Caro accepts the cup, her movements slow and punctuated by winces. I’m still dizzy from my loss of time, my body as tender as a bruise, and I can’t imagine how she must be feeling, having lost four times as much. Her hands aren’t bandaged, like mine—Ivan must have pulled it from her arms. My stomach makes a fist. Her wrists are covered by her thick velvet dress, so I can’t see the marks. “Thank you, Jules,” she says, her voice a hoarse whisper, and drinks.
The effect is immediate. Points of color appear in Caro’s white cheeks, and her grip on the cup tightens as she swallows the mixture of wine and time. Even her posture seems to change, her back becoming straighter in the bed. She sighs, the sound of her breath stronger than it was before, and moves to put the empty cup back on the nightstand.
Before her hand reaches the table, Caro stops abruptly. The room is thick with heat—her arm hangs crooked in midair, and her fingers uncurl from the cup until it falls, cracking against the floorboards. Caro gasps in pain and brings her hand to her throat.
I lean forward, pulse spiking in my blood. “Caro, what’s wrong?” Had I melted the blood-irons enough? Did I administer them wrongly somehow?
Caro opens and closes her mouth, but nothing comes out. She doesn’t seem to be able to breathe; her face twists in pain and she goes rigid, then begins thrashing in the sheets, spluttering and choking. The sounds are harsh and urgent, gasps that are cut off uselessly before the air can reach her lungs. Her face has turned bright scarlet, and her eyes are bulging in her skull.
She’s choking.
“Caro,” I hear myself shout. Panic swelling my throat, I cup her head with one hand and force her jaw open with the other. Something glints in the back of her throat.
Shaking with fear, I push Caro’s head to the side and reach into her mouth with two fingers, but with her struggling, I can’t reach the object, can’t dislodge it. Caro spasms, her face turning redder and redder, and I hear myself begging to the Sorceress for Caro’s life and internally screaming to hurry, please hurry. My own heart is pounding so hard I think it will splinter my ribs and burst out through my chest.
Caro’s eyes roll up in her head, and she goes slack in my arms.
The world falls silent.
She has passed out. My own breath comes in gasps. The rest of the room is quiet—a quiet so thick that it settles into me like stone.
I look up and almost scream.
Nothing looks immediately wrong about the room, but something about it has turned to terror. The gauzy curtains don’t wave in the wind, but stick in their billowed-out shapes as if they’re made of ice. From the rose in a vase on Caro’s vanity, one falling petal is frozen in midair, halfway to the ground.
And Caro’s not moving—not in the slightest. Her body is still as a statue—no movement of her chest as she breathes, not even a blink. The wrongness of it makes the hair stand up on my arms. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. As I look down at her, I notice a droplet of sweat gleaming on her cheek. It’s stretched, poised to drip from the ridge of her cheekbone down to the floor. But it doesn’t fall. And doesn’t fall. It’s only when I brush it away with my hand that it drops, hitting the floor with a plink audible in this dead silence.
Certainty takes hold of me, cold and terrifying.
Something is wrong with time.
In the silence and the stillness, I feel more alone than I’ve ever been, with my friend lying as still as death in my arms. She doesn’t stir when a sob, formerly held back by adrenaline, bursts from my chest.
When I release Caro and sink to my knees beside her bed, she slumps back into the pillows, her face bright red but utterly still. The floorboards creak under my weight, the mattress rises back into place when I take my weight off it, but everything else in the room remains as motionless as if it has all become suddenly encased in glass. It’s dizzying, nightmarish; and my tears come hot and fast. I’ve felt time slow before, but never this full stop, this eerie space where I alone can move. What if I’m stuck, like the town of Briarsmoor?
Fear clears my mind. Taking a deep breath to master myself, I get to my feet and bend over Caro. I grip her shoulder and hip carefully and turn her onto her side. Then I climb up beside her and, remembering some instructions from Lora on choking victims, strike her between the shoulder blades with the heel of my hand.
Nothing changes. I steel myself and hit again, harder. And again, until my recently bandaged hand screams and aches and begins to bleed.
On the fourth blow, something gives. A blur of gold bursts from Caro’s lips—I gasp with shock and relief—and the thing hits the floorboards with a heavy thud before rolling under the wardrobe. Though my eyes are blurred with sweat and tears, it looks bigger and heavier than a year-coin.
A strange, strangled sound comes from beside me—the second half of a sob. I turn my head to see Caro draw in a ragged, painful-sounding breath.
“Thank the Sorceress,” I say, and bend over her. She’s breathing hard, her chest heaving, and there’s blood on her lips—but her face is going slowly from red to pink, and I can feel her pulse where I grip her shoulder, strong and alive. I look to where the gold thing fell on the floor. “You were choking.”
Caro’s crying quiets. She stares at me, her eyes ringed with red. It’s more than surprise, I realize as she follows my gaze to the floor—it’s suspicion.
No, something else—betrayal.
I don’t understand. Does she think I meant to hurt her?
Finally tearing her eyes away from mine, Caro leans over and tries to grab the object, but she’s too weak. I bend down, thankful to be free of her eyes on mine. But the relief in me twists back toward dread at the thought of what I will find beneath the wardrobe.
It’s not a coin. I kneel down to the floor, both to look closer and to hide my face from Caro. On the floor, trailing blood and spit but immaculately clean itself, is a gold sphere the size of a walnut. It’s new blood-iron—that’s obvious from the sheen of the metal—but it’s as if the three coins that I had dissolved in the wine have reformed into this sphere.
Slowly, something takes hold of me again: the feeling that I’m trapped on the board of a game I can’t begin to understand. The thing sickens me and calls to me at the same time. I reach out for it.
The metal, when I close my hand around it, isn’t hot but gently warm, as if it’s been sitting in the sun. It’s smooth and seems almost to be humming, as if there’s something alive inside. It’s heavy and—
I gasp as I my fingers sink into its surface, as if the metal is melting under my touch. I drop it and scramble back.
“Hold on to it.” The voice is a whisper, barely audible, but unmistakable.
I look up at Caro, who’s weakly pulling herself to the edge of the bed. Her face is still flushed and shining with sweat, but she’s staring down at the ball of metal with wide, alert eyes.
“See what happens,” she adds, meeting my eyes again. There’s a flicker of something there, some emotion I can’t identify, but in a moment she’s cast her eyes down and is looking at the gold sphere again. I want to protest, go and hide until I can puzzle out what in the name of the Sorceress is happening, but Caro is waiting expectantly. And she’s alive, for now, which is all that should matter.