Chapter 47
Iwas shaking.
Not a lot of things were worse than knowing you weren’t in control of your own body, that if you wanted—and I did—to turn around and walk away at any moment, you couldn’t.
Your legs would move backward. They wouldn’t walk you away—they would take you straight to where you were supposed to be, not where you wanted to be.
Nobody cared about what I wanted. What we wanted.
We were going to enter the fourth and final trial in a backward timeline, and that was that.
It made me rage.
It made me desperate.
It took all my hope and threw it at the wind.
And through it all, I could do nothing but stand there and listen.
“Hear, hear!” said the voice of the speaker who might not even exist at all. I’d never once seen his face, but I had heard his voice in my dreams just the night before, I thought, amplified by magic, made to sound like it was coming from everywhere at once.
The crowd cheered. The other Hands looked as hopeless as I felt. March stood beside me, and I instinctively reached for his hand—screw who could see. Screw what anybody would think.
He gripped mine without hesitation, too.
“A warm welcome to our Royal Clocklinesses, to you, ladies and gentlemen, and of course, to the stars of today—the Hands of the Turning Trials!”
Bile rose up my throat. I looked at March, and he was more pissed off than I’d ever seen him, I thought, eyes bloodshot, jaws locked.
The others did, too. We all exchanged looks to try to remind one another of the night before.
Of what we’d promised. What Mimi had written in that small green notebook.
Together. We were in this together, and once we were free of these trials, we would find the truth no matter the cost.
All that mattered was that we did not forget that green notebook.
And the people we’d already lost…what was the name of the girl who fell again?
Sweat on my brow. I didn’t remember.
“You have come to the edge of these trying times. You have traveled far along this winding descent. You have unwon what was once won, fair and square, and you stand now before the threshold of the final trial,” the speaker continued, then gave a moment for the applause to die down.
We were in the arena again, and behind us was the audience sitting in their tiered seats, and the queens were there, too, sitting on their high-backed chairs, only their box was covered in a thin white veil so we could barely make out their silhouettes.
The queens of the Clockrealm.
Something about them that I couldn’t quite catch. A thought that flew so fast across my mind it was a complete blur.
“This is where threads end, our dearest Hands. Or…they begin again,” the speaker said. “In the place beyond this arch, you will find echoes of the past. To unwin, you will not need to take, but to return what was once borrowed.”
I looked ahead at the dome that had appeared inside the arena, made entirely of glass, except it was thick glass, half frozen, and you could see nothing but darkness inside it.
The afternoon sun made the surface of it glisten like it was liquid just before I blinked, and the archway in the middle of it, some twenty feet ahead of us, had no doors, only darkness on the other side.
That was where it would all end. That was where we would finally be free.
The last trial.
Meanwhile the Great Clock stood atop the long tower just there in my peripheral, the hands stuck at eight-thirteen, and the Timekeeper Elida told us while she saw us down here today that it had been stuck that way since the backward trials began.
Funny thing about the Great Clock was that you could always see its face no matter what angle you looked at it from, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked.
All I remembered was that I’d woken up in March’s bed to a knock on the door, and the maid—Lida was her name, she said—had rushed me to my own bedroom to get ready.
“Go now—let us not keep you. The Great Clock awaits for the final unwin, and so do we. We will be watching closely, and we will be praying to Time. May all the seconds you need be with you, and may your time always be right!”
Applause.
Elida the Timekeeper smiled at us, and she was sweating so hard her entire face glistened.
“Come now, this is it,” she told us. “Come, let me walk you into the Ballroom.”
She waved for us to follow her. There were soldiers dressed in silver armor watching us on both sides, standing there on the green grass with their hands folded in front of them, like they expected us to run or something. How silly, when we couldn’t even try.
As if on cue, my legs took me forward.
Whatever magic was in the Labyrinth or underneath our feet in the machinery that worked without stop, it pulled my body forward and I was walking toward the glass dome whether I wanted to or not. There was no choice here—I was entering the final trial. We all were.
At least March was right beside me.
“Good-timing, guys. I will be praying for you,” Elida said, and she stopped some three feet away from the archway that seemed to lead into some sort of an abyss. “See you on the other side!”
Her voice was cheerful—too cheerful, and not genuine. March squeezed my hand, and we exchanged a look that didn’t really say much. What was there to say, anyway?
A whisper. A prayer. A soft cry. A deep breath from one Hand or another.
Without a word, we all walked into the darkness together.
None of us was sure what to expect, but when the Timekeeper said Ballroom, I expected some grand hall with red and white tiles, red and white roses, crystal chandeliers hanging on the ceiling.
What we found was something very different.
The darkness didn’t last for longer than a few feet.
The sunlight reached us through the ceiling eventually, and we found ourselves in a hallway set with black tiles, in front of a set of red doors, both open all the way.
Beyond them was a ballroom, all right, except it was… in ruins. Covered in dust and cobwebs.
“What in Time’s Temper is this place?” Levana whispered as we crossed through the threshold.
Nobody had an answer.
“Do you guys…remember what the first trial was?” Cook asked.
“Or…the second?” Anika.
We thought hard for a second.
Nobody had an answer to that, either. Maybe if I tried hard enough, and for longer, I would remember, but there simply wasn’t enough time.
At least that’s what I told myself.
The ceiling of the ballroom was made of glass, thick, blurry, covered in dirt everywhere.
The red and white carpet that covered the floor was torn, burned, just as dirty, and the tables and chairs were all over the floor.
Dust clung thick to everything, and cracked chandeliers dangled like bones from the fractured glass over our heads.
Cobwebs stretched between wooden partitions that sliced the room into maze-like chambers for no obvious reason we could see.
Velvet curtains lay rotten and heavy along the walls, their color faded to ash. A stage stood at the far end, warped and half-splintered, its instruments abandoned and broken—violins split in half, a cello with snapped strings, a grand piano gutted open like a corpse.
But even that wasn’t what filled us with dread going in.
Above us, suspended by threads so fine they were nearly invisible, hung masks.
There were dozens of them, all clean, spotless, and they swayed gently to a wind we couldn’t feel, casting strange shadows from the broken sun rays slipping through.
The air was thick in here, not just with dust but with silence—the kind of silence that came after destruction. And this room had indeed been thoroughly destroyed.
As we moved deeper toward the partitions, it felt like the room shifted with us, and those large pieces of wood closed in behind us. Like the ballroom wanted to keep us here—or maybe it was just my fear talking.
When we reached the middle, we stopped. Looked around at the masks and the partitions and the ruined tables and dishes…
“What now?” asked Seth, and his voice echoed in the high ceiling. There was plenty of light coming through from the sun, and it was easy to see that there was nobody here but us.
Then the doors behind us groaned like living beasts. We turned just in time to see them closing with a loud bang that made the floor beneath our feet vibrate.
The click of the lock turning in place came last.
Shivers raised the flesh on my forearms.
“Guys…” someone whispered, but they couldn’t even finish the sentence. The silence that followed the sound of that lock didn’t last.
The next second, a key struck.
A piano note.
We jumped again to the other side of the room, to the ruined stage where the broken instruments were, and we saw it with our own eyes how the keys that were still intact on the piano moved down as if some invisible finger was pressing on them.
Next came the strings on the violins and on the cello.
A minute in, and the instruments were playing themselves, the sound of them warped, distorted, wrong.
“Just stick together, okay? Just-just stick together,” Russ said, and we were already moving closer to one another in a circle, and March’s hand was still on mine, thankfully, because the room was not done surprising us yet.
The light slipping through the ceiling began to shimmer, and as the warped melody played in the background, figures made of light and dust began to simply split from behind the many partitions and glide into our view.
Cries and gasps and whispers.
They were people without faces, wearing suits and dresses and jewelry around their slender necks. Their colors were faded, made of flickering light, but they were moving, jumping around, hopping from side to side, dancing.
The figures were swirling around us, grabbing the tables and chairs and pulling them upright, grabbing half broken glasses from the floor and pretending to sip from them as they moved.
So many—and more were coming through from behind the partitions as we watched.