“There,” he said, and my heart jumped again. “Spoons. They’ve drawn spoons!”
In an instant, we were all on our feet and standing behind him, trying to see. Indeed, spoons were drawn on both sides of the inner bowl—one bigger, one smaller. The first was followed by= 5m,and the second by= 2m.We took it to mean that the big spoon held five minutes’ worth of sugar, and the smaller one only two.
“There are no spoons on the table,” Cook said.
“But there are plenty on the trees,” Mimi said, and she was already climbing on her chair to reach a spoon on the nearest branch, then two, then three.
We sat around the table again, so hopeful we had red onour cheeks. All except Levana and Reggie, who hadn’t even bothered to get up and look at the markings.
“Are you going to be sick?” I asked him because the table wasn’t too wide, and he sat close enough to me that I might need to move away if he did.
But he looked at me, and it suddenly felt like I was sitting on flames.
His eyes were glossy and red, full of unshed tears, and his chin was trembling—what an awful, awful sight.
“I think…I’m going to be dead.”
I read the words on his lips because his whisper was too low to hear it properly. Something inside me threatened to break—or rather, my body remembered something that had been in me before, that would have broken this very second. The sound of it echoed in the empty space it had left behind, along with fear.
Because if this guy thought he was going to be dead, what about me? And what about March?
“One heaped big spoon makes five minutes.” Both our heads snapped back to Russ, and most were still standing behind him, March and Seth and Helen. “I’ll do six spoons, and fill the rest with tea-minutes,” he claimed, and proceeded to fill his cup with sugar.
Too much.It looked like way too much sugar, but it did make an hour.
Russ was brave, I’d give him that. Levana was still old, and still crying, and he picked up the teapot anyway, and carefully poured half of what she’dused into his own cup.
We all held our breaths again.
“Thirty minutes worth of sugar, thirty minutes worth of tea,” Russ whispered to himself. When he put the teapot down, it had390minutesworth of tea left inside.He’d indeed poured thirty minutes exactly.
Please work, please work, please work…
“Sparetime save me…” Mimi whispered, and I just knew that I wasn’t going to like the next second.
Blood dripped down Russ’s nose. Screams and shouts and curses in Time’s name. The wrinkles that appeared on him were just as deep as Levana’s, and I couldn’t see his Life Clock from where I sat, but I was willing to bet the hands were spinning too fast to see.
He was losing minutes.
We were all losing minutes.
And no Cheshire Cat had come to grin and speak sensible nonsense to any of us yet.
“Perhaps we needto find the host.”
“Yes, yes, that could be part of the game.”
“The host would know—he’d tell us what to do.”
“Yes, the host, the host!”
Reggie was crying in silence. He was a big guy, and he’d been so happy before we came in here. Now he had his hands in front of his face and his shoulders were shaking, and they were all going to him to pat his back, to ask him why he was crying—he hadn’t aged a minute—but he never said. I doubted he knew himself.
Meanwhile, I continued to scratch the tabletop with my fingernails, trying to make calculations.
The others moved around, deeper into the forest on all sides, tried calling for help, for clues, but nobody came. Nobody was coming. Whatever nightmare we were stuck in, we were the only ones who could get us out. We were the only ones who could undo this hour.
If only we knew how we’d actuallymadeit.
