A Drop of Night (2 page)

I heard it being built. Father's secret Versailles, a palace beneath a palace. A world of gilt and crystal hidden deep within the roots of France. When I was a small girl, only three or four, I heard the booming far below, shivering up through the floor. I watched the tiny furniture rattle inside my dollhouse and I asked my governess, Mademoiselle d'Églantine, what it meant. She told me with great, frightened eyes that the earth had swallowed something dreadful and was suffering indigestion. I was not the cleverest child in France. I believed her
.

We are fleeing along the upper gallery when the windows explode. Seventy-two panes of glass burst inward. I am knocked sideways by the force of it, my vast skirts billowing into a banner of flickering silk. For a heartbeat all is silent, echoing and slow-moving, as if I have been submerged suddenly underwater. Rocks hang suspended among the glittering shards, burning clods of peat, flaming torches whirling end over end. . . .

And now everything is noise again, my running feet, my bloody hands, and the growl of the crowds outside.

Mama is shrieking: “Aurélie, do not leave me behind!”

She is coming after me, but she is dressed for a ball, whalebone corsets and thirty pounds of Florentine brocade. She is far too slow. Ahead, Bernadette and Charlotte have reached the stairs. Father's guards are with them, their faces bright with sweat. Delphine huddles against the newel post,
fingers digging into the wood, waiting for Mama and me.

“Follow the guards,” I snap. The cuts on my palms are small, from glass or from the rocks, I do not know. I press them to my side, wincing, then snatch Delphine and start down the stairs. “All of you, follow them!”

I look back over my shoulder. Mother has almost reached the head of the stairs. She is prancing, snatching things, letting them fall. Her little hands are full of snuffboxes, strings of pearls, and gilt figurines. Frightened to go, frightened to stay.

Outside, I hear voices rising above the others, bellowing orders. I hear
financier
and
porcs
and
le meurtrier
. The slaughterer. I have heard my father called many things, but never that. I wonder what will become of us if we do not make it down. If we are lucky, we will be taken to Paris for trial and be executed before a roiling, toothless crowd. If we are less lucky . . . I see our bodies lying in a heap among the ruins of the château. Moths flit across our dirtied faces and spread their wings over our eyelids. And all in a moment, my life seems very small, a shred of cloth snagged in a hedge, blowing in a hard wind. Soon it will be torn away, and what have I done with my years here? Not very much. Nothing at all.

In the entrance hall, the doors are breaking. Boots hammer the marble, an echoing chorus of hobnails and slapping leather. I know where they are by the sound of them. The music room. The
salle des arts
where the Bessancourts' painted frowns and beakish noses have all been taken down, leaving nothing but phantom squares on the wallpaper.

Mother starts down the stairs. Her shoes are so high she must go down sideways, step by step. Smoke is beginning to drift into the lower passage, bitter as crab apples. I can hear the crackle of flames. The torches must have caught hold of the drapes.

I tap the young guard on the shoulder. “Get her,” I whisper. “Drag her if you must, but
get her down
.”

He nods; he seems to coil, gathering energy, and now he bolts past me, back up the steps. In the gallery, the flames flare brighter. A door bursts open, frighteningly close. Rough shouts echo toward me, clanking weapons and the thudding march of feet.

“Run, Mama! Kick off the shoes!
Run!
” My sisters are all shrieking at once. Delphine is weeping, tears flowing down her fat baby cheeks.

The old guard swings his musket off his back and trains it up the steps. The young guard has almost reached Mother.
She is so small. He could carry her under one arm. . . . But just as he is about to snatch her, she darts. One step up. One step away.

I freeze, clutching at my skirts. The young guard stares at her, slack-jawed. She shakes her head at him. And now she looks past him, to me.

Her mouth is moving. “Forgive me, Aurélie,” she says, and it is only a whisper amid the crashing and the flames. “I wish I were braver. For all of you, I wish I were brave.”

“No.” I feel a blistering rage surge toward my heart, turning my lungs to ash. “Mama, no,
NO
! Come with us!”

She wipes her face, turns, and climbs back toward the gallery.

They have seen her. The shouts become shrill, grotesque and jubilant, hounds barking before the kill. The flames are roaring. The young guard careens back down the stairs toward us.

A shot rings out.

I scream, but I do not hear it. All I hear is the gunshot, deafening, ringing in my ears. Mother stands transfixed at the top of the stairs, her back toward us.

No, Mama, please no—

She turns slowly, one hand clutching the creamy fabric
above her stomach. When she pulls her hand away, it wears a shining red glove. Her face registers astonishment. The guards are trying to herd us behind a little panel in the wall, a panel with a butterfly in it, wrought in brass, and I am struggling, straining to keep Mother in sight.

“Mama!”

The revolutionaries flow around her. Delphine is wailing in my arms. The old guard slaps her. The panel slides shut.

And now there is only darkness, our moving feet and our quick gasping breaths, and we cannot cry, we cannot stop. The guards are pushing us—down, down into the blackness—toward the new palace, to good luck and safety and everlasting peace, where Father waits.

I'm scribbling a good-bye note in permanent marker on Mom's
stainless-steel fridge. I don't know if permanent marker sticks on stainless steel. I'm thinking maybe I should have been super dramatic and scratched it in with a steak knife, but the marker is going to have to do because in one minute I'm gone. In one minute I'll be in a black Mercedes heading for the airport. In an hour I'll be meeting the others. In three we'll be somewhere over the Atlantic.

Hi family!
I mash the tip against the cold surface. The clock above the oven locks on to 5:59
P.M.
The sun's setting, oozing gold and pink all over the lawn outside.

I'm going to Azerbaijan, surprise surprise! Why, you ask? Oh wait, no you don't. But you'll hear about it anyway in about three months. In the
New York Times
. And
Good Morning America
. Pretty much everywhere.

Bye, Anouk

It's not funny. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to hurt. And that last part–Anouk–that really is my name. I don't know who picks up a newborn baby, looks it in the eye, and names it Anouk, but that's me: Anouk Geneviève van Roijer-Peerenboom, pronounced like “
Ahhh-nuke
is falling, everybody run!”

You should.

I pull my woolen granny coat around me and hurry out of the kitchen. A bunch of neon feathers screeches at me from a cage above the bar. Pete the Parrot. Ancient, perpetually depressed, incredibly annoying. Basically my soul in bird form.
Bye, Pete.

I'm in the front hall. Tires are crunching up the gravel driveway outside. The house feels huge and empty around me, marble pale. I'm a deliberate smudge, an eraser mark on all the sharp lines and sleekness. No one's going to be home for hours. Penny has a ballet recital. They all went. In a perfect world Mom and Dad would come tearing out of their rooms right now, and Penny would show up in a purple unicorn onesie or whatever she wears these days. They'd all lean over the railing like extras from
Les Misérables
and shout and beg me to reconsider, and I'd snap something scathing at
them and march myself righteously out the door.

Pete shrieks again from his cage. Good enough.

I hear a car door slam and the driver start up the front steps.

I take a deep breath. This is it. The biggest thing I've ever done. Not vandalizing fridges. And I lied about going to Azerbaijan.
This
. I was picked for it. Picked out of hundreds of other brats and geniuses and entitled, private-school-educated, polo-shirt-wearing bootlickers.

I see the driver's shadow growing against the Venetian glass panes in the front doors.

Go.

I grab my suitcase, click off security, open the doors.

“Good evening, Miss—”

I hand the driver my bag, dart around him, and walk down the front steps. Slide into the backseat of the Mercedes. Pull my toothpick legs in after me. Sunglasses on. Cold face.

The driver closes my door and gets back in, up front. He gives me a quick glance in the rearview mirror, eyebrows knit, trying to sum me up.

You can't, buddy. Don't even try.

He starts the engine. The car eases up the driveway.
The gates are open. We're out on the street, gliding under the bare branches of Long Island winter. I don't look back.
Have a blast at the ballet recital,
I think, and I can actually feel my anger curling like a red-hot animal in the pit of my stomach.
Dance your heart out, Penny. For me.

We're meeting in JFK, in the white-glass-steel world of
Terminal 4. We were given very specific instructions:

6:45
P.M.
—Arrive at airport. Do not check your bags. Clear security and proceed to the exit at Gate B-24. Your plane will be waiting for you there, together with the other students selected for this expedition. Your chaperone and point of contact: Professor Dr. Thibault Dorf.

I got the fancy blue folder in the mail a matter of hours ago. Reams of thick, creamy paper detailing exactly where we're going, what we'll be doing, what's expected of us. Up until then, I was mostly in the dark, coasting on hints.

I run my fingers over the Sapani coat of arms embossed on the top right corner of each of the pages—a hatchet and flag, entwined with two roses. They're the financiers. They own the château under which the site was found.
According to Google, they're the fifth richest family in the world. Never heard of them. They definitely don't go to my parents' lawn parties. I keep flipping back and forth through the pages like I'm actually reading them. I'm not. I've gone over all this a dozen times, but I don't want the driver to get chatty. If he does, I'll snap his head off, he'll throw me out on the curb or drive us into the ocean, and I'll miss my plane. I'm really trying to be helpful here.

My eyes dart over the documents. Packing lists. Safety precautions. Something called
Building Good Teams: Clarity, Communication, and Commitment,
which I've skipped every time. They had me take weeklong intensive courses in rock climbing and scuba diving, sign thirty-six pages of contracts, get tested for every major disease and condition known to man, to make sure I didn't have anything that might endanger the expedition. On top of that they expect me to be a clear, communicative, and committed person? That's asking a lot.

I hold the papers in front of my face and let my gaze wander out the window. Watch the trees turn to town, now city, red-brick tenements and gas stations, networks of power lines chopping the sky into manageable pieces. I
thought the whole thing was a scam at first. That single unmarked envelope six weeks ago, outlining the opportunity, all smarmy and fake.
Dear Miss Peerenboom: The information you are about to read is strictly confidential
. That's as far as I read. I left it sitting on my homework heap for a while. Looked up the name Sapani on a whim. Turns out smarmy and fake is pretty much synonymous with polite professionalism. The Sapani Corporation is huge. It has offices in Paris, Moscow, San Francisco, Tokyo. Based on my SAT scores and past accomplishments, they had plucked me out of the desperate, wallowing masses of New York's private school elite. I wasn't going to let this opportunity pass me by.

So here I am. Following their rules like I'm good at it. They had me do the prep, notified me as I passed each round. I was worried they'd ask for a face-to-face meeting at the end, I'd say something rude, and they'd throw me out the window. They never asked.

We're in Queens now, heading south. I try not to think about home. I was supposed to tell parents or legal guardians about the expedition, have them sign off on it. I didn't. Now that I think about it, it wouldn't have made much difference either way. As far as they would
have known, I'd be visiting a fairly regular—though culturally significant—château in the Loire Valley for a restoration camp. After reading the blue folder, I get why the organizers were so stingy about information. This site we're visiting is not just any château. It's on the same level as the Terracotta Army in China. The pyramids. Pompeii. Not as old as those, but huge and bizarre and possibly monumental for the historical community. And so nothing's allowed to leak. No news outlets have been informed yet. Once we're there, we're on a complete social media blackout.

The car is pulling up in front of Terminal 4. I tuck the blue folder under my arm. As soon as the locks click open, I climb out and scurry for the trunk, dragging at my suitcase while the driver is still opening his door. I walk away as fast as I can without looking like I'm fleeing a crime scene, which I basically am. The driver is probably staring after me, scratching his head.

Sorry, man.

I catch a split-second image of myself in the sliding doors as I approach. Tall. Thin. A tiny, vicious-looking, sharp-chinned face. Haircut like a helmet, a severe black bob. Dark rings under my eyes. The granny coat hangs
around me like a box, my stick legs punching out the bottom, and from there it's all skinny jeans and witchy lace-up boots with pointed toes that will probably kill my feet in a few hours—

The doors whoosh open, snipping my reflection in half. I step into the terminal.
Eau d'Airport washes over me—coffee and dusty carpets, top notes of radiator heating and cheap cleaning products. Passengers, pushing their luggage mountains in front of them like they're doing penance for something, stare at me, bovine and slightly hostile.

I plow into the crowd.
Clear security and proceed to the exit at Gate B-24.

A young mom dragging two kids bumps into me. For a second I think she's going to apologize, but she takes one look at me and her expression changes—embarrassment-surprise-fear-pride-disgust—all in millisecond flashes. It's almost fun, like watching a slide show. A PowerPoint called
How People React to Other People Who Don't Conform to Their Expectations of Niceness and Civility.
I draw my coat around me and step past her. Slap my passport and boarding pass down in front of the TSA guy. I allow myself to wonder what
the other kids will be like. What
they'll
think of me.

The TSA guy starts leafing through my passport. Does a suspicious double take when he sees that nearly every page is full. Aruba, last summer. Dubai, for a paper on migrant workers. Tokyo, volunteering after the earthquake. He eyeballs my boarding pass. Motions for me to step to the side.

Oh great. I move out of the line, eyeballing the boarding pass, and trying to see how it incriminated me.

A TSA woman approaches, red lipstick so bright it's like she just gorged herself on cherries or blood or something. “Follow me, miss,” she says in the most bored voice ever, and starts leading me around the endless security queue. I brace myself for deportation, gulag, whatever they do to people these days. The TSA woman positions me right at the front of the line. And leaves. The security people wave me forward.

Oh?

Phone out, coat off, hands up for the body scan. And now I'm in the gate area, squeezing past some punk guy who thinks it's a good idea to travel with studded belts and twelve dozen piercings. He looks at me accusingly, like I'm personally responsible for his poor life choices.
I head into the gauntlet of fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, screaming kids, and snack walls.

Well, that was strangely easy. I think of the last time I was here. I was on my way to a master class on Renaissance literature in Perugia, Italy. Everything was infinitely worse. Dad couldn't take me to the airport—he stays at the loft downtown during the week—and I said I'd order a car, but Mom had to drive Penny to her ballet class so she offered to take me.

I should have guessed this wouldn't end well. Mom doesn't do things for no reason.

They sat up front. Mom was chewing that nasty medicinal herbal gum she likes. She kept leaning across the middle console and tucking Penny's hair behind her tiny, half-gone ear. I wanted to tell her to watch the road.

Later, in Departures, Penny was power texting, her hair brushed forward to hide the scarring on her cheeks. Mom was telling her something about Madame Pripatsky's carpel tunnel syndrome. I was being pathetic, thinking,
Mom? Penny's not even good at ballet. I'm the one going to Italy. Talk to
me
.

And I was saying, “Penny, don't forget to feed Pete.”

I adore Penny. I shouldn't even be allowed near her,
but she's the only person in the world I'd bother rescuing, if, say, the world were about to be hit by a comet and I had a spaceship. She's the one who gave me the nickname Ooky, back when she was two and the name “Anouk” involved way too much drooling. When she was four, she told me she wanted to be a starfish when she grew up, a blue one, and also a veterinarian. I remember saying she could totally do that because blue starfish skilled in veterinarian work were really rare. She's eleven now. She wants to become principal dancer at the New York City Ballet someday. She can barely walk upright.

I remember Penny nodding to me. Her thumb, tapping away at her screen. Me and Mom, staring past each other. Mom's forty-three. She's got huge hair, like Mufasa. She's charismatic. She can make shareholders, VPs, the hot-dog seller on the curb outside her office building follow her into the void. She wishes I were dead.

We stood like that for maybe ten seconds, and inside I was screaming for her to just turn her eyes a quarter of an inch and look at me.

She didn't. She fixed her gaze on a point over my shoulder and said: “Keep those Italian boys in line.” And then she smiled this tiny, grim smile that said:
Serves you right.

She unwrapped another square of gum. Leaned down and whispered into Penny's ear, like they were friends, or at least a mother and a daughter. I watched them and I wanted to slap Mom, grab her flowing black clothes and shake her until she screamed, until she hated me, because if she hated me at least she'd have to look at me. I stood perfectly still, my skin crackling. “There are three bottles of M
oë
t behind the couch in the basement if you're planning on celebrating when you get home,” I said.

I left feeling sick and angry, and hid in the business-class lounge as soon as I got through security. Chewed on blood orange rinds until my mouth hurt. Three of my classmates from St. Winifred's were there, also on their way to Perugia. A trio of perfect brains, perfect nose jobs, and perfect Tiffany jewelry, whispering and throwing glances in my direction. One of them—Bahima Atik, I think—waved. I pretended not to see. I don't feel bad about that. Neither did they. At St. Winifred's you don't have friends. You have allies. You have trade agreements and pacts of nonaggression, and if you're lucky you have one or two people who won't stab you in the back. Unless stabbing you in the back is a prerequisite to becoming president of something, in
which case, buy a coffin; you're already dead.

I snap back to the present, and I feel the anger again, nestling behind my ribs like it belongs there. I left the lounge that day like some kind of dark and spiny sea creature, daring anyone to get too close. It's where all this started, I guess. This searching for something colossal, some epic task that would make people move out of the way when I walked down a hall, that would make me fearsome and great and impossible to ignore. I hope this is it.

I could have done a million other things. I could have gone through the Long Island house with a baseball bat and broken all the Kutani porcelain. I could have made party streamers out of Mom's and Dad's sensitive business emails and thrown them around at their next fund-raising gala. I could have picked up drug-addled Ellis Winthrope and flown to LA and sent pictures of our wedding to the whole family. But this is better. It's my coup de grâce. Or maybe just my coup, no grâce.

I look down at my phone. Three minutes until I meet the others.