“When a portion of the time is taken before the burst fires, the energy that reaches the edges is reduced. Not by much at first, maybe a fraction of a fraction—but it compounds. Year after year, decade after decade, the deficit grows. And the edges feel it first because they were already receiving the least,” he explained.
My mind worked—and finally it made sense. Something made perfect sense.
“From what little I know, the flowers were the first sign. They began closing earlier—not at sunset, but hours before. Then they stopped opening at all. The seasons shifted—winters stretching longer than they should, springs arriving weeks late, autumns that barely lasted a breath. The trees fruited at the wrong time, the crops failed, and the life cycle of animals, even insects shortened. Things that should have lived for years lived for months. Things that should have lived for months lived for weeks, and so on…”
The gears inside me worked and worked like I was about to come apart any second.
“And the people?” Mimi whispered.
Master Talik stopped pacing.
“The people aged faster. Not dramatically. Not enough to see from one day to the next. But a woman of forty would look sixty. A man of sixty would move like a man of eighty. The gap between generations shrank until grandparentswere dying at ages when they should have been in their prime.”
“Hastenheart,” I breathed, and the word tasted like ash. That’s the disease Jinx had died of. It hit way too close to home.
“Among other things,” Master Talik said with a nod. “Hearts giving out, lungs failing, bones turning brittle too early—all symptoms of a body receiving less time than it needs to sustain itself. Nobody had an explanation. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed before, so they just blamed it on the Spill.”
“But how come we don’t know anything about it? I’ve never heard this—never once,” Cook said.
“No, the queens made sure that the tales would be isolated,” said the Timekeeper. “And this whole thing happened slowly, gradually. Village by village and settlement by settlement. For each of them, when the crops died and the people weakened and the magic thinned, the queens would send officials to declare that it was the Spill that was causing disruptions in time, and they would quietly make offers that sounded generous.Relocation, they called it. Safety because the edge was no longer stable. They told the people they were moving them to better land.”
“And the people believed them,” said Silas. It wasn’t a question.
“What choice did they have? They were dying. Their children were sick. Their fields were dust.” And of course, he was right.
“Where did they go?” asked Mimi.
“Where the queens took them—scattered them across the courts. A family here, a family there. Never in groups large enough to talk to each other.”
“So, they silenced them with a lie, and isolated them byseparating them,” said March, his every word an extra weight over my shoulders.
“Exactly right,” said Silas. “Within a generation, the stories faded. The children who grew up in the courts quickly forgot they came from the Spill once their lives went back to normal.”
“Which means they didn’t just steal time. They also erased the evidence,” Cook said, a dumbfounded smile on his face.
“And what exactly is in the Spill now? What…what’s out there, Master Talik?” I asked, and my voice shook.
“Nobody quite knows for certain, but I’ve heard stories. The villages are gone, which is what we know happens when there’s no temporal energy in any part of the realm. Even the remains of things eventually stop existing. They say there’s no wind, no growth, no decay. Mostly just silence.”
I tried to imagine a place like that, I really did. With nothing but silence—nothing.
Impossible. My mind couldn’t picture it accurately if I tried for a hundred years.
“But how does that happen in one place, and not in the courts? Nothere,in Neverwhen—how?!” Levana sounded frustrated. I wished I was, too—but I was just…off.Like someone had turned a switch on me or had wound me wrong.
“The clocks are always full in Neverwhen,” Silas said, his voice bitter. “It will be centuries before this city feels the difference—ifthe queens aren’t stopped.”
“Every plaque in that tower,” I said, a little surprised that my voice was steady, considering what it was like inside my chest, “is proof of what they’ve done.” I looked at Master Talik, as he was the one with the answers.
He nodded reluctantly. “It is.”
“I’m going into the tower,” Silas said. “Tonight, at three o’clock. I’m going for the plaques.”
And wasn’t it funny how I wasn’t surprised bythisat all?
Wasn’t it funny how I nodded right away without needing to even think a second longer, and said, “Me, too.”
“Me, three,” said Mimi.
