Chapter 25
Aknock on the door.
“Are you two alive in there?”
Mimi, if I had to guess, though she was more whispering than talking, and when she knocked again, her knuckles barely touched the wood.
March and I, still in each other’s arms, talking for more than an hour now (mostly me as he really meant it when he said he wanted to know everything), looked at each other. Both smiling. Our eyes sparkling. Comfortable.
“Should we answer that?” I wondered, and he grinned.
The way my heart stopped and started again was unfair.
“I would much rather do what I did earlier again,” he said, and there went my cheeks, melting once more—which then made him kiss them twice. “I love how your freckles disappear when you blush. I should just keep you flushed at all times.”
And I would absolutely adore that, but…
Mimi knocked again. “Hey! We’re waiting out here!”
We, she said. And that changed everything.
“Let’s leave the flushing for later, shall we?”
March grinned. “I guess I’ll survive.”
So, we got up and put our clothes on in record time, before we went to the door and pulled it open.
Indeed, Mimi was in front of it, and a little farther down the narrow corridor were a few others.
“What is it? What happened?” I asked in a whisper.
“We’re going up. C’mon! And don’t make a sound,” she said with barely any voice as she waved for us to follow.
March and I looked at one another again.
Up? What was up?
“Here’s another thing about me: I’m crazy curious about…well, everything,” I said in all honesty.
He kissed the top of my head with a chuckle. “I’m right behind you.”
Up was up. Literally above the ground.
Apparently, Seth had found a stairway at the other end of the corridor, and he’d opened the hatch and checked out the field, and he told everyone it was safe.
It was between those hills we saw before, beyond which was the city of Neverwhen, and there was a big willow tree near the hole in the ground.
The others had figured that if we stuck to its shadows, we could safely stay out there and get some air for a bit.
So, we did.
We climbed the thin ladder made of metal that was barely holding itself together, and outside, we found Silas and Cook already sitting near the willow, looking out at the lights between this hill and the next.
The first breath of fresh air felt like freedom, and my body was instantly calmer, even before I turned around and took in the silhouettes of all the buildings and the small woods that made the Labyrinth beyond the golden bars of the fence.
It was there. The Labyrinth was right there, barely any lights flickering inside it—but even so, I felt the presence of it as if it had eyes and it was watching me.
On its other side, just outside the golden fence, was the Great Clock in all its glory, its face shiny, lit from within in the dark, a constant presence over our heads, too.
Shivers ran down my arms, raising my skin in goose bumps. The others all came through the hole in the ground, which was identical to the one where Kohen and Damon had led us much farther away, much closer to the Labyrinth that night.
Which made me wonder, how many more of these things were on this hill, hidden in plain sight?
No sign of other people, though. The crescent moon in the sky was alone, barely any stars twinkling in the dark fabric of the night, and it reminded me so much of a sharp-toothed grin my stomach turned.
For a second there I thought the Cheshire was going to simply materialize in the darkness and claim the moon as his grin.
Of course, he didn’t.
We sat near Silas and Cook, close together, near the leaves and the thin, soft branches of the willow tree that was slightly to the side of the hill, which was why I hadn’t seen it till then.
But from here, Neverwhen looked like a sky of its own with a million warm, golden lights winking at us every second.
We didn’t feel as alone as before. All of us were here now. Ten instead of twelve, but we were together.
“If they find us, tell them I made you,” Silas said, his eyes glazed over as he looked at the city lights in the distance.
“If they find us, they find us. We don’t need to explain ourselves,” Levana said. “We’ll be doomed, anyhour—who cares about what we say?”
True.
“Nobody’s going to find us,” Mimi said. “The hatch is right there. We hear movement, we leave, and that’s that.”
The grass was only a couple inches long, but it hid the hole in the ground through which we’d come perfectly. Yes, nobody was going to be able to spot us here. We’d disappear underground as soon as we heard or saw something.
“I keep thinking,” I suddenly said. “I keep…wondering why she only hid them.” Just a thought that had been spinning in my head while I talked to March.
“You mean our memories?” asked Cook, the same time Anika said, “You mean the Red Queen?”
I nodded to both. “She could have extracted all the memories. I wonder why she didn’t.”
“She could have destroyed them all for good, too,” Levana muttered.
“Would that require more magic?” I asked March.
“Not necessarily. It would most likely take less energy,” he said.
“It would,” said Silas. “I’ve studied memories. Extracting and erasing them would have been easier—heartlocks are easy to destroy. But veiling them, hiding them from their owner would most certainly take a whole lot more effort and Sparetime and talent to do.”
“So…why didn’t she just wipe our minds clean or extract everything—however that works?” Mimi.
Nobody had an answer.
For a while, we just sat there and looked out at the city, at the night sky. I leaned my head on March’s shoulder as the light winked at me from ahead, and a soft breeze pushed my hair back just a little.
Yes, the world was in chaos all around us, and I wasn’t entirely me right now, but I was…calm. I was at peace. I felt like I belonged, no matter how little sense that made while sitting among strangers.
“It’s hard to predict where we’re going to end up next,” Russ said all of a sudden.
“Yeah, tell me about it. I, for one, never dreamed I’d be sitting here at any point on my life,” said Erith.
“Me, neither, but we’ll go wherever we need to go to figure this out,” I said.
“But we’ve already been everywhere—we’ve been forward and backward in time, too. We’ve been everywhere and look at us now. Where could one possibly go from here?” Levana.
“Onward,” Cook said, his voice as soft as the breeze.
“Onward,” Mimi repeated, as if she was tasting the word on her tongue. “That’s good. I like that,” she decided.
“We never stop. Not until we get it all back or die trying,” Seth said, and we all nodded. “We keep going onward.”
It sounded exactly right.
“Silas,” I said after a beat. “Tell us a story. About us.” There was plenty he hadn’t told us—there simply hadn’t been enough time, but I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know the small things, the details, the stuff that didn’t seem all that important in the moment but was.
“Yeah, Silas. Tell us what it was like. Did we ever sneak out back then?” Anika asked.
Laughter, short and sweet. Silas nodded his head. “Every single night, actually.”
Slowly, he dragged himself a little to the side so he could look at us.
What?!—No way, you’re joking!—where did we go?—I always knew we were trouble—tell me we wrecked things!—did we set something on fire, by any chance?—did we ever make it to the city? I so want to see the city…
The others talked over one another like always, as Silas’s eyes moved from face to face, and his smile faltered, then stretched again. The look in his eyes changed, too, and it broke my heart because I knew exactly what he was remembering.
A time when we were whole. When we weren’t missing two.
But he cleared his throat, anyway, and turned his back on the city lights, and said, “All right, all right. Let me tell you about this place we called the Junkyard…”
We stayed there for almost an hour talking about the past, and as we did, we all changed a little more in the present, or…perhaps returned more to ourselves?
I guessed I would find out in time.
They gave us cloaks—heavy and dark, just like the ones they wore all the time.
And we weren’t going to be sitting in a carriage all the way to the Court of Hearts, no.
We were going to use something the Timekeepers called conduit runners—and it was worse than anything the Labyrinth had thrown at us.
Master Talik and Damon were coming with us, at least. We wouldn’t need a seeker or have to figure out the way on our own, but that didn’t mean much when we saw where they led us the next morning, just as the sun had begun to rise.
They led us down, through a section of underground rooms we hadn’t seen before—deeper, hotter, where the pipes were wider than doorways and the hum in the walls became a roar.
The air tasted like hot metal and I was constantly sweating from the moment we descended the first flight of stairs.
By the time Talik stopped in front of a massive circular opening in the wall—a pipe, easily wide enough for three people to stand in—I was already regretting ever leaving March’s room.
I should have just stayed in there forever.
“What is that?!” Mimi asked with half a voice, but I think she already knew. We all did, from the way Kohen had described it before we left. A maintenance track inside the distribution conduits—the system that had once carried Timekeepers and materials outward to the four courts.
Which was a surprise to me as I had no idea Timekeepers had been required to travel to other courts to fix their problems, but Kohen said they did so all the time.
Chronobank stations and Sparetime factories and harvest regulators—especially ward systems. Apparently, they’d maintained everything, not just the Great Clock—but that changed when a new magical system was installed—a waste of Sparetime, the old Timekeeper called it.
We now had self-calibrating chronobank stations, self-syncing court clocks, automated harvest regulators.