Chapter 28 #3
“As many as you want,” said March, half a smile on his face as he watched me.
So, I reached for another glass heart.
Then another, and another…
A man on a bench, holding a hand I couldn’t see, the feeling of love so powerful it could blind me if I felt it too long.
A boy lying on his back on a rooftop. Stars everywhere on the dark sky. On his tongue—and mine—was the taste of something sweet, and in his chest the certainty that the person beside him would be there forever.
Then there was a girl running through rain as her heart all but soared from her chest, pumping with an almost reckless happiness that knowing you were about to see someone you loved brought.
A boy playing with a cat in a field full of roses.
A woman painting at twilight, a rich mixture of orange, blue, white and purple on her canvas, an identical replica of the sky ahead.
A dark memory, unlike any other, because whoever it belonged to had her eyes closed, and she only felt—her hands pressed to another pair, her lips pressed to another pair, her heart beating the same as the one in the person she was chest to chest with. A kiss suspended in time forever.
Each one was different, the most precious moments in the lives of people I’d never know, never meet. Every memory felt like mine while I held those hearts, like I was borrowing them and giving them back, while I remained slightly fuller than I’d been before. Like the emptiness in me was…less.
Incredible how they were all almost the same, too. They all featured someone the person loved the most—a partner, a child, even a pet. They were all shared memories they’d chosen to immortalize.
March walked right beside me at all times. Sometimes he touched one too, and I’d watch his face change — soften, open, full. Once he chuckled that sound I loved, and when I looked at him, he said, “A dog! They saved the memory of a dog stealing food from a table.”
I laughed, too. Then somewhere along the laughter, I also cried. It was like I was being cracked open but also being filled up at once. All these people, all these emotions—and it was all just love wearing different faces.
Eventually, we stopped on one of the other red benches, and the glass hearts clinked above us, and the light shifted through the canopy in slow, steady pulses. People walked past us, only a few, but they were all focused on the hearts. Nobody paid us any attention.
We were quiet for a while, just sitting there, holding hands, absorbing everything we saw.
Then March said, “I used to come here when I was a kid. My mother brought me first, and then I snuck out and came back any time I could. She held me up so I could reach the hearts, and when I came back alone, I jumped from the benches and climbed the branches I could climb.” He looked at his hands holding mine between them.
“I think that’s why I make glass. I think my hands fell in love with the feel and shape and texture of these hearts from the beginning. ”
My eyes filled with tears again. “I wanna see your work so badly,” I said, in awe of him, the way his face looked from where I was sitting, the way the light brought every color on him to life.
“I’ll show you,” he said. “When this is over, I’ll show you. And I’ll bring you back here, too.”
I smiled. “You already brought me.”
“Then I’ll bring you again.”
“And I’ll hold you to it.” Because I already knew that this would be my favorite place in all the courts, too. Maybe it already was.
I rested my head on his shoulder, and he rested his forehead to mine. Like that, we breathed in and existed in the moment, surrounded by memories.
Then March said, “We have to go back.”
I flinched. “I know.”
Neither of us moved.
“March?”
“Hmm.”
“When we come back here, will you make me one of these? I want to leave it here in this Garden, even if I can’t put in a memory.” I was no Heart, but I could still think of a memory to immortalize.
A kiss on my forehead. “I would be honored,” he whispered, and my eyes closed for a moment. “What memory would you put in if you could, though?”
I didn’t need to think about it long. “This one,” I said. “This bench. This garden. This.” None of this would look right in graphite because unfortunately, you can’t draw light. And that’s what he was. That’s what this whole place was.
Another kiss on my forehead, and this one felt like a promise.
We sat a little longer. Just a little.
Then we walked back through the garden, hitched a ride on the back of another cart heading the right direction—this one carrying barrels of wine, which March said was very typical of the Court of Hearts—and made it back to Vesta’s.
I was happy. I was sad. I was everything in between.
The others had noticed us gone—of course they had. Master Talik was pissed off, eyes red with anger, and he asked us if somebody had seen us at least a dozen times.
But one whisper in his ear from Vesta, and he seemed to calm down as if by magic.
We said we were out for a walk. March insisted that he’d only wanted to show me around his home.
They had no choice but to believe him—and it was the truth, in a way.
And those who didn’t…well. There wasn’t much Damon and Master Talik could do, anyway, and Vesta kept winking at us, as if she knew exactly where we’d been and what we’d done.
But then it was time to go.
Master Talik was a damn liar. The ride back was worse.
Maybe because we knew what was coming this time—the anticipation made it ten times harder.
Every hum that built behind us in the conduit sent my stomach into my throat before the pulse even hit, and by the fifteenth slam of speed, I’d stopped trying to keep my eyes open altogether.
I just pressed my face into March’s shoulder and held on and counted.
Mimi threw up somewhere around pulse twenty-three, and Russ around thirty.
By the time Master Talik called out “Last one!” and the final wave of energy slammed us forward and then released us into stillness, we were all shaking so badly that climbing out of the runner took twice as long as climbing in.
We lay on the tiled floor near the hatch for a good five minutes, nobody speaking, nobody moving, just breathing and being grateful that the ground beneath us was solid and still.
My stomach was completely empty—none of us had dared to eat before the journey, remembering what happened on the way there—and now the hunger hit all at once, sharp and mean, mixing with the nausea in a way that made me unsure whether I wanted food or whether the very thought of it would finish me off.
Russ was the first to sit up, pale as paper, and say what we were all thinking: “If anyone mentions food right now, I will end them.”
Nobody did.