The maids guided us down corridors Ialmostrecognized but didn’t. Less dust here, and the flowers seemed in a better shape, red and blue roses mostly, mixed in with pink tulips here and there. The scent filled my nostrils, but I couldn’t focus on it long enough to try to figure out if I’d smelled it before.
We passed sets of doors, polished to perfection, each with an individual motif of flowers, under archways also carved with roses that made my fingers itch for my sketchbook.
We climbed a flight of stairs, too, our footsteps echoing in my ears, keeping me perfectly distracted—and I preferred it. Because I thought I knew what to expect—we’d be locked into a room with plenty of space and time to talk and figure the best way out.
There would be time, I thought.
Then we stepped onto the hardwood floor at the end ofthe stairs, the hallway wide with floor-to-ceiling windows on either side, and we only took a few steps when the groaning began.
It came out of nowhere, just like the Timekeepers and the maids.
It camefrom the floor.
They stopped. We stopped.
At this point I had no idea what to expect, but the last thing I remembered was looking back at the Timekeeper woman, and seeing her eyes, her mouth open as she shouted something I didn’t hear, reaching both her hands out toward us—but the floor caved.
Right underneath our feet, the floor caved, the slight groaning seconds prior the only warning—and then I was falling together with March, certain that I would never wake up again.
Time must have been holdingits breath because my eyes were half open, yet nothing moved. I was alive—or at least Ifeltalive, yet my heart didn’t beat and my lungs didn’t expand and there was no sound whatsoever in the world around me.
But I wasthere.
Maybe I was simply…stuck. Like I sometimes fell for hours and hours down that hole—I was stuck here, too, on my back, my body at an odd angle, my eyes half open but I couldn’t see anything but sparkles floating around in the air. Or maybe it was just dust?
There I stayed for however long Time held its breath with me. I tried to remember…well,anythingat all, but I couldn’t. My mind was stuck, too. Near empty.
Until I felt warmth on the tips of my fingers.
Everything changed so suddenly.
Charges of electricity spread from my fingertips and up my arm, jumpstarting my heart and filling my lungs with air. Just like that, from one second to the next, I was breathing and blinking and my heart was beating frantically in my chest, and sound began to reach my ears, too.
Coughs. Whispers. Movement.
A hand around mine.
“Ora.”
It’s March, it’s March, it’s March,said the thoughts in my head, and I pushed myself up with all my strength to reach for him, move closer. I could.
Broken pieces of wood and concrete all around me, some of it over my limbs. They shifted and moved with ease as I sat up, eyes blinking fast to clear the blur—but it wasn’t in my eyes. It was the clouds of dust hanging in the air, indeed, that were slowly settling while people moved. While people sat up and stood and looked around, coughing—and March was lying in the rubble right next to me, our hands linked.
He had a larger rock over his right foot and couldn’t shift it. But I was free. I was free to drag myself until I was close enough to push the piece of rock off his leg. I couldn’t even tell if it was heavy or not—it could have weighed a ton and I still would have moved it, fueled by sheer panic.
Suddenly March was on his feet, pulling me up, wiping my face with his hands before I even realized thathiswas almost completely gray, too. Covered in dust.
Just like everyone else.
“Is everyone alive?” someone called from farther behind me—could have been Mimi.
I wanted to turn, to look around, to count, but March took my face in his hands and didn’t let me. “They are. Everyone’s moving. Stand still,” he told me and proceeded to wipe my face and hair as well as he could.
I nodded absentmindedly, then reached for his cheeks,too, to clean them up—which was impossible to do since we were all covered in dust, especially our hands. All I managed to do was move the dust around, when?—
“Hey! Don’t move!”
Up.
