“I’ll show you,” he said. “When this is over, I’ll show you. And I’ll bring you back here, too.”
I smiled. “You already brought me.”
“Then I’ll bring you again.”
“And I’ll hold you to it.” Because I already knew that this would be my favorite place in all the courts, too. Maybe it already was.
I rested my head on his shoulder, and he rested his forehead to mine. Like that, we breathed in and existed in the moment, surrounded by memories.
Then March said, “We have to go back.”
I flinched. “I know.”
Neither of us moved.
“March?”
“Hmm.”
“When we come back here, will you make me one of these? I want to leave it here in this Garden, even if I can’t put in a memory.” I was no Heart, but I could stillthinkof a memory to immortalize.
A kiss on my forehead. “I would be honored,” he whispered, and my eyes closed for a moment. “What memory would you put in if you could, though?”
I didn’t need to think about it long. “This one,” I said. “This bench. This garden.This.” None of this would look right in graphite because unfortunately, you can’t draw light. And that’s whathewas. That’s what this whole place was.
Another kiss on my forehead, and this one felt like a promise.
We sat a little longer. Just a little.
Then we walked back through the garden, hitched a ride on the back of another cart heading the right direction—this one carrying barrels of wine, which March said was very typical of the Court of Hearts—and made it back to Vesta’s.
I was happy. I was sad. I was everything in between.
The others had noticed us gone—of course they had. Master Talik was pissed off, eyes red with anger, and he asked us if somebody had seen us at least a dozen times.
But one whisper in his ear from Vesta, and he seemed to calm down as if by magic.
We said we were out for a walk. March insisted that he’d only wanted to show me around his home. They had no choice but to believe him—and it was the truth, in a way. And those who didn’t…well. There wasn’t much Damon and Master Talik could do, anyway, and Vesta kept winking at us, as if she knew exactly where we’d been and what we’d done.
But then it was time to go.
Master Talik was a damn liar.The ride back was worse.
Maybe because we knew what was coming this time—the anticipation made it ten times harder. Every hum that built behind us in the conduit sent my stomach into my throat before the pulse even hit, and by the fifteenth slam of speed, I’d stopped trying to keep my eyes open altogether. I just pressed my face into March’s shoulder and held on and counted. Mimi threw up somewhere around pulse twenty-three, and Russ around thirty.
By the time Master Talik called out “Last one!” and the final wave of energy slammed us forward and then releasedus into stillness, we were all shaking so badly that climbing out of the runner took twice as long as climbing in.
We lay on the tiled floor near the hatch for a good five minutes, nobody speaking, nobody moving, just breathing and being grateful that the ground beneath us was solid and still. My stomach was completely empty—none of us had dared to eat before the journey, remembering what happened on the way there—and now the hunger hit all at once, sharp and mean, mixing with the nausea in a way that made me unsure whether I wanted food or whether the very thought of it would finish me off.
Russ was the first to sit up, pale as paper, and say what we were all thinking: “If anyone mentions food right now, I will end them.”
Nobody did.
29
“It’s over.”
I had my head in my hands, elbows resting on the three-legged table, trying to come to terms with everything we’d gone through already, and everything Kohen was telling us now.
