Helen wrapped her arms around herself. “Guys, I’m scared.”
“Don’t be,” Levana. “We’re okay, aren’t we? We’re all alive. It was just a party.”
But we all knew that wasn’t true, was it?
Just that there were no right words to say so yet.
“We went in there. We danced. We won.” Erith.
Except… “We did much more than that,” I said.
Silence for a beat.
“Wewon.” Reggie. “We went in there. There were no fights, no blood, no nothing—we won.”
And he was absolutely right, of course.
“We paid with our memories,” March said.
The gears and cogs in my stomach malfunctioned. I would be sick if my stomach wasn’t empty.
“Reggie’s right. There wasn’t even any fighting involved. Any blood. It waseasy.” Cook.
Mimi flinched. “It wasn’teasy.”
“But it worked, didn’t it?” said Reggie.
“My maid said a lot of Sparetime was gathered yesterday,” I said.
“I don’t believe it. We didn’t exactly use magic, did we? Not a single minute on my Life Clock has been spent. On the contrary—I got five minutesadded.” Levana.
The rest of us pulled our Life Clocks out of our pockets to check. Thirty-eight minutes. Not a single second spent, but eight earned.
“Do you not have any idea how much energy, how much magic is required to play around with memories? To hop in and out of them? It’s pure, raw magic. What we gave yesterday provides this place with a lot more magic than if we’d fought with blasts of magic for days,” said Silas, and he sounded disgusted.
“It’s true,” said March. “Memories use more chronobank minutes than any other magic in our court.”
“Inanycourt.” Silas.
“We weren’t even trained for it.” Cook shook his head, stared at the floor, half disappointed, half in disbelief. “All those lectures and all that running—none of it had anything to do with the trial.”
“And they say the first one is supposed to be the easiest one,” said Anika. Yes, that was what always happened in the earlier trials.
“It wasn’t easy for me—and we werenotprepared. We should talk to someone about this, we—” Russ said, but Silas cut him off.
“Do you think it matters? The lectures, thetraining”—he made air quotes with his fingers when he said that last word—“none of it makes any difference. It’sthree daysbetween each trial. No kind of training is going to prepare us for anything.”
He sounded bitter. He sounded angry.
I was, too.
“They kept us distracted. We should have asked questions. Weshould askquestions about the second trial now,” I said. They would have no choice but to tell us if we demanded, didn’t they?
“We can try,” Silas said with a sigh.
“Stop.All of you—stop,” Reggie said. “We finished the first trial. We’re all perfectly okay. We weren’t hurt. We didn’t bleed. We didn’t lose—we all won. So, how about we focus onthat,and we go eat, and we try to relax and enjoy the victory for the rest of the day?” He smiled, and it was forced, but only those first seconds. “After all, we’re here now. We all came here to play, and we’re not leaving until we winallthe trials.”
Silence for a tick.
