Chapter 27 #2
But all he said was, “Fetch me the box in the back, the big one,” and he waved a hand toward the end of the table.
There was a built-in shelf there, tucked into the recessed corner of the room where the wall pressed inward, creating a shallow alcove.
More tools and jars and toolboxes there, of course, and there was indeed one that was bigger than all others.
With a sigh, I picked up the drawing, folded it and hid it in my pocket again, and dragged my feet to the other side of the room. There was no point in this. I was wasting time here. I should go to bed, I figured, and I would, as soon as I brought Master Talik his toolbox.
It was on the shelf before last, so I dropped to one knee to grab it—it really was big, and half full, and really heavy, and—
There was something inside it.
I stopped. Put the box down again. Fell on both knees.
It was as big as my hand, about two inches thick, and it had gears and strings of metal wrapped around like protective bars.
It was shaped like a droplet, and underneath the bars and the cogs, there was a piece of glass that looked like a crystal at first, but it wasn’t.
Just a round piece of smooth glass with a drop of white light in the very middle.
Exactly like the drawing in my sketchbook.
“Hurry up, Miss Reese. I don’t have all night,” Master Talik called.
I don’t know what got into me, why I reached for the device and put it in my other pocket.
I was never one for stealing—Spades craved balance, and taking more than you needed or something that didn’t belong to you was the definition of chaos in our court.
But I was not myself here, was I? And I couldn’t just leave that thing in the box—I’d drawn it. There was a reason why I’d drawn it, and I would put it back in its place just as soon as I made sure that this was, in fact, the same object I drew. Just as soon as I found out what it was and why.
The box was heavy, but I no longer felt the weight of it as I took it to the table. I was sweating by the time Master Talik looked inside and paused for a moment, and all the alarms in my head rang at the same time.
Holy Hour, he knew.
He knew I’d taken the device. He knew he had it in the box—of course he knows, Ora, it’s his box!
But then Master Talik reached for a cog that was folded in half, held together by a thin pin, and proceeded to work on the clock without so much as a look my way.
I breathed deeply. Released my muscles. Released my fists.
He didn’t know.
The device pulled my tunic to the side a little. It was heavy, but the table helped in keeping the Timekeeper from seeing it. I hoped.
Even so, I slowly stepped to the other side, pressing my stomach to the edge of the table as well as I could without looking suspicious. I probably did, though. I was still sweating.
“Has it started yet?”
His voice almost made me jump. It wasn’t loud at all—I was just on the verge of panicking because there was a device I’d drawn and it was real. It wasn’t mine, but I took it anyway, and now it weighed so heavy in my pocket.
“What?” I barely managed.
“Have you started to feel the time?” the man said, fully focused on fixing that clock still.
“I…I’m not sure what you mean, Master Talik.”
“So, you haven’t then. But you will,” he muttered. “The body isn’t fit for a backward timeline. I keep telling them—it isn’t.”
I narrowed my brows. “Telling who?”
“The queens, of course.” He leaned down and pulled something for a second, and then it clicked into place, and the hands stopped moving.
Master Talik straightened his shoulders, took off his loupe and pushed his hair back. “Even clocks don’t know what to do—and we really aren’t very different from them.”
Yes, he’d said this before. I didn’t know even close to enough about machines to decide whether he was right or wrong.
The object in my pocket was getting heavier by the second. The tick-tocking of the clock on the table had stopped, and the silence somehow added to my guilt. Like maybe the Timekeeper could hear that device, know that I’d taken it without asking. Without even telling.
“The lands feel it. The entire realm,” he said, more to himself than to me as he shook his head and proceeded to pull pieces of gear apart from the clock, lay them out on the table. “Which is why I told him it was useless. Which is why time must be healed.”
My stomach dropped. “What’s useless?”
He looked at me from below his lashes. “To try.”
“Try what?”
“To change things, Miss Reese. To change things,” the Timekeeper said.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” He spoke in half riddles, too, just like the Cheshire.
Except Master Talik didn’t accuse me of bragging when I said that.
“Time must be healed,” he told me. “That is all you need to understand. Otherwise, there will never be a future, only the past.”
“We’re trying. We…we unwon two trials,” I said. “And we lost a Hand, too. And I…” My eyes squeezed shut, and the next words rushed out of me before I could help it. “Do you know what I lost, Master Talik? You said before that I was incomplete. Do you know what I lost?” Do you know who I am?
The man looked at me. Really looked at me for once. Saw me. Saw my face.
“You’re brave, Ora. So are the others. So was Silas.” It was like he’d slapped me across the face. “Continue to be brave, and the rest will work itself out.”
“You did know him,” I said, and why were there tears in the back of my eyes again?! Something must have been wrong with my body—I couldn’t think of any other explanation. “You knew Silas. You knew him.”
“Sleep tight, Miss Reese,” the Timekeeper said, and turned back to his work.
And that was that.
I tried to call him again, to ask him, to plead with him to tell me more, but he didn’t. He never once looked up at me. It felt like trying to talk to a wall.
On my way back to my room, I found Mimi pacing around the grandfather clock again, eyes down on her feet, whispering something to herself—maybe a song?
She didn’t notice me, though, and I didn’t interrupt her.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were much worse than any of us realized yet because Master Talik knew Silas.
And if he knew Silas, didn’t that mean that he remembered?
All the doors in the hallway of our dormitory were closed. I waited in front of March’s room like a fool for a minute, hoping it opened, and hoping it didn’t.
Finally, I went to my own room, pulled out the object I’d stolen, put it in the middle of the bed, and opened my sketchbook next to it.
Identical.
Every line, every string of metal, every cog, and the smooth curve of the glass ball in the middle—it was all identical in the drawing as it was in real life. And I had no idea what it was.
I searched it inch by inch, searched for a button or a switch or a winder—anything at all that could give me a clue, but I found nothing.
I fell asleep with it under my pillow.