Chapter 39
Icame to only halfway at first, the taste of metal and grass on my tongue. My face was pressed against the ground—real ground, soil and fiber and something sharp digging into my cheek. My ears were ringing.
Maybe screaming was the better word to describe it—a high-pitched whine that blocked out everything else, and for a few seconds I couldn’t remember where I was or how I’d gotten there.
Then the pain made itself known like it had been eagerly waiting for my awakening.
It was on my back mostly, where I’d slammed against the ground, right between my shoulder blades.
Every breath sent a hot wire of pain through my ribs, but I gritted my teeth and moved anyhour.
When I did, I realized my hands were scraped raw—I must have tried to catch myself.
My left knee throbbed, too, but I was alive.
I was breathing. That was all that mattered.
I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The ringing was fading, slowly, replaced by other sounds—groaning, coughing, then someone calling a name.
My name.
And it was March.
My eyes blinked fast, the sound of him creating an urgency in me right away. The faster I blinked, the more I moved, the more I saw—and what my eyes were telling me was that the mechanical garden was destroyed.
Maybe not entirely—the outer hedges still stood, though they were bent and blackened, their painted metal surfaces peeled back like skin.
But the inner garden, the brass apple trees, the copper rosebushes, the benches—it was all gone.
Flattened. Scattered in pieces across a wide circle of scorched ground, the metal twisted and smoking faintly under the dim light of the sky.
The sky was lighter now, much lighter than it had been. Not sunrise yet, but close—that pale gray at the horizon told me that we’d been out here for a long time.
Unconscious. Out in the open in these ruins.
“Ora…”
Levana was on her hands and knees maybe ten feet from me, blood on her forehead, one of the bundled sheets still clutched in her fist.
Behind her, Russ was sitting up against a bent metal trunk, blinking, dazed. Seth was on his feet already—unsteady, swaying, but he hadn’t fallen yet, and Erith was beside him, pulling a piece of brass from her sleeve with a hiss of pain.
My heart fell.
The bundles.
I looked around frantically, counted two-three-five. Five bundles of plaques, scattered across the scorched ground, most of the fabric that had covered them gone, and the metal was stained black on most plaques. Some were almost completely destroyed.
“Is everyone—” I started, but the sound of footsteps coming from across the garden cut me off.
Someone was running.
Multiple sets of feet, heavy, hitting the ground in an even rhythm. And voices—voices I knew, shouting over each other.
“ORA!”
“Hold on, we’re coming!”
“Hold on, everyone, we’re coming!”
Then they were there, Mimi and Cook at the head, behind them Anika, and Master Talik, and behind them Silas and March, holding Reggie between them.
Reggie, whose head was down, chin pressed to his chest. Reggie, whose feet dragged behind his body because he was unconscious.
But he was there.
They’d done it, too. Time’s Teeth, they’d actually done it.
March’s eyes found mine across the ruined garden.
The moment he saw me, he said something to Silas, and they both began to slowly lower Reggie to the ground.
They put the boy—still dressed in those awful, colorful clothes but without the hat—on his side, and Silas stayed with him while March ran for me.
Not sure when I stood up all the way, but when he made it to me, I was on my feet. His hands were on my face and a little bit of my soul returned to my body, and he was okay. He seemed perfectly fine—not a scratch on him.
“You’re hurt,” he said, pushing my hair back, inspecting my face. “Does it hurt?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, and indeed the sharp pain between my shoulder blades had lessened, or maybe I just didn’t feel it anymore.
Too many things to think about. Too much relief and fear and panic.
“Hurry, up—quick!” Master Talik was saying, while everyone checked on everyone, and my thoughts were coming back to me as March looked me over one more time.
“What happened? Why are you here—why is Reggie here?!” Because he was—still there, on the ground, with Silas squatting right next to him, a hand over Reggie’s shoulder, looking at the ruined garden, scanning the perimeter.
“There was a blast. The tunnel collapsed. We had to come up,” March said, and Master Talik was waving for us to keep moving—here, over here, this way, quick!
A blast, March said.
“There was a blast here, too! It threw us back, knocked us out cold,” Seth said, wiping the blood from his forehead—but the wound must not have been deep because he looked okay otherwise.
“We got them. Guys, we found them,” said Russ, moving in a circle, looking at the ground, and I took in a deep breath so I could gather strength to move—around March and to Reggie.
I wanted to see if he was breathing because he wasn’t moving at all.
His eyes were closed, and the more the sky brightened with dawn, the paler he looked.
“We only got five, but there were more—”
“So many more, and we found them right there in the wall!”
“It was the room beyond the kitchen, indeed—I found it—”
“And then we couldn’t get through—”
“And the wall wouldn’t budge—”
“But then Erith—”
“And the plaques—”
“And the walls—”
“Everyone—STOP!”
Silas was on his feet before I reached Reggie. We had no choice but to stop when he shouted like that, his arms to the sides, his eyes everywhere around us…
And Reggie.
Reggie still had his eyes closed, but Time’s Teeth, he was breathing. I could see his chest rising and falling as he lay there on the scorched ground. Breathing—alive—out of the Labyrinth.
Tears in my eyes, and they slipped out without asking for permission.
“What is it, boy?” Master Talik asked, slowly coming closer to us, together with the others—all standing, all walking on their own.
“Do you”—Silas closed his eyes and twisted his face like he was suddenly in pain, his fingers close to his temples like he was trying to focus on the inside of his head—“feel that?”
I squeezed March’s hand as we all started to look around.
No, I didn’t feel anything. I only felt the loud beating of my heart and the chaos of my thoughts and every instinct in my body that wanted me to somehow sprout wings and fly right out of here now.
“I don’t feel anything,” March said.
“Fuck feeling—we need to run!” Russ.
“Let’s go, go, go!” Anika.
But Silas opened his eyes and said, “Something’s wrong.”
He turned slowly, his gray eyes scanning the tree line, the palace beyond, the dark shapes of the buildings in the distance. His body was tense, every muscle locked in, his hands fisted tightly.
“The blast,” Master Talik said.
“It wasn’t random.” Silas.
My stomach fell, and March pulled me closer to where Reggie lay, and all the others were already there, moving closer on instinct…
“A perimeter ward. It must have been a perimeter ward…” Master Talik’s voice trailed off as he, too, came toward us, arms out, shaking.
“It wasn’t.” March.
“How do you know?” Levana asked from his other side.
His answer was simple: “Nobody’s running.”
Holy Hour, nobody was running. Nobody was coming toward us.
How fast had those Timekeepers found us last time when we came here?
And…why hadn’t they been anywhere in the palace, or when we ran outside, or when we were knocked out cold by the blast and apparently lay here unconscious and unprotected all night long?!
“An explosion that size, in the middle of the Labyrinth grounds, and not a single soldier has come to investigate,” Silas said slowly.
The silence that followed was one of the loudest sounds I’d ever heard because in it we realized just how screwed we were.
“She knows,” I whispered, even if a part of me insisted that words so awful shouldn’t be said out loud. “She knows we’re here.”
“Of course I do.”
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once—the hedges and the trees and the sky and the ground. That’s what it felt like to me at first.
Until the shadows peeled like ribbons from the brass trees that still stood, though ruined, and slithered all around. Until a woman stepped through them, her white dress catching the first gray light of dawn like she’d been sewn from it.
The White Queen was here.