Where I come from, time is everything—you breathe it, spend it, bleed it.
And every five years, when the Clockrealm's magic supply runs low, the Turning Trials begin. Twelve players. One mechanical arena. No guarantees. My name is Ora Reese, and apparently, I've already lived this story once. When I wake up, I don't know my own name for the first three seconds. By the fourth, I'm sitting at a table with ten strangers, a queen who won't stop smiling, and a boy across from me whose face I've never seen before—yet know in detail. We're told we played in a game, survived, won. We're told a curse is the reason we can't remember any of it, the same curse responsible for time moving backward, too. We're told a lot of things, but there's no way to know what is the truth. Everything is brand new to me—except him. March is supposed to be a stranger, just like everyone else, but somehow, my body remembers him. It's in the way I still flinch when he gets too close, in the way my breath changes when he looks at me, in the feel of his skin against mine. Like I've touched him before. Like I've wanted him just as badly then. Now we have to unwin trials we don't remember winning, survive a mechanical arena that shifts and breathes and punishes, and figure out why nothing we've been told quite adds up. The curse is real; I have no doubt about it. But the longer I survive, the less I believe it's the reason we're here. Almost as if our memories weren't stolen by the curse at all. Almost as if someone doesn't want us to remember. But the most important question is, when the games are finally unwon…will they have ever even happened?
