Chapter 37
We made it back.
Somehow, we made it back to the fields right outside the Labyrinth fence, and nobody was after us.
Nobody had followed, and no soldiers had been searching the perimeter at all.
According to Kohen, Damon’s distraction had worked much better than anybody had thought.
Nobody had suspected it wasn’t an accident at all.
Which was good news, except I couldn’t bring myself to be relieved because of how the gears inside me were turning—fast, then slow, then crawling to an almost stop, like my heart half intended to stop altogether.
Like it had done when I was listening to Jinx playing the piano.
But the worst part was when, just before we reached the hatch where Damon and the other Timekeepers were waiting for us, I had to stop and turn at the last moment, let go of March’s hand, and throw up right there on the grass.
The sun had already begun to rise, and I could see just fine, and the only thing that came out of me was bile. It didn’t last long, and March held my head and pulled my hair back, but by the end of it my strength was nearly gone. I was still standing, still able to walk, just not as quickly.
“Let’s stop,” Silas said when March helped me toward the hatch again, where all the others were still waiting for me. “Let’s sit out here for a while. We need to breathe.”
“It’s dangerous, too dangerous,” Master Talik said, but the idea of sitting there on the grass and breathing for a bit while the sun took over the sky sounded better than the Everstill.
The others thought so, too. We all needed a moment.
“Nobody’s coming, and if they do, we’ll see them,” Russ said. “It’s still dark. Let’s take it easy.” He had already sat on the grass right next to the hatch.
Luckily, I’d thrown up far enough away. I was mortified as it was, but when I sat down next to March and allowed my body to let go of its weight, I felt better right away.
Until Master Talik squatted in front of me all of a sudden, took my face in his hands and began to check me—pulled my eyes down, checked my nostrils, told me to open my mouth wide, and then practically stuck his thumbs into my ears and asked me if it hurt.
It did but only because he pressed so hard I thought he might crack my skull.
“You’ll be all right,” he concluded. “You’re lucky to be awake. You’ll need time to regain your strength—but when you do, I’d very much like to have a talk about it.” He looked at me with such wide, hopeful eyes. “If you’re willing, of course.”
“I am. We’ll talk.” I saw no reason why I shouldn’t tell him all that I saw. In fact, Master Talik could maybe help me decipher some of the scenes—especially the one with the figure standing alone at dusk with the clock in his hands.
Master Talik nodded with his lips pressed, clearly relieved, like he’d expected me to say no.
“How was it? Did it hurt?” Mimi asked.
“Not at all. It was…not too bad, actually.” I saw my sister, I thought but didn’t say.
“It is very bad. The stillward isn’t a place for a person. The mind is too fragile,” Master Talik said.
And I knew exactly what he meant—I felt like I was still there. I felt like my thoughts kept crashing and burning and merging and mixing with too many impossibilities, too many timelines, too many feelings.
“She was only there a moment,” March said, which made me wonder.
“How did I get out, anyway?”
“You were holding onto the edges. I reached in and grabbed you, pulled you out,” March said, and my heart did a flip.
“What, you mean right away?”
“Yes, maybe a few seconds.”
A ringing in my ears. “That’s impossible. I was there a long time. Maybe a full day. Possibly more.”
But now that I was thinking about it, we’d just come out of the tower, and we hadn’t stayed there for a day, had we? We would have been caught.
“Seconds,” March insisted. “Your hand slipped from mine, and then you were holding onto a rock’s edge, and I reached in and grabbed your wrist, pulled you out.”
“Yes—I was there. I saw the whole thing,” Mimi said.
“But…” It had felt like so much time to me. More than just one day—maybe a few. Maybe even longer.
All those images, all those moments that had played around me in real time…
Except— “There is no time when you go stillward.” Master Talik’s voice emptied my mind for a moment.
He said, “Everything happens at once. There’s no time or space—you’re falling through a gap, a literal tear in Time’s fabric.
” A hand over my leg. “I don’t know how you made it out the way you did, but the next time, really, young lady—watch the floor. ”
Shivers broke down my back, ice cold.
Master Talik stood up and went to speak to Kohen in whispers, both their eyes on me one second, and around us the next.
“How did you make it out, Ora?” Mimi asked, her green eyes wide and warm, her curiosity shining through.
I shook my head, looked at March. You, I wanted to say but I didn’t. “I just…chose to come back here. I don’t know, I don’t think I did anything special.” I just chose to let go.
“What was it like?” March asked. “What did you see?”
By then, all the Hands were sitting around me on the grass, while the Timekeepers stood by the open hatch and waited, clearly anxious, hoping we’d wrap it up soon.
I didn’t look around, didn’t think I could handle the stress, to be honest, and I seriously doubted I could stand at that point. But I could still speak.
“It was like a gallery,” I told the others.
“It was like…watching stories play in real time from far away. Glimpses, some fast and some slow. I saw things from years and years ago, and from recent times, too. I saw…my sister.” The words stuck in my throat, hesitant to come out, but I somehow found it necessary to speak them.
I never spoke about Jinx. Not unless I absolutely had to. She was mine. Her memory was all I had left.
But that was before I knew just how tightly I’d been holding on. Before I knew that I was keeping myself at the bottom of the sea.
Letting go was painful, but it felt like I was already at the surface. I was breathing. And Jinx’s memory was too precious to keep to myself…wasn’t it?
“What was Jinx doing?”
Just the sound of her name on someone else’s lips.
Silas—of course Silas knew her name. I probably told him myself.
I smiled as tears pricked the back of my eyes. “Playing the piano.” And that memory was what I’d hold onto to keep me afloat for the rest of my life.
Silas smiled at me—an honest smile, the first one I’d seen on him since this madness started.
“I also saw her,” I whispered, as a tear slid down my cheek—but it was a happy tear. A relieved tear. “I saw the White Queen.”
And I saw her more than once, but—
The questions were immediate. How—what—where—when?! And the panic was clearly visible in every set of eyes looking at me. Even the Timekeepers stopped what they were whispering about and looked at me.
“She stole the plaques—I saw it,” I said, and the scene played itself in front of my eyes. “I saw it twice—once while she took them out of the column, dragged them away in a big piece of fabric, and once when she hid them—”
Their voices fell on me like they had physical weight. I understood their frustration, though, but they didn’t let me answer at all until Master Talik shouted, as loudly as he could, and for once he wasn’t looking around. Nobody was.
“Speak, Spade,” he said when the others finally rested, and I did.
“I saw her walking down a narrow corridor, dragging the plaques wrapped up in fabric behind her, and she took them into this strange room—all white, with dishes placed in wheeled racks. It was…” My eyes closed and I tried to think back to the room, and I saw it in my mind’s eye as I’d seen it for real.
As if I’d been in it myself and not just seen a flash of it in the gallery while I was stillward.
“Clean. It smelled clean. There wasn’t a speck of dust in that room. ”
The words spun and spun in my mind just like I’d been spinning down that hole…
“The royal palace,” Kohen whispered. “Talik, they have them in the royal palace.”
“Was anybody else with her?” March asked, but I shook my head.
“I saw her twice—once when she was younger, in the Distribution Room, and once when she was older, in that white room.”
Silas was unusually quiet as he stared at the grass. The colors of the sky had brightened, and there was more light to see with now. I could see the calculating look in his eyes as his mind worked.
The others threw ideas around.
“The palace is north,” Kohen said, turning to look beyond the tower and the Great Clock. “Past the Veil Road. We’ve seen it from a distance but never…” He stopped, shook his head. “No one goes there without an invitation.”
“Then we get an invitation.” Levana.
“From who?” Cook.
“There must be servant entrances, right?” Erith. “Every palace has servant entrances—you know, for supplies and such.”
“We could blend in. We could dress up. That’s not a bad idea.” Mimi.
“It’s an absolutely terrible idea.” Master Talk.
“There must be openings, breaks in the shields, and ways to identify them…” Silas, almost to himself.
Then…
“I’ve seen a white room full of dishes on racks.”
Every person out there on the grass turned to Russ. He was standing there, pale as a bone, scratching the back of his head, flinching. “I-I-I saw a room like that the other night when we were in the palace. The palace in there.” And he pointed his finger toward the Labyrinth fence.
Mouths opened and closed. Eyes blinked, moved from his face and to the Labyrinth, to Master Talik.
It was a long time before I found enough voice to ask, “Where?”
Russ shrugged his shoulders. “In the room beyond the kitchen.”
The room beyond the kitchen.
How strange that those words kept spiraling in my head over and over, even as I ate.
Even as I thought through all the things I’d seen, told March all about it while we rested in his room with the glass floor, thinking maybe I’d missed something important.
Maybe there was something more to all those scenes I’d seen—maybe none of them had been accidental.
Maybe I’d seen what I’d needed to see—and it felt like I was missing something.
Even as I told March, and even as we went over the biggest, slowest memories I’d seen, the feeling didn’t go away.
The plan was to rest, to sleep, to eat, and to go back to the palace, to check the room beyond the kitchen Russ insisted was exactly like I was describing it—dark corridor, white room, with racks on wheels lining the walls, all full of spotless white dishes.
It had to be it. How many rooms could there be in the world that looked like that, let alone in Neverwhen?
Probably no more than one, and that’s why we were going to find a way into the Labyrinth again just as soon as things calmed down.
Just as soon as we were sure nobody had suspected a thing about that distraction.
So far nobody had, and no alarms had been set off, and one of Kohen’s outside contacts had nothing new to tell us.
Which was…odd.
Only because of those two soldiers we’d left unconscious up there in the hallway outside the Distribution Room.
Silas insisted that his magic would erase the memory of how they’d been knocked out. He insisted—but it was Silas, and I didn’t particularly trust him when it came to this.
We were supposed to be sleeping, and we were supposed to try to break into the Labyrinth again before dawn, but I’d fallen asleep on March’s arm for only an hour before the knock on his door woke me up.
Of course, it was Silas, and he said, “I’m going in now. I won’t wait another minute.”
Master Talik nearly lost his mind. Kohen was unusually quiet—he wanted this over with sooner rather than later, I thought.
Damon was begging Master Talik to figure out a way to let him come with us, while the old Timekeeper kept insisting that it was the Labyrinth—“Not a single one of you has any idea what that means!”
But we did, though. We’d been in there. We’d seen plenty.
In the end, Silas looked us all in the eye, a different man from the one we’d found in that room—determined, unafraid, confident.
“I’m going back tonight and I’m going after Reggie first. You’re all welcome, of course, and you’re also welcome to ignore me—just so long as you don’t try to stop me.”
A tick of silence that weighed more than the entire realm stretched in the room just outside the Hollow.
The edge of the three-legged table I held onto was the only thing keeping me upright—not because I was weak.
My gears still malfunctioned constantly inside me, but I hadn’t thrown up again, and I’d actually eaten.
I’d also laid down a few hours, had slept for one.
I was fine.
And I was not prepared, but…I was ready, if there even was a difference. I was ready.
It was Mimi who broke the silence first, though.
She stepped around the table and went so Silas, and for a split second there I thought she might either hug him or smack him on the back of his head.
Instead, she offered him something—her chronobank. She held it in front of Silas’s face and said, “I’ll be right behind you.”
Cook was next to say, “And me.”
Then Erith. Then Anika—and she offered her chronobank to Silas, too.
I closed my eyes and released a long breath. It was decided, it seemed, because it wasn’t just me who wasn’t prepared. None of us were—but we were all ready.
Master Talik lowered his head and closed his eyes and looked on the brink of tears, but he said nothing. Didn’t object. Kohen sat down in one of the chairs with a deep sigh, like he was both terrified and relieved at the same time.
March and I looked at one another, and though I was terrified, I was smiling because my mind was full of the image of the boy with the hat-within a hat-within a hat, making tea in a room underground, all alone.
Not for long, though. Maybe we’d lost Helen, but Reggie was still there, and we would try our best to get him out. Somehow, against all odds, I’d fulfilled the one promise I’d been so sure I would never keep.
And that made me feel like I’d already won—or, at least, like I would win no matter what.
Thirty minutes later, we were armed with enough will to carry a mountain—and enough hope and magic to get us all the way back to the Labyrinth again.