A Drop of Night(82)

Will stirs, his eyes flickering open. “Will,” I whisper. “Will, wake up!”

I move, start dragging us desperately away. I’m hunched double, and my entire chest cavity hurts, and my arm is digging into Will’s shoulder blades painfully. I raise my head. The butterfly man is right in front of me, stock-still, obsidian eyes boring into me.

“You are indeed Aurélie’s descendant,” he says. “Her own mother would not know the difference.”

“We’re not part of this,” I whisper. “None of us are, just leave us alone—”

He’s too close. The buzzing noise is back and it’s deafening, and that shudder in the air hurts. My lips are cracking. I can’t hold Will up anymore. He slumps out of my grasp. I’m falling, too, dropping to the cavern floor.

“You are a part of this,” the butterfly man says. “You are my long-lost comrades. Forsaken children of the wicked, greedy family. You are my allies. I have waited long for one of you to come so far. For you to slip their nets and fight with me.”

I look up at him. He is standing over me, but all I can see is a blurry oval, two black holes where his eyes should be.

“We have much to do,” the butterfly man says. “We will return to the surface, you and Lilly and Jules and William. Together we shall end this once and for all.”

What is he talking about? I push myself up onto my knees, gasping. It feels like the air has turned to iron, a thousand pounds of pressure bearing down on me, pounding me into the ground.

“End what?” I whisper. “What are you saying?”

“The cycle. The Bessancourts. This empire of suffering and pain. There is no end to it. There cannot be. When we are poor we wish to be rich, when we are rich we wish to be loved, when we are loved we wish for freedom from pain and endless life and unchanging happiness. It is a great, unstoppable conundrum. There is some sickness deep in our minds, a darkness that causes all ills. It cannot be helped. It can only be eradicated.”

Eradicate. I remember Rabbit Gallery, the stolen artwork, the massive warheads, the weapons used in all the wars of the last two centuries.

“You did that?” I say. My voice takes forever to reach my ears. “You were using them. You invented the weapons, and Havriel and the marquis got rich and took the credit, but you wanted it, you wanted them to kill people.”

“You speak as though you do not approve,” the butterfly man says. “But what reason have you to love the world when it has treated you so harshly? Do you not crave revenge? Do you not crave justice?”

Uh-oh. No-no-no.

The butterfly spreads his hands over my eyes. I feel the scream ripping out of me, but I can’t hear it––

And everything’s gone.

I see a billion people crowding a busy street, dirty faces, ragged clothing, an endless swarm under neon signs. I see troops trudging off to a war, mothers sending off their sons with flowers in their plumed helmets, boots shined, faces grim. I see smoke rising from roofs and spires. Streaks of flame raining down on low wooden houses and walled gardens, the sky between the power lines staining hot, ugly red. I see bombs tumbling like heavy birds onto a city, and I see the little mark on their rivets, a butterfly with human eyes in its wings. Péronne—the Bessancourts’ own town—blown to smithereens, bodies lying along the roadside.

“This is what I have done,” the butterfly man says. “I gave them the tools and they gladly used them. There is no hope for such a people.”

The images keep rolling, wave after wave. My skull is being filled up, synapses crackling, nerves overheating. I see things from my life, from other people’s lives: a beggar being beaten on a roadside by two men in elegant clothing. Bahima Atik smiling—bright lights—a neon frosted birthday cake—bodies leaping from the sides of a huge gray aircraft carrier as it burns. I see Mom turning slowly to face me in the kitchen, a horrible look of determination on her face.

We’d been fighting that day. Or I’d been fighting, my little one-sided duels, doing something drastic to get her attention. This time it had worked. Mom was mad. Penny was there, peeking around the corner of the kitchen counter.

“Penelope,” Mom’s saying, her voice shrill. “Do you want to know who did that to you? Do you want to know why your face looks different from all the kids at school? Because your dear sister is a manipulative, desperate, mentally deranged person. You can thank her, go on!”

But now I see a great thing: Penny’s gaze darting between us, confused and scared. Mom telling her what I had done, how she should hate me now, because I deserved it. But Penny didn’t. She came and found me afterward sitting on the dock, and she curled up next to me, and we swung our legs above the water, and after a while she smiled up at me, and scars and all she was the best-looking kid in the universe to me.

The images speed up, burning snapshots, and I see Lilly, Will, Jules, and me on the floor in the library, laughing even though there was nothing to laugh about. Us helping each other after Jellyfish Hall, holding each other up. Lilly coming back for me, and running, running into the light—

“You are unable to understand,” the butterfly man whispers. “You think you are different from the rest, but you are not. We are all follies, hopeless and doomed to repeat our mistakes forever. Every organism will fight against its own demise. Even a virus. And in the end that is what mankind is: an endless, stubborn blight.”