Tessa moved as though she were part of the machine itself, taking steps at regular intervals in time with the rhythmic ticking that roared through her ears like rushing blood. That was how you avoided its great glass eyes: by pretending to be one with it.

Her orders from Nik were clear. Find the heart of the Doomsday Clock. Stop it. Save us all. He always had been the planner, the executive of their little group of anarchists. He had dreams of a future beyond the Clock's terrible prediction of Doomsday, a world where the actions of people were not judged by their possible consequences many decades in the future, but by the truth in their hearts.

Tessa, for her part, was happy to follow him anywhere. Electricity sparked between metal antennae, the lightning cannons that protected the center of the machine. She knew she was the only fleshy thing within this palace of copper and glass, and that her heart could only withstand a few hundredths of an ampere before it started to shut down. Gloves of rubber protected her flesh, designed to insulate against intense currents. And her heart... it had never been hers to lose, anyway.

Our doom does not have to be inevitable! She remembered Nik chanting from a soapbox in a smoggy alleyway, surrounded by a crowd of only rats and a few grubby homeless people. Do not let its calculations define you! In a world where we are more than the sum of our parts, what grand creations could we make? I have a plan, brothers and sisters, and if you join me, we will dismantle the Clock, gear by gear, until we are no longer slaves to our own future!

Never had she seen a man so confident, so charismatic and committed in his controversial opinions. This was a cause she could get behind. Walking up to the soapbox, she had told him as much.

Never have I seen a girl so willing to follow a cause she's only just learned about, he had answered.

I'm sure anyone would do the same, she'd said, for the right reason.

Not in my experience. You're special... what was your name?

Tessa. I study physical sciences. I think the only way anything is ever truly inevitable is if we tell ourselves it is.

Well said, Tessa. I'm Nik. Welcome to the revolution.

And so they had become the first two members of a group of rebels without a name, sworn to destroy the Doomsday Clock. At the time, they had no gear and no idea how they were going to do it. Bit by bit, Nik had pieced the plan together, gathering like-minded individuals from every corner of society, stealing train timetables and mechanical augments wherever he could. Tessa had practiced climbing, avoiding the Clock's sensors, and using explosives. He was the planner, and she was the executor, who would carry out his design atop the Clock Tower one fateful night.

They weren't a couple. But sometimes, after an exhausting night of training for the mission, Tessa would walk in on Nik staring cross-eyed at a blurry pile of paperwork, too tired to think. She would gently move the papers aside and sit next to him, and they would talk about the future. I'd like to move to the country and run a farm, he had told her, so tired his words slurred. I think sheep would be nice. I've always liked wool socks. It'll have a big huge maple tree in the back, and there'll be a little pond, and I'll stay up as late as I want and light a bonfire to burn all the stupid orders the Clock typed out for us. Then he looked at her with his big blue eyes, rimmed with black bags and goggle lines, and for once he looked less like a rebel leader and more like a young man trying his best. And what about you, Tess?

That sounds like a lovely life, she said. Afterward, as she helped him stagger out of the workroom, she wondered if any of these visions included her.

Tick went the clock as she took one more step forward. A glass eye stared her right in the face. A puff of steam scalded against her left arm, sheathed in a bronze gauntlet. The sticks of dynamite hanging from her belt felt heavy, like consequences, like freedom.

For too long, the world had been living in a lie. The Doomsday Clock told people that the only way to live was perfectly. That any deviation from its orders only hastened its conclusion, the inevitable destruction of the world via human error.

But error wasn't a tragic byproduct of human condition. Error was human condition.

Tessa reached the center of the Clock at last, a great circular room of whirring gears and pipes. Here, the ticking drowned out everything else, even her heartbeat. Even the thoughts racing through her head at lightning speed.

So close to the new world now, she could almost taste the bonfire smoke on Nik's farm. Would he finally slow down, now that there was no more mission? Would he finally look past Tessa the loyal saboteur, and see Tessa the girl who was willing to throw her entire future away for him?

She placed the dynamite at regular intervals, twelve wedged between copper pipes around the edges of the chamber.

She looked up at its enormous face, hanging high above her like a second sky. Its hands creaked and shifted as she watched, moving faster than they ever had before. Days passed in the span of seconds, slowing down as the hands approached the top. The chamber contracted in on itself, sealing every exit, but it wasn't enough to stop the explosion.

One hour to midnight. Forty minutes. One minute. Twenty seconds.

The clock knew it was about to die.

The clock always knew.

It had never been counting down to the end of the world, but to its own end. As the last strike chimed and the fires ignited, Tessa realized what she should always have known: whatever the world after Doomsday looked like, she was not going to be a part of it.

She hoped Nik would be all right in the new world, where people weren't judged only by the consequences of their actions.

But she hoped he would think of her, the consequence of his action, and understand.