Chapter 24
It was almost dawn when we walked out from those same gates, into the same arena.
The sun was just about to unrise, and the sky was almost completely dark on the other side of the world.
Beyond the screaming, cheering audience.
Beyond the White and Red Queen, whom we could just see as dots of color in the distance, standing in their glass box and clapping their hands, waving at the crowd that was losing their minds as they screamed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, your Royal Clocklinesses—the second Backward Turning Trial has been officially unwon!”
Over. It was over.
We’d unwon the second trial.
And the moment those words registered in my mind, just like last time, I began to fall.
Flashes took over my mind. I saw broken glass and timesand everywhere. I saw lights and heard the melody, heard laughter, and I could have sworn to you I recognized all the voices of the Hands.
I recognized mine, too. We had been laughing. All of us, together.
I remembered for a split second. I remembered how it had been then, how different, and how much of it was still the same.
I remembered—and then the darkness lifted from my eyes, and the arena came back into view again.
Gone, gone, gone. Everything, all those memories—they were gone, and they left behind imprints all over me, yet I hadn’t passed out this time. I was still awake. My legs still held me, and the crowd still cheered.
I looked at the others, confused, so sure that I was just about to say something, but there were no words on my tongue now. No words in my mind, either. Just…emptiness.
And the way they looked about themselves told me they felt the same, too.
Elida was proud, she said. We’d been brave, she said. She always knew we’d make it, she said.
Then she urged us to move, to get to the palace, to follow the six soldiers dressed in silver armor who would make sure we were safe until we were inside the palace’s doors.
Safe. What an illusion. How could we be safe when we were trapped, couldn’t even walk away from this place, couldn’t even speak to anyone to ask for help? What did safe mean, when we’d been about to starve in that room surrounded by darkness, and nobody had offered us a single helping hand?
Still, we eagerly followed.
It may have been eight or nine hours only, but Time’s Teeth, we were exhausted. Terrified. Hungry as one can be, and we just wanted to lie down on something soft.
None of us argued. We followed the soldiers toward the palace, and all the way up to the eating hall without so much as a glance at one another. There was no blood on us this time, so we didn’t need to clean up first.
Only when we sat down around the table, and the help came in all at once with plates full of food, did we allow ourselves to feel. To look. To breathe easy.
We were still shaking. Most were crying in silence. A few were brave enough to whisper, to remind us that it was over, we’d unwon, we’d made it out of that place, and none of us had died. We were champions indeed—said who could have been Russ.
But I only had eyes for the plate and only put food in my mouth because I knew I’d regret it later if I didn’t. Just a little. Just so I could sleep.
And water, too. I drank just so I didn’t feel like I was as dry as timesand on the inside, and then I was ready to go.
March hardly looked at me. Something on his mind.
Something on all our minds—but we didn’t know what. We didn’t know how. We just knew that it was a heavy burden whatever we were made to bear.
We knew that we knew for that split second. We remembered again, and now we didn’t.
I didn’t say goodnight when Lida waved at me from where she stood with the other maids near the wall, as if to say that it was okay to get up.
I didn’t look at any of them as I walked over to the door she was holding open for me.
I heard others pushing back their chairs and making it to their feet, no doubt eager to disappear, too.
A blink, and I was in my room, and Lida said something I didn’t hear. I fell on the bed with the suit still on and felt her pulling my boot off. I was asleep long before she undid the laces of my second one.
The face of the Red Queen was with me until I woke up under the light of the moon half hidden behind thick clouds.
The stars—those I could see from the window of my bedroom— were unusually bright, too.
The night was alive, yet I felt…less so.
Like I’d lost something else already, and I didn’t know what.
Trying to think back to what it could have been was going to drive me insane, so I stopped.
Instead I peeled off that suit from my body. It seemed Lida hadn’t taken me out of it, and I was thankful. I didn’t want to be undressed by her or anyone else while I was unconscious. And I would rather try to scrub the last trial from my skin all by myself.
When I walked out of the bathroom, I thought I’d feel lighter, but I didn’t.
I’d only lost six minutes from the Life Clock in the Thirteenth Hour trial when I transported the sand into the hourglass.
The rest remained untouched. I took the chronobank with me and the drawing of Silas’s face, and I walked out of the room at a little past nine m.b.
I was hungry, my stomach rumbling, but I couldn’t even think about eating yet.
No, I needed air. I needed to be able to breathe and to be somewhere where the walls didn’t threaten to cave in on me. Suffocate me.
So, I went out into the garden that wasn’t a garden, with gears and metal parts that were shaped like flowers—and for what purpose, I wondered? To look good? Was that it?
It didn’t matter, though. I found a bench to sit on, near a bush that was a real bush, only the one between it and the other wasn’t. Instead, it was hiding some sort of a vent underneath that groaned every once in a while as if it were a living, breathing beast.
Other than that, the night was warm and quiet. Nobody was working in the mechanical garden at this time, for which I was thankful. There, I sat with Silas’s drawing in my hand—folded still—and I counted my breaths until I reached one thousand.
Tears had slipped from my eyes, but I wasn’t sure what for.
I was still wiping my wet cheeks when I noticed something moving beyond a hedge and a tree that seemed all too real—until I looked hard enough to notice that the bark was made of metal, and oil was slowly sliding down between the lines of the rough surface.
At first, I thought it was a worker. They tended to leave me alone, hardly looked at me even when I was inside the palace.
Then I thought—hoped it would and hoped it wouldn’t be—March. He liked to follow me around and I never noticed until he wanted me to.
Lastly, I thought it was some part of the machinery, something moving or twitching or steaming, but it was so consistent, and it sometimes sounded like something sharp being dragged across a metal surface. I got curious, so curious to see what was wrong.
Something must have been, I figured.
But something wasn’t.
“You’re walking backward very well, I must say,” said a cat with a grin as his claws slowly scratched the side of the metal branch he was lying on. “Why do you think that is, O-ra?”
It was the Cheshire.
My heart skipped a beat, and my eyelids a blink. The cat was there, lying on its front, thick tail swooshing up and down, a paw under his grinning face, the other scratching the branch like he thought he was making music.
“It’s you,” I whispered, afraid, but more relieved because I’d been sure I’d imagined him.
Time’s Teeth, I’d been so sure the conversation in the woods had never happened when the Cheshire didn’t show up in the Thirteenth Hour trial—yet here he was.
Grinning. Talking. Its fluffy fur changing with numbers every blink, its ears sharp, perked up.
“Yes—I am I. And you are you,” the Cheshire told me. “You haven’t answered me yet.”
For a second I was confused—mostly by my relief. “Oh. Right, erm…I don’t-don’t know why.” He’d wanted me to tell him why I was walking backward very well.
“Well, I am no expert on the matter,” he said, slowly moving to the side, stretching his legs and his neck in an almost natural way before he sat up at the base of the metal branch.
The tree was really constructed like a real tree, and it seemed the Cheshire didn’t have trouble pretending it was wood.
“But, if I had to guess, and guessing is my fifth favorite thing to do, I’d say it usually happens when you’ve lost enough of the parts of you that slow you down. ”
My brows narrowed. “What…what exactly does that mean?”
“How should I know—I’m only but a Cheshire.” Pulling his paw up to his mouth, he began to lick it, only he did so backward, from the tip, down.
“You didn’t show up in the Thirteenth Hour trial,” I said, and I tried not to sound like I was accusing him.
“Yes, yes, there were too many eyes. You did well, if I may say. You chose all the wrong things again—bravo, O-ra.”
“I don’t think I chose all wrong,” I muttered—because I had figured out that the clock didn’t need to be correct to work.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. How’s the monstrosity now? Has it had enough?” And he made a point to try to see through the metal canopy over us—the tree was indeed large. But the Cheshire was looking in the direction of the Great Clock.
“It’s not a monstrosity,” I thought I should say. “And no, the Great Clock is still stuck.”
“Remind me again, why is that? Why did this glitch happen, O-ra? Do not get me wrong, I rejoice that it did.”
“Because of the curse. Because of…the traitor who unleashed a curse on Time and tried to ruin the world.”
Silence.
The Cheshire lay down on his belly again, licked his lips and his whiskers like he was tasting something, and he didn’t necessarily like it.
“Such big words,” he ended up muttering.