Chapter 35
So many images. So many faces. So many stories…
I was lost, completely lost as I fell. Sometimes my focus slipped and my heartbeat sped and the images moved in the same rhythm.
Then I’d remember to breathe, to focus, to blink my eyes that were slightly burning, and everything would slow down again.
The stories painted themselves with different colors all around me. Old and new, I saw everything for real.
It occurred to me at one point that I might know exactly what was happening to me. Stillward, Master Talik had called it, but I wasn’t still at all—on the contrary.
Could it be that there were other gaps in time to fall through?
Because here everything was moving. All the time, without stop.
Different timelines—you could easily notice it by the way the people in the scenes were dressed, by the way the rooms and the buildings looked, by the tools they used and the beds they slept in.
These moments went way, way back—and if I had to pick the oldest one so far, I’d choose that shape I’d seen standing in the field at dusk, or even the women bathing naked in a lake together.
The more I saw, the more curious I became. It was starting to feel like this had always been my past, and it was my present, and it was going to be my future, too. It was starting to feel like I’d always belonged to this place, not another.
Which was…strange. And as wrong as it felt right. I couldn’t really put my finger on it—but any time I tried to figure it out, the scenes would change and a new image would catch my attention, and then I was falling down another hole all over again.
Until I heard it.
A piano.
The melody was imperfect. Hesitant in places, too fast in others, stumbling over a transition before catching itself and continuing with renewed confidence. The kind of playing that comes from a beginner.
Beneath the notes was the humming that made my heart stop altogether. It was soft, tuneless, unselfconscious. Authentic—and I knew that sound so perfectly my bones sang with it. I knew it better than I knew my own heartbeat.
Listening to Jinx play before she really started to get the hang of the piano would forever remain one of my favorite things to do. All feel and no skill. She felt the music, even if she didn’t know how to play it yet.
I stopped falling.
The nothing stopped with my heartbeat. The images stopped moving and whispering and making any kind of sound. It all just…stopped.
Except for Jinx.
She was right there in front of me, right there yet a world away.
Close enough so that I could see her freckles, darker than mine, blurred at the edges, a painting on her face like Time had used her skin as a canvas.
Close enough to see the way her hair fell across her forehead, always across, never behind the ear because she refused to tie it back.
Close enough to hear the humming perfectly, and every breath she took in between.
She was in our living room, the old one, before Mother decided to rearrange everything. Before she and Father pushed her piano against the back wall, put a bookshelf where it used to be, and pretended the room had always looked like that.
The window behind Jinx was open, and sunlight poured through it like it was indeed made of golden glitter.
She was wearing a pale purple shirt and a black skirt that spilled around her chair like it was made of liquid.
My eyes burned harder now. My whole body burned with so much longing, so much guilt, so much feeling.
The distance between me and her was a gap in my chest that no amount of breathing was ever going to fill.
And Jinx continued to play.
I cried there in the nothing all by myself. I smiled and I laughed and I even danced a little when she played a faster melody, a happier one. She’d stop, then start again, and I absorbed every movement of her body with my eyes and forever became perfectly possible.
This was indeed where I was meant to be all along. This. Here, with Jinx.
Just like it was always supposed to be.
I’d stay. Right here, for real, for good.
My eyes closed at one point, and my thoughts drifted. The imperfect melody and that humming was home. My very soul rested in it, and I let go, completely. No inhibitions.
I let go.
Sometimes I’d open my eyes to see her, sometimes I’d smile, and sometimes a tear or two would slide down my cheeks. I knew I couldn’t touch her if I tried, so I didn’t even reach out my hand in her direction. I was more than happy to exist there anyway.
Eventually, Jinx’s fingers hit a wrong note. She laughed—that bright, sharp laugh that always sounded like it surprised even her—then shook her head and started the passage again from the beginning. Never angry. Never impatient. Just…content. Happy.
And just when I thought I was standing still, I found myself reaching for her anyway.
Knowing I couldn’t touch her, but there was no harm in trying, was there?
I knew she wasn’t real. I knew she wasn’t really here, but I was, and as long as I could keep my heart still, she wasn’t going anywhere.
She wouldn’t know I was watching, and she would—
Jinx looked up.
Not at the piano or the doorway or even the sheet music she never even glanced at while she played.
No, she looked up and turned her head to the side a little bit, and her eyes locked directly on mine.
Through layers and layers of time.
Two years had passed since she was gone, and I hadn’t moved smoothly through a single day. I did now, while I looked at her eyes—blue, like mine. Wide, like mine. Full.
My heart wanted to come right out of me. This, this, this is it, went the thoughts in my head, and I would do anything, anything at all to reach her, and maybe because she was looking right at me, I could.
It made sense in my head, it really did. That’s why I shot forward with all my strength, both arms raised, determined to get to her no matter how long it took.
Instead, I hit a wall.
An invisible wall that wasn’t a wall at all, but…a face. Reddish eyes and curly hair and a smile that must have been made for me, if the way I reacted to it was anything to go by.
March wasn’t there. The image of him was in my head. Just my imagination coming alive from the unholy amount of details I knew about his face.
A blink, and he was gone. A blink and I was there again, in the nothing, falling—no. Reaching for my sister who’d died a long time ago because she was looking at me.
Then she smiled.
It wasn’t a sad smile. It was just…a smile. She smiled a lot, Jinx, and it always warmed me to my core. Right now, it did, too.
“Jinx,” I whispered and reached out to get closer to her again with all of me, with every fiber of my being.
And just like a moment ago, March’s face filled my mind, stopping me again.
By then, Jinx had turned back to the piano.
“Jinx—no!”
No sound came out of me, but when she started to play again, I heard it clearly. The melody was now perfect, and she played the way she used to before her death. Exactly right, every note merging into the next, the melody spilling like liquid, not a single note late or early or wrong in any way.
I don’t know why I was crying.
I had my arms wrapped around myself and I was crying so hard while Jinx played, and I could almost hear her voice in my head. Soft and sweet, just like the melody she played, she said my name.
But with the seconds, it turned…less sweet. Louder. More urgent.
With the seconds, her voice changed, too.
The more I listened, the more I saw March’s face in my mind, the more his eyes gained color, the more Jinx’s voice became his.
She was no longer calling my name at all, but he was. He was calling for me, and he sounded…afraid.
Jinx continued to play.
At first, I thought I was irritated. Ora, Ora, Ora—he wouldn’t stop, and I just wanted to listen to Jinx, and I wanted her to look at me again. I wanted to stay.
But the more I felt the urgency in his voice, the more I realized…
I wasn’t here at all, in fact.
I was up there, with him.
My eyes closed again, and the melody picked up, Jinx’s fingers now moving over the keys like they’d been doing so for years and years. She had become a professional from one moment to the next.
It isn’t real, said a voice in my head, a voice I screamed at internally, told it to just shut up! It was Jinx and she was real and she was here and I was…
Not.
I was somewhere with others. With March. With people who needed me—eight former Hands who’d lost their memories, in a world that was being stolen from, one minute at a time.
The melody faded a little in the background, and then I heard a voice, crisp and clear, as if she was standing right there over me:
“Tick-tock-tea-talk. Wake up, you hairy hare.”
It soothed me, the sound of her voice. The idea that she was about to come force me awake so she could tell me all about her dreams soothed me.
A dream.
Was that what this was? Because I was here, and I knew I wasn’t, and I’d seen and seen and seen…
My eyes remained on Jinx’s face, her stretched lips as she played the notes so beautifully. Maybe it was a dream, but it was also very real to me.
It was real to see her, to hear her, to feel her. I’d been so angry at the world for so long for taking her from me. I’d been so stuck since that morning she’d been gone, and I hadn’t wanted to be unstuck for a second after.
I hadn’t wanted to let go.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, went the voice in my head, sometimes Jinx’s, sometimes March’s, sometimes that of the Cheshire’s.
“I love you, you silly snake,” I whispered, and the words tasted like salt and sunlight and every single note she’d ever played on her piano.
I’d wanted to say that for so long, so badly. I’d held those words in my chest, unable to utter them at her grave, knowing she wouldn’t hear.
But here…she did. Jinx heard, and even though she didn’t turn her head or look at me again, I saw how her smile stretched wider. I saw how her cheek became rounder. I saw how eagerly she pressed those keys.
Those words were out there now. She finally heard me.
I could let go.
Not because I wanted to—I didn’t. But because it was time. Because I’d been searching for a way to release myself since forever, and because I was no longer all alone in the world. There were others who…liked me. There was March who knew me.
It was time.
Two long years, but it was time to fall back.
So, I let go.
With Jinx’s melody in the background, and her smile close to my heart, I let go.
Not of her—I could never, if I tried—but I let go of the feeling of her loss that had pulled me under for so long.
I stopped letting it drag me down and started to carry it instead.
In my arms and my chest and my head—everywhere on me.
Like that, it was still with me, her loss, but it didn’t weigh me down and paralyze me the way it used to.
Then my heart started beating again.
I heard it—that first beat, powerful enough to shake me, to set things into motion again.
The floating, the images, the sounds—all at once, they came back.
Jinx continued to play and the image of her sitting there in front of the piano dissolved little by little.
I was crying, sobbing, smiling, letting go.
But I was no longer falling as I did.
I was floating up instead.
The faster my heart beat, the faster I breathed, the faster the scenes and the moments around me changed. I no longer focused on any of them, no longer really saw what the shapes and the colors showed me.
The piano faded away into nothing, but the sound of that melody remained in my head, and my fingers itched for a piece of paper to draw her sitting there, smiling, and the nothing pulled me farther and farther up…
Until I was lying.
Somewhere hard and cold. Somewhere real.
Hands on mine, on my cheeks. March’s voice cracking on my name. Mimi screaming something I couldn’t quite get.
I was back, in the real world where there was light behind my closed lids as I fought to open them—not scenes and moments from all of time flashing around me. I was back where Jinx no longer played her piano or smiled or talked to me about dreams…and that was okay.
It hurt, but it was okay.
I was here.