28 DAYS. 22 HOURS. 48 MINUTES.
The next morning I met stares, looks of bewilderment, and scowls of disapproval from all at the breakfast table—to which I was invited for the first time in five years.
“Cinderella, I must ask,” Phyllis started, and I internally groaned, “what work are you doing for the princess?”
Lazuli snorted as she reached for her water glass. “As if. There’s no way Cinderella knows the princess. Who would even speak to someone as grubby as you?” Her brown hair fell in awkward waves down her back, and I grimaced at the ridiculous amount of pink eyeshadow she’d used.
“Yeah,” Lapis said. “No way.”
“Girls,” Phyllis said. “I was there too. Or did you forget?” She scowled at them. “She really is working for Princess Jemeena.”
“But...but,” Lazuli said, “that’s not fair!” She stamped her foot and pouted like a child. “How come she gets to prance about with royalty?”
“That’s enough, girls!” Phyllis shouted. “Go finish getting ready for this afternoon’s pageant on floor three.”
Every floor held an annual pageant for women and men to meet and be paired up by their parents for marriage. Phyllis had been trying for the last two years to get both girls up a floor or two—in vain.
Once the two of them had left, she looked at me and waited for an answer. “I’m sorry,” I responded, “but I signed a confidentiality agreement. I cannot talk about the work she assigned me.”
Phyllis looked at me in defeat. “Just remember to be polite and don’t forget to negotiate a solid payment for us! She’s royalty, she could pay us thousands if she wanted. Do not settle for a three-figure sum, Cinderella. Do you hear me?” She licked her lips, as though the thought of all that money solicited the same reaction as a kid in a candy store.
Disgusting.
“Yes, Phyllis.”
“Mother!” she shrieked. “Call me mother!”
“Yes, Mother.” I ran out of the room before her limited politeness exploded and shed its mask to reveal the beast within.
By the time I’d walked around the corners and down the barely lit streets, the sun had risen. Or, at least, I assumed so, because the lights had turned to their usual daylight yellow. I paused outside the garage door, contemplating what the day would hold.
By the end of today, I’d finally know what secrets my father had been hiding all those years.
I’d never seen a bot like IoN before—a bot who cared. As though part of his machine makeup gave him a personality. But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
“Get it together, El,” I muttered to myself as I took a deep breath and opened the loud metal shutters. “It’s just IoN.” There was nothing I could learn that would change anything.
“El,” IoN said the moment I closed the door. “We’ve already begun, but?—”
“Already begun!” I shouted. “What? Why?”
“Sorry,” a gentle voice crooned from the center of the workshop. “It was my fault. I persuaded him.” Princess Jemeena sat on the dirty floor and had cluttered the space with papers, diagrams, schematics, and a whole host of other complicated mechanisms and tools I hadn’t seen in years.
“Dad’s things,” I whispered.
Princess Jemeena flushed as she looked from my bewildered face to the mess scattered around her. “I-I-I am sorry.” She stood and leaped over the pile, dodged a particularly precarious pile of instruments, and skipped to a stop a few feet away. “Now that I think about it, I should not have dived into your father’s things without permission.” She bowed her head in apology. “I am deeply sorry, Cinderella.”
I cringed at the use of my full name. “Er...it’s okay. Well, it’s not, but you...you’re fine.” Damn it. What was it about this girl that made my insides flutter and my words fail? “And, please, call me El.”
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“No one but Phyllis calls me Cinderella, and it’s ruined my name for all future use.” I laughed but it was true. The way she screeched it while my mother and father used to use it with such adoration made my blood boil.
“Not a fan of your...stepmother?” She used a higher pitch on that last word, ensuring she was correct in the relationship.
“She’s awful.”
IoN added, “Truly evil.”
“An evil stepmother?” Jemeena said with a laugh. “It is like we’re in some kind of fairy tale.”
I laughed alongside her, and for a moment, everything was right. There was no looming royal death, no moneyless peasant, no evil stepmother...no dead father. But reality always crashes down, and this time, it did so with a knock on the door.
I looked at Jemeena, then at IoN, and realized I should probably be the one to answer. Out of the three of us, it mattered least if I got caught doing something illegal.
The garage door swung open before I could reach it, and I blanched, yelling at the princess to hide.
“Do not be stupid, El,” she scolded. “No one down here will recognize me.”
Oh, right.
The flickering light of the garage I’d been meaning to fix for days illuminated a small, familiar figure with shaggy brown hair and clothes that barely fit his rapidly growing frame.
“Bobby Helsham,” I chided. “What are you doing here at such an early hour?”
“Sorry, El, but...” Tears rained down his raw, red face, and I panicked. “It’s Ma. She’s...”
“Heeey,” I soothed as I grabbed him from the floor and held him in my arms. “Heeey, it’ll be okay.”
“No,” he mumbled into my neck. “No, it won’t. They said she’s gonna die.”
I stiffened. Bobby Helsham was the six-year-old boy from the corner everyone knew because he was always out doing odd jobs, like carrying shopping home for the elderly, for a small amount of money. It was just him and his mother, and she’d been sick for a while. We all suspected the worst, of course, but she wouldn’t let anyone check her lifeclock. She always had it covered.
I placed him down and wiped his tears with my blue sleeve. “There,” I whispered. “That’s better.” I grabbed his hand and pulled him to the back room. “Come sit down.” The sofa slackened under our weight, and I groaned as I added it to the ever-growing list of things that needed fixing or replacing. “Why don’t you tell me all about it.”
He crawled up to me and sat between my legs, head buried into my chest as he cried and sobbed some more.
I didn’t know what to do, but I stayed and rubbed circles into his back. Nothing I could say would help if she really was dying, but having someone around would be useful. Maybe I could offer him a job here afterward?
I scoffed. With what money?
Bobby sniffed and pulled his head off my chest, wiping his snotty face with the sleeve of his raggedy jumper. “The doctor said she’s gonna die in a few days.” He hiccuped. “She’s been sick for years, but...”
“We all thought she’d get better.” I said it, but I didn’t mean it. We all knew her time was coming.
He sobbed into his hands. “And now she won’t!”
“Heeey.” I rubbed his arms in gentle strokes and pulled him in for another hug. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but everything will be okay.”
He nodded, but he still cried. “But I can’t . . . stop crying.”
“It’s okay to cry. When Dad died, I cried for three months nonstop.”
“Really?” He perked up.
“Yup.”
“But you never cry.”
“Everyone cries. Once in a while.” I turned to the door where IoN and the princess hovered. “IoN, make Bobby a cup of toffee and a sandwich, would you?” I looked the kid up and down. “I bet you haven’t eaten in a while?” The question was rhetorical—you could tell by looking at the bones jutting out of his chest that it’d been days since he’d eaten.
“Mom’s been real sick. Couldn’t leave her bedside.”
I nodded in understanding.
Princess Jemeena sat on the other side of the sofa, and Bobby turned to look at her. “Who are you?” he asked.
If I didn’t know she was the bloody princess, I wouldn’t have cringed, but I knew and so I did. I mouthed, “Sorry,” but she didn’t care. At least, she didn’t act like she cared.
Instead, she frowned at him. “I am sorry about your mother, Bobby.” She held out her hand. “Hi, my name is Meena.”
He sniffled and grabbed her hand. “Name’s Bobby.” He shrugged and grumbled, “Thanks.”
“You know,” she said, “I think your mother would love that you have friends to turn to.” She met my eyes as a tear slipped down her cheek she quickly brushed away. “That even in a time as hard as this, you’re not alone.”
“Mom would love El, but she’s not been right in the head for the last two years, so El’s never gotten to properly meet her.”
Jemeena looked at me with a quizzical expression.
“No one really understands what’s wrong with her, but she sees things, then she gets a bad flu-like virus and is bedridden for weeks.”
“This last one’s been bad.” He shuddered as he cried again. “Been coughing up blood.”
The princess cringed. There was nothing we could do. If her time was up, no amount of medicine or tinkering with the lifeclock would help. You couldn’t mess with time.
“Did you want us to come back to your mom with you?” I asked. “Or would you prefer to stay here?” The choice was his, and I wouldn’t take it away from him by forcing him to watch her die. I could always leave him here with Jemeena while I sat with Mrs. Helsham.
But Bobby, the brave little boy that he was, said with a weak voice, “I want to be with her, even if she does...die.” The last word was said with a sob, and he started crying uncontrollably again.
“Shhh, it’s okay.” I returned to rubbing soothing circles on his back and holding him tightly as he clutched at my coveralls. “We’ll go together.”
His head lifted and grabbed my hand.
“Come on, then.”
IoN grabbed the sandwich and drink he had made and followed along with the princess, and we all traveled the crisscrossing streets of floor zero to Bobby Helsham’s small apartment. We took a left at Old Mags’s moss-covered door, took a right at the small apartment I shared with Phyllis, Lapis, and Lazuli, walked past the dilapidated old playground and the dumping ground where everyone put their used stuff to see if someone else could make use of it, and eventually found ourselves outside the door with the peeling red paint, dusty windows, and rusted bronze knocker.
Bobby grabbed the key from his pocket and let us all in. The smell hit us immediately. It reeked of mold, decay, and dust as weeks’ worth of dirt plastered every visible surface. Bobby, however, noticed none of it and rushed through a door just off the lounge.
I turned to Jemeena and whispered, “You can wait outside if you’d like. Or IoN can escort you back to the garage.”
She shook her head and took the drink and sandwich from IoN’s grip and stepped forward.
IoN whirred in front of me and settled into my arms. “You cannot help her, El.”
“I’m not here for her. I’m here for Bobby.”
We walked through the same door Bobby had run through and found a small cheerless room that had a bed with ragged sheets littered with mysterious stains, a small barrel acting as a nightstand, and a tossed-through pile of clothes in the corner. Mrs. Helsham lay on that bed in that half-asleep way people did when they were ill.
Or dying.
I picked Bobby up and placed him on my lap as we sat on the floor beside her bed. Her wrist dangled just outside of the sheets. I grabbed it and unwrapped her lifeclock. I took a quick glance and then flipped her arm over and wrapped it back up, hopefully quickly enough that Bobby hadn’t seen.
“She only has a few hours,” he sobbed. “I checked yesterday.”
“Here.” Jemeena sat on the floor beside us and handed Bobby his drink and sandwich. “You should try to eat something.”
Bobby took the plate and started nibbling on the crusts, but his gaze was fixed on his mom’s face as she slept in a fitful daze and struggled to breathe. While he ate absentmindedly, we all sat in the pregnant silence and watched her labored breathing.
“She used to take me to the playground,” he mumbled. “The one around the corner, before it got too dangerous to play in.”
“I bet that was fun,” Jemeena said, a distant edge to her voice.
“She was fun. We’d walk all the way to the square and dance to the violin man who played by the fountain.” Tears ran down his face, but they were silent, lacking the harsh sobs from earlier, and he continued sharing memories, eating the food, and watching his mom die until, eventually, two hours later, her breathing stopped altogether and he wept into the crook of my shoulder until his eyes had run out of tears and he fell asleep.
“What now?” Jemeena whispered.
IoN flew into the air and turned to us. “We should find somewhere for him to live for now, then alert the authorities that she’s passed.”
“I’m going to take him to Mags. She’ll know what to do.”
By the time I had taken Bobby to Mags, who had taken him in with a promise that she would handle everything, we were exhausted as we made our way back to the garage, but Jemeena wanted to keep looking through Dad’s paperwork. We worked until the exhaustion ate at our bones. Jemeena looked more determined than ever, fueled, no doubt, by the death she had just witnessed.
“Maybe we should call it a day?” I handed her a cup of toffee, but she declined and instead made herself a cup of mint-leaf tea.
“I don’t want to, but I don’t think I can work for another minute.” She flicked off her heeled boots and rested her feet underneath her legs on the sofa. She sipped her tea and looked at it with surprise. “Seren, this stuff’s good.”
I laughed and sat next to her. “Dad used to love it. I never had the heart to get rid of it. I never saw him in this garage without a cup of the stuff.” I stuck my tongue out in disgust, remembering the last time I’d tried some, hoping my taste buds had changed.
“He had good taste.” She looked at me. “I am sorry about your father.”
“Thank you.”
IoN whizzed into the room and shouted at full volume, “I have found something!”
“What?” I rushed to my feet and followed him into the workshop, Jemeena hot on my heels. “What do you mean you found something?”
Jemeena wrapped her arms around IoN and squealed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
IoN removed himself from her arms, dusted himself off, then flew to a series of papers he’d pinned to the wall. “Read these.”
Jemeena and I squinted at the scratchy handwriting, starting from the top left and working our way through.
Test 392 , he wrote. I’ve played with the calibration settings and reversed the time polarity, so I’m hoping this is it. Eleday’s time is nearly up. This has to work.
“Mother,” I gasped. “This must be from just before she got sick.”
The steam lines connected and both lifeclocks glowed then made a whirring sound as the hands on the clocks spun faster than I could track. A small burst of white light appeared, and the steam lines disconnected themselves. It caused us both to fall backward and gasp deep breaths.
Result: Test 392 failed.
Eleday’s lifeclock —the paper had been smudged here, where the ink had gotten wet— lost time. Perhaps meddling is not something that should be done after all. She now has a mere fourteen days left with Cinderella, and I don’t know how to fix it. But I will try.
The papers came to an end, and I looked at IoN with tears in my eyes. “He was trying to reverse Mom’s time, wasn’t he?”
He moved up and down, nodding, and said, “He never managed it though.”
“I can see that.”
Jemeena chimed in with, “But he was nearly there.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “He somehow managed to find a way of stealing someone’s life.” She frowned and looked at IoN. “That is why he made you hide this away.”
“Why?” I rubbed the tired tears from my face.
“El,” she said as she faced me, grasping both sides of my face between her hands, “imagine if this information got out? What would people do when desperate to save loved ones? To save themselves?”
My eyes widened, understanding the implications. “This could change everything.”
“The rich would live forever and the poor would barely live at all.” She took a deep breath and began cleaning up the objects and papers scattered around the floor. “This cannot get out. Not even if it means saving my life.”
“Now, wait a minute.” I gestured to the stuff lying everywhere. “This is all safe here.” I grabbed her wrist and yanked her toward me. “We can keep looking.”
“Correct,” IoN said. “Your father was looking for a way to reverse what he had done until the day your mother died. It was his only mission. His singular drive.”
“That was why he was barely around back then, right?”
IoN nodded. “He traveled all over the land looking for answers. But she died before he could find them.”
“So,” I said, “if we track his progress, we might be able to pick up where he left off?” I spun around to face Jemeena, grinning. “There’s your hope, Princess.”