Chapter 1 #3
That’s why I no longer bothered to answer. It wouldn’t make a difference what I said, anyway.
“Leave her alone. She’s relaxing,” said Finn when they stopped to my sides and squatted near me, eyeing the hands I was working on, one smaller (possibly mine), the other bigger, reaching for it from across the page. Their middle fingers almost touched in the middle. Almost, but not quite.
“Aren’t you, Ora?”
Well, I wouldn’t call this relaxing. More like trying to hold onto my sanity, but…
“Yep. I’m relaxing,” I said.
“Could’ve fooled me,” Allan said, trying to reach for the pages of my sketchbook to see what else I’d drawn.
I closed it over my lap and threw him a look—he knew better than to try to touch my sketchbook. My drawings were me in my rawest form. The world didn’t get to see me like that.
“What? I just want to see,” he complained.
“Well, I just want to know what the whole world knows, but do you care?”
A flinch, followed by a flush on his round cheeks half-covered by a blond stubble that grew in patches here and there.
“You know we can’t talk about that,” he muttered.
“We want to, Ora, we do,” said Finn from my other side—and he did genuinely feel bad about it. I believed it—except it really made no difference to me.
“If you did, you’d tell me.” I focused on the surface of the lake instead, on the sun reflecting on it—like it was woven by a million diamonds.
“We can’t,” Finn instead. “Ora—it’s the queens! Nobody is above the law.”
“Truth be told, I’d tell you all about it,” Allan whispered from my other side. Goose bumps rose on my forearms. “But I care about ya, kid. I don’t want to mess up your mind even more. I swear it on Time.”
There. The thing that had made sure the queens’ will was fulfilled by my own parents, too. Everyone was told that they’d be damaging my mind if they talked about what had happened, that my mind needed its own time to heal.
And I’d believed that for a week or two. I had.
I didn’t anymore. Not only that they wouldn’t be damaging my mind if they told me the truth—it would only help me remember!—but also that I wouldn’t.
No matter what the royal decree or what their physicians—whom I’d never even met, by the way, so how could they have examined me or known how my mind would react?—said, I was not going to get my memories back. Not ever.
And that thought both terrified me, and gave me a sense of urgency, an instinct to rebel like I’d never had before, to move—speak—shout—do something!
Time’s Teeth, I should have never-ever-reven applied for the Turning Trials. I should have known it wouldn’t be a solution to anything—on the contrary. I should have known.
“—doing it again.”
“Ora, hello? Blink twice if you can see me!”
Finn was waving his hands in front of my face, speaking slowly, like time was suddenly moving in slow motion, and…my heart jumped.
My heart jumped like it was suddenly terrified of the idea.
My heart jumped as if she’d just remembered something, but my mind remained blank.
“Don’t bother—she’s not gonna respond,” said Allan.
“Maybe we should just get Uncle Neil,” muttered Finn.
“See that? She’s already not well in the head. I’m telling you, it’s not gonna change,” Allan.
I continued to stare ahead at the lake and pretend I didn’t hear or see them. Easy to do since I did tend to zone out all the time when my heart did strange things and the gears inside me twisted the wrong way and I kept waiting for something that just wasn’t coming.
I kept waiting for a memory that I knew would never arrive.
Meanwhile, the world around me continued to move and to breathe and to talk, like my cousins who felt like strangers to me now, but no more than I felt a stranger to my own self. It felt like something separated me from myself, from my own life, from the past, and the present, and the future.
“Let’s just go, okay? Uncle Neil can fetch her himself,” Allan said as he stood up, and he sounded afraid. “C’mon, let’s just go.”
“Ora,” Finn tried one more time, and it was hard to keep staring ahead, but I really just wanted to be by myself before my father came to get me. I needed another moment, so I said nothing, didn’t move an inch.
Finn stood up to leave, too.
“She gives me the creeps, I’m telling you,” Allan whispered as they went. “I keep expecting her to go all feral on us any second.”
“She really isn’t well…”
No. I really wasn’t, but…
“She really needs to go back to the queens so they can do something about it.”
“Maybe it was the clockbeasts.”
“Maybe it was the timewraiths.”
“Maybe it was the curse…”
My eyes closed and I released the breath I was holding.
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about a curse and a rogue Timekeeper—but any time I tried to ask anyone, they’d panic and run from me so fast it would have been funny if we weren’t talking about my memories.
My questions were the same inside and outside of me: unanswered.
I opened my sketchbook and continued to draw until Father came to get me to eat, but this time I couldn’t stop two tears from slipping and falling on the page, right onto the tips of those fingers that almost touched.