A Drop of Night(22)

We’re nearing the end of the corridor. Up ahead is a massive door, like a bank vault. A huge circle of dull blue metal. It’s slightly ajar.

“Come on!” I yell. “Get through the door and close it!”

Another glance over the shoulder: Will has disentangled himself from the helmet thing, is stumbling into a run. Further back, the other helmet things are searing down the corridor, their arms chopping the air. Their speed is incredible, inhuman. Miss Sei is holding a gun now. It’s pointing directly at me.

I reach the door and slip through the gap.

“Get in!” I scream. “Come on!”

I hear a shot, the ping of a bullet glancing off metal.

Jules and Lilly dart through, start heaving against the door. Will and I grab the edge, our fingers straining. The hinges are oiled, slick as silk, but the door weighs a ton. We throw ourselves against it.

“Don’t!” Miss Sei shouts, and now her voice is different, scared.

Out in the corridor, one of the helmet figures pulls ahead of the rest. It’s freakishly close, speeding toward us. I see its visor through the narrowing crack, a curved pane of night, the slice of red light throbbing like a wound along its jaw. Black fingers curl toward me, ready to grip my face, crush my skull.

Miss Sei screams, “Don’t!” one last time, shrill and desperate.

The door slams into place, and I jam the bar home.



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 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 the most enormous space I’ve ever been in, 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. “Wow.”

I glance down. The floor is a huge mural, 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 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 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. “What about all our prep? 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. 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.

“Already saw it. 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 slightly 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 Boy 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.”