“Something like what?” March asked.
“We’re…slow.” Cook raised his head. Looked at us. “We’re moving slowly. We’retalkingreally slowly, too.”
I could have laughed. I’d know if we were moving or talking slowly—we all would.
Except…
“Holy Hour—look!” Levana said, moving her hand in front of her face—but I didn’t see anything unusual. Her hand was moving as it should.
“Focus,” Cook said. “Look at your own hands and focus.”
I’d be damned, but I did. I looked at my hand, moved it in front of my face and…there!
My intention was to move it faster, yet my hand still took its time to travel from left to right. Had I really lost it, or did my hand take way longer than it normally would to do that simple motion?
The gears in my stomach shifted. I reached for the pocket specifically designed for our Life Clocks. I pulled it out as the others did, too, and…
“It’s moving so slowly,” Helen whispered, and I saw it, too. The hands that told the time on my Life Clock were counting the secondstooslowly. One in three.
I looked up again, and this time it was like a veil had been lifted from in front of my eyes. Isaweveryone for how they were moving, like they were stuck in slow motion. I heard the way their voices warped when they spoke, too, but I was moving at the same speed, so I hadn’t noticed at all…until I did.
“We have to get out of here,” said March, except now thatI was actively thinking about the normal speed of time, I could hear it perfectly how slowly every word left his lips. How slowly his lips moved, too.
And it was fuckingterrifying.
“I’ll do it. I’ll plant the seeds,” Reggie said, and it took him a good five seconds innormal timing—if my sense of time could even be trusted at this point—to lower to his knees as we watched.
Time’s Teeth, I was evenbreathingslowly, but the panic racing through my veins was as fast as always. My heartbeat, too—it shook me like a drum, and now that I could hear it slamming against my ribcage, it showed me exactly whatnormalwas. It gave me the proof that we were indeed stuck in slow motion.
What kind of magicwasthis?!
How could they slow down time at such a scale?
“Guys, it’s getting worse,” Cook said—and judging by my heartbeat, it took him more than three times the normal time to get those words out.
He was right.
It wasn’t my heart that was beating faster—it couldn’t beat any faster than this if it tried. It was just the time in this place that was slowing down by the second…
“It’s not working!” Reggie shouted, on his knees still, looking down at the pile of seeds he’d put between a mess of thinner branches and roots and leaves that made for the floor of this forest.
We all rushed to him, and we moved so slowly I had trouble believing I wasn’t stuck in a dream. There was no way my heart could beat so fast and my body could move so slowly. There was no way it would take methatlong to take three steps and kneel on the floor, too.
Silas had managed to bring both hands over Reggie’sseeds, to drop his in as well. To watch him closing his eyes when we were getting slower and slower by the second terrified me all over again.
Because if blinking took this long now, we were indeed going to be frozen solid. If blinking took this long, in a few of these stretched seconds, none of us were going to be able to move at all. It would take ushoursjust to blink!
“Not enough.”
The words could have filled my ears years later. Silas’s lips moved slower and slower, and we were practically motionless now, all of us on our knees around Reggie and his seeds.
Not enough magic.
I thought that’s what Silas tried to say when he spoke again, but we could no longer make out the words. It took so long for one to be complete that it lost meaning by the end of the next.
But the others must have understood the same thing because they moved. Slowly, they all moved, reached out their fists and threw their seeds on top of Reggie’s.
Meanwhile,minewere in my pocket.
