This Monstrous Thing(80)

“Sir—” I heard the officer holding me up say, but Jiroux whirled in the doorway and cut him off.

“I don’t care which of you does it, Krieg, but there’s to be no record they were here. I don’t want to see either of them again.” And then he spun on his heel and stomped out.

Most of the officers followed. A few stayed behind, watching me warily and glancing at each other like they were silently arguing over who was going to pull the trigger. “What are we—” one began, but the officer holding me—Krieg—instructed, “Go down below and fetch Mr. Finch.” When none of them moved, he snapped, almost as fierce as Jiroux, “Do it now.” Two of the officers departed, leaving Krieg and one other. My legs were still shaking, and I felt myself start to tip over again. “Help him,” Krieg grunted, and the other officer came forward and pulled me back up by my injured arm. Another hot surge of blood slipped free.

The officers unchained my ankles and led me down through the station and out into the alley behind it. They stopped in the splash of lamplight, each with a tight hold on me, and waited. The butts of their rifles knocked into the back of my legs as the officers shifted from foot to foot to keep warm.

After a few minutes, the station door opened with a gust of hot air and two officers appeared with my father pinned between them. As they dragged him forward, his eyes met mine, and I knew no one had to explain to him what was happening.

One of the officers reached for his rifle, but Krieg shook his head. “Not here.”

And suddenly we were moving again, and I was counting down the seconds left in my life like the tower clock running backward.

With Krieg half carrying me in the lead, the officers marched us through the network of connecting alleys behind the station, which were dark but for the moonlight and rank with piss and mud. I didn’t have a clue where they were taking us—I’d never seen this part of the city before. The only light came from the bare windows above us blazing with Christmas candles. Streets over, from what felt like worlds away, I could hear cheering, and the bells from Saint Pierre’s ringing like it was Sunday. People were singing. Carols and hymns rose above the wind in celebration that the city was still in one piece. Krieg had a tight hold on my arm, but he kept glancing in the direction of the noise, then down at the chains around my wrists. I stared at him, but he wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

They led us through a checkpoint and outside the city walls until we were standing at the edge of the lake. At our feet, the water lapped hungrily at the shore. I wondered for a moment why they’d brought us here rather than just finishing us off behind the station, but I figured it was probably easier to throw our bodies into the lake and be rid of them. A bitter wind snapped off the waves as one of the officers pushed me forward so that my face was toward their rifles with Father beside me. I shivered.

I am going to die here, I thought.

I wondered if it was a luxury, knowing the end was coming, or if it was better for it to knock you down out of nowhere, like Oliver crashing from the clock tower. Everything felt like it was crashing—the waves behind us, the raucous carols mixed with laughter from the city, the sound of my heartbeat as it clawed at my chest. But then I thought of Oliver, alive and free, and it all quieted a bit.

I took a breath and closed my eyes.

The officers’ rifles clattered as they swung them off their shoulders. I waited to hear the shots or feel the pain or at least the impact. To feel something. But long seconds stretched to a minute, and nothing happened.

I opened my eyes. The officers were standing shoulder to shoulder in front of us with the butts of their rifles still on the ground. They were all staring at me. Then Krieg said, “You stopped the explosions.”

I didn’t know what would come out of my mouth if I tried to speak, so I just nodded.

He took a step forward, hands outstretched, and I flinched. “It’s all right,” he said, and I realized he was undoing the chains from around my wrists. When I was free, he unfastened Father’s too and tossed them into the water behind us. Their splash was swallowed by the waves.

Krieg turned to the other officers. “Gentlemen,” he said, and they all raised their rifles to the sky and fired once. I knew it was meant as a decoy, but somehow—madly—it felt like a salute.

Then the officers turned. They began to walk back to the station. And Father and I were left alone.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t get my breath back. I was standing there like I was made of stone, shaking and gasping and wondering how the bleeding hell I was still on my feet. More than that, how I was still alive. We both were.

“Alasdair.” Father’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Alasdair, we need to go.” I felt his hand on my arm. I think he meant to pull me toward the road, probably to run, but instead I turned and fell against him, my face pressed into his shoulder. After a moment, he reached up, and we stayed there for a while with my face in his coat and his hand on the back of my neck.

Far behind us, buried deep within the city streets, I heard the tower clock strike.


Ornex was the first town across the French border, and it was where Mum was hiding at Morand’s boardinghouse. It was a few hours’ walk there on a clear day, but it took us most of the night to reach it. We had to cross the foothills to avoid the checkpoints at the border, which involved a fair amount of scrambling up rock faces slick with ice. The striped shadows from the pines made it nearly impossible to see where we were going, and I kept sinking into snowdrifts that I barely had the strength to pull myself back out of. It was the coldest I could remember being in my whole life.