Chapter 12: Daylight Saving

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a girl who learns to trust a boy in a single heartfelt scene, close this book now. Dear Reader, Hadjer had exactly forty-five minutes to figure it out, and most of them were spent watching a clock.

The clock ate them one by one.

At 3:25, she’d stopped pacing and started counting the cracks in the ceiling, because that was quieter than counting her own heartbeat. At 3:40, the shuttle rolled past outside and honked twice at an empty stop, and she flinched like it had been aimed at her.

He left me. He left me, and he took the plan with him.

At 3:55, by her phone, she stood up and walked out the door.

She ran across the street with her shoes untied.

She hammered on Lyra’s door until her knuckles stung.

"Lyra! Please! Open the door!"

The door opened four inches. Lyra’s face filled the gap, tired and triumphant and almost kind, and that was the worst part.

"Look at you," she said softly. "Three minutes left and you’re begging."

Hadjer looked behind Lyra’s shoulder. The wall clock said 4:07.

She frowned. Phones drifted. Old clocks drifted more. Everything in that house was trying so hard to look richer than it was that a few wrong minutes hardly seemed worth noticing.

"Give me my coins back. Please. This is wrong, you can’t just—"

"Wrong?" Lyra stepped out onto the porch, arms crossed. "I was born without a dollar to my name. I never got what I wanted. Just what nobody wanted anymore, fakes, Replicas or Fantasies, if that’s all I could afford."

"That doesn’t make it—"

"You lived ten years rich and free." The smile fell away. "So spare me. You take from people like me, and I’m just taking it back. Your family took it all. I’m only returning the favor."

Hadjer opened her mouth, and something small and hopeless slid out of her chest.

"Then you’re the same as them."

Lyra flinched, then smiled again, harder.

Behind her, through the open door, the clock ticked over to 4:10.

The knock came a moment later.

A man in a gray vest stood at the bottom of the porch steps with a clipboard tucked under one arm. Gray vest, gray face, empty hands, and Hadjer’s heart dropped through the floor.

"Good afternoon," he said, in a voice like a form letter. "Time’s up."

Lyra all but glowed. She hauled the briefcase out from behind the door and set them at his feet, like he was her king accepting tribute.

"Every coin. Count them if you want." She looked at Hadjer sideways. "I won."

He knelt, opened the first case, and ran a thumb along the stacked coins. He glanced at his wrist, as if checking a watch he wasn’t wearing, then closed the lid and stood. Both cases went under his arm.

"Miss Hadjer."

She couldn’t speak.

"You have failed to reclaim your assets." He took her gently by the hand. "As of this moment, you are an employee of the Game of Life. Come with me."

Lyra’s smile stretched wide and slow and sadistic, and for some reason, watching Hadjer walk away felt right, like the world finally correcting itself. A crooked little justice, delivered exactly on time.

Hadjer didn’t fight it.

She couldn’t have said why. Her legs simply moved, one after the other, along a road she’d never learned. She didn’t see the buildings. She didn’t hear the street. She only felt the hand around hers, cooler than she expected, and thought:

Was I really that naive?

"We’re here," the man said.

Hadjer looked up.

It was her house.

Enormous, white-stoned, with a fountain out front and a gate she’d walked through her entire childhood. She’d only ever come by car, so she’d never realized how close it was to that street. Five minutes, on foot.

The man opened the gate and led her up the path, and she stood there, dumb with confusion.

"Why..." Her voice cracked. "Why bring me here?"

He didn’t answer until they reached the porch. Then he turned, and something in his face was different, sharper, more awake, like a person who’d been asleep and had only just opened his eyes.

"Because you’re afraid," he said. "And you should know why."

"What?"

"The trust you gave her. Did you ever test it?"

Hadjer stared at him.

"Did you ask why her ability had never shown up in class? Did you pay close attention when she showed it to you, before you handed over two thousand coins? Or did you decide she was your friend and stop looking?" His voice wasn’t cruel. It was patient, almost weary. "There are four hundred stories where the hero believes the first friendly face. That’s why they’re stories."

"She was my friend," Hadjer whispered.

"She was someone who said she was. Those aren’t the same thing." He set the briefcase down on the marble step. "You believed her because you wanted to. That isn’t trust. That’s hope wearing trust’s coat."

The wind moved through the fountain.

"Real trust isn’t believing," he went on. "It’s asking. What does this person gain if I say yes? Do their words match what they do when nobody’s watching? What would it cost them to lie? If the answers hold up, you trust them more. If they crack, you found out cheap."

"So I should doubt everyone," Hadjer said slowly.

"Doubt isn’t the enemy of trust. It’s the door." He looked at her. "You’ve been afraid of it your whole life. You thought mistrust made you a bad person. It only turns bad when you use it to hurt someone. Used carefully, it’s how you find out who’s worth keeping."

She thought about Lyra. About the Vault she’d never taken a really good look at, and the serpent that changed color at just the right moment, and how easily she’d swallowed all of it.

Then, without wanting to, she thought about someone else.

A boy who’d punched her in the jaw, then lied about it with the worst poker face she’d ever seen. Who’d stayed anyway. Who had rented an apartment, faked notes, watched a window for weeks, and asked for nothing.

What does he gain? she thought. What has he actually taken from me?

Nothing. Not a coin. Not a favor. Nothing except her patience, and she’d given him plenty of that for free.

"It’s not the doubt that’s the problem," she said. "It’s what you do with it."

"Yes." The man’s mouth twitched, just barely. "So ask the questions you’ve been too scared to ask. Of everyone. Check every answer against what you saw. And if someone holds up, believe them all the way."

He nodded at the cases.

"Hand those to the next man who comes. Don’t get tricked again."

Then he turned and walked away down the drive, past the fountain and out the gate, and Hadjer stood there watching him go.

On the other side of town, Lyra opened her door for the second time.

A man in a gray vest stood on the porch with a clipboard. It was the man who’d dropped off her cards every afternoon, patient and bored and pressed, and he handed her one without a word.

LYRA — DEFAULT.

PAYMENT NOT RECEIVED.

"I already paid you," she said, confused. "You took the coins."

"That was not us."

"Yes, it was. You came at ten past four. I gave it all to you."

"The due time is 4:10," the man said, in the flat voice of someone reading terms and conditions. "It is 4:10 now." He held up his wrist. His watch read 4:10 exactly.

Lyra looked at the wall clock behind her. It read 4:20.

She looked at her phone. 4:20.

She looked at the oven, and the microwave, and the alarm clock on the hall table, and every single one agreed with the others. Every single one was ten minutes wrong.

Not us.

She tried to picture the man who’d knelt on her porch earlier, and couldn’t. No face. Just a gray vest, a clipboard, and a stitched shape on the shoulder she’d never bothered to read. A wrench, maybe. The Game’s men had never worn wrenches.

And then she remembered the smoke.

The bin behind the house. The thin gray column that had never once threatened to burn anything. The stupid, useless fire, and the way she’d stood outside the gate for nearly twenty minutes, arguing with a poisoned girl while her house stood open and unguarded behind her.

"No," she whispered.

"Somebody changed your clocks," the man said, without heat. "The fire was a distraction. You locked yourself in for so long that every clock in this house was the only time you had. And they used it against you."

Lyra’s mouth opened, and nothing came out.

"A payment made before the due time is void," the man went on. "You have nothing to give us at the official hour. As of now, you are an employee of the Game of Life."

She didn’t scream. She didn’t argue.

She just laughed, softly, like something breaking. Her whole winning life was as thin and temporary as a fading curtain, and she’d been so proud of it. What a cruel joke.

At 4:10 exactly, a second man in a gray vest turned in at Hadjer’s gate and her alarm confirmed it. So this is what he meant. She went online and checked it on a site just to be sure.

A different face. The same vest. She hadn’t heard his footsteps, and she noticed distantly that her hands were shaking.

"Payment due," he said.

She held out the briefcases. He set them down, opened them, counted, and closed them again, like a man who had done this ten thousand times. Then he pulled a card from his pocket and held it out.

"The man before you," she started. "Who—"

"Payment received." He didn’t look up. "Stage Two."

Her hand shook as she took the card.

CONGRATULATIONS.

HADJER AND MR. SPECTER HAVE ADVANCED TO STAGE TWO.

Hadjer read it once. Then she read it again.

Mr. Specter.

They knew his name. They’d known it the whole time. The Game had been watching Arthur just as closely as he’d been watching them, and she’d walked right into it. She’d dragged him in.

The card slipped out of her fingers and landed on the doormat.

She wanted nothing more to do with this Game, ever again.

On a laundromat bench across town, a boy blinked and sat up.

The pretzel in his hand was cold. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like pennies, and he was fairly sure he’d left his stomach somewhere in the last four blocks.

Beside him, a plumber’s assistant slumped sideways with his eyes closed, snoring gently into a gray work vest with a wrench stitched on the shoulder.

Wow, Arthur thought, staring at the sky. That felt like shit.

He’d noticed the man on the fourth day. Every afternoon at 3:55, he came up from the basement for a cigarette, and every afternoon he wore that vest, the wrong gray in exactly the right way. A stranger. No connection to the Game. No one who’d be missed for the next ten minutes, and no one who’d remember anything but a bad nap.

It had taken all of 3:55 to find the man, and all of the next five minutes to hate himself for it. Possessing a stranger was different from possessing a ghost’s leftovers. There was a person in there, small and startled and asleep. He’d apologized to it the whole way to Lyra’s porch.

The rest had been arithmetic.

4:10, always 4:10. The real vest man had never once been late in seventeen days, so the coins had to change hands before then, or they’d count. That was what the six lines on his scrap of paper were for. A stove clock. A microwave. A hallway clock. An alarm. A wall clock. A phone. Ten minutes fast on every one, done in the twelve minutes he’d bought with a barbecue smoker and wet leaves.

Lyra had believed her own clocks, because nothing else in that house was telling her different. Hadjer’s had been the only correct time on the street.

And the speech.

He rubbed his face. He hadn’t planned the speech. He’d meant to say walk home, wait for a man, hand him the cases, and instead a boy who’d never once asked a single question about anyone he trusted had started lecturing a girl about doubt.

Hypocrite, he thought, without heat. But not wrong.

His Boophone buzzed.

One message, from Hadjer. No greeting, no apology, no are you okay.

Where are you. We need to talk. I have questions.

He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he smiled, a tired, crooked, entirely honest smile, because for the first time in seventeen days, he understood exactly what he’d be up against.

Doubt is the door you knock upon twice...

the honest ones open without a price.

TO BE CONTINUED...