Safe.What an illusion. How could we be safe when we were trapped, couldn’t even walk away from this place, couldn’t even speak to anyone to ask for help? What didsafemean, when we’d been about to starve in that room surrounded by darkness, and nobody had offered us a single helping hand?
Still, we eagerly followed.
It may have been eight or nine hours only, but Time’s Teeth, we were exhausted. Terrified. Hungry as one can be, and we just wanted to lie down on something soft.
None of us argued. We followed the soldiers toward the palace, and all the way up to the eating hall without so much as a glance at one another. There was no blood on us this time, so we didn’t need to clean up first.
Only when we sat down around the table, and the helpcame in all at once with plates full of food, did we allow ourselves tofeel.To look. To breathe easy.
We were still shaking. Most were crying in silence. A few were brave enough to whisper, to remind us that it was over, we’d unwon, we’d made it out of that place, and none of us had died. We were champions indeed—said who could have been Russ.
But I only had eyes for the plate and only put food in my mouth because I knew I’d regret it later if I didn’t. Just a little. Just so I could sleep.
And water, too. I drank just so I didn’t feel like I was as dry as timesand on the inside, and then I was ready to go.
March hardly looked at me. Something on his mind.
Something on all our minds—but we didn’t know what. We didn’t knowhow.We just knew that it was a heavy burden whatever we were made to bear.
We knew thatwe knewfor that split second. We remembered again, and now we didn’t.
I didn’t say goodnight when Lida waved at me from where she stood with the other maids near the wall, as if to say that it was okay to get up. I didn’t look at any of them as I walked over to the door she was holding open for me. I heard others pushing back their chairs and making it to their feet, no doubt eager to disappear, too.
A blink, and I was in my room, and Lida said something I didn’t hear. I fell on the bed with the suit still on and felt her pulling my boot off. I was asleep long before she undid the laces of my second one.
The faceof the Red Queen was with me until I woke up under the light of the moon half hidden behind thick clouds. The stars—those I could see from the window of my bedroom— were unusually bright, too. The night wasalive,yet I felt…less so. Like I’d lost something else already, and I didn’t know what.
Trying to think back to what it could have been was going to drive me insane, so I stopped.
Instead I peeled off that suit from my body. It seemed Lida hadn’t taken me out of it, and I was thankful. I didn’t want to be undressed by her or anyone else while I was unconscious. And I would rather try to scrub the last trial from my skin all by myself.
When I walked out of the bathroom, I thought I’d feel lighter, but I didn’t. I’d only lost six minutes from the Life Clock in the Thirteenth Hour trial when I transported the sand into the hourglass. The rest remained untouched. I took the chronobank with me and the drawing of Silas’s face, and I walked out of the room at a little past nine m.b. I was hungry, my stomach rumbling, but I couldn’t even think about eating yet.
No, I needed air. I needed to be able to breathe and to be somewhere where the walls didn’t threaten to cave in on me. Suffocate me.
So, I went out into the garden that wasn’t a garden, with gears and metal parts that were shaped like flowers—and for what purpose, I wondered? Tolookgood? Was that it?
It didn’t matter, though. I found a bench to sit on, near a bush that was a real bush, only the one between it and the other wasn’t. Instead, it was hiding some sort of a vent underneath that groaned every once in a while as if it were a living, breathing beast.
Other than that, the night was warm and quiet. Nobody was working in the mechanical garden at this time, for which I was thankful. There, I sat with Silas’s drawing in my hand—folded still—and I counted my breaths until I reached one thousand.
Tears had slipped from my eyes, but I wasn’t sure whatfor. I was still wiping my wet cheeks when I noticed something moving beyond a hedge and a tree that seemed all too real—until I looked hard enough to notice that the bark was made of metal, and oil was slowly sliding down between the lines of the rough surface.
At first, I thought it was a worker. They tended to leave me alone, hardly looked at me even when I was inside the palace.
Then I thought—hopedit would and hoped it wouldn’t be—March. He liked to follow me around and I never noticed until he wanted me to.
Lastly, I thought it was some part of the machinery, something moving or twitching or steaming, but it was so consistent, and it sometimes sounded like something sharp being dragged across a metal surface. I got curious, so curious to see what was wrong.
Something must have been, I figured.
But somethingwasn’t.
“You’re walking backward very well, I must say,” said a cat with a grin as his claws slowly scratched the side of the metal branch he was lying on. “Why do you think that is,O-ra?”
It was the Cheshire.
My heart skipped a beat, and my eyelids a blink. The cat was there, lying on its front, thick tail swooshing up and down, a paw under his grinning face, the other scratching the branch like he thought he was making music.
