Chapter 17 #2
Stabs at my gut, my chest, the back of my eyes. Or maybe those were the tears that kept trying to push their way out of me by force every few seconds.
I swallowed hard, turned to Silas, the Spade boy who wasn’t just a Spade boy, but a Timekeeper as well.
Half this and half that. Two things at once.
The way the thought twisted my mind was scary.
“You keep saving my life,” he whispered, holding onto the cane with both hands, leaning most of his weight against it while Damon waited behind him—possibly to make sure he didn’t fall.
But he felt better, Silas. It was plain to see. He was calmer, had more color on his cheeks. Timekeeper physicians had already done healing magic on him, he’d said, and so he’d keep improving throughout the night. By morning, he’d be good as new.
Me?
I didn’t really know what I believed anymore, except…
“I didn’t—” I started to say but then stopped. Because I did save his life, according to him and the Timekeepers. Back in the forward Trials, I did save his life in what they called a Tree of Years.
“Thank you. You really do give me hope.”
He said it like he’d said the same thing before, except he didn’t. Not that I remembered.
I looked at him, really looked at him, willed myself to remember, begged my mind to let go of whatever it was keeping out of my reach.
In the end, the best I could tell him was, “I’m sorry, Silas.
” Even though he technically hadn’t even lived the time we’d lived.
Even though when stuck in that pocket of the Labyrinth—which were literal blind spots for time in the machinery, created by too much magic use through the years—no more than an hour or two had passed, he had still missed half the story. He’d still been stuck behind that wall.
He smiled a sad smile, but it was a hopeful smile, too. “Go to bed, Ora. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. We’ll figure it all out.”
Except how were we going to do that?
Of course, I didn’t ask him this, only slipped into the small room and closed the door behind me, took off my mother’s coat and lay down on the tiny bed in the corner.
The room was hexagonal, all the walls covered in faded diagrams of gears and numbers, formulas I couldn’t begin to read even if I’d wanted to. So, instead, I stared at the ceiling until my eyes burned.
Because every time I closed them, I saw Silas’s face behind my closed lids, smiling that same sad smile again. Or Calren’s. Or the cat.
Or me. The…other Ora.
A girl who’d lost her compassion in the Tree of Years. A girl who’d apparently fallen for a Heart boy head over heels, both in the beginning, and in the end when time moved backward. Twice.
A girl who’d signed up for the trials to run from grief and had instead run straight into something much worse, apparently, had lived through it—again, twice.
Me.
That was supposed to be me.
Words spun in my head, stories that my imagination tried to conjure images for, but couldn’t. Everything came out warped, twisted, wrong in my head. Everything sounded…fake. Like it hadn’t really happened. Like it wasn’t really real.
I couldn’t just be with someone like both Kohen and Silas had claimed, and then not remember it! It was impossible. It was absurd.
I would have remembered!
Except…I did, didn’t I?
My body remembered, even if my mind didn’t. Even if my heart was…confused. Time’s Teeth, she was so, so confused…
But my body continued to be confusing when I found myself standing in front of the door of the room they’d put me in, and at first, I couldn’t even be sure why.
The glass tubes at the base of the walls pulsed faintly, and the clock faces mounted everywhere stared down at me from the shadows. I wasn’t sure why they were stuck. None of them told the time. They just watched.
I don’t know why I watched back for a while, arms wrapped around myself, why I then walked.
Why I opened the door or slipped out into the semi-dark corridor or made my way toward the other side. Third room down on my left. Right where March had gone to sleep.
When I stopped in front of it, it finally clicked.
No idea how long I stood there, but eventually, I felt the wood underneath my knuckles. Heard the sound of my knocking.
It took him less than three seconds to answer the door, looking more disheveled than I’d ever seen him, his hair wild, his eyes a bit swollen, those lips parted and red and so smooth looking, I wondered what they’d feel like under my tongue.
Which wasn’t a thought I’d had for the first time. Definitely far less strange than wondering what he’d taste like when I stared at my drawings of him.
“Ora?”
My name on his lips sounded different than it did on anybody else’s. I wondered what it would sound like if he whispered it—there, against my lips.
My heart did that thing it kept doing lately—the skipping, the falling, the starting up again too fast, too eagerly.
“Can I come in?” I said without really planning to.
A pause. Then, “Yes,” he said—in that same way: too fast, too eagerly.
He pulled the door open and stepped aside, and my heart flipped for a whole other reason now before I went in—the floor of his room was made out of glass.
Thick, cloudy glass, through which you could see the shadows of massive gears in the darkness beneath, coming in and out of smooth, gray rocks.
Red light pulsed up through it from somewhere far below, dim and warm.
Whatever machinery was under there wasn’t moving, but I almost saw how it looked when it did.
It was like looking through a window into the guts of a sleeping animal.
“Do you mind?” March said when he noticed my hesitation. “We can go someplace else if—”
“No, it’s fine.” I stepped inside before I gave myself more time to think. I liked to jump headfirst into what I feared and then deal with the aftermath later. It usually worked out, since the alternative was complete paralysis.
And the glass held.
I was still wearing those sneakers, but I could have sworn I felt the cold surface right against my feet as I took one step after the other and stopped in the middle of the room.
A narrow cot was against the wall on the right, a basin with a round mirror hanging over it on the left, and a chair where March had put his jacket, his old boots by the legs. The room was even smaller than mine.
“I woke you,” I said when the sound of the door closing echoed in my head, and I had the overwhelming desire to kill the silence dead.
“You didn’t.” A step closer to me, then two.
I looked up at him, ignored the way my heart pounded because of the floor underneath my feet. It was going to start pounding for a whole different reason any second now, anyway.
“You should be sleeping,” he then said.
“So should you.” He didn’t look like he’d been asleep, though. Yes, his eyes were swollen, and those lips were slowly becoming the center of my universe, but he looked wide awake, March.
He smiled, just a little. That one corner of his lips curled up.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed, patted the gray sheets next to him and said, “Sit.”
I did.
And I was absolutely right—my heart was pounding for a completely different reason now that our shoulders were touching.
We were sitting on a bed, and we were close, and we were alone.
We’d never been alone before.
Together we stared at the gears below the glass floor but didn’t really see them. We just…caught our breaths, which fell into the same rhythm, like our lungs were friends already.
“I keep thinking,” he finally said. “About everything they said. About…who I was.”
“Me too.” That’s why sleeping was impossible.
“The way they talked.” March flinched. “They sounded so…sure. Like all of that had really happened. Like I really had been…that person.”
The person who pretty much had claimed me, according to Silas, since day one. And he’d said it so easily: “Then there was March, who claimed Ora from the beginning, and let the whole world know,” to which Master Kohen had smiled and nodded too many times, and said, “Yes, yes—backward, too!”
Something about being told things like that. Something about being spoken about without any memories of it that tried to turn my mind inside out.
“I know,” I said. “I know. It makes me…” I couldn’t quite finish the whole sentence at once, but March could.
“Angry,” he said.
And also, “Confused.”
But… “Like that couldn’t have possibly been me,” as well.
And… “Like I want to do anything to not be that person I don’t even remember.”
Slowly, March turned his head toward me. “Is that why you moved away from me?”
I nodded. Gritted my teeth to make sure I didn’t start crying.
The silence stretched between us for another tick.
“Part of me doesn’t believe it,” I whispered a few heartbeats later. “That can’t be me. That’s somebody else. Another version of me—just not me.”
“But then another part of me almost…remembers.” He slowly reached out his hand for mine—slowly, to give me all the time in the world to move away.
I didn’t.
“I remember the feel of your skin.” His fingertips caressed my knuckles and every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps. “I remember the feel of your hair.” He raised his hand and took a strand between his fingers. “I think I know how many freckles are on your face.”
“I think I know you love glass.”
Our eyes locked and we didn’t breathe for a second.
“I think I know your favorite cake is red velvet.” And maybe it was a silly thing to think, but I was almost sure I guessed it.
Just as sure that I wasn’t guessing.
His lips parted—those beautiful lips I was yearning for separately while I lived all these other seconds.
His lips parted but he didn’t speak.
He let go of my hair and closed his eyes and sighed.
“Say it,” I whispered. “Whatever you’re going to say, just say it.” I wanted to hear it.
March exhaled, long and slow.
“I don’t remember being that guy they said I was,” he said. “And the things I do remember are worse. I don’t know what to do with them, Ora. I don’t know how to tell what’s mine from what’s…his.”
His being the version that he was before.