A Drop of Night (15 page)

I hear the others congregating behind me, rustling like birds. I
feel my face rearranging itself into an expression of abject horror. “What's that?” I squeak. “What—?”

Jules breathes out: “Whoa.”

My knuckles go white. I want to hold my skull, squeeze it like a lemon and feel the craziness drip out, bitter and golden between my fingers.
I'm hallucinating again. Microbes. Bad air. It's been happening a lot lately.

I drop my head, breathe.

I look back at the portrait. Still me. Still my thin arms protruding from the dress, snaking around the bust. Still my angular, closed-up face, looking miffed even when I'm not. My eyes are narrowed, a spark of rebellion in them, as if I was angry at the person painting me, and now I'm angry at the person watching me, I'm angry at
me—

I shake my head violently. Turn away. We're in the underground palace of a criminal, weapons-dealer family. There's a portrait of me on their wall. It didn't make sense before, it doesn't have to now—

I start running.
But what if it does make sense
? A sick, guilty feeling slithers into my stomach, the one that comes every time I win an award and no one cares, every time I learn a language and I don't have anyone to speak it with, the one that was there when I was standing in the airport and my mom was chewing gum and Penny was hiding her scarred face behind her hair and they wouldn't look at me; they didn't want to.
You're hanging on that wall like a prize buck because that's where you belong, Anouk. You're a bad kid. A bad person.

I hear the others coming after me. Lilly tries to grab my arm. I shove her off. She grabs me again and jerks me around. “Hey,” she says. “Anouk,
stop.
”

I can't look at her.

She keeps walking with me toward the doors, but she doesn't let go. I have a flash of fear that she's going to turn on me now. They all are. They're going to bash my head in and leave me for dead, a psycho daughter,
bleeding out on a psycho's floor. I would if I were them. If it were Jules or Will or Lilly inside that gilt frame, I would go ballistic.

I feel something welling up inside me, rage at myself, but also hurt and fear, and I feel like I'm slipping—losing control.

Lilly pushes open the double doors at the end of the gallery. Jules closes them behind us.

You're not going to cry, Ooky. You've gone eight years without crying. It was just a picture, and you have to think—

I let out a long, grating sob. The sensation is so bizarre I kind of wonder if it came from someone else. I spin away from Lilly, try to hide my face. She's staring at me. “Go away,” I say, stupidly. I want to make them all turn their backs, but they don't, and I'm crying now. And for some reason the others don't look like they want to bash my head in.

They look worried. They're huddling around me, and now Lilly grabs my hand and knots her fingers through mine. “It's okay, Anouk. It's okay.”

How is this okay?
I want to shriek.
How is any of this okay?

But I feel Lilly's hand in mine, and Jules and Will—the warmth of them and the weight of them beside me—and I hear myself wail, loud and long like a newborn baby.

“Aurélie? Aurélie, I must speak with you!”

Jacques comes tearing into the boudoir. I leap to my feet, smiling, straightening my sleeves—his visits are becoming ever more seldom—but now I see him and the smile drops from my face. He is gasping, his shirt drenched with sweat. His eyes are wild.

“Jacques, what's wrong?”

“I don't know. Perhaps nothing. I don't know!” He begins pacing, his hands raking through his hair.

I grip his arm, guiding him quickly toward a chair. “Jacques, stop this. What has happened?”

He collapses into the chair and stares at me, and something odd and fearful passes behind his eyes. Now he blinks, and he is himself again. “I have seen something, I—”

“What. Tell me.” I say it as gently as I can, but I want to scream and shake him.

“One of the cooks,” Jacques says, and his breathing begins to slow, his posture dropping deep into the chair. “Madame Boucheron. She was a saucier in the château's kitchen, Parisian, very good and well paid. But they do not need sauces here. The marquis eats only biscuits and boiled mutton, day in and day out, and she is left stirring bouillon for the servants—”

“I do not see how this is so alarming.”

“Aurélie, listen! The servants are all discontented. Everyone is. There are no parties to cook for, nothing to look forward to. And she was saying so. She was demanding to be let back up, to be allowed to return to Paris. And now . . .”

“Now what?”

He turns his head away, his eyes pinched shut.

“Jacques, tell me! What is it?”

“I will not go down there,”
I hear Mama whisper, framed in the open window to the park. “
Do not ask me to.”

“I found her today,” Jacques says. “I was cleaning the marquis's private apartments above the
salle de Jupiter
. The marquis did not know, he was busy elsewhere, but Monsieur Vallé gave me the key and told me to hurry. I went in with brushes and buckets. There was something on a table. I thought it was an animal at first, I thought—”

His hands go to his face.

I stare at him, uncomprehending.

“They had been working on her,” Jacques says. “They had opened the skin of her arms, and . . . there were diagrams everywhere, and books and papers and cisterns filled with water, large enough to hold a human body, and vials of blood, and in the corner was a man. At least, I think it was a man. I do not know. He was seated like a sculpture, and he was marble white, and his face, his
face,
Aurélie.”

He grips my hands and peers at me beseechingly, searching my countenance as if it holds some secret he is desperate to know. “He spoke to me,” Jacques whispers. “He asked me to come closer and sit with him awhile. He asked me if I was afraid. He said everyone else was afraid of him—his parents, and the servants—and that all he wanted to do was to make them happy. I ran from there, but I can still smell the blood and the stench of decay. It was like a charnel house. They have been murdering us, Aurélie! Your father and that thing they killed, the servants that went away, the ones we thought had been released—they have been butchering them.”

I tear my hands out of Jacques's grasp. “I refuse to believe this. My father is mad, but he is no murderer. What would he
have to gain from this? He is a man of reason, a philosopher and a scientist—”

“I am afraid to return to the kitchens,” Jacques says, as if he did not hear me at all. “I am afraid to speak to anyone. What if the marquis were to find out what I saw? What if that thing tells him—?”

I cannot breathe. It is too warm in this chamber. The air feels thick and silky, like hot steam.

“What if they kill me?” Jacques's voice is pitiful, a little boy's keen, and it pierces my heart to its core, because I know it is not fear of pain or death that drives him. He fears what will become of the ones who depend on him. His siblings and his mother, my sisters and me.

I grip my skirts in my fists, so tightly it hurts. “There is a logical explanation to this. I know there is. Ask the head butler to come to me. Better yet, tell him I
demand
to speak to Father. Tell anyone. Tell them I left a note for you. They have nothing to gain from murder. Perhaps it was the carcass of an animal you saw, or perhaps Madame Boucheron was already dead. It is not unheard of, the study of corpses for medicine and the betterment of human knowledge; it is not impossible—”

“And what if he tells you the truth? What if he says he is killing us?”

I go very still and release the skirts from my hands. “Have you found the way out?”

“I'm close, I—”

“Then bring me a key, Jacques. Bring me a pistol, bring me
something
!” I feel the tears pricking behind my eyes, a hot, painful pressure. “If they catch you, I will have nothing, do you understand? My sisters are lost!”

And suddenly we collapse into each other, and his arms are tight and fierce around me. We cling to each other like drowning people, part in fear, part in desperation.

“I will come back, Aurélie. I promise. They will not kill me, not before I've found a way. I will return as soon as I possibly can, and when I do, we are leaving. We will go back to the surface. Home.”

When he is gone, and I am alone again in the beautiful room, I lay my head against the wall and weep.

Come back,
I pray.
Come back before it is too late.

The announcements start about twenty minutes after my feelings-
vomit outside Rabbit Gallery. We're moving through a suite of warm-toned, curlicue-filled rooms, all idyllic landscape paintings and satin wall coverings glittering like insect wings. Jules is ripping a strand of thread from the frayed edge of his pocket. I'm feeling like a car ran over me. And now Lilly freezes, one hand raised.

“Guys?” she says.

“What?” Jules pauses, looking back at her.

“D'you hear that?”

Will and Jules hurry over to her. I don't. I don't hear anything. Honestly, I can't even bring myself to care right now. All I can think about is the picture hanging in the gallery and me bawling. I try to listen for whatever Lilly is talking about. All I hear are the lights. Maybe the whirr of an air vent—

“. . . is being transmitted . . .”

There it is.
A single spike of sound, and now it's faded back into a distant, indistinct line. Deep in the palace, a voice is droning.

“Trackers?” Jules asks.

“I don't think trackers talk,” Will says.

I don't think so, either. Those things were massacred right outside the library doors and we didn't hear a sound. Something tells me they weren't made to vocalize their feelings.

“I think it's a recording,” Lilly says. “I think it's Dorf.”

On some unspoken command, the others break into a jog. I follow, making a point to run a little behind them. I know this is pathetic junior high–type behavior, but I'm emotionally stunted and this is how I deal, okay? We're heading north like Perdu told us to. The voice seems to be on a loop, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away. The cut in my foot starts to throb again. I want to eat everything—painted fruit, stone grapes, the wallpaper. I want to hide behind my hair.

I swipe it out of my face so I can't.
I cried. I got it out of my system. It's done.

But it doesn't feel done. Once people see you cry, it's
like they own part of you. It's like you ripped a hole in yourself, and they saw through whatever armor you had on, got a good long view of all the screaming alien goop underneath
.
I definitely think Will and Jules are being quieter now. Like they're worried the crying might become a regular thing.

Lilly notices I'm not jogging with the rest of them. She slows down until she's right beside me. Will and Jules do, too.

“I'm not an invalid,” I snap, but Lilly just keeps jogging next to me, and it makes me feel worse, because it means she knows I'm full of crap.

We're passing through a room that looks like the residence of an upper-class goldfish: aquamarine silks, the chandelier dripping with silver-plated seashells and crystal. Behind us the voice is echoing, fading into the distance. I'm guessing it will be piped into where we are, eventually. The fact that it hasn't yet might be a good sign. Maybe it means the Sapanis don't know where we are.

Except we don't know where we are, either. We slow down.

“What if we die down here?” Jules mutters. He's breathing hard.

No one answers.

“I'm serious, what if we don't get out? Hayden didn't make it. We knew him for exactly twenty-four hours and then he was dead, and we didn't even . . . we didn't even
like
him. I don't want to be—”

The doorways stretch ahead of us like a fun-house infinity mirror. Our feet are loud on the parquet, rubber soles squeaking. I wonder what Jules was going to say:
I don't want to be forgotten. I don't want to die surrounded by people who hate me.

“We're not going to die,” I say, and I make sure it comes out loud and clear.

“Says who?” Jules says, slightly surprised that I'm speaking again. “If we run into those trackers again, I'm the first to go. Shouldn't we . . . shouldn't we know something about each other?”

“No,” I say. “Because, what if we all survive? Then we know things about each other.”

“So?” Jules says.

“So no.” I flip out the compass again.

“I think we should,” Lilly says.

Oh great. I don't know what it is with Lilly. I remember the sharp look she gave me on the airplane, her
lifting that chair in Razor Hall even though she's tiny, and stopping Jules and me from fighting, and I have a hunch that under those blond ringlets and hippie vibes, she's something else entirely. Possibly an annoyingly determined boss.

Will glances over his shoulder at us. “We need to keep it down,” he says in that mellow voice of his, when really he should be snapping:
Shut up, or we will be murdered
. “Sound carries down here.”

Jules ignores him. “You want to start?” he says to Lilly.

She looks worried for a second. Starts playing with her hair feathers again. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I want you guys to know that I lied.” We step through the last doorway of the corridor, into a room like a checkerboard. Black furniture, white marble walls, onyx-framed mirrors, blinding-white sheepskin rugs. “About my aunt in Wisconsin and the tattoos. About a lot of things. I don't actually have any tattoos and there is no town called Flemings in Wisconsin, and I'm not actually nice. I act nice because I don't want people to hate me, but . . . Also, I'm not really smart. I don't know how I got on this trip. It took me two years to repeat eighth grade and I have dyslexia pretty bad, and when I got the letter that said I
made it onto the expedition, I was super proud because I thought I was actually good at something besides being a weirdo. But I'm not.”

Nobody says anything for a full ten seconds. We've all stopped, pooling in the black-and-white room. I think Lilly's joking. Until she starts crying.

“You're not a weirdo,” Jules says quietly. “You had the idea with the chair. Jamming the wires? That was smart. That was awesome.”

What is this, therapy round? But Lilly doesn't stop crying. So maybe she has a limited vocabulary and bad taste in fashion, but I don't know whether she should be crying like that, like she's a terrible person. I could count all the genuinely nice people I know on one hand. Actually I could count them without any hands, and Lilly's definitely one of them.

“You should stop,” I say. “Stop crying. You're nice. Not that many people are actually nice.”

Stunned silence.

Was that the wrong thing to say?

And now Jules smacks both hands to his cheeks and says: “A
wwwww!
Nukey!” muted and whispery, and in my mind I tip him into a brush cutter and watch
stoically as his shoes disappear down the chute.

He sees my expression. Laughs. Lilly laughs, too, a little shakily.

“I'm serious, Lilly, it doesn't matter why you're here; they clearly didn't invite us for our brain power anyway. It just matters that we get out. So let's keep going.”

We start walking again and Will smiles at me, quick and cautious. I see it, but I keep my gaze fixed straight ahead.

The next chamber looks like a children's playroom. Rocking horses. Painted wooden blocks arranged in precarious towers across the carpet. There's even a miniature stone castle built into one wall, complete with kid-sized portcullis and glass windows. Jules starts telling his story. Something about growing up in small-town Nebraska and being picked on all the way through middle school for being the only kid in town with a Middle Eastern dad, and then being picked on all the way through high school because kids didn't like kids who stuck out like gangly scarecrows, who had purple hair and weren't interested in football. He starts talking about how he got expelled for breaking someone's nose, even though it was seven to one and the person he punched
had just pulled a knife. How he ran away to San Diego to art school two years early because if he stayed, he'd end up exactly like his tormentors, flipping burgers at Benny-O's for all of eternity in his own personal minimum-wage hell. He tries to make it sound funny, like he's recounting a vignette from a hilarious coming-of-age movie, but it's not funny. It's awkward to listen to, and I want someone to take him away and pat his hand or something.

He delivers his clincher in a bitter, irony-dripping newscaster's voice: “But look at me now, Stainfield, Nebraska. Chilling in a French palace. More gold than I know what to do with. Living the dream.”

He swings around to me. “Anouk. Your turn.”

“I'm not telling you anything. This is stupid.”

“Just talk to us! Tell us why you came to the airport dressed like a bag lady.”

“No.”

It would be cool to hear Will speak. I would like to listen to his drawly accent, figure out if his house is nice, if his parents do dishes together while listening to
Greatest Country Hits of the
'
70s
, whether he likes William Makepeace Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
or if he's more of a
Joyce kind of guy. Except maybe he likes neither. Maybe he likes loud baseball games and corn dogs, in which case he should just continue not-speaking forever and let me live in my delusion.

“Why?” Jules asks.

“Because. I don't need to give you reasons.”

There aren't any doors in the north wall. We're still heading east, and I feel like we're getting more off track by the second.

“Come on, Anouk. Maybe I won't be next. Maybe you'll be.”

“Psh. Please . . .” My voice is caustic enough to burn metal. “I'm the Final Girl. Gaze upon my wholesome innocence and despair.”

Will has maneuvered to the front of the pack, either completely oblivious to the jabber or pointedly ignoring it. I hurry after him. I think of the little smile he gave me. Maybe I can talk to him alone, without doing this awful group storytelling thing. He's moving pretty fast.

“Will?”

He stops in the doorway three steps ahead of me, shoulders tense. I scuffle up behind him.

I freeze. We're looking into a vestibule. An alabaster
vase of red roses, petals thick and velvety, stands on a table in the center.

“Uh-oh,” Will says.

The buzzing is back—a high whine, shimmering in the air. I put my hands to my head.

I think I hear the announcements, only it's a new voice now, a thin, indistinct whisper, murmuring in French, almost like another frequency overlapping with the first. And in the background, barely, barely audible, someone is singing.

“Four blind mice. Four blind mice. See how they run,

oh . . .

. . . see how they run.”

The buzzing spikes suddenly, piercing, sliding red-hot into my ear—