Page 10 of The Book of Lost Hours
“Well?” she asked. “Aren’t you going to take us there?”
Azrael shook his head. “No. This is something you should do on your own.”
Without another word, he slipped back into the shadows, leaving her alone.
Lisavet looked down at the book in her hands, frowning.
She heard the whispers calling out from the pages and clung to them, accepting their offered hand.
The universal invitation to come closer.
Around her, the familiar shift of color began.
Lisavet slid between the folds of Time and found herself standing in an open field.
It was night. Behind her, a line of trees cut a jagged arch across the horizon, but in front of her there was nothing but endless meadow.
In her periphery, fireflies blinked in their silent light language.
Overhead, the sky opened up from one end of the horizon to the other, lit by a full harvest moon.
The time space had stars, thousands of them, all swirling together like paint.
But the moon only existed in memories. Seeing it was her favorite part of time walking.
She heard voices. Laughter came from one end of the field and a young couple emerged from the trees, one chasing after the other.
The girl had pale skin and held the skirts of her yellow dress tightly in two fists while she ran.
The boy chasing her, brown skinned and dressed in a pauper’s clothes, caught her around the waist as they neared the center of the field, both of them toppling into the grass.
Lisavet drew closer, intrigued by their breathless laughter.
The boy had drawn the girl beneath him, one hand cupping her cheek.
Their eyes shone as they gazed at each other.
A light language all their own. Their lips met shyly, clumsily, and Lisavet knew this was the first time they’d dared to try it.
For what felt like a long time, the two of them stayed like that, kissing under the light of the moon.
Was this what Azrael had wanted her to see?
Two people kissing in a field? Then the movements of the boy slowly started to change.
The girl’s breath became shallower, her body arched and twisted beneath his as her own hands pulled him ever closer.
Their kisses grew more desperate, the two of them enveloped in passion.
The boy’s hand disappeared beneath the girl’s skirt, and she made a different kind of sound altogether.
Lisavet couldn’t look away. This was love, or at least the beginning of it.
Different from the kind she thought she knew about.
There was magic about it. Vulnerability.
She could sense that there was something more to what they were doing.
A precipice they tiptoed at the edge of but dared not jump from.
There was a look in the eyes of them both that she had never seen before.
It was radiant, impassioned. Full of light that burned even brighter than the moon.
L ISAVET SET off in search of other memories of love.
And she found them. More than she expected and far more than she’d bargained for.
Two young people kissing at sunset on the coast. A girl and her husband dancing on their wedding day, eyes aglow.
Two men, a musician and his muse, stealing intimate glances between acts of a performance.
Lisavet longed to feel someone’s lips caress hers that way.
She wanted to know what it felt like to touch and to be touched in return.
She wanted to be looked at. Seen by someone who wasn’t a memory.
Lisavet was lingering in the back of a salon in France, watching a young artist paint his lover’s portrait when it happened.
The girl herself was half dressed, a sheet draped lazily over one shoulder, hair undone.
The artist had just traced the particularly delicate line of the girl’s lips and Lisavet was leaning forward to get a better look when her arm brushed against the cup full of paintbrushes.
The sensation, cool glass against her skin, was so sudden and foreign to her that she didn’t notice it falling until a loud crash filled the room.
Both the artist and his subject jumped in alarm.
The young man let out an anxious laugh as he scrambled to collect the brushes.
He gathered them back into the cup, apologizing for his clumsiness. The moment passed.
Lisavet held still, too shocked to move again.
She stared at the glass. The long crack in the side.
Had that really happened? Had she touched something in a memory?
That had never happened before. Normally, if she did touch something, it went straight through her, leaving only a phantom tingle.
Carefully, she hovered her hand over the surface of the table and let her fingers fall.
The moment her skin brushed the glossy finish, her heart plummeted.
With a jerk, she fell out of the memory back into the time space.
When Azrael found her several hours later, her face was still pale from shock.
“What happened? Is everything all right?”
She explained, still scarcely believing it.
Azrael said nothing for a long while. His silence only unnerved her more. Never had Azrael not had an explanation for something. She had come to rely on it, his assuredness. They both decided it would be best if she didn’t do any more time walking on her own for now.
That night, as she lay down in the center of the rows, she stretched her hands out in front of her face, studying them for signs of flickering.
What if she was dying? Would she even know if she was?
Her mind was already here, after all. All her memories were lived in the time space.
Where else was there for her to go? Maybe she had died a long time ago, her body abandoned somewhere in the rows of books while her mind continued to wander.
Trapped like Azrael, with no book of memories to call her own.
It wasn’t death she feared most, but rather the thought of dying without ever having known what it was to be in love.
I N THE world outside her own, Time spun onward.
Soon the year outside the time space was 1946.
Autumn. Lisavet had just turned nineteen years old but didn’t know it.
It had been months since she had seen a Nazi timekeeper.
The threat of them had gone from the time space at least, but fewer Nazis didn’t necessarily mean fewer burned memories.
In fact, there had been a steady uptick in burnings from the Russians and the Americans specifically.
Lisavet grew bolder in her salvaging attempts, sometimes swooping in before the timekeeper had even gone.
She had begun time walking again without Azrael, drawn to the memories in spite of her concerns.
Her days were spent traipsing through time like a shadow, dancing through dinner parties and festivals or climbing onto the roofs of houses at night to drink in the sight of the full moon overhead, as if it was made only for her.
The moon, which borrowed its light from the sun the way she borrowed life from memories to fill her own.
She had begun to take things from memories, too, always careful to avoid anything that looked important.
The first was a dress made of pale blue fabric left behind by a vacationer in a hurry, taken to replace her own tattered nightgown.
Wearing it, she looked grown-up, the new curves of her body filling out the fabric, a girl no longer.
She took other things too. A brush for her hair that had grown long and straight, like spun gold.
A pair of shoes tossed on the rubble heap outside the cobblers.
Gloves, like the American soldier had worn, so she could stamp out flames just as he had.
This method was particularly effective, and her book was becoming overfull.
The contents burst through the binding, necessitating a new cover.
She began to keep a closer eye on what the timekeepers were destroying, searching for the right one.
One night, when following a Russian timekeeper from a distance, she found just the thing she was looking for.
The memory he’d chosen was a thick volume belonging to someone a hundred years old or more.
Instead of burning the book in one piece, he removed its blue leather cover and cast it aside.
Lisavet watched him light the fire, noticing how disinterested he seemed in the whole process.
He was a soldier following orders, not caring about the outcome.
He left quickly, not bothering to see the process all the way through and Lisavet leapt for the book.
Pages first, she told herself, donning her gloves.
She quickly extinguished the flames, salvaging a large chunk of the center pages.
Enough to be a book all on its own. She pulled her gloves off with her teeth, letting the pages whisper to her.
As she turned around to retrieve the discarded cover, she was arrested by the sight of another person, a timekeeper, lifting the cover off the ground.
She recognized him in an instant. The copper-haired American she’d caught rescuing memories. It had been two years since she’d last seen him. He wasn’t wearing a uniform anymore, dressed instead in a white buttoned shirt and charcoal trousers.
“Hello there,” he said quietly, as though addressing a frightened animal.
His water-blue eyes seemed to pierce right through her. The first set of living eyes to look at her in eight years. Instead of being excited by it, she found the vulnerability of being looked at terrifying. She wanted to run, but curiosity stilled her feet.