I narrowed my brows. “Telling who?”
“The queens, of course.” He leaned down and pulled something for a second, and then it clicked into place, and the hands stopped moving.
Master Talik straightened his shoulders, took off his loupe and pushed his hair back. “Even clocks don’t know what to do—and we really aren’t very different from them.”
Yes, he’d said this before. I didn’t know even close to enough about machines to decide whether he was right or wrong.
The object in my pocket was getting heavier by the second. The tick-tocking of the clock on the table had stopped, and the silence somehow added to my guilt. Like maybe the Timekeeper couldhearthat device, know that I’d taken it without asking. Without even telling.
“The lands feel it. The entire realm,” he said, more to himself than to me as he shook his head and proceeded to pull pieces of gear apart from the clock, lay them out on the table. “Which is why I told him it was useless. Which is why time must be healed.”
My stomach dropped. “What’s useless?”
He looked at me from below his lashes. “To try.”
“Try what?”
“To change things, Miss Reese. To change things,” the Timekeeper said.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” He spoke in half riddles, too, just like the Cheshire.
Except Master Talik didn’t accuse me ofbraggingwhen I said that.
“Timemustbe healed,” he told me. “That is all you need to understand. Otherwise, there will never be a future, only the past.”
“We’re trying. We…we unwon two trials,” I said. “And we lost a Hand, too. And I…” My eyes squeezed shut, and the next words rushed out of me before I could help it. “Do you know what I lost, Master Talik? You said before that I was incomplete. Do you know what I lost?”Do you know who I am?
The man looked at me.Reallylooked at me for once. Saw me. Saw my face.
“You’re brave, Ora. So are the others. So was Silas.” It was like he’d slapped me across the face. “Continue to be brave, and the rest will work itself out.”
“You did know him,” I said, andwhywere there tears in the back of my eyes again?! Something must have been wrong with my body—I couldn’t think of any other explanation. “You knew Silas. You knew him.”
“Sleep tight, Miss Reese,” the Timekeeper said, and turned back to his work.
And that was that.
I tried to call him again, to ask him, to plead with him to tell me more, but he didn’t. He never once looked up at me. It felt like trying to talk to a wall.
On my way back to my room, I found Mimi pacing around the grandfather clock again, eyes down on her feet, whispering something to herself—maybe a song?
She didn’t notice me, though, and I didn’t interrupt her.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were much worse than any of us realized yet because Master Talik knew Silas.
And if he knew Silas, didn’t that mean thathe remembered?
All the doors in the hallway of our dormitory were closed. I waited in front of March’s room like a fool for a minute, hoping it opened, and hoping it didn’t.
Finally, I went to my own room, pulled out the object I’d stolen, put it in the middle of the bed, and opened my sketchbook next to it.
Identical.
Every line, every string of metal, every cog, and the smooth curve of the glass ball in the middle—it was all identical in the drawing as it was in real life. And I had no idea what it was.
I searched it inch by inch, searched for a button or a switch or a winder—anything at all that could give me a clue, but I found nothing.
I fell asleep with it under my pillow.
