Chapter 42 #2
We kept coming back to this huge grandfather clock in the middle of a junction that for a second there felt familiar to me, though I hadn’t seen it before.
But Mimi must have known it because she kept finding her way back to it.
She would walk a circle around it before taking us down another hallway each time.
Finally, though, we made it to a door at the end of a narrow corridor, and beyond it was a single stairwell leading down. It was darker than in the rest of the palace down there, too, no windows, just lanterns on the plain white walls.
“Here,” Mimi said when we stopped in front of the only other door at the end of it. “She comes here.”
A single sign was on the door, cursive letters engraved on a silver plaque: Out of Sync.
“What’s in there?” Erith asked.
“I don’t know,” Mimi said.
“You’ve never been inside?” Levana asked.
“No, I never thought to try.” Mimi scratched her chin, like she was suddenly confused.
“Let’s find out right now, then,” said Russ and, stepping forward, tried the handle.
Locked.
He didn’t hesitate nor did he wait for anyone else to offer to open it.
He just put his hand over the keyhole, and white flashed from his palm.
It didn’t cost more than a minute to pick locks, so Russ didn’t even look at his Life Clock, but the door gave.
When he pulled down the handle again, it opened with a weak screech.
I was afraid, yes, but not nearly as much as I ought to be, maybe because I wasn’t alone.
All nine of us were here together, and that was more comforting than anything else in this…
brand new body of mine. I’d changed, yet again, and I was full, whole, but I still had parts that I didn’t recognize.
I still had parts inside me that had yet to settle into place and make sense. Become familiar once more.
Such a strange state to be in.
And then there was the room on the other side.
There were no windows here, either, just torches and flames burning atop them, and a big square hallway with barred doors on the walls on both sides. Barred doors that kept you out of dimly lit rooms full of racks—that were full of boxes—that were full of tools and parts, all made of metal.
It smelled like oil in there. Oil and dust. The floor and the walls were made of stone blocks, smaller than the ones of that tower. No marble here, and nothing fancy—no mirrors or vases full of roses. Just emptiness, and a lot of metal.
“Whoa,” breathed Russ as he went through, and his voice echoed in the wide space. The ceiling wasn’t high, but the sound of him bounced back anyway.
“So many things,” someone said, and we all spread out deeper into the room to see beyond the bars better. The sight of them made chills rush down my back because I remembered that cage. I remembered how I’d been so certain that I was going to die when I forced myself to jump off it.
Yet here I was, still alive, still looking around, trying to find something that made sense, when…
It did.
The others were trying to open the barred doors, to get to those boxes, to find out if these devices were really out of sync, and if they could be fixed. Anything we could use to help us figure anything out.
But the devices weren’t what Elida came here for.
I knew the moment I saw the plaque on the only metal door in the room, on the wall across from the entrance.
My feet took me forward without my needing to even think about it.
All those bars around, but this door stood alone.
The same handwriting as the one outside carved a name on the plaque attached to it: Calren Hock.
That was Elida’s brother.
The words that man at the banquet said before came back to me in a rush. Such a shame—such a brilliant, bright mind to be reduced to…to…
“No way,” Erith whispered from behind me. “Is that…”
“Her brother,” March said. They had all gathered at the door, too.
“Well? Is he in there? Go on, open it,” Seth said, and my hand moved on its own. I reached for the handle, certain that it would be locked, but it wasn’t. It moved with ease.
The door opened without a single sound, and what we saw on the other side shocked us all out of words for a good, long moment.
White walls. A bed. A table. Paper.
Paper everywhere—on the bed and the floor and the table, stuck to walls, stuck to the ceiling.
A man sat cross-legged on top of the long table, hunched over almost completely, two pens in his hands as he wrote or drew something at the same time.
Nobody breathed. Nobody moved for a while.
Then…
“She was late.”
Three words that broke whatever ice had taken over my insides. That voice that shook me where I stood, even if you couldn’t see it. My heart was yanked right out of my ribcage, then put back in place again all within the second, and the room swam before me. Tilted. Spun.
“It’s him,” someone whispered—Mimi. She stepped around me and inside the room without hesitation.
The others followed her.
I followed them.
The room was bright, a lot of lanterns burning with pale flames on the white walls.
You could clearly see how little there was in this room—little of everything else, that is.
A lot of paper. A lot of lead. A lot of words scratched over, and numbers in no particular order, and clock faces without hands, and the outline of human faces with no features.
It smelled of something sweet in the room, something I was seven-hours certain I’d smelled before, but I couldn’t say where. The air was softer against my skin, too, somehow.
“Who was late?” Russ asked the man. “Your sister?”
He was still hunched over, drawing with two hands at the same time—different things, not the same. With his left he was drawing circles, and with the right, he was writing numbers out of order—5, 1, 11, 9, 4, 2…
“He doesn’t look…well,” Levana whispered.
“He isn’t. He’s out of sync,” said Cook, as if he knew exactly what that even meant.
“Hello—Calren, is it? We’re, uh…we’re the Hands. You know, of the Turning Trials,” said Seth, stepping closer to his long table, waving a hand to get his attention.
It worked.
The man raised his head only slightly and looked up. All of us held our breaths—that face.
It wasn’t familiar, but… he wasn’t a stranger.
That was the best way I could explain it.
Ginger hair, curly, cut close to his head. An orange stubble covered his pale cheeks, and his brown eyes looked…troubled. Muddy. Full—too full, on the verge of spilling.
It was easy to see that he was Elida’s brother. They had the same nose, the same face shape, the same curly hair. Calren was tall and skinny, too, long limbs, on his body a shirt that could have been white once, and brown trousers that hung too loose on his frame. His feet were bare.
“Hi-hi, hello,” said one or the other, and the rest waved their hands at him in greeting.
“We’ve possibly met before. You seem almost familiar,” said Anika.
“We’re—we’re the Hands, like we said,” Seth added.
His eyes moved from one face to the other, and when they stopped on mine, I released a breath.
“Not all Hands.”
That voice. The way he looked at me. The flavor of his attention.
“Reggie and Helen are…” The words slipped from me, but I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t say it. “And-and Silas—”
A flinch.
Calren sat up all the way, widened his shoulders like he was trying to stretch into his own size, and he wasn’t as skinny as I’d first thought. He was much bigger than I’d realized, in fact.
Most of the Hands took half a step back casually, and my heart jumped, too, but I wasn’t afraid. On the contrary—I felt like I was on the verge of…something.
“You know Silas,” said Russ.
“Do you know us?” said Levana.
“Do you remember us?” asked March. “You were our warden in the forward trials. Do you remember?”
Nothing. Not a word, just those eyes moving, hopping from one face to the next.
“We don’t remember,” said Mimi. “We don’t remember anything, and-and we think maybe others do. Maybe you do.”
“Why are you here?” asked Seth. “How can a person be out of sync?”
“What happened to you? Why are you… what are you writing? What are all these letters?” Anika.
Nothing.
The Timekeeper returned to his papers. He held up his hands over both of them, and in a flash of golden light, two blank sheets appeared over the old ones. He must have had a chronobank underneath his clothes somewhere because he most definitely could execute magic perfectly well.
Then he began to draw again, with his left hand featureless faces, with the right clocks, some with numbers and hands, some without.
“Maybe he can’t hear us,” Russ whispered.
“Maybe he can’t understand us,” said Mimi.
But he did. I knew deep in my bones that Calren understood perfectly.
I stepped closer to the table, took in a deep breath, went all the way until the edge of the table touched my hip.
“Calren.” He stopped drawing but didn’t raise his head. “We woke up here without memories, without a clue how we even got here, and we’re told there was a curse, and that we need to unwin to save everyone.”
Those eyes locked on mine.
“Unwinning will not save everyone.” He said the words slowly, carefully, like each letter was made of glass and he was being careful not to break them.
“They said it will. They said the curse was going to destroy—”
“No-no-no-no-no.” As he said this, he slammed both his pencils onto the sheets of paper, making several holes in them, until the tips of his pencils broke. “The curse was not meant to destroy!”
Someone stepped behind me—March, and he stayed close enough that I felt the heat of him all over my back. His hands closed over my shoulders, too, and I knew he was worried that Calren might attack me or something, but he didn’t need to be. Calren wouldn’t, regardless of how I knew.
“So, what was it meant for then?” I asked.
Another flash of golden light, and the tips of his pencils were sharp again.
“They told us it was meant to destroy Time itself, the entire realm,” said Mimi from my other side.
Laughter, dry and short, and I did jump back a bit at the sharp sound on instinct.
“You don’t go breaking lamps when you want to blind a room, do you?
” He looked at us and it was like he was a completely rational, intelligent man for a split second there.
“No—you close the shutters to stop the light from seeping in.”
The rest of us looked at one another—nope, not a single one understood anything he said.
“What does that mean?” Anika asked.
“I don’t think it means anything, guys,” Cook muttered—but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“Calren, we need help. We don’t remember anything. Is there something you can tell us, someone who knows what happened?” I asked. “Is there any way to end this, to not play in the trials? Any way to leave the Labyr—”
“No.” The word was so final it cut mine in half.
“So how are we to know what we’re doing when nobody will tell us anything?” Mimi asked. “We don’t remember the trials we won! We don’t remember a curse—everything’s just missing!”
Calren looked up at her then. “Mim-mim,” he said, and something inside me twisted. “Missing things don’t have edges. They don’t tear anything. They don’t break anything, they don’t.”
His words echoed in my mind. “Does that mean it was on purpose then?” I asked. “Does that mean we were made not to remember?”
Silence.
“The Red Queen,” whispered someone behind me, but I couldn’t tell who. And I couldn’t really focus on anything but Calren.
“Just tell us. What happened to you? What happened to us?!”
Finally, he stopped scribbling long enough to look up at me. “Tick-tock-tea-talk,” he whispered and drew all the air out of my lungs, locked all the air of the world out of my reach. “Your time is running out, and when all of it does, you will be free. When everything’s over, you will be free.”
White noise in my ears. The others spoke again, asked him questions, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t stop March from pulling me back when he did, either.
How-how-how was it possible? How did he know those words—how?!
A small scream pierced right through the confusion in my mind. I blinked and found Erith holding her hand to her chest—the same hand she’d grabbed Calren’s wrist with.
“He’s freezing cold!” she cried out, moving farther back. The rest of them did the same.
Meanwhile, Calren was already writing again, scribbling, drawing—his eyes remained on the paper, both his hands moving impossibly fast. Any faster and the tips of his pencils were going to start steaming.
He did indeed look out of sync—his hands seemed to be moving like they belonged to two different people, not one.
“Just help us!” Mimi called, while Anika and Seth rushed us back toward the door, told us to keep moving, that we needed to leave.
“We know they’re lying to us, but we don’t know who to trust,” Russ said. “If you know anything, help us. We’ve forgotten!”
That was the last time Calren looked at all of us at once—somehow, like when you looked at the Great Clock from any angle, and you always saw its face.
And he said, “You’re not done forgetting yet.”
We tried to get him to talk again, to listen. To look at us, but Calren only continued to scribble away on his papers like we weren’t even there.
We tried hard and long, we did.
Eventually, we calmed down and left. Eventually, we walked right out of the Out of Sync room, up the stairs and back to the palace. The sun had unset and the windows let through so much light now that it felt we were in a new world altogether.
None of us said a single thing all the way back to our rooms.