Everyone nodded. Everyone stared at their feet for the longest moment, just to process the decision. To come to terms with it.
And we did.
Thirty minutes later,we were dressed, had food in our stomachs, and we were ready to go.
19
The tunnel beneath the hatch was narrower than I expected, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, the walls rough-cut stone, ice cold to the touch.Old.
That only increased my anxiety.
The air down here was different, too, thinner, colder, carrying a faint vibration that I felt in my chest rather than heard. Almost like, despite this place no longer being functional, it was still here. Still…alive.
Headfirst,I told myself as I looked at the darkness, not entirely certain I could get my feet to move when the time came.
“This tunnel is supposed to be sealed,” Kohen said, crouching at the entrance, right there over our heads. He ran his fingers along the edges of the hatch. “He most likely used the Sparetime to open this.”
“Stole,”muttered Russ from somewhere ahead. “The sneaky little?—”
“He wasn’t sneaky—he wasdesperate,” Mimi cut him off, but Kohen ignored both.
“There should be blockades along the way, too, so either you find him by them—and I pray to Time that you do—or he broke through them as well.”
“How?” I asked in half a voice. “How will we know where to look?”
The old Timekeeper looked somewhere behind him. “Damon, is it ready?”
Footsteps, and then Damon, flushed cheeks and bloodshot eyes, crouched near the hatch, too, and offered him something.
“I can’t calibrate it properly without his clock, but it should still work,” he said, and Kohen raised the device to better look at it—round, flat, no bigger than a pocket clock, but thicker. When he turned it over to inspect the back, the other side was etched with fine circles, and a single thin needle rested in the center.
“This is a seeker,” Kohen said. “We use these to find people, but they work as they should only when we can calibrate them to their clocks or chronobanks. Right now, we can’t do that, as Silas took his clock with him, but it should still guide you toward the biggest magical source it can sense. Hopefully, that will be Silas.”
Hopefully,he said, but he didn’t look very hopeful at all.
No, he looked worried as he leaned in to give us the seeker, and March reached out to grab it since he was the tallest.
Once he looked it over, he handed it to me.
The needle quivered in my palm, and at first, I thought it was just my shaking hands, but then it swung firmly to the left. There was no mistaking it—it was pointing left.
And I’d been twelve-hours certain we’d be starting right. Both sides of the corridor were equally dark, though, so it wouldn’t really matter.
“Follow the needle. It should lead you to him.” Kohen stood up, brushed the dust from his knees.
“And…if it doesn’t?” I asked—not that the answer would make a difference, but just to be somewhat prepared.
It was Damon who answered me. “Then use your eyes. Search. You found him once. You’ll find him again.”
Yes, that was exactly what I was thinking, too, except hearinghimsay it out loud made me feel…lessprepared for some reason.
I could hardly believe it myself, but it had beenbetterwhen they hadn’t told us what to look for exactly in the Labyrinth. It was worse now that we knew.
“I wish you all good-timing. Be careful down there. The Labyrinth is not safe, and people might be looking for you,” Kohen said, and he tried his best not to sound concerned. “And whatever you do—don’tlinger in one place too long.”
For the longest second, we looked up at him, waiting, though I wasn’t sure for what. Nothing else was coming. Nobody else would be joining us. It was just us.
“Let’s get going then,” said Seth eventually. “Ora, get to the front.”
