There really was no use.
The images were moving—and maybe it was just my imagination, but theymoved with me.The faster my heart beat, the faster the flashes blinked in and out of existence, and the faster I seemed to spin.
Except I wasn’t twelve-hours certain of whether I was spinning or if the gallery moved.
Maybe both?
Calm down,I told myself, out loud or only in my head—it didn’t really matter.
The White Queen—that’s what I wanted to see. The White and the Red, but mostly the White. I wanted to see more.She’dtaken the plaques, andshe’dhidden them, and I needed to know where. Such a strange room—with white walls and clean dishes on racks…and why did it almost feel like I’d seen it before?
But my heart had steadied and the alarms in my head were no longer ringing, and the thoughts in there weren’t screaming, either. Slowly, I opened my eyes again, and then my breath caught right away—ababy.
I was looking at a baby, and the moments weren’t moving fast, weren’t flashing, so I could see it clearly.
It was a room, small but cozy, with candles on the windowsill, their flames barely moving. The baby lay there on a bed with rumpled sheets—an infant, really. Sleeping.Tiny.
There was a girl there sitting at the edge with it, wearing a black shawl over her head, her back turned to me. I saw her hands over her knees as she gripped them, head down, knuckles white.
Such a strange scene—and I thought the girl might be crying. Her shoulders shook a little, but maybe I was just making it up.
The queen,I thought. I needed to see the queen—notthis.
But the baby, bundled up in white sheets, opened its eyes. Could have been a boy or a girl, but it had light hair—just a tiny curl over its forehead—which made me think it was a Spade.
The image changed, fell away, got replaced by another—but once again, it didn’t show me the queen.
A man carving a name into the trunk of a mechanical tree, his chisel sparking against the copper bark, tears on his face but a smile on his lips.
Two boys fishing at the edge of a canal in Neverwhen, their lines tangled together, arguing about whose fault it was that all the fish seemed to have swam away.
An old Heart woman on her deathbed, surrounded by family, pressing a glass heart into the hands of a young girl—who was the spitting image of her—and whispering something that made the girl laugh.
Another baby, this one older, in the arms of a Timekeeper woman nursing her by candlelight in a room full of clocks, all of them ticking at different speeds. The baby’s eyes wereopen and watching the hands move like she understood exactly what was happening, even if nobody else did.
A Diamond man weighing Sparetime on a silver scale; a little girl with flour in her hair standing on a chair to reach a kitchen counter, her tongue between her teeth; a young man hugging a black horse; a cat sitting alone on a field, watching the sky as a star shot right through the darkness…
All of these and more. So many more images rushed past me, bleeding into one another, lives and smiles and tears and heartaches layered on top of each other like pages in a book. And I moved too fast to read all the pages, see all the details, but I thought I might try. I thought, if I only had forever to fall, I could seeallof it, everything that this gallery allowed me to see.
Yes, I decided. I could stay here forever.
After all, wasn’t falling better than standing when the ground underneath your feet could crumble and let go at any second?
35
So many images. So many faces. So many stories…
I was lost, completely lost as I fell. Sometimes my focus slipped and my heartbeat sped and the images moved in the same rhythm. Then I’d remember to breathe, to focus, to blink my eyes that were slightly burning, and everything would slow down again. The stories painted themselves with different colors all around me. Old and new, I saweverythingfor real.
It occurred to me at one point that I might know exactly what was happening to me.Stillward,Master Talik had called it, but I wasn’t still at all—on the contrary.
Could it be that there were other gaps in time to fall through? Because here everything was moving. All the time, without stop. Different timelines—you could easily notice it by the way the people in the scenes were dressed, by the way the rooms and the buildings looked, by the tools they used and the beds they slept in.
These moments went way,wayback—and if I had to pick the oldest one so far, I’d choose that shape I’d seen standingin the field at dusk, or even the women bathing naked in a lake together.
The more I saw, the more curious I became. It was starting to feel likethishad always been my past, and it was my present, and it was going to be my future, too. It was starting to feel like I’d always belonged tothisplace, not another.
Which was…strange. And as wrong as it felt right. I couldn’t really put my finger on it—but any time I tried to figure it out, the scenes would change and a new image would catch my attention, and then I was falling down another hole all over again.
