Chapter 12
They took my hand, danced with me—a man, then a woman, then a man again. I went through the motions, saw what their masks showed without even registering the memories, and then I moved on. Went closer to the stage, hoping somehow the instruments would save me.
They didn’t.
Hours must have passed. No hope in me, but my eyes still searched, and there in the distance to my left, I noticed a couple breaking apart.
More like the guy letting go of the woman—and she reached out a hand for him like she meant to call him back. A lot like the illusions reached for me when I pulled away from them.
My legs were moving on their own before I realized it. The man walking through the crowd wore a dark red suit, had wide shoulders, slicked-back hair, a mask on his face—like half the other men in the ballroom—but the way he’d let go of that woman. The way he walked now. The way he scanned the room.
When he slipped behind a partition, I rushed my steps and nearly knocked down a woman wearing a dress almost identical to Erith’s, but I didn’t stop to apologize. I couldn’t even speak, anyway.
I continued ahead, slipped behind that same partition and my eyes found the guy right away—he was looking ahead at a woman and a man as they approached him.
He fell back half a step as he looked at them, and I could have sworn he was going to turn and run away any second now. Run from them while they reached for him.
I moved so fast I hardly felt the ground underneath my feet, and before either of them had the chance to grab his hand, I spun around and slipped between them.
My breath was held, my heart hammering. My hand shook when I reached for his. Warm.
The guy looked down at me, eyes dark from the shadows of the mask on his face, exactly like all the other males I’d danced with.
Then he put his other hand around my waist, and we began to dance.
Behind us, the man and woman who’d been coming for him turned to one another, and they danced their way toward the crowd, too.
It was the same dance, always following the rhythm of the music.
The same steps, the same turns—the same feeling as all the others, and that same dread, that same hopelessness came back so fast, like it had been waiting by the threshold all along.
When was this going to end? Because I refused to believe in that voice in my head that whispered that same word—forever.
I refused.
Just get it over with. It’s a numbers game, I told myself, trying to sound like my father, because maybe I’d believe it if I thought he said it.
Because it was—it really was a numbers’ game.
I’d have to go through all these people or illusions or whatever they were until I found another Hand, and it was bound to happen at some point.
I just had to stick with it. I had to keep dancing, keep exploring memories.
Except the guy still hadn’t touched my mask, and the more we spun around, the more impatient and angry I became. Yes, it was a numbers’ game, and yes, it was going to end eventually, but I already felt like half of who I was when I woke up this morning, and I didn’t even know why.
How much more of me was I going to shed before the end?
Raising my hand off his shoulder, I touched his mask the way I’d done countless times already, half my mind on trying to come up with a way to keep track of which person I’d danced with in this room.
Then I saw fire.
The ballroom fell away. I was no longer dancing, but I was standing in a dark room lit only by a huge fire ahead—a furnace bigger than any I’d ever seen before.
The heat coming off it was almost unbearable, and it had a different flavor from the other temperatures I’d felt in the other memories.
The eyes through which I was looking moved, focused lower on the hands, on this long rod between them, and the glass at the end of it, very close to the edge of that furnace.
It was spinning, that rod, and moving closer and closer as the body I was in leaned forward.
The eyes focused on the way the flames kissed the edges of that molten glass—and that, too, was different. The smell was stronger than the other memories—ashes and something acidic. The sound of the spinning rod and the crackling fire was different, too, but that wasn’t what took my breath away.
It was my chest.
Or rather what went on inside it, inside this body. The feelings—pure joy, and so much pride, and a mind that was calm, clear. I felt all of it as if it were mine, felt happy and proud of the way the molten glass was shaping at the end of that rod.
I fell back as my lungs screamed for air.
I hadn’t been breathing at all for Time knew how long, and the ballroom was still there.
The guy I was dancing with was still there—and he was real.
He felt. There was no doubt about it in my mind because I’d felt those emotions together with him as if they were mine.
He let go of me, stepped back.
My heart fell all the way to my heels. He didn’t even want to touch my mask.
No—wait!
No voice left me. He turned to walk away from me, and I reached for him the same way my last partner had reached for me, like I was one of them, too.
But I wasn’t, and I’d be damned if I let him get away.
So, I ran again, grabbed his hand, and before he even turned to look at me, I pressed it right onto my mask.
His arm froze. His entire body froze mid-movement, his head still only half turned to me. Please, please, please, I chanted to myself, and my lips moved with the words, too. I begged whoever would listen with all my being for him to see that I was real, too, and for this to be over.
I don’t know what it was about this place, but the very air going down my throat felt wrong, unlike anything I’d ever felt before. This whole thing still felt wrong, just like it had before we entered. It just did a great job keeping me distracted since I found myself all alone in that darkness.
Then the guy fell back, pulled his hand away from my mask.
Stood there and looked at me, lips parted.
I could only see a little bit of his chin because of the shadows falling from the edge of his mask, and I thought I knew that chin, knew the shade of his skin, but I could very well be trying to fool myself here.
With the way I wanted to get out of this place now, that was a very real possibility.
Either way, the man who let me into this place said to give away my mask when I felt it was right, and this was as close to right as I was going to get. So, I reached behind my head, unlaced the silk ties as fast as I could, and took it off.
Time’s Teeth, I was shaking.
The next time I blinked, the entire ballroom changed. The colors became brighter, the movements clearer, and I could have sworn that even the sound of the music was a bit louder now, too.
The guy looked at me for a second, and I had never held more hope and hopelessness in my heart at the same time. I knew well what the consequences would be if I chose wrong, but…
I hadn’t.
Because in the next second, he pulled the mask off his face, too, almost violently.
March-it’s March-it’s March-it’s March—
My mouth opened and a scream ripped right out of me, even if my voice never produced it. March was standing in front of me, looking just as confused as I was, and even though tears had gathered in my eyes, I was smiling.
My body barely cooperated when I went closer, lifted my mask to his face. I was shaking so badly still that the thing almost slipped from my hand, but March caught my wrist and steadied me.
He smiled, too, just a little, and the colors in his eyes repainted the world for me from scratch. I released a long breath of relief as he put his mask over my face.
Once more, the world fell away.
I was in a kitchen.
How strange. It was a kitchen I knew, yet I’d never seen it before in my whole life.
The tiles were white and red. The cupboards, too.
Someone was screaming—a muffled scream—and I was moving.
The body I was in was moving, shooting forward, and through these eyes I saw a man, taller than me.
All my focus was on him because I was going to him, aiming for where he stood across the room.
The silhouette of the other two people near him caught my attention, except I couldn’t see them because my eyes were not my own, and they remained on the man as he said something, something that didn’t quite reach my ears as it should.
The sound of him was warped, as if my head was underwater when it wasn’t.
All I heard with clarity was the loud beating of a heart—was it mine?
Was it the heart of the body I was in?
Hard to say.
Then the man saw me coming, and he straightened up, and I no longer breathed again because it was March.
A different March. An older March with stubble on his cheeks and eyes slightly rounded and lips a bit thinner and body built differently.
His eyes were bloodshot, though. His hair—straight—was all over the place, darker.
It wasn’t March at all—I was in March’s memory—but it had to be someone close. Brother or maybe father?
He turned, the man, for a split second, and then I was in front of him, the two other people behind me, one still screaming even though the sound that reached me was almost completely muted.
A knife flashed, the blade big, silver.
My arm rose—no, March’s arm rose, and I felt it as though it was my own. I felt his heartbeat, too, freezing for a split second, and I felt his fear. Raw fear. Raw anger. Raw disappointment.
The man brought the knife down and drove it straight into March’s forearm.
The pain paralyzed me completely. In my head, it cut off my own scream, too. Blood dripped down his skin that was mine, and March’s eyes didn’t move from the tip of that blade, so that’s the only thing I saw, too.
Then I fell for a long time down a never-ending hole that opened just below my feet.