Chapter 19
Another level, identical to the one we’d been in.
That’s where those smooth branches had brought us—to another level, not the top of the tree.
A few of the others cursed under their breath.
“What in the world?”
“Where are we supposed to go from here?”
“It all looks the same, the same, the same!”
“Is time going to slow down again? Or are we going to move in fast forward now?”
A few were already looking at their Life Clocks to check the time, but I doubted that was it. We’d completed that level. This challenge was going to be different. I just knew it.
“What if—” Seth started, but this loud groan that came from somewhere in the distance cut him off abruptly.
We all turned, hearts in our throats. Whatever that was, it couldn’t be anything good. We all braced ourselves, looked around and waited…
That same sound came again a moment later from right over our heads—and it came from the tree.
Everything came to a halt again.
“They’re getting paler,” Silas whispered, reaching out a hand for one of the rings on the branch next to his head, but never touching it.
He was right.
Every single branch around us was suddenly groaning, like something was squeezing the wood from the inside, and every single ring on the bark lost half the glow it had when we first came up here.
Then…
“Oh, no! You shouldn’t have come here. You poor, poor souls—you shouldn’t have come!” someone cried. Someone close.
We stopped once more, looked around with our breaths held.
It was a woman’s voice I’d never heard before, and judging by the look on the others’ faces, neither had they.
“Well, they’re here now. If they were smart, they’d go back, but I’m willing to bet a whole petal they aren’t.”
Time’s Teeth, had I finally lost my mind for real? Because I could have sworn I heard another voice, this one male.
“Don’t be rude, Tulip. You’re so judgmental!”
Laughter.
I was still frozen in place, my arms to the sides, just waiting for something to jump at me, but Anika was a few feet to my right, laughing her heart out as she looked…
down. As she looked at the edge of a branch as wide as my shoulders extending from the floor, that could have very well been a tree on its own.
I looked, too.
That’s when I saw the flowers. Three of them, moving. Talking. Arguing.
Two tulips with a daffodil between them.
“No way,” someone said, and they could have taken the words right out of my mouth, because no way, indeed. There was no way my eyes weren’t lying to me when they insisted that these flowers had leaves for arms, and eyes and mouths between their petals, too.
Absolutely no way in any timeline.
Except…they were.
“Oh, you’re one to talk, Daffy!” said the tulip on the left with the bright magenta petals. His voice was deeper, darker.
“You’re the one who’s judgmental, I say!” The other tulip sounded female, and its petals were white, with the same magenta bleeding down the edges toward the stem.
Meanwhile the daffodil opened her mouth—the daffodil has a mouth.
“Oh, hush, you two! You’re distracting the Hands!” she said, moving her white petals and the two leaves on her stem like she was indeed waving them off.
“They’re talking!” Anika said, standing up as we approached, pointing at them. “You guys—the flowers are talking!”
“Well, of course we’re talking—how else would we communicate? We’re flowers, not animals,” said the pink tulip.
“Never mind the tulips—they’re outrageous,” the daffodil said. “But quick—you must go back. You can’t be here, children. Go back while you still can!”
“Hello,” Anika said, waving her hand. “We’re the Hands of the Turning T—”
“Yes, we know who you are, you thistle-brain,” the white tulip spit.
Anika gasped before she started laughing again. I was close enough to see now that they indeed had eyes on those flowerheads. Eyes and mouths to speak with. It was all real.
“Time’s Teacups—they’re so cute!” said Levana.
“Fake,” said Silas. “They’re fake.”
“Who’re you calling fake, you half-grown weed?!” the pink tulip raged.
Even Silas cracked a smile. “Part of the Labyrinth, that’s all,” he muttered almost to himself.
“Why don’t you come closer, and I’ll show you what I’m part of, stemwit?!”
Holy Hour, the tulip meant business.
Most of the Hands laughed out loud as Silas shook his head. He was trying to hold back his laughter, too.
“Why did you say that, though?” I asked the daffodil a moment later. “Why did you tell us to go back?”
It was the white tulip that answered. “Because we’re not evil, that’s why. If you were smart, you’d run. Go back where you came from, right now.”
My smile dropped a little bit, and the others stopped laughing. I exchanged a look with Silas, who was leaning in to see them better right next to me.
“This isn’t worth dying for, I tell you. It isn’t,” said the daffodil.
“Why, though? What’s up here? We don’t see anything,” I said, looking around again, just to make sure that nothing had changed since we’d climbed.
“What’s up here?” the pink tulip screeched. “WHAT’S UP HERE?!”
It was shaking.
“How dare you—how dare you even mention it to him?!” the white tulip.
“Don’t you know what we’ve had to go through—don’t you know?!” the daffodil.
“BAD HAND! BAD HAND!”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to—” upset you, I was going to say, but the others started screaming.
Holy Hour, the flowers were indeed screaming.
We all moved back a step or two, and Anika and Levana tried to calm them down, but it didn’t work.
A tick later, right before our eyes, the flowers closed.
They stopped screaming, and they simply closed their petals, and stopped moving altogether.
A breath escaped my parted lips.
“Still stuck? How original.”
We jumped, and a few of us screamed—could’ve been me as well.
This time, it wasn’t a flower that had spoken, but a mushroom.
An honest-to-Time mushroom, tall as my forearm, with eyes and a mouth on the thick brown stem, the head of it hanging on top like a hat.
The mushroom then rolled its eyes—I saw it. We all saw that it rolled its eyes and moved to the sides like it was trying to shake its head—then froze. The eyes and the mouth disappeared.
He was just a mushroom again.
“Did that just…happen?” Cook whispered from behind me.
The rest of us looked at one another. Swallowed. Nodded.
That definitely happened.
“Let’s just keep moving,” March said and took my hand in his.
I really wished he didn’t have to let go anytime soon.
We kept our eyes wide open and our ears strained at all times. We kept checking our Life Clocks, too, to make sure that time wasn’t moving slower—or faster, for that matter—but no. The seconds ticked by exactly as they should. Time in this level of the Tree of Years, it seemed, didn’t change speed.
And the scenery didn’t change either.
“How much longer?” Erith asked for the third time in the past five minutes, but I couldn’t blame her, could I? I was asking the same question in my head over and over again, too—how much longer did we have to go to find something in this place? Anything at all, just…something.
“That’s it, I’m done,” said Levana all of a sudden, and stopped walking.
Fell on the floor on her knees. “There is no point in trying to get anywhere—we need to go up.” She pulled the seeds from the pocket of her suit and arranged them in a small space between two thicker roots.
“What we need is another one of those bridges that brought us up here.” She looked at us.
Put her hands on her hips. “Well? C’mon—bring your seeds whoever has any left! ”
“She’s right,” Erith said, and she rushed to get her seeds out of her pocket as well.
“Maybe we should ration them,” said March. “We don’t know what else is up there—we might need them more then.”
“You’re right,” said Silas. “We might need more later. It only took five of us to create the first bridge. Let’s try to do the same now.”
A moment later, Helen, Seth, and Mimi dropped their seeds on top of the other ones, too, and this time we were all prepared. We were all moving back, waiting for the moment the branches would sprout from the floor, explode the way they had before.
Only…they didn’t.
“More.” Levana turned to look at March and me. “We need more!”
Something about the way the gears turned in my gut.
It was wrong, they insisted. It was a bad idea, and we still had no clue what awaited us higher up—and we still had no idea what awaited us here, either.
I doubted those flowers had been joking when they warned us, but at the same time, there was a part of me that hoped it would be the same now as it was a level below.
A part of me hoped that if we just went up as high as we could, we were going to reach the top eventually.
It was common sense—except I wasn’t sure how much common sense was worth in the Tree of Years.
Either way, when March dropped his seeds on the floor together with the others, I did the same. So be it. Whatever came next, we’d figure out a way to handle it without seeds. We were already doing this.
A second ticked by, then another.
Nothing happened.
“It’s not working,” Levana whispered.
“Well, we don’t have more seeds,” Erith said.
Silas leaned down and raised a hand over the seeds like he’d done earlier. Closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, and…
“No magic,” he whispered. “There’s no magic in them whatsoever.”
“But there was plenty of magic in them earlier,” Helen argued.
Silas shook his head. “There isn’t anymore.”
“It’s evident,” Reggie said—he, too, had leaned in to feel the seeds. “There’s no energy, no warmth to them.”
“So, let’s give it to them, then,” said Russ. “We can fire them up. We can give them our own magic.”
“They didn’t need our magic down there,” I said reluctantly, but Seth shook his head.
“That was another level. It’s worth a try. C’mon let’s try.”
We did.
Russ, Seth and Levana were kneeling all around the little hole full of seeds, their hands out, their eyes closed as they called for their magic. And we waited.
I expected the smoke, the colors. I expected a mix of them to fall upon the seeds any second, half hopeful, half dreading that it wouldn’t work.
But the colors never came.
“Fuck!” Levana shouted, panicked now. “My magic isn’t working anymore!”
A terrifying thought, indeed, especially when we’d discovered minutes ago that we could use it like never before. That still didn’t stop the rest of us from trying, though. From being hopeful.
Until we failed, all of us, one after the other. We all failed.
The heat of the magic that was usually humming in my chest whenever I looked for it wasn’t there. It was like I’d been stripped of it completely. Like it didn’t even exist anymore.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, said a voice in my head. Screamed it.
“It’s not it,” I said, hoping to drown it. “Magic is not the way we complete this level.”
“Then how?” asked one Hand or the other.
“How are we to know what needs doing?”
“That good-for-nothing speaker!”
“Our so-called warden didn’t give us any clue, either.”
“We’re stuck—”
“We’ll be wandering this place forever—”
“We’ll be stuck in a tree—”
“Nothing’s ever going to change—”
They went on and on, speaking one over the other, and I argued, too, my nerves getting the best of me. It seemed to be easier to think out loud sometimes, even if I couldn’t hear what I was saying through the noise.
Until…
“Still stuck? How original.”
The rest of us all clamped our mouths shut at the same time.
A mushroom with a mouth, and eyes that rolled like a person’s.
A mushroom with a mouth that said the exact same thing as before. In the same way.
Something cold spread under my skin, and it was so fast, so all-consuming, even the thoughts in my head froze out of my reach. All—except one that burned like flames.
“A loop,” I whispered when those flames illuminated me well enough. “We’re stuck in a time-loop.”
Of course.
It made sense the way everything was the same everywhere we looked. It made sense that that mushroom would be in the same place, and that the tulips and the daffodil were there, too.
They had eyes and mouths again, and they told us all about how our lives were too precious to be lost here, that this wasn’t worth dying for.
But the most important proof of all was…
“It’s here,” Seth and Mimi said at the same time, pointing down at the hole on the floor just a few feet away.
The hole where those smooth twisted branches had broken through to form a bridge for us.
The same place we’d come through what felt like hours ago—and we’d only walked straight ahead, yet we’d ended up right back where we started.
“Easy then,” said Helen, pointing at me and Silas and Cook. “You’re Spades. You can break loops.”
Three problems with that.
One—we could break magical loops that were made by mistake, or that were a result of too much residual Sparetime concentrated in one area or one person for too long. The kind that caused glitches in time. Two—we needed at least a decade of active magic use to even begin to understand time-loops.
And three…
“Magic doesn’t work here, Helen,” Cook reminded her, and his voice broke. “We’re stuck for real now.”
Nobody had a single thing to say to that.