Which begged the question,why?Cats didn’t talk. Animals didn’t talk.
Yet the cat stretched on the boy’s lap, arching its back, its fur rippling with more numbers, and continued, ”I tell people things they didn’t ask for and don’t want to hear.”
“Is thisreal?” asked one of the boys—I thought Cook.
“Or is this some kind of an illusion?”
“What…whatareyou?” Anika breathed.
The cat yawned. Actually yawned, showing teeth that were too sharp, far too many. “What a dull question,” it said. “You should be asking who—or better yet,when. But I suppose that’s beyond most of you.”
Holy Hour, a hurricane of senseless words spun in my mind, and in the storm, there was one that stood out more than most, and I had no idea why.
“Glitch,” I said because sometimes speaking out loud made it easier to tame those storms.
And the cat grinned. “No, no—Iam not the glitch. I merely live in them, as would all Cheshires if others existed.”
I blinked and blinked and chased my own thoughts in my head like a dog its tail…
“Do they?” Were there more cats like this out there that we didn’t know about?
“Of course not,” it said, turning its head to the side like it was offended. “There is only one Cheshire, and that is I.” It licked its paw for a short second, in which I was almost eleven-hours certain I’d heard that voice before. Male, and thick but also smooth, just…different.“Now, are you going to stand there until he dies, or are you going to do something useful?”
Dies.
The word hit me like a bucket of ice-cold water on myface. My eyes moved from the cat to the boy slumped against the metal hook, his chest barely moving.
His skin wasn’t just pale. It was gray, almost translucent, like something underneath was dimming. His lips were cracked. His hands were curled loosely around an object—a clock. A bigger clock than most, bigger than all chronobanks I’d ever seen.
I went closer before I realized what I was doing, but I wasn’t the only one. Mimi and March were right beside me when we lowered to our knees close to the boy.
The cat leapt off his lap with an offended flick of its tail and began to move away toward the wall that wasn’t a wall, but a perfectly silent, perfectly even waterfall.
“Is this…is this Silas?” I asked—the cat,mind you. I was speaking directly to a cat.
And it answered. “Who else would he be?”
Mimi’s shaking hand closed around the boy’s pale cheek.
“Silas,” she breathed, closed her eyes, sighed. “He’s ice cold.”
March touched his hand. I touched his neck.Ice cold,indeed, but he was breathing.
Mimi tried again, “Silas, can you hear me?”
I didn’t expect anything to happen, which was why I was so shocked when his head moved.
Just barely—a tilt, a shift, like his neck couldn’t quite hold the weight of it anymore—but it was movement, and that’s what counted.
“How long has he been here? What…what in Time’s Trousers happened here?” Seth said from behind us.
“Oh, you don’t want to know what happens in Time’s trousers, I assure you, young one.” The cat was grinning. The cat waslaughing.“But the Timekeeper has been here a while.”
A second of silence.
“Not the Timekeeper—him,” I said because he had to know we were talking about Silas.
“Yes—him,” the cat replied. “Pay attention,O-ra.”
