Chapter 10
Lanterns on the walls flickered to life one after the other like fireflies just waking from sleep, and with them came the sound of footsteps. Fast ones. Many of them, coming from ahead—and behind—at the same time.
Everything changed so quickly, none of us were prepared.
“Who’s there?!” someone called, someone I didn’t recognize.
Then…
“Don’t move!” shouted a woman. A stranger.
My muscles were already locked, my mind screaming at me to turn around and run, but my legs refusing to take a single step.
Then March was in front of me, blocking my view of the people who came from around the corner in the hallway—but I saw. I saw the three Timekeepers dressed in loose, dark clothes, and two women wearing white dresses and aprons threaded with red.
I caught but a glimpse of them, and then we were all moving together, gathering closer to the wall because more Timekeepers were coming in through the same door we’d come through just a moment ago.
Eight of them. Five Timekeepers, three Clockfolk.
We were surrounded.
I was having trouble keeping up with my own train of thoughts when someone grabbed my hand from the right—Erith—and from the left—March.
They squeezed my fingers and I squeezed theirs, and none of us knew what to do, what to say as they spoke, called for us to not move and to show ourselves, as if they couldn’t see our faces for themselves.
We were right there, pressed against the wall, the round hallway lit up with all those lanterns.
A hundred scenarios crossed my mind in a second, from we’re going to get kicked out to we’re going to end up in prison.
“What do we do—what do we do—what do we do?!” chanted Anika while we looked back and forth from the two groups of people who had surrounded us, when…
“Time’s Trousers, it’s them,” said the Timekeeper woman who’d come in through the same door we had. She wore a dark green dress stained with grease all over, and her wild curly hair was gathered on top of her head, her brown eyes spitting fire as she took us in.
Silence for a tick. We all held our breaths, held onto one another’s hands, and—
“How in the Everstill did you get in here?” the Timekeeper woman said, her voice just over a whisper as she slowly took a couple of steps toward us, clearly shocked.
Nobody dared to say a single thing—and I realized just how utterly unprepared for this we were.
The questions I should have asked Kohen before he left—this should have been one of the questions!
If we get caught, what do we say? What do we do?
Do we run or stay or talk? Do we pretend to be someone else?
Yes, now I could think of a hundred questions, but Kohen was long gone.
What in Time’s Teeth were we going to do?!
“Send word to the queens now,” the Timekeeper woman said, and for some reason every single instinct in my body was suddenly on high alert. I wanted to do everything—everything in my power to stop her, and I didn’t even know why.
“You heard me—go!” the woman shouted at the men standing behind her, one a Timekeeper, one a Spade judging by his light hair and black shirt.
Suddenly they both turned around and ran back out the door, nodding their heads, a terrified look on their faces—as if they were afraid of us.
We were no match for them, and they knew it. This woman here—she knew who we were, too.
And now she was getting closer.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said, her wide brown eyes hopping from one face to the next, while the rest of them came at us from the other side, too.
“You will follow us now, and you will do exactly as I say. Do you understand?” The woman was barely five feet away from us now. “Answer me—how did you get in here?!”
I looked at March. He looked at me. We all knew by now not to say a single word.
“That’s okay. You’ll answer Her Royal Goodness when she gets here, I’ll bet.” The Timekeeper woman ran her hands over the sides of her head, clearly frustrated as she inhaled deeply.
“Move when we tell you, and stop when we tell you—no sudden movements; otherwise, I will knock you out cold,” she said.
“Move along now, follow them.” She raised her index finger stained with ink or oil or both, and she pointed to the other side of the room, to the three Timekeepers and the maids who looked positively panicked as they watched with their hands over their mouths.
“Take them upstairs, to the second,” was the next order the Timekeeper barked.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” said Mimi, trying but failing to keep her voice from shaking.
“I beg to differ,” the woman said, her hand on a thick leather belt over her dress where the golden chain of one of her clocks peeked through. The other appeared to be in her chest pocket. “The Labyrinth is sealed. Nobody enters without authorization from the Crown. You did plenty wrong.”
Her voice alone sent shivers down my back.
March pulled at my hand. “Let’s go,” he said, not an ounce of fear anywhere in his expression as he watched the Timekeeper woman waiting for us to walk ahead.
He was right. There was no need to panic, at least not yet.
Seeing him like that brought a calm over me, too—we were okay.
These people were going to take us somewhere, possibly lock us in, and we could then talk.
Make a plan. Make our escape. There were plenty of windows here, and we had our chronobanks.
Even if we had to blow something up, we didn’t need specific spells or anything like that.
We just needed brute force to get out of here—once we were alone.
So, we walked.
The maids went first, slipped out the door behind them, and two of the Timekeepers went with them, while the last one, the biggest of the three with shoulders twice the size of March’s, stayed behind, never blinked, his eyes almost bloodshot as he watched us.
He followed right behind us together with the woman, close—too close to Cook and Anika, who were the last in the group.
I didn’t dare let go of March’s hand.
“As soon as they’re secured, do a perimeter check. Alert all staff. We need to search the grounds,” the Timekeeper woman said.
I was trying so hard to keep my composure, but the more I thought about her words, the quicker that calm faded, and the more I squeezed March’s fingers.
Which then made him lean closer and whisper, “We’re going to be all right.”
Maybe we would and maybe we wouldn’t. But when he spoke, it helped to focus on him and not the fear.
We continued ahead. What other choice did we have? We were outnumbered, and they were all adults with chronobanks they could actually use.
And I could fight. Well—spar, really, but to do that I’d need weapons. Pretty sure the others were the same, which was why nobody had made a single attempt to run or speak or do anything at all except walk.
The maids guided us down corridors I almost recognized but didn’t.
Less dust here, and the flowers seemed in a better shape, red and blue roses mostly, mixed in with pink tulips here and there.
The scent filled my nostrils, but I couldn’t focus on it long enough to try to figure out if I’d smelled it before.
We passed sets of doors, polished to perfection, each with an individual motif of flowers, under archways also carved with roses that made my fingers itch for my sketchbook.
We climbed a flight of stairs, too, our footsteps echoing in my ears, keeping me perfectly distracted—and I preferred it. Because I thought I knew what to expect—we’d be locked into a room with plenty of space and time to talk and figure the best way out.
There would be time, I thought.
Then we stepped onto the hardwood floor at the end of the stairs, the hallway wide with floor-to-ceiling windows on either side, and we only took a few steps when the groaning began.
It came out of nowhere, just like the Timekeepers and the maids.
It came from the floor.
They stopped. We stopped.
At this point I had no idea what to expect, but the last thing I remembered was looking back at the Timekeeper woman, and seeing her eyes, her mouth open as she shouted something I didn’t hear, reaching both her hands out toward us—but the floor caved.
Right underneath our feet, the floor caved, the slight groaning seconds prior the only warning—and then I was falling together with March, certain that I would never wake up again.
Time must have been holding its breath because my eyes were half open, yet nothing moved. I was alive—or at least I felt alive, yet my heart didn’t beat and my lungs didn’t expand and there was no sound whatsoever in the world around me.
But I was there.
Maybe I was simply…stuck. Like I sometimes fell for hours and hours down that hole—I was stuck here, too, on my back, my body at an odd angle, my eyes half open but I couldn’t see anything but sparkles floating around in the air. Or maybe it was just dust?
There I stayed for however long Time held its breath with me. I tried to remember…well, anything at all, but I couldn’t. My mind was stuck, too. Near empty.
Until I felt warmth on the tips of my fingers.
Everything changed so suddenly.
Charges of electricity spread from my fingertips and up my arm, jumpstarting my heart and filling my lungs with air. Just like that, from one second to the next, I was breathing and blinking and my heart was beating frantically in my chest, and sound began to reach my ears, too.
Coughs. Whispers. Movement.
A hand around mine.
“Ora.”
It’s March, it’s March, it’s March, said the thoughts in my head, and I pushed myself up with all my strength to reach for him, move closer. I could.
Broken pieces of wood and concrete all around me, some of it over my limbs.
They shifted and moved with ease as I sat up, eyes blinking fast to clear the blur—but it wasn’t in my eyes.
It was the clouds of dust hanging in the air, indeed, that were slowly settling while people moved.
While people sat up and stood and looked around, coughing—and March was lying in the rubble right next to me, our hands linked.