“Onward,” Mimi repeated, as if she was tasting the word on her tongue. “That’s good. I like that,” she decided.
“We never stop. Not until we get it all back or die trying,” Seth said, and we all nodded. “We keep going onward.”
It sounded exactly right.
“Silas,” I said after a beat. “Tell us a story. About us.” There was plenty hehadn’ttold us—there simply hadn’t been enough time, but I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know the small things, the details, the stuff that didn’t seem all that important in the moment but was.
“Yeah, Silas. Tell us what it was like. Did we ever sneak out back then?” Anika asked.
Laughter, short and sweet. Silas nodded his head. “Every single night, actually.”
Slowly, he dragged himself a little to the side so he could look at us.
What?!—No way, you’re joking!—where did we go?—I always knew we were trouble—tell me we wrecked things!—did we set something on fire, by any chance?—did we ever make it to the city? Isowant to see the city…
The others talked over one another like always, as Silas’s eyes moved from face to face, and his smile faltered, thenstretched again. The look in his eyes changed, too, and it broke my heart because I knew exactly what he was remembering.
A time when we were whole. When we weren’t missing two.
But he cleared his throat, anyway, and turned his back on the city lights, and said, “All right, all right. Let me tell you about this place we called the Junkyard…”
We stayed there for almost an hour talking about the past, and as we did, we all changed a little more in the present, or…perhapsreturnedmore to ourselves?
I guessed I would find out in time.
They gave us cloaks—heavyand dark, just like the ones they wore all the time.
And we weren’t going to be sitting in a carriage all the way to the Court of Hearts, no.
We were going to use something the Timekeepers calledconduit runners—and it was worse than anything the Labyrinth had thrown at us.
Master Talik and Damon were coming with us, at least. We wouldn’t need a seeker or have to figure out the way on our own, but that didn’t mean much when we saw where they led us the next morning, just as the sun had begun to rise.
They led us down, through a section of underground rooms we hadn’t seen before—deeper, hotter, where the pipes were wider than doorways and the hum in the walls becamea roar. The air tasted like hot metal and I was constantly sweating from the moment we descended the first flight of stairs. By the time Talik stopped in front of a massive circular opening in the wall—a pipe, easily wideenough for three people to stand in—I was already regretting ever leaving March’s room.
I should have just stayed in there forever.
“What isthat?!” Mimi asked with half a voice, but I think she already knew. We all did, from the way Kohen had described it before we left. A maintenance track inside the distribution conduits—the system that had once carried Timekeepers and materials outward to the four courts.
Which was a surprise to me as I had no idea Timekeepers had been required to travel to other courts to fix their problems, but Kohen said they did so all the time. Chronobank stations and Sparetime factories and harvest regulators—especially ward systems. Apparently, they’d maintained everything, not just the Great Clock—but that changed when a new magical system was installed—a waste of Sparetime, the old Timekeeper called it. We now had self-calibrating chronobank stations, self-syncing court clocks, automated harvest regulators.
At first, I wasgladfor it because that meant the tunnels were no longer used by anyone, which to me translated tosafe.But that’s until I got there and saw…
“It’s the runner,” Master Talik simply said.
The runner.Interesting choice of name for something that sat inside the large pipe, bolted to a rail on the floor. If it were me, I’d call it something more practical—likea metal ribcage,as that’s exactly what it looked like: an open frame of rusted iron bars curved into a shape that was supposed to hold people, with a flat base that locked onto the track, and…that’s about it.
No roof. No walls. No straps.
“You’re joking,” said Levana, a tiny bit hopeful, but Master Talik wasn’t.
“The conduits still carry residual pulses every ninety seconds,” he said, checking the bolts on the runner with thesame calm precision he’d used to dismantle that clock in the Labyrinth. “The bursts of temporal energy were tied to the Great Clock itself back then and it’s a lot more work to undo that system than to leave it untouched”—he turned to look at us once—“for now. These runners catch the pulses and ride them.”
“And what arewesupposed to do in there?” asked Cook, his voice shaking a little bit.
A shrug, and the Timekeeper said, “You hold on.”
As simple as that.
