“He went back.”
We all turned to Kohen as he slipped out the darkness of the Hollow, a grave look on his face. He was without his cloak for once, and he looked taller like that. Thinner.
“The tunnel that hatch leads to goes directly underneath the Labyrinth. Silas most likely knew,” he said. “He went back.”
Back,he said, and my thoughts spun and spun in my head as Mimi hugged her notebook beside me, eyes full of unshed tears.
“Why?” Damon said, shaking his head, still one knee against the floor when he turned his head back to look at Kohen. “Why would he go back to the Labyrinth? Forwhat?”
“Not for what,” Cook said from a little farther away. “For who.”
Suddenly, a single word popped in the center of my mind.
Reggie.
His name had been the first thing Silas had said when we found him in that room—and I wasn’t the only one who thought it. I could practicallyseethe name settling over the room, could feel the ripple of it spreading out.
Reggie was a Hand, too, from the Court of Clubs. Silas had told us this the night before—and then Kohen had told us about how the game had taken him, how it had rewired his brain, hadrecreatedReggie, made him its own. Part of the Labyrinth now, just as much as everything that was built or lived or turned inside its grounds.
It would remain so forever.
We’d all noticed Silas’s tears while he told this story—which to me was as much a fantasy as the stories about the Thirteenth Hour we were told when we were little. Just a story—not real.We’d all noticed how he’d closed his eyes and had fisted his hands over his knees all the while as Kohen spoke about the last trial—which was the first backward.
“He’s going for the boy,” the old Timekeeper said, while the others, the new faces nobody had bothered to introduce us to stayed a couple feet behind, staring at the floor, shaking their heads.
“We should have known,” Damon said, finally standing up, hands over his head. “They were lovers—of course he would try to go back.Of course.”
Something inside me twisted and the echo of it drowned the voices in the room for a second as the others talked. There was a memory, almost within my reach but not quite, creating an itch inside me, in my very bones.
“…barely walk,” Mimi was saying. “He was using a cane! How would he?—”
“He’s well enough to go anywhere on his own now. Energy levels climb fast when there’s purpose,” Kohen cut her off. “That’s not the issue here—it’s the Labyrinth.” His eyes were glazed over as he looked at Damon but didn’t really see him. “It’s not going to let him go. The boy…he belongs to it now. It won’t let him go.”
The story he’d told last night came back to me in waves—the dead host, the knife, the aging, the way the ground had claimed Reggie. Such an absurd, fantastical story.
Yet Kohen now looked as terrified as if it had all been real.
“Is there a chance—any chance at all—that Reggie really is still alive in there?” Mimi asked in half a voice.
Something like a shadow passed right through my mind—words bundled together, thrown at me as if from the sky.
I couldn’t make sense of them for the Time in me.
Then Kohen opened his mouth to speak and closed it again.
Several times.
Which was indeed curious.
“If something is owed to its games, the Labyrinth takes itback—but whatever that is, it doesn’t destroy it,” Kohen finally said.
“Then what does it do?” I wondered.
“It repurposes it. In this case, the game needed a host—so,yes,technically speaking, the boy would still be in the game. But he would not be the same person Silas is looking for. He’s now only the Host.”
“But he’s alive,” March pressed.
A flinch. “Functioning,” Kohen corrected. “Whether that counts asaliveis a matter of perspective.”
