A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  “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.

  14

  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 univers
e 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.

  Palais du Papillon—Salle d’Acajou—126 feet below—October 23, 1789

  Thick fingers find the sack’s hem and drag it off my head. I am standing in a dark room, a jewelry box of red plush and smoldering gilt. My sisters are with me. The ceiling is tented, a canopy of ribbed silk. Dim lamps hiss softly along the walls. Father sits at the center of the room like a troll king in his lair, huge and hulking upon a delicate chair, one leg hooked over the other.

  He is as enormous as Havriel, but that is where all similarities between them end: where Havriel is a mountain of calm and shadowy grace, Father is like a boar after the hounds have caught it, heaving and fighting and grasping for life, though the chance for that has long since fled. He wears a splendid coat of cherry red. On his head is a chalk-white wig. His mouth is in perpetual motion in his powdered face, shivering and twitching, forming silent words that he does not utter, and he holds a small tin mask full of herbs and perfume to his nose even as he speaks. He has always done this, for as long as I can remember. The doctors say it will stop the plague, influenza, any sort of sickness from befalling him, but he looks a fool for it.

  His hands have begun to tremble, the rings on his fat fingers clinking against the arms of his chair.

  “My wife,” he says again. “Where is she?” He attempts to rise, collapses. Small black eyes skip across our faces and linger on the empty air at my side, as if he expects to see someone there.

  Havriel’s knuckles tighten around the blindfold in his hands. “Frédéric?” he says gently. “Frédéric, you must listen to me—” He goes to Father’s side.

  “Where is she, Havriel?” Father hisses, and beside me Delphine jolts upright. She must have been dozing as she stood.

  Havriel lays a hand on Father’s shoulder. Father shrugs it off. Again he tries to stand and again he fails. “Where is Célestine? It promised we would be safe, the wicked thing, it promised—”

  “The guards are with her as we speak,” Havriel says quickly. “She did not want to leave the château, but they will no doubt bring her safely down—”

  “They shot her,” I say. My voice is just a thread, but it jerks Father’s head up like a puppet. Havriel does not turn. He has gone deathly still.

  “She did not want to come,” I go on, louder now, and my voice turns taunting, bitter. “She was afraid. She was so afraid she was willing to die rather than come into your paradisical underground realm. Why might that be, Father, pray do tell?”

  But Father is no longer listening. He is shrieking. He curls in the chair, his spine contorting, his hand scrabbling up the cushion as if he seeks to climb over the back of it, and Havriel is gripping him, and Delphine is whimpering.

  “Frédéric, calm yourself! They are bringing her to safety as we speak! We do not know the extent of the damage—”

  “They shot her!” I shout. “They shot her, and if they had not, she might have done it herself!”

  I’m crying, and as I move toward Father, Havriel spins.

  “Stay back, Aurélie,” he spits. “Stay back.”

  Havriel’s bell rings. A door opens. Someone is here. The sack falls again over my eyes. I’m being bundled away, and I don’t know where my sisters are, but suddenly my body is wax and twigs and straw hair; I am a drained, brittle husk, too tired to fight. I walk on and on, through echoing halls, my feet aching inside my shoes. It feels as if I walk for days, soft hands guiding me through the dark, and yet I can still hear Father screaming.

  15

  We stagger away from the wires, examining our bodies for wounds. My foot feels like it’s been sawed off. I pull up my pant leg, bracing myself for partial amputation, exposed muscle, the works. I’ve got a cut just above the knob of bone in my ankle. It’s tiny, the size of a fingernail clipping. The definition of anticlimactic.

  I collapse against the wall next to Jules. He’s testing his hand, watching it swell red and shiny where it caught his fall. Lilly’s on her knees in front of the wall of wires. Her head’s slumped to her chest, hair hanging lank over her face. I can’t see if she’s hurt. She’s breathing, at least.

  I lean back against the wall and close my eyes.

  “What do they want from us?”

  It comes out in a rasping, grating croak.

  No one answers. I roll my head to the side, try to catch Jules’s eye. “I’m serious, what? Why didn’t they just kill us in the mirror room? Or at dinner? Or on the freaking airplane? And why are there traps? Dorf said they could see us, they know we’re here, so why did they stop the wires? Why didn’t they just finish us off?”

  Will eases himself down next to us. He has a cut on his arm. One of the long sleeves of his T-shirt is sticking to his skin, soaked dark and glistening. He rips the other sleeve along the seam at the shoulder and starts tying a tourniquet above his bicep, the knot held between his teeth.

  “They don’t want us dead,” he says.

  I see the barbed nozzle, sliding into Hayden’s skull.

  “Really?” I say. “Because they sure wanted Hayden dead.”

  Will pulls the tourniquet tight, wincing. Jules has his head between his knees. All I can see of him is his black hair, hanging toward the floor. I feel like throwing up, and I also feel like I want to smack someone, or argue and figure things out, but everyone is just sitting here!

  I stand abruptly, ignoring the pain in my foot. “We need to get out of here.”

  Jules starts gasping. He’s sobbing, his head still pinched between his knees. Will glances up at me. His eyes are clear and still. He’s not crying like Jules, but I think he might if no one were around.

  I look to the golden doors at the end of the hall. They seem to be flaming in the light from the chandeliers, gathering it. “So get up!” My voice bounces through the hall, cold and hollow.

  Nobody moves.

  I start toward Lilly. I saw Hayden die, too, and I’m all for the four stages of grief and periods of mourning and all that, but I also don’t want to be murdered. I grab Lilly’s wrist and practically drag her to her feet.

  “What is your problem?” Lilly sobs. “We almost—”

  “Yeah,” I say fiercely. “We almost died, and we’re going to completely die if we don’t get moving!”

  As if in response, a series of metallic pops echo behind the walls. Lilly and I freeze. The wall of wires starts sliding back along their tracks. They’re not whirring anymore, not vibrating. It’s like watching a wounded animal drag itself back into its hole. They reach the end of the hall and rise up, coming to rest in their slots above the golden door. Taut. Invisible.

  “Will, get Jules,” I snap over my shoulder. “Dorf said they were dispatching trackers from the other end of the palace. That means there is another end.”

  Somewhere behind me, Jules speaks, his voice bitter: “You want us to just walk through those doors? Is that your plan? And what about Dorf? He said there’s something down here. What if whatever he warned us about is right on the other side—”

  “It’s that or Miss Sei and her gas nozzle, so puzzle it out.”

  I’ve got Lilly by the arm and we’re moving quickly across the floor. The golden doors loom, spiny and vaguely surreal, Rodin’s Gates of Hell. They’re like a gold-drenched nightmare—gilt faces, contorted bodies, wings and hooves and claws, all struggling up through the golden mass. Jules and Will catch up, Will supporting Jul
es even though Jules’s swollen hand is in no way impeding his ability to walk. We stand in a row, breathing hard, staring up at the doors.

  “Maybe it’s a trap,” Lilly whispers. “Maybe it’s rigged.”

  I put my hand against it.

  “Maybe,” I say, and push.

  16

  It’s not rigged. Or if it is, whoever’s controlling this place decides not to kill us. We slip around the golden doors. Will closes them behind us as quietly as he can.

  This new room has nine more doors—three in each wall, not including the one we just came through. Everything is bone white. The ceiling, the walls with their curling plaster moldings, the circular table in the center . . . everything. The only color comes from a massive bowl of fruit on the table, a Dutch still life of grapes and oranges and ruby-colored apples, rich and vivid against the whiteness. Nothing else. It’s utterly silent.

  I glance around. I’m guessing it’s some sort of antechamber, but it’s not like any I’ve ever seen or read about. It looks drained somehow, desaturated, like an unfinished bit of computer animation. The ceiling is a butterfly again, a white one. This time the eyes are almost closed. Not sleepy. Sly. Catlike.

  “They can’t do this,” Lilly breathes, and the words feel like a disturbance, a ripple in the dead air. “They can’t get away with this. Our parents know we’re in France. They don’t know where exactly, but my mom will find out, and she is going to dig this place up with a spoon if she has to—”

  “See if they care. Our boarding passes were enough to completely skip U.S. security. That’s a whole different level of rich.”

  “They still must care about being caught, though,” Will says. “Otherwise why the big lie? Why bring us here in the first place?”

  “And then let us get away,” Jules says.

  “They didn’t let us get away,” I answer. This room is creeping me out. I have to force the next words out. “I don’t think we were supposed to wake up. I spat out most of my pills, which is probably why I regained consciousness sooner. And then I was able to wake you up, too, and Hayden—”