The clock did not skip again.
Lin Yue watched it for a long time anyway, sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees, waiting for the numbers to betray him the way everything else in the room had betrayed him tonight. They didn't. 11:52 became 11:53 became 11:54 with the dull, mechanical honesty of an object that had never once considered lying to him. He almost didn't trust it for that.
Try not to waste what cannot happen twice.
He didn't like the sentence. Not because he failed to understand it — he understood it perfectly, turned it over enough times in the last few minutes that its edges had started to smooth from handling — but because understanding it hadn't made it lighter. If anything, the opposite. A warning he couldn't parse would have been easy to set aside until it made sense. This one had made sense immediately, and gone on getting heavier the longer he sat with it.
