Chapter 5
Ora Reese
Staring at the ceiling of my room had become part of my sleeping routine. I could no longer tell just how long my eyes remained open or what exactly went on inside my head before I slept—or when I fell asleep, or what was sleep and what was awake.
That’s why, when I heard the tapping on my window, I figured I was imagining it. I figured it was just one of the things that had no explanation that I sometimes thought about or remembered or didn’t.
So, I went down this hole in my mind that opened somewhere below my bed like a tunnel that went on forever—and in it were the strangest things.
Shelves full of books and candles trapped in cages, colorful feathers and jars full of eyes, and grinning cats, too.
Such a strange place to be in that I could spend hours and hours falling, trying to see everything the hole contained, even though most things I saw were lost on me the second I looked away.
But that night, the tapping on my window continued.
I’d sketched the whole day. I’d pretended to be present at the picnic.
I’d pretended to read when we came back home, too, and I’d pretended I wasn’t in pieces during dinner.
Here, though, in my room, in my bed while I stared at the ceiling, I wasn’t supposed to have to pretend.
I wasn’t supposed to have to ignore a sound as hard as I was trying now.
I just wanted to focus on falling, yet the tapping didn’t stop.
I sat up on the bed, either in a dream or in reality. I looked at the lamp on my nightstand, and the round clock that had been a gift from Father for my twelfth birthday—and it still ticked every second exactly as it should.
The hands claimed it was a little past midnight, and nobody had any business being outside at this hour—but the tapping continued, and when I focused on the window on the other side of the room, I could make out the little rock that fell against the glass just as the tapping sounded.
Someone was throwing rocks at my window.
That’s when I decided that I was dreaming.
It was easier to move once that decision was made.
Easier to pull the covers off and instinctively grab the chronobank that I’d been given in Neverwhen—like it was a habit to take it with me everywhere I went.
I never even went to the bathroom without it, which was strange enough on its own. I couldn’t explain why.
My bare feet barely made a sound on the hardwood floor as I walked to the window, looked outside into the side yard of our house, at the trees beyond the fence gate. Everything was dark, even though there were lanterns shining nearby.
Nobody was there.
Yet as I stood there with my breath held, a tiny rock slammed against the right side of the window just near the corner. There was no mistaking it—it was a rock. A rock somebody had thrown.
The gears in my stomach turned. I had the feeling I was about to get into trouble, yet it was also excitement that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
Another rock against the glass, and then I was out of my bedroom door, tiptoeing my way down the wide hallway, as Mother and Father’s room was just around the corner from mine.
They’d be fast asleep, and I never left my room at night, so they had no reason to suspect—but still.
I was suddenly desperate to find out who it was that was throwing rocks at my window, these fantasies from every romance novel I’d read and every play I’d seen spinning like a hurricane in my mind, warping my reality even more.
Or my dream—whichever I was in right now.
I had nothing but my nightgown on, so when I opened the door, the cold air raised goose bumps all over my arms. I reached for the hanger nearby without looking and grabbed the first thing I touched—a black leather coat that was my mother’s, but it would do.
I put it over my shoulders and slipped the chronobank into the pocket, just in case, then stepped outside, barefoot as I was, an almost-smile on my lips.
The lights mounted on the outside wall of our house were bright enough that they illuminated the entire front yard.
Empty. Nobody was there—and nobody was outside in the street, either.
Just the night, the sky dark and full of clouds, the air sometimes warmer, sometimes colder, like it was still deciding what to be.
Closing the door behind me, I walked barefoot on the grass and to the side of our house, stopped right by my window. I could see my bed from it, could see my room. Could almost see myself lying there, staring at the ceiling for the past two hours, too.
No idea why I was so excited, why some part of me felt like it knew exactly what to expect, like I’d gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and had snuck out of my room regularly before, too, which I hadn’t.
Except I waited there, a minute and three and five, and no more rocks slammed against the glass, and nobody moved or breathed around me.
It would make sense that I’d imagined it, of course—except there, on the glass, I could just see where the rocks had slammed, and some had left scratches behind, and that last one had left a little dirt near the corner, too.
Somebody had thrown those rocks, and they’d pulled me out of my bed, and now they wanted to hide?
My excitement waned. Anger took its place all over my chest so suddenly, and then I was walking ahead toward the trees, calling, “Allan! Finn—I know it’s you!”
And who cared what time it was or that I was shouting—it was them, my cousins, and I was going to make them pay. Maybe right now was my chance to give magic a try, to finally spend a couple of minutes from my new chronobank. Maybe I could set their hair on fire or give them hives for days.
Never mind that I didn’t have the first clue about setting things on fire or giving people hives, but I would certainly try.
The way I felt, the raw disappointment that was acting as fuel for my anger, I was willing to spend every second of Sparetime I had—however I’d earned it—on paying them back for this.
For making me…feel something other than dread.
“Come out—I know it’s you! Show your faces this instant, you stemwits!”
And I might not have had any idea where I even heard such a word, or who could have possibly come up with it, but in those moments, I couldn’t bring myself to care. I just wanted to see their faces, and I wanted to relish the feeling of triumph when they saw what was in my hand—the chronobank.
They would not be laughing then. I would make sure of it.
Except…
I was already by the trees, having jumped over the low fence that circled our house, and the boys weren’t coming out.
I called their names again, two-three times, but the woods in front of me remained silent. Dark.
My heart skipped a couple of beats.
“Hello?”
I waited, ears strained, breath held, fists tight…
No answer.
But there was a light.
It burned somewhere between the trees, deeper into the woods—and I knew this woods like the back of my hand.
I’d grown up in it. The poplars were tall, with plenty of distance between the trunks, and it was only about fifty feet wide.
The other side was bordered by a low hill where we used to play when we were kids.
In there, too—we played a lot in this wood, and so I knew for a fact that there was no lantern anywhere in it.
Yet the light burned, dim at first, but with every beat of my heart, it was becoming brighter. Greener, until it was a clear teal light ball, possibly the size of my head.
Magic, liquid and gas and everything in between floating in the air between the trees like it had always been there. Like it belonged in this woods when it didn’t.
Before I knew it, I was walking toward it.
Before I knew it, all that anger had disappeared, and in its stead was now a sense of wonder, of curiosity so deep it felt like awakening. Like feeling all of me for the first time in a very long time.
Then I heard the noise behind me when I was still halfway to the light—or maybe it was floating away from me?
I turned, expecting Allan or Finn to jump at me, but it wasn’t them.
They hadn’t been the ones who’d thrown rocks at my window. It had been…someone else. Someone taller, hooded, and with a piece of wood in his hands, which he swung with all his strength into the side of my head.
A gasp, and then I was gone, my mind dark long before I hit the ground, the last image in my head that of a crescent moon that was also the sharp teeth of a grinning cat.
I heard things, though at this point it was impossible to tell if any of it was real, if it was just things I was imagining while I stared at the ceiling or the sky or a door, if I was in a dream for real—or if I was getting those flashes of faded memories that forever slipped between my fingers.
There was no way to tell the difference anymore, but I did hear voices. Male, two of them, I thought. They talked about—check the rope, and check her head-bag, and check her pulse, too.
Then I could have sworn that I felt hands on my body, and I felt magic buzzing nearby, the kind that was not Spade. Spade magic was warmth, and it flowed so smoothly. I’d felt it countless times when the people around me used it, especially my parents.
This one was stiff and cold and wrong. It was foreign, yet any time I tried to push myself away from it, I found my body perfectly unresponsive.
I couldn’t even get my eyes to open or fill my lungs with enough air in those seconds when I heard the voices talking—but luckily everything would go dark soon after.
The voices would disappear. My discomfort would disappear.
I had the impression that I was moving any time I was aware, too. Maybe like I was sitting in a carriage with wheels underneath, traveling down a very bumpy road. Which made me think this was a dream, after all, not my imagination—I fell down a hole in the ground when I was imagining.
Eventually, though, I became aware of my body again, and I realized I was standing still.
No—sitting.
Curiouser and curiouser, said the voices in my head.
I was sitting down on something hard, and in my mind I heard laughter, but it wasn’t real. It wasn’t out there, not in the real world. And when I opened my eyes, I saw…
Nothing.
Something was in front of my face.
Fabric touched my nose and my cheeks and my forehead—check the head-bag, check the head-bag, check the head-bag—and the panic that climbed up my throat like it wanted to run out of my mouth suffocated me.
My body moved—and I heard voices, too, different voices, screams and gasps and panicked shouts—but my whole focus was on my hands, on raising them to grab whatever it was that was touching my face, and taking it off.
Fabric, indeed—rough and brown and dirty.
Bile replaced the panic, burning my throat. It fell on my lap and to the broken floor instantly, and I was breathing, both my hands around my neck as if to convince myself that I had nothing there. I was free to breathe, and the air was going down my throat as it should.
I was alive, and I was sitting—and my neck and back and legs were almost completely numb the way they usually were when I sat or lay down wrong for too long.
But most importantly, I was not alone.
A gasp escaped me when I saw eyes made of reds and rusty browns, and wild curls standing in all directions, a dark stubble over his cheeks.
Another gasp escaped someone else—a girl sitting farther to my right, and she still held onto the brown fabric in her shaking fists.
A few still had those same brown fabrics over their heads.
Head-bags.
It had been real. The voices had been real.
“What…what is happening? Where am I?!”
The three people who still had the head-bags on woke with screams and gasps and jerked movements until they pulled the fabric off and saw.
The room we were in, broken concrete walls, ruined concrete floors, dark, save for two lanterns burning with golden light on opposite walls.
The chairs we sat in, set in a perfect circle, and the table standing on three legs to the left of the room.
Most importantly—the people.
The more I looked at them, and the more they looked at me, the more I recognized each one.
I’d seen them before. Time’s Teeth, we’d all seen each other before, even if it was only for a few moments that dreaded day in Neverwhen.
It was them.
It was us—the former Hands of the 31st Turning Trials, and we were all equally terrified as we waited to either wake up or for whoever had brought us here to show themselves.