Chapter 34 #2
As we ate our snacks, we talked in hushed voices about Master Talik’s timeometer, and we all agreed that the Timekeeper had wanted us to know about it without Calren finding out.
“It’s for the last trial,” Seth said. “I know it—he’s trying to help us, the old man. We’ll be dealing with timeometers in the last trial.”
“Makes perfect sense. I think he likes us. I like him, too,” Mimi said as she popped a cherry in her mouth. She had a bowl full of them on her lap, and they did make me nostalgic. Jinx had adored cherries. I hadn’t tasted one in two years.
“Let’s hope so. Let’s hope that the last trial is easy and that we get it over with quickly like we did the third,” Anika said. “As much as I enjoying seeing your stupid faces, I think I’m about ready to go home.”
Yes. I was, too.
Except one look at March, and the gears inside me twisted like they’d run all out of oil. The realization hit me as if I was just considering it for the first time: I was never going to see March again.
In all likelihood, when the trials were over, March would go back to his court, and I would go back to mine, which were on opposite sides of the realm with Neverwhen in between. Days worth of travel.
“I don’t know,” he said, and the sound of his voice did something to me. Far too many things to be able to pick them all apart. “It doesn’t feel like it. I don’t think he showed us that device to help us with the trials.”
And I didn’t think that, either. Just a feeling I had—except now that I had the other feeling, that pure, raw desperation and panic, I no longer paid the timeometer thing much attention. Couldn’t if I tried.
“Why else would he show it to us then?” asked Russ.
“Where is Silas?” March asked. My eyes closed—you will never-ever-reven hear that voice again, said other voices in my head, a symphony of them.
“No idea. He wasn’t in his room. I knocked,” said Mimi with a shrug.
“Maybe the others went to check out the junkyard,” said Erith. “Maybe we should, too.”
“Nope. Still protected. I checked before dinner,” Russ said.
Silence for a tick. I felt March’s attention on the side of my face like heat from a summer sun. When I opened my eyes, he still looked at me, his expression unreadable, but the red in his eyes was as vivid as ever.
A million needles pierced my skin everywhere at once. My truth is that I miss you, he’d said, but I bet he didn’t know that that was my truth, too. I missed him more than was reasonable—or sensible, considering he was a few feet away from me right now.
But I missed all the seconds in the future when we wouldn’t be sitting a few feet apart more.
Then something hissed right behind our bench, and steam shot toward the tree over our heads lightning fast.
Mimi and Helen jumped off the bench screaming, and I would have, too, if I hadn’t frozen so completely. My instincts must have been malfunctioning, or maybe I was spread out too thin with too many wants and fears just now, but I stayed seated as the steam shot off into the air with a loud hiss.
Others laughed.
Mimi and Helen flipped them the tick. “Yeah, yeah—you all jumped, too!”
“What in the world is that?” Cook asked as he went onto the bench and leaned over it to see better. He sniffed the air as the steam lost strength more and more. “Smells like boiling potatoes.” Cook flinched visibly, like he couldn’t think of any worse scent than that of boiling potatoes.
“What could be down there?” the others wondered.
“What would be steaming like that—and so loudly?”
“I wonder if there’s people there—”
“Or if they ever come out—”
“Or if it’s like a whole world below our feet, like in books!”
“I wonder if there’s a way to peel the ground off and look…”
Then, “There is.”
We all turned to Seth, who popped the last cracker in his mouth and chewed with his mouth open. “There’s actually a doorway at the edge of the garden. Lots of stairs, but they lead down.”
We looked at one another. “Down where?” March asked.
But Seth shrugged. “Just down. I don’t know, I never checked. I can show you if you’d like.”
“Yes!” we all said almost at the same time. Yes, we definitely wanted to see if there was a doorway with stairs to take us underneath the ground and into the actual Labyrinth.
Just like that, we were running through the fake bushes and trees and flowerbeds, all the way to the other side of the garden, very close to the fence of the Labyrinth, which separated it from the rest of Neverwhen.
It was a whole city out there. People from all over the realm lived in it.
There were some three-hundred thousand Clockfolk in the Clockrealm (including Timekeepers) and this city alone housed more than seventy-thousand.
We were part of it, yet perfectly separated.
Those tall golden fences made sure to keep everyone out—and to keep us in, too.
The tips of them were a reminder that we were stuck here, regardless of whether we came willingly or not.
We were stuck here until the trials were over.
Then Seth showed us the door.
It was half-buried at the edge, indeed, where the hedges gave way to exposed gears and vine-wrapped pistons—a narrow seam in the ground that didn’t belong to any path.
He leaned down and pressed his hands against it, and the ground shifted with a muted click, revealing a metal door flush with the soil.
I’d never seen something so well hidden that I wondered how Seth had even found it, but there was no time for questions.
Our eyes were wide and our ears perked up, just in case someone came and saw us while Seth pulled the door open.
The hinges gave soundlessly, breathing out air that smelled of metal.
Below it, a narrow stairwell spiraled down into the dark.
“Light, anyone?” Helen whispered, and Anika was the first to raise her hand. White smoke rose over her palm and gathered into a small ball that burned brightly a second later.
“Guess I’ll go first,” she whispered, afraid, but also excited. We all were.
What could be down there, and what more could we learn about the coming trial if we could actually see the inside of the Labyrinth? I already couldn’t wait to find out.
We went slowly, as silently as we could—well.
Considering all the hissing and complaints and ouch—you stepped on my toes again!
, I wouldn’t say it was silent, but we did descend two levels in just a couple minutes.
The metal of the stairs vibrated faintly.
Pipes threaded the walls, these ones not painted, not decorated, not trying to pass for something they weren’t down here.
At the bottom, the passage opened into a low, vaulted corridor carved straight into the rock. There was plenty of light there, old lanterns burning with bright flames, and through a series of grated openings in the walls, we caught a glimpse of the strangest, most incredible thing I had ever seen.
The actual understructure of the Labyrinth.
We stopped, all of us at the same time, looking out the openings, at the massive interlocking rings suspended in the darkness, rotating slowly.
Symbols were carved onto most surfaces, symbols I couldn’t even begin to understand, that glowed faintly as something passed through them—like small charges of electricity. Or maybe magic?
Thick conduits ran along the ceiling, pulsing with light that brightened and dimmed in perfect rhythm.
The smell was very close to boiling potatoes, indeed, just like Cook said.
The air was dense, weighted, and the floor thrummed beneath our boots, which meant the machinery went down lower than this level. Possibly much lower.
“That’s Sparetime,” whispered Russ, pointing at the opening on the right, where those interlocking rings with the glowing symbols rotated. “See that—that’s Sparetime being harnessed!”
I leaned in closer to see better—we all did. If Russ was to be believed, we were actually witnessing one of the most important things in our world—the harnessing of Sparetime.
We couldn’t really see much, unfortunately, just those rings spinning. We would need to get closer to see more, to see what they were connected to.
“C’mon, let’s keep moving, see what else is down here,” March said after a moment, and we moved forward together.
Not for long, though. The corridor went on for another few feet, and then took a sharp turn to the left.
Suddenly March stopped walking and held up a hand first, then turned around and brought his finger to his lips to tell us to keep quiet.
We all stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped blinking.
Someone’s there, March mouthed, pointing his thumb behind him.
That’s when we heard the voices slipping through the openings on the walls.
Holy Hour, someone was going to catch us—and that only made this whole thing more exciting.
Mimi went closer to the wall on the left on her tiptoes and peeked through like she could see something the rest of us couldn’t.
Then she stopped. Froze for a tick.
When she turned to us, her mouth was open and her eyes wide, and she mouthed something a few times but we still didn’t understand.
What?! we mouthed back, so she finally whispered, “It’s Talik!”
Right away, Russ and March, who were taller than the rest of us, went to see for themselves, but they didn’t need to bother. Mimi knew what Master Talik looked like, and I didn’t doubt for a second that it was him she’d seen. He would be impossible to mistake for someone else.
But then March and Russ turned, too, even more shocked than Mimi had been.
Russ whispered, “Calren.”
It was like a slap to my face, and I was sure the others felt the same.
Suddenly, we were all moving toward the corner, trying to see, trying to hear better, because there was no way any of us was going to leave without hearing what they were talking about first. Not after we’d already gone through all three trials, and not after how Master Talik had behaved in his workshop today.
There you are.
We took turns, three after three, to peek around the edge of the wall, to see the Timekeepers better.
The corridor widened a few feet from the corner, and Master Talik and Calren were standing there behind two people—both Timekeepers judging by the color of their curly hair—who sat in front of this big console mounted on the wall.
It had two large screens, and green symbols moved on it from one side to the other, impossible to see with clarity from this distance.
But we did hear the voices when we focused, like the Labyrinth itself was throwing them our way.
“…you felt it, too, didn’t you?” Calren was saying—to Master Talik.
“The lag? Yes, of course.” The old Timekeeper nodded, then put his hands in the pockets of his gray pants, his posture rigid, his shoulders straight. “I felt the echo arriving too late clearly.”
The sound of metal shifting, rubbing against one another like swords in a duel, filled our ears, and the others pulled me back for a chance to see, too. It didn’t matter, though. I’d seen enough.
I pressed my back against the wall and closed my eyes, focused all my attention on my ears.
“That shouldn’t be possible inside the Labyrinth,” Calren said, and his voice barely reached, but I still heard it. I could still make out his words.
“It wasn’t,” said Master Talik. “Until him.”
A moment filled with only the sound of wheels and cogs turning, not metal but plastic this time. Maybe those Timekeepers sitting at that console were working something?
A deep sigh. “He’s been moving the anchors.” Calren.
“Also impossible. They were sealed after the first trial,” Master Talik said calmly.
What in the Everstill were anchors, though?
And most importantly, who was him?
“Not all of them,” Calren said, almost reluctantly.
I pressed my back against the wall harder, tried to lean closer as they whispered—possibly Calren asking about whatever those anchors were, and I didn’t catch it.
But then Master Talik said, “We have to intervene. If the fourth trial runs on misaligned anchors…” his voice trailed off.
“The Sparetime won’t funnel cleanly,” Calren finished for him.
By that point my brain was mashed potatoes.
“Exactly,” said Master Talik. “I say we send in the team again.”
“It takes hours,” Calren said, a little too loudly, and then slammed his cane against the floor like he always did. The sound was unmistakable. I even saw how he did it in my mind’s eye. “How? How did he get through? Answer me.”
This time, Master Talik stayed silent, but one of other Timekeepers sitting at the console spoke: “He bypassed the Diamond clearance, Sir.”
“On whose authority? Check the records,” Calren said.
“That’s the thing.” Another voice, this one shaking. “There is no record, Sir.”
Another deep, long sigh.
“You know what he is, right?” Calren then said, and my heart skipped all the beats.
“I do,” said Master Talik. “I think it’s—”
An alarm rang somewhere on the other side of the corridor.
We jumped.
A miracle none of us screamed, but we were moving. The alarm went off in a perfect rhythm every two seconds, and Calren was saying something, shouting orders, but at that point I couldn’t have understood if he’d spoken right next to my ear. The panic wouldn’t let me.
“Go, go, go!”
Erith whispered, waving for us to follow as her magic lit up the palm of her hand, and she went back where we’d come from.
Nobody argued. That alarm kept ringing, though a bit faded now, and the sound of footsteps came from somewhere behind us. People—probably even Calren and Master Talik themselves—would be coming through here any second now, and we needed to leave before they saw us.
Because something told me that if they did, it wouldn’t be so easy to lie our way out of this, especially with what we had heard.
And if they knew that we heard them, what exactly would Calren and Master Talik do to us?
None of us wanted to find out.