Chapter 34 #2
The figure held the clock to its chest, like it was suddenly afraid it might lose it.
And suddenly, around it the grass began to grow fast, the way grass didn’t grow, and seeds went to stems and to flowers in the time it took me to blink.
Trees erupted from the soil before my eyes, their trunks spiraling upward, their branches reaching for a sky that was filling with stars that hadn’t been there a moment before.
I could swear it—they hadn’t existed just now.
The ground shifted, flattened, spread outward in every direction like a disc being drawn in real time.
Then, just as fast, in barely a blink, the field was gone, and that heartbeat faded into the background noise.
After that, the scenes came faster—or maybe my attention shifted from one to the other quicker?
I couldn’t be sure, but the deeper I fell, the more I saw—except the images didn’t linger now, not the way they had a moment ago, in full vivid detail.
Now they were more like flashes, bright and brief, like lightning illuminating a landscape for a single instant.
A coronation. Two women kneeling before a crowd, crowns being placed on their heads, their hands clasped between them. The crowd was cheering, but one of the women with snow-white hair was squeezing the other’s fingers so hard her knuckles were white, and her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
A war—or rather, the end of one. Soldiers in court colors dragging themselves through mud, their chronobanks shattered, the sky above them the wrong color. A tower in the distance, burning. Someone screaming a name I couldn’t quite make out.
The sounds, the smell—it was all so wrong. So…painful.
But I didn’t have time to feel more because in the next blink the flash had changed, and now a child was in front of me, planting a glass heart on a tree.
Reaching up on her tiptoes, her mother holding her waist, both of them laughing when the branch dipped under the weight and the heart swung like a pendulum.
The child clapping her hands; the mother wiping her eyes—small, powerful things that settled right inside my heart like they now belonged there forever.
A Timekeeper, possibly older than Kohen, standing at the base of the Great Clock, looking up at its face with an expression of such complete and utter exhaustion that I wanted to reach in there, wherever (whenever) he was, and ask him what was wrong.
He was holding a wrench. His hands were shaking. He looked at the Great Clock and his lips parted—and then he was gone.
Another Timekeeper, this one a woman, crouching inside a room that was almost familiar—only because the ceiling of it was made of glass.
I could just see the light outside, but nothing else.
The room itself was dark and old and full of thick pipes crusted with decades of rust. Across from the woman, slumped against the wall, was a man, his eyes open but vacant, his hands moving in small repetitive circles against the stone floor—drawing something invisible, over and over, the same pattern, the same shape.
It felt…wrong. He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe right.
His chest rose and fell in a rhythm that was too even, too mechanical, like something else was doing the breathing for him.
The woman wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at a device mounted to the wall above his head—a small clock mechanism, half hidden behind a pipe, its gears still turning.
She studied it for a while, and then she reached up with bare hands and pulled something out.
A pin. A single pin, thin as a needle, and the gears ground to a halt.
The man on the floor jerked. His hands stopped drawing. His breathing stuttered, broke its mechanical rhythm, became ragged and uneven and human again.
He fell sideways onto the stone, gasping like he’d been underwater for too long.
Then the Timekeepers were gone.
The flashes came faster.
My heart beat louder.
One face, then three, then ten—light and dark and muted and bright colors—a knife, a hammer, a chair, a glass—too much, too much, too much, too much—
My eyes closed, squeezed shut tightly. My hands covered my ears on instinct as the noise seemed to get louder and louder, too. It was too much, too fast. I was falling way too fast, and my mind screamed and my muscles locked, and my heart said, slow down!
I needed to slow down.
I needed to, if I was going to continue to fall as I should.
The thought fell in the center of the chaos of my mind and settled all disputes. Slow, my heart said, and my body listened.
My muscles relaxed. My lungs filled all the way, slowly. My eyes opened again, and I was no longer going down like an arrow—more like a feather, slightly swinging to the sides.
The scenes, the moments that were being displayed on the walls around me had slowed down, too, the noise simmered, my focus strong and able to stick to one thing at a time again.
The next moment opened for me slowly, deliberately, almost hesitantly. Of all the scenes I’d seen so far, possibly hundreds of them before my mind nearly shut down, this was the only place I actually recognized with certainty.
It was the Distribution Room.
The same room I’d just been standing in.
The same Distributor, the same column that held it, the same ceiling—but it was also different.
A little newer. Cleaner. The brass plates of the column were brighter, the stone floor unscuffed, the walls more intact—the makeshift window we’d looked through was half as big here, as if the wall had just begun to break apart.
Most importantly, the room wasn’t empty.
She was standing there all by herself.
I came to a halt—mind and heart and lungs. I paused as if I no longer belonged to Time at all. I recognized her even though she looked different from how she looked now.
Then again, anyone would be able to recognize the White Queen when they saw her, I supposed.
She was…a girl. She was maybe a few years older than me, with pale hair pulled back from a face that was beautiful and tired and hard in a way that made me feel like maybe that hardness was new. Still uncomfortable on her features—a brand new expression she was just learning to wear.
The room was dark except for the amber glow of the pipes and the sunlight that slipped through the opening in the ceiling from where you could see the Great Clock’s underside. She moved through it with the confidence of someone who’d definitely been here before, had walked this floor many times.
She went straight to the Distributor’s base, knelt in front of the column, right there in front of the gear lock. The same gear-lock.
There were no tools in her hands, only white magic flashing from her raised palm—and then the panel opened.
Just like it had before, when Master Talik had spent minutes and minutes going through the sequence, the panel opened with a hiss that I heard as if I was standing right behind her.
Then the White Queen reached inside and pulled out plaques.
One, two, three, four—eight in total, each one the size of a large book, thin and light. She stacked them on the floor, on this black piece of fabric beside her, then closed the vault in one movement.
Mechanical, almost, how she pulled the edge of the fabric and wrapped the plaques with it. Stood. Looked around the room—not nervously, not with any amount of guilt or remorse, just with a straightforward expression on her face, like what she was doing was just a routine task. A chore, that’s all.
Then she dragged the bundle out of the room with ease.
“STOP!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, with my everything, but the voice that came out of me slammed onto the surface of those colors, and it couldn’t go through. I saw it as it turned back, as if my voice had color, as if it rippled in the air.
The door closed, and the White Queen was gone.
No, no, no, no—
Images in front of me, moving slightly faster by the second.
Horses running down a hill, people swimming in a lake—flash after flash after flash of landscapes and laughter, rain and tears, sunlight and the moon reigning over the night sky by herself—it all moved faster in sync with my heartbeat, until I was afraid I would lose my mind.
Until I closed my eyes again and forced myself to breathe.
Whatever was happening, wherever I was, it matched me. This place matched my heartbeat—it moved as fast or as slowly as I was thinking. Like it knew me inside-out.
And if the images were going to slow down, my heart needed to set the rhythm.
It was easy enough to do. I’d spent years forcing myself to calm down—the past few weeks at home especially. Being on the brink of losing my mind and talking myself off the ledge each time. It was easy, and then my heart was no longer galloping, and I was breathing deeply, too. Steadily.
When my eyes opened, the image in front of me played almost in slow motion.
I saw a woman dressed in white, a shawl over her head, a crystal crown shining on top of it. My breath caught right away, but the image didn’t speed.