A Drop of Night (9 page)

We're in a hall. Huge and cavernous, a cathedral of shadows.
Lilly and Jules are racing into it. And now I'm spinning back to the door, scrabbling with the other bolts. They're solid steel, radiating out of the center of the door, locking it into the wall.
Three, four, five . . .
Will and I slam them into place. I hear more locks, smaller ones clicking into place, the hiss of air as we're sealed in. I collapse against the metal, gasping.

There's no other sound. Nothing from the other side of the door. Nothing in this vast new space. The silence presses around me like an actual weight, solid and icy.

I raise my head. Jules and Lilly have stopped about twenty paces in. I can't see a light source, but somehow it's not pitch-black. The walls are marble, black and green. They remind me of some sort of digestive organ, darkly translucent, veins pulsing just below the surface. The
ceiling is a vault of gilt and crystal. I still have Lilly's key-chain light and I raise it, flicking it across the expanse. It catches on golden leaves, marble hands. Portraits and mirrors glimmer, chairs and Chinese-style vases twice as tall as a person. It's like it was built for giants.

I let my breath out slowly. “Jules?” I call out weakly. “Lilly, wait.”

I start toward them, tripping all over myself. Jules has his hands tangled in his hair. He's bobbing around like he can't decide between throwing up and staring around in awe. Lilly is sobbing “Wow” over and over again.

I glance down. The floor is a huge mosaic, fitted together out of thousands of marble tiles. Enormous wings. Human eyes.

You've got to be kidding me.

I reach Jules and Lilly. “They're going to kill us,” Lilly whispers. She looks at me beseechingly, her face streaked with tears. “They're insane, they—”

I'm not listening. My brain is spinning, twisting into a single thread of thought.
This is the Palais du Papillon. It's not lost. It's right here and it has a very twenty-first-century vault door and fluorescent-lit glass corridors. They were lying, lying from the moment they contacted us—

Out of the corner of my eye I see Will moving toward us. He's favoring one side of his body, limping slightly.

“What about the expedition?” Lilly sobs. “We were supposed to pick up our gear by 9
A.M.
—”

“Lilly, there
is no expedition
,” I snap. “Don't you get it? They drugged us. They tricked us into coming here. We just barely escaped being murdered, okay?”

The voice in my head is changing, getting shrill:
You can't stay here. You've been kidnapped by psychos. RUN!

But I don't move. My body feels a thousand miles away. Lilly and Jules are both on the floor now, dazed. I'm just standing, stiff and scared, my hands clenched at my sides.

“We should hide,” Will says. “We don't know who might be down here.”

“
Down
here?” I mimic. My voice sounds spiky, mean. It's not supposed to. But that's the only way I know how to talk. “How do you know we're
down
anywhere, Will? How do you know where
down
is?”

“The butterfly—” he starts, gesturing at the floor, and I laugh at him.

“The Bessancourts' coat of arms? But you're assuming the Bessancourts ever existed in order to own a coat
of arms. You're assuming we weren't lied to every single
second
by the Sapanis.”

Will moves a little closer to me. He's wearing a watch, one of those bulky mountaineering ones. He sidles up, cautiously, and hits a button on it. Shows me the green-glowing screen.

Elevation: 88 feet above sea level

“So?” I say. I don't know what that means. I'm an art history major, not a freaking Girl Scout.

Will hits another button. Coordinates appear on the tiny screen. “I checked them when we got out of the cars,” he says. “The coordinates are the same. We're right where we were yesterday. Except Péronne is two hundred feet
above
sea level.” He looks up at me. “We're a hundred and twelve feet underground.”

Lilly's standing up, craning her neck to get a view of the watch, still bawling.

Will shows her. A second later he switches off the screen. “The battery's solar-powered,” he says quietly. “It's going to die soon.”

I have the urge to scream
Just like usssss!
while spinning maniacally over the marble.

Instead I mumble: “I don't get it. They didn't have to
do all this. They could have just dragged us off a street somewhere, or hacked us up in a parking garage—”

Will doesn't answer. Something else does. Somewhere in that huge, unbroken silence, something is creeping over the floor toward us, skittering like an animal. Lilly breaks out in a fresh, high-pitched sob.

Images rush into my mind: huge, muscled zombies dragging rusted chains. Carnivorous plants. Shape-shifting insects. Every cliché I've ever seen on one of my late-night movie-watching binges.
Please don't let there be carnivorous plants down here. Please don't do that to us.

Click.

The skittering breaks off. A red pinpoint of light pops up about thirty feet down the hall, glimmering.

I stare at it, holding my breath.

The light's in the wall. A panel snapped back, and now a square of embedded machinery is exposed, coils of gray metal tubes and that red lens, staring out like an eye.

“Sealed for two hundred years?” Jules breathes. “Really?”

To the right, I hear a second click.

I jerk around, staring through the dark. Another red light has popped up on the opposite wall. A steady, round
glow. And now the red light buzzes out of it, slicing across the hallway in a pure, thin cut, as if someone slit open the darkness. A hologram springs up in the center of the hall. We gape at it, huddling together on the floor.

“Children.”

It's Dorf. The hologram isn't detailed, no eyes or nose discernible, but I recognize the sloping shoulders, the hugeness. “Reopen the blast door.” His voice is low and quick and utterly clinical. “This is for your own safety. Reopen the blast door and let in the security team—”

The hologram casts a grainy, fuzzy red light over our faces.

“Can you hear me?” Dorf says. “We have a visual on you. Open the door and let in our security team. I cannot guarantee your well-being otherwise.”

“Our
well-being
?” I almost choke on my own sarcasm. “If you were concerned for our well-being, maybe you shouldn't have
murdered Hayden
,
how's that for an idea?”

“Anouk,” he says. He
can
hear us. He pauses. Turns, maybe to someone else in the room he's in. “Listen to me,” he says, in that same cold, urgent voice. “This should not have occurred. It is
vital
that you follow my instructions exactly. Turn around. Return to the blast door. Unbar
it as quickly as you can. If you do not open that door, you
will
die. There is nothing we will be able to do to help you. You're being clever now, thinking, ‘Well, I'll die either way,' but believe me, there are ways to die so terrible you cannot possibly comprehend them.”

“Yeah?” I say, and I feel a hysterical thrill rising in me, making me brave and giddy. “Well, we're not opening that door.”

The hologram seems to stiffen, darken. “Anouk, this is not a game. You have not locked us out; you have locked yourselves
in
. You have approximately three minutes to live—”

“And if we let you in, we have one,” I say.

“What happens in three minutes?” Jules whispers. “What are they going to do to us?”

“He's bluffing,” I say, like I have a clue.

“Children,
open
the door.
” Dorf's voice is tense now, his control slipping.

I start walking toward the red eye in the wall. Wrap my fingers around the key-chain light, locking it behind my knuckles. I reach the panel. Above the red light is a camera lens.

“Come and get me,” I say under my breath. Grit
my teeth and smash my fist into the tech panel. Glass crunches. It hurts, but I don't bleed. The hologram flickers out.

Everyone's on their feet now. I hurry back to them. We have about five seconds of silence, and now two more panels slide open, farther down the hall. Two new lights blink on. The red lines collide. Dorf springs up a second time.

“You don't know what you're doing,” Dorf says, and the cool sheen in his voice is completely shot. “A team of trackers is being dispatched from the other end of the palace. They are three miles away at present. Wait for them to arrive and do not, I repeat,
do not
, go farther into the hall. The palace is not a safe environment. There are rogue assets loose within, and we cannot risk a meeting, we
—”

“Trackers?” Lilly asks, her eyes wide, the whites huge in the darkness. “What are trackers?
What do you want from us
?” She shrieks the words, jagged and raw throated. There's something in her hand—a pointless, useless bracelet. She hurls it at the hologram. It passes through with barely a blip and skitters away over the marble.

Jules is starting to fidget, and now he runs straight for the hologram, all skinny legs and rage, like he's going to tackle it. He tumbles through, twists, falls on his back.

“Stop moving!” Dorf shouts. “
Do not move!
Someone open that damned door!”

I race toward the next red eye, my fist raised. Will is going for the one on the other side of the hall. We smash into them at almost the same time. The hologram blinks out a second time. But Dorf's voice keeps coming, echoing through the hall
—open-the-open-the-door-don't-DON'T-MOVE—

And I snap the trip wire. I barely feel it. A slight tug against my ankle, and the speakers cut out. The hall goes silent. Almost.

Under the thumping of the blood in my ears, I hear
something—a hurried ticking, like a pocket watch.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick,
somewhere in the walls.

I stand perfectly still, trying to place the origin of the sound. It
seems to be coming from everywhere at once, rippling through the huge space.

“Uh—” I look down at the severed wire, coiled on the marble. “Guys?”

A sharp
clank.
The sound intensifies, thumping now, rolling along the paneling. I imagine the hall as a huge aquarium; there's a squid just beyond the walls, its tentacles batting along the glass. Lilly sees the wire at my feet. She looks up at me from where she's crouched on the floor, wide-eyed.

“What did you do?” she whispers.

The rumbling stops. It's replaced by a gentle, shimmering hum.

My head snaps around.
The sound is coming from the far end of the hall.

Ssssss.
A hiss, like Penny dragging her mangy toy crocodile over the floor by its tail. Like fingernails sliding through a groove, sand pouring through an hourglass.

Will and Jules turn slowly. Lilly stands, twisting toward the sound. I stare, paralyzed.

At first it looks like a thin strip of mirror, two hundred feet away, stretching from one side of the hall to the other. Except the mirror is rising. And now it's coming closer.

“Anouk, what did you do—?” Jules starts.

It's not a mirror. It's a wire. A single glinting wire, skimming approximately five feet above the floor. Not fast. Not slow. I stare at it, transfixed. And now it reaches a tall oriental vase and slices through it like butter.

My skin turns to ice.

“Duck!” I scream. “Duck, duck, get DOWN!”

I slam to the floor. Flip onto my back. The wire sings over me. The others are sprawled in a circle around me, shoes squeaking against the tile eyes of the butterfly. “We need to get out of here,” I say, panicking. “We need to—”

I push myself onto my palms. At the far end of the hall is a door. Huge, gilded, set in an ornate marble frame. It seems to be glowing dimly in the shadows. I hop to my feet. Will is right behind me.

“Move!” I shout. “Get to the door!”

I glance over my shoulder. The wire has reached the end of the hall. It pauses. Another
clank,
reverberating down through the expanse. And it's coming back. Two feet lower. Twice as fast.

Lilly's on her feet now. Jules isn't.

“Run!” I scream.
“Get up, run!”

Will heads for Jules, jerks him upright, and we're off, sprinting down the center of the hall. In front of us, three new wires emerge from above the golden door and drop down, shooting along the tracks on either wall. All different heights.

Lilly shrieks, looks like she wants to turn around. But the other wire is still approaching from behind.

“Watch the ones ahead and I'll watch our backs!” I yell at her, and we run together, me stumbling over my feet trying to look back over my shoulder. The original wire is moving faster than the others. I see it shimmering ten feet away, speeding toward us. I fall and pull Lilly with me. Wriggle onto my back, knocking my elbow hard on the floor. The wire passes a hair's breadth above my nose. I'm up again, leaping the second wire, ducking under the third. Lilly's not with me anymore. She's
wailing, on and on, like a siren, but where?
Is she hurt?
I can't see anything. I can't look back.

A fourth wire is coming toward me, three feet above the floor. It slices through chairs, another vase. It's vibrating, shivering back and forth, blindingly fast. Will is ahead of me. He's running straight for it. And there's another wire. A fifth wire I didn't see, sliding low over the floor. He's going to duck the high wire and the low one is going to take off the soles of his feet.

“Will, look down—” I whisper.

He's four feet away.

“Will,
jump
!”

A second before the wire catches him, he sees it. Leaps. The one following it dips down. And somehow he's turning, spinning onto his back, still in the air, slipping over both wires. He hits the floor, rolls, and he's running again, full speed for the golden doors.

The hall is a grid of wires now. Nine. Ten. Dropping out of the wall above the doors and speeding toward us. They're not following a pattern. Some are going forward, some back. Some shift in their tracks, clacking a foot higher. I don't know where anyone is, can barely see in the blackness.

“Jam the tracks!” someone's shrieking. “We need to jam them!”

It's Lilly, behind me.

I drag myself across the floor toward the wall. Look up.

“What is this place . . . ?” I breathe.

What I thought were decorative inlays in the panels is a network of grooves, a complex track system going up about six feet. The wires are attached to wooden nubs. I watch one of them buzzing along its track toward me. There's a clicking sound. It's like it knows I'm here. The wire shifts into a new lane a foot lower.

This place was
designed
to kill.

“Anouk!”

I duck the wire. Spin. Lilly's heaving something onto her shoulder—a chair. She throws it at the nearest wire, and for an instant I want to scream at her. The chair touches the wire. It's intersected neatly. Butchered chair legs come sliding across the floor toward me.

Oh. Jam the tracks. I get it
.
I grab a leg and mash it into the track just as a wire swoops overhead.

It doesn't stop. The chair leg, pinched between the nub and the wall, goes squealing away down the tracks.
Somewhere to my right I see Jules, a ragged outline in the gloom, ducking a wire. Will up ahead. Lilly behind me.

I hear a sharp
ping
. The jammed nub has stopped. But only on one side. The nub on the opposite wall is still moving. I watch the wire stretch, creaking. . . .

“DOWN!”
I scream, and everyone drops and rolls into a ball just as the wire snaps and goes whipping back through the wall. Something snatches at my ankle. Blinding pain explodes up my leg.

I push myself onto my hands, clenching my jaw. I see what's coming.

We're dead now.

An entire wall of wires, eight feet high, two inches between each wire, is speeding toward us down the hall. There's a space where the broken wire should be, but it's five feet off the ground. The gap's only six inches wide. There's no way we can get through that.

Will is running back to us. I glance over at Lilly and Jules. I can't see their faces, but they're just standing there in the dark, calm suddenly, staring as the glinting wall approaches. I wonder if this is how death happens. Minimal drama. A simple cause and effect, and the universe ends for you. I see our bodies after the wires
have passed through them, blood spattering our faces.

I close my eyes.

Another earsplitting
clack
.

And I'm seeing light. Not light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel crap, but actual golden light, blazing through my lids.

My eyes snap open. Two inches in front of us, the wires have stopped.

Sconces are flaring to life along the walls, spreading down the hall. The chandeliers are blooming into balls of light high above. Sweat drips off my face. The wires hover, shimmering. All we can do is stand here, four in a row, staring into the blazing, beautiful glare.