Counter
When two strangers' Blood Clocks synchronize and start counting up instead of down, they have to figure out if they're witnessing a malfunction or measuring something no clock has ever tracked before.
In a world where Blood Clocks count down to the most significant moments of your life, Matthias has learned not to ask too many questions. Death, marriage, career-changing opportunities - the clocks predict them all, but never tell you which is which. You just know something big is coming.
Then he meets Sera in the Temporal Quarter, and both their countdowns hit zero at the exact same moment.
That's not the weird part.
The weird part is when their clocks reset and start counting up instead of down. Measuring time elapsed instead of time remaining. Doing something Blood Clocks have never done in four hundred years of recorded history.
Now Matthias and Sera are stuck with two choices: report their malfunctioning clocks to the guilds and become test subjects, or figure out for themselves what it means when your clock stops predicting the future and starts measuring the present.
Because if the clocks aren't broken, then they're inside something. Some kind of ongoing significant event that hasn't finished yet. And neither of them knows if it ends well.
A story about fate, choice, and two people trying to decide if they're falling in love or just following orders from a piece of blood-powered machinery that might be smarter than both of them combined.