Then I could have sworn that I felt hands on my body, and I felt magic buzzing nearby, the kind that wasnotSpade. Spade magic was warmth, and it flowed so smoothly. I’d felt it countless times when the people around me used it, especially my parents.
This one was stiff and cold andwrong.It was foreign, yet any time I tried to push myself away from it, I found my body perfectly unresponsive. I couldn’t even get my eyes to open or fill my lungs with enough air in those seconds when I heard the voices talking—but luckily everything would godark soon after. The voices would disappear. My discomfort would disappear.
I had the impression that I wasmovingany time I was aware, too. Maybe like I was sitting in a carriage with wheels underneath, traveling down a very bumpy road. Which made me think this was a dream, after all, not my imagination—Ifelldown a hole in the ground when I was imagining.
Eventually, though, I became aware of my body again, and I realized I was standing still.
No—sitting.
Curiouser and curiouser,said the voices in my head.
I was sitting down on something hard, and in my mind I heard laughter, but it wasn’t real. It wasn’t out there, not in the real world. And when I opened my eyes, I saw…
Nothing.
Something was in front of my face.
Fabric touched my nose and my cheeks and my forehead—check the head-bag, check the head-bag, check the head-bag—and the panic that climbed up my throat like it wanted to run out of my mouth suffocated me. My body moved—and I heard voices, too, different voices,screamsand gasps and panicked shouts—but my whole focus was on my hands, on raising them to grab whatever it was that was touching my face, and taking it off.
Fabric, indeed—rough and brown and dirty.
Bile replaced the panic, burning my throat. It fell on my lap and to the broken floor instantly, and I was breathing, both my hands around my neck as if to convince myself that I had nothing there. I was free to breathe, and the air was going down my throat as it should.
I was alive, and I was sitting—and my neck and back and legs were almost completely numb the way they usually were when I sat or lay down wrong for too long.
But most importantly, I was not alone.
A gasp escaped me when I saw eyes made of reds and rusty browns, and wild curls standing in all directions, a dark stubble over his cheeks.
Another gasp escaped someone else—a girl sitting farther to my right, and she still held onto the brown fabric in her shaking fists.
A few still had those same brown fabrics over their heads.
Head-bags.
It had been real. The voices had been real.
“What…what is happening? Where am I?!”
The three people who still had the head-bags on woke with screams and gasps and jerked movements until they pulled the fabric off and saw.
The room we were in, broken concrete walls, ruined concrete floors, dark, save for two lanterns burning with golden light on opposite walls.
The chairs we sat in, set in a perfect circle, and the table standing on three legs to the left of the room.
Most importantly—the people.
The more I looked at them, and the more they looked at me, the more I recognized each one.
I’d seen them before. Time’s Teeth, we’d all seen each other before, even if it was only for a few moments that dreaded day in Neverwhen.
It wasthem.
It wasus—the former Hands of the 31st Turning Trials, and we were all equally terrified as we waited to either wake up or for whoever had brought us here to show themselves.
6
Neither happened.
