Chapter 40 #2
The Red Queen threw her a look—and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was full of hatred. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was the same look I gave the White Queen.
But even so, she stepped forward. Came closer until barely five feet separated me from her.
I was kneeling at the front of the group with Mimi on my right, and March and Silas on my left.
The rest were right behind me, and I was trying to think of a way to keep the Red Queen’s magic off them.
If at least one of us made it out of here intact, it would have been worth it.
But the Red Queen raised her hand long before I could think of a solution, if there even was such a thing.
Our time was really up.
So fast. So unbelievably fast.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock,” the White Queen sang behind her.
She was still smiling, but the Red wasn’t. Her eyes were dark. Deep brown, almost black, and they were full of something I couldn’t name.
She looked at us. At all of us—eleven former Hands, only ten conscious, and an old Timekeeper with a belt full of tools, shaking his head as he muttered to himself, tears on his cheeks.
She looked at the ruined plaques on the ground, too.
She looked at March. At me. At our hands locked together between us.
Then March let go.
It was like he’d cut off my lifeline.
For a second there, I thought I’d find him standing up, running, trying to stop the queens—it would be a very March thing to do—but he didn’t. He was still there, kneeling beside me, and he was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen on his face before.
Not fear. Not sadness. Something…beyond both.
“Ora,” he said, and his voice was steady. Perfectly, impossibly steady.
He leaned in, right in front of the queens, and took my face in his hands.
“What…what are you doing?” I breathed, not sure if this was even real, but he held my face the way he’d done in that bedroom, and in the Garden of Memories, too. His thumbs on my cheekbones. His fingers in my hair. His eyes holding mine like they were my own personal source of gravity.
“I want to give you something. Something even she can’t take,” he whispered.
I knew exactly what he meant right away.
“March,” I choked, but I couldn’t spill out another word.
“What are you doing, Heartling?”
Heartling, Heartling, Heartling, went the beats of my heart, settling on the name, like they knew it. Like it was mine.
But the Red Queen had said it.
“I’m giving her my most precious memory, Your Highness.” March looked at her for a second. “It’s my birthright, and you can’t erase it when it’s in her.”
A memory.
A memory of his in my mind.
And his hand was already on his chest, right over his heart. And mine was already beating in rhythm with it.
The White Queen was talking, laughing—I could hear her voice, but it was distant now. She was laughing at March, I was sure of it, but I didn’t care. Her words didn’t reach me. Nothing did—only him.
“I don’t remember falling in love with you,” he whispered. “I don’t remember the trials or the junkyard or anything we said. I don’t remember any of it…”
His voice trailed off. His hand pressed harder against his chest, and beneath his palm, I saw it.
Light, but not a usual light. Something rising from inside him, traveling from his chest to his hand, like a thread—a glowing thread.
With a sharp intake of breath, March closed his eyes and said, “But I remember this.”
His hand moved from his chest to mine before I could blink.
The thread of light stayed close to his palm like it was attached to it. It wasn’t thick, or longer than my middle finger, but it was bright. It was pure white.
While I watched, breath held and heart suspended in my ribcage, he pressed it right onto my chest, and the warmth that poured over me was unlike anything else I’d ever felt…that I remembered.
In a single beat, I felt everything that wasn’t mine, that was completely, purely March: his certainty, his terror, his absolute, bone-deep refusal to let me go.
And when the world fell away, I was looking at…me.
Suddenly, the sound of the White Queen’s voice no longer reached me. I was somewhere else, in a place where the sun shone but barely slipped through the thick canopy created by the most beautiful trees I’d ever seen. So big. So green. Full of glass hearts hanging onto their branches like fruit.
I was sitting there on a bench, and I was smiling. My eyes were wide, impossibly blue, my freckles almost gone because of the flush on my cheeks, my hair shiny, my soul served in the smile that stretched my lips.
That’s it. That’s all I was doing—sitting there on a bench in the Garden of Memories, smiling.
That was the whole memory. His most precious memory.
Then it was gone.
Then the world was dark again, terrifying, and the ground underneath my knees was scorched, and the sky was bright with the new sun but to me it made no difference.
The Red Queen was right there. Her veil had shifted, revealing more of her face, more of the curls in her hair, so dark and twisted. Her lips were parted now, her brows slightly raised.
Meanwhile, the White was still laughing, just behind her.
“There,” March said, turning back to the Red Queen as he gripped my hand in his again. “That’s a memory forever out of your reach.”
Tears.
There were tears in the Red Queen’s eyes. I saw them, even if she closed them the very next second and gathered herself. I saw them.
“What are you waiting for? Who cares about a binding—do it now!”
The Red Queen’s jaw locked so tightly I heard her teeth popping in my head. She didn’t look at her sister, didn’t tear her eyes off March’s face at all.
Meanwhile, he looked at me, squeezed my hand, smiled at me.
Whispered, “Remember what we said.”
I barely bit back a sob. “Timeless,” I breathed.
March nodded. “Timeless.”
Whichever way the clock turned, we were timeless, he and I.
Then we saw red.
I knew it was over. I knew this was the end.
I knew that nothing was going to remain inside me by the time the Red Queen was done, and I wished with all my heart that I could have given March one of my own memories, too.
Of the way he made me feel when he held my hand.
When he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that truly mattered.
It hurt so much I couldn’t breathe.
Then again, that didn’t matter, either.
Soon, I and all my memories, all my love and all my pain would be no more.