Chapter 21 #2
March’s hand was in mine and I squeezed and squeezed, held on tight to the seeker with the other as if he and it were the only things holding me together. If I let go, I’d become undone.
Then…
“The doors!” Cook shouted from across the room. “Look at the doors!”
I looked.
We all looked.
The door on my left, the one we needed to go through to get out of here, now had something above it, something that most definitely hadn’t been there before. A clock face. Large, mounted over the frame, a single hand pointing straight down at six.
And as the clock on the floor spun, the hand above the door moved, toward the twelve.
What is that—are we going to die?—is the ceiling going to collapse?—somebody do something!—if we scream will somebody hear us?!
Then Silas said, “It’s most likely a timer,” and he sounded so much calmer than everyone that we all stopped to listen. “It’s just a timer for the door to open.”
“When?” I asked with half a heart.
He flinched, his eyes moving fast, perfectly focused on the makeshift clock slowly spinning on the floor, and the one that had appeared out of thin air over the door (or had pieces of those clocks climbed over the frame while we were too busy panicking?)
“I don’t know. Maybe…maybe when it reaches twelve,” Silas said, except he didn’t sound sure in the least.
“And what if we don’t wait?” March asked.
“I doubt we can open those doors with brute force,” Seth said.
“I am not going anywhere near those moving pieces. Tick that—I am staying right here!”
“They could eat us!”
“They look like insects! Ugh—disgusting!”
“Not spiders, not spiders, not spiders, not spiders—”
“Then we have to stay here until the doors just…open?”
“How long will it be?!”
“Could be minutes,” I whispered. “I think…look at the speed of the hand on the door clock. It’s moving with the way this one spins.
” I pointed at the clock on the floor, at the smaller pieces near the edges that were still rushing and rolling and spinning to assemble, to spread out until they had most of the floor completely covered.
“But we don’t have minutes,” Russ said. “You heard the Timekeeper—they could be…” He shook his head. “Someone could be coming.”
“Exactly. Every second down here is a second closer to being found,” said March, making the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention.
“What if the door isn’t really locked? What if we try to open it, anyway?” Seth said.
“I wouldn’t,” said Silas. “This is the Labyrinth.”
We all looked at him. Even though we’d been in the Labyrinth for a whole day before, it seemed he was the only one who knew this place for what it really was. The only one who…understood.
“Look, even if we can break the door somehow, if you break a game’s mechanism, the Labyrinth could lock down the whole section. We could be trapped here for days.”
Days.
“But what if it doesn’t?” Cook wondered, swallowing hard as he eyed the door.
“Are you willing to risk it, Spade?” Erith asked.
Cook said nothing.
“So, we just sit here and wait?” Levana’s voice could have cut glass.
“I don’t see another way,” Silas muttered, almost to himself.
His eyes were on the spinning clock, watching the last of the pieces assemble, watching the hand above the door crawl up the clock.
“This isn’t the trials so the games can’t be played to get them to finish faster, but if they’re activated, they would need to complete a cycle. ”
Which did make sense.
“That clock is counting time,” I said, just to think out loud. “This one is like…”
“Supplying it with its spinning,” said Cook. “But a full cycle could be when that hand comes back to six.”
I flinched. “Too long.” That was way too much time.
“I think it’s gathering it,” said Mimi. “Look at it go—it’s like it’s building an hour. Maybe that’s what the door clock is doing—just building an hour, and it will complete when the hand reaches twelve.”
“Yes,” Silas whispered. “When it has…enough.”
“Enough what?” Russ and Anika asked at the same time.
“Sparetime,” Silas said. “Every game runs on Sparetime. See that?” His shaking finger pointed at the spinning clock made of thousands of tiny pieces.
“It’s not just spinning—it’s collecting Sparetime from the walls, from the pipes, from whatever reserves it can find down here.
There’s not much left. That could be why it’s moving so slowly. ”
“So, if we gave it more Sparetime…” I said in wonder, and Silas nodded.
“It would finish faster. Theoretically.”
“We can do it,” Erith said. “We can give it more Sparetime. We’ve got our chronobanks.” And she reached for hers in her pocket.
“Yes—you do. We don’t,” Russ said bitterly.
“Because of you!” Levana was pointing her finger at Silas. “This is all your fault!”
“It’s his fault, too, for knocking down the stupid clock,” Seth hissed, throwing Russ a look.
“You—”
“Everyone—shut up,” March said, his voice booming in the small space. “Let’s figure out a solution and argue later.”
“The glass,” said Cook, looking up at the ceiling. “Can we break through the glass if not the door?”
“Impossible,” Silas said. “It only looks like glass from here—it isn’t real.”
And I would ask how that was possible, but there were way more pressing issues here at the moment.
“We would need to channel the Sparetime in your chronobanks into this mechanism.” Silas looked up at the Diamonds. “It’s the same principle as harvesting Sparetime, but…”
“We can’t do it,” Anika said with a flinch. “I’ve seen it done a hundred times, but I can’t tap straight into raw Sparetime yet.”
“We’re too young. We need training, practice—it’s too soon!” said Erith.
“What about you?” Levana pointed her finger at Silas again. “You’re half Timekeeper, aren’t you? Maybe you can do it.”
But Silas shook his head. “I can’t. I’m half Timekeeper, half Spade—not Diamond.” And other than Diamonds, nobody could even begin to move Sparetime about in any way in its raw form. The rest of us could merely use it as energy for our magic.
So that was that. That was all the ideas any of us had.
We really were stuck.
The reality of it settled over us all at once.
We were locked in a room underground, beneath the Labyrinth, with no way out except a door that wouldn’t open until a clock decided it had counted enough.
We couldn’t speed it up, and we couldn’t break it, and every minute that passed was a minute closer to being found by that Timekeeper woman—and taken to the queens.
Eventually, March got up from the table, walked around the clock on the floor, searching. Mimi and Seth joined him, and together they searched the walls for seams, for hidden panels, for anything that might be a second exit.
Nothing.
Then Levana made her way to the door and tried it, just in case, and I’ll admit my heart didn’t beat at all in that second it took her to pull the handle down.
Of course, it was locked. She even tried to pick it with a pin but failed.
Then Erith went and tried to use her magic, too, but even though the minutes in her chronobank were spent, the door didn’t budge.
March sat beside me again, our hands linked, always linked. When they weren’t, I felt like I was floating—and not in a good way. Feeling the warmth of him, his smooth skin, helped me breathe.
And when the silence got too much, and the hand on the door clock just reached nine, I said, “Silas?”
He sat on March’s other side, one knee up, an arm over it so he could rest his forehead on it.
“Yes?”
“How does…how is that possible?” I whispered, not entirely convinced that the words were out there, not just in my head. “Half Spade, half Timekeeper. How is that possible? You look exactly like a Spade. Your colors, your build…”
I didn’t mean to pry, of course. I was just so curious it drove me insane trying to figure it out.
At first, I bit my lip when Silas didn’t react, thinking maybe I had offended him. I looked at March and he looked at me, and I tried to ask him with my eyes, but he only shook his head a little bit, perfectly calm as he played with my hand. He didn’t think I’d taken it too far with the question.
Then Silas raised his head a little, and he was smiling.
“Well, I assume you know how babies are made.”
Mimi, Cook and Seth chuckled.
I pulled my lips inside my mouth to hide the smile. “Of course I do. The Tick Bird brings them,” I joked.
More laughter—which confirmed that the Tick Bird was not just a Spade thing, but the whole Clockrealm had it.
It was this story that our parents told us when we were little about where babies came from.
They said there was this giant bird with blue feathers that lived inside the Great Clock, and when two people loved each other enough, it plucked a second from the Clock’s face, and brought it to a mother’s lap through the window while she slept. That second then turned into a baby.
“Exactly. My Tick Bird just happened to be half Timekeeper,” said Silas, and when he smiled like that, even just a little, it transformed his face completely.
It hurt deep in my gut to see it, and I didn’t even know why.
“My father,” he said, after the chuckling died down from the others.
Silas kept his eyes on the spinning clock on the floor as he spoke.
“He was raised by Timekeepers—here in Neverwhen. Learned their trade, worked with machinery. He was good at it, actually. Better than good.” That smile cut right through me.
“His hands understood the machinery in ways that even born Timekeepers said were unusual.”
He took a moment to breathe, close his eyes, get himself together before he continued.
“He also fell in love with a Timekeeper—my mother. She was a seamstress, made clothes for workers of this very Labyrinth.”
“Did she look like a Timekeeper?” Erith asked, and Silas looked up at her. “Sorry, just that…you’re…you really don’t look like one.” Her cheeks were bright red.