A Drop of Night(41)

Nope. We reach the top and we’re looking down an exhibition hall. Glass cases stand in rows down either side. Hundreds of feet away, at the end, a pair of double doors, flung wide. I can see more rooms through them, gold and paintings and decadence, stretching away. The palace just keeps going.

“How many floors d’you think this place has?” Jules asks Lilly.

She shrugs. “Will?” He doesn’t answer. “Will?” Nope. “Wi-ill!”

At the third ‘“Will”‘ he finally looks over, startled.

“You study architecture,” Lilly says, the way dumb people say “‘You’re American”‘ when wondering about hamburger recipes or how to do a rodeo. “D’you have any idea how this place is designed?”

Will shakes his head. “I thought maybe it was based on Versailles, but . . . it’s not. It’s like they just kept building in every direction. If the folder was right about this place being inside natural caverns, they probably just built until they ran out of space.”

I watch the needle jiggling inside the compass. Listen to Jules and Lilly murmuring behind me. We’ve slowed down a lot.

“Maybe this whole thing is an experiment,” Lilly says. “Like, maybe they’re total GMO pushers, and they’re testing a virus on us. We had to send in medical documents and get tested for Ebola. That could have been part of the requirements. Maybe they shot us up with something.” She pauses, says thoughtfully: “Or there’s something else, something we don’t even know about.”

“Could be psychological,” I say, turning and walking backward a few steps. “They do it all time with rats. Get control groups with animals from different environments. Put them in a labyrinth and see what happens. Maybe Perdu was from a previous group. And maybe we all come from terrible families and they’re seeing how we react to trauma, who survives and who goes insane.”

Crickets. Jules looks like he’s about to laugh. Lilly is peering at me curiously. It sounded reasonable in my head.

“Um, I have an awesome family,” Lilly says.

I turn quickly and keep walking. “Oh. Cool.” Awkward.

“It could also be hallucinogens,” Jules says, and his voice is quiet, because he’s only talking to Lilly now. The conversation moves on to zombies. The apocalypse. Time travel and aliens and elaborate retreats for wealthy serial killers. It all sounds ridiculous. I glance over at the displays, kicking at the embarrassment clawing up onto my shoulder, laughing at me. Don’t care. Not caring.

Behind the cases, the wallpaper shimmers royal blue, studded every few yards with silver wall sconces. Dark, heavily carved wooden beams rise to the ceiling, twining overhead like branches. Between them, in alcoves or hanging on the walls are sculptures, portraits, still lifes.

I pause, leaning down next to one of the displays. Inside is an antique pendulum clock. The face is alabaster, the color of bad teeth, cut so thin I can see the tangle of gears and sprockets behind it. It looks ancient. Seventeenth century at least. The next case holds a wire-spewing device that I think is a telegram machine. Then an old telephone. I get excited for a second, wonder if we could use it to call someone. Nope. The cable snaking out of its base is rolled up and zip-tied. I highly doubt we’ll find a hookup to a landline down here.

The displays seem to be organized chronologically, by type. I’m in front of weapons now. Some weird, medieval-looking stone cannon. Now flintlocks. Revolvers. I stop in front of an ammunition shell. Blunt, dark metal with a brassy tip—the kind they shot in the First World War when the whole “‘noble heroes’” illusion broke down and it was all bloody tussles in trenches, corpses stuck in the mud, and gas masks.

I squint at the little brass plaque below the box.

First mass-produced shrapnel shell, 1912, by H. B.

Like it’s a work of art. Like it’s something beautiful, not something that eviscerated people in bursts of fire, something some human designed to destroy other humans.

I turn and stare down the row of glass cases. My heart does a clumsy, reverberating beat. From here on it’s all weapons. Grenades. Missiles. Guns poised on tripods, like spiny black insects.

Seriously?

Lilly’s ahead of me, inspecting an exhibit of bright red canisters stamped with biohazard symbols. “By H.B,” she reads out loud, and cuts her eyes toward me.

“This one’s marked with insignias,” Jules says from the other side of the hall. “Red Army, Khmer.”

I start walking again. The guns stare out, lifeless but still somehow watchful, and I imagine one of those black-eyed barrels winking suddenly, a bullet ripping through me––

“This is their stuff,” I say. “Their hall of fame or something. Maybe they invented all this stuff.”

“That would explain why they’re so rich,” Lilly says, crossing to the other side of the gallery. “If they’re weapons manufacturers. I mean, you’re never going to go out of business that way.”

I pass Will, standing in front of a case of bullets, frowning at them.

“You know what’s funny?” Jules calls over his shoulder. He’s in front of what looks like a giant iron sea urchin. “Those blue folders we got. All that stuff about parts of the palace maybe being underwater, that we might have to dive, that they had no clue how big this place was, yadda yadda. They knew exactly what was down here. We were never supposed to live long enough to see any of it.”