Chapter 34
Ifell.
Not like you fall from a height—not fast or violent or with the wind screaming past your ears and the ground rushing up to meet you.
No, this was different. This was slow. Gentle, almost, if gentle could also be terrifying. It was like sinking into warm water—except the water was made of light, and the warmth was made of time, and there was no bottom at all ever.
The Distribution Room disappeared above me so fast. The doorway, March’s face, his hand still reaching for mine, the way he called my name—it was all gone, replaced by nothing in a blink.
Not darkness or light, no—nothing, the way the space between seconds is nothing—and I was suspended inside it, turning slowly, my arms out, my hair floating upward around my face like I was underwater.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The tools slipped out of my pockets. I watched them with my mouth open as they fell—or rose or drifted?—away from me, until they were too far to even make out anymore.
It occurred to me that I should have been afraid.
I should have been screaming at the top of my lungs by now, thrashing and trying to get to the top—but that was the thing.
There was no top, just like there was no bottom here in the nothing.
It was so quiet, so impossibly still that my body forgot how to panic.
My heartbeat was slow, my breathing steady. Even my thoughts that had been caught in a hurricane in my mind since we’d entered the tower went smooth and flat, like the octopus lake back home did after rain.
Then the nothing began to fill.
It started at the edges. Colors bled in from somewhere I couldn’t see, shapes forming and dissolving and forming again. They swirled around me, above and below and on every side, and I realized I wasn’t falling through nothing anymore.
I was falling through…a gallery.
Suddenly there were walls around me.
Well, maybe not walls. More like moments. Scenes, both frozen and unfolding at the same time, layered on top of one another like the pages in my sketchbook—and someone was flipping through very, very slowly.
Unlike my drawings, though, these had color. Lots of colors. Some were vivid, sharp and bright, every detail rendered with perfect precision; others were faded, blurred at the edges; a few like I was looking at them through fog.
Instinct took over and I leaned in to try to touch them just to see what they’d feel like, reached out my hand toward the nearest…moment? Scene?
It didn’t really matter what I called it. I couldn’t touch it or feel it at all—my fingers passed right through it, like I was made of nothing but light. Like I was a ghost here. An audience of one—while the view around me changed and changed, like a theater that stretched in every direction.
And the show was…well, everything.
Time’s Teeth, how could this be possible?
“How strange,” I said, but even though my voice reached my ears as a distorted sound, almost like I was trying to speak underwater, I still didn’t panic.
My heartbeat remained steady, my breathing even.
The sound spread about me, of everything at once—chatter, laughter, shouts, metal rubbing against metal, wood, things being thrown and things sliding and things clinking—there was a sound for everything.
I tried to focus.
The first scene that I looked at—really looked at—caught me by surprise.
It opened right before my eyes, bloomed like a flower. If flowers bloomed fully and all at once, that is. I was so close, I thought I could smell it—oil and metal and heat.
A workshop.
I’d been to a workshop when I was little. It fascinated me how machinery worked and how people worked on machinery—but this place I was looking at now was different. Older, rougher, the walls made of raw stone, the ceiling so low that the man standing at the workbench had to duck his head.
A Timekeeper—young, his hair ginger, his broad hands moving with a delicacy that didn’t match his size at all, his fingers threading a thin wire through a mechanism so small I couldn’t see it from where I…stood? Floated? Fell?
Impossible to tell, but my hair was still raised all around me, and my arms remained outstretched.
The Timekeeper in the scene I was focused on was building something.
A clock, if I had to guess, but not like any clock I’d seen before.
This one was round and flat and its face had no numbers, only symbols etched into the metal in a language I didn’t recognize.
His lips moved as he worked, whispering to the device like he thought it could hear and understand.
And when he set the final piece into place and the clock began to tick, his face split into a smile so wide and so pure it made my chest ache.
I didn’t know him, had never seen him before, had no idea what he was even doing with that clock, but I felt his emotion as if it was my own when he smiled.
How very, very strange.
He held the clock up to the light. It caught the glow of the forge behind him and threw it back in fragments, and the man laughed. A single, joyful laugh that bounced off the stone walls and filled the workshop with energy.
Then I was moving, turning, leaving that scene behind to bleed into the nothing beyond, and my eyes did the same thing when they could—they focused on the next that was closest to me, right ahead.
Meanwhile, the other moments or scenes or whatever they truly were continued to change and move and dissolve and reshape without stop.
Now, I was looking at a bridge, one I almost recognized—or my body almost recognized. Just this presence I felt in my chest when I took it all in. It arched over a canal in what had to be Neverwhen judging by the size of the buildings, the city’s twinkling lights reflected in the dark water below.
Two women stood at the center of the bridge, leaning against the railing, their shoulders touching. One had dark hair, cut short. The other had silver hair that fell to her waist, and she was laughing—the breathless, wheezing kind of laugh, like she’d been at this for a while.
The dark-haired woman said something I couldn’t hear. The silver-haired woman doubled over the railing, hands on her knees, shaking her head. Then she straightened up, wiped her eyes, and looked at her companion with an expression I knew.
I knew it because I’d felt it on my own face any time I looked at March these past…two days? Maybe three.
The dark-haired woman reached out and tucked a strand of silver hair behind the other woman’s ear—a small gesture, so ordinary, yet it spoke so much.
When they leaned in to kiss, the bridge and the canal and the lights dissolved before their lips met—and then I was turning again, spinning, falling.
The next scene unfolded in this new angle like it had been waiting for my attention all along. My mind buzzed as I chased the colors that came into existence, the shapes that drew themselves out of the air.
A room full of children, dozens of them.
They couldn’t be older than five or six, and they were sitting cross-legged on a wooden floor.
They were wearing white suits with colored patches at the pockets and collars, and their faces were turned upward, mouths open, eyes wide, watching something I couldn’t see from my angle.
Their expressions were identical—that particular blend of terror and wonder that only children could hold at the same time properly.
Then came a voice that shook me to my core, not because I recognized it, but because I heard it so clearly, just over the background noise that was made of all sounds together, simultaneously.
“And the Great White Rabbit looked upon what he had built, and he said: this is mine, and it is magnificent, and I shall share it with no one!”
The children gasped. One of them—a tiny girl with braids—grabbed the arm of the boy next to her. The boy grabbed the girl on his other side. A chain reaction of tiny hands holding other tiny hands, and the voice continued:
“But Time—oh, Time was clever, you see. Time was patient. Time said: you may keep your clock, Rabbit. You may keep your realm. But you will never keep me. For I belong to everyone, and no one, and especially not to thieves.”
The children squealed. The girl with the braids shouted, “Did the Rabbit cry?”
“Oh, he wept,” said the voice, and I could hear the smile in it. “He wept rivers of minutes and seas of hours, and his tears became the Spill, where time runs out and the falling never stops.”
The scene was already fading when the girl with braids whispered to the boy beside her: “I’m never-ever-reven going to steal anything.”
I barely heard the boy whispering back, “Me, neither.”
Such an intense, personal moment, and then they were gone.
More. There were more scenes, more moments, more whatever it was that I was looking at in this gallery.
The next came slower, almost crept in from below, rising to meet me as I fell—and the moment it took shape, I knew it was older.
Much older. The colors were muted, browns and golds and the deep, bruised purple of a sky at dusk.
The air I breathed suddenly smelled of grass and smoke and something sharp I couldn’t name, and the sound of silence became clearer over the background noise of everything else that was going on around me.
A field, wide and flat, stretched to the horizon.
Standing in the center of it, all alone, was a figure.
I stopped breathing.
Something about that shape. Something about that field. Something about something about something…
It wasn’t a man or a woman. It was…something in between, or beyond, with hands that were too long and feet that were bare against the grass and hair that moved in a wind I couldn’t feel.
Don’t ask me how I knew, but in the figure’s hands there was a clock—enormous and delicate at the same time. Its face wasn’t metal or glass but light, solid light, ticking with a sound that was less a sound than a heartbeat.
The heartbeat of everything.
Or so it felt like to me.