He was still hunched over, drawing with two hands at the same time—differentthings, not the same. With his left he was drawing circles, and with the right, he was writing numbers out of order—5, 1, 11, 9, 4, 2…
“He doesn’t look…well,” Levana whispered.
“He isn’t. He’s out of sync,” said Cook, as if he knew exactly what that even meant.
“Hello—Calren, is it? We’re, uh…we’re the Hands. You know, of the Turning Trials,” said Seth, stepping closer to his long table, waving a hand to get his attention.
It worked.
The man raised his head only slightly and looked up. All of us held our breaths—that face.
It wasn’t familiar, but… hewasn’ta stranger.
That was the best way I could explain it.
Ginger hair, curly, cut close to his head. An orange stubble covered his pale cheeks, and his brown eyes looked…troubled. Muddy. Full—too full, on the verge of spilling.
It was easy to see that he was Elida’s brother. They had the same nose, the same face shape, the same curly hair. Calren was tall and skinny, too, long limbs, on his body a shirt that could have been white once, and brown trousers that hung too loose on his frame. His feet were bare.
“Hi-hi, hello,” said one or the other, and the rest waved their hands at him in greeting.
“We’ve possibly met before. You seem almost familiar,” said Anika.
“We’re—we’re the Hands, like we said,” Seth added.
His eyes moved from one face to the other, and when they stopped on mine, I released a breath.
“NotallHands.”
That voice. The way he looked at me. The flavor of his attention.
“Reggie and Helen are…” The words slipped from me, but I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t say it. “And-and Silas?—”
A flinch.
Calren sat up all the way, widened his shoulders like he was trying to stretch into his own size, and he wasn’t as skinny as I’d first thought. He was much bigger than I’d realized, in fact.
Most of the Hands took half a step back casually, and my heart jumped, too, but I wasn’t afraid. On the contrary—I felt like I was on the verge of…something.
“You know Silas,” said Russ.
“Do you knowus?” said Levana.
“Do you remember us?” asked March. “You were our warden in the forward trials. Do you remember?”
Nothing. Not a word, just those eyes moving, hopping from one face to the next.
“Wedon’t remember,” said Mimi. “We don’t remember anything, and-and we think maybe others do. Maybeyoudo.”
“Why are you here?” asked Seth. “How can a person beout of sync?”
“What happened to you? Why are you… what are you writing? What are all these letters?” Anika.
Nothing.
The Timekeeper returned to his papers. He held up his hands over both of them, and in a flash of golden light, two blank sheets appeared over the old ones. He must have had a chronobank underneath his clothes somewhere because he most definitely could execute magic perfectly well.
Then he began to draw again, with his left hand featurelessfaces, with the right clocks, some with numbers and hands, some without.
