Chapter 16
Ionly felt the difference once we were back in that corridor, no longer in that room that wasn’t a room at all.
I only felt the way time moved when it wasn’t still anymore, and I realized it had been in there. I realized it had barely moved at all, which was senseless all on its own.
Then we saw the Timekeeper, Calren Hock, who was still unconscious on the floor, right where we’d left him, the plate full of food that man had brought still there, untouched.
With the way time shifted for me from one second to the next, reality no longer felt real to me. Instead, it kept warping from one step to the next—like I was walking underwater, then running in the wind.
March had helped the boy up, put his arm over his wide shoulders and secured his hand around the boy’s wrist, too. Like that, he carried most of his weight with ease, but Russ stayed close by, too, just in case.
The boy could barely move his legs. He couldn’t keep his head up at all.
Time’s Teeth, he must have been worse off than we thought.
We needed to get him out of there—and fast. The others were already ahead, rushing, but just before I turned the corner of that corridor, I went back to the room. To the metal hook. To the cat that was now sitting on top of it, watching me with that horrible, beautiful grin.
“Aren’t you…aren’t you coming?”
The Cheshire tilted its head. Numbers cascaded down its fur like rain.
“I live in glitches, O-ra. I couldn’t follow if I wanted—which I would very much like if I did. As it happens, I do not.” Slowly, he raised a paw to his mouth and began to lick it. “Guess I shouldn’t complain—the Timekeeper was dreadfully boring, but so is being impossible—and yet, here I am.”
There’s no such thing as impossible, went the voices in my head, but when I opened my mouth to speak, I said, “You keep calling him Timekeeper, which he is clearly not.”
He was a Hand, Silas, however it had happened. He was a Spade.
That grin. So awful and stretchy and sharp. “Then by that calculation, I am clearly wrong, am I not, O-ra?”
“Why do you call me that? How do you know my name?” Though it wasn’t my name at all—it sounded wrong the way he pronounced it.
But the next blink, the cat began to fade away.
Right there, in front of my eyes, it began to lose substance while it sat on the top of that hook—which was impossible all on its own—and licked its paw and grinned and grinned.
Then said, “Oh, we have history, you and I…” Even his voice had faded halfway. “The kind that never happened.”
Laughter.
By the next blink, the cat was gone, and I was standing there looking into an impossible room, trying to decide if my sanity was gone for good.
Luckily, someone called my name—March—and his voice I always heard.
Whether I was real or not, as long as he was, I could be, too.
I could use him as my anchor to pretend at the very least. So, I turned and I walked all the way back to the real world, but the Cheshire’s voice remained in my head for a long time after.
“…can’t leave him!” Mimi was saying. Calren was still on the floor, barely breathing, and March was still carrying Silas on his own.
Others were arguing.
“We can’t bring him with us—he’ll slow us down!” Russ insisted. “We have to go! It’s bad enough that we have one unconscious person, and we haven’t even found our proof yet!”
Proof, he said.
“I don’t care!” Mimi shouted. “I am not leaving him behind like this—look at him! He wouldn’t survive!”
“He will! The Timekeeper who brought him food will come and-and—”
“No.” The word slipped from my lips, and I was moving, and how could I stop?
Time was moving here, too. The difference was right there in the air. My lungs had finally filled properly.
The others stopped, looked at me. Silas gasped beside March like he was surfacing from deep water, but he couldn’t even open his eyes.
“Easy,” March murmured, adjusting his grip around his wrist as he watched me. “I’ve got you.”
“We’re not leaving the Timekeeper behind,” I said, stepping carefully over his legs to get to the other side.
“Then you carry him,” Russ spat.
I would if I had to, but that was not the issue here. “Don’t you see? They sent us here to look for proof.” I looked at Russ—at March. “They know. That boy and this Timekeeper…they know what happened. They are the proof.”
And if they asked me how I came to that conclusion, I wouldn’t know how to answer, but I felt it. I felt that this was it.
“She’s right,” Erith said in wonder.
“Even if this isn’t the proof they wanted,” said Cook, slowly lowering to his knees on the other side of the Timekeeper, his eyes on me. “They can tell us everything in Kohen’s stead. They know.”
“This boy definitely knows something,” Anika muttered, rubbing her shoulders as she looked at Silas’s face.
“I’ll carry him,” Cook said and grabbed Calren’s arm.
“I’ll help.” I had strength. Plenty of it to use, but…
“I got him,” Seth said. “It’ll be faster. Move.”
Together, Seth and Cook they got Calren up—and then Russ came in, muttering under his breath, and just hoisted him over his shoulder like he weighed nothing.
Just like that.
The Timekeeper’s head hung limp against Russ’s back, his hands dangling, bloody and still.
“There. Happy now?” the Diamond said.
I smiled—he wasn’t half as mean as he wanted us to think. “Very.”
He rolled his eyes and started for the other side of the room. “Let’s just get out of here.”
So, we did.
We climbed up the stairs as fast as we could, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. I went to help March with Silas, even though he didn’t need it, but the boy was barely conscious between us, his feet dragging whenever he tried and failed to step on his own.
Russ was right ahead, Calren a dead weight on his shoulder, Seth hovering at his back, ready to help.
We made it up the stairs in no time, and through the first hallway. Then the second, barely breathing, none of us making a single sound as we went.
We’d just turned the corner of the corridor that was going to lead us right to that same doorway we’d come from, when…
Two maids, different faces from the night before but dressed in the same uniforms. They were both carrying clothes in their hands, talking to one another—until they saw us.
It was like someone had turned them off.
They stopped. Just…stopped. Lips parted, eyes wide, watching us like we were ghosts. Not too far from what I felt, but regardless.
I expected them to scream.
I expected them to shout, to call for the Timekeeper woman, to tell us to stand still and not move.
I expected them to attack.
But I did not expect them to back away toward the wall without a word.
They didn’t look like Timekeepers—both had brown hair.
Could have been Clubs or Hearts, but either way, they did not say a single word.
Instead, they looked terrified as they analyzed Calren’s limp body over Russ’s shoulder, and then March holding Silas upright while his head moved to the sides, eyes closed.
It occurred to me they might think we did this. It occurred to me the maids would think us capable of knocking them both out like this.
“Go,” March whispered. “Go—don’t stop.”
Just like that, we were moving again, toward the maids—and we went right past them. They became one with the wall, pressed their backs against it with all their strength, just watched us walk away.
I wasn’t as relieved as I thought I would be, though. Because silence meant they were going to tell somebody—later, calmly, in detail. Silence meant we probably didn’t have much more than minutes before the whole palace knew we were here.
Then we were through the doors and in the abandoned corridor on the other side, shouting, go, go, go! Ignoring the withered flowers and the thick dust that coated every inch of this place. We hardly noticed the doors at the far end until Cook pushed them open and the cold air filled our lungs.
We were outside, out the same door near the overgrown white roses, and the rain hit us in the face like a slap.
It was pouring. Not a storm—there was no thunder or wind—just that heavy, steady kind of rain that soaked through clothes in seconds. The sky was nearly dark, the last of the sunset bleeding its muted colors behind the clouds at the edge of the horizon, and everything was wet and gray and cold.
The whole day had passed, yet it had felt like an hour or two at the most to me.
The whole day had passed while we’d spent what was supposed to be minutes in that room.
A pocket. Wasn’t that what the Spade boy had called it?
Once outside, we ran.
Through the grass, through the weeds, through puddles that splashed up to our knees.
It must have been raining the whole day.
Silas groaned against March’s shoulder, and I held onto his arm as tightly as I could, too.
Russ went ahead like he couldn’t even feel the weight of the Timekeeper’s body on him.
We cut through the trees, our feet heavy, our clothes already completely soaked—yet the energy rushing through my body made me feel light as air.
The rain grew heavier beneath the canopy because the leaves were pouring it down on us in streams. My hair was plastered to my face.
My sneakers were soaked. I couldn’t feel my fingers at all—yet I could run all the way to the Spill if I had to, just like this.
We had no idea if we were going in the right direction, but we thought so, until we were on the other side of those trees—and the world got strange again.
We were in some sort of a garden, except it wasn’t real. The sound of the rain as it splattered against everything in there gave it all away—it was metal.
The hedges were made of painted metal. The trees had bark made of metal, and the large leaves hanging on the branches were plastic.
An apple tree with brass apples the size of my fist. Rosebushes where the roses hid copper pipes that ticked faintly under the rush of the rain.
The smell confirmed it—it was sharp, oil and old metal and something sweeter underneath that I couldn’t name but almost knew.
“What is this place?” Erith whispered, but none of us had an answer, because none of us knew.
But my chest ached in that same way it had been aching since we woke up here all those days ago, but that’s it. All I had was that ache.
“Keep moving,” Seth said. “We can figure it out later.”
We went through the mechanical garden, water streaming off every false leaf, off every metal petal, off the brass apples that swayed without really swaying. Past a bench made of wrought iron that looked out at nothing.
It wasn’t long till we reached the other side and went beyond into the wet grass. The fence was right there, the golden tips catching the last of the dying light. We’d come too far from the gap where the bar was missing, but it was okay. All we had to do now was follow the fence.
Maybe it was the rain, but the farther we went, the more it felt like there were screams coming from somewhere behind us. Calls. Shouts.
“Don’t look, don’t look, just keep moving!” Mimi shouted as she went, running ahead faster than the rest of us.
It wasn’t just the rain, after all, but I did listen to her. I didn’t turn.
And what felt like minutes later, we made it all the way to where half the bar of the fence was missing.
Pieces of the memory were lost to me still, but in what felt like a blink, Cook, Mimi and Erith were on the other side. Mimi continued to run, to scream—“Hey! We’re here, hey!”—while Cook and Erith leaned down to grab the Timekeeper. Russ lowered him to the ground as slowly as he could.
They dragged his body through however they could, and the rain had washed away the blood on him, but he was still dirty from the mud. Russ went through, and Anika, and they helped us with the boy Silas as we lay him on the ground, then inched him on his side toward the gap.
So small. His wide shoulders barely fit, but they did.
And only after he was safely on the other side did I turn to look behind us. At the trees. At the people screaming, running, coming.
“Go, go, go!”
A hand around my arms, and I was pushed toward the gap. March kept his hand over my head to make sure I didn’t hurt myself as I went through, and then Seth was right behind me, and March was behind him.
All before the Timekeeper woman and her friends, screaming and shaking their fists in the air, made it to the fence.
They stopped when they were still five feet away from the bars.
Time’s Teeth, it was like they held my very soul in their hands.
Nobody made a single sound for a second.
Then…
“Run.”
A voice I knew. A voice I’d heard just the day before.
Kohen the Timekeeper was right behind us.
“All of you—run, and don’t look back.”