Chapter 26
Seth’s room was identical to mine. It had its own bathroom, virtually the same wardrobe, the same lamps and clocks, the same nightstands.
It was easy enough to gather all my things—I didn’t have much to begin with.
Then, Seth ran from his room to mine to bring over his stuff, and he ran from my room to his to bring my stuff here—and he looked reborn by the end of it. Fully charged.
Movement really added a glow to his skin.
When I closed the door to unpack, Mimi was just bringing the last of March’s things to his new room, too. Right next to mine.
We’d have a quarter of the day off, the queen said, to rest from the trial, to try to relax before Elida came to take us to our next lesson.
I was thankful that Seth had asked me to switch rooms because putting my things in place and rearranging where I wanted everything to go—I even switched which side of the bed I’d sleep on, and put Jinx’s picture on the nightstand to the right—proved to be very distracting.
It brought me peace, didn’t let me dwell too much on my reality, and by the time I was done and sat on the bed, the sun was already higher up in the sky, warm, filling my new room with a gorgeous golden hue.
I opened a window, looked outside into the forest that stretched for maybe half a mile behind this side of the palace. Beyond the tall fence was the city of Neverwhen with its big buildings, steaming towers, with its people from all over the realm.
I wondered where the palace of the queens was.
I wondered why the White Queen needed to hide in some room behind the kitchen here in the Labyrinth and clean dishes that were already polished. And in her free time, no less.
I wondered if March was done putting his things in his place in his room.
And just as I finished that thought, I heard the sound of a window opening, and his head came out some ten feet away from me.
The way my heart jumped. The way my stomach fluttered. The way my mind became perfectly blank when our eyes met.
Sunlight looked very good on him. It made his eyes look more orange than red and gave a deeper reddish hue to his dark hair, and gave his skin a golden tint, too.
“Waiting for me?”
His voice was like music to my ears.
I wanted to say no. I wanted to say yes.
I said nothing at all, and a moment later, he disappeared.
A long sigh left me.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I quoted Mimi from that first night I’d seen her wandering around the grandfather clock.
Then came the knock on the door.
Before I understood what I was doing, I fixed my hair, combed through it with my fingers, put it behind my ears, and I made sure my purple tunic didn’t have any wrinkles on it.
When I opened the door, my body did the same thing as before, like I was surprised to find him there when I wasn’t.
Like I hadn’t known for a fact that he was going to come to my door in a minute.
“I said, were you waiting for me, Velvet?”
Velvet.
I wasn’t sure why I liked that name. It wasn’t even a name—just a word.
“Only because I was curious about what you said in the kitchen.” That was the first thing that popped in my head—his whisper while we’d been going to see the room beyond. He said, I saw you again.
March grinned. “Is that all?”
“Yes. That’s all.”
“Well, then. If you want to know, you’ll have to invite me inside.”
The teasing in his voice made me want to smile.
I bit the inside of my cheek instead and nodded, stepped aside.
“Come on in. The room’s new, anyhour.” Yet somehow the memories of the last time he’d been in my bedroom had come with me and all my things.
Maybe Seth had unknowingly transported them here with everything else.
“Maybe you were here before,” said March as he entered, took a single look around, then stopped his eyes on me when I closed the door. “Maybe we were here before.”
Goose bumps all over my forearms. “No, I don’t think so. Not in this room.”
A second ticked by. I pressed my back against the door and sighed again, trying to release some of the tension but failing. It was too deep in me.
“I keep knowing things I don’t remember learning.” And it was harder to deal with than I’d have imagined before.
Before the curse.
“And I keep remembering all the things I don’t trust,” said March in wonder, scratching his chin for a second as he looked at the floor.
“What was it?” I wondered, drinking in the sight of him, half of me yearning to get closer, the other half insisting I keep distance between us at all costs. “What did you see?”
“You,” said March. The sun fell on his back like it was appreciating his silhouette.
I wanted to melt onto him the same way, too, but I didn’t dare.
“You’re just…sitting there.” His eyes closed for a moment, but moved fast under his lids, like they were searching for something—a thought.
A memory he’d collected. “There’s grass underneath you, and a lake ahead.
Large, green, shaped like an octopus.” Tears stung the back of my eyes suddenly.
“The sky is not dark but not light either. Just a mix of all the colors, and you’re…
you’re breathing.” He looked at me again, eyes opening slowly. “You just exist.”
Inside me something cracked, something empty that had been full before.
I knew the lake he spoke of—it was indeed shaped like an octopus, with a round head and eight separate legs.
Father had told me that when I was little and we used to go for picnics by the lake at least once a week.
The image had stuck in my head. It was close to home, possibly not even ten minutes away from my house, and I went there often by myself when I grew up.
Sometimes I stayed for hours.
Sometimes I just caught a glimpse of the surface of the lake and headed back without even breathing in the scent of the water.
Before I started crying for real, I pushed myself off the door and went to March, a stranger in my own skin.
But he was wearing a short-sleeved red shirt, and if I turned his arm just a little, I could see if the images that had popped in my head on the trial had been real.
I grabbed his left hand and he didn’t stop me.
I pulled up his arm, then turned it just slightly to see a small cut on either end—right where the pain had been.
“I saw you, too,” I whispered and touched the faded scars with my fingertips.
The one below his forearm was almost completely covered by hair, but the other, where the tip of the blade had come out of just below the crook of his elbow, was very visible.
“It hurt here. You had your arm up and the knife went right through. There were screams. I…” My own eyes closed. “There was blood.”
For a moment, March froze in place, and when I looked up at him again, I found him staring at my hands where they touched his scars.
I expected him to be mad. I expected him to want to get away from me—that’s what I’d felt when he’d seen me hurting.
But March only shook his hand, grabbed my hand in his, and said, “I was wondering how I got these scars just yesterday. I don’t remember any of it.” Just like I didn’t remember the things he saw. “Who was it? Who stabbed me?”
“I don’t know. All I saw was a silhouette, heard the scream, felt the pain.” And the blood—but I didn’t want to say that again.
Our eyes locked. I wanted to move away but didn’t. His hand was wrapped around mine and it was so warm. “Why do you have my memories, Velvet?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Why do you have mine?”
“Maybe…for safekeeping?” he offered, but we both knew that wasn’t it.
“The White Queen is lying about something,” I said instead.
He moved slightly to the side, ran his hand up my arm, making the blood in my veins come to a boiling point just like that.
“Everybody’s lying about something,” March said. “Did you really not know she was going to be in that room?”
“I didn’t.” But it hurt to know he hadn’t believed me, and I wasn’t sure why. He had every right to be suspicious. I was suspicious of him, too, no matter what it felt like to be near him.
“So, who told you about the room?”
My eyes closed. The grin was there, in the center of my mind.
March’s fingers touched below my chin, and he slowly raised my head. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
A lot of things.
“I didn’t know she was going to be there. And I don’t know why she was…doing what she was doing.”
“I think she’s a Diamond. They have obsessive compulsive disorders when it comes to cleanliness and polishing things,” March said. “It’s my best guess.”
“But why here?” I wondered.
“There are a lot of why’s to go around.” He looked down at my lips like that again, like he wanted to eat them just like he had that red velvet cupcake.
“But I still don’t know the taste of all of you.
” He slowly moved closer and closer, and I was hyperventilating on the inside, but on the outside I was completely frozen.
Refused to move an inch. “I want to fix that, Velvet. I want to know so badly.”
His lips were right there, just slightly touching mine. My eyes closed and I surrendered. Fix it, yes, fix it, I thought, but at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was wrong.
March didn’t trust me. He was just…curious about me. About why he had my memories in his head, and I had his.
He was only curious, that’s all. He didn’t even like me.
“A mistake,” I muttered against every instinct in my body. It had been a mistake to kiss him—both times now—and a mistake to want him the way I did.
The reason?
The aftermath of the trials, of everything that had happened since we woke up. That’s all there was to it.
“A mistake?” March leaned back a moment, looked at me intently.
“It’s…it’s not real, Heartling. It can’t be. It’s just this place that’s messing with our heads. We don’t know each other.” And that was logic. That made sense. That was possible.
“The only thing that messes with my head is you and your memories and the thought of your face.”
March had yet to move away or let go of my chin. I found I was still holding onto his arm, and he was still holding onto my hand, too.
“You are more real to me than everything out there I can see and touch and smell.”
“March,” I breathed because he was making it too hard. He had to know that this was wrong—he had to want answers first. All those why’s—didn’t he want answers?!
“Something’s wrong with you, Velvet.” This time, I paused. “Something’s wrong with me, too. Something’s wrong with all of us, every day—but this is not one of those things.”
Yet it was there, in his eyes what he really thought—and I said it: “You don’t trust me.”
“And you don’t really care about anything.”
Holy Hour, how was that so…true?
“But that doesn’t mean I’m not dying to know every inch of you better than I know myself,” he said in a lazy whisper, and it was all I could do not to moan when he pulled my bottom lip between his teeth and bit.
Curiosity, it’s just his curiosity, it’s just his curiosity—
Then came a loud banging from the hallway.
“It’s five o’clock. Lesson starts in ten. Out with all of you!” Elida shouted, then continued to slam her fists on the rest of the doors in the hallway.
My eyes closed. I let go of March and he let go of me, stepped back.
“Looks like it’s time to go,” he said with a wicked grin.
“It is,” I said, trying to make up my mind, to make the right choice. I had to—until I knew more, I had to be smart about this, no matter what he felt like. He didn’t trust me and I didn’t care. There were far more important things to worry about.
So, I forced myself to say, “And March? Don’t come back here again.”
He stopped. Turned to look at me with his hand on the handle still. Surprised first, then curious—then he shrugged.
“All you have to do is not open the door, Velvet.” And he walked out of my room, leaving me to stare after him in silence.
They took us to Master Talik’s workshop again, and we learned how to dismantle a much simpler machine than the other ones he’d prepared for us before.
That’s because the lessons were following the timeline, Elida said, and so we were learning backward, too—from hard to easy. Which made no sense at all.
Master Talik didn’t look at me once, even when he was standing right next to me at the main table, watching how I was pulling the pins out of a gear to take it apart.
His focus didn’t waver. Mine did. I wanted to ask him if we could meet later, alone, because I had to ask him more about Silas.
The Cheshire said he hadn’t had authority, only permission—so who did?
Surely it must have been a Timekeeper, and though Neverwhen was supposed to be full of them, we only saw the ones inside the Labyrinth.
Elida was out of the question—not a single one of my instincts trusted her.
So, Master Talik remained the only option.
Elida was with us the whole time, so I could say nothing before we had to leave, but I planned to come back at dawn. I planned to sit there and knock on the door until he either came out or let me in.
In training, the exercises had gotten significantly easier, too.
Asha and her partner put us in low-oxygen tunnels to test how long we could hold our breath and put us in shifting labyrinths to see how well we could find our way out based on pure intuition.
They made us balance on these huge moving platforms on the part of the arena that was outside, and climb ropes faster and more efficiently as well.
There was no sparring, no weapons, just over three hours of pure movement.
Mimi and Seth thrived. When we were done, they were glowing. The rest of us were beyond tired, but it was worth it. Nothing better to distract you from your strange reality than to be so physically exhausted you wondered if you’d make it to your bedroom before collapsing.
I almost walked right into Seth’s room when we got back, but then I saw Mimi entering March’s old room at the end of the hallway, and realized mine was now right across from hers.
I didn’t wait for March, who was walking behind me with Russ and Helen.
I just got into my new room that looked identical to the old one, and collapsed on the bed, clothes and all.