Chapter 20
He was sitting with his back against the wall, maybe ten feet from the boy’s table, his knees raised and his cane lying across his lap. His hands were on his head. His eyes were open and on the boy’s back, full of unshed tears, bloodshot.
Two chronobanks lay on the floor beside him.
He didn’t look up when we came in, either, but for a very different reason.
The others saw him, too, once the initial shock passed and they started to look around. Suddenly we were all moving closer to him, cautiously—because who knew what to expect from this place after all we’d already seen? For all we knew the cups and saucers would start speaking soon.
“Silas,” I whispered, dropping to my knees to his side, right near the chronobanks. Both of them were spent, completely empty of Sparetime.
His eyes moved, locked on my face. He looked at me, barely saw me, then moved on to March kneeling beside me, and Mimi, and Russ, and Levana on the other side, who slapped him on the leg.
“You took my chronobank!” she whisper-yelled, and reached out to grab one of the two by my feet.
But Silas’s expression was worse than everything we’d seen down here so far. Worse than Calren’s bloody hands.
It was defeat. Complete, total, irreversible defeat.
I didn’t know this boy long, just like I didn’t know any one of them long. Not that I remembered, anyway, but I knew this. I knew the pain he felt, and it was my own somehow. It weighed on me the same way, even if it made no sense.
“He doesn’t know me,” Silas whispered, and every part of me broke to pieces. “I…I keep telling him…he doesn’t know me. He just…” His voice cracked. He pressed his lips together and looked at the boy at the table. At the mechanical pour-spoon-sip that hadn’t changed once since we walked in.
“He just keeps making tea.”
Tears in my eyes, sliding down my cheeks, and I wasn’t the only one crying. The others, too—most of them.
March then put a hand over his shoulder. “Silas, the Labyrinth will not let him go. Kohen told us this. He’s part of the game now.”
Silas looked up at him like he couldn’t understand a single word March said. “He just doesn’t know me. He doesn’t…he doesn’t know me. I begged him. I told him—he doesn’t listen. He doesn’t know me.”
“We all forgot,” March told him. “We all—”
“But you know her!” Silas suddenly shouted, his hand pointing at me. “You know her—and don’t tell me that you don’t!” My poor heart. “He doesn’t know me!”
A single tear slid down his cheek, and I fell together with it. All the way down to whatever existed at the bottom of the universe.
Mimi and Erith had their arms around themselves, their heads down, shoulders shaking, but the rest of us cried in silence. Passively. Without moving.
And we stayed like that for a long time.
The rhythm of the sound of that boy making tea was hypnotic.
At some point I turned and watched him going through the motions, and the longer I did, the more wrong it felt.
Not because of what he was doing, but because of how perfectly he did it.
No hesitation. No variation. The exact same tilt of the teapot, the exact same angle of the spoon, the exact same pause before the cup touched his lips.
A machine. Not a boy performing a task, but a machine running a program.
Mimi was the first to stand up. She walked past Silas and went straight to the little table. Pulled out the empty chair across from the boy and sat down.
All while we watched in silence.
“Reggie?” she said softly.
Pour. Spoon. Sip.
“Reggie, it’s Mimi. We were…I’m told we were friends. Do you…remember me?”
The boy set his cup down. Picked up the teapot. Poured.
“I’m afraid there’s no Reggie at this tea party, darling,” he said, and his voice made every hair on my arms stand up.
It was a boy’s voice, deep, a bit rough but with a sharper, colder edge underneath that felt fake. Unnatural. Like someone had taken a real voice and filed the warmth off it.
The boy said, “But you’re just in time for tea! Sugar?”
“Reggie, please,” Mimi whispered.
“The name is Host Ticktock, darling. Call me Ticktock. Tea?”
He picked up one of the cups on the table that I could have sworn was a round clock just a second ago and poured without waiting for an answer.
The tea was dark, and judging by the way Mimi wrinkled her nose, it smelled off, too. When it hit the cup, it didn’t steam.
Mimi didn’t take it. She just sat there, her hands flat on the table, her chin trembling.
“I tried everything,” Silas said, his voice barely a whisper. “I told him his name. I told him who I was. I told him about…about us. About the trials, about what he did, about why the game took him.” He swallowed hard.
“And?” I breathed, as if I didn’t already know the answer.
Silas looked at me, his eyes rimmed red. “He poured me a cup of tea and asked if I wanted sugar.”
March leaned closer, “Tell us exactly what happened. Exactly.”
But that made Silas laugh—a sharp exhale through his nose, joyless.
“I came down here, found him sitting right there, tried talking to him. He responds, but only as the Host. Everything is about the tea and the table and the damned game.” His eyes squeezed shut and my heart skipped a beat.
“I tried using magic—both chronobanks, every last minute of Sparetime in them. Nothing. The game’s magic is woven into him.
That’s not a costume he’s wearing. It’s…
it’s inside him.” His hand came up and pressed against his chest.
“But…he’s just a boy,” I said, tears streaming, voice breaking. “He’s Reggie. He has to know that…right?”
Then I was standing, seeker in hand, going closer to the table.
“Reggie, you have to know who you are,” I said—demanded it, like I had any right. “You have to know—look at us. We’re the Hands of the Turning Trials. All of us, together. We’re—”
“Oh, how lovely. Another guest. More tea!” And he grabbed another clock—a clock, not a cup, as the table was full of them—and he began to pour the smelly tea over it like he couldn’t even tell.
My mouth opened but my voice failed me.
The others came, too, all of them. They called his name, told him who he was, who we were.
We told him over and over again, but he didn’t listen.
That’s because he really wasn’t Reggie.
Whoever he had been before, he was now only Host Ticktock.
I don’t even remember how I moved away from the others, at what point I gave up. I don’t remember how I made it all the way back to Silas, sat there with him on the floor, rested my back against the wall. Watched the others try while Reggie offered them soaked clocks and told them it was tea.
Whatever was breaking inside me, it hadn’t stopped breaking. I doubted it ever would.
“Silas, we have to go.”
“No.”
“Silas.
“No—I won’t leave,” he said.
“They’ll find us. The queens, the…the Timekeepers, they know we took you. They know, and they’ll be looking for us. It’s only a matter of time before they find us.”
“I don’t care—”
“Of course you do!” I put my hand over his. “You do care. You care about us, don’t you?”
The way he looked at me. The way he accused me of using that against him, but I would do it again. I wouldn’t hesitate.
“If they find us, all of this will have been for nothing.”
He shook his head again and again, so lost when he looked back at the others, who were no longer trying to get through to Reggie, but only watched him pour his tea.
Then Silas said, “He’s in there, Ora.” My eyes closed. “I swear to you, he’s in there somewhere.”
I felt that all the way to my bones. His every word, every letter etching itself inside me. I felt his hope as I’d felt his pain. I felt the want he had for what he said to be true.
And how in the world could I possibly go against it?
“Then we’ll find a way to get to him.” I squeezed Silas’s arm and I turned to him, looked him in the eyes.
“We’ll find a way to get to him, but we can’t do that today.
We can’t do anything if we just sit here and let them find us.
But if we leave, if we’re free, we can find a way to break whatever magic is holding him here.
” Because if everything they said was true, I doubted the queens would simply put us in prison if they caught us.
I doubted that very much. They wouldn’t bother—and Silas knew it.
But when he spoke again, he put a mountain right over my shoulders.
He said, “Do you promise?”
Time’s Teeth, I’d never been so empty of air in my life.
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. Weighed me down. Tore me apart, inch by little inch.
Eventually, I said, “I promise.”
I promised him, and I thought they were empty words, but the promise stuck to me. Stuck to my every cell, to my heart, to my soul. It threaded itself with the very time that made me. It became absolute—a true promise, one I intended to keep.
Even though I knew I couldn’t.
“He doesn’t remember anything.”
“He’s worse than we are…”
“He refuses to even look me in the eye for longer than a second!”
“Time’s Teeth, what have they done to him?!”
The others were back, standing all around us, looking back at the boy who continued to pour his tea and drink it as if we weren’t there at all.
The host of the game.
He was the host of the game, no longer Reggie.
Then March said, “We have to go.”
“I can’t leave—” Silas started, and I grabbed his hand the same time March squatted in front of him.
“You can if you don’t want to cost all of us our lives,” he said, looking at Silas from under his lashes. “We might not remember any of this, Silas, but we’re not leaving here without you.”
True words. I felt those, too, deep in my soul, and the fire that existed inside me for him burned a little brighter, with a different flavor.
I looked at March’s face for a second, really looked at him—the way his eyes had darkened as he stared at Silas, an honest stare, an almost dangerous stare, while he made his own promise.
And I knew beyond a doubt that he would keep his.
He wouldn’t leave here without him no matter who was coming, and whatever knowing that did to me, I felt a little fuller. I felt a little…more.
“That’s okay. We’re leaving,” I said, squeezing Silas’s hand. “We’re all leaving.” Our eyes locked. “For now.” And then we would come back. And if we couldn’t find a way to get to Reggie, we could just stay here forever.
It was less mad than everything we had lived through already, wasn’t it?
Yes, we could stay here.
Just as long as we tried first. We really tried to right all the wrongs we didn’t remember.
Silas closed his eyes and released a long breath. Two tears snuck out and slid down his cheeks fast, like they just wanted to be done with it.
“We’ll figure something out,” Mimi said, wiping her own tears. “We’re not going to leave him here—we will figure something out, but not here. Not underground, not with the queens looking for us, not when you can barely stand and when we don’t remember even knowing you.”
“We will. We’ll figure it out together,” said Cook.
“Together. Out of here.” Seth.
“As long as we’re free, we can always come back.” Anika.
“We’ll get him out out. Just…not today.” Erith, and she turned to look back at the boy, and so we all did together for a beat.
Then…
The boy—the Host poured another cup and raised it up, turned his head toward us just slightly. “Leaving so soon?” he said. “Tick-tock, darlings. Tick-tock.”
We all flinched when he chuckled—the sound wrong, even if I couldn’t say why.
But when March and Russ leaned in to grab Silas, he didn’t protest. They pulled him up, put his arms over their shoulders, and I took his cane.
Silas didn’t fight. He didn’t argue. He simply kept his eyes on the Host as the boys pulled him back toward the door we’d come from, until we were outside.
None of us looked back.