A Drop of Night(40)

Jules throws his head back and guffaws. Who does that? Who laughs that loud when there could be literally anything right around the corner listening? But he’s got a wounded look to him now, injured pride, and he says: “Who are you calling a whiner, Miss-I’m-so-saaaaad-I-have-to-forge-my-parents’-signatures-just-to-get-out-of-the-house?”

Oh, he did not. I’m going to slap that kid’s face off, little punk hipster with his ink sleeve––

I spin on him. Lilly jams between us. “Stop,” she snaps, and Will moves in front of Jules, saying, “Come on, bro,” really softly.

I try to get Lilly out of the way.

“Seriously, stop it,” she hisses. She braces herself against me. The top of her head barely reaches my collarbone, but she’s strong. “Us fighting each other is the last thing that’s going to help us get out of here. Okay? You need to quit.”

Jules and I glare at each other. And now Jules is getting awkward and apologetic, and I hate that. It’s like cheating. You can’t punch someone in the throat and say you’re sorry and think that’s all it takes.

But Lilly’s right. Fighting each other is straight-up stupid. I raise an eyebrow in what I hope is a devastatingly condescending gesture and head down the gallery.

Jules comes after me. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t want his placating. I don’t want any of them to think I actually care what they think. “I’m just saying, maybe there are other options. We’re walking around hoping some insane person was telling the truth, and in the meantime they’re chasing us—”

“Who is chasing us?” I slam into the next set of rooms. “Not those trackers anymore. And why us? Why fly U.S. citizens to a different continent to murder them? And why are we all teenagers?”

“Maybe they have preferences.”

“For what? Stupid spoiled brats?”

Everyone stares at me.

“Sorry.” I look down at my shoes. “Never mind. What I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty sure stabbing people with gas nozzles has the same effect whether you’re American or French. You don’t need to import your victims. You definitely don’t need to invent a complex ruse to get them to visit you.”

We walk in silence for a minute. Pass under an archway and into a dim, grotto-like room with drifts of embroidered pillows and a tiled fountain in the middle. It looks like one of the courtyards at the Alhambra in Granada. We all check for traps, moving slowly across the floor. We practically dive into the fountain, drinking greedily. There’s no door in the north wall. We have to turn west.

As soon as we start moving again, Will clears his throat. “I have a theory,” he says, and it’s like we even try to walk quieter just so we don’t miss anything he says. Apparently not talking often has the awesome side effect that when you do decide to talk, people actually listen.

“Not about why we’re here, just . . . you know, about the palace. I think we’re running from two different things.” His voice is low, and he looks at us one at a time, earnestly. “It’s like a triangle. Here’s us at the base on one corner. And Dorf and the trackers on the other corner. And at the tip is something else.”

I blink. That was a lot of sentences at once.

“What’s at the tip?” Lilly asks. “What’s your theory there?”

“I don’t know.” He starts rubbing his thumb furiously along the leather hilt of his sword, as if the fact that he hasn’t figured this whole place out yet is mildly embarrassing. “The thing that got Perdu. The thing that killed those trackers and wrote on the wall. I don’t know.” He looks away, and his voice becomes even quieter. “But whatever it is, it’s bad enough that the Sapanis are afraid of it. And they keep it locked underground behind traps and blast doors. It’s out of their control.”

“And we’re just stuck in the middle?” Jules asks. “Just kind of arbitrarily?”

“No,” Will says. “They brought us down for something, but it wasn’t so that we’d lock ourselves in their palace and end up as food for whatever they keep down here. I think we screwed up their plans a lot.”

A chill runs down my spine. I glance up at the ceiling, plaster moldings, arched like the top of a pale, sickly mouth.

“Well, the enemy of our enemy is our friend, right?” Jules asks.

“No, Jules,” I say. “Something that can kill a room full of superhuman soldiers without making a sound: not our friend.”

I’m suddenly afraid to look back, to look anywhere except straight ahead. I think of Perdu cowering behind the chair in the library, his trembling finger extended toward the doors. L’homme papillon.

“The butterfly man,” I say quietly. No one hears me. The gallery seems to lick up the words and swallow them whole.



We’re climbing a wide marble staircase. I’m thrilled, because anything leading upward is good, means were getting closer to the surface, Wi-Fi, police stations, sanity. . . . We reach a landing. The stone balustrade is carved with writhing, white marble sea creatures, twisting around each other like they’re in the process of devouring themselves. I glance back over the huge hall we just crossed, an empty expanse of diamond-shaped tile, dozens of square yards of fresco paintings. The staircase splits in two after the landing, jutting out at right angles. We take the left one, and I get this irrational hope that there will be doors at the top, maybe the exit Perdu was talking about––