Chapter 19
The tunnel beneath the hatch was narrower than I expected, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, the walls rough-cut stone, ice cold to the touch. Old.
That only increased my anxiety.
The air down here was different, too, thinner, colder, carrying a faint vibration that I felt in my chest rather than heard. Almost like, despite this place no longer being functional, it was still here. Still…alive.
Headfirst, I told myself as I looked at the darkness, not entirely certain I could get my feet to move when the time came.
“This tunnel is supposed to be sealed,” Kohen said, crouching at the entrance, right there over our heads. He ran his fingers along the edges of the hatch. “He most likely used the Sparetime to open this.”
“Stole,” muttered Russ from somewhere ahead. “The sneaky little—”
“He wasn’t sneaky—he was desperate,” Mimi cut him off, but Kohen ignored both.
“There should be blockades along the way, too, so either you find him by them—and I pray to Time that you do—or he broke through them as well.”
“How?” I asked in half a voice. “How will we know where to look?”
The old Timekeeper looked somewhere behind him. “Damon, is it ready?”
Footsteps, and then Damon, flushed cheeks and bloodshot eyes, crouched near the hatch, too, and offered him something.
“I can’t calibrate it properly without his clock, but it should still work,” he said, and Kohen raised the device to better look at it—round, flat, no bigger than a pocket clock, but thicker.
When he turned it over to inspect the back, the other side was etched with fine circles, and a single thin needle rested in the center.
“This is a seeker,” Kohen said. “We use these to find people, but they work as they should only when we can calibrate them to their clocks or chronobanks. Right now, we can’t do that, as Silas took his clock with him, but it should still guide you toward the biggest magical source it can sense. Hopefully, that will be Silas.”
Hopefully, he said, but he didn’t look very hopeful at all.
No, he looked worried as he leaned in to give us the seeker, and March reached out to grab it since he was the tallest.
Once he looked it over, he handed it to me.
The needle quivered in my palm, and at first, I thought it was just my shaking hands, but then it swung firmly to the left. There was no mistaking it—it was pointing left.
And I’d been twelve-hours certain we’d be starting right. Both sides of the corridor were equally dark, though, so it wouldn’t really matter.
“Follow the needle. It should lead you to him.” Kohen stood up, brushed the dust from his knees.
“And…if it doesn’t?” I asked—not that the answer would make a difference, but just to be somewhat prepared.
It was Damon who answered me. “Then use your eyes. Search. You found him once. You’ll find him again.”
Yes, that was exactly what I was thinking, too, except hearing him say it out loud made me feel…less prepared for some reason.
I could hardly believe it myself, but it had been better when they hadn’t told us what to look for exactly in the Labyrinth. It was worse now that we knew.
“I wish you all good-timing. Be careful down there. The Labyrinth is not safe, and people might be looking for you,” Kohen said, and he tried his best not to sound concerned. “And whatever you do—don’t linger in one place too long.”
For the longest second, we looked up at him, waiting, though I wasn’t sure for what. Nothing else was coming. Nobody else would be joining us. It was just us.
“Let’s get going then,” said Seth eventually. “Ora, get to the front.”
The gears in my stomach turned. I held onto the seeker with all my strength and nodded.
“I’m right behind you,” March whispered as the others made a little way for me to pass through.
Then we were on our way.
The tunnel stretched ahead of us, dimly lit by the same faded amber glow that seemed to be the Labyrinth’s signature light.
The seeker in my hand pointed steadily forward, the needle unwavering, and we followed it, March and I at the head of the group.
He never once left my side, which made this whole thing possible.
Headfirst.
At first, the tunnel was just stone. Rough walls, uneven floor, the occasional pipe running along the ceiling that dripped what I really hoped was just condensation onto our heads.
Our footsteps echoed, and nobody said a single word.
We walked fast, as if we were trying to convince ourselves that we weren’t afraid, or that we’d get there in just a minute, or that we weren’t trying to hide or rush or anything—but then the tunnel began to change.
The stone walls gave way to metal in sections. There were copper panels, green with age, bolted together with rivets the size of my thumb. The floor smoothed out and the pipes multiplied, branching and converging overhead like the roots of a tree. A mechanical tree.
Then the ceiling started to shift, too.
Stone became glass. Not all at once—in patches first, like windows cut into the rock. Thick, cloudy glass, green-tinted, but we could still see shapes above.
Soil. Roots. The underside of things.
“What in Time’s Temper is that?!” Erith whispered from right behind me, and instinctively, we all stopped walking.
Through the glass, we could just see a vast open space.
Maybe a room, or a clearing—it was hard to tell.
Rising from the other side of the glass were dozens of tall, narrow pillars arranged in circles, some broken, some tilted at odd angles.
Between them, strung like spider silk, were hundreds of thin silver threads that caught the faint light and glittered.
“I have no idea,” Levana said in wonder.
“It looks like…a game,” Cook said.
A game. At that word, something in my stomach dropped like I’d missed a step on a staircase.
“What kind of game?” I wondered because all those pillars and those threads…they could be anything.
“No idea,” said a few of them at the same time.
“Let’s keep moving,” said March, taking my hand in his while I held up the seeker in the other.
So, we did. It didn’t matter what that place over the glass was—we were here for Silas.
The seeker pulled us left at the first junction—a fork in the tunnel where the right branch sloped downward into darkness and the left continued on level ground. Thank Time it’s left, I thought but didn’t say. I didn’t want to go even deeper underground than we were.
The ceiling over us was entirely made of glass now. It showed nothing but darkness for a while, with pulsating lights blinking all around us—and then we turned a corner, and there was light. A lot of light coming from above, right through the ceiling.
The room over us was enormous. We couldn’t see too much—the glass was cloudy—but what we could see were trees or things shaped like trees.
Massive structures of twisted metal and wood, their trunks spiraling upward, their branches interlocking overhead to form a canopy so dense it blocked whatever light source existed above them.
Between the trunks, I could make out platforms at different heights, connected by bridges and ladders and what looked like nets made of rope.
“Holy Hour, that’s massive,” said Seth. “I’ve never seen a bigger tree in my life.”
“It’s got levels. Look—it’s got levels. Look at all those branches,” said Anika in wonder.
“How far does it go?”
“How high?”
“Do you think we could break this glass ceiling and get up there?”
“I’d very much like that. I can’t breathe properly down here…”
“Too narrow—”
“Too crowded—”
“Too hot—”
“How are we going to ever get up—”
They spoke at the same time, all of them, like they were relieved that they finally could. Relieved that everyone else was talking, too.
I couldn’t bring myself to say a single word, only look up at that massive structure, at those branches and those leaves, and what was glowing faintly on the bark—blue, but I couldn’t be too sure. I was too far away. I was…under.
“Do you think it’s real?” March then whispered from beside me while the others still talked.
“I don’t know. There’s…something about it.” Something I could almost touch.
“Guys—keep moving,” Cook said from behind. “The Timekeeper said not to linger.”
Of course, he was right.
On we went, March and I at the front, the needle of the seeker pointing straight ahead, but I wasn’t as terrified as I had been when we first started.
When the tunnel branched again, the seeker pulled us right, then right again, then down a short flight of iron stairs that rattled under our weight.
The next room we passed under was a bit darker, smaller, filled with what looked like mirrors arranged in a circle, each one reflecting something different despite the fact that there was nothing between them to reflect.
Something…shapeless. Like ink in a glass of water—or maybe the glass was too cloudy for us to see properly.
We didn’t stop to inspect it this time at all.
After that, the ceiling showed us a long, narrow corridor with doors on both sides, each a different color, each slightly ajar.
“Definitely games,” said Levana. “What else could these places be?”
“Are all these inside the Labyrinth?”
“It would seem so if we’re under it.”
Shivers ran down my spine. Apparently, the Timekeeper hadn’t been kidding when he said under the Labyrinth.
“So many games…”
“Guys, does any of it look familiar? Do you think we played one of these games?”
“How big even is this place?” Seth whispered. “Because it feels like we’re walking through its skeleton.”
“Thanks for the image, sandbrain,” Russ muttered, and he was right. Imagining we were walking through a skeleton did not do us any favors.
“Just saying,” Seth said with a shrug.
The tunnel opened into wider spaces the deeper we went.
More rooms than tunnels, connected with low archways and iron doors that were all open.
Any time we passed through, the needle on the seeker would vibrate so hard it made my arm move, which made me wonder if Silas had used magic to get through these doors, too.