Chapter 8 #2
These corridors were alive. Pipes ran along the walls on both sides, some as thin as my wrist, others wide enough to crawl through.
They hummed, too—a low, constant vibration I felt in my teeth more than heard with my ears.
Even the air was different here—warmer and damp, almost like copper against my tongue, and there was plenty of light, too, much more than in that room.
It was coming from the pipes themselves—an amber glow that pulsed every few seconds in perfect sync with my heartbeat.
None of it was scary, though.
Except the floor beneath our feet that was made of metal grating with only darkness below.
Ice-cold shivers rushed down my back.
“What is this place?” asked Anika as we followed the Timekeepers, passing closed doors of all sizes and shapes. The deeper we went, the louder the hum became, until it was almost a pressure against my body. I felt it everywhere.
“Old tunnels that Timekeepers used a long time ago to travel through courts,” Kohen said.
“You traveled through courts underground?” Levana said.
“Our ancestors did all the time, yes.”
“But…why?” Mimi wondered, just like I did.
A quick look back—and Kohen looked bigger in the soft shadow that the amber light cast everywhere in this tunnel. “Because it was safer,” was his answer.
I looked up at March walking beside me, resisted the urge to grab his hand. I kept wanting to—like it was natural, like I was supposed to be doing just that, but luckily, I held myself back.
“Safer…from what?” asked Russ from behind us.
“From the Clockfolk, young man. From the Clockfolk,” said Kohen, and his friend the younger Timekeeper threw us a look back before he continued ahead.
We’d always heard about how Timekeepers were…sort of separate from us. That’s what we learned growing up—that they were they, and we were we, and we weren’t the same.
Except, we kind of were. There even were Clockfolk with ginger-ish hair in the Court of Spades, and maybe the Timekeepers accessed magic a different way, but we all lived in the same world. Father said we weren’t different on the inside, where it mattered, and I tended to agree.
We’d learned in school that a long time ago, Timekeepers and the Clockfolk were much more divided.
The Clockfolk had always tried to sort of keep them under control because of the story of our creation.
The Great Rabbit was a thief, despite having created the Great Clock.
He stole from Time, and since Timekeepers were believed to be his descendants, the Clockfolk had always regarded them as… suspicious. Untrustworthy.
I never knew they had tunnels underground to travel through the Clockrealm, though. It must have been awful for those who came before.
“So, how long until the Labyrinth?” asked Cook from the front of the group. We were walking in twos and threes, and he and Mimi led the rest of us.
“Just a little more,” Kohen said.
“Really? We’re that close?” I wondered.
The Timekeepers didn’t answer, only quickened their pace.
They moved fast, turning at junctions without hesitation, ducking under low-hanging conduits that none of us would have seen until we slammed our heads onto them. Almost like they knew the whole place from memory.
At one point the tunnel narrowed so much we had to walk single file, our shoulders brushing the pipes on either side. At another, the floor shifted from grating to bare rock, then grating again.
Everything was the same, but…different.
A little while later, we climbed a set of iron rungs bolted into the wall that brought us up through a vertical shaft barely wide enough for March’s shoulders. Other than a few complaints here and there, nobody spoke or asked the Timekeepers anything. We just focused on getting ahead.
Then they stopped abruptly.
“Halt,” said Kohen, and the voice traveled on both sides of the corridor like his words were running. I stretched my neck to try to see a door, but then he and his friend pressed their hands against a section of the ceiling.
Magic in the air, colorless this time. A tick later, a hatch opened above us, letting in the first breath of cold night air I’d tasted in what felt like days.
Not sure why I expected sunlight when we knew that it was a little after one in the morning—Cook, Levana and Seth had clocks with them.
Still, I was almost surprised to find the sky dark.
The rusted metal of the ladder scratched my palms on the way up, but I didn’t even flinch. We climbed out one by one into tall grass, the night dark above us—and just there to our left, the golden tips of these high fences caught the moonlight not twenty feet away.
“What’s that?” asked one or the other as I rose on my tiptoes to try to see better, beyond the trees and to the other side of that fence.
Kohen simply said, “That’s the Labyrinth.”
Goose bumps on my flesh.
The fence. It was the Labyrinth fence.
“Keep moving,” the Timekeepers said, and they led us closer to them.
I waited as March helped Erith up, who came through last. He looked a bit surprised to find me standing there when everyone else was already gone.
Which in turn made my cheeks feel like they were burning.
Maybe I should have gone, too. Maybe it was just an accident that he sat close to me at the table or that he walked with me through the tunnel. Maybe—
My eyes know your face.
His words repeated themselves in my mind like a mantra.
Yeah, maybe not.
Together, we followed the others. The fence was taller than I remembered. Not that I remembered much—only the golden tips of it from the carriage window, the way they caught the last of the sunlight that day I woke up in the middle of the arena.
But my body remembered more, though. The moment my fingers wrapped around the cold metal bars, something in my chest twisted so hard I had to close my eyes and focus on drawing in air.
Like I’d done this very thing before. Like I’d grabbed these bars, had felt the coldness of the metal, too.
“Keep walking. Just a little longer,” Kohen said as he continued down the long grass, walking right next to the golden fence.
“How exactly are we going to get through?” Russ asked.
“There’s a narrow gap close to the east here. It should fit all of you, though maybe…” He looked back—right at March beside me. “You should all fit, yes,” the Timekeeper concluded.
A minute later, we found the gap—and it was half a fence bar missing. Very narrow, indeed.
Kohen then looked at March again. “The rest will fit, but you…you think you can make it in there?”
“I will,” March said without missing a beat. He didn’t sound worried in the least.
I leaned in a little and whispered, “You sure?”
“If you go through, I’ll go through.”
He said it simply, like it was a fact, like it was natural, like it was as easy as breathing to him to admit it out loud.
The gears inside me must have been malfunctioning because I could have sworn I heard them groaning—just before my lips stretched and curled and opened to reveal all of my teeth.
Whatever was wrong with me, it was coming from deep, deep inside, and I had no hope of controlling it. At least not yet.
“Aren’t you going to show us the way?” asked someone from the front, taking both our attentions back to the Timekeepers.
“Like I said, we cannot enter the Labyrinth grounds. It will not let us through,” Kohen said.