A Drop of Night(45)

Lilly notices I’m not jogging with the rest of them. She slows down until she’s right beside me. Will and Jules do, too.

“I’m not an invalid,” I snap, but Lilly just keeps jogging next to me, and it makes me feel worse, because it means she knows I’m full of crap.

We’re passing through a room that looks like the residence of an upper-class goldfish: aquamarine silks, the chandelier dripping with silver-plated seashells and crystal. Behind us the voice is echoing, fading into the distance. I’m guessing it will be piped into where we are, eventually. The fact that it hasn’t yet might be a good sign. Maybe it means the Sapanis don’t know where we are.

Except we don’t know where we are, either. We slow down.

“What if we die down here?” Jules mutters. He’s breathing hard.

No one answers.

“I’m serious, what if we don’t get out? Hayden didn’t make it. We knew him for exactly twenty-four hours and then he was dead, and we didn’t even . . . we didn’t even like him. I don’t want to be—”

The doorways stretch ahead of us like a fun-house infinity mirror. Our feet are loud on the parquet, rubber soles squeaking. I wonder what Jules was going to say: I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want to die surrounded by people who hate my guts.

“We’re not going to die,” I say, and I make sure it comes out loud and clear.

“Says who?” Jules says, slightly surprised that I’m speaking again, but too curious to make a scene about it. “If we run into those trackers again, I’m the first to go. Shouldn’t we—Shouldn’t we know something about each other?”

“No,” I say. “What if we all survive? Then we know things about each other.”

“So?” Jules says.

“So no.” I flip out the compass again.

“I think we should,” Lilly says.

Oh great. I don’t know what it is with Lilly. I remember the sharp look she gave me on the airplane, her lifting that chair in Razor Hall even though she’s tiny, and stopping Jules and me from fighting, and I have a hunch that under those blond ringlets and hippie vibes, she’s something else entirely. Possibly an annoying little determined control freak.

Will glances over his shoulder at us. “We need to keep it down,” he says in that mellow voice of his, when really he should be snapping: Shut up, or we will be murdered. “Sounds carries down here.”

Jules ignores him. “You want to start?” he says to Lilly.

She looks worried for a second. Starts playing with her hair feathers again. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I want you guys to know that I lied.” We step through the last doorway into a room like a checkerboard. Black furniture, white marble walls, onyx-framed mirrors, blinding-white sheepskin rugs. “About my aunt in Wisconsin and the tattoos. About a lot of things. I don’t actually have any tattoos and there is no town called Flemings in Wisconsin, and I’m not actually nice. I act nice because I don’t want people to hate me, but . . . Also, I’m not really smart. I don’t know how I got on this trip. I had to repeat eighth grade and I have dyslexia pretty bad, and when I got the letter that said I made it onto the expedition, super proud because I thought I was actually good at something besides being a weirdo. But I’m not. Obviously.”

Nobody says anything for a full ten seconds. We’ve all stopped, pooling in the black-and-white room. I think Lilly’s joking. Until she starts crying.

“You’re not a weirdo,” Jules says quietly. “You had the idea with chair! Jamming the wires? That was really smart. That was awesome.”

What is this, therapy round? But Lilly doesn’t stop crying. And I don’t know whether she should be crying like that, like she’s a terrible person. I could count all the genuinely nice people I know on one hand. Actually I could count them without any hands, and Lilly’s definitely one of them.

“You should stop,” I say. “Stop crying. You’re nice. Not that many people are actually nice.”

Stunned silence.

Was that the wrong thing to say?

And now Jules smacks both hands to his cheeks and says: “Awwwww! Nukey!” muted and whispery, and in my mind I tip him into a brush cutter and watch stoically as his shoes disappear down the chute.

He sees my expression. Laughs. Lilly laughs, too, a little shakily.

“I’m serious, Lilly, it doesn’t matter why you’re here; they clearly didn’t bring us here for our brain power anyway. It just matters that you get out. So let’s keep going.”

We start walking again and Will smiles at me, quick and cautious. I see it, but I keep my gaze fixed straight ahead.

The next chamber looks like a children’s playroom. Rocking horses. Painted wooden blocks arranged in precarious towers across the carpet. There’s even a miniature stone castle built into one wall, complete with kid-sized portcullis and glass windows. Jules starts telling his story. Something about growing up in small-town Nebraska and being picked on all the way through middle school for being the only kid in town with a Middle Eastern dad, and then being picked on all the way through high school because kids didn’t like kids who stuck out like gangly scarecrows, who had purple hair and weren’t interested in football. He starts talking about how he got expelled for breaking someone’s nose, even though it was seven to one and the person he punched had just pulled a knife. How he ran away to San Diego to art school two years early because if he stayed, he’d end up exactly like his tormentors, flipping burgers at Benny-O’s for all of eternity in his own personal minimum-wage hell. He tries to make it sound funny, like he’s recounting a vignette from a hilarious coming-of-age movie, but it’s not funny. It’s awkward to listen to, and I want someone to take him away and pat his hand or something.