When he put it like that…
Most of us found ourselves nodding along. Helen and March refused to smile at first, but when we closed our doors and finally decided to go to the eating hall, they relaxed more with every corner we turned.
Calren sat alone at the head of the table like always, a cup of tea in front of him. He smiled when we entered, and I could have sworn something else crossed his eyes for a split second, but it was gone too fast and I didn’t catch it.
“The victors,” he said as he stood up, a hand to his heart. “Congratulations, everyone. You were indeed incredible. The first trial is already over.”
We muttered our thanks and took our places around the table, same as usual. Sunlight streamed through the windows, except this morning it didn’t have the strength to improve my mood like usual. This morning, I was still…processing.
“Are we going to get them back?” March asked before any of us had the chance to even pour a cup of tea or reach for the food in front of us.
They’d prepared everything you could think of, as usual—eggs and sausages, pastry, at least twelve kinds of jam, chocolates and caramel and fresh fruit—it had all impressed me terribly those first days before the trial. Now, somehow, the color of them had faded a little bit. And even though I hadn’t eaten, I wasn’t nearly as hungry as I thought I would be to smell the freshly baked croissants.
“Excuse me?” Calren said, though a part of me insisted that he knew. Hemusthave known what March meant.
Either way, March clarified for him: “Are we going to get our memories back? We paid with memories going into that ballroom. I don’t know what I forgot exactly, but I know I’ve forgotten.”
Exactly.I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d thought about when those three men told me to put my hand on that table. I’d thought ofsomething,but I didn’t know what.
“Yes, that was the price of admission. I believe you all had to spin the spinner to pick the number and kind of memories you paid with.” We nodded. “And you paid the price, and you went inside. You danced, and you searched memories, and you were all able to tell the real one among the fakes.” He nodded, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “That was the first trial.”
“You didn’t answer his question, though,” Silas said from the end of the table.
The way he was looking at Calren…
“I did, actually. You paid the price. You gave away your memories, and there’s no getting them back. The game has them now.”
I squinted my eyes at him. “The game?” BecauseIhad March’s memories in my head still. I could think of them, and it was like they wereminebut weren’t. They were implanted in me, a part of me as much as my own.
“But I still—” Mimi started, but…
“Yes.” Silasshoutedthe word, not only said it. He was looking at Mimi, too, when he said, “Yes, Calren, you answered his question.” His hands were fisted over the table. His jaw locked. His eyes remained unblinking as they moved from one Hand to the other, like he was trying to tell us all something.
“That’s that, then. There’s no need to talk about memories anymore. They’re gone, the game has them. We move on,” said March, who had locked eyes with Silas. He nodded slowly, just a little.
The rest of us bit our tongues.
It was clear what both of them were saying—do not tell Calren we remembered.And I agreed.
If they thought the game had the memories, so be it. I’d rather be able to tell March what he lost before they figured it out, and…what,exactly? Would they extract the memories? Magic them out of us? Put us under again and control us somehow like they did the night before? Make us disappear and then reappear elsewhere?
The more I thought about it, the more I panicked. The more I feared. The more I wanted to rage.
The Turning Trials were…not at all what I thought they would be, though I’d seen. Iknewthey were strange. I knew everything was possible in the Labyrinth—everybody said so.But to actuallybe hereand live these things was a completely different story.
“Right.” Reggie cleared his throat and grabbed one of the teapots. “Tea, anybody?”
It was the first awkward breakfast we’d had since we came here, not because we were all being careful not to mention memories again, but because of Calren. He usually talked, made jokes, asked us questions about our lives, and this time he didn’t. This time he hardly looked up from his plate, and when he did, there was something in his eyes.
There wassomething about something.
Then he saw us to the lecture.
We would no longer be sitting in that classroom with Miss Ren or Lefa James, it seemed. We were done learning about the courts and timekeeping. Now it was time for lessons on machinery, and the guy who would be teaching us was a Timekeeper, too—Master Talik with gray hair and oil-stained clothes, and with a smile so easy we were all relaxed the moment we made ourselves comfortable in his workshop.
That, too, was very different from the neat and clean classrooms we’d been to before. This was an actual mechanic’s workshop turned semi-clean lecturing room. There were four rows of metal benches on the left with narrow tables in the front, facing a very long one at the other end—full of gears, springs, rods, half-dismantled devices unlike any I’d ever seen before. The walls were full, too—of diagrams outlining all sorts of mechanisms, each more complicated than the last.
It was incredibly intriguing, maybe because I used to love going to work with Mother when she was an apprentice to a train engine builder for a while back home. It was the only place I’d traded sparring with Father for when I was a kid.
