Page 9 of The Book of Lost Hours

Azrael had become the closest thing she had to a friend.

He took care of her in lieu of a parent, watching out for Nazi timekeepers heading her way, teaching her to hide in the pages of memories.

He taught her how to time walk, steering her away from the uglier parts of history.

It was through him that she learned the languages of other countries—Russian, English, French, and Arabic—practicing the conversations she heard in memories with him until she’d mastered their meaning.

Her hours were divided into days and nights of her own making.

Daytime became the time she spent reliving time passed.

At night she lay on the floor between the shelves, staring up at the swirling stars.

She had stopped sleeping long ago, no longer a necessity.

“What are those up there?” she asked Azrael one night.

“Those?” Azrael directed his gaze upward. He seldom looked at the strange lights floating above them. None of the dead ever did. “Those are living thoughts. Memories that are happening now at this very moment.”

Lisavet was fascinated by this. The idea of things really happening.

Happening now, and not in the past. She wondered what it must be like to see things as they really were, and not reflected in the memory of someone else.

When they went time walking, Azrael steered her away from anything too close to the modern day.

“Best to let that lie,” he told her when she asked him about the 1940s, a decade half gone before she’d known it had begun.

“To know too much about the course Time is taking before it happens is to fill oneself with torment. Living is the most dangerous thing, after all. More than death. More than memories.”

Azrael’s words held more weight for her than any others, living or dead. So Lisavet did as he suggested and avoided the recent years, despite the pull to know what was happening.

She didn’t always listen to him, though.

There were certain edicts she would not obey, no matter how many times he warned her.

He often hovered by her side as she stepped in to salvage the memories that timekeepers attempted to burn.

After witnessing the erasure of her father’s memories, she took to following timekeepers from a distance, ducking around corners and mimicking the slow movements of the dead should she ever be caught.

She watched them select books from the shelves and light them on fire, the smoke blurry against the starlit ceiling.

Timekeepers never stayed until the books had burned completely, and the moment they left, Lisavet would strike.

She took the remnants of scorched pages and hid them away between the covers of what had once been her father’s book.

“What if they find out what you’re doing?

” Azrael asked as she brushed away soot and ash from the remaining pages.

“You’ll put a target on your back.” He was wearing the anxious look that Lisavet had come to recognize, his dark forehead wrinkled, his pupils large and opaque in spite of how transparent the rest of him usually was.

“There’s always been a target on my back,” Lisavet told him. “I’m Jewish.”

He started to say something else, and she shushed him, pressing her ear close to the smoldering pages to catch whispers of the memories they contained.

These memories, the ones she carried around in her book, were the most precious to her.

Many of the people who owned them were Jewish, like her.

Everyday memories of quiet moments that composed a life.

A child’s laughter. A morning walk with a loved one at dawn, cold hands entwined.

A dinner shared among friends. All seemingly innocuous things that some outside force had deemed a threat.

What could be so dangerous about a life that made somebody want to erase it?

At first Lisavet had merely wanted to save the memories out of principle.

But over time, she noticed something strange happening among the memories she visited.

They were… changing . Scenes she thought she knew would suddenly appear differently to her, the substance of them altered.

Sometimes the change was subtle. A name once mentioned, glossed over.

A face in a crowd erased, the space around them empty and unacknowledged.

Other times, the changes were more noticeable.

Entire events gone. Lives altered, memories and timelines manipulated to fill in the gaps left by someone who had been erased.

“This is what it means to be Forgotten,” Azrael explained when she’d first come to him in distress over one of those lost memories.

“The version of the past we remember is often very different from what actually occurred. Events, histories, entire communities… it’s all been written and unwritten dozens of times over.

Nobody knows how much has been lost. Nobody knows how much of what remains is the truth. ”

“Nobody?” Lisavet asked, tears shining in her eyes.

“Well… the timekeepers remember what it is they’ve erased, I suppose. But only that which they themselves have altered. The bigger picture is lost.”

She came to recognize most timekeepers and knew which ones were liable to burn memories and which did their duty to save them.

Most of the timekeepers she saw were white men in military uniforms. The Europeans dominated the time space, although Azrael explained that there had once been others.

Timekeepers from Africa and Asia and South America who gained access to the time space, not through watches, but through deep, meditative prayer.

But those people had been wiped out by imperialists years ago, leaving only a few who hid from the other timekeepers as frantically as Lisavet did whenever they saw them coming.

Then there were the Americans. They were just like the others, until one day Lisavet saw one of them do something unexpected.

She was waiting in the shadows, preparing to salvage another set of memories when she saw him.

The German timekeeper burning the memories performed his task with the same efficient callousness that they all did.

Experience had taught her that he would leave quickly after setting the fire, and she was ready for it, muscles tensed in anticipation.

But when the moment came, someone else emerged from between the shelves, sending Lisavet scrambling backward to avoid being seen.

She crouched low, peering at this new timekeeper.

A man in an American soldier’s uniform took the burning bundle into his hands as she would have, as though he understood, as she did, the worth of what he was holding.

He wore leather gloves, a luxury that allowed him to stamp out the fire as it still burned and rescue more of what remained.

Lisavet followed him, taken aback as he carried the book carefully through the time space and hid it within another set of shelves, far from where the first timekeeper had found it.

As he turned back, passing by her hiding place so close she could have touched him, she caught a closer look at his face.

He was young, younger than many of the other timekeepers she’d seen, with curly, copper-colored hair cut uncomfortably close and eyes the color of the ocean.

There was something… different about him.

And not just because he was saving memories.

He had a softness in him, in spite of his uniform.

A kindness to his face and features. She continued to follow him at a distance, getting closer than was advised, all the while hoping he would turn his head her way again so that she could see his face a second time.

When at last he turned the crown on his watch to go, Lisavet found herself wishing that he wouldn’t.

As his door sealed behind him, Lisavet felt Azrael’s astral presence appear at her side. He was looking at her strangely, a wry smile curling his lips.

“What?” Lisavet asked.

Azrael was studying her as if noticing her for the first time.

In the years that had passed, she had grown taller.

She no longer had to look up quite so much to look him in the eye.

The shabby nightdress she’d worn ever since that fateful night was tight around her chest, barely extending to her knees.

Her arms fit through the sleeves of her father’s coat without needing to be rolled up.

“What year is it on the outside, Lisavet?” he asked. “Do you know?”

Lisavet shook her head.

Azrael’s smile grew strained. “Nineteen forty-four. February. It will be six years this November since you first came here. You are already sixteen.”

Lisavet considered this with very little concern.

She had long been accustomed to life inside the time space.

Thoughts of leaving, though they still appeared in her daydreams, no longer occupied her every moment.

How could they when she’d seen how violent the world could be on the outside?

In the real world, there was no way of knowing what was real and what had been altered by timekeepers.

No way to know which parts of her might have been erased.

Still, there was something in the way Azrael looked at her as he said it that told her that her being here was something to grieve.

That sixteen, the age she was now, was important somehow.

And that being here and being sixteen together at the same time was cause for concern.

Later, when it was time for them to do their usual time walking, he put a book into her hands, opened it to a particular page, and stepped back.

Lisavet waited for him to take her hand, as he usually did.

She relied on his guidance to keep her out of any memories she shouldn’t see.

War, executions, violence… he kept it from her on purpose, always taking care to choose where and when they visited.