Chapter 36
The melody played in the back of my mind, sometimes whole, smooth; sometimes full of the wrong notes. Both were equally perfect.
And equally painful.
“Ora?! Ora, can you hear me?”
The image of her sitting there bathed in sunlight, pouring her heart onto that keyboard was at the center of my mind, shining in the dark.
Time’s Teeth, I’d missed her face—and was I crying?
How I’d almost forgotten the shape of her, the colors of her, the feel of her—and was I awake?
“Ora, look at me. Open your eyes, look at me…”
Holy Hour, I’d been holding on so, so tightly, my hands must have been covered in blood—and was that March calling me to look at him?
I thought it was. I thought he might be there for real if I opened my eyes, and my hands might be mine again, and Jinx would still be gone.
But she would also be…there. Inside me. Sitting in the center of my mind, playing her piano in the sunlight—forever.
My eyes were mine to open. They were wet, too—I’d definitely been crying.
But the tears were light, and they were refreshing.
They weren’t like the other tears, the ones that added weight to my shoulders.
These were different. These didn’t blur the memory of Jinx at all.
In fact, they just intensified it. She was absolutely still there.
I opened my eyes. March’s face was indeed above me—pale, his eyes bloodshot, his hair wild. His hands were on my cheeks, on my shoulders, pulling me up, but my body had yet to respond as quickly as he needed it to. That’s why I immediately tried to lie back down—was I lying on the floor?
Yes, I was.
In fact, I was still there, still on the threshold of the Distribution Room, and the humming in the air was so much louder, I hadn’t even realized it wasn’t in my head. No, it was out there, and there were screams in the background, too—“PICK HER UP, QUICK, PICK HER UP!”
Mimi.
I’m up, I’m up, I wanted to say, but my mouth didn’t quite work yet, either. Arms underneath me, and the more I blinked the more clearly I saw—March holding me in his arms, Mimi pulling a door closed, Silas right over my head, saying something to March in a whisper.
Then we were moving.
March ran with me in his arms. The melody of Jinx’s piano faded away a little as I tried to come to my senses, to hear better, to see, to understand—were we still in the Distribution Room? Was that humming the charge for the next hour? Was it going to kill us?
“Thirty seconds!”
Silas.
“The…the tools,” I thought I said, but I wasn’t sure the words came out right.
But the tools had fallen out of my pockets in the nothingness, and Master Talik needed them to get us out, but my eyes refused to obey me.
My mind refused to stick to reality just yet.
It was too tired from all those scenes, absorbing all those moments.
I was exhausted.
Even so, I kept saying it for as long as I was awake—the tools, the tools, they were in my pocket, and the best I could do was pray that they were somehow still there. That they hadn’t disappeared in the dark, but they’d come out here with me.
Eventually, I could no longer get my mind to even remember Jinx’s melody. I was gone.
“Ora.”
My heartbeat shook me like a drum in my chest, like it was the first time it was beating in forever.
“Ora, can you hear me?”
Yes.
The word remained inside me, but my eyes were opening. Blinking. Chasing away the darkness little by little.
And the melody in the back of my mind had already started again.
I wasn’t moving anymore. Nobody was carrying me. I was lying on something—no. I was sitting on something hard, and my head was on the side, lying on something soft—March’s hand. His other was on my cheek, caressing it.
I was no longer crying.
“Just give her time. She’ll come around.”
Silas’s voice pierced right through my mind and silenced even Jinx’s piano for a tick.
“We don’t have a second—we have to go!” Russ, if I had to guess.
“Not yet. We wait for the signal, not yet…” Master Talik.
“How much longer? They’ll be coming in any second now!” Mimi.
My mind spun and spun, and my tongue touched the roof of my mouth, and I finally said, “Silas.”
The name stumbled out of my lips like it was drunk. I forced my eyes to open with all my strength, and it worked. A little light slipped through—the amber hue of Master Talik’s hand-lantern as he paced around the room we were in.
Not a room—but a hallway. The walls, the floor were made of stone, and there was a stairway on the far right, and a door on the left, but no window. I had no idea if it was night or day, and I didn’t care.
“There she is.” Footsteps. “Brave Ora. Can you see me?” Silas.
I blinked and blinked and tried to move, and March helped me sit up straighter—I knew it was March from his touch alone. I knew the weight of his hands, the heat of his skin.
“Tools,” I thought I muttered—because that was the most important thing. I’d lost the tools, and—
“We found the tools in your pocket. We got them. We got them,” March said, and it was like he handed me the entire realm.
I hadn’t lost the tools. They’d been in my pocket all along, even if I’d seen them floating in that hole, and the realization gave me a much needed boost to get myself together.
I was sitting on the floor, and everyone was there with me, all the former Hands—well. Not all.
My heart beat and beat. My thoughts slammed onto one another. My mind had started running already before it could even walk, and everything I saw, all those images and sounds and stories came crashing into my head at the same time.
I was drowning, and thoughts were forming, old ones and brand new—but one thing stood out to me, pushed by my own instincts, my own guilt. A promise I’d made, threaded with words I’d heard back there in the Distribution Room, linked with a scene I saw in that gallery while I fell.
A moment in time. Someone else’s moment, but it had become mine even if I didn’t realize it then.
The Timekeeper drawing invisible images on the stone underneath a glass ceiling.
“Silas.”
“I’m right here,” he said, and his hand was ice cold when it grabbed mine. “We’re all here. Breathe.”
But breathing was not what I needed right now.
“Reggie,” I said, and I blinked and blinked, and I saw March first. I saw him now just like I saw him then, as I was falling. I saw him and I was reminded of why I could never stay in the past, even if I got to listen to Jinx play for the rest of eternity.
I could never because he was here.
And—the thought came at me slowly and calmly, like it was the most natural thing that had ever occurred to me—where he was, that’s where I’d be. Just like the day was wherever the sun went in the sky. As simple as that.
“Breathe, Ora,” said March, his hand on my cheek, his eyes wide open, concerned. “Breathe. You’re okay. We’re safe.”
A snort. “Yeah, right,” someone mumbled, but…
“What about Reggie?”
Silas was sitting on the floor on my other side, his hands still wrapped around mine, still ice cold.
“Give her a minute,” March said—but I’d had minutes.
“Pull me up.” My tongue was so dry, but the words still came out. March pulled me to sit up straighter until I realized I could keep my own body upright.
I was okay.
“You should have watched for the floor.”
Master Talik was standing right behind Silas now, looking down at me, mad, concerned, afraid.
And the others had all gathered around him, too, some squatting down, some standing, all panicked.
“You should have—”
“I know,” I cut him off. I knew I should have watched the floor.
His lips opened and closed as he analyzed my face. “You could have fallen forever.”
I swallowed hard. “I know.” But the fact that I wanted to at one point didn’t make it out into the world. That was for me to know.
A tick of silence.
Then the Timekeeper said, “Well, did you?”
“Did I what?” My mouth felt weird—I needed water. I was parched.
“Go stillward?”
Goose bumps on my arms. “I did.”
Slowly, Master Talik squatted behind Silas. “And?” he asked in half a voice.
“And…I fell.” Which hadn’t exactly felt like falling, but it wasn’t something I could explain just now. “And I saw.”
“Did you see Reggie?” Silas said, like he both couldn’t wait for me to answer, and he was terrified of what I was going to say next.
“No,” I said, and he held his breath. “But I saw a game. And I…” My eyes closed as the thoughts in my head raced for sense. “The Clockrealm is one big, massive Labyrinth.” The words popped up in the center of my mind, and I repeated one after the other. “Our lives are the games inside it.”
“I said that.” I opened my eyes, looked at Cook as he scratched his head, confused. “Didn’t I?”
I nodded. “And, if the Great clock were to stop, the games would end.”
“Hey—I said that!” Levana said. “Up there in the Distribution Room!”
Tears in my eyes as I nodded again.
“Ora,” said Silas, his voice half a whisper, almost like he saw it, too.
“The players would no longer be needed,” I said. It was so hard to choke the words out, but I did.
And Seth said, “Pretty sure I said that, but I could be mistaken.”
He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t.
“We’re all bound to the Clockrealm because it exists.
If it didn’t, we would all perish.” Seth said that, too.
And I heard, even if I couldn’t put it together yet.
Not without seeing those Timekeepers… “While I fell, I saw a room similar to the ones under the Labyrinth, and a Timekeeper lost to some kind of magic, and I saw another pull out a pin from the game’s machine.
The…the man wasn’t lost anymore. He just… fell.”
In my mind, it all made sense. It made so much sense—except I wasn’t sure I knew how to put it in plain words.
“Silas.” I pulled at his hand to get him to look at me—he’d been staring down at nothing just now. “Silas, if the game doesn’t exist, the players would no longer be needed.”
Just like we wouldn’t be if the Great Clock ever stopped.
His eyes closed. He let go of my hand. I leaned to the side—right onto March’s arm. He was there to catch even when I didn’t pay attention. His arm wrapped around my shoulders.
“How? Is that possible?” March asked—but he wasn’t looking at me or Silas. He was looking at Master Talik.
He slowly stood up again, a hand around his chin, his eyes down.
“It…might be,” he whispered.
“Wait, wait—hold on a second. Are you saying that if the tea party game doesn’t exist, the Labyrinth will let Reggie go?” asked Mimi. “Am I getting this right?”
I nodded and nodded and nodded. “I’ve seen it. I…saw it, Master Talik. The woman pulled a pin and the man just…stopped.” The scene was still playing in front of my eyes.
“Destroy a game,” said Silas. He, too, was standing now, pacing around just like Master Talik. “I’ve never heard of that before. The Labyrinth saves all games.”
“Not all,” said Master Talik. “There’ve been games that have been shut off. Erased before. When they continued to expand and consume more and more magic even after being shut down. They’re games—not exactly in someone’s full control.”
Now that made no sense to me whatsoever, but I didn’t get the chance to ask how that could be.
“So then how? Do you break the mechanism? Or the magic?” Silas stepped in front of Master Talik. “Have you seen it being done before?”
The old Timekeeper shook his head. “No. It hasn’t happened since I’ve been here.”
“But you know how,” he pressed, and he was right to do so because I could see it in the Timekeeper’s eyes that he did.
He sighed. Closed his eyes. Said, “Every game in the Labyrinth runs on its own clock—a mechanism built into the structure of the game itself, woven into the floor, the walls, the magic. It’s the heartbeat of the trial.
As long as that mechanism ticks, the game is alive.
It resets and runs and maintains whatever it needs to maintain. ”
“Including its players,” Silas said.
“Including its players.” Master Talik nodded slowly.
“The mechanism is what tells the Labyrinth that the game still exists. The Labyrinth doesn’t think—more like it responds.
It receives the signal and it responds by continuing to protect it, to feed it magic, as much as it needs, as long as it doesn’t get too… expensive, so to speak.”
“So, if the mechanism stops, does that mean the signal stops?” March asked.
“Theoretically, yes. The Labyrinth no longer receives confirmation that the game exists, so it has no reason to protect or feed it. It has no reason to hold on.” He paused. Looked right at me. “It would simply let go.”
“Of everything?” Mimi whispered.
“Of everything the game is maintaining. The space, the magic, the—” Master Talik swallowed hard. “The roles, too. Most likely.”
The words landed in the room like a stone, and they echoed in my mind for a while after.
“All of this is theoretical,” he added. “I’ve only heard of this—I’ve never seen proof or records.
The way the games are built now—we program their ending before the beginning.
There’s never a need to shut one off completely.
On the contrary—they go to great lengths to make sure the games can be reused and reshaped into whatever they want later. ”
“How?” Silas said—more like demanded. “How would one go about stopping the mechanism of a game, theoretically?”
“One would have to dismantle it from the inside.”
“How, though? Can you do it?” Mimi asked.
“I-I-I don’t know! I’d have to find it first, then take it apart piece by piece, in the correct order—but it’s dangerous!” He moved back, started pacing again, hands on his head. “It’s-it’s-it’s like taking apart a time-bomb—except the bomb is also trying to rebuild itself while you work.”
“But can you do it?” March insisted, and we were both sitting up straighter now, and I no longer needed support to hold myself.
In fact, the more we spoke, the more I breathed, the more I felt like myself. Like my body actually belonged to me now.
“I’ve never seen the tea party’s mechanism. I don’t know what it looks like, where it’s housed, or how many components it has.” Master Talik closed his eyes. “But…I suppose the principle is the same for every game…” His voice trailed off, and he didn’t finish speaking, though we waited.
Eventually, Seth said, “That’s not a no.”
Master Talik opened his eyes. Looked at each of us in turn.
“No,” he said quietly. “It’s not a no.”
Then the door far in the left opened fast.
Since my soul didn’t slip right out of me in those moments, it never would. A million scenarios crossed my mind, and it almost felt like going stillward again—but when it was over, it was over all at once.
Kohen’s face filled my vision and my limbs turned to jelly again. “Quick. We have less than two minutes.”
His voice echoed in the hall. Everyone rushed toward him, with sighs of relief and hushed whispers.
March and Silas were at my sides, my hands in theirs, and they pulled me up with ease.
“I can carry you,” March said, but I shook my head. My legs were strong enough to hold me.
“Let’s get out of here already.”
And we did.