Chapter 13 #2
Calren sat alone at the head of the table like always, a cup of tea in front of him. He smiled when we entered, and I could have sworn something else crossed his eyes for a split second, but it was gone too fast and I didn’t catch it.
“The victors,” he said as he stood up, a hand to his heart. “Congratulations, everyone. You were indeed incredible. The first trial is already over.”
We muttered our thanks and took our places around the table, same as usual. Sunlight streamed through the windows, except this morning it didn’t have the strength to improve my mood like usual. This morning, I was still…processing.
“Are we going to get them back?” March asked before any of us had the chance to even pour a cup of tea or reach for the food in front of us.
They’d prepared everything you could think of, as usual—eggs and sausages, pastry, at least twelve kinds of jam, chocolates and caramel and fresh fruit—it had all impressed me terribly those first days before the trial.
Now, somehow, the color of them had faded a little bit.
And even though I hadn’t eaten, I wasn’t nearly as hungry as I thought I would be to smell the freshly baked croissants.
“Excuse me?” Calren said, though a part of me insisted that he knew. He must have known what March meant.
Either way, March clarified for him: “Are we going to get our memories back? We paid with memories going into that ballroom. I don’t know what I forgot exactly, but I know I’ve forgotten.”
Exactly. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d thought about when those three men told me to put my hand on that table. I’d thought of something, but I didn’t know what.
“Yes, that was the price of admission. I believe you all had to spin the spinner to pick the number and kind of memories you paid with.” We nodded.
“And you paid the price, and you went inside. You danced, and you searched memories, and you were all able to tell the real one among the fakes.” He nodded, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “That was the first trial.”
“You didn’t answer his question, though,” Silas said from the end of the table.
The way he was looking at Calren…
“I did, actually. You paid the price. You gave away your memories, and there’s no getting them back. The game has them now.”
I squinted my eyes at him. “The game?” Because I had March’s memories in my head still. I could think of them, and it was like they were mine but weren’t. They were implanted in me, a part of me as much as my own.
“But I still—” Mimi started, but…
“Yes.” Silas shouted the word, not only said it.
He was looking at Mimi, too, when he said, “Yes, Calren, you answered his question.” His hands were fisted over the table.
His jaw locked. His eyes remained unblinking as they moved from one Hand to the other, like he was trying to tell us all something.
“That’s that, then. There’s no need to talk about memories anymore. They’re gone, the game has them. We move on,” said March, who had locked eyes with Silas. He nodded slowly, just a little.
The rest of us bit our tongues.
It was clear what both of them were saying—do not tell Calren we remembered. And I agreed.
If they thought the game had the memories, so be it.
I’d rather be able to tell March what he lost before they figured it out, and…
what, exactly? Would they extract the memories?
Magic them out of us? Put us under again and control us somehow like they did the night before?
Make us disappear and then reappear elsewhere?
The more I thought about it, the more I panicked. The more I feared. The more I wanted to rage.
The Turning Trials were…not at all what I thought they would be, though I’d seen. I knew they were strange. I knew everything was possible in the Labyrinth—everybody said so. But to actually be here and live these things was a completely different story.
“Right.” Reggie cleared his throat and grabbed one of the teapots. “Tea, anybody?”
It was the first awkward breakfast we’d had since we came here, not because we were all being careful not to mention memories again, but because of Calren.
He usually talked, made jokes, asked us questions about our lives, and this time he didn’t.
This time he hardly looked up from his plate, and when he did, there was something in his eyes.
There was something about something.
Then he saw us to the lecture.
We would no longer be sitting in that classroom with Miss Ren or Lefa James, it seemed.
We were done learning about the courts and timekeeping.
Now it was time for lessons on machinery, and the guy who would be teaching us was a Timekeeper, too—Master Talik with gray hair and oil-stained clothes, and with a smile so easy we were all relaxed the moment we made ourselves comfortable in his workshop.
That, too, was very different from the neat and clean classrooms we’d been to before.
This was an actual mechanic’s workshop turned semi-clean lecturing room.
There were four rows of metal benches on the left with narrow tables in the front, facing a very long one at the other end—full of gears, springs, rods, half-dismantled devices unlike any I’d ever seen before.
The walls were full, too—of diagrams outlining all sorts of mechanisms, each more complicated than the last.
It was incredibly intriguing, maybe because I used to love going to work with Mother when she was an apprentice to a train engine builder for a while back home. It was the only place I’d traded sparring with Father for when I was a kid.
“Well. Would you look at that,” Master Talik said when we all took our seats on the benches.
He smiled again as he wiped his hands on a rag that had given up on being clean a long time ago.
“You’ve already completed your first trial.
Won the game. That’s very promising, young ones.
” His voice was soft but sharp at the same time.
We looked at one another—I mostly looked at March who sat next to me, and he thought so, too. Master Talik was…nice, it seemed.
A few gears ticked somewhere behind him as he stepped beside the big table, then gestured to the chaos on it.
“Welcome. This is where things break, get fixed, and occasionally pretend they were never broken at all.” He grinned, showed us yellowed teeth, and I found myself smiling, too.
“I’ll do my best to teach you the difference. ”
Master Talik picked up a small brass cog, rolled it between his blackened fingers, then set it down again.
“You know, machines are really not that different from us.” As he said this, his eyes skimmed over our faces, then stopped on Silas, who sat in the front row.
The Timekeeper paused. Blinked.
Then continued.
“Most of what keeps the Labyrinth running passes through hands like mine at some point. Gears, locks, all kinds of devices. None of it is complicated, only…” He rubbed his fingers together as he searched for the right word, then settled on, “particular.”
That was certainly one way to look at it—but more than that. There was something about him.
I took a moment to analyze him again. He was tall, had long, thin limbs and curly gray hair that had remained a deep shade of orange only around the nape of his neck. His eyes were full of life, a deep blue, like an afternoon sky. Gray stubble covered his cheeks, too, and it suited him perfectly.
He spread his arms to the sides and looked down at himself—at his stained brown shirt and apron. “You’ll be expected to have at least one ruined pair of clothes before this is over, and to ruin at least one mechanism. If you don’t break anything, I won’t be happy.”
“This is my favorite class already,” Reggie said, and we all laughed a little. So did the Timekeeper.
“It’s mine, too,” he said with a wink. “Ask questions. I like being annoyed. And I won’t promise that you’ll understand answers, obviously—but I’ll do my best not to ignore you when you speak.”
An especially mischievous grin. We laughed again.
“And that’s the extent of the only speech you’ll ever get from me, Hands. Let’s begin.”
I was actually excited—or maybe just eager to escape having to think about trials and memories and dancing with illusions?
One or the other.
Master Talik started us on the smallest things.
We had to listen first—not to him, but to the devices themselves.
He passed around simple gears, locks, timing plates, and showed us how to feel when something was off without taking it apart.
How resistance meant wear. How silence could be just as wrong as any rattle or grind.
It really was like he said—not complicated, but precise.
The lecture was three hours long, but it went by in a blink.
By the time it was over, all twelve of us had dismantled and rebuilt a device that was used only to spin wheels.
All kinds of wheels, all sizes. When we left the workshop, I had three oil stains on my tunic, and none of the others had escaped without at least a little bit of grease on them, either.
Even so, my head was buzzing in a way that felt almost pleasant.
A reminder—of what it used to be when we got here, before the trial. A reminder that just because we’d had to play that strange game, it didn’t mean that things here had changed. They hadn’t—we were still together, and we still had days to live.
Maybe we really were going to be okay.