Chapter 6 #2
We stopped near the corner and hid behind a thick round pillar engraved with roses, held our breaths and strained our ears for a beat to make sure nobody would be there to see us or stop us.
Nobody was. The doors were open, too, and just a couple minutes later, we were outside, breathing in the cold air of the night.
Goose bumps on my arms but it had nothing to do with the temperature, only the thought that I was here, now, together with these people, feeling like I belonged again like I hadn’t in ages in my own home.
The other Hands were all strangers to me, yet I understood deeply what it meant that we were in this together, and that I really, really wasn’t on my own here.
Not to mention March.
Whatever it was about that guy, I wanted to know more. I wanted to know him. In detail. Study him over and over, until I saw all the colors on him. All the shades.
But March wasn’t waiting outside with the others like I thought.
Nobody else seemed to care, though, and I figured I shouldn’t, either. We were all out here to explore, and we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“That way—look,” Seth said, pointing farther to the right of the palace, where there had been a field full of cocktail tables and people the night before. Now, there were only trees and grass.
Which made me wonder if I’d mistaken the east for the west?
I turned to look, when—
“The cocktail tables are gone,” said Russ.
“Exactly!” Seth.
“I swear there were no trees there before.” Mimi.
So, it wasn’t just me.
“C’mon, let’s keep moving,” I said, running on my tiptoes still farther to the right, praying we didn’t stumble upon the help—or worse, a soldier.
Not that they’d do anything, of course, but they could make us go back inside, and I was feeling so free in those moments.
So…unchained. I refused to go back to the room yet.
“Wow,” someone breathed when we reached these high hedges that had only looked like hedges from afar, to the sides of a wide pathway cut out of bone-colored stone. They could’ve plucked the word right from my thoughts, because wow, indeed.
“It’s a mechanical garden,” said Anika, and she was right.
The hedges weren’t really hedges—they were made of metal painted green.
They went all around the square garden, circling it until we lost sight because of the large trees that weren’t trees at all.
Their bark was made of metal, and oil dripped down it like black sap, and the branches were full of metal and plastic leaves, colored appropriately.
There were apples hanging on them as well, but they weren’t real apples.
They had the right colors, but you could easily see when you went closer that they were made of metal, too.
The roses. The bushes. The blades of grass were some kind of fiber—a whole garden that looked like a garden, but wasn’t one.
The flowers were metal spouts dripping dark ink into these narrow channels that went through the soil.
Rosebushes shielded pipes that rattled softly when we went closer, like something was flowing beneath them.
It smelled of oil here, too, and the patch of daisies near Mimi’s feet was actually a drain of some sort.
Only the lanterns atop the low poles here and there were actual lanterns.
“A maintenance yard,” said Russ when we were just ten feet in. “We have these at home.” He slammed his booted feet against the pathway. “There’s a machine underneath here, and this is an actual maintenance yard they’ve prettied up.”
I wouldn’t know what that looked like because I’d never even heard of one before. In the Court of Spades, everything was out in the open, and there were no machines underneath anywhere.
“How strange. Why, though?” asked Mimi. “Why do they need a machine here?” She spun around, looked about us, at the trees and the flowers, all of it fake. But the benches and the pathways were real enough, though.
“Who knows? It’s the Labyrinth,” Erith said. “Come on, let’s go deeper.”
So, we did.
“You guys have seen the projections of the other trials, haven’t you? The ones that are in the archives?” Russ turned to us. “You do have archives in your courts, right?”
I laughed, but Mimi rolled her eyes. “Of course we do, Diamond. We have everything you have—and more.”
“You have towers. Lots of towers,” Cook said with a shrug. “So we’re told.”
“We have a lot more than that, too,” Seth said.
“Is it true that your council moves their headquarters every month?” asked Cook.
“Yep—we have to be moving all the time,” Mimi said.
“And is it true that when you die, you burn the bodies and throw them off the highest cliff?” Anika.
“Again, yes—we have to be moving all the time, even when our souls go to the Everstill. The wind keeps us moving eternally,” said Mimi.
It did make sense.
“So, you believe in the Everstill, too?” Russ again.
This time I didn’t laugh, either—he seemed to be serious.“We all do. We’re all part of the same world, aren’t we? We just live in different courts.”
He raised his brows as if the idea was just now occurring to him.
Father had told me about it a long time ago, though.
All Clockfolk believed in the Everstill—even Timekeepers.
It was the place we all went to when we died, and we all had as much or as little time to spare there depending on our deeds during our lifetimes.
Some could live forever in the Everstill with the time that they earned while alive, Father said, while some could perish within minutes if their deeds had been so awful in life.
I didn’t think anybody that awful could even exist, but still.
If everyone believed it, there had to be some truth to it.
“Oh, don’t mind him. He’s the reason people think we’re stuck up and arrogant and believe we’re better than everyone else,” said Erith with a wave of her hand, nudging Russ playfully on the shoulder before she went ahead after Anika, and we followed.
But just as we passed by Russ, he said, in all honesty, “But we are better than everyone. We harvest Sparetime!”
Mimi and I looked at one another, and we both laughed. Russ meant no harm or disrespect—he was just…taught wrong, I figured. Maybe the weeks he spent here with us would teach him better.
“So, what do you guys think the first trial is going to be?” Seth asked as we went deeper into the garden.
“Hey—let’s just sit here for a minute,” said Mimi and ran to sit on a particularly wide bench made out of the same white stone as the pathway. “Then we can go search for a kitchen. I could use some cherries before bed. They help me sleep.”
“And I could use some crackers,” Erith said with a nod. “Let’s find the kitchen, then.”
“After we sit here for a moment,” I said because Mimi was right—the bench was mighty comfortable, and somehow it wasn’t cold at all.
I sat near her, and Erith sat near me, and the others made themselves comfortable on the grass.
“It’s soft,” Russ said as he ran his hands over the strange blades. No idea what they were made of, but they looked exactly like grass. “Huh. Doesn’t look soft.”
“To answer your question, Seth,” Anika said, lying down all the way on the grass, waving her arms and legs about like we did at home to make snow angels in the winter. “I think it will be some sort of puzzle to solve. Historically, the first trial is always the easiest, so it would make sense.”
She was right—the first trials were always the easiest, according to the records available.
“Or it will be a guessing game. Most first trials in the past decades have been guessing games,” I offered.
“True—but I get the feeling they’ll want to switch things up this year,” Russ said. “Just a gut feeling.”
“Switch things up? How would they do that? There’s no switching up—this whole thing is done for Sparetime. We’re producing more of it by just being here in this Labyrinth right now, right?” Seth argued—and he was right. That was supposed to be the truth of it.
“How exactly does that work, though?” I asked the Diamonds. “Do you guys know of another machinery that can multiply Sparetime like the Labyrinth does?”
They all shook their heads. “Absolutely not. The Labyrinth is the only machine of its kind.” Anika sat up, touched the grass on both sides of her hips. “Do you guys think this here is the machinery that does it?”
We all looked about at the fake flowers and rosebushes, hedges and trees…
“Could be,” said Mimi, and the rest of us shrugged.
“We can ask Calren about it tomorrow,” I said. Maybe he would tell us.
“Calren is a Timekeeper,” said Erith. “He’s not our friend.”
Which surprised me. “He is, though. I think he is. He’s been very kind to me since the beginning.” He had kind eyes, too. Like the Red Queen. He did look at Silas weird sometimes, but that could be anything.
“Me, too. I like Calren,” said Mimi.
“I think he’s decent,” said Seth.
“Decent he may be because of the queens, of course. But like I said—he’s a Timekeeper. His kind and ours do not mix for a reason,” Erith insisted.
“They seem to mix pretty well here,” said Seth.
“You saw them when we came—the people cheering. Timekeeper and Clockfolk alike,” I reminded her.
Yes, even though we were very separated from Timekeepers in our court—and from the other courts as well, actually—here in Neverwhen things seemed to be very different.
“I did see the people cheering,” Anika said with a grin. “They called my name—so many of them! I had no idea they even knew me.” And she pushed her hair back dramatically, batting her lashes. “It feels so good to be famous already.”
We laughed because she was joking, but only halfway.
“Imagine how much more famous we’ll be by the end of this,” Russ said, a dreamy look in his eyes.
“Imagine how much money we’re going to make out of this, how much Sparetime we’ll take home with us,” said Erith with a sigh.
“All we have to do is finish the games,” Mimi said. “We were lucky to be chosen.”