“Shestarted it!”
“She hit me with her book! My head ispounding!”
“She’s a freak—she doesn’t care about us!”
“For all we knowshe’sthe reason we’re here!”
“Didn’t you see her when Reggie died? Didn’t you see her when Erith was throwing up, and-and-and Helen? She’sevil!”
“Enough,” March said with a growl. “That’s enough.”
My own body felt foreign to me, which wasn’t anything new. I was on my feet, and I thought about running out of there already, but I still had to pick up my things from the floor, and the others still watched. Anika and Levana helped Russ to sit up, and the rest of them watched me. Mimi and Seth were there, too, and Mimi was crying, a hand to her mouth, looking from March to me like she didn’t know what to think yet.
Me, neither, so I didn’t. I just grabbed my backpack, put in the throw-up bag, my sketchbook, the library book, and?—
“You okay?” March asked me, the same second someone else said, “What isthat?”
We turned around, my mind too crowded to recognize voices, and my eyes moved from Russ—rubbing his neck, giving March a look that clearly said how much he hated him right now—to Anika, who was still holding the left side of her face with both hands, and then Seth, who was holding something in his hands, something familiar.
The device I’d stolen from Master Talik’s shelf.
My stomach dropped.Shit, shit, shit!It must have fallen from my backpack, too.
I moved without thinking, strode the three feet to him and grabbed it from his hand. If Master Talik found out that I’d stolen from him, he’d never speak to me again. If the White Queen found out?—
“Ora.”
I pulled down my backpack again to put the device inside, intending to make sure to zip it all the way this time, then run—but before I could, March was towering over me, close. Too close. So, I froze like I always did, and I looked up with my breath held.
“Where did you get that?”
He was looking down at the device in my hand.
I found my voice somehow. “Nowhere.”
His hand wrapped around my wrist. Gently, but I still couldn’t move.
Silence in the library. Nobody was complaining or calling me names anymore.
“That’s a heartlock,” Levana then said. “Where didyouget a heartlock, Spade?”
I looked up at March—what in the Everstill is a heartlock?
“Where’d you get it?” he asked me and slowly reached his other hand to grab the device. I let it go, gave it to him.
“I…”Lie!“In the workshop. I got it in the workshop.”
I never said Istoleit, or that I didn’t ask for permission, or that Master Talik didn’t see me putting it in my pocket.
“What is it? It looks…familiar.” Seth was near my right, and the others were all coming closer, eyes on the device. None seemed interested in me anymore—at least for the moment.
Familiar,Seth said.
“It’s a heartlock. They’re memory extractors. Our court uses them on convicted criminals as proof and to make them forget,” Levana said. “This one looks to beold.We don’t make them like this anymore, but it’s full.”
Court of Hearts.
Of course. I was never going to find information on the device in books about Timekeepers. This was made by Hearts.
