The Clock of the Time Dragon tolled midnight over the Emerald City.

Elphaba crept down a dirty alleyway. The once green walls of the buildings beside her were smeared with dirt, and the stars she had come to love in Quadling Country were masked by the sickly yellow glow of the streetlamps.

The bell tolled again. If there was one thing she had learned in the Resistance, it was this: To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and to be late is to be dead. She quickened her pace marginally, hurrying as much as possible without being obvious.

The package under her arm bounced rhythmically in a pressing reminder: Late, late, late.

The Clock of the Time Dragon tolled again.

Where had her Shiz days gone? The stuffy summer days spent on the docks at Caprice-in-the-Pines had seemed to drag on and on, bleeding one into another. The quiet evenings spent with Galinda in their dorm room and the calming naiveté of their fledgling friendship – both just faint memories, blurs of color and laughter.

And then there had been moments when time seemed to fly by – the days just before end of term exams when Elphaba felt as if the clock was cheating her out of precious seconds and whole evenings ended in a moment.

Or her last few days in the city with Glinda – endless carriage rides building up to four agonizing minutes with the Wizard. Then came the rush back to the carriage, and before she knew which way was up, Elphaba was shivering under the eves of a seedy-looking building, trying to pull together enough coins for a bed.

How long had it been since she'd left Glinda? One lazy summer afternoon or five hundred meetings with the Wizard? Was it two books read or an eternity of this mindless errand-running? Elphaba imagined herself grasping for every second, like flour through a sieve, clinging to lost moments and watching the present slip away.

The bell sounded again.

Who was the Clock of the Time Dragon to assign a value to the distance between sunrise and set? Who was anyone to decide when one day ended and another started or tell her she spent as much time on these nightly deliveries as she ever had with Glinda? Time was a subjective force, fluid and shifting – no two people could perceive one moment as the same length.

Elphaba shook the cobwebs from her head. She pulled her hood farther over her head and ducked into a doorway.

The Clock of the Time Dragon tolled midnight over the Emerald City.