My heartbeat was slow, my breathing steady. Even my thoughts that had been caught in a hurricane in my mind since we’d entered the tower went smooth and flat, like the octopus lake back home did after rain.
Then the nothing began to fill.
It started at the edges. Colors bled in from somewhere I couldn’t see, shapes forming and dissolving and forming again. They swirled around me, above and below and on every side, and I realized I wasn’t falling through nothinganymore.
I was falling through…agallery.
Suddenly there were walls around me.
Well, maybe notwalls.More like moments. Scenes, both frozen and unfolding at the same time, layered on top of one another like the pages in my sketchbook—and someone was flipping through very, very slowly.
Unlike my drawings, though, these had color. Lots of colors. Some were vivid, sharp and bright, every detail rendered with perfect precision; others were faded, blurred at the edges; a few like I was looking at them through fog.
Instinct took over and I leaned in to try to touch them just to see what they’d feel like, reached out my hand toward the nearest…moment? Scene?
It didn’t really matter what I called it. Icouldn’ttouch it or feel it at all—my fingers passed right through it, like I was made of nothing but light. Like I was a ghost here. An audience of one—while the view around me changed and changed, like a theater that stretched in every direction.
And the show was…well,everything.
Time’s Teeth, how could this be possible?
“How strange,” I said, but even though my voice reached my ears as a distorted sound, almost like I was trying to speak underwater, I still didn’t panic. My heartbeat remained steady, my breathing even. The sound spread about me, of everything at once—chatter, laughter, shouts, metal rubbing against metal, wood, things being thrown and things sliding and things clinking—there was a sound for everything.
I tried to focus.
The first scene that I looked at—reallylooked at—caught me by surprise.
Itopenedright before my eyes, bloomed like a flower. If flowers bloomed fully and all at once, that is. I was so close, I thought I could smell it—oil and metal andheat.
A workshop.
I’d been to a workshop when I was little. It fascinated me how machinery worked and how people workedonmachinery—but this place I was looking at now was different. Older, rougher, the walls made of raw stone, the ceiling so low that the man standing at the workbench had to duck his head.
A Timekeeper—young, his hair ginger, his broad hands moving with a delicacy that didn’t match his size at all, his fingers threading a thin wire through a mechanism so small I couldn’t see it from where I…stood? Floated? Fell?
Impossible to tell, but my hair was still raised all around me, and my arms remained outstretched.
The Timekeeper in the scene I was focused on was building something. A clock, if I had to guess, but not like any clock I’d seen before. This one was round and flat and its face had no numbers, only symbols etched into the metal in a language I didn’t recognize. His lips moved as he worked, whispering to the device like he thought it could hear and understand.
And when he set the final piece into place and the clock began to tick, his face split into a smile so wide and so pure it made my chest ache.
I didn’t know him, had never seen him before, had no idea what he was even doing with that clock, but Ifelthis emotion as if it was my own when he smiled.
How very, very strange.
He held the clock up to the light. It caught the glow of the forge behind him and threw it back in fragments, and the man laughed. A single, joyful laugh that bounced off the stone walls and filled the workshop with energy.
Then I was moving, turning, leaving that scene behind to bleed into the nothing beyond, and my eyes did the same thing when they could—they focused on the next that was closest to me, right ahead.
Meanwhile, the other moments or scenes or whatever they truly were continued to change and move and dissolve and reshape without stop.
Now, I was looking at a bridge, one I almost recognized—ormy bodyalmost recognized. Just this presenceI felt in my chest when I took it all in. It arched over a canal in what had to be Neverwhen judging by the size of the buildings, the city’s twinkling lights reflected in the dark water below.
Two women stood at the center of the bridge, leaning against the railing, their shoulders touching. One had dark hair, cut short. The other had silver hair that fell to her waist, and she was laughing—the breathless, wheezing kind of laugh, like she’d been at this for a while.
The dark-haired woman said something I couldn’t hear. The silver-haired woman doubled over the railing, hands on her knees, shaking her head. Then she straightened up, wiped her eyes, and looked at her companion with an expression I knew.
I knew it because I’d felt it onmyown face any time I looked at March these past…two days? Maybe three.
