That’s because hereallywasn’tReggie.
Whoever he had been before, he was now only Host Ticktock.
I don’t even remember how I moved away from the others, at what point Igave up.I don’t remember how I made it all the way back to Silas, sat there with him on the floor, rested my back against the wall. Watched the others try while Reggie offered them soaked clocks and told them it was tea.
Whatever was breaking inside me, it hadn’t stopped breaking. I doubted it ever would.
“Silas, we have to go.”
“No.”
“Silas.
“No—I won’t leave,” he said.
“They’ll find us. The queens, the…the Timekeepers, they know we took you. They know, and they’ll be looking for us. It’s only a matter of time before they find us.”
“I don’t care?—”
“Of course you do!” I put my hand over his. “You do care. You care aboutus, don’t you?”
The way he looked at me. The way heaccusedme of using that against him, but I would do it again. I wouldn’t hesitate.
“If they find us, all of this will have been for nothing.”
He shook his head again and again, solostwhen he looked back at the others, who were no longer trying to get through to Reggie, but only watched him pour his tea.
Then Silas said, “He’s in there, Ora.” My eyes closed. “I swear to you, he’s in there somewhere.”
I felt that all the way to my bones. His every word, everyletter etching itself inside me. I felt his hope as I’d felt his pain. I felt thewanthe had for what he said to be true.
And how in the world could I possibly go against it?
“Then we’ll find a way to get to him.” I squeezed Silas’s arm and I turned to him, looked him in the eyes. “We’ll find a way to get to him, but we can’t do thattoday. We can’t doanythingif we just sit here and let them find us. But if we leave, if we’re free, wecanfind a way to break whatever magic is holding him here.” Because if everything they said was true, I doubted the queens would simply put us in prison if they caught us. I doubted that very much. They wouldn’t bother—and Silas knew it.
But when he spoke again, he put a mountain right over my shoulders.
He said, “Do you promise?”
Time’s Teeth, I’d never been so empty of air in my life.
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. Weighed me down. Tore me apart, inch by little inch.
Eventually, I said, “I promise.”
I promised him, and I thought they were empty words, but the promise stuck to me. Stuck to my every cell, to my heart, to my soul. It threaded itself with the very time that made me. It became absolute—atruepromise, one I intended to keep.
Even though I knew I couldn’t.
“He doesn’t remember anything.”
“He’s worse thanweare…”
“He refuses to even look me in the eye for longer than a second!”
“Time’s Teeth, what have they done to him?!”
The others were back, standing all around us, looking back at the boy who continued to pour his tea and drink it as if we weren’t there at all.
