How ridiculous to think that this trial would be easy. How ridiculous to think about what they’dtaughtus, lessons about courts and timekeeping, running laps and climbing ropes. Useless. All of it had been perfectlyuseless!
Forever,whispered the voices in my head, making my skin crawl. Not proud of the way I was about to break down—but thenI didn’t.
Because just as I had decided to sit in one of those vacant chairs and scream on the inside until I let everything out, my eyes caught someone…notmoving. Not dancing.
My heart jumped.
There, in the distance, too far away, two people were standing in front of one another. Two people I recognized.
Mimi and Cook.
They’d stopped dancing, and they’d taken their masks off. As I watched in awe with my mouth open, they each put theirs over the face of the other. They exchanged their masks, smiling all the while.
Real people. Mimi and Cook.Real-real-real.
I ran.
Slamming onto bodies, pushing them away, elbowing them to get them to move faster, I did whatever it took to get to the other side of the ballroom on time, and I still failed. When I finally stopped where Mimi and Cook should have been, they were no longer there.
They’d just…disappeared.
I was all alone again.
12
They took my hand, danced with me—a man, then a woman, then a man again. I went through the motions, saw what their masks showed without even registering the memories, and then I moved on. Went closer to the stage, hoping somehow the instruments would save me.
They didn’t.
Hours must have passed. No hope in me, but my eyes still searched, and there in the distance to my left, I noticed a couple breaking apart.
More like the guy letting go of the woman—andshereached out a hand for him like she meant to call him back. A lot like the illusions reached formewhen I pulled away from them.
My legs were moving on their own before I realized it. The man walking through the crowd wore a dark red suit, had wide shoulders, slicked-back hair, a mask on his face—like half the other men in the ballroom—but the way he’d let go of that woman. The way he walked now. The way he scanned the room.
When he slipped behind a partition, I rushed my stepsand nearly knocked down a woman wearing a dress almost identical to Erith’s, but I didn’t stop to apologize. I couldn’t even speak, anyway.
I continued ahead, slipped behind that same partition and my eyes found the guy right away—he was looking ahead at a woman and a man as they approached him.
He fell back half a step as he looked at them, and I could have sworn he was going to turn and run away any second now. Run fromthemwhile they reached for him.
I moved so fast I hardly felt the ground underneath my feet, and before either of them had the chance to grab his hand, I spun around and slipped between them.
My breath was held, my heart hammering. My hand shook when I reached for his.Warm.
The guy looked down at me, eyes dark from the shadows of the mask on his face, exactly like all the other males I’d danced with.
Then he put his other hand around my waist, and we began to dance.
Behind us, the man and woman who’d been coming for him turned to one another, and they danced their way toward the crowd, too. It was the same dance, always following the rhythm of the music. The same steps, the same turns—the samefeelingas all the others, and that same dread, that same hopelessness came back so fast, like it had been waiting by the threshold all along.
Whenwas this going to end? Because I refused to believe in that voice in my head that whispered that same word—forever.
I refused.
Just get it over with. It’s a numbers game,I told myself, trying to sound like my father, because maybe I’d believe it if I thought he said it. Because it was—it really was a numbers’ game. I’d have to go through all these people or illusions orwhatever they were until I found another Hand, and it was bound to happenat some point.I just had to stick with it. I had to keep dancing, keep exploring memories.
Except the guy still hadn’t touched my mask, and the more we spun around, the more impatient andangryI became. Yes, it was a numbers’ game, and yes, it was going to end eventually, but I already felt likehalfof who I was when I woke up this morning, and I didn’t even know why.
