“What in the Holy Hour is that supposed to mean?” Seth hissed. “You’re the host—tell us what needs doing! Tell us?—”
The words stuck in his throat.
The air stuck inmine. In all ours.
The feeling came out of nowhere, all at once. It was like I had something inside me, something in my gut, and it was crawling up my windpipe, trying to get out. My mouth was wide open and I was suddenly choking, leaning back against the rough bark of a tree to keep my balance—and the others were exactly the same.
Fuck, I was terrified, twelve-hours certain that I was about to collapse on the ground right now and die. There was no other explanation—whatever was inside me right now, it was going toconsumeme,cut me wide open, leave me to bleed on the forest floor.
Then it was over.
The second turned and that thing that had been inside me slipped out of my mouth—except it wasn’t anything physical. It was just a warmth that spread from my lips and all the way down to the tips of my toes.
Another sharp scream—Levana, who was standing just beside Cook to my right. She was looking at her hands, andthenIwas looking at her hands and my mouth was wide open to scream, too.
Wrinkles.
My mind must have been playing tricks on me. I was breathing, no longer choking on thin air, though no sound was coming out of me. I was standing on my own, too, and so were the others. But the sudden cries that ripped out of them rang in my ears, and then suddenly everyone was looking down at their own hands.
That’s why I looked at mine.
I saw my skin, my knuckles, my palms. I saw the wrinkles that shouldn’t be there, wrinkles that had never-ever-reven been there before. Right thereonmy skin.
Black dots in my vision, but I blinked fast to clear them, to see better, to see the Hands that had aged right before my eyes. Around me—March, Seth, Mimi, Cook, they had wrinkles around their eyes, too. Wrinkles around their mouths. They had gained ten or twenty years just now, in a literal blink.
So hadI.
My hands shook as I reached to touch my face. I couldn’t quite tell, couldn’t really feel the wrinkles under my fingertips because I was in shock, but they were there.
I knew because they were there on every other face around the table—except for the host.
Host Ticktock laughed again.
“Overdone! Greedy batter!” he shouted. “Try again, and do it better.”
The look on his face was evident—he was enjoying this. His smile was authentic,sickand twisted, and that gleaming in his eyes was, too. He stepped back, took his place a little farther away from the beginning of the table, and began to hum a melody to himself.
Meanwhile we gathered around the table once more, looking at one another, terrified, trying to calm down.
“Old, we’re old, we’re so old?—”
“Our Life Clocks—I lost ten minutes!”
“How am I going to go back home like this?”
“Nobody will even know me!”
“I want out—I want out—I want out!”
I looked at March on the other side of the table, his teeth gritted and brows narrowed, holding onto the back of a chair. His knuckles had turned completely white.
“Enough,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “That’s enough. It’s just the game. We won’t be like this forever—let’s try again.”
“Try again? Are you insane?! I won’t be trying anything again!” shouted one Hand or the other.
But March was right. Crying and screaming right now wasn’t going to get us anywhere. Making the cake—better,like the host said—was going to be the only thing that set us free.
Pushing back the voices and the cries and my own panic wasn’t so hard, not when I knew that I literally had no other choice. I went closer to the table, my knees shaking, and I looked at everything the host had given us.
