A Drop of Night(84)

We keep climbing, keep climbing, and listen to it all fall away.








Palais du Papillon—112 feet below, ten seconds before the detonations


Jacques lies against the wall of the empty panic room. His blood is a red-black mirror beneath him, still as glass. The light buzzes. The distant sound of running feet reaches his ears. But it is echoing away, leaving him behind.

A shivering jolt reverberates in the walls of the capsule. He thinks of the girl with the black hair, a steel girl with a tiny wounded heart. He thought she was Aurélie at first. But what a foolish dream that was. Aurélie is gone. Aurélie is free.

The jolt comes again, closer. The entire capsule shakes. Jacques’s thoughts turn to home. The dry clack of his mother’s knitting needles. The smell of drying herbs and tallow candles and damp wood. He hears the creak of a hinge and looks up. A face is peering in at him through the hatch. At first he does not recognize it. But now she smiles. . .

“Jacques,” Aurélie says, and hurries for him. She kneels beside him. “Come, Jacques, we must go! Can you hear not them? They are waiting to see you! The fair is here and the jugglers.”

And suddenly the stuttering light, the cold metal and the blood, all of it twists away and fades. He can hear the waterwheel, Madame Desjardin’s voice calling across the fields. Aurélie is pulling him to his feet and he is on the green outside Péronne. In the distance he can see his brothers and sisters just as they were when he last looked back at them in the road, not yet wizened and old, but young and smiling, raising their hands to him, and he cannot say if they gesture in farewell or welcome.

Jacques can feel the sunlight flowing over his skin. . . .








Palais du Papillon, 96 feet below—1790


“Careful,” I whisper, one hand on Charlotte’s back as she grips the iron rungs and begins to climb. “Quick and careful.”

Bernadette goes next, then Delphine, and I make my way up the ladder last, now and then giving Delphine’s heel an encouraging squeeze. Our feet tap up, up.

“There is a door here!” Charlotte calls down.

“Open it!” I shout. “Open it!”

The shaft has become wider, blooming into a small chamber, a tulip atop a long stem. We all reach up, hands grasping. We slide back the door, a square of iron into the stone.

And there is sunlight. Fields and wind and the smell of grass and the scratch of insects. And sunlight.

Delphine laughs and wriggles out into the brightness. Charlotte follows. Even Bernadette cannot help herself and laughs with the rest of them, her sour little face twisting, her hands shading her eyes against the sudden, painful light. I climb out last. The sun tickles my cheeks. I listen to my sisters’ joyful shrieks, and I feel the darkness squirming beneath my skin, the sting of the deep red wound.

My fingers reach for the daisy in my apron pocket, and I twist it like a charm. “I will come back for you, Jacques,” I whisper, and the breeze takes my words and folds them away. “I will find you.”

It is a vain promise. Perhaps I will die tomorrow. Perhaps Father will send guards after us and drag us back into the depths, or we will be captured by revolutionnaires and guillotined, and I will never see Jacques again. But in this moment, there are no truer words. I will find him. I will try.

We start off across the field. The wheat is a soft new green, waving in the breeze. The air is hazy with pollen. Trees border the field like a hunched gathering of giants. In the distance I see smoke rising from the chimneys of a farmhouse. I hear the splash and babble of water, the gentle creak-creak of a waterwheel, rolling tirelessly nowhere.

And I decide then that I dare not think of tomorrow. I dare not think of hours or days or years at all. I will think of Mama, smiling at me from under the apple tree. I will think of the wind and the wheat and the sound of the birds, and how, if I could, I would take my sisters by their hands and we would leap into the air like little starlings and let the breeze wheel us away. I will think of a tall boy and a tall girl, far underground.

I have this moment in the sun. I have had many before it. Come what may, they will be mine forever.








Epilogue—217 feet above sea level, Pitié-Salpetrière Hospital, Paris


We crawled up somewhere near the outskirts of Péronne, in a freezing green field. We dragged ourselves about three hundred feet to a little farmhouse. Nearly gave the elderly couple living there a heart attack when we asked to use their phone. The police came, ambulances bleeding swirling light onto the snow.

I’m lying in a hospital now. Lilly is one bed over. Across from me are Will and Jules. They kept us together, probably for security reasons. Four teenagers purported dead in a plane crash emerging alive from a massive, unexplained subterranean explosion is a bit of a sensation, apparently. Journalists, the gendarmerie, folks from the U.S. embassy: they’re all waiting to talk to us. Our room’s been quarantined, a guard from the special police stationed right outside. We’re being spared for now.

Bright winter sun streams through the blinds, and I feel heavy and weightless, sad and happy. But more happy than sad. A lot more happy. Happier than I’ve ever felt in my life, which is ironic because there’s a drip stuck into my arm, and Hayden’s dead, and we’re going to be explaining this for a long, long time.