Me?
I didn’t really know what I believed anymore, except…
“I didn’t—” I started to say but then stopped. Because Ididsave his life, according to him and the Timekeepers. Back in theforward Trials,I did save his life in what they called a Tree of Years.
“Thank you. You really do give me hope.”
He said it like he’d said the same thing before, except he didn’t. Not that I remembered.
I looked at him,reallylooked at him, willed myself to remember, begged my mind to let go of whatever it was keeping out of my reach.
In the end, the best I could tell him was, “I’m sorry, Silas.” Even though he technically hadn’t even lived the time we’d lived. Even though when stuck in that pocket of the Labyrinth—which were literal blind spots for time in the machinery, created by too much magic use through the years—no more than an hour or two had passed, he had still missed half the story. He’d still been stuck behind that wall.
He smiled a sad smile, but it was a hopeful smile, too. “Go to bed, Ora. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. We’ll figure it all out.”
Excepthowwere we going to do that?
Of course, I didn’t ask him this, only slipped into the small room and closed the door behind me, took off my mother’s coat and lay down on the tiny bed in the corner.
The room was hexagonal, all the walls covered in faded diagrams of gears and numbers, formulas I couldn’t begin to read even if I’d wanted to. So, instead, I stared at the ceiling until my eyes burned.
Because every time I closed them, I saw Silas’s facebehind my closed lids, smiling that same sad smile again. Or Calren’s. Or the cat.
Orme.The…other Ora.
A girl who’d lost her compassion in the Tree of Years. A girl who’d apparently fallen for a Heart boy head over heels, both in the beginning, and in the end when time moved backward.Twice.
A girl who’d signed up for the trials to run from grief and had instead run straight into something much worse, apparently, had lived through it—again,twice.
Me.
That was supposed to be me.
Words spun in my head, stories that my imagination tried to conjure images for, but couldn’t. Everything came out warped, twisted,wrongin my head. Everything sounded…fake.Like it hadn’t really happened. Like it wasn’t really real.
I couldn’t justbewith someone like both Kohen and Silas had claimed, and then not remember it! It was impossible. It wasabsurd.
I would have remembered!
Except…I did, didn’t I?
My body remembered, even if my mind didn’t. Even if my heart was…confused. Time’s Teeth, she was so, so confused…
But my body continued to be confusing when I found myself standing in front of the door of the room they’d put me in, and at first, I couldn’t even be surewhy.
The glass tubes at the base of the walls pulsed faintly, and the clock faces mounted everywhere stared down at me from the shadows. I wasn’t sure why they were stuck. None of them told the time. They just watched.
I don’t know why I watched back for a while, arms wrapped around myself, why I then walked.
Why I opened the door or slipped out into the semi-darkcorridor or made my way toward the other side. Third room down on my left. Right where March had gone to sleep.
When I stopped in front of it, it finally clicked.
No idea how long I stood there, but eventually, I felt the wood underneath my knuckles. Heard the sound of my knocking.
It took him less than three seconds to answer the door, looking more disheveled than I’d ever seen him, his hair wild, his eyes a bit swollen, those lips parted and red and so smooth looking, I wondered what they’d feel like under my tongue.
Which wasn’t a thought I’d had for the first time. Definitely far less strange than wondering what he’d taste like when I stared at my drawings of him.
