Chapter 8
Iran.
Clockbeasts that wanted to devour me aside—and grinning, talking cats—the trial was done. Unwon.
It had worked. I’d set the beast’s clock ten minutes back, which was ten minutes into my future, and it had ticked, and its heart had started to beat so very slowly, and its fresh wounds had all closed up—while the clockbeast lay there on the ground still with its eyes closed.
Its clock worked, the hands moved as they should.
It was alive, but…not yet.
Now was the time to run, get out of this forest, go back to the Labyrinth and the living quarters—and figure out a way to escape Neverwhen before the sun unrose again.
Then I heard it.
The growls. The screams. Even a little laughter.
The sound of something hitting the ground hard.
The other Hands.
They were there still, in the clearing and around it, each one dealing with their own clockbeasts—fixing the clocks, running for a bit, then breaking them again before the beasts regained full consciousness and speed. It took them a minute or two.
And I hid there behind a tree and watched.
I didn’t care to help them—they were of no importance to me. Strangers I didn’t owe anything to. Yet there was that voice inside my head that insisted I should and I would, back before…before what?
I had lost the before, it seemed, and I was eleven-hours certain that I had been different then.
Now, I wasn’t, though. Now I was just me. And I was going to get out of this game one way or the other—because I earned it. I brought the clockbeast back to life. I unkilled it.
The problem was a certain boy with curly hair and eyes that were half red, half brown, and all the shades in between. Some would call it maroon, and they would be wrong—but the problem was, that I didn’t see those colors now.
I didn’t see him. He wasn’t with the others, and neither was Helen.
I didn’t really care if Helen was hurt or not. And I didn’t really care if March was hurt or not—but he had to survive with me. Because, my mind insisted, I had to ask him if he liked glass before he died. Simple.
With that lonesome reason in my pocket, I went all around the clearing to search for him, always hiding behind the trees so that the rest of them didn’t see me.
They weren’t looking, anyway—they were too busy fixing clocks, then smashing them again.
All those clockbeasts and they were all dead.
One came alive, then its clock was broken again by a sword or a fist or a rock.
I wondered if the Cheshire had come to speak to them, too.
I wondered if ‘do remember to forget him properly this time’ was just one of the many senseless things he said.
Or was it supposed to make sense somehow, like the advice he gave me for the clockbeast?
There he was, though—March with the wide shoulders and his suit splattered with blood. Mine was, too, but only on my right arm. His was almost completely black—just like mine was before.
I closed my eyes for a second, shook my head to clear it. Now was not the time to visit those flashes of memory. It was time to walk away.
Except March, who’d likely run from the clockbeast he’d unkilled a little deeper into the forest, was bent over it now, his red pouch open and on the ground, the loupe firmly between his cheek and his brow bone.
I moved a little closer, hid behind a tree better, and made sure the others couldn’t see me.
Then March moved, stood up, left his pouch behind, and instead grabbed that spear he’d left against the tree while he watched the clockbeast slowly rising to its feet.
I went as fast as I could without making too much noise, and without coming out in the open.
I was going to call out his name, tell him to stop what he was doing, hit the beast on its clock so it could die again for a moment, but the beast had already gathered its strength, it seemed, and I was still five feet away when it leaped into the air and tried to slam onto March.
The scream stuck in my throat, thankfully, because March was prepared. At the right moment, he grabbed his spear in both hands, and he charged for the beast as well, pushing it back until it hit the tree with a yelp, the thick wood of the spear right below its jaws.
“Stand down,” I thought March shouted while I convinced my body to unfreeze and keep moving. “Stand down!”
He was trying to order the beast to not kill him, I gathered. And it was simply not going to work.
The fear returned when I was just behind him, those wide shoulders, the strength of his arms as he held the beast against the tree with his spear.
Something about it.
But the beast was growling and yelping and whining and trying to claw at his body as hard as it could to free itself. “Stand—”
“Stop.”
I said the word slowly but he heard. I was right there behind him now, but he didn’t turn to look—because the beast was still between his spear and the tree, and it was growing more and more violent by the second.
I licked my dry lips. “Don’t move. Just keep it there.”
The clock of this beast was on its shoulder, right below the spear that was cutting off the beast’s airflow. It was a messy, broken thing, but the hands were moving, and it was working. It had given life to the creature, and that’s all I needed to know.
March had frozen completely, and he only turned his head slightly to the side, looked down, like he could already see me clearly from his peripheral. I took that as a sign that he was going to do as I said, even if he didn’t confirm it with words.
So, I stepped to his right, went closer to the beast, and when his eyes finally locked on mine, the second stretched like an anomaly.
Stretched seconds were dangerous, and they could create loops one could never get out of—unless they were a Spade, of course—but this one didn’t seem really stretched.
Just like the Cheshire didn’t seem really real.
Just like unwinning didn’t seem really possible.
And when time snapped back into a normal pace, I reached a hand—that was oddly shaking—for the beast’s clock.
March’s lips parted. There were words in his mouth, on his tongue, but he didn’t say them. Instead, he continued to look at me while I focused on the clock—half broken and battered, the crown almost completely dented in.
I touched it—and the clockbeast lost it. It moved frantically, growled, pushed at March’s arms and chest with all its might.
“Hold it—just hold it like this,” I said through gritted teeth. He raised up a knee, pressed it onto the beast’s chest, making it whine again and struggle for air.
I didn’t hesitate. There was a little light, and the sky must have been getting brighter because I didn’t even need the lanterns to pull up the crown on the beast’s clock.
The second it came up, the beast went limp.
It, too, looked like a rabid dog with long, thin limbs and teeth that could rip apart my arm in seconds.
But it was no longer struggling, and March still held it there against the tree with his knee and his spear, and I only needed a breath to wind the crown ten minutes back, into our future, then push it down.
A tick.
A heartbeat.
I stepped back as March looked at the clock, frozen still, his breath held. He heard—and saw the clock working just fine, yet the beast kept its eyes closed, its body limp.
“It’s alive,” I whispered. “Just not yet.” That way we could both run out of here, and never-ever-reven return to whatever forest this was.
Finally March moved away from the beast, and it fell to the ground, breathing very slowly, the hands of its clock moving with the minute.
The next beat, he came at me fast, towered over me, one hand around the spear, the other around my chin.
Every bell in my head rang at the same time.
My own hands wrapped around his forearm, his suit still a bit wet with blood.
He had a scratch on his left cheek as well, and his hair was a mess, and his eyes spilled colors all over me as he analyzed me.
They didn’t blink, and he didn’t breathe, and so neither did I.
I stayed there when I should have pushed back.
I stayed, and my hands around his arm were more to make sure he didn’t make any sudden movements, than to actually force him to let go of me.
Close. Four inches, if I had to guess.
Three now.
“Who are you?” The words left his lips in a whisper that caressed my ear.
Could I speak if I tried, even though his hand, warm and rough, was firmly around my chin and jaw?
No idea, but it didn’t look like I was planning to find out.
“Why do I know exactly how many freckles are on your face?”
My knees buckled under the weight of his words, and I didn’t even know why.
His hand squeezed my face, his thumb and index fingers coming together, pulling my lips out into a pout.
The way he looked at them…
“Why do I know the shape of your lips?”
If I could, I’d raise him a question of my own: why do I know yours?
“You’re in my head.” He leaned closer—an inch, barely. “Why are you in my head, Spade?”
My legs would have given up all the way if a scream hadn’t distracted me.
As it was, we both jumped back at the same time, letting go of one another. We looked at the clearing just in time to see that the sun had indeed unset already, and the sky was a deep blue, and Mimi had just broken the clock of the beast she’d been fixing a moment ago again.
Her scream was of frustration.
“We have to go,” I said, and I was going to turn back where we’d come from, back to the arena, the crowd, the queens.
But apparently, March had other ideas because he bent down to grab his tools and put them in his pouch, and he looked at me only once, in his eyes a promise that we would be talking more about those questions later.
Then he turned and went straight for the clearing. For the others.
“Gather up, everyone. This is how we unwin,” he said, and the others all stood up at once. “Someone go get Helen. Let’s get this over with quickly…”
And he kneeled on the ground near the first clockbeast carcass.
My eyes closed. My jaws clenched. The feel of his hand on me must have been imprinted on my skin because it burned everywhere he’d touched me. I hadn’t realized it just now, but his breath had smelled like roses, too. Just one of those facts that come back only after the moment was already over.
Time’s Teeth, the point was not to help the other Hands! Let them figure out on their own how to unwin this game. I didn’t care about them, and I didn’t care about March—I didn’t.
Even so, I dragged my feet to them with my pouch in hand, and I got to work without a word.
It only took us a few minutes of time, and a few minutes from our Life Clocks to fix all the clocks on the beasts, and unkill them. They all breathed. Their hearts beat, though slowly. Their eyes remained closed.
“Alive, but not yet,” March said, his eyes on me while the rest of them admired the work—all those clockbeasts on the ground. Eighteen of them—plus two that March and I had fixed away from the clearing.
They cheered. They clapped their hands, and a few even hugged one another.
March and I just stood there, a few feet apart, eyes locked.
I wondered, how many freckles were on my face? I’d never really thought to count.
Then we were finally on our way back.
Over.
The first—last?—trial was over, and we’d unwon. We’d unkilled all the clockbeasts in the forest, and the sky over us was blue, and it was finished. Now, all I had to do was walk out of here, and make sure I never came back.
My spirits were high. I didn’t care to smile with the others, but I was alive, and I had some answers—yes, this was real, and yes, I didn’t want to have any part of it anymore, and to the Everstill with whatever had happened in the forward trials.
I also had more questions—who was March, and why did I feel I had the right to claim him, and how was I in his head, and was he whom the Cheshire warned me to forget properly this time? Just how much had I forgotten, really?
It didn’t matter, though, did it? It was already forgotten, and that was that. It was over, our first trial backward. And soon we were going to be back in the arena, back at the palace, away from the forest.
“Hey…guys?” someone said as the laughter among the Hands died down quietly. “What is that?”
Levana was pointing her finger forward, slightly up, at a branch.
My heart jumped, thinking it was the Cheshire.
Instead, it was a silver spoon that had grown on a tree.