Then he picked up the teapot again.
Nobody else made a single sound.
We could only see his profile, but his eyes were glassy and distant, and his skin had a waxy quality to it, like porcelain left out in the sun. The hat sat crooked on his head, and the silk clothes he wore were too bright, too colorful, wrong in a way I could feel but couldn’t name.
We made plenty of noise as we came through, but he didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge us at all. He just poured, spooned, sipped, and started again, and…
“Reggie,” Mimi breathed beside me, and the name came out broken.
The boy at the table didn’t react. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink—pour-spoon-sip; pour-spoon-sip.
Then I heard it—a sound so quiet we’d missed it beneath the clink of porcelain and the hum of the pipes.
Breathing. Ragged, uneven breathing, coming from the other side of the room.
I turned and my heart about broke right out of my ribcage.
Silas was on the floor.
20
He was sitting with his back against the wall, maybe ten feet from the boy’s table, his knees raised and his cane lying across his lap. His hands were on his head. His eyes were open and on the boy’s back, full of unshed tears, bloodshot.
Two chronobanks lay on the floor beside him.
He didn’t look up when we came in, either, but for a very different reason.
The others saw him, too, once the initial shock passed and they started to look around. Suddenly we were all moving closer to him, cautiously—because who knew what to expect from this place after all we’d already seen? For all we knew the cups and saucers would start speaking soon.
“Silas,” I whispered, dropping to my knees to his side, right near the chronobanks. Both of them were spent, completely empty of Sparetime.
His eyes moved, locked on my face. He looked at me, barely saw me, then moved on to March kneeling beside me, and Mimi, and Russ, and Levana on the other side, who slapped him on the leg.
“You took my chronobank!” she whisper-yelled, and reached out to grab one of the two by my feet.
But Silas’s expression was worse than everything we’d seen down here so far. Worse than Calren’s bloody hands.
It wasdefeat.Complete, total, irreversible defeat.
I didn’t know this boy long, just like I didn’t know any one of them long. Not that I remembered, anyway, but I knewthis.I knew the pain he felt, and it was my own somehow. It weighed on me the same way, even if it made no sense.
“He doesn’t know me,” Silas whispered, and every part of me broke to pieces. “I…I keep telling him…he doesn’t know me. He just…” His voice cracked. He pressed his lips together and looked at the boy at the table. At the mechanical pour-spoon-sip that hadn’t changed once since we walked in.
“He just keeps makingtea.”
Tears in my eyes, sliding down my cheeks, and I wasn’t the only one crying. The others, too—most of them.
March then put a hand over his shoulder. “Silas, the Labyrinth will not let him go. Kohen told us this. He’s part of the game now.”
Silas looked up at him like he couldn’t understand a single word March said. “He just doesn’t know me. He doesn’t…he doesn’t know me. I begged him. I told him—he doesn’t listen. Hedoesn’t know me.”
“We all forgot,” March told him. “We all?—”
“But you knowher!” Silas suddenly shouted, his hand pointing atme.“You know her—and don’t tell me that you don’t!” My poor heart. “Hedoesn’t knowme!”
A single tear slid down his cheek, and I fell together with it. All the way down to whatever existed at the bottom of the universe.
Mimi and Erith had their arms around themselves, theirheads down, shoulders shaking, but the rest of us cried in silence.Passively.Without moving.
