**A week later**
These words become our joint hope.
Rest easy? I could only dream about resting. The feeling of race against time becomes stronger and stronger with each passing day, despite no indications of that. Yet none of us doubt even for a moment that a timer exists even if we don't know what numbers are on it.
Zeke sinks into research deeper than ever before. "I have all the pieces, I'm sure!" he tells me. "When everything comes together, I will be shocked by how obvious it all actually was all along."
Well, to me, it doesn't look like whatever he works on is obvious at all. When he doesn't write endless equations and cyphers, he performs strange rituals that don't seem to do anything at all besides making my skin crawl.
