Chapter 16 #2
Something dripped on the page as if to nudge me, to pull me out of my trance. It was a tear. My tear. I was crying.
But when I turned another page, I stopped.
The next drawing was of an object about as big as my hand, shaped like a droplet, with gears and strings of metal wrapped around it, caging in this round piece of glass.
I knew this because I knew how I drew glass surfaces, and that little ball had something in the very middle.
Maybe a spark or some kind of light? I couldn’t be too sure.
The detail I’d put into every part of it, the shadows and the highlights, every stroke of my pencil—it was so precise. This object, too, was real. I’d seen this before, had analyzed it long enough to be able to draw it—only I had no idea where.
When I turned the page, I expected to find more like it for some reason. Instead, Mimi’s smiling face greeted me.
Now, I was smiling, too. Her eyes sparkled on the portrait. She looked happy. She was glowing.
I liked you before.
I must have liked her, too. Just the way I’d written her name at the edge of the page in cursive. My special handwriting.
Then there was Anika. Seth. Helen. Erith. Russ…
And Reggie.
A cross between a cry and a moan slipped out of me before I could help it.
My body and my mind were two different entities right now—I was sobbing, but I didn’t know why.
Reggie was smiling on the page, that easy, mischievous grin I’d seen when we first woke up here, and it hurt so badly I couldn’t breathe.
It hurt physically all over my body and I didn’t understand why.
I didn’t understand why I continued to look at every line, every shadow, every feature I’d drawn with such care, until I was sure I would pass out.
I had to turn the page. I had to, so I did.
Again, I stopped crying.
I must have been louder than I thought because when I stopped abruptly, my ears still rang.
The face on the page in front of me was one I’d never seen before yet knew in detail. Big eyes, dark; long lips and cheekbones deeply carved; hair straight, thick, tucked behind his ears, the tips just grazing the outline of his shoulders.
The name handwritten at the edge of the page was Silas.
“Silas.”
The Spade boy. The Timekeeper.
The traitor.
His name was Silas, and I’d known his face in detail at one point. It made sense—every face I’d drawn here was exactly like the person. Identical. Every line was so precise. There had been no hesitation here, no second thoughts.
This person was real. This face belonged to the Spade boy. This was Silas.
And I most definitely had liked him before, too.
A few hours later, I woke up to a scream so loud I didn’t even consider it was inside my head at all. I sat up with a jerk, the sketchbook still between my arms. Must have slept with it clutched to my chest—and the screaming continued.
Time’s Teeth, what is happening?!
The sound of doors opening and closing, and footsteps rushing down the hallway had me jumping off the bed in no time. I ran, pulled my door open to find Cook running to the other side, toward one of the rooms down the middle—right where the scream was coming from.
I ran, too, without really thinking, the sketchbook in my hand still, like it was the only thing keeping me upright. By the time I made it into the room, the screaming had stopped, and all the other Hands were already in there, standing around the bed, trying to get a terrified Erith to calm down.
She was shaking, her hands on her head, her knees up to her chest— “The queen, it was the queen, the queen!” she repeated in a shaking voice.
I was by the door still, and I couldn’t make my legs move, couldn’t get myself closer like the rest of them had gone, all around the bed.
They all wore pajamas—only I’d gone to bed fully clothed.
The only thing I’d removed was my boots, but I didn’t even feel it if the marble was cold underneath my feet.
“It was a dream, just a dream,” the others told her, and Anika tried to grab Erith’s hand to hold, but she refused.
“It was the queen!” she insisted, eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth, shaking her head.
“What about the queen? What about the White Queen?!” someone asked—could have been Russ. They all looked panicked, disoriented, terrified.
And my eyes fell on Mimi, who had her arms wrapped around herself, and who was looking down at the floor or her bare feet.
“The queen, the queen, the queen,” Erith chanted.
“What was it? Did she come to you? Did she speak to you, Erith?” Helen said from the edge of the bed. “What did the White Queen do?”
“The Red Queen.”
Everybody stopped.
Even Erith stopped rocking and chanting and turned to Mimi together with the rest of us. “The Red Queen,” she repeated, still staring at the floor.
“Shut up for a second,” Russ hissed. “Close that door. Do it—close the door!”
He was looking at me.
I’m not sure how I managed to turn and close the door, press my back to it, hold on tightly to the sketchbook against my chest, but I did it.
“You saw the Red Queen?”
March’s voice sent ice-cold chills down my back. He was asking Erith, but Mimi answered, “Yes.”
Erith looked at her. “It was the Red Queen.”
Mimi repeated, “It was the Red Queen.”
“What was? What happened with the Red Queen?! Was she here?” Russ demanded, and out of all of us, he seemed the most worked up, moving from one side of the bed to the other.
But Mimi shook her head. “She did something.”
Silence in the room. The gears inside me groaned violently.
“She did something,” Erith repeated. She wasn’t crying anymore or shaking or rocking.
“What?!” Anika demanded, grabbing her hand between hers.
The next second took forever to tick. “I don’t know,” Erith said.
My eyes closed and I breathed deeply, and while the others asked Erith—and Mimi, too—if they were okay, I reminded myself that dreams could feel perfectly real sometimes. That you could wake up believing they had actually happened, but that didn’t mean they had.
That was probably the case with both Mimi and Erith here—they’d dreamed, and they thought it was real. That’s all—it was no big deal.
Except the voice in the back of my head that sounded exactly like the Cheshire now called my own thoughts liars.
“Something’s going on here,” Seth whispered after a moment. “They’re…they’re hiding something from us.”
That, the voice in my head said, is truth.
“They’re hiding the entire trials from us—we all know this,” Levana said, her face pale as the sheets on Erith’s bed.
“They don’t remember the trials, either. Nobody does,” Cook said, but he didn’t seem all too convinced in his own words.
“Do they, though?” Mimi said, and it was like she’d squeezed my lungs in her fists. “Or do they just say they don’t?”
Master Talik’s face came before my eyes, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew this. He knew this answer.
“What did they do to us?”
“What did they take from us?”
“Why wouldn’t they tell us?”
Questions. So many questions. I had plenty of my own as I stared at the floor and tried to come up with a decent plan on how to get Master Talik to speak to me. To trust me. To tell me whatever truths he knew.
“It’s late. We’re supposed to wake up in a bit.” Russ had stood up. “Let’s get to bed, everyone. We can talk more tomorrow.”
“But…but the queen,” Erith whispered, and she started shaking again.
Anika sat up higher on the bed. “I’ll stay with you, don’t worry. I’ll sit here and you can get some sleep.”
Her words twisted my gut in a different way. I couldn’t understand why she’d agree to just sit there so Erith could sleep, why she wouldn’t want to go back to sleep herself, and it irritated the time out of me because some part of me almost understood.
But it didn’t. Because there was no sense in it.
“Why are you dressed?” A shadow fell over me. “What’s that in your hands?”
March was in front of me, his eyes dark, analyzing. He wore dark red pajamas, and he was barefoot, too, and a knife was in his hand, the blade just longer than my middle finger.
My heart skipped a beat. “I…” The words were there, but somehow they slipped from my tongue. I wanted to tell him—wanted to show all of them what I’d drawn, wanted to show them Silas, but I couldn’t.
“Move out of the way. Some of us are trying to get to bed here,” Seth said, coming to my other side, as irritated as I had been a second ago, but for a whole different reason.
I turned, half thankful, pulled the door open, and walked out. The rest of them followed.
When I looked back before closing the door to my room, I found March still by Erith’s door, eyes on me.