A Drop of Night(39)



I’m the first one to move. I step forward and squat next to the closest one. If it’s a trap, we’re dead anyway––

I nudge it. Its helmeted head rolls, facing me. The red light along the jaw is off, now only a dull, empty strip.

“What did this?” Jules whispers, and Will says: “It doesn’t make sense.”

No. It doesn’t. These were the trackers Dorf sent. They must be. They look exactly like the ones with Miss Sei in the mirror cube, and those things were fast. They probably could have killed us with one punch and picked their teeth with our swords. But there’s no sign of a struggle. Not a scratch on the surface of their glossy black suits. And no way did they stumble into a trap. No way we walked through this hallway unscathed and the actual inhabitants of this place were massacred.

“Should we take off its helmet?” Lilly asks.

That hum is back, turning the air bright and tickling. Will leans down next to one slowly. I watch in horror as he wraps his fingers around its helmet and pulls. It won’t come off. He grabs the visor. Slides it up.

Bile rises in my throat. I reach over and slap the visor closed, but it’s too late. I saw the face. Everyone saw the face.

It was almost human. Its skin was milky, a gel-like blue fluid making a film over its cheeks. Some kind of tech had been implanted around the lashless eyes. It was definitely dead. Thousands upon thousands of hairline scratches covered its skin, circling the eyes, the mouth, traveling down its neck and into its suit.

“Perdu had scratches like those,” Lilly whispers. “All over him.”

“You guys?” Jules stands. He’s pointing at something on the wall opposite the doors.

We all look.

There’s a sentence on it, gouged deep into the splintered wood: six words, chopped into the silk wallpaper and paneling in savage, angular letters.

SEE HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN

I stand abruptly.

We exchange looks, the sentence hanging behind us like a gruesome grin, a jagged row of teeth. “Let’s get out of here.”

We leave the bodies behind, running for the end of the gallery. Burst through the doors. Slam them and bar them behind us, but it doesn’t make me feel safe, not even close.

“They’re supposed to be the bad guys,” Lilly says, leaning against the wall, pulling frantically at her clothes like she can’t breathe, like they’re constricting her. “So who killed the bad guys?”

“Perdu—” Jules starts.

“Not Perdu,” I say, cutting him off. “Perdu was scared. He was terrified of something down here, and he wanted to escape with us. I think it got him before he could.”

“Then why didn’t it get us?”

I shake my head. I have no idea. And the thought that there are worse things down here than trackers and Miss Sei and Dorf is not one I want to entertain. “Let’s just hope we don’t run into it.”

I take out the compass and turn, watching the needle. I hear Perdu’s voice, high and excited, melding with the static in my head:

A secret way . . . Due north . . . You will help me, won’t you? You will not leave me behind?

I stare at the needle. Look up. And head north.



Walking in the open feels awful. Like leaving the house in your tiniest, flowiest party dress and realizing your front door opened straight into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Which is possibly something only I’ve ever worried about, I don’t know. We’re in a high, narrow gallery lined with doors. The lights are low and the floor is carpeted with an endless, purple-black Persian runner, embroidered with profusions of bronze flowers and satyrs. The carpet gives the space a weird feel, like it’s supposed to be homey, but my body knows I’m underground, in a windowless hallway below a trillion tons of soil and rock. It knows I’m trapped. It puts a little itch right in the center of my skull, impossible to scratch. This must be what insanity feels like.

Behind me Lilly and Jules are talking in low voices. “Seriously, there’s no reason all of us were picked for this. My dad’s from Egypt. We don’t come from remotely similar cultural backgrounds and we’re not even polar opposites, either, like a test group or something. We’re just random middle-class American kids that they picked up for some reason.” A pause. “I mean, I’m sorry, but when I saw you guys at JFK I was regretting signing up.”

“And now you’re not?” Lilly’s voice is scared.

Jules doesn’t answer. We get to the end of the gallery. I shift the compass into my other hand, my throat dry.

“Are we just going to hope Perdu was right about the exit?” Jules asks, his voice rising a notch. He’s talking to me. “The secret exit that we’ll totally find on our own?”

“When you have a better plan you can tell us, Jules. No really, I’m on pins and needles.”

The next room is a study, a shimmering box of a chamber paneled entirely in polished squares of amber. We cross it in ten steps.

“We could try negotiating,” Jules says.

“D’you want to offer yourself up so the rest of us can go free? Because I don’t, either.”

“I’m just suggesting maybe—”

“No, Jules, you’re being a whiner.”

“You guys, stop—” Lilly says nervously.

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