Chapter 47 #2
Then came the sound of chatter and laughter as if from a world away.
It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen to watch those figures dancing and drinking from broken glasses, laughing and talking without mouths or noses, knowing where to go without eyes and how to avoid us standing there in a circle.
We were all stunned as we watched, and for a while that was all they did. They danced and swirled around, sometimes with one another, sometimes by themselves, so gracefully. The instruments continued to play that music that sounded so wrong I was tempted to close my ears but didn’t.
“What are they?” Anika asked.
“Are they us from back then?” Seth wondered.
“How will we know when they don’t have faces?!” Mimi cried. “Guys, this is so wrong! This is…”
Her voice trailed off when the figures began to jump in the air—to reach for the masks hanging onto those near invisible threads over our heads.
Within the second, every single figure made of light was jumping and trying to grab the masks, but their hands went right through them.
“They can’t touch them,” said Cook. “They can’t touch the masks.”
He was absolutely right. Every single one of those figures were jumping as high as they could, and their fingers just went through. Strange, when they’d been able to grab the chairs and the glasses just fine. Why not those masks?
The next second, Cook jumped, too.
He reached for the mask right over his head, and he grabbed it.
My heart skipped a beat at the sudden movement. The thin thread extended. Cook’s feet touched the floor again, and he gasped and froze in place as if something had attacked him from within.
“Cook!”
We grabbed him, shook him, called his name, but he didn’t move for half a minute, his muscles locked, eyes ahead but he didn’t see anything, the mask still in his fist.
It was a dark cherry red in color, with black satin strings on the sides like ribbons, and it was meant to cover half the face, the edge of it just below the nose, shielding the upper lip of its wearer.
The holes of the eyes were shaped like a cat’s, uptilted, and outlined with a silver thread woven into the thick fabric.
There was no dust on the mask, no dirt—it looked brand new.
Then Cook let go of it and stepped back, and the mask, still attached to the thread, traveled up over our heads again, as if nothing at all had happened.
“What is it, Cook? What did it do to you? Did it hurt?” we asked as he raced to catch his breath, shaking his hands, pale as a sheet.
“No, no,” he breathed. “It…it showed me something. It showed me…something!”
I’d let go of March’s hand, but he was still right behind me when I looked back.
“How? How did it show you?” Erith asked.
“What was the something?!” Mimi.
Cook blinked, looked down at his shaking hands and said, “I think it was…a memory.”
“A memory?” March said, and the heaviness of his voice fell over my shoulders.
“It was someone’s memory,” Cook said with a nod. “I touched the mask, and I saw it. In here.” He pressed his fingers to his temples.
“Is that how we unwin?” Anika said, turning to look at the figures, who were dancing and jumping and reaching for the masks still, despite the fact that none could touch them still. “Is that what they’re trying to tell us?”
“It’s a trap,” March said. “They’ve put memories in these masks—it has to be a trap. Where did they get those memories from?”
He spun around, looked up at the many masks above us—there must have been at least fifty.
“He’s right,” Levana said. “Memories cost something. They always cost something to be moved around.”
“What other choice do we have?” I wondered. Because there was clearly nothing else in here—just these figures made of light, and the broken instruments playing that awful music—and the masks.
The only thing unbroken. The only thing clean.
“Let’s spread out,” Mimi said. “Let’s try a few, see if we can figure out what they want us to find.”
“The speaker said we would need to return what was once borrowed,” Erith said. “I have…I have memories in my head that aren’t mine.”
Something about those words.
My stomach twisted in rhythm with the music from the broken strings and the ruined keys. I looked at March one more time, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was still staring at the masks.
“Me, too,” said Levana. “It’s one of the few things I remember clearly. I think it’s you, Seth.”
“But why, though?” Seth whispered. “Why remember foreign memories clearly, when our own are gone? Because I remember you, too, Levana.”
“Maybe because they aren’t ours?” March whispered. “Maybe whatever took our memories couldn’t take what was never ours to be taken.”
“Guys, let’s just do this. We will be okay. Let’s just get this over with quickly, and then we can sit and talk outside,” Mimi said, then patted the front pocket of her suit. “I have the notebook right here. We’ll talk.”
We’d talk.
Yes, we would. We’d figure out whatever was happening here, and why.
“All we have to do is unwin this last trial. It’s the last one,” Anika said with a nod. “And it’s going to be easy. The first trials are always the easiest.”
She was right about that, too.
“We unwin this no matter what, and then we walk out of here, free. We walk right out of the Labyrinth,” said Erith, and we all nodded.
“Together,” Mimi said.
“Together,” we all chanted in unison.
Then we turned around, and we spread around the room.
I thought March would be behind me but when I looked, he was already moving to the other side. I wanted to run after him—his proximity grounded me, and I needed his warmth to function properly, but he was right to want to be by himself.
We needed to finish this on our own. Each one of us had to unwin for all of us to unwin.
Freedom had never been closer.
So, I got to work.
The figures made of light were jumping all around me, still trying. Their hands went right through the masks, but when I jumped for the one over me, my fingers wrapped around the edge of it, and the thread holding the mask extended with me when I landed on the floor again.
The effect was immediate.
One second I was looking at a figure made of light, half faded from existence, wearing a dress and jumping impossibly high to try to reach a mask, and the next, the ballroom blinked away.
I was instead sitting on a narrow windowsill made of grey stone, looking out at a place I’d never seen before, with so many tall buildings I couldn’t see beyond a few feet ahead.
Tower after tower after tower, some lighter, some darker, all of them high enough to reach the clouds.
I could only think of one place that could look like this, and it was the Court of Clubs. They built all their buildings vertically, tall, and with as many stairs as possible so they could be on the move constantly, all the time. So that they could always have stairs to climb up and down from.
Beside me sat a little girl, maybe five or six years old, her skin a rich brown, her eyes light and as clear as the sky above us. My own hands were brown, too, which surprised me, like I’d forgotten that I was looking into someone’s head—and I knew exactly whose.
Mimi, because the little girl sitting beside me, looking up at me now, was a copy of her. Same face, same nose, same eyes. A miniature Mimi, showing me a silver pocket watch as she giggled.
“Did I get it right?”
The sound of her voice shook me to my core.
The raw love and happiness that came over me—Mimi’s not mine—consumed me, and I jumped back.
I had let go of the mask, thankfully, and in another blink, the ballroom came into my view again.
My ears were full of the sound of the distorted melody, and the faceless figures were still reaching for the masks.
The others were focused, jumping and reaching one mask then the other, searching.
I didn’t see March anywhere when I looked around—must have been searching somewhere behind a partition, but there was no time to waste.
Whatever way they’d gotten our memories on these masks like this, whatever sick, twisted games they were playing with us, the finish line was near.
So, I jumped, and the next time I grabbed a mask, I expected the change, so it didn’t shock me like the first.
A field of silver grass shimmered beneath a storm-black sky. Whoever’s eyes I was looking out from turned to look to the sides. Far in the distance I could see a jagged line in the dark—buildings, possibly, but the field stretched so far I couldn’t be sure.
Someone was behind where I was standing, and…
“There.” The voice was unfamiliar, but the eyes I looked out of moved ahead, and I realized that the grass wasn’t silver—it was actually a rich green, but it was coated with something thin, something shimmery, almost like the thick dust in the ballroom.
Except this wasn’t dust.
This was Sparetime—that’s what the inside of the mind I was in at the moment identified it as.
And what I was looking at across the field weren’t men at all.
Timewraiths.
A sense of fear gripped my insides, and I felt like I wanted to scream. My mouth opened—no. The mouth of whoever I was looking from opened, but before they could scream, that same voice called from behind—“Run, Russ! Ring the alarm!”
I let go of the mask and sucked in a deep breath, thankful to see the ballroom just now, because the fear had been so real.
It had attached itself to my bones and it took me a few deep breaths to convince myself that I wasn’t staring at a field covered in Sparetime, and an army of timewraiths weren’t coming at me from the other side.
I got this, I whispered to myself, and I prayed with all of me that the next mask I touched was mine. Something about being in the heads of the other Hands. Something about seeing those memories, feeling those feelings.
I would rather run laps and spar all day, every day.
A small scream escaped me when I jumped for the next mask, and it wasn’t my memory, either.