“Well. Would you look at that,” Master Talik said when we all took our seats on the benches.
He smiled again as he wiped his hands on a rag that had given up on being clean a long time ago. “You’ve already completed your first trial. Won the game. That’s very promising, young ones.” His voice was soft but sharp at the same time. We looked at one another—I mostly looked at March who sat next to me, and he thought so, too. Master Talik was…nice, it seemed.
A few gears ticked somewhere behind him as he stepped beside the big table, then gestured to the chaos on it. “Welcome. This is where things break, get fixed, and occasionally pretend they were never broken at all.” He grinned, showed us yellowed teeth, and I found myself smiling, too. “I’ll do my best to teach you the difference.”
Master Talik picked up a small brass cog, rolled it between his blackened fingers, then set it down again.
“You know, machines are really not that different from us.” As he said this, his eyes skimmed over our faces, then stopped on Silas, who sat in the front row.
The Timekeeper paused. Blinked.
Then continued.
“Most of what keeps the Labyrinth running passes through hands like mine at some point. Gears, locks, all kinds of devices. None of it is complicated, only…” He rubbed his fingers together as he searched for the right word, then settled on, “particular.”
That was certainly one way to look at it—but more than that. There was something about him.
I took a moment to analyze him again. He was tall, had long, thin limbs and curly gray hair that had remained a deep shade of orange only around the nape of his neck. His eyes were full of life, a deep blue, like an afternoon sky. Gray stubble covered his cheeks, too, and it suited him perfectly.
He spread his arms to the sides and looked down at himself—at his stained brown shirt and apron. “You’ll be expected to have at least one ruined pair of clothes before this is over, and to ruin at least one mechanism. If you don’t break anything, I won’t be happy.”
“This is my favorite class already,” Reggie said, and we all laughed a little. So did the Timekeeper.
“It’s mine, too,” he said with a wink. “Ask questions. I like being annoyed. And I won’t promise that you’ll understand answers, obviously—but I’ll do my best not to ignore you when you speak.”
An especially mischievous grin. We laughed again.
“And that’s the extent of the only speech you’ll ever get from me, Hands. Let’s begin.”
I was actually excited—or maybe just eager to escape having to think about trials and memories and dancing with illusions?
One or the other.
Master Talik started us on the smallest things. We had to listen first—not to him, but to the devices themselves. He passed around simple gears, locks, timing plates, and showed us how to feel when something was off without taking it apart. How resistance meant wear. How silence could be just as wrong as any rattle or grind.
It really was like he said—not complicated, but precise.
The lecture was three hours long, but it went by in a blink. By the time it was over, all twelve of us had dismantled and rebuilt a device that was used only to spin wheels. All kinds of wheels, all sizes. When we left the workshop, I had three oil stains on my tunic, and none of the others had escaped without at least a little bit of grease on them, either.
Even so, my head was buzzing in a way that felt almost pleasant.
A reminder—of what it used to be when we got here,before the trial. A reminder that just because we’d had to play that strange game, it didn’t mean that thingsherehad changed. They hadn’t—we were still together, and we still had days to live.
Maybe we really were going to be okay.
14
Calren saw us to our dorms to rest before lunch. We’d only have a few minutes, he said, and he stayed there with us until we were all in our rooms, but that was okay. We could still talk—if not now, then at night when the rest of The Ever was asleep.
But when I closed my door, I found I couldn’t even bring myself to lie down. I felt like I was beingwatched—only it wasn’t a real eye that watched me. It was a mechanical one—just like that heart I’d drawn for March. I grabbed my sketchbook and sat at the coffee table, planning to keep busy so my mind didn’t get overwhelmed again with questions I still had no answers for—when someone knocked on the door.
My heart jumped.
Had Lida come to get me for lunch already—or was it the other Hands?
Another knock.Not Lida.I knew exactly how she knocked, and it wasn’t this.
I made it to the door in a blink, and when I pulled it open, March threw a quick look back at the hallway and stepped inside. Grabbed the door and pushed it closed behind him.Grabbed my hand and went deeper into the room, almost all the way to the bed.
