Chapter 23
They moved around us, went from one Hand to the other, cleaning our faces with these cotton pads, putting a salve onto our cuts and bruises.
Meanwhile Calren stayed by the double doors and watched, a smile on his face so fake it hurt to look at it, so I didn’t. I just ignored him like everybody else was doing.
We’d all made it. We’d all won the trial, it seemed.
When I walked into the broken mirror, I’d found spiral stairs that went on forever at the end of a short corridor.
They’d led me all the way down the tower, and outside.
March, Anika, Russ and Mimi had already been there, waiting, wide eyed and silent while the crowd cheered.
The others came down, too, all through that same door on the side of the tower.
Calren brought us here in The Ever, sat us down in that same lounge room with a wall full of pictures of the other Hands. I couldn’t look at those anymore, either, partly because I thought I finally understood the look on their faces. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself yet.
Then the help came to patch us up, our usual maids and butlers, as well as a couple Timekeepers to check us for wounds. I had my head examined, too, like they knew I’d fallen and lost consciousness at one point.
But of course they knew. I was willing to bet anything that they watched every single step we took in here. At least during the games.
Silas, Reggie, Seth, Erith and Helen were examined much more thoroughly, of course. They’d been the ones to be touched by timewraiths. They’d been the ones who had given their own life energy to those monsters.
Monsters that these people had put in there with us.
Five timewraiths.
The memory sent shivers down my back, but I knew that I wouldn’t get an answer if I asked. We’d been asking questions since we came out of that tower, and all Calren had said was we’ll talk later.
And the queens hadn’t even been there in their little box when we came out.
It made me angry. It made me furious to be sitting here, to know that I had come to this place with my own free will. To remember what the people out there believed the Turning Trials to be. To know that they were being lied to.
We’d been lied to all along.
Because who was to say it hadn’t been like this the other times as well, and the people in charge, whoever they were, hadn’t just kept it a secret?
Time’s Teeth, I felt so betrayed.
Then the help finally left, and the Timekeepers put all the salve they could put on our wounds—some kind of a grease that smelled like cinnamon—and Calren closed the door of the lounge room behind them.
His cane slamming against the floor as he came closer to us irritated me like never before.
“Congratulations,” he said, and I squeezed my eyes shut just to stop myself from screaming at his face.
Others laughed, shaking their heads.
“Congratulations—you did very well,” he continued like he heard nothing.
“Congratulations?” Helen spit first. “Congratulations for being face to face with timewraiths and surviving to tell the tale?”
“They put wraiths in there with us!” Reggie said, a dumbfounded smile on his face. “Do you…do you understand what we’re saying? Wraiths.”
Calren put his cane in front of him, both hands over the handle, his eyes on the floor.
I thought his cheeks were flushed, and I thought maybe he felt like shit—just the way he was standing there—but also I didn’t care.
For once, I couldn’t care less about how he felt, because he hadn’t been there with us.
He hadn’t been chased by those monsters, hadn’t had to run from them inside a fucking tree.
“We almost died, Calren,” Cook said. “You train us to climb ropes and to fix devices—then put us inside a tree with monsters. Why would you do that?!”
Cook sounded a little bit desperate as he said this.
“And the queens couldn’t even stick around to wait for us to walk out?” Silas demanded.
“Who makes these games, Calren?” March said. He sat right next to me on an armchair, so I saw how tightly he fisted his hands. There were cuts all over his knuckles, too, covered in that salve.
“Yes—who?! Maybe you should look into it,” Anika shouted. “Maybe you should fire them or put them in jail, because that can’t be legal!”
Except it was.
We’d all been given the terms and conditions to read before signing up to become an applicant.
I read the document together with my parents, and Father explained how they’d used general language to indicate that pretty much anything went, and anything could happen, and that we wouldn’t know what the games were beforehand, and that there were no guarantees, but that they would do their very best to ensure the safety of the Hands—but it’s the Turning Trials.
It’s only games. Nobody’s ever even been hurt in them before! Father had said.
So I’d gone and signed the next day, and that was that.
“Calm down, everyone,” Calren said, and we all wanted to say something at the same time—well.
They did. Not me. I was feeling pretty good about my silence at the moment.
The memory of my own face on that reflection, smiling, understanding, kept me at bay.
Reminded me that it was already done. Anything I said here wasn’t going to make a difference, change the past, or even the future.
“Before you say anything,” the Timekeeper said, raising his hand. “I heard you. I heard all of you, and I’m sorry you’ve had to go through that traumatic experience—I am. But this is the Turning Trials. Yes, they are games, but they are not easy games.”
“Except we’re all told continuously that they should be. Everybody I know, every projection you’ve added to the archives of my court—they all say that these games are not dangerous, that they’re safe!” Mimi shouted.
“That is what the audience is supposed to believe, Mim-Mim,” said Calren—and again, he had a softness in his eyes and a small, sorry smile on his face I couldn’t care about. “They want games. They want entertainment.”
“So you lie to them?!” Levana shouted.
“We don’t lie, no. We only show a specific part of the games.” Calren slowly squatted down in front of us. “I understand that this is not what you expected, but for the Labyrinth to create the Sparetime we need, it requires true magic, and a lot of it.”
“So you’re just going to risk our lives just like that, and never even tell us what we have to do before we go in there?” Erith said, her voice shaking.
“We don’t just risk anybody’s lives. There are protection mechanisms in place for—”
“Where were those protection mechanisms when Reggie was being sucked dry by a wraith?” My own voice caught me by surprise.
“Had we not returned, had we not noticed the change in the loop, had we just continued ahead without him—what kind of a protection would have made sure that he would be among us now?”
“And the others, too?”
“How would they have survived if Silas hadn’t cut the tree open?”
“And why?”
“For what? Where does all that magic even go?!”
“That tree almost fell on us, almost collapsed.”
“We barely made it out alive—barely…”
The others spoke one after the other. Calren listened with his head down, his jaws clenching, his knuckles around the handle of his cane white.
He waited for everyone to stop talking first, then said, “I can’t tell you about the mechanisms of the games, but I can tell you that the games are indeed dangerous.
There are protections in place, yes, but ultimately, it is all of you who have the responsibility to keep yourselves safe and alive.
” He looked at each and every one of us for a second, then added, “As per the contract you signed before you came here.”
There. That was the only thing that mattered here.
“The magic goes to the Diamonds to harvest, and what you earn stays with you. When the games are over and you walk out of here, every second you earned in these games will be yours forever.”
“What seconds? We have only spent magic, not earn—” Seth stopped talking.
He’d pulled out his Life Clock from his pocket and was looking at it with his eyes wide and his lips parted.
Russ and Reggie who were at his sides looked at the face of it, then hurried to pull out their own Life Clocks.
Impossible not to do the same, purely instinctively. I wanted to see what they saw, too.
Forty-three minutes. There had been thirty-eight when we first started the second trial and we’d also spent minutes in the Tree of Years. I’d felt the magic being consumed when I made those axes, at least.
Yet now, somehow, I had more.
Whispers among the Hands.
I put my Life Clock back inside my pocket.
Maybe I could find use for all those minutes when I was out there, but right now I was in here, and magic wasn’t going to be of any help when they could decide whether to allow us to use it at all.
We hadn’t been able to do anything with all these minutes when we were in the second level of that tree, not until we broke the time-loop.
And then again against wraiths—to use magic on them would have only made it worse.
“Here’s a question for you, Warden,” Mimi said, and she was clearly pissed off.
Called him warden when she was definitely Calren’s favorite and she knew it.
They had inside jokes during meals, and he seemed to always hang onto every word she said.
I thought he genuinely cared about her. “Can you guarantee that we won’t have to deal with timewraiths again in the coming trials?
Because I will withdraw from this madness if we do.
I will not put myself anywhere near a wraith, ever again. ”
Mimi’s voice shook, too, broke. A tear slid down her cheek. I didn’t care for her pain, but she did raise a good point.
“So. Can you promise us that there will be no wraiths in the remaining trials?”
Calren didn’t hesitate. “Yes. There will be no wraiths in the remaining trials. I can promise you that.”