Chapter 23 #2
A bitter smile curled my lips. “So you do know.” He always said that nobody really knew what the games would be like, but he did. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to make that promise.
Calren sighed. Stood up. Touched the floor with his cane once, and the doors he’d closed a moment ago opened.
“You’re tired. You’re weak. You need rest. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
Just like that the help poured in to get us going. The others tried to argue, tried to protest, but they shouldn’t have bothered. What they said wouldn’t matter anyway.
Lida was there to help me to my feet, like she thought I wasn’t capable of standing up myself.
“I’m fine. Just give me space. I can walk on my own,” I told her, and she did. She moved back a couple feet and nodded, waited.
Then March looked at me as he waved his own butler off—a man with a round face and hair as dark as his big eyes. “What’s up with you?”
I raised my brows at March. Other than the fact that we’d been running about in a gigantic tree, fighting for our lives, going through slowed time and time-loops, and giving up whole parts of ourselves, he meant?
“Nothing,” I said.
The suspicion in his eyes was evident. I moved toward Lida without another word.
I slept like I fell dead, then came back to life in the morning.
All those cuts and bruises on my hands were almost gone, the skin just slightly red now.
I’d bathed with Lida’s help, and she’d practically dressed me in my nightgown herself, before she tucked me in.
I was gone before she left the room, but when I woke up, she was still there.
Claimed she’d let herself in because I’d refused to wake up by her knocks, and breakfast was already served.
My muscles screamed in protest, so much more sore than I’d expected, but Lida seemed certain that after breakfast, I was going to feel much better. I didn’t believe her, but I also didn’t argue.
When I made it to the eating hall on the other side of the third floor, all the others were already there. Only Calren was missing, his chair at the head of the table empty.
“There she is,” said the others as I went to take my seat on the other side, near March.
“Sleepyhead,” they muttered. “We knocked like ten times!”
“Didn’t hear you,” I muttered, then reached for some water, and tea. My throat was so dry.
“Sleep well?” March asked, and I nodded.
“Like the dead.”
“Me, too,” said Cook from across the table. “I swear I couldn’t bring myself to keep my eyes open to even get dressed. I slept naked.”
Others laughed.
I filled up my teacup and grabbed a piece of toast with my favorite sour cherry jam.
“I did not need that image in my head, Spade,” Levana said with a roll of her eyes.
“He’s right, though. I could barely move, and my muscles are killing me,” said Russ.
“And our Life Clocks are still loaded,” said Anika from the front of the table, looking at her Life Clock like she could hardly believe her eyes.
“All right now, since we’re all here—spill it.” Reggie put his cup down and cleared his throat. “What did you forsake?”
The gears in my stomach malfunctioned. My heart skipped one or three beats. I looked up at Reggie—everyone did—and he was grinning.
“Why don’t you spill it yourself, you ape,” Helen said, a grin on her face, too.
In fact, everyone was smiling, the wounds we’d gotten the day before barely there.
They looked rested. They looked…perfectly okay.
“I thought I’d save the best for last, but since you insist,” said Reggie, and a few of them laughed. “I had to forsake daydreaming.”
Once again, I stopped, the toast covered in jam halfway to my mouth.
Daydreaming?
“Nice,” said Russ. “It was nostalgia for me.”
“Meanwhile I gave up my fear of spiders,” said Mimi. “Possibly the best part of these trials so far. I just need to find a spider around here to make sure it stuck. I was terrified of them. Literal phobia.”
Shivers ran down my spine now—exactly like an army of spider was walking all over me.
What in the Everstill? The others got to give up silly things like nostalgia and fear of spiders?
“It was patience for me—though to be frank, I never had much of it to begin with,” said Levana.
“The sense of missing people,” said Seth. “Or at least I think so…”
I turned to my food, angry now. Mad.
My choices had been very different from their choices, it seemed. I’d had strength, fear, compassion. Impossible to start with, now that I thought about it.
“You?” March asked, nudging me on the elbow.
I swallowed hard. Didn’t want to answer—it wasn’t his business anyway.
But then there was something about the look in his wide eyes. Those colors that merged in them, all the shades of red and brown.
My heart ran out of beats again. I said, “Compassion.”
Shock registered in his face. I turned to my cup. “You?”
“Trust,” March whispered.
Shock passed through me now, too. It looked like I wasn’t the only one to have been faced with difficult choices.
“Intuition,” Silas said from across the table, and I hadn’t even realized he was listening to us.
Our eyes locked. I saw the desperation going through him, but didn’t really understand it. It was only intuition.
“You make up for it with your intelligence. I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, and bit into my toast.
A tight lipped smile, and Silas nodded. I meant it, though—he seemed to know most things about most things. He would be okay without his intuition.
“It shows,” said March, as he, too, continued to eat, his voice lower, darker.
“What shows?” I wondered.
“You. What you gave away. It’s like you’re…not you anymore.”
In his eyes I saw the suspicions glistening like the sun outside. It ruined all my favorite colors for me, so I looked away.
“Well, I am.” I was still me. I’d seen the mirror in the bathroom, but…
The words that had popped into my head when I’d been in front of those other mirrors in the tower came back to me. If you forsake me, you forsake who you are.
Which in turn made me wonder: when was I going to get my compassion back?