The Conspiracy of Us

by Maggie Hall

  “. . . about the mandate,” one of the men said. I tripped over my sandals.

  “Any news?” Madame Dauphin asked.

  I flattened myself against the wall next to the doorframe.

  “The Mikados claim to have a lead, but it’s unlikely,” one of the men replied.

  “And nothing has come of the Louvre exhibit?”

  “Not yet,” said another voice. “Cecile, time is running out. If more information on the mandate is not found—”

  “Then we choose the union ourselves, and assume the rest are intelligent enough to rally behind us, even without confirmation of the One. We can’t let this opportunity pass us by. Meanwhile, we keep searching for the tomb. As much as some of the families want to believe it, the mandate isn’t magic,” Madame Dauphin said scornfully. “This is the modern world. No one’s even certain anything will happen.”

  There were murmurs of assent, then a few moments of silence, broken by a hesitant voice. “And we must have a united front if we expect to stand against the Order. Aren’t you particularly concerned about them right now? The recent attacks . . . They seem to know so much. They even found out about the baby girl.”

  “What are you saying?” another man said. “Do you think information is being leaked?”

  There was a loaded pause. The taffy stuck in my teeth was sickeningly sweet.

  “It doesn’t matter how they’re finding out. You heard what Alistair Saxon has been saying. He thinks the Order should be eliminated altogether, just in case,” someone else said. “And it sounds like many others are starting to agree.”

  Madame Dauphin cleared her throat. “And if we vote to do that, it will be made easier by finding the tomb. Shall we return to the matter at hand?” she said coldly. “Monsieur Dauphin has sent some intelligence out of Egypt. If you will turn to page three . . .”

  I took this time when everyone would be looking down to creep past the door. I glanced in as I did, and saw another familiar face.

  One of the men who had been speaking was the president of France.

  • • •

  The mandate. The Order, whatever that was. Alistair Saxon—someone from my own family. The president of France. Attacks.

  It didn’t sound like they’d been meeting for a fund-raiser. I thought about all the paranoid looks at the party, and it was almost enough to make me forget I was in a limo, driving along the Seine. I tried to shake off worries about politics that weren’t my problem and enjoy that I was going dress shopping in Paris with friends of my family. And especially that I was suddenly able to say “friends of my family.”

  Stellan sat in the facing seat and looked me over, from my sundress to my white wedge sandals. I followed his eyes down to my chipped eggplant-purple pedicure, which looked out of place with these casual-but-obviously-expensive clothes. I tucked my feet back against the seat.

  “So, Avery West,” Stellan said. “I’ve been wondering about you. You don’t know much about your extended family?”

  I looked up from my hands in my lap. “I think we’ve established that.”

  “Why were you so willing to come along, then?” Stellan leaned forward. For the first time, I noticed that his eyes were deep blue, with splashes of gold around the irises.

  I frowned. “I—”

  “What kind of girl abandons everything for people she doesn’t know?” he continued, eyes narrowing.

  “If you’d stop interrupting, maybe I’d tell you.”

  “Please do.” Stellan splayed his long legs casually into my foot space, and I ignored them with Zen-like control. I couldn’t help but wonder again what he was trying to do. He could be one of those guys who saw an uninterested girl as a challenge, but I felt like there was more to it.

  “I wanted to meet—”

  “Yes, yes, you wanted to meet your family. Your father was a long-lost third cousin twice removed. But that’s not all of it. Really, you wanted a change.” He folded his hands behind his head. I opened my mouth to chastise him for interrupting again, but then what he’d said sank in.

  “A change,” he continued with a slow smile when he saw my face. “A way away from ‘the ache that is your existence.’”

  Zee ache. In Stellan’s light accent, it sounded especially weighty, like an ancient prophecy. I leaned forward without really meaning to.

  “Toska.” He leaned forward, too. “It’s a Russian word. It has no translation into any other language, but the closest I’ve heard is the ache. A longing. The sense that something is missing, and even if you’re not sure what it is, you ache for it. Down to your bones.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath.

  Stellan rested his chin in his hand and watched me, like he understood things I wasn’t saying.

  How did he know that? How did he know exactly the way to describe the gnawing hollow in my chest? I sat back and folded my arms like he could see straight inside me. “I’m not longing for anything,” I said defensively. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  I scooted as far away from him as I could and leaned against the window. We were stopped at a light, and outside, a group of laughing girls rode bicycles along the cobblestone walk bordering the Seine.

  I could tell Stellan was still watching me. Toska. The Ache.

  Past the walkway, through the flowering trees, I could see people taking photos from the deck of a white barge cruising lazily along the river. The sun warmed my face through the sterile cool of the car’s air-conditioning.

  “It was Nabokov who coined that translation of toska,” Stellan said after a minute. I heard the shift as he leaned back into his seat. “Nabokov is—”

  I let out a breath. “I know who Nabokov is,” I said without turning around. “I’ve read Lolita.”

  Stellan kicked his feet up on my seat. “Have you?”

  I moved even farther away. “Why not?”

  “Lolita is not a children’s book.”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “I know exactly how old you are. Sixteen, seventeen next month. June fourteenth.”

  Now I did turn around. “How did you—”

  “Five foot two inches tall.” He looked me up and down again, and I straightened automatically. “One hundred and three pounds.”

  “How do you know—” I tucked my skirt under my legs. “That’s creepy. Why do you know that?”

  “Could use a little more meat on those bones, if you ask me,” he said, leaning across the seat to wrap one slim hand entirely around my upper arm.

  “Do not touch me.” I jerked away. “So part of your job is stalking? What, did you find my driver’s license records?” After everything else that had happened, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Why would an innocent thing like you read Lolita? Into older men?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “What is wrong with you?” I pulled my feet up onto the seat, tucking them under my dress.

  “Ah. Daddy issues, then,” he said with a sage nod. “Though I suppose that should have been obvious when you immediately agreed to run off with strange and somewhat threatening men you didn’t know.”

  I felt myself flush. Okay, yes, obviously I did have daddy issues, but it had nothing to do with my literary preferences. I fished for a witty comeback, but I’d gotten too flustered. “You’re an ass,” I said instead. “I’d read through the whole kids’ section of the library by the time I was seven, so . . .”

  Stellan rolled his window down a few inches and tested the breeze with his fingertips. Outside, a car smaller than a golf cart zipped past. “So then you read Lolita?”

  “So then I read everything,” I huffed. It was none of his business that imaginary friends were my only friends for a lot of my childhood.

  “Everything? Just fiction?”

  “Everything.” I turned to the window again.
How could I possibly make it more obvious that this conversation was over?

  Stellan drummed his fingers on the seat. “You know Aristotle? ‘He who is to be a good ruler must first have been ruled.’”

  I ignored him.

  “So that’s a no? By ‘everything’ you really just mean twisted love stories.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Yes, I’ve read some Aristotle. And I can see that you’ve read philosophy to give yourself an excuse for pretentious name-dropping.”

  “Works better on girls than you might think,” he said with a wink.

  “Ugh.” I rested my forehead on the window.

  “And I don’t only read philosophy.” He nudged my hip with his boot. “I enjoyed Lolita for the lollipops.”

  I finally turned and shoved his boots off the seat. We drove by what must have been a government building. High, arched windows were ringed by carved stone garlands, and a row of statues kept watch from the roof. But then again, nearly every place we’d driven by looked like that. It would make a good game. Buildings in Paris: significant national monument or apartment complex?

  “What about history?” Stellan said. “How much do you know about Alexander the Great?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” He made me so combative. As hard as I’d tried to ignore him, and even though I knew he was doing it on purpose, he still annoyed me.

  I gestured to the outline of the knife hilt on his side. “So, why the concealed weapons? What is there to be afraid of on a weekend of famous people going to balls and meetings?”

  He tilted his head to the side. “Even a girl from small-town Minnesota should not be that naive.”

  “What’s the Order?” I said. Two could play at this game. He’d deflect my questions, and I’d ignore his deflection.

  The smile slid off Stellan’s face. “They’re nothing you need to worry about, kuklachka.” He cocked his head to one side. “Unless, of course, you know something I don’t.”

  The car rolled to a stop, cutting off any more conversation. We were on a wide street, lined by trees in full bloom. Shops paraded down either side, and the Eiffel Tower loomed much closer than I’d realized. The annoyance dropped away and a thrill shivered through me.

  Yesterday, I’d never left the United States. Today, I was shopping in Paris. I opened my own door before the driver got there, and followed Stellan out of the car and down the street.

  And then we turned up the walk to one of the shops and I stopped, my foot halfway up a step. The tasteful gold lettering on the cream-colored building said PRADA.

  CHAPTER 11

  A young man opened the doors, his deep-set eyes dark and shadowed behind wire-rimmed glasses. His shoes clicked a staccato beat as he led us past the mannequins standing guard in the front window, across a black-and-white checkerboard floor, and into a foyer thick with the perfume of stargazer lilies and wealth.

  “Where is everybody?” I whispered to Stellan. No one browsed the racks of buttery leather gloves, and not a single bored boyfriend read magazines on the white leather couches.

  “Madame Dauphin prefers to shop alone,” Stellan said. “She has the store closed for her guests as well.”

  I took a deep breath. Prada, in Paris, was closed. For me. To choose a ball gown. It was ridiculous. And extravagant. And . . . amazing. My father’s family and the rest of the Circle were by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me.

  A few minutes later, Stellan had left to do errands and I stood in an opulent dressing room, all snowy white with splashes of gold and magenta and a whole wall of mirrors. I held my arms out to the sides while a tall girl named Aimee, who had shockingly red hair, cinched a measuring tape around my hips. I remembered buying my purple prom dress off the sale rack at Macy’s, and almost laughed out loud.

  “Does Madame Dauphin come here a lot?” I asked, pretending to be capable of normal conversation.

  Elisa, who was tiny with a dark pixie cut, nodded, and held swatches of colored fabrics up to my skin. “Every week.”

  “Has she sent other guests in this weekend?” I asked.

  Aimee unzipped my sundress and gestured for me to take it off.

  “Yes. You are the last appointment of the day. And the only one under the age of fifty,” Elisa said, and Aimee swatted her with the tape measure. “It’s true! The fashion sense of the other younger ladies must already meet Madame’s approval. I don’t mean to offend,” she said to me, “but you are not a regular guest at the family’s events, am I right?”

  I shook my head.

  Aimee lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Tell us. Who are they? We could never ask Madame Dauphin. Are they only rich, or diplomats, or—?”

  “Aimee!” said Elisa, and I pressed my mouth closed. Even if I knew their whole story, I had a feeling I shouldn’t respond to that kind of question. It did make me wonder, though. If the Dauphins were in French politics, Aimee and Elisa would know it.

  “What dresses are we trying on?” I said, and the questions were over.

  Soon, they were slipping gowns on and off me like I was a doll. Gowns that were as much art as clothing. There was a red-feathered dress that was pretty, but shaped weirdly in the hips, and a stiff, architectural cobalt gown Aimee loved.

  One dress was black and modern, and a white one with a full skirt was gorgeous but could have been a wedding dress. Elisa was partial to a gray shift, but the top was too sheer, and another dress was short and pink and looked too eighties.

  All of them were amazing pieces, but it felt like I was just playing dress-up until Elisa lowered a burnished silver gown over my head.

  The dress looked like a glittering stormy night. I pushed my hair off my shoulders to see its delicate, sheer straps, which blended into shimmering raw silk that crossed my chest, then hugged close to my hips. I turned to see the back, open to my waist in a deep V. A small train swished behind my feet.

  All of a sudden, I felt like I should be going to a ball.

  Elisa giggled, and I realized my mouth was hanging open.

  “You like it?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t find any words.

  “We’ll keep it aside, then,” said Aimee.

  They lifted the silver dress off me, and I fought the urge to touch it as Elisa hung it on the opposite wall. The next dress was flashier than what I’d usually choose—gold, covered in intricate beadwork and sequins—and I barely paid attention to it at first. I couldn’t take my eyes off the silver dress. But when they slipped it over my head and the light hit me in the mirror, Elisa gasped out loud. I glowed.

  The dress was nothing like the silver one. If that one had been storms, this was sunlight. It glowed against my dark hair, and hugged my body all the way down, from the plunging halter neckline to the flouncy mermaid hem. I ran my hands over my hips, and my reflection glittered.

  Aimee had been prepping a pink dress with a lace bodice, but she put it back on the hanger. “The gold one. Or the silver. We do not need to try more, no?”

  I glanced at myself in the mirror, then at the silver dress again. I shook my head.

  Elisa led me to a three-way mirror, where a girl who hardly looked like me stared back in triplicate. They changed me into the silver dress and the girl in the mirror looked more serious, more elegant, then the gold again, and she was glamorous, striking. I pictured myself dancing in both dresses, because that’s what you did at a ball, right? Dancing, laughing with the people I’d meet soon. Being introduced as part of the family.

  Toska. The word echoed in my head. A change. In who I was, in how I saw myself. Filling that ache that never quite left my chest.

  I found myself hoping fiercely that my mom would let me stay for the ball, and even a little longer. Meet the Saxons, find out more about my father’s family and the rest of the Circle. To feel like I belonged in this strange, fascinatin
g world. To feel like I belonged anywhere, just for a second.

  “You have to choose eventually.” Elisa smiled. In the mirror, the sequins shimmered.

  The gold dress was perfect for my body type, Elisa said, and I had to admit it was dazzling. But there was something about the silver. It belonged on me. The silver felt right.

  Aimee was grinning as big as I was. She unzipped the gold dress and left me to get out of it, following Elisa downstairs to wrap the silver one. I watched it go. I couldn’t believe that, just like that, it was going to be mine.

  I stood in front of the mirror for a few more minutes, watching the gold sequins twinkle. This was the only time I’d ever get to do anything like this. I wanted to make it last as long as I could.

  I was about to step out of the gold dress when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. “Elisa?” I said. “Aimee?” There was no answer.

  In case it was one of the men come to escort me downstairs, I zipped the dress up.

  The girls were nowhere in sight, but the man who had let us in stood at the top of the staircase.

  “Sorry, I’m not ready yet,” I said. I smiled at him, and he reached into his jacket pocket.

  He pulled out something that, for a moment, didn’t register. It was too discordant with the marble floors, the dresses, the Bach chiming from the speakers. He stepped toward me, and the overhead light glinted off the object.

  Then I knew, but I still didn’t understand.

  It was a knife.

  CHAPTER 12

  I stood frozen, half in and half out of the dressing room. The man moved slow and steady toward me, the dagger—shorter than Stellan’s, but thicker and more menacing—gleaming in his hand. My reflection glittered in his wire-rimmed glasses.

  I stumbled back into the dressing room and slammed the door. I snapped the lock shut with shaking fingers, and my heartbeat thundered in my ears.

  The store was almost empty, plus it was late afternoon—the perfect time for a robbery. I just hoped he wouldn’t come after the gowns that were in here with me. There were only a few, and they couldn’t be as valuable as the cash register, or the jewelry, or the merchandise out on the floor.