Authors: Stefan Bachmann
I tear across the library.
“Perdu!”
I don't even care if anyone hears me. The clock stopped at 2:17. Five hours after I last checked it. There's blood on the floor, dark, stinking of hot metal. My feet are slapping in it.
I reach the doors and stare up at them. All the furniture we had stacked in front of it is lying in a pile. I see soggy stacks of paper, stained red. Broken chair legs. The massive walnut table is on its side. The doors are still closed. The floor peg is out.
No-no-no, how long was it out, how long was the door openâ
“Will?” I wail over my shoulder.
I jam the floor peg in again and spin, racing back toward the fireplace. It's not just blood on the floor. There are tufts of dark hair floating in the red, and fatty, pearly
strands of white. Like something
ripped
at Perdu.
“Jules!” The others are just starting to stand, gaping at the blood. “Jules, please tell me you didn't fall asleep. Pleaseâ”
He jerks around to look at me, his eyes wide.
He fell asleep. We all did.
Will peels away from us, heading for the door. I drop to hands and knees and crawl between the chairs, trying to see if anything is missing. My letter opener is still in my pocket. The compass is on the floor, half hidden under a heap of pillows and carpets. I grab it and clench it in my fist, still crawling. The two swords are lying on the floor. We don't have anything else to steal.
I leap to my feet and run back to the doors. Will's there, one hand hovering over a bloody print on the wood. It's smaller than his hand. Smaller than my hand. It's tiny, almost delicate.
Did Perdu have delicate hands?
“Nothing's broken,” Will says quietly. “The floor peg and the fire poker, it's all fine, which means . . .” He coughs. “Which means the door was opened from this side.”
I let out some sort of animal cry and turn in a circle, my fingers going to my hair, digging into my scalp.
“Perdu
let someone in
and we didn't hear? He pulled down a mountain of furniture, was possibly attacked and mauled, and we just slept through it?”
Lilly and Jules race up, carrying the swords. Will grabs his. I drop down and jerk the floor peg out. We thought we were safe in here. We
slept
. As long as we're down here, we're nowhere close to safe.
I stand, and we stare at one another for a second, our eyes popping from our dirty faces like marbles. I nod, knuckles bobbing around the grip of my weapon. I can almost hear our hearts beating, our thoughts screeching in unison.
“It's okay,” I say. “We'll be okay.”
I open the doors.
It's like jumping into a nightmare, some sort of surreal,
Dadaesque ballet. The floor is covered with bodies.
They lie splayed over the marble, black suits glistening dully, legs pinned under them at horrific angles. We stand, frozen in the library's doorway, gazing over the carnage. There's no blood. Just helmeted bodies, dripped over the floor like tar.
I'm the first one to move. I step forward and squat next to the closest one. If it's a trap, we're dead anywayâ
I nudge it. Its helmeted head rolls, facing me. The red light along the jaw is off, now only a dull, empty strip.
“What did this?” Jules whispers, and Will says, “It doesn't make sense.”
No. It doesn't. These were the trackers Dorf sent.
They must be. They look exactly like the ones with Miss Sei in the mirror cube
,
and those things
were fast.
They probably could have killed us with one punch and picked their teeth with our swords. But there's no sign of a struggle. Not a scratch on the surface of their glossy black suits. And no way did they stumble into a trap. No way we walked through this hallway unscathed and the actual inhabitants of this place were massacred.
“Should we take off its helmet?” Lilly asks.
That hum is back, turning the air bright and tickling. Will leans down next to one slowly. I watch in horror as he wraps his fingers around its helmet and pulls. It won't come off. He grabs the visor. Slides it up.
Bile rises in my throat. I reach over and slap the visor closed, but it's too late. I saw the face. Everyone saw the face.
It was almost human. Its skin was milky, a gel-like blue fluid making a film over its cheeks. Some kind of tech had been implanted around the lashless eyes. It was definitely dead. Thousands upon thousands of hairline scratches covered its skin, circling the eyes, the mouth, traveling down its neck and into its suit.
“Perdu had scratches like those,” Lilly whispers. “All over him.”
“You guys?” Jules stands. He's pointing at something on the wall opposite the doors.
We all look.
There's a sentence on it, gouged deep into the splintered woodâsix words, chopped into the silk wallpaper and paneling in savage, angular letters:
SEE HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN
I stand abruptly.
We exchange looks, the message hanging behind us like a gruesome grin, a jagged row of teeth. “Let's get out of here.”
We leave the bodies behind, running for the end of the gallery. Burst through the doors. Slam them and bar them behind us, but it doesn't make me feel safe, not even close.
“They're supposed to be the bad guys,” Lilly says, leaning against the wall, pulling frantically at her clothes like she can't breathe, like they're constricting her. “So who killed the bad guys?”
“Perduâ” Jules starts.
“Not Perdu,” I say, cutting him off. “Perdu was scared. He was terrified of something down here, and he wanted to escape with us. I think it got him before he could.”
“Then why didn't it get us?”
I shake my head. I have no idea. And the thought that there are worse things down here than trackers and Miss Sei and Dorf is not one I want to entertain. “Let's just hope we don't run into it.”
I take out the compass and turn, watching the needle. I hear Perdu's voice, high and excited, melding with the static in my head:
A secret way . . . Due north . . . You will help me, won't you? You will not leave me behind?
I stare at the needle. Look up. And head north.
Walking in the open feels awful. Like leaving the house in your
tiniest, flowiest party dress and realizing your front door opened straight into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Which is possibly something only I've ever worried about, I don't know. We're in a high, narrow gallery lined with doors. The lights are low and the floor is carpeted with an endless, purple-black Persian runner, embroidered with profusions of bronze flowers and satyrs. The carpet gives the space a weird feel, like it's supposed to be homey, but my body knows I'm underground, in a windowless hallway below a trillion tons of soil and rock. It knows I'm trapped. It puts a little itch right in the center of my skull, impossible to scratch. This must be what insanity feels like.
Behind me Lilly and Jules are talking in low voices. “Seriously, there's no reason we, in particular, should have
been picked for this. We're obviously not here for our skill sets. We don't come from remotely similar cultural backgrounds. My dad's from Egypt. And we're not even polar opposites, either, like a test group or something. We're just random kids.” A pause. “I mean, I'm sorry, but when I saw you guys at JFK, I was regretting signing up.”
“And now you're not?” Lilly's voice is scared.
Jules doesn't answer. We get to the end of the gallery. I shift the compass into my other hand, my throat dry.
“Are we just going to hope Perdu was right about the exit?” Jules asks, his voice rising a notch. He's talking to me. “The
secret
exit that we'll totally find on our own?”
“When you have a better plan you can tell us, Jules. No really, I'm on pins and needles.”
The next room is a study, a shimmering chamber paneled entirely in polished squares of amber. We cross it in ten steps.
“We could try negotiating,” Jules says.
“D'you want to offer yourself up so the rest of us can go free? Yeah, me neither.”
“I'm just suggesting maybeâ”
“No, Jules, you're being a whiner.”
“You guys, stopâ” Lilly says nervously.
Jules throws his head back and guffaws. Who laughs that loud when there could be literally
anything
right around the corner listening? But he's got a wounded look to him now, injured pride, and he says: “Who are you calling a whiner, Miss I'm-so-saaaaad-I-have-to-forge-my-parents'-signatures-just-to-get-out-of-the-house?”
Oh, he did
not
. I'm going to slap that kid's face off, little punk hipster with his ink sleeveâ
I spin on him. Lilly jams between us. “Stop,” she snaps, and Will moves in front of Jules, saying, “Come on, bro,” really softly.
I try to get Lilly out of the way.
“Seriously, stop it,” she hisses. She braces herself against me. The top of her head barely reaches my collarbone, but she's strong. “Us fighting each other is the last thing that's going to help us get out of here. Okay? You need to quit.”
Jules and I glare at each other. And now Jules is getting awkward and apologetic, and I hate that. It's like cheating. You can't punch someone in the throat and say you're sorry and think that's all it takes.
But Lilly's right. Fighting each other is straight-up stupid. I raise an eyebrow in what I hope is a devastatingly
condescending gesture and head down a gallery.
Jules comes after me. “Look, I'm sorry,” he says, but I don't want placating. I'm tired and thirsty, and we have bigger problems
.
“I'm just saying, maybe there are other options. We're walking around hoping some insane person was telling the truth, and in the meantime they're chasing usâ”
“
Who
is chasing us?” I slam into the next set of rooms.
“Not those trackers anymore. And why us? Why fly U.S. citizens to a different continent to murder them? And why are we all teenagers?”
“Maybe they have preferences.”
“For
what
? Stupid spoiled brats?”
Everyone stares at me.
“Sorry.” I look down at my shoes. “What I'm trying to say is, I'm pretty sure stabbing people with gas nozzles has the same effect whether you're American or French. You don't need to import your victims. You definitely don't need to invent a complex ruse and send a Brazilian rain forest's worth of paperwork, while literally prepping them for the ordeal.”
We walk in silence for a minute. Pass under an archway and into a dim, grotto-like room with drifts of
embroidered pillows and a tiled fountain in the middle. It looks like one of the courtyards at the Alhambra in Granada. We all check for traps, moving slowly across the floor. When we get to the fountain, we practically dive into it, drinking greedily. The water tastes cool and liquid and that's all we care about at this point. I look up after a few gulps, and realize that there's no door in the north wall. We're going to have to turn west.
As soon as we start moving again, Will clears his throat. “I have a theory,” he says, and it's like we even try to walk quieter just so we don't miss anything he says. Apparently not talking often has the awesome side effect that when you
do
decide to talk, people actually listen.
“Not about why we're here, just . . . you know, about the palace. We're running from two different things.” His voice is low, and he looks at us one at a time, earnestly. “It's like a triangle. Here's us at the base on one corner. And Dorf and the trackers on the other corner. And at the tip is something else.”
I blink. That was a lot of sentences at once.
“What's at the tip?” Lilly asks. “What's your theory there?”
“I don't know.” He starts rubbing his thumb furiously along the leather hilt of his sword, as if the fact that he hasn't figured this whole place out yet is mildly embarrassing. “The thing that got Perdu. The thing that killed those trackers and wrote on the wall. I don't know.” He looks away, and his voice becomes even quieter. “But whatever it is, it's bad enough that the Sapanis are afraid of it. And they keep it locked underground behind traps and blast doors. It's out of their control.”
“And they threw us into the middle of this, because why?” Jules asks. “Just for kicks?”
“No,” Will says. “They brought us down for something, but it wasn't so that we'd lock ourselves in their palace and end up as food for whatever they keep down here. I think we screwed up their plans. A lot.”
A chill runs down my spine. I glance up at the ceiling, plaster moldings, arched like the top of a pale, sickly mouth.
“Well, the enemy of our enemy is our friend, right?” Jules asks.
“No, Jules,” I say. “Something that can kill a room full of superhuman soldiers without making a sound: not our friend.”
I'm suddenly afraid to look back, to look anywhere except straight ahead.
I think of Perdu cowering behind the chair in the library, his trembling finger extended toward the doors.
L'homme papillon.
“The butterfly man,” I say quietly. No one hears me. The gallery seems to lick up the words and swallow them whole.
We're climbing a wide marble staircase. I'm thrilled, because
anything leading upward is good. Means we're getting closer to the surface, Wi-Fi, police stations, sanity. . . . We reach a landing. The stone balustrade is carved with writhing, white marble sea creatures, twisting around one another like they're in the process of devouring themselves. I glance back over the huge hall we just crossed, an empty expanse of diamond-shaped tile, dozens of square yards of fresco paintings. The staircase splits in two after the landing, jutting out at right angles. We take the left one, and I get this irrational hope that there will be doors at the top, maybe the exit Perdu was talking aboutâ
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, like she'd just rudely woken him up from a nap.
“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 checked 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 know about.”
“Could be psychological,” I say, turning and walking backward a few steps. “They do it all the time with rats. Get control groups with animals from different environments. Put them in a labyrinth and see what happens.”
“I'm not an animal,” Jules says.
“Could have fooled me. Look, 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.
“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. I liked my theory better. I glance around at the gallery.
Behind the display 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 tipâthe 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. I imagine one of those black-eyed barrels winking suddenly, a bullet ripping through meâ
“This is their stuff,” I say. “Their hall of fame or something. Maybe they invented all this.”
“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.”
I pass Will standing in front of a case containing the black carapace-like armor of a tracker. He's frowning at it.
“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.”
“And we believed them,” I say as I pass him. “That's the funniest part.”
We barely even questioned anything until it was too
late. We saw their snazzy names, looked up their snazzy websites. It was all just paper and internet stuff, stuff that's so easy to fake and lie about.
Selective Perception n.âThe tendency to disregard or more quickly forget stimuli that causes emotional discomfort or contradicts prior beliefs.
Aka, if you don't want to see it you won't.
I can't even fathom myself from twenty-four hours ago. I was so busy following my rotten little heart, Disney princessâstyle. I did end up in a palace, so that's cool.
I slow down, because the others are still milling around the weapons. I wish they'd hurry up. “If we get out of here, these people are done for,” Lilly's saying. “Can you imagine the court cases? I mean, even if we
don't
get out, something's going to happen. Our parents will go to the cops.”
Something about Lilly's words gives me a sinking feeling. She's still banking on her parents, still thinks they might rescue us. And it's not just because I'm bitter and my parents don't have a clue where I am that I'm worried. (Also, if they knew, they would probably be planning a celebratory lobster brunch right now.) Down here, in this huge, fake, beautiful alternate universe,
words like
cops
and
court cases
sound ridiculous. The Sapanis flew us on a private jet out of JFK. They marched us over international borders without us ever showing our passports. I doubt they care at all about cops and court cases.
I'm passing more modern weapons now. Mortars and shells morph into high-tech warheads, night-vision helmets, body armor. Body armor like the trackers wore. Sleek and angular. A helmet stands on a display arm like a severed head.
I focus on the pictures on the walls. At least they're gorgeous. The one nearest me shows a woodland clearing full of people having a country lunch. The sky is almost completely blocked out by leaves, but the light's finding a way through anyway, dappling everything in mottled gold. The people in the painting are draped artfully over a blanket, plucking things from a woven basket. They're dressed in late eighteenth-century costumes, obviously wealthy, but with little hints of carefully tailored farmer chic. A straw hat here. A striped apron there. It looks like a family. A really beautiful, happy family.
I take a step toward it and I feel something like
nostalgia, which is strange because God knows I've never been on a picnic like that. I catch details: the wine, glossy red inside crystal goblets. A spot of sunlight on a silver fork, almost hidden inside a fold in the blanket. The smiling lips of the woman holding the cake. There's a glow to her, like the painter wanted to make her look even more beautiful than she already wasâ
Her teeth are bloody red, her smile stained.
I blink.
No. Her teeth are normal. White and small and delicate, like chips of bone.
I tear myself away from the painting.
What is wrong with you, Ooky?
The others are ahead of me now. I hurry to catch up. They've congregated around a painting of a rabbit. We should be moving, running, not hanging around, browsing art. I reach them. Jules is right in front of the painting, staring up.
“Are you sure?” Lilly's saying, incredulous. “It could be a copy.”
“It's not a copy; look at the brushstrokes,” Jules says. He's doing some sort of indignant, expressive hand gestures up at the canvas. “You can't copy that kind of motion. I know this one. I know it!”
I look up at the painting. It's not even that interesting. Definitely doesn't grab me and shake my brain around like the meadow scene did. The rabbit is standing against a brown background, draped silk, I think. Its back is to the viewer, its head turned over its shoulder. It's looking at me.
Okay, maybe it's a little bit interesting. Something about the rabbit's gaze is heartbreaking, a sort of reproach in its almond eyes, maybe inevitability, like the rabbit is going to a horrible fate and it's partially my fault.
“What is it?” I ask. It's awkward that I don't know.
“It's
lost
is what it is.” He looks over his shoulder at us, eyes wide. “Or it should be. It's by Kanachev. The Russian master? They only have black-and-white photographs of it, and his pictures were stolen during the siege of Leningrad. He disappeared during World War II, died in a concentration camp or something. This was his masterpiece.”
“So what's it doing here?” Lilly asks.
What
is
it doing here?
I don't even want to know. I don't want any more revelations and I don't want to know who these people are, because every time we get another inkling, they get more nightmarishly awful. I start walking
toward the doors at the end of the exhibit hall, fast.
“Oh wow,” Lilly whispers behind me. “Anouk, wait. Look.”
I glance back. She's pointing up at another painting, a small gilt frame high on the wall. I stop dead in my tracks.
The painting is of a girl. She's wearing a gray silk gown with a blue sash, and she's standing, one arm resting on a marble bust. Her fingers are curled around a key and a sprig of something, a daisy maybe. A gauzy shawl hangs from her bare shoulders. Her hair is dark. Her eyes are piercing blue. Her face is sharp, angry.
It's a portrait of me.