We’d learned in school that a long time ago, Timekeepers and the Clockfolk were much more divided. The Clockfolk had always tried to sort of keep them under control because of the story of our creation. The Great Rabbit was athief, despite having created the Great Clock. He stole from Time, and since Timekeepers were believed to be his descendants, the Clockfolk had always regarded them as…suspicious. Untrustworthy.
I never knew they had tunnels underground to travel through the Clockrealm, though. It must have been awful for those who came before.
“So, how long until the Labyrinth?” asked Cook from the front of the group. We were walking in twos and threes, and he and Mimi led the rest of us.
“Just a little more,” Kohen said.
“Really? We’rethatclose?” I wondered.
The Timekeepers didn’t answer, only quickened their pace.
They moved fast, turning at junctions without hesitation, ducking under low-hanging conduits that none of us would have seen until we slammed our heads onto them. Almost like they knew the whole place from memory.
At one point the tunnel narrowed so much we had towalk single file, our shoulders brushing the pipes on either side. At another, the floor shifted from grating to bare rock, then grating again.
Everything was the same, but…different.
A little while later, we climbed a set of iron rungs bolted into the wall that brought us up through a vertical shaft barely wide enough for March’s shoulders. Other than a few complaints here and there, nobody spoke or asked the Timekeepers anything. We just focused on getting ahead.
Then they stopped abruptly.
“Halt,” said Kohen, and the voice traveled on both sides of the corridor like his words were running. I stretched my neck to try to see a door, but then he and his friend pressed their hands against a section of the ceiling.
Magic in the air, colorless this time. A tick later, a hatch opened above us, letting in the first breath of cold night air I’d tasted in what felt like days. Not sure why I expected sunlight when we knew that it was a little after one in the morning—Cook, Levana and Seth had clocks with them. Still, I was almost surprised to find the sky dark.
The rusted metal of the ladder scratched my palms on the way up, but I didn’t even flinch. We climbed out one by one into tall grass, the night dark above us—and just there to our left, the golden tips of these high fences caught the moonlight not twenty feet away.
“What’sthat?” asked one or the other as I rose on my tiptoes to try to see better, beyond the trees and to the other side of that fence.
Kohen simply said, “That’s the Labyrinth.”
Goose bumps on my flesh.
The fence. It was the Labyrinth fence.
“Keep moving,” the Timekeepers said, and they led us closer to them.
I waited as March helped Erith up, who came throughlast. He looked a bit surprised to find me standing there when everyone else was already gone.
Which in turn made my cheeks feel like they were burning.
Maybe I should have gone, too. Maybe it was just an accident that he sat close to me at the table or that he walked with me through the tunnel. Maybe?—
My eyes know your face.
His words repeated themselves in my mind like a mantra.
Yeah, maybe not.
Together, we followed the others. The fence was taller than I remembered. Not that I remembered much—only the golden tips of it from the carriage window, the way they caught the last of the sunlight that day I woke up in the middle of the arena.
But my body remembered more, though. The moment my fingers wrapped around the cold metal bars, something in my chest twisted so hard I had to close my eyes and focus on drawing in air.
Like I’d done this very thing before. Like I’d grabbed these bars, had felt the coldness of the metal, too.
“Keep walking. Just a little longer,” Kohen said as he continued down the long grass, walking right next to the golden fence.
“How exactly are we going to get through?” Russ asked.
