Chapter 18
Idid.
What could only have been a minute later, my eyes opened, and the pain in my body was almost unbearable. Black dots in my vision, and it took me a few blinks to clear them out. It took me a few deep breaths to manage to sit up, push through the pain, and focus on my ears.
Holy Hour, that had been real. The branches were still there.
They’d sprung out from the floor and they’d twisted together, had grown so impossibly tall that I couldn’t even see how far up they went.
Most importantly, I seemed to be moving in rhythm with my heartbeat.
Time was no longer slowed down.
A new wave of energy came over me, and for a moment, I was able to forget all my pain. Others were just making it to their feet, too. Mimi was shaking Reggie, and Helen and Levana were slapping Silas to get him to wake up, and March was just three feet behind me, blinking his eyes slowly.
I fell to his side and grabbed him by the suit, pulled him to sit up as well as I could.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, we’re okay,” I chanted, touched his cheek to feel his warmth, pushed his hair away from his eyes.
His hand closed around my chin, and he spun my head to the side while he was still blinking fast, probably to clear his view.
“Blood,” he said and touched the edge of my temple. His fingertip was stained with blood.
“I’m okay.” I touched it with my fingertips and barely felt it. “It’s just a scratch. Can you stand?” I whispered, a little flushed, checking his head now for a sign of blood, but there was none.
March nodded, but he still swayed a little to the sides a bit when I pulled him up by the arm.
“Time’s Trousers, this shit is slippery!”
Russ was already by the branches that had sprung from the floor, touching the wood. It looked slippery, indeed. Like someone had just polished the wood, and they’d done an amazing job of it, too.
“How in the world are we going to climb up there?” said one or the other as we approached.
“Impossible.”
“We’d slip and fall three feet up.”
“We’re moving at a normal pace now, though…right?” Reggie said, scratching the back of his head as he looked around.
“We are,” I said without hesitation—my movements matched the rhythm of my heart perfectly.
“I think we completed this level when we made this,” said Seth and slapped his hand against the wood a couple of times. “Now, how are we going to climb it?”
“Magic.” We turned to Silas, who was pacing around in a circle with his eyes down and his hand around his chin. He looked older like that. Almost like a different person.
“We have our Life Clocks. If they allow us to use Sparetime, we can magic the soles of our shoes, and make rope at the very least.”
“Will that be enough? It’s pretty steep,” said Russ, and he was right. The branches went almost straight up.
“Only one way to find out.”
March dropped to his knees, took his Life Clock out and put his hand over my boot.
“What are you doing?”
“What he said,” March said, nodding his head to the side.
I looked at the others—all of them were kneeling, too, working on their own boots. “I can do it myself,” I muttered, feeling awkward to have him kneeling there in front of me.
“I never said you couldn’t,” said March without even looking up at me. Red spilled out of the palm of his hand and on my right boot.
A heartbeat later, I felt them changing around my feet, felt the soles getting thicker, raising me up another inch. The hands on March’s Life Clock moved—four minutes. It had cost him four minutes of Sparetime to alter my boots, which was entirely too high a price to pay, if you asked me.
March didn’t, though. He just looked up at me and grinned, his eyes sparkling.
My heart squeezed.
Dangerous, Silas had said, but even he hadn’t known just how dangerous March was becoming for me, and I didn’t know it, either, then. Not fully.
“Guys, it works,” said Erith a tick later. “My magic’s never quite worked before, but it worked on the first try.” She showed us the thick brown sole of her boot, almost identical to mine. That’s when it hit me—March had used his magic so easily. They all had.
“It did exactly what I wanted it to do!” Erith cried, ecstatic.
“Mine, too,” said Helen. “Look at his! I never used to be able to make much of anything before.”
That made me insanely curious.
Would my magic work the same way, too? Because it didn’t back home, not quite.
I’d tried. We were all encouraged to try in school after we turned fifteen—only the most basic things.
I tried at home with my parents, too, and it never quite felt right.
It never moved the way it was supposed to, the way the adults said it should. It was always…hesitant.
Eventually I’d stopped trying. Not that I was a big fan of making things out of thin air. Well, not thin air, but Sparetime. Minutes that we could have used for something else, something bigger.
Regardless—now I was curious to know if it worked for me, too.
Then Silas said, “C’mon, let’s get up there, see what else they have in store for us.”
And so, we did. At first, we didn’t magic any other tool, only the boots. We didn’t think we needed to. We started climbing, trying to find edges on the smooth surfaces to hold on to, and the soles did help a great deal. My boots wouldn’t slip a single inch. March had done a really great job.
But when we were about ten feet off the floor, they were no longer enough. There were only so many places where we could hold onto those branches, and my hands were so, so tired, my fingertips bleeding.
“Hey guys, watch this!”
Green magic, dark and thick, like something between smoke and liquid, spread from under Reggie’s palm where he was climbing just a couple feet over my head.
The next second, he was holding this device that looked like an axe, but the head of it was pointy, sharp, thick. A climbing axe.
He laughed as he swung his arm back, just barely, then slammed the sharp tip onto the wood. It went right through. It pierced through the shiny, smooth surface, and when Reggie pulled himself up, it held his weight just fine.
The rest of us got to work right away.
I was actually eager to do magic. Father was right—these trials had really turned a new Ora in me. I was excited to close my eyes and imagine an identical copy of Reggie’s climbing axe in my hand, and I almost screamed when the magic rushed from my chest and down my arms.
My Life Clock was in my pocket. I didn’t reach for it—couldn’t without risking a fall.
I didn’t even dare look down, but the magic still came.
I still felt the longest hand of the Life Clock moving, even if I couldn’t see it.
Magic slipped out of me, thick smoke against my skin—and then metal touched the palm of my hand. Cold, smooth metal.
More laughter around me, more cheers. My eyes opened to find a copy of Reggie’s axe secured in my fist, my fingers wrapped tightly around the handle.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Holy Hour, it had actually worked—and it hadn’t been difficult at all. Not even close to how it was before. The way the magic responded to me was incredible, like it had been waiting for my call its whole life.
The realization hit me all of a sudden—we hadn’t even scratched the surface of what the Labyrinth truly was.
My hands were shaking when I called for more magic to make another one of those axes, and this time my eyes remained wide open. I saw the purple smoke slipping out of the palms of my hands, covering them completely. It left behind an identical axe before it faded away.
I laughed, too. The ease with which the magic moved was incredible. I finally understood why everyone was so obsessed with it.
Before the minute was over, all of us were equipped with two climbing axes, and boots that didn’t slip.
Just like that, we climbed the branches without trouble and finally saw where they ended.