The Human Resource

"Sixty seconds," she whispered, and I brought my gloved hands to the gleaming cylinder. The war effort had consumed every available shard of glass, so we'd improvised with other delicate materials – leaves, wax, even some frogs' eggs we'd found – to rehearse this, over and over. Your fingers are water, I reminded myself. The lightest possible touch.

One full clockwise turn and then a hair to the left, and it would come free. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, staring unblinkingly at the battered watch. Less than a minute and the alarms would go. I took a silent breath. My wrists moved in smooth, parallel lines. Click.

The undulating blue and silver light within the glass shone in her eyes as she stared at our prize and then looked up at me, elated. There was no time to talk, but we didn't need to. I could still hear her on that night months ago, when we'd first started planning: Just think of what we could do with all those extra years. What we could change, who we could save.

It weighed very little, I noticed as we climbed. Time has no substance until it's meaningfully used.