“Yes, maybe a few seconds.”
A ringing in my ears. “That’s impossible. I was there a long time. Maybe a full day. Possiblymore.”
But now that I was thinking about it, we’djustcome out of the tower, and we hadn’t stayed there for a day, had we? We would have been caught.
“Seconds,” March insisted. “Your hand slipped from mine, and then you were holding onto a rock’s edge, and I reached in and grabbed your wrist, pulled you out.”
“Yes—I was there. I saw the whole thing,” Mimi said.
“But…” It had felt like so much time to me. More than just one day—maybe a few. Maybe even longer.
All those images, all those moments that had played around me in real time…
Except— “There is no time when you go stillward.” Master Talik’s voice emptied my mind for a moment. He said, “Everything happens at once. There’s no time or space—you’re falling through a gap, a literal tear in Time’s fabric.” A hand over my leg. “I don’t know how you made it out theway you did, but the next time, really, young lady—watch the floor.”
Shivers broke down my back, ice cold.
Master Talik stood up and went to speak to Kohen in whispers, both their eyes on me one second, and around us the next.
“Howdidyou make it out, Ora?” Mimi asked, her green eyes wide and warm, her curiosity shining through.
I shook my head, looked at March.You,I wanted to say but I didn’t. “I just…chose to come back here. I don’t know, I don’t think I did anything special.” I just chose to let go.
“What was it like?” March asked. “What did you see?”
By then, all the Hands were sitting around me on the grass, while the Timekeepers stood by the open hatch and waited, clearly anxious, hoping we’d wrap it up soon.
I didn’t look around, didn’t think I could handle the stress, to be honest, and I seriously doubted I could stand at that point. But I could still speak.
“It was like a gallery,” I told the others. “It was like…watching stories play in real time from far away. Glimpses, some fast and some slow. I saw things from years and years ago, and from recent times, too. I saw…my sister.” The words stuck in my throat, hesitant to come out, but I somehow found it necessary to speak them.
I never spoke about Jinx. Not unless I absolutely had to. She wasmine.Her memory was all I had left.
But that was before I knew just how tightly I’d been holding on. Before I knew that I was keeping myself at the bottom of the sea.
Letting go was painful, but it felt like I was already at the surface. I was breathing. And Jinx’s memory was too precious to keep to myself…wasn’t it?
“What was Jinx doing?”
Just the sound of her name on someone else’s lips.
Silas—of course Silas knew her name. I probably told him myself.
I smiled as tears pricked the back of my eyes. “Playing the piano.” Andthatmemory was what I’d hold onto to keep me afloat for the rest of my life.
Silas smiled at me—an honest smile, the first one I’d seen on him since this madness started.
“I also sawher,” I whispered, as a tear slid down my cheek—but it was a happy tear. A relieved tear.“I saw the White Queen.”
And I saw her more than once, but?—
The questions were immediate.How—what—where—when?!And the panic was clearly visible in every set of eyes looking at me. Even the Timekeepers stopped what they were whispering about and looked at me.
“She stole the plaques—I saw it,” I said, and the scene played itself in front of my eyes. “I saw it twice—once while she took them out of the column, dragged them away in a big piece of fabric, and once when she hid them?—”
Their voices fell on me like they had physical weight. I understood their frustration, though, but they didn’t let me answer at all until Master Talikshouted, as loudly as he could, and for once he wasn’t looking around. Nobody was.
“Speak, Spade,” he said when the others finally rested, and I did.
