Too many things. Entirely too many, and the Great Clock didn’t feel familiar in the slightest, not like this in the dark. It had looked very different in sunlight, like another tower altogether. That’s probably why I had such a hard time tearing my eyes off it.
Finding a door on the side of the palace was easy, indeed—there were three just on the right of the building. We picked the first one that was hidden by overgrown white roses, and we couldn’t believe our luck when we found it unlocked.
Not a single soul was around us, and it was getting stranger by the second. We were sure we’d run into someone by now—this place washuge.
Still, none of us said anything as we went through into a wide corridor. The air in there was heavier and smelled of dust and dead flowers.
The roses.
We could just make them out in the faint light that slipped through the windows—vases over tables along the walls, the flowers inside them long dried and brown. They were everywhere, mounted on brackets, tucked into alcoves, arranged on every surface as if someone had once wanted this place to smell of nothing else.
Hadit?
The gears in my stomach turned—the answer was there in front of me, but it was just out of reach. Trying to catch it was going to make me sick.
The others felt it, too. Nobody spoke still, but a few ran their hands along the wall as they walked. Anika stopped at awindow and pressed her palm flat against the glass like she was waiting for someone to tell her not to. Erith stopped and stared at her reflection in a small mirror over a vase full of long-dead roses. The image was distorted because its surface was covered in a thick layer of dust, like nobody had been in this place for years and years, not just weeks.
We walked through and we looked and we stayed silent—more ghosts than people. Shells.
Another hallway, this one wider, with doors on its walls instead of windows, all of them locked. But the one on the other end was slightly ajar, so that’s where we went.
More of the same tables, vases, dead flowers. More of the same scent, the same heavy air.
I thought that was it—that was all we were going to find in this place. I thought everyone had gotten it wrong—or maybewe’dfound the wrong palace—because clearly this place was abandoned.Clearly. Nobody lived here and they hadn’t in years.
Then we went through the door at the end of the hallway, and all the lights came on.
10
Lanterns on the walls flickered to life one after the other like fireflies just waking from sleep, and with them came the sound of footsteps. Fast ones. Many of them, coming from ahead—and behind—at the same time.
Everything changed so quickly, none of us were prepared.
“Who’s there?!” someone called, someone I didn’t recognize.
Then…
“Don’t move!” shouted a woman. A stranger.
My muscles were already locked, my mind screaming at me to turn around and run, but my legs refusing to take a single step.
Then March was in front of me, blocking my view of the people who came from around the corner in the hallway—but I saw. I saw the three Timekeepers dressed in loose, dark clothes, and two women wearing white dresses and aprons threaded with red.
I caught but a glimpse of them, and then we were all moving together, gathering closer to the wall becausemoreTimekeepers were coming in through the same door we’d come through just a moment ago.
Eight of them. Five Timekeepers, three Clockfolk.
We were surrounded.
I was having trouble keeping up with my own train of thoughts when someone grabbed my hand from the right—Erith—and from the left—March. They squeezed my fingers and I squeezed theirs, and none of us knew what to do, what to say as they spoke, called for us tonot moveand to show ourselves, as if they couldn’t see our faces for themselves. We were right there, pressed against the wall, the round hallway lit up with all those lanterns.
A hundred scenarios crossed my mind in a second, fromwe’re going to get kicked outtowe’re going to end up in prison.
“What do we do—what do we do—what do we do?!”chanted Anika while we looked back and forth from the two groups of people who had surrounded us, when…
“Time’s Trousers, it’sthem,”said the Timekeeper woman who’d come in through the same door we had. She wore a dark green dress stained with grease all over, and her wild curly hair was gathered on top of her head, her brown eyes spitting fire as she took us in.
Silence for a tick. We all held our breaths, held onto one another’s hands, and?—
