Chapter 42
Wrinkles.
So many wrinkles on my hands, and I didn’t dare search for a reflection, didn’t dare try to look at my face. But I could see plenty on the others’ faces. I could see plenty on March.
He’d aged at least twenty years. Even the hair around his temples had turned gray. There were wrinkles, deep ones around his eyes, and the laugh lines around his mouth were perfectly pronounced. The light in his eyes had dimmed, too—or maybe it was just the panic making me see things.
The others were the same. Gray hair, crepey skin, wrinkles everywhere, as well as tears and snot and bloodshot eyes.
How in the Everstill were they doing this to us?! Our Life Clocks had lost ten minutes, too. How?! How could the Labyrinth make us age like this within seconds, just because we couldn’t bake a cake the right way?!
Time’s Teeth, I was losing it. I was losing my mind. This was madness!
Host Ticktock laughed and laughed as he came around the table again, opened the oven and pulled the mold out, just like last time. He continued dancing and spinning as he went back to his place.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” he sang. “If every slice’s a different hour, how can a time-cake not go sour?”
Suddenly Silas was on him.
He’d grabbed the host by the collar of his vest, and the rest of us rushed to them, but the host never stopped smiling.
“Be clear and give us instructions. How do we bake that hour?!” Silas hissed, and his voice had changed, too. Most of his hair had turned to a deep gray, though age hadn’t taken away from his sharp jawline and the sharp look in his eyes. On the contrary—he looked…more.
“It’s easy, I promise. Easy,” said the host, putting his hand onto Silas’s face.
Then Reggie jumped in—“Don’t touch him!” he shouted, and grabbed the host by the vest and pulled him to the side.
He and Silas let go of one another—and I convinced myself that I was living in a dream.
Seeing these boys I knew turn into middle-aged men within minutes, and the girls teary-eyed and silver-haired—there was no magic that could do this, not so perfectly.
No magic that could make this happen right in front of my eyes like this, and so it had to be a dream.
Or an illusion. Or a different world, a different timeline—what mattered was that it couldn’t be real.
The host laughed, but his laughter had lost its shine just now, and we were moving away from him again.
“You must divide the hour, to make the hour,” he said, his voice low, dark. “It’s really, truly as easy as that.”
“How?!” Seth demanded, but I had already turned to the table together with March and Mimi and Cook.
We were searching what was over it again, the lanterns and the clocks stuck at six, the teapot that had somehow refilled itself when the game made us older.
Same with the bowls of sugar and flour.
It was a dream, wasn’t it? And didn’t Jinx always say that there was reason within dreams if we only looked for it?
I was looking. I had my eyes wide open, though the view tended to get a little blurry around the edges, now that I noticed. My mind was too crowded with other things to dwell on it for too long, thankfully.
The others continued to argue with the host, but he never changed his words. That’s all he said—divide the hour to make the hour.
I leaned closer to inspect the minutes marked on the teapot. Mimi did, too, from the other side of the table.
Then Cook said from her side, “Are those spoons?”
He was looking at the white bowl of sugar, but I’d taken one of the two bowls of flour to inspect it, because I could have sworn a teacup was drawn in silver on the inside of the porcelain.
“Guys—over here,” March called, as he leaned in to look at my bowl of flour. I shook it to move it to the side a little so we could see better, and…
“There.” It was a cup, all right. A teacup just like the ones that set this table, drawn in silver, barely visible, followed by = 3 m
“One spoon of sugar equals forty seconds,” Mimi said from across.
“One cup of flour equals three minutes,” I said, my eyes wandering to the mold and the triangular slices in it, and the teapot with the numbers near the handle. Twenty minutes.
“We must divide an hour equally, not just pour everything in together without measure,” said Cook. “Divide the hour—of course.”
“Five minutes,” I said as my mind worked. “Five minutes for each of us makes an hour.”
“And to make five minutes we need a spoon and a half sugar, a cup flour, and a minute of tea,” said Mimi with a wide grin on her face.
We paused, looked at one another, six on my side of the table, six across.
“Oh, good, good—nearly there,” called the host from the distance. “Not quite, though. He, he, he…”
We ignored him.
“We got this,” Reggie said. “We got this—let’s bake this hour right. Five minutes each. Let’s go!”
“And what if it’s the wrong answer?” Levana cried, hands over her head. “I can’t be any older than this—I won’t be!”
It irritated me to hear the sound of her voice, but I was already pouring the flour in my teacup. This wasn’t about her at all. It wasn’t about any of us individually. Now was not the time to break down.
“It’s okay, Lev,” the others said. “We’ll make it. It’s the right way simply because there is no other.”
“We’ll be back to being our young selves in no time.”
“And if we don’t, we’ll all be old together.”
This last one made her cry harder, which earned Cook an elbow in the gut from Mimi.
“I was just trying to help,” the Spade muttered, then got to work on his slice.
“A spoon and a half,” March said from my other side as he poured the sugar, then passed the bowl to me,
I took it, and handed him the bowl of flour, but he didn’t let go for a moment. Held on. Looked down at me.
“What?” I breathed.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, and wiped my mind of all thoughts as if by the pull of a lever. “I want to see you become this woman with my own eyes, little by little.”
Inside me, gears shifted and twisted and broke. New ones emerged.
“You’re looking right at me,” I whispered, and heat gathered in my cheeks like it always did when he spoke to me like this.
“And I’ll be looking right at you then.”
It was a promise if I’d ever heard one. It was a promise, and it broke me apart just as much as it put me back together.
March chuckled—and he sounded exactly like always, despite how he looked. He was beautiful, too, though I would never tell him that here. What those extra years had done to him was refine him even more.
“Ever baked a cake before?” he then asked, and finally let go of the sugar, and took the flour.
“No,” I said, blinking my eyes quickly to force myself to focus. “You?”
“Yes. I’ve baked a huge red velvet cake once.”
I was smiling when I picked up the spoon, and my hand wasn’t shaking anymore.
“I like red velvet.” I hadn’t had any in a while, but I always liked it.
“It used to be my favorite taste,” said March. “Before you.”
My cheeks could have melted off me.
“You done with that?” Russ asked, pointing at the bowl of sugar in my hands still. The others were all waiting.
I cleared my throat. “Yes,” I barely managed, and I didn’t dare reply, or even look at March again.
Focus. We needed to focus on the game.
“You know, now that I think about it,” said the host, who’d come closer to the table, had put his hands on the edge as he watched us pass the tea and sugar and flour.
“Seven’s really a wound, isn’t it?” He made a face.
“Seven’s a theft. Six is the hour that Time has left—six.
” He grabbed one of the clocks on the table and showed us.
He indeed looked panicked, now that I was looking at him while I waited for the teapot.
Host Ticktock wasn’t smiling for once, and as he slowly moved to the left of the table near the others, his eyes twitched, and his skin looked slick with sweat, too.
His eyes darted back to the tea and the sugar and the flour—then at Silas who was closest to him, pouring drops into his mold.
“Six. It’s supposed to be six o’clock. Tea-time o’clock at this table. No need for seven—really, friends, really.”
I narrowed my brows. Shook my head.
“I thought you wanted to be set free,” I said reluctantly. It’s what he’d gone on and on about—us setting him free by baking an hour.
“No, no—don’t pour the time, don’t pour the time!” he said, and charged for Silas, eyes suddenly bloodshot, but Silas had already passed the teapot to Anika on my side of the table, so he was able to push back the host easily.
“Don’t come near me again,” he spat, and the host moved farther back, those glossy eyes on Anika next as she poured the minute into her mold.
“Seven’s a theft,” he whispered. “Seven’s a theft!”
I didn’t understand it—but then again, I doubted I was meant to. The host had been so desperate for us to set him free, and now he looked like he was about to lose his mind if we actually did what we were supposed to do. All from one tick to the next.
I wondered—part of the game, or just Host Ticktock?
Maybe…he was trying to warn us, like those flowers had tried to do in the Tree of Years?
“Faster, faster, faster,” Seth chanted from across, watching Levana pour the tea next with shaking hands. When she did, Cook took the teapot, poured the minute, then handed it to Russ, who was right beside me.
Almost there, I reminded myself, trying not to look at the host, who continued to stare at Cook—then at Reggie on the other side as he poured the sugar, and handed the bowl to Silas.
Their side of the table had already completed the molds.
“Here,” Russ said, handing me over the teapot. I had to pour one minute—no more, no less.
I dripped the gold-colored tea onto my mixture of sugar and flour, then checked the measurements to make sure I wasn’t pouring too much. Another drop or two, and I had exactly one minute. Done.
March grabbed the teapot next—the last one. The others had already put their molds into the bigger one, while the host continued to make these strange sounds, to grab his head, to pace in front of the table back and forth, fast.
“Get it in there—go!” shouted Reggie, and the moment March and I put our slices into the mold, Silas grabbed it with one hand, and spun the oven around with the other. Reggie pulled the door open—and the host shouted.
“No! Not that cake—NO!”
It all happened so fast.
Silas put the mold into the oven.
Host Ticktock ran for him with his hands on his head, his eyes bloodshot, his teeth bared like he thought himself a snake, and was coming to bite us.
Reggie moved, stepped in front of Silas as he closed the lid of the oven, shouting, “STOP!” at the host, but he didn’t.
The host kept coming, and Reggie raised his arms to stop him, and in his right hand something shone silver.
A knife.
A pastry knife like the ones on the table. I hadn’t even seen him grabbing it.
The host fell right onto him.
“NOT THAT HOUR, NOT THAT HOUR, NOT THAT—”
His words cut off.
His breath cut off.
His eyes, blue and bloodshot, widened, but he no longer saw Silas. He no longer reached for him, either, but his hands fell over Reggie’s wide shoulders.
I must have been in shock because I only remembered fragments of the next few seconds—when the host continued to slide down Reggie’s arms, then fall on his side against the table; when Silas pulled Reggie back by the shoulders, and Reggie chanted, “He wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop…
” The blood on the vest of the host, right there over his gut. Dark blood. Fresh blood.
Then the host slid off the edge of the table.
A blink and he was on the ground. Everybody screamed—everybody gasped—everybody said to move back, but even so, when the others rushed around the table, I did, too. Couldn’t help it—it was instinct.
I went all around the table and I saw the host lying on the ground, not moving, not breathing, not blinking, his eyes wide open, looking somewhere underneath the tablecloth. My hands were over my mouth. A dead man, a dead man, a dead man.
I’d seen a dead body before. I’d seen Jinx, but that was different. Her face had been stuck almost smiling when she died. So peaceful—but the host’s had frozen in horror.
A hand on my arm pulled me back just as the ground began to move. Vines and ropes and sticks from the forest floor rose in the air, reached for the body of the host, and they began to wrap around it.
Screaming, crying, sobbing.
No sound left me, though, as I watched how those roots, twisting and turning like arms, moved the host’s body so they could wrap all around him better, until not an inch of him was visible to us anymore.
Within seconds, the roots had swallowed him, hat and face and vest and all.
Then something rang on the other side, and I did jump and I did scream and I did expect the world to go dark right away.
It didn’t, though. It was just the oven chiming.
The cake inside it was baked, and it chimed like a boiling kettle while a single ribbon of smoke curled up toward the canopy.
The next second, the clocks began to vibrate, then groan—then stopped.
The hands on them moved in unison.
The next time I blinked, it was seven o’clock in the forest. The tea party was officially over.