Cronos pointed at the clock in his chest before taking a small pause. “Well, you know what this is, don’t you?” Cronos smirked and Mane nodded his head. The grey clock that reeked of time and ticked several seconds into minutes and minutes into seconds was one that Mane had never seen before. Yet he didn’t need to be told what it was. “The Clock of Eternity,” Mane croaked, his voice patchy and broken like a man who had known no food nor wine for decades.

“Stop.” Lucas froze the display. “Go back three seconds.” He did. A tiny fluctuation appeared in the lower corner. Not data. Timing. The systems had synchronized for 0.0007 seconds. Every major subsystem. At exactly the same moment. I stared at it. “That shouldn't be possible.” Lucas leaned closer. “Why?” “They aren't supposed to share a clock at that resolution.” “They don't.” “Then why did they?” He didn't answer. Because he was already running the same question through his models.

It was currently sitting on the mantle of the fireplace in our real home, the one we had fled after the explosion. "The clock?" I whispered, my voice failing me. "Not the clock," Cassian said, his voice dropping an octave into a register of pure lethality. "The weight inside the pendulum. It’s not lead, Mrs. Moretti. It’s a specialized, low-frequency transponder. It doesn't just track location; it records audio within a thirty-foot radius and transmits it via a burst-signal to a satellite uplink every six hours." The air left my lungs in a sharp, cold rush. "The bedroom. The clock was in the library, right next to the master suite. Every word we’ve said... every plan you made with the Battal

I narrowed my eyes at a brown clock on the table as we made our way outside. "What's this?" I stopped to pick it up. "That's just my time run." He said, receiving the rusty looking clock from me. "Don't touch it, it could be dangerous." "Dangerous, how?" I resumed walking while he led the way. "You see, for three years now, I've been working on a time machine, but that's never happened. No success at all." He began. "Okay?" I raised a questioning eyebrow at him. "But I managed to come up with the time run. It's a reverse clock that takes you to twelve noon the day you use it." He explained even though I was unable to comprehend.

Cyprian ​The digital clock on the master control board glowed a harsh, sterile green: 03:00 AM. ​In the quiet of the estate’s subterranean command hub, that illumination was the only real light left. Outside, three flights above my head, the Kampinos storm was tearing through the night, but down here, the air was thick, stale, and smelled of warm copper wiring and cooling coffee. ​I leaned both hands on the edge of the console, my knuckles white against the matte dark steel. My thumb traced the silver band on my left wrist a habit I couldn’t break when the silence got too heavy.