Chapter 41 #2
Meanwhile Anika and Reggie from either side pulled up the tablecloth to see underneath the table, then looked at us and shook their heads—there’s nothing there!
“There. Mix your minutes, mold the hour, one cake whole—you hold the power.” The host leaned back, crossed his arms in front to his chest with a grin.
It was a mold. It was an actual cake mold that he’d put up there on that wooden platform—which wasn’t a wooden platform at all. It was actually metal painted like wood, if my eyes weren’t liars.
Or if the Labyrinth hadn’t already fried all my brain cells.
“So…that’s it?” Cook whispered, wiping the sweat from his brow. “We just bake an hour like a cake, and…we’re done?”
A hundred nods later, and the strange hat on Host Ticktock’s didn’t move an inch. “It would make me so happy,” he sang. “After all, happiness is a piece of cake.” And he winked.
“How do we make the batter, though?” Erith wondered. “There’s no flour, no—”
“You have there your solid seconds, right there in the bowl,” he said, pointing at the bowls of sugar. “You have your minutes that flow, too—plenty to work with.” His laughter echoed in the dark forest. The flames in the small lanterns seemed to shake at the sound of it, too.
“And…the flour?” Erith insisted.
“Oh! Oh, silly me, I almost forgot!” The host moved again, went under the table, came up with a tray—so fast I was getting dizzy from the other end of the table.
He climbed on all fours, and somehow he didn’t push a single cup or lantern or clock to the side as he did this, like he knew exactly where to place his knees and hands.
He put the tray right there near the platform.
More bowls were on it, and these triangles no bigger than my hand made of the same metal as the cake mold, a lot of them stacked one on top of the other.
The bowls were full of flour, and there was a ladle and a whisk there, too, half the size of normal ones.
“How’s that for a full list of ingredients?” Host Ticktock laughed again.
“That’s it? That’s all we have to use?” Anika asked.
“Yes, that’s right, Miss. But don’t forget—baking time requires both precision and chaos.”
“How are we supposed to bake it, though?” asked Reggie.
“Why, in the oven!” The host raised both hands toward the middle of the table where he’d put the cake mold.
On the other side, Levana and Erith leaned in closer— “Guys, it has a handle. It’s an oven!” they cried.
I was willing to bet anything that the handle hadn’t existed until now—they would have seen it.
“This is your chance, Hands,” said the host solemnly, a hand to his heart as he stood up, slowly this time. “Complete the perfect hour, and you may taste Time’s sweetest flower.”
With that, he bowed his head, stepped away from the table and behind his chair, and watched us—all the while smiling.
Something about him that made me feel like my skin was turned inside out.
“Okay, okay, this is easy,” said Levana. “We just bake a cake and we’re done. C’mon, let’s see what we have here.”
We all stood up to get closer to what the host called an oven, which was really just a metal compartment painted like a piece of wood for whatever reason.
The white teapot was full, and near the handle, there was a piece of glass to show the inside.
Around it were lines and numbers, starting with 0 at the bottom, and ending at 20 near the lid.
“Twenty minutes are in here,” said Mimi.
“Plenty for an hour,” said Russ. “Go ahead and pour it in the mold.”
“I’ll get the flour,” said Anika.
“I’ll get the sugar,” said Reggie, jumping off his chair, where he’d climbed to grab a spoon right off one of the branches over us.
I went to the other side of the table to analyze the oven better. It had a small window in the front, and a golden handle, too. It would fit the cake mold the host had given us just fine.
The blood in my veins rushed, both afraid and excited as I watched the others pour the contents into the mold together.
Meanwhile Host Ticktock stood back, a little farther away, sometimes spinning, sometimes humming, always watching us, even when he danced.
I swallowed hard and tried to shake the feeling that I was in the presence of a monster. March’s eyes were on me when I looked up, and he must have known exactly what I was thinking, because he kept staring at the host, too.
So far, though, he was staying away.
“There. I think that will do it,” Levana said. “A little whisk, and into the oven to bake.” She grabbed the whisk and mixed in the ingredients in the mold, then put it aside. Cook grabbed the handle of the oven, and when he pulled it open, hot air blew out like it had been eager to escape for ages.
“Oh—that’s hot,” Levana said, and she carefully put the mold into the oven with a big smile on her face.
Cook closed it, pulled the handle down, and stepped aside.
Done. Easily done.
That was a cake made of solid seconds and tea-time and flour-minutes—just like the host wanted.
“It’s done,” Anika said. “We made the cake.”
Host Ticktock, who’d been spinning around in a circle, staring down at his own feet, stopped and looked at us almost like he was surprised to find us there.
Then smiled, his wide blue eyes glistening. “Is it now.”
Something about his voice.
Then the table began to shake.
“Oh, no…” someone whispered as we all started to back away—because it was the oven that was vibrating like that, and shaking the entire table with it. It was vibrating and it was steaming at the corners, and the cake inside it was swelling, ballooning up as we watched, and—
A scream.
The cake exploded inside the oven, and the noise was unmistakable.
We were all leaning away as far as we could, terrified, in shock, watching the steam spiraling up the corners—while the host, laughing his heart out, went to it.
He opened the oven and we all held our breaths, thinking he was going to burn his hand, but…
He pulled the mold out, and it was clean. No tea or sugar or flour or inflated cake inside it.
He put it over the oven again, just like before, then moved back to the front of the table, the smile never leaving his face.
“All hands in one hour? Oh, dear!” He shook his head. “Time chokes on such greed.”
“What in the Holy Hour is that supposed to mean?” Seth hissed. “You’re the host—tell us what needs doing! Tell us—”
The words stuck in his throat.
The air stuck in mine. In all ours.
The feeling came out of nowhere, all at once.
It was like I had something inside me, something in my gut, and it was crawling up my windpipe, trying to get out.
My mouth was wide open and I was suddenly choking, leaning back against the rough bark of a tree to keep my balance—and the others were exactly the same.
Fuck, I was terrified, twelve-hours certain that I was about to collapse on the ground right now and die. There was no other explanation—whatever was inside me right now, it was going to consume me, cut me wide open, leave me to bleed on the forest floor.
Then it was over.
The second turned and that thing that had been inside me slipped out of my mouth—except it wasn’t anything physical. It was just a warmth that spread from my lips and all the way down to the tips of my toes.
Another sharp scream—Levana, who was standing just beside Cook to my right. She was looking at her hands, and then I was looking at her hands and my mouth was wide open to scream, too.
Wrinkles.
My mind must have been playing tricks on me.
I was breathing, no longer choking on thin air, though no sound was coming out of me.
I was standing on my own, too, and so were the others.
But the sudden cries that ripped out of them rang in my ears, and then suddenly everyone was looking down at their own hands.
That’s why I looked at mine.
I saw my skin, my knuckles, my palms. I saw the wrinkles that shouldn’t be there, wrinkles that had never-ever-reven been there before. Right there on my skin.
Black dots in my vision, but I blinked fast to clear them, to see better, to see the Hands that had aged right before my eyes. Around me—March, Seth, Mimi, Cook, they had wrinkles around their eyes, too. Wrinkles around their mouths. They had gained ten or twenty years just now, in a literal blink.
So had I.
My hands shook as I reached to touch my face. I couldn’t quite tell, couldn’t really feel the wrinkles under my fingertips because I was in shock, but they were there.
I knew because they were there on every other face around the table—except for the host.
Host Ticktock laughed again.
“Overdone! Greedy batter!” he shouted. “Try again, and do it better.”
The look on his face was evident—he was enjoying this. His smile was authentic, sick and twisted, and that gleaming in his eyes was, too. He stepped back, took his place a little farther away from the beginning of the table, and began to hum a melody to himself.
Meanwhile we gathered around the table once more, looking at one another, terrified, trying to calm down.
“Old, we’re old, we’re so old—”
“Our Life Clocks—I lost ten minutes!”
“How am I going to go back home like this?”
“Nobody will even know me!”
“I want out—I want out—I want out!”
I looked at March on the other side of the table, his teeth gritted and brows narrowed, holding onto the back of a chair. His knuckles had turned completely white.
“Enough,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “That’s enough. It’s just the game. We won’t be like this forever—let’s try again.”
“Try again? Are you insane?! I won’t be trying anything again!” shouted one Hand or the other.
But March was right. Crying and screaming right now wasn’t going to get us anywhere. Making the cake—better, like the host said—was going to be the only thing that set us free.
Pushing back the voices and the cries and my own panic wasn’t so hard, not when I knew that I literally had no other choice. I went closer to the table, my knees shaking, and I looked at everything the host had given us.
“The molds,” I said, and for a moment, the others stopped talking.
I reached for the triangular molds that he’d brought for us on the tray, took one while I counted the others.
“There are twelve molds for the twelve of us.” I swallowed hard, looked up at the host, but he wasn’t interested in what I was saying.
He was spinning around in place, humming still, dancing.
“I think we’re supposed to each make our own slice.
” Because why else would he give us twelve molds?
“They fit,” said Seth from across the table, placing one of the triangles into the big cake mold over the oven. It did fit, indeed.
Suddenly everyone gathered to do the same, and it worked perfectly. All twelve triangles fit into the cake mold.
This was it. It had to be. I looked up at March and at Seth, and at Silas, and they all seemed to be of the same mind. We were supposed to make our own slices to make the full cake. There was no other way.
So we got to work.
My hands shook as I waited for the teapot to pass hands after hands. Then the sugar and the flour, too.
Lastly, we all waited for the whisk to mix in the ingredients—that’s why the whisk is so small! said an excited voice in my head.
I didn’t think about how I looked. I didn’t even look at any of the others in the face anymore because it didn’t matter that they had wrinkles. It didn’t matter that I was older. I felt the same, didn’t I?
On the inside, I felt the same panic. My excitement had the same flavor. Everything was going to be all right, just as soon as we baked this cake.
These were the only things that kept my panic drowned out for a little longer.
Everyone was done whisking, but none of the Hands volunteered to put the cake in the oven this time.
I was impatient, so impatient to get away from here, to not see the face of the host as he watched us now, smiling that sick smile.
And those sick eyes—I wanted them off me.
So I made to grab the mold, but a bigger hand than mine grabbed it first.
March.
He came all around the table, never once meeting my eyes. Half terrified and half relieved, I opened the oven for him, reminding myself that it was the right way to win this game. It had to be.
March leaned in and put the mold into the oven without hesitation. My knees trembled as I stepped back with everyone else, our wide eyes, our hands fisted.
Even the host was no longer spinning and humming and dancing.
Waiting for the next second to pass was like carrying a mountain on my shoulders. My palms were bloody from my own fingernails cutting into my skin.
A moment ticked by, then another.
Everyone had gathered on our side of the table now, and all our eyes were stuck on that little window of the oven. We all watched as the batter rose and rose and rose.
Slower this time, though, slower—which was why it gave me hope. Which was why nobody had started crying yet.
Then the table began to shake again.