“Is he…will he make it?” March asked—and he was talking to the cat who was back to resting its chin over his crossed paws right there on the boy’s other side. Just near his legs.
“How should I know? I’m a cat, not a physician.”
“But you said he was dying,” said Seth, and his voice broke—buthe wasn’t.
I was looking at the boy’s chest—he wasn’t dying. People didn’t breathe when they died.
“I said,are you going to stand there until he dies. There’s a difference,” the cat calmly said. “One is a statement. The other is a question about your priorities.”
It paused mid-lick. Looked at us—so, so strange—those eyes moving from face to face with an intelligence that had no business being in an animal.How are you real?“He’s been here a long time by your measurements. By mine, it was lasthour. Or the next hour—it’s really all about perspective here.”
No sense.
He made no sense at all.
“It’s really about?—”
“Cheshire.”
That voice.
Silas moved his lips, though his eyes were still closed, and how could oneknowa voice they’d never heard before so well?
“Stop playing with them.”
A pout.
A pout on a cat that was stranger than a grin on a cat.
“But I never get to play,” was his answer, and the boy had already opened his eyes halfway.
“We’re in a pocket,” he said, looking at March, then me, then Russ and the others. One after the other, like he was searching.
Searching for someone who wasn’t there.
“The longer we stay here the bigger the toll on our bodies. We need real time and real air. We need to get out.”
Real time and real air,he said.
“I’ll carry you out,” March said without missing a beat. “But once we’re out there, you’re going to tell us everything.”
The boy looked up at him, eyes half open still, and it was clear to see he was barely staying awake.
But even so, he said, “Everything.”
It was a good enough promise for me, and it was a good enough promise for March.
16
Ionly felt the difference once we were back in that corridor, no longer in that room that wasn’t a room at all.
I only felt the way timemovedwhen it wasn’t still anymore, and I realized ithad beenin there. I realized it had barely moved at all, which was senseless all on its own.
Then we saw the Timekeeper, Calren Hock, who was still unconscious on the floor, right where we’d left him, the plate full of food that man had brought still there, untouched.
With the way time shifted for me from one second to the next, reality no longer felt real to me. Instead, it kept warping from one step to the next—like I was walking underwater, then running in the wind.
March had helped the boy up, put his arm over his wide shoulders and secured his hand around the boy’s wrist, too. Like that, he carried most of his weight with ease, but Russ stayed close by, too, just in case.
