Chapter 9
The next day was more of the same, except we had very sore muscles, and much higher spirits as we went through the meals, the lectures, and Asha’s and Hector’s orders to run and climb in the arena.
Nobody had seen or heard us the night before, it seemed, because nobody said a single word to us about it.
Even so, for a moment there during breakfast, when Calren asked us if we slept late, and we said no, I could have sworn a smile tugged at his lips.
But he hid it by lowering his head and pretending to be busy putting the next bite of food in his mouth.
There was no reason for him to lie and say he didn’t know, though, so I didn’t think anything of it.
When night fell, and the help saw us to our rooms after dinner, we waited all of five minutes before we slipped out of our rooms to go to the junkyard.
This time, though, we had snacks we’d stolen during dinner—fruit and crackers and small bites of chocolate only, but we swore to find the kitchen next. Just as soon as we were done exploring the junkyard first.
“I wanna show you guys something,” said Helen when we reached the ground floor, very close to the junction with the grandfather clock in the middle. “Come on—this way.”
A few of the others protested—what if someone saw us?
, and I would rather just get to the junkyard already!
, and What could possibly be more important than the junkyard?
!—but we all walked together, followed Helen down a hallway we hadn’t been to before, no different than all the rest in the palace.
I was curious to see, though—very curious to know everything that hid in The Ever.
March stayed beside me, my hand always in his, and any time I looked at him, he was looking at me and smiling. Every single time. It made me so giddy it was ridiculous.
Then Helen brought us through a set of polished doors and into a large room full of furniture.
Couches and armchairs and sofas and recliners in all colors, all made of velvet, with beautiful tables against the walls full of vases and fresh roses, as well as sets of small lamps and clocks made out of the same colored metal.
By then I’d gotten used to the scent sticking to everything inside the palace, so it no longer bothered me.
The tall narrow windows between the tables on the wall opposite the doors showed us a portion of the forest near the tower of the Great Clock.
“There,” Helen said, pointing to the wall on the far left. “Look at that—it’s the other Hands!”
The wall was completely covered in picture frames.
My heart jumped as I went closer. Plenty of light from the lamps to see, but Silas pulled out his hand-lantern again and shone it on the pictures.
There were twenty pictures, all the same dimensions, their frames silver and gold, stacked one over the other. The ones near the ceiling were much older, the colors on them paler, faded.
The ones below looked brand new.
It was the Hands, indeed. In each one of those pictures, there were twelve boys and girls staring at the light-catcher, wearing identical clothing, each group a different design. They were the Hands of the prior trials, the people who’d been in this very palace before us.
“Wow,” Reggie whispered, squatting in front of the last picture—the Hands who’d played five years ago in the trials. “They look so…” He looked up at us, eyes wide, confused. “Miserable.”
We all leaned in to see better, too, and indeed the faces of the Hands portrayed in the picture looked…maybe not miserable, but sad. Confused. Uncomfortable, even.
Which was insane. I’d seen the projections in the records of our school when I was chosen for the Turning Trials. I’d seen the Hands before entering the games, and I’d heard the interviews they’d done afterward.
I didn’t remember them looking like this, but…did they? Because now that I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure.
“The others, too,” Anika said, pointing to the second row of pictures, at the young faces of the Hands as they looked at the light-catcher. A few smiled—forced. Most didn’t.
“I wonder why,” said Cook. “I mean, I’m pretty happy.”
Me, too, we said, one after the other. We were doing perfectly fine.
For a moment there, we just stared at the many faces, many eyes, many smiles.
Then Mimi said, “It’s only pictures, though. They could have been over the moon but look at these colors! How are they going to portray emotion accurately?” She shook her head and stepped back. “If you’re done, I’d rather be in the junkyard.”
“She’s right,” Reggie said. “These are just pictures, and even if they were sad, that doesn’t mean we have to be. C’mon, who’s up for a race?”
Just like that, we were all running again.
They were right, even if I did have a strange feeling in my gut as I thought about those pictures.
We couldn’t possibly tell from pictures alone how the Hands before us had felt.
And was that any indicator, anyway? It could be different for us—we were already friends.
We already knew how we danced, how we laughed, how we talked.
I was twelve-hours certain we would be just fine.
In the junkyard, while we were going through the rubble, Russ and Erith found a board game somewhere in the back that they recognized—most of us had no clue what any of the things in that place were, so this was a big deal.
There was music in the air from the timebloom—we had to reset the date to today to get it to play again when we brought it to the middle of the room—and the board game was more fun than I initially thought it would be.
It was called the Game of Hours, the original version of it, at least, and the Diamonds said they played it back home all the time.
It was a circular board made of dark stone, more or less the size of our dinner table back home.
It had a clock face but no numbers—just symbols of all kinds and shapes.
The inner rings turned manually, and in the very center of it was a small hourglass with sand made of glittery gray powder.
The players, two at a time on each side, had to spin the rings to align specific symbols—the order of which I had yet to learn properly—and then ask a question to their opponents.
With every true answer, the sand drained in the hourglass, and when it was empty, the winning team could choose a punishment for the losers from the game’s own selection of ideas.
That part didn’t work, according to the Diamonds, so we had to be creative when choosing punishments on our own.
We tried everything—from wear the strangest garments you can find in the junkyard until the night’s end, and walk all around the junkyard backward without turning your head to look back once, and we’ll pick an object, and you have to convince us that it’s actually a magical relic with a very dramatic background story.
This last one fell on Reggie, when he and Cook lost to Mimi and me, and the story he made up about a handheld mirror had us holding our sides.
And that was just the first half of the night.
In the second, we decided to play hide and seek.
Silly, yes, but it was the perfect spot for it, in fact, and with the loud music coming from the timebloom, it was going to be impossible for anyone to hear where we were going.
Unfortunately for me, I drew the short straw, and so I was the first to do the seeking.
They had me sitting on the floor near the timebloom, wrapping my arms around my head to make sure I wasn’t peeking, and they also had me count to fifty. I didn’t complain—I was excited, more so than when I was a kid and played this game with the kids in our neighborhood.
But when the counting was done and I stood up, I was completely alone in the junkyard.
Scary. A tiny bit. The large lantern with the half-frosted glass was right behind me, so there was plenty of light to see. For a moment there, I held my breath and looked around. The piles of devices and tools did not look as friendly and fun as they had when everybody else was here as well.
Perfectly normal, though. I just needed to remind myself that we were playing a game, and they were all hiding in here somewhere, and even if some of these machines came to life somehow, I knew how to fight.
Spar, really, but Father and I used real swords and knives for the past few years all the time, so it counted.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” I said to the room, and my voice was lost to the music from the timebloom—Levana had chosen Almost Always for tonight, which was a slightly faster melody—so I doubted any of the others heard me. I barely heard myself.
But I did hear the sound of my heart beating like a drum in my chest.
I searched behind the nearest piles first, as was logical, but not a single movement caught my eye. That was okay. We were all grown up now, so I expected them to hide better. Such a silly game to play, but it didn’t feel silly at all.
In fact, the more the minutes ticked by, the more I began to sweat.
“Hello?” I called eventually. “You guys are making this difficult for me on purpose, aren’t you?”
No answer.
I wanted to stick close to the lantern because the shadows got really big and dark the farther from it I went, but I had no other choice. They had definitely made use of my counting all the way to fifty, and they must have gone to hide near the edges of the junkyard.
That’s where I went, too.
The shadows stretched with my every step, I swear it. Too long, too twisted. One near a smaller pile of broken gears looked like it had fingers curled at the edge—a perfectly shaped hand on the shadow against the floor. The hand of a timewraith.
Those were bad. Monsters who fed on time, who could kill you, drain you of all your seconds. They had four fingers on each hand, long and twisted like those very shadows, and once they latched onto you, they were near impossible to shake off.