Chapter 23 #2
“Well, of course she is—she’s the queen!” Levana said, then looked terrified for a second like the words had slipped from her lips accidentally, too.
“She’s a thief,” Silas said through gritted teeth. “They both are. They use magic to stay in power. To keep themselves young. They use the magic that they steal from the land. From the people.”
“Silas,” Master Talik whispered, but he didn’t tell him he was wrong. On the contrary—the Timekeeper looked down at his lap, pale as a sheet.
“How long?” I asked, my blood rushing, heart racing. “How long have they been queens for? I keep trying to think if we ever learned about this, but we never did. They were always just…there.”
Silas met my eyes, a half-smile on his lips. “Exactly. Before, queens grew old and stepped down for new ones to take their place. They grew old within a few decades—but these queens have been reigning for almost five.”
“Five decades?” Because that couldn’t possibly be…possible.
“Yes. Five decades,” Silas said with a nod.
Which was ridiculous. “But they are so young.” They look forty at the very most. It made no sense.
Not that anything did lately, but still.
“They are not. They look like it because of all the magic they steal. They keep themselves young so they can hold onto power—don’t you see? They will stay in power forever.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Russ. “They can’t stay in power forever.”
Silas turned to him. “Why not? Who’s gonna stop them?” He waited a tick. Nobody made a single sound. “Who? Who’s going to stop them, Russ? The people that benefit from their theft? The rest of the Clockfolk who don’t even know why their lives are shorter and shorter, their magic supply lower?”
“It happens gradually,” said Kohen, almost to himself. “It happens only seconds at a time, so nobody knows.”
“Or if they do, if they notice, they just…die.” Silas shrugged. “It’s that easy when you have all the power, and ears everywhere, and soldiers and people to do your bidding without you having to even worry.”
“But…but they are queens,” Erith said in half a voice, and she was crying. Mimi was crying, too, and there were unshed tears in Seth’s eyes as he tried to stare at his hands over the table without blinking.
“They’re supposed to protect us, not steal from us,” Cook whispered.
“They’re supposed to take care of their people,” said Mimi, and she sounded so disappointed it was painful.
This whole thing was painful to all of us.
For a while there, all we did was breathe and think and try to hold ourselves together.
Did I believe what Silas and Kohen were saying?
Absolutely. Power corrupts. That much we’d been learning in school since forever.
There had been queens throughout the history of the Clockrealm who’d gotten greedy, who’d ruled in a way that had taken the people to poverty—but poverty was different from what they were saying.
Stealing money was very different from stealing time.
“How do we get to her?” I asked—and I wasn’t crying only because my mind was working fast, and March still held onto tightly to my hand. “How do we get to the Red Queen and confront her? Make her give us our memories back?”
Because at the end of the day, without our memories, none of this was ever going to feel real, at least not for me. If I was going to decide to try to do anything about this, I needed to know first. I needed to be whole.
It was Damon who answered me this time. “You can’t.
You can’t even get close to them, especially now when you’re wanted, and…
” His voice trailed off as he threw a look at Kohen, who had yet to raise his head.
“I doubt you can actually get your memories back,” he said, and my heart fell and fell. “She most likely erased them.”
There it was.
Just like that, it felt like my life had been indeed stolen from me for real because my hope was gone, down the hole, too fast for me to catch.
It had stuck with me until now, and it had been great.
I had never-ever-reven even considered the possibility that I would never get my memories back, and now I was spiraling.
My mind twisted, my thoughts all over the place, as if it was giving it one last try to remember.
One last try—and failing, and failing, and failing, and—
“No.”
No.
I blinked, looked at March as he leaned back in his chair and looked at my hand, played with my fingers, traced the shape of my nails with his fingertips. Calm.
No.
“She didn’t erase anything. The memories are still here.” He raised his finger and touched his temple for a second. “I feel them. I remember the echoes of them. They’re still here, only…”
“Out of reach,” I breathed.
That was it—that was the answer. He spelled it out for me perfectly—my memories were there. They were in my mind somewhere, hidden underneath a veil, waiting for me to uncover them.
“I draw. I drew all of you even when I didn’t know your faces. I almost remember.” And that was proof, wasn’t it? That was proof enough so that the hope could climb back up that hole and stay with me again.
“I dreamed of how each of you laughs. I knew without thinking which sound belonged to who,” said Mimi.
“And I knew your voices.” Levana.
“I know how all of you dance,” said Cook, then looked at Silas as if expecting an approval.
To my surprise, Silas nodded. “You did dance with all of us a few times.”
I danced with Cook.
The thought didn’t surprise me in the least.
“There’s…there’s a story in my head that isn’t mine,” said Seth, eyes on Levana. “I think it’s…it’s you. I see you near water somewhere. I can’t…I can’t explain it.”
“It was a game,” said Silas, a bitter smile on his lips as he shook his head. “We had to exchange memories in the very first game. They stayed with us even though they weren’t supposed to—a glitch in the game’s magic. But they stayed. I still have Reggie’s.”
My poor heart.
“When memories are erased, nothing remains behind. It’s how extraction works.
They don’t leave any kind of feeling behind, let alone fragments,” March said, and he sounded so sure.
He sounded so calm. So very confident in every word he spoke that I melted on the inside even in the state I was in.
There was something about this Heart boy that called out to every part of me, in every situation.
“Exactly,” Levana said with a shaky breath. “And when memories are erased, they don’t just disappear. They have to be extracted. They have to be put somewhere. There are devices made specifically for that.”
“Heartlocks,” said March with a nod.
“Heartlocks,” Levana confirmed. “Memories don’t just disappear. Even if they’re not here”—she touched her chest, not her head—“they are somewhere.”
“Unless someone destroyed the heartlocks, that is correct,” Master Talik finally said.
A long, loud breath left me and expelled all that fear from my body at once. “So, we find the Red Queen, and we get our memories back.” It sounded simple enough to me.
“Two problems with that,” the Timekeeper Kohen said, clearing his throat.
“You can’t get anywhere near the Red Queen without a hundred soldiers seeing you first, and if they see you, they won’t be merciful.
It’s standard protocol to attack to kill any threat to the queens as soon as they are identified.
You won’t stand a chance.” Shivers broke down my back.
“And second—even if you do somehow manage to get in front of the queen, you can’t force her to give you your memories back. ”
“She’ll kill you thrice before she can even begin to work the magic required for that,” Damon said. “It’s impossible. Truly—impossible.”
And it sounded a lot like it, too.