I was falling, falling, falling, and there was no bottom to where I fell.
“My name isOra.” That’s what I said, instead of asking,how do you know my name?Not entirely certain why that didn’t seem as important at that moment.
Thoughts spiraled and images flashed and suddenly I had no more skin to hold me together, but I was loose. I was one with the air, spreading, expanding.
“Ora.”
A hand on my arm and March’s face was right there. I wondered, if he hadn’t been here, how would I have found my way back to sanity? Because he seemed to be the only one who kept me grounded. I kept floating and falling at the most inappropriate times.
“You’re okay,” he said, as if to remind me. And I was.
“I don’t understand. What…what’s happening here? How did this boy get in here through that wall?” Mimi asked, moving a little to the side. “Whois he?”
We all held our breaths as we waited for the cat’s answer…
“TheTimekeeper—do you listen with your ears? The Timekeeper.” The cat sat down on its hind legs and began to lick its paw, always grinning.
I looked at March. As confused as I was, if not more. All the others were the same, a few worse.
“He’snota Timekeeper. We canseehim—this boy’s not a Timekeeper,” Anika insisted with a shaking voice.
And the cat said, “So you would rather believe the evidence of your own eyes? How typical.”
I wondered if he realized how senseless he sounded.
I wondered if I’d ever find out why I was tempted tobelieveitmore than I did my eyes. It was a talking cat that knew my name thewrong wayand who called this boy a Timekeeper when he was clearly a Spade, judging by his light blond hair.
And judging by his suit…
“A Hand,” Mimi said, slowly lowering on her knees near the boy, her shaking hands hovering just over his arm. “He’s a…he’s a Hand.”
Yes, he was. Because his suit was that same suit we’d all had on when we first woke up in the arena that day. The same suit, and it was stained with something black, too, which the Timekeeper woman had told me was just grime and oil.
This boy’s suit had the exact same stains—and the same colors as my suit. Black and purple.
He was definitely a Spade, and… “He’s been here since the trials?” I asked in half a breath, and now all of us were kneeling around the boy, looking at his pale face. His eyes were moving beneath his lids. Flickering, like he was dreaming, or trying to wake from one.
Time’s Teeth, my heart was about to come right out of my chest.
“S-s-silas,” I said, and the name tasted strange on my tongue, but also right.
“We’re here, Silas. Open your eyes,” said Mimi, touching his fingers with hers.
None of us expected him to hear her. To listen.
But the boy opened his eyes the next second.
Gasps. Sharp intakes of breath. Locked limbs.
His eyes were a pale gray, like smoke or mist or something in between, and for a second, they saw nothing. They looked right through me the way the Timekeeper’s did, focused on something far away, somewhere I couldn’t reach.
Then they found me.
And March. And Mimi.
“For all the minutes he spent sitting there, I thought his eyes would have changed color, but alas…”
All our attention snapped back to the cat as the boy with the gray eyes continued to take us all in, no expression on him. His eyesbouncedfrom one face to the other, and I feared we scared him looking so completely confused and terrified as we did.
