I couldn’t. I just lowered my head and walked into the archway, and once again, the darkness swallowed me whole.
The soundof footsteps was in my head. It helped to try to keep up the rhythm with my mind. That way I didn’t think. That way there was no time to wonder.
I had my hands out—I was sure the boys did, too. There was no way to see, and we weren’t Diamonds to be able to produce light so easily.
In fact, maybe wecouldwith all those minutes in our Life Clocks, but for some reason we didn’t bother.
“Do you need to lean on me, Silas?” I whispered as we went, because not only had he been dried up by a timewraith in that tree, but he’d been manhandled by the tree itself, too.
“No, I’m fine. Thank you,” Silas said, his voice soft.
“How did you do that, Sy?” asked Cook from his other side. “How did you make the tree spill that juice?”
It was a question I wanted to know the answer to myself—and also an even better distraction from my own mind. From having to wonder and worry about where the others would end up. WhereMarchwould end up at the end of this nightmare.
“It wasn’t me—just the tree. I figured because of those rings that it had magic inside it, since, you know, it’s called theTree of Years,” Silas said. “So I figured I’d cut holes on it and see if the time it contains would spill out. It worked better than I expected, to be honest.”
Except…something about the way he spoke just now wouldn’t let me believe him the way I always did.
“Did you know that the tree would lash out like that?” I asked.
Because I knew thathe had.I’d seen it in his eyes when he’d turned to tell us to run, long before the tree had acted, while the wraiths had still been drinking the silver sap. He’d known.
“No,” Silas said.
Lie.
I wanted to call him out on it, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t. I wanted to ask him, too—how did you know, and how did you tear that tree’s bark so precisely?Anddid you think you were going to die? Did youknowyou were going to die when you did it?
“Brave Ora,” he whispered next. “Thank you for that.”
“No thanks needed. I almost killed everyone,” I muttered, thankful for the dark just now so they couldn’t see the flush of my cheeks.
“But you didn’t,” said both Silas and Cook at the same time.
A chuckle—Silas. “You give me hope, you know. All of you give me so much hope.”
Hope?“For what?” Because right now I was feeling quite hopeless.
“That not all Clockfolk is…messed up.”
This time Cook chuckled. “You know, you sometimes talk like you’re a hundred years old.”
Silas laughed. “But I’m merely eighteen.”
I agreed with Cook, though. He sometimes sounded like he wasn’t from this world at all.
“I think we’ll be all right. We’re at the top. It won’t take much longer now. We’ll be just fine,” Cook then said.
“Yes, we will,” said Silas.
The sound of our footsteps kept us company as we fell silent, each lost in our own heads, trying to either rethinkthrough what had happened, or forget. I was somehow trying to do both at the same time, and maybe that’s why my head was threatening to split open right through the middle.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice the light burning at the other end of the tunnel—or did, but didn’t really register it until I was about ten feet away.
I stopped then.
Holy Hour, there’s light.We’d reached the end of the tunnel.
