Chapter 14
Atick of silence.
“Missing things have no edges,” the Timekeeper suddenly said. “They can’t tear lies apart.”
Every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps.
A minute later, we were back by the wall, hands pressed and eyes closed, trying to feel the buzz with our every fiber—and it was there.
I felt it. Time’s Teeth, it was so clear to me it was ridiculous to think the others couldn’t feel it.
Except Cook. Cook felt it just as clearly as me.
“A Spade thing,” said Russ, shaking his index finger at us. “It’s gotta be a Spade thing, then.”
“He’s right. If both of you feel it, he’s right,” March said, looking at Cook suspiciously—but I believed him. We were standing right next to one another now, eyes locked, both hands pressed to the cold wall.
“Bad magic,” Cook whispered.
“No,” I said because I’d felt bad magic. My mother used to work for a train engine builder when I was little, and a lot of magic went bad in his workshop. I knew how bad felt—and this wasn’t it.
Cook closed his eyes, and the fact that he didn’t once doubt me made me feel…strange.
“Is it…” I held onto the next word that would leave his lips while the others talked and talked, threw ideas around. “…a loop?” Cook wondered.
Close. Closer.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t feel like a loop.” I flinched. “Do you know what loops feel like?” Because I didn’t. Shouldn’t have known, except…
“Almost,” said Cook, and that was exactly what I felt, too. Almost.
“It’s…it’s like…” Now Cook looked at my lips, waiting as impatiently as me for what I’d say next, even though I didn’t know what I was thinking. My mind was that chaotic. “A seal?”
Cook closed his eyes.
I closed mine.
The others continued to talk. A presence was right behind me—March. “Ora, what are you thinking?” he asked, but I didn’t really know, did I?
I didn’t know what I was thinking, just that there was magic on this wall and it was buzzing, and it wasn’t bad magic, which Spades had the natural affinity to end or turn right.
And it wasn’t a loop, I didn’t think, which Spades could close, too.
It felt like a seal, something I’d only really felt once when we were fooling around in high school, and our elder cousins—who were in the second year of their magic studies—had tried to do a blood bond on Allan and Finn.
In the end, it hadn’t worked. They hadn’t had enough Sparetime in their chronobanks for it, but I’d been scared to death while they’d tried around a fire we’d lit in my uncle’s yard in the middle of the night, and that’s why I remembered it vividly still.
A blood bond was technically a seal—magic that sealed two lives together to a certain extent (when done right) and I thought this came close to that. At least a little bit. Same flavor.
Or maybe I was just as terrified now as I had been then?
“Yes,” Cook said, and my eyes opened wide. “I think it’s a seal.”
Both of us moved away from the wall at the same time.
“We think it’s a seal,” I told March. “It’s…there’s a seal on this wall.”
Now everyone was around us.
“What exactly is a seal—”
“How do you know what a seal is—”
“Is it like ritual magic—”
“Did a Spade do it—”
“Did the Timekeeper do it—”
“Why would anyone put a seal on a wall—”
“Can you undo it—”
Questions and questions, one after the other, and Cook and I kept saying, no, no, yes, yes, but no—and then Seth said, “Everybody—shut up.”
Everybody shut up.
Silence in the room again.
“Let them talk,” Seth said. “Now, Ora, Cook—what do you know about seals?”
For me—not much, was the honest answer. I knew what all Spades learned in school.
There were two kinds of seals—one a simple spell that required a lock and a key, both magical, and the other much stronger, made with blood, a person’s magic fused with their own life force—which made them nearly impossible to break from the outside.
We knew that seals were one of the strongest forms of closure magic in the Clockrealm and that Spades had a natural affinity for them because Spades ruled endings.
We sealed deals. We closed loops. We recognized when magic had been shut, locked, bound—the same way a Heart recognized when an emotion had been tampered with.
But knowing what a seal felt like and knowing how to undo one were two very different things.
“A seal is best opened by its maker,” I said, words I’d either learned from school or from one of Father’s late-night lessons about magic theory that I’d only half listened to.
“They’re all keyed to the person who cast it. Either their magic or their blood,” said Cook.
“So, Calren has to open it.” March.
“Calren can’t even tell what a door is right now, let alone a magical seal!”
Levana wasn’t wrong. I looked at the Timekeeper on the floor—still on his side, still twitching, still murmuring under his breath. His hands were bloody, practically destroyed. Even though he sometimes looked like he knew what was happening, he didn’t. Not really. His mind was in splinters.
Whatever he’d used to make this lock, I doubted he could be convinced to remember or to undo it.
But.
“The seal responds to his magic,” I said slowly, the thought forming as I spoke it. “Possibly to his blood. His blood is everywhere here…” I turned, touched the stains on the surface of the wall. “It’s why we can feel it. It does respond to him. Right, Cook?”
Cook pressed his hands to the stone again. Closed his eyes. Nodded. “A blood seal, definitely. It’s like…a fingerprint.” It was terribly exciting not to be the only one who understood.
“So, it’s like…a lock?” Mimi asked, scratching her chin.
“Yes, exactly,” said Cook.
“A lock that knows its key,” I said. “It’s just waiting for the magic to…sort of, turn it in place. You know?”
Other than Cook, nobody seemed to quite picture it in their heads the way I was picturing it, but that was okay.
“He can’t really turn shit, though,” Seth muttered, nodding his head to the side toward the Timekeeper.
“Can’t you do it? You’re Spades,” Anika said.
“And we have Sparetime. You guys have plenty, right?” Erith.
Cook and I looked at one another, flinched.
“This type of magic requires years and years of practice and experience,” March said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with an emotion even if it was waiting for me to change it.”
“So what good is all this Sparetime they gave us?” Russ spat.
“We couldn’t do it alone,” I said, eyeing the Timekeeper on the ground, not really sure I wanted to say the next sentence.
Cook said it for me. “But what if we just…guide him?”
“We’ve got Sparetime, you’re right. And we can’t use it—but he’s a Timekeeper.
He should be able to.” Timekeeper magic worked a little different from ours.
So we’d learned, though never the reason why.
Only that they were able to access a much bigger source of magic, and they were just better at it in general—which had always struck me as odd.
If that were the truth, then why were they considered as less?
Why were we always taught to be wary of them?
“He destroyed his clocks—didn’t you see?” said Seth, pointing to the floor, to those clock chains he’d been inspecting earlier.
“Maybe because he had no guidance.” I looked at Cook. “Maybe if we help him see it…”
“Or maybe we can just get out of here right now and go do what we came here to do—because this is ridiculous,” Levana snapped. “We’re wasting time here. Who cares what the Timekeeper does?!”
Except we did.
Most of us did.
“I think—” I want to try to help him first, I was going to say, but then the Timekeeper suddenly moved.
Not gradually—all at once.
It was so sudden none of us had a chance to prepare ourselves. His eyes snapped open and his body lurched upward like something had yanked him by the spine—so, so strange.
He was on his feet and throwing himself at the wall before March even had time to reach for him. All we could do was move back before he slammed onto us.
The impact was sickening. Time’s Teeth, I couldn’t stand it, yet I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes or turn my head. His shoulder hit first, then his forehead, and the sound of bone against stone made everything in me rebel.
He bounced back, staggered, and went again. Mechanical. Relentless. Like he’d been wound up and set loose with only one instruction inside him—slam against that wall.
March and Seth grabbed him before he could go at it the third time. The Timekeeper thrashed and kicked and groaned, so Russ had to join them, too.
I didn’t understand where he was getting all that strength, but it took three of them to pin his arms, and even then his legs kept pushing toward the wall, his bare feet sliding on the floor.
It was absurd. It was madness.
It had to stop now.
These thoughts were running through my head just before I found myself in front of him with both my hands raised—“CALREN!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. His eyes were still locked on the wall like it was the only thing that existed in his world.
I wasn’t planning to give up, though.
“Calren—stop. STOP! Look at me!”
I was right in front of him now, and March warned me, and others told me to move back, but I grabbed his face in my hands all the same.
It wasn’t even a decision—leaving him behind was not an option. No matter what we came here for, no matter who he was, I would not leave him—nor anyone else—behind. If I could help him, I would.
Sparetime save me, I wanted to, more than I wanted to remember.
By some miracle, the Timekeeper stopped thrashing. Actually looked at me. Maybe because I was just in front of his face, the tips of our noses almost touching, but still.
“I know,” I said, and I hated that my voice cracked. “I can feel it. I know there’s magic there. I can feel the seal. It’s there.”
There.