Chapter 24 #2
“I still…I still don’t quite believe it myself.” My head lowered. My eyes closed. “It feels like something’s wrong. I was home and everything was going as it should and then—”
“You lost everything.”
My head snapped up again. “No, I…I just woke up here and the Great Clock had stopped.”
“Oh—oh, right! That was before.” The Cheshire nodded, and it was like he’d run those little claws down the inside of my mind instead of the metal branch.
“Do go on about your curses and your ruins and your traitors.” Again, he stood up, and he began to descend from the tree—backward.
It was still as strange to watch as the first time, the way his tail moved, the way his every step was perfectly precise, even though he couldn’t see where he was going.
Curious. “There’s nothing to go on with. We’re stuck inside this Labyrinth and we can’t get out. I can’t even choose not to go into a trial because my legs will just take me there, backward if they have to.”
“Yes—I did say you’re walking backward well, did I not?” The Cheshire stopped and sat on the concrete and looked up at me with that wide grin.
“Well, it’s not just me,” I muttered. “And…and someone died at the tea party. Don’t know if you heard.” What did he hear, I wondered? Where did he go when he wasn’t lying on trees when nobody else was around?
Where did he live? Backward wasn’t a place, was it?
And why had Time cast him out in the first place?
“Well, yes. No tea party is a proper tea party without death,” the Cheshire said, and my stomach twisted a little bit.
“That’s an awful thing to say,” I said, surprising myself with my own words.
“Why, thank you, O-ra.” The Cheshire grinned wider before he stood up, pleased with himself—but I hadn’t paid him a compliment. On the contrary.
I shook my head. “I don’t understand you.” And I didn’t understand most of what went on in the world around me anymore, either.
Laughter, short and sharp. “The way you brag makes me want to blush,” the Cheshire said.
“I’m not—” bragging, I wanted to say. What a silly little grinning cat—not understanding wasn’t something to brag about!
But he cut me off. “What’s that in your hand? How curious. May I see?”
I looked down at my hand, confused still. Angry. Mostly confused, though, because I didn’t know what to be just now.
There, clutched in my fist was the folded sheet from my sketchbook with Silas’s portrait.
I fell on one knee as the Cheshire came closer—backward, of course, and stopped when he was right next to me where he could look down at the drawing in my hand.
He felt like…nothing at all. No heat came off him, and though my hand was close to the tips of his fur, he might as well not have been there at all. My body didn’t feel his body, his energy, his presence, not even a tiny bit.
“This is—”
“Oh. Him.” The Cheshire stood up and continued to walk around me, backward.
My stomach fell. “You know him?”
“I most certainly do not.”
“But you said, oh, him.” That sounded like something you said when you knew someone. I turned, following the cat walking backward all around me. “That’s Silas. He’s the one who betrayed us, who was half Timekeeper. Who cast the curse.”
The Cheshire stopped on my other side, looked up at me curiously, his eyes darker than the night. “A curse is only a curse when it comes full circle, O-ra.”
I thought about it for a second. “What does that mean?”
“Exactly what it means,” said the cat, and he continued backward to the tree again, walking upside it like the metal bark had its own gravity field holding him upright.
“I don’t know what it means,” I insisted.
“Well, what do you know, then?”
So frustrating. “There was a curse and now we’re stuck here and we have to unwin trials none of us remembers winning, and two Hands are already dead, and Silas…” I looked down at the drawing.
Time’s Teeth, I was exhausted—not just from the trial, but from seeing his face and not knowing. Living like this, with only half of me present.
“Silas did what Silas had to do. He didn’t have authority, only…permission,” the Cheshire said, making my heart skip a beat.
“Permission from whom? For what?” I demanded. “And I thought you said you didn’t know him.” Because what he just said implied that he did.
“I say a lot of things,” the Cheshire said, and he was already sitting on the branch, licking his paw backward.
“You want answers, O-ra, but you’re looking in the loud parts of the Labyrinth.
” As if to prove his point, a valve went off somewhere behind us, and steam rolled out of it with a screeching sound for a second.
“Where should I look instead?” I asked the Cheshire, not really hopeful that he’d say. So far, all he’d done with his words was confuse me.
“Well, I am no Hand to Time, I assure you—but if I were, I’d look for whatever is trying to make sure nothing changes.” Slowly, he stretched his front legs and lay down on his belly on the metal branch.
“And what is that?”
“A what, a who—so much to do,” he said, and his eyes were already half closed as he settled with a paw under his grinning face, and with the other scratched the metal of the branch exactly as he had been doing when I found him.
The sound of it was identical, too. “Which is why I shall now take a nap or two.”
“Wait, wait, hold on,” I said, but I already knew it was a losing battle.
The tip of his tail was no longer there, but I went closer to the tree anyway, looked up at the branch that was low enough I could reach it if I jumped a little.
“Who’s trying to make sure nothing changes?
Where should I look for answers? You have to help me, Cheshire. Please—help me.”
A pause. His grin faded. “For someone who’s lost so many parts, you’re awfully sensitive,” he told me. “Find the kitchen and go beyond. Maybe there’s a quiet place for your questions.”
“What kitchen—the palace’s kitchen?” But the Cheshire had already faded halfway, and only his grin remained clear for another second.
“Don’t just disappear like that,” I whispered, knowing full well it was useless. “Who even are you? Why did Time cast you out?!” Because it couldn’t have been for anything good, could it? For all I knew, I was talking to a criminal. To a thief. To a traitor.
The grin was the only thing visible about the Cheshire’s body now, and it turned downward with a growl that seemed to only pop up in my head.
Even so, I moved back on instinct.
“Because Time doesn’t cast out liars.”
The words were barely there, slow, and there was a good chance I’d misunderstood them.
“Wait!” I called, but the Cheshire was gone, teeth and all. He was gone just as quickly as he’d come.
I closed my eyes, squeezed them, breathed in deeply, called for order to my messy thoughts, and—
“Who’re you talking to there?”
The scream got stuck between my clenched teeth when I jumped and spun around to find Seth sitting down underneath another mechanical tree, eating a box of crackers.
“You…you…”
“I scared you, yes. But you were focused on whoever you’re talking to. I made plenty of noise, you just didn’t hear me.”
Could very well be. I was so caught up on that annoying, grinning cat that I—wait.
I looked at Seth, at the way he lay against the metal bark, then popped another cracker in his mouth, chewed with his mouth open so I heard every bite as if it were in my head, too.
“How long have you been there?” And how much had he seen?
“A minute or two.” Seth shrugged.
Shivers rushed down my back. “And? Did you see…” A talking cat?
I couldn’t say the words, only turned to look at the tree where the Cheshire had been, but he was long gone.
“I saw you talking to yourself,” Seth said. “I do that sometimes, too. It helps.”
Heat rushed to my cheeks. “I didn’t—” But I clamped my mouth shut again.
It was better that he thought I was talking to myself, than to a talking cat. Because the fact that he hadn’t see the Cheshire most likely meant he wasn’t even real.
“Was he your boyfriend?”
“What?”
Seth nodded his head at my hand, at the sheet from my sketchbook I was still holding, unfolded so that he saw exactly whose face was drawn there.
“Oh. No, no—nothing like that,” I said instinctively. Not that I knew how I’d felt about Silas, but he had most definitely not been my boyfriend. I knew that for a fact. Undoubtedly, somehow.
Seth bit another cracker, and I felt each time his teeth came down as if they were on my own. “So how do you do it?”
“Do what?” I felt awkward. Uncomfortable. He looked so relaxed sitting there, eating, that I thought I should walk away and leave him be.
“Know the answers. You figured out all three solutions so far,” Seth said, and blood rushed to my cheeks all over again.
“I…I don’t know.” I did know, in fact. The first tip was from the very cat that apparently others couldn’t even see.
The second was the tea party—just simple math.
And the third… “It was you, actually. In the Thirteenth Hour trial. It was something you said about it activating as soon as everything was in place that gave me the idea.” That, and the thought of Silas.
Time’s Temper, I was really losing my mind here. I was really losing parts of me, just like the possibly-imaginary Cheshire Cat said.
Just like Master Talik said.
“I do say the right thing more often than not,” said Seth with a nod, and popped the last of his cracker into his mouth.
“I heard you’re going to the kitchen. You don’t mind the company, do you?
I need more crackers.” He jumped to his feet and showed me the empty wrapper before he crushed it in his fist.
“I…” Once more I looked back at the metal tree like a fool—empty. “You know where the kitchen is?”
“Of course. I need to snack all the time when the rest of ya’ll are sleeping. I’ll take you if you’d like.” He offered me a grin that was borderline fake. “In return for a teeny-tiny favor, of course. After all, I did help us get out of the trial, didn’t I?”
My brows narrowed. “What favor?”