Chapter 13 #2
Diagrams made of brass were pinned to the walls, each one outlining different mechanisms. I’d been to the workshop my mother used to work in before, plenty of times, but none of it had looked anything like this.
So…complicated, whatever type of machinery they were demonstrating: pressure locks, rotating bridges, collapsing platforms.
I won’t lie, it intrigued me. Before I knew it, I found I’d already caught up with the group, curious to see more, to get in there, to touch the gears and analyze them from up close.
The benches were to the left of the room, and the other Hands all went to sit in groups of two and three.
I, of course, sat on the last one, all alone, and this time I did mind it.
This time, I would have liked to be in the front.
But the front was already full, and I would still rather sit alone.
It was clear the others didn’t want to sit with me, either—even Cook who looked back at me from the third row and almost smiled like he was sorry. I didn’t exactly know how to feel about it, so I just focused on my surroundings.
The surface of the table was cold against my palms. The more I looked at the gears on that big one ahead, the more I realized it was one single machine, not several put together. They were all connected, a network of moving parts.
Then there was the Royal Timekeeper who’d worked at the Labyrinth for two decades.
He did not look like Elida at all. No suit and no hat on his head, only ink-stained fingers and the posture of someone who lived hunched over since childhood. Could he even straighten those shoulders, I wondered?
Behind us, the door closed. Elida had stayed, it seemed, just to the side of it, sitting on a small chair with a pad on her lap, pressing the tip of her pen to her tongue before she started writing.
“Good day, Hands. They call me Master Talik, and I will start to teach you about advanced machinery restoration, as our queens and my people seem to think that it’s necessary to unwin the Turning Trials.”
The man spoke, and his voice was calm, low, so soft. Almost like he was doing it on purpose, like he thought we were children or something. And only after he finished speaking did he drop the screwdriver and take off the loupe from his right eye.
He could straighten his shoulders, it seemed, and like that he was indeed tall, with thin limbs and mostly gray hair, wide blue eyes with razor sharp focus.
A stranger, yet something about him felt almost familiar, like I’d caught sight of him passing me by on the street.
“And what do you think?”
My own voice startled me. I needed to either get used to my words sneaking out on me or break this nasty habit of theirs.
Master Talik turned his head, looked up at me, just slightly surprised. “What does it matter what I think?”
It did, though. He’d worked in this place for two decades, had he not? I’d much rather hear what he thought about this whole unwinning thing, than anybody else.
“Who exactly creates these games, Timekeeper?” asked someone from the front—Anika.
“The Labyrinth, of course.”
“Yes, but who supplies the Labyrinth with the magic?” said Seth.
A gray brow arched to the middle of his wrinkled forehead, and suddenly he looked pissed off. His mouth opened, but then before he spoke, Master Talik looked up to the front of the room, to the door.
To Elida.
The next second he cleared his throat, turned around toward the boxes of tools in front of him, and said, “Time—who else?”
“Yes, we know it’s time, but who supplies it with time? Who makes the sketches? Who thinks up the games?” Helen said, irritated now, and then March moved.
He’d been sitting in the front row with three others, and suddenly he was moving toward the front of the room—no.
He was coming toward me.
Like a fool I looked up at him with my lips parted, not entirely sure if my eyes were telling me the truth. They were. March came all around my bench, stepped inside the seat, and sat next to me.
Sparetime save me, he was smiling.
“This is near.” This time I spoke deliberately—and I was right. There were maybe two inches between our arms and thighs. It was very near, if you asked me.
“It is,” March confirmed, and with his arms over the table, he pretended to look ahead at Master Talik, who was speaking again, but suddenly I couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t March’s face.
“You said, I’m not going anywhere near you again, remember?” It had only been hours ago. He couldn’t have possibly forgotten.
March turned his head toward me, and I forgot to breathe for a second. From so close up and with the bright lights overhead, I saw every detail of him like I hadn’t the morning before.
The heat on my cheeks turned up again. His eyes fell on my lips, and mine automatically went to his, and then I was falling down that hole in the ground, where even Time Himself couldn’t reach me.
March leaned in just a little, and I held my breath until he whispered, “I lied again.”
Then he sat back and turned to Master Talik.
I breathed. I looked ahead but didn’t see. My heart beat so fast I was terrified that he’d hear it, but it didn’t look like it. He’d have made a comment if he could.
“Liar,” I whispered before I could catch the word between my teeth.
“Traitor,” March whispered back, and he didn’t even try to hold back the smile.
I did.
I tried.
I failed, and instead turned my head to the side as casually as I could so he didn’t see.
So, there I was, sitting at our first—or last?
—lesson, smiling while my heart pounded, and there were loads of anger and arousal barely contained under my skin, too.
All because of this Heartling who liked glass, had somehow heard me screaming alone in the woods, and who lied without an ounce of shame or remorse.
“You mean to say that no person is in charge of the games? No person knows what goes on in the trials? No person decides or makes safety checks before throwing children in them?”
Cook’s voice was loud, and it snapped me out of whatever trance I’d fallen in so quickly, so fully. The smile on my face was behind the sudden surge of panic, too, and it helped in getting rid of it quickly.
When Cook’s words actually made sense to me, that helped in getting me to focus on Master Talik—while also somehow being perfectly aware of all the space March occupied on the bench next to me.
“We do know. Before the Turning Trials begin, we do know what the games will look like. We’re allowed inside to see the landscapes it creates.” A flinch on the old face. “Most times, that is.”
“So, why don’t you know this time?” Cook instead.
“We did. We knew. And now…we don’t. We’ve forgotten.”
Silence in the room for a tick.
“Even so, you must know what to expect based on the gears alone. You’ve been here two decades,” March said, and his voice was like music to my ears. It irritated me how everything about him appealed to all my senses, all my instincts, turned my own body against me.
What even was the deal with him? I’d surely met him before. It made sense that I had—we were Hands, and we’d been here two whole weeks before we forgot. Before the curse.
Now I was curious. I was dying to know what it had been like when we sat in this classroom for the first time, if my eyes had insisted that there was no better thing in the world to look at than the profile of his face.
It was difficult, so very difficult to keep myself in check.
“You would be correct under normal circumstances, Hand,” Master Talik answered. “But nothing works properly during glitches, I’m afraid. The predictable becomes perfectly unpredictable.”
“So that’s what this is. A glitch,” said Levana.
“More or less,” said Master Talik. “If you look here, I’ve prepared—”
“But where’s the balance here?” Cook asked again. “How will we know that we won’t die in the next trial, or that the game won’t claim one of us again like it did Reggie? How can we be sure?”
The whole class held their breath.
Master Talik said, “We don’t.”
“But—”
“No more questions, I’m afraid!” Elida sang from behind us, and she was furiously writing on her pad at the same time. “Please, Master Talik—continue with the lecture.”
“Right, right, if you will each come to pick up a box of tools. I’ve prepared them for you,” the man said, and March was already on his feet to go get his, and I was thankful for a moment alone to gather my thoughts.
Except by the time I stood up, March was already back, two toolboxes in his hands. He slipped onto the bench, put one in front of me, and the other in front of himself, right there on the table. Without ever looking at me.
Curiouser and curiouser.
I wasn’t sure whether he hated me, whether he was so suspicious of me that he’d decided he was going to keep an eye on me from up close and personal, or if he simply…liked that kiss as much as I did. If he liked my freckles, and my hands in his hair. My tongue in his mouth—
No.
“Together, we will go through every tool in the box, and I will explain to you what they are and how to use them. For the second part of this lesson, we will pull apart this device, and put it back together again in the right order.” As if on cue, a soft whir started inside the machine.
I swallowed hard and kept my eyes on the toolbox, willing the heat on my cheeks away. There was no more time to entertain silly memories. The lesson had officially begun.