We all leaned in to see better, too, and indeed the faces of the Hands portrayed in the picture looked…maybe notmiserable, but sad. Confused. Uncomfortable, even.
Which was insane. I’d seen the projections in the records of our school when I was chosen for the Turning Trials. I’d seen the Hands before entering the games, and I’d heard the interviews they’d done afterward.
I didn’t remember them lookinglike this,but…did they? Because now that I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure.
“The others, too,” Anika said, pointing to the second row of pictures, at the young faces of the Hands as they looked at the light-catcher. A few smiled—forced. Most didn’t.
“I wonder why,” said Cook. “I mean, I’m pretty happy.”
Me, too,we said, one after the other. We were doing perfectly fine.
For a moment there, we just stared at the many faces, many eyes, many smiles.
Then Mimi said, “It’s onlypictures,though. They could have been over the moon but look at these colors! How are they going to portray emotion accurately?” She shook her head and stepped back. “If you’re done, I’d rather be in the junkyard.”
“She’s right,” Reggie said. “These are just pictures, and even if they were sad, that doesn’t meanwehave to be. C’mon, who’s up for a race?”
Just like that, we were all running again.
They were right, even if I did have a strange feeling in my gut as I thought about those pictures. We couldn’t possibly tell from pictures alone how the Hands before us had felt. And was that any indicator, anyway? It could be different forus—we were already friends. We already knew how we danced, how we laughed, how we talked.
I was twelve-hours certain we would be just fine.
In the junkyard,while we were going through the rubble, Russ and Erith found a board game somewhere in the back that they recognized—most of us had no clue what any of the things in that place were, so this was a big deal.
There was music in the air from the timebloom—we had to reset the date to today to get it to play again when we brought it to the middle of the room—and the board game was more fun than I initially thought it would be. It was called the Game of Hours, the original version of it, at least, and the Diamonds said they played it back home all the time. It was a circular board made of dark stone, more or less the size of our dinner table back home. It had a clock face but no numbers—just symbols of all kinds and shapes. The inner rings turned manually, and in the very center of it was a small hourglass with sand made of glittery gray powder.
The players, two at a time on each side, had to spin the rings to align specific symbols—the order of which I had yet to learn properly—and then ask a question to their opponents. With every true answer, the sand drained in the hourglass, and when it was empty, the winning team could choose a punishment for the losers from the game’s own selection of ideas.
That partdidn’twork, according to the Diamonds, so we had to be creative when choosing punishments on our own.We tried everything—fromwear the strangest garments you can find in the junkyard until the night’s end,andwalk all around the junkyard backward without turning your head to look back once,andwe’ll pick an object, and you have to convince us that it’s actually a magical relic with a very dramatic background story.
This last one fell on Reggie, when he and Cook lost to Mimi and me, and the story he made up about a handheld mirror had us holding our sides.
And that was just the first half of the night.
In the second, we decided to play hide and seek.
Silly, yes, but it was the perfect spot for it, in fact, and with the loud music coming from the timebloom, it was going to be impossible for anyone to hear where we were going.
Unfortunately for me, I drew the short straw, and so I was the first to do the seeking.
They had me sitting on the floor near the timebloom, wrapping my arms around my head to make sure I wasn’t peeking, and they also had me count to fifty. I didn’t complain—I wasexcited,more so than when I was a kid and played this game with the kids in our neighborhood.
But when the counting was done and I stood up, I was completely alone in the junkyard.
Scary.A tiny bit. The large lantern with the half-frosted glass was right behind me, so there was plenty of light to see. For a moment there, I held my breath and looked around. The piles of devices and tools did not look as friendly andfunas they had when everybody else was here as well.
Perfectly normal, though. I just needed to remind myself that we were playing a game, and they were all hiding in here somewhere, and even if some of these machines came to life somehow, I knew how to fight.
Spar,really, but Father and I used real swords and knives for the past few years all the time, so it counted.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” I said to the room, and my voice was lost to the music from the timebloom—Levana had chosenAlmost Alwaysfor tonight, which was a slightly faster melody—so I doubted any of the others heard me. I barely heard myself.
But I did hear the sound of my heart beating like a drum in my chest.
I searched behind the nearest piles first, as was logical, but not a single movement caught my eye. That was okay. We were all grown up now, so I expected them to hide better. Such a silly game to play, but it didn’t feel silly at all.
In fact, the more the minutes ticked by, the more I began to sweat.
