A Drop of Night (19 page)

Forty-five minutes to go. Will, Jules, and Lilly are sleeping again.
I don't know how they can. Perdu's tied up at the end of the panic room like a psychotic freaking Sméagol. His wrists are knotted to two hooks in the wall, his arms stretched wide, hands limp. He doesn't talk. Doesn't move. He's just glaring, his eyes dark and glittering.

The light strip on the ceiling has started cutting out.
Flash-flash-flicker,
the panic room going black for seconds at a time. The oppressive heat is gone, replaced by a damp airlessness. A warm sheen has settled clammily against my skin. I'm curled into a ball right next to Will, his body so close I can feel the warmth coming off his back. I hold my face, sweet-talking myself into a calm that won't come.

You're safe, Ooky. They're all right beside you, Will and Lilly and Jules and Hayden, they're right here
—

I open my eyes. Perdu is watching me from the far end of the capsule. I can feel the hatred gathered around him like a cloud of insects. Images fly into my mind: The picture of me hanging in Rabbit Gallery, only someone's scratched out my face; a bunch of veiny purple grapes, tiny black bugs floating inside them like embryos; six gleaming wires carving me up neatly—

Don't look at him, Anouk. Don't think about him.

But something in those eyes makes me want to hide, to apologize or beg forgiveness. Something in those eyes is accusing me.

I wake to find Perdu leaning over me, blood and spit glistening
down his chin. He exhales—a short, sharp gasp. And slumps forward, right on top of me.

I scream. Shove him off. Hayden is behind him, holding the serrated hunting knife. The blade glints ruby in the light. His shirt is covered in blood. “Anouk?” he whispers. His eyes are wide.

I scrabble backward, falling into Lilly's sleeping form.
“What did you do?”

Hayden drops the knife and it slides across the floor, leaving a red smear. “He got free, I don't know how, he charged you!” His voice is scared.

Blood is starting to pool under Perdu—dark, dark red. He's still breathing, gurgling softly. Lilly's sitting up, pushing me away.

“What happened?” Jules says. “What's going on?”

“I heard him when he started crawling or you would be dead, too,” Hayden says. “We need to go.”

Lilly sees Perdu and lets out a shriek that quickly devolves into a tired, defeated moan. Hayden squeezes past us, starts grabbing things off the shelves, toppling my five careful piles. Food packets and batteries go spinning, falling to the floor. He's got the flashlights. The batteries.

“Everybody up!” he bellows over his shoulder. “We're getting out of here.”

“He's bleeding,” Lilly says. “He's dying!” She crawls to him, rolls him over. She's trying to staunch the flow of blood from the wound in his back with her bare hands, but there's too much of it, and there's something weird about: it's thick and gloopy, and something is swimming in it, strands of darkness—

Hayden shoves her away. “Don't get close to him,” he growls, but she shoves him back, crying.

“Hayden, he's going to
die
.” She slides around him. Starts looping the leftover gauze from Will's bandages over Perdu's wound. It's soaked through instantly.

I don't know what to do. I feel sick. Will is sitting perfectly still, staring at the knife on the floor.
The buzz is back, dark and low, pulsating in the air. Everything is pandemonium, everyone crawling over everyone else.

“We should never have let him in here,” Jules says. “This was your
stupid idea
, Hayden!”

Hayden practically throws the three flashlights at us. Now he's snapping open the black, oblong box again. Inside is the handgun, encased in black foam. He takes it out and shoves it into his waistband.

“What about Perdu?” Jules asks, and Lilly starts smacking the metal arch of the wall, her eyes squeezed shut.

Hayden is unbarring the hatch, crawling out. “Leave him,” he says over his shoulder. “We're not coming back.”

Lilly looks at me, her face streaked with tears. I meet her gaze for a fraction of a second. Shake my head and scramble out after Hayden.

Flashlights click on. The floor creaks under our feet. I catch one last glimpse of Perdu in the panic room. His head is tipped back, eyes wide as he watches us go. Hayden slams the hatch shut. Now it's just us, the dark, our flashlight beams swooping along the walls.

We hurry east, the way we came, darting through the doors as quietly as we can. Hayden's up front, then me, Will, Lilly, Jules. We're drawn out in a line.

Will taps my shoulder with his good hand. I glance back at him. “Anouk?” he says under his breath.

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

He starts talking, fast. “It's Perdu. I don't know if I was imagining things or what, but when he was in the panic room, he—”

Hayden doubles back. “Stay close,” he mutters.

I recognize the bedroom we're in. The ornate four-poster, tasseled ropes missing from the canopy. Somewhere up ahead I hear a dull rushing, crackling sound, like a distant waterfall.

I look over at Will, waiting for him to continue, hoping he'll save it for later.

He sees my expression. “I don't know what I saw,” he says, moving away from me again. “I'm going crazy.”

Join the club.
We're back in the antechamber to Jellyfish Hall, the cloakroom with its dozens of small drawers and cupboards. It seems smaller somehow.
Our light beams bounce on something. Something that definitely wasn't there before.

“What the—” Jules starts to say. My stomach drops.

A roiling mass hangs in the darkness. The doors to Jellyfish Hall are half gone. Blue fumes are creeping toward us in a hissing, bitter wall.

“Get out!” Will yells.
“Out!”

We stumble backward, turn, run. Hayden's screaming, raging, like the whole universe has conspired against him. We back into the bedroom, try the set of doors in the eastern wall. They lead into a room buzzing with magnets. It's a billiards room, but the orbs are shimmering steel, floating above the table, ready to smash anyone who enters. Hayden is almost jerked in, the gun in his pants dragging him through the door. We all pull him back, clawing at his shoulders, trying to get him into the bedroom. Will slams the doors shut. We pile up against the side of the bed, gasping.

“Now what?” Lilly whispers.

Now what, indeed.
We can't go back to the panic room
.
It's Perdu's tomb now. I think of him shut up in there,
wheezing, almost dead, maybe all the way dead.

Hayden has his head in his hands, fingers working his scalp. “I want
out
,” he says, his voice awful, deep and grating. “I hate this. I hate
them
.”

“We can get around,” Lilly says. “We can backtrack and keep heading north a different way, like we were going to do in the first place. It's—it's not the worst thing that could happen.”

But it is. We waited six hours for nothing. We banked on getting through Jellyfish Hall and getting out, not running back into the middle of the palace.

I tuck my flashlight under my arm. My head aches. “Perdu told us something about this. At least, he tried to. He said if you go along the edge of the pond you'll fall in, and if you jump in the middle you'll be all right. He meant the traps. That the traps go along the perimeter of the palace. And if Dorf wants us in the hall of mirrors, it's probably going to be somewhere at the center. Which means there's no other way to go. The traps are always on. I don't know if Hayden just stumbled on a broken one, but the rest of them are trigger-ready, to keep everything down here in. We'll have no
choice
but to go find them.”

“We're dead,” Jules says. “We're just done, over, terminated—”

“You guys made it this far,” Hayden interrupts. His face is greasy, sweating. “How hard can it be to get through a couple of trap rooms?”

I laugh bitterly. I don't care if he's angry; so am I. “We made it this far because we had help. Something saved us in Razor Hall, then you rescued us from Jellyfish Hall. The Sapanis don't want us mangled, but now I think they're done being patient. They need us for something and we're not cooperating, so either they're going to scrape our pulverized corpses out of their trap rooms, or catch us. I wouldn't be expecting any merciful treatment anymore if I were you.”

“Merciful treatment?” Hayden snaps. “I'm suggesting we run. I'm suggesting we force our way out at all costs. What are
you
suggesting? Nobody hold your breath; she's not that great at being helpful.”

I sit up. “I could try kicking your teeth in, Hayden. I think that might be really helpful.”

Hayden looks like he's about to go ape, pummel everything, me included. I press my thumbnail into the grid of lines on my flashlight's grip, until I no longer
want to smack him with it. “We can fight,” I say.

Hayden snorts. “I'd take you out in two seconds.”

“Not us, idiot, we can fight the Sapanis. We can go to the hall of mirrors. Dorf thinks he can bag us when we get there and that'll be the end of it, but what if we're not that easy? What if we stop freaking out and actually
do
something instead of just running around screaming?”

“I think running around and screaming has been really acceptable behavior under the circumstances,” Jules says.

I shake my head. “They're fighting something, too. They already lost a bunch of trackers. Their camera feed is down. We have a gun.” I point at Hayden.

“They probably have more guns,” Will says.

“We have the element of surprise,” I say. “They think we'll be terrified and panicked—”

“We
are
terrified and panicked,” Lilly says.

“But we don't have to be!” It comes out angrier than I wanted it to. “What's the worst that could happen? We die. But we could die sitting around here, too. At least we died trying to
do
something, at least we tried to show those people we're not—”
We're not weak.
I'm not. I'm not some brainless little pawn waiting around to be stomped on, manipulated. I've been that
before, and I'm done with it. “They'll be expecting us to stumble in there all bloody and desperate and give ourselves up, maybe betray each other for a chance to get out of here alive. What they won't expect is us coming in guns blazing.”

Okay, that was cheesy. This isn't a pep rally, Ooky, and you're not Lara Croft.

But everyone's listening. Not agreeing, but definitely listening.

Hayden is smirking. “I like it,” he says. “We'll call them out. Duel at twenty paces.”

“I can't shoot,” Jules says nervously. “I don't believe in guns—”

Hayden reaches over and digs his thumb into Jules's collarbone, giving his shoulder a decidedly unfriendly squeeze. “You'll learn to.” He trains his eyes on us. “I think we should do it.”

Will's got his one good hand spread across his knee in his thoughtful pose, his eyebrows knit. In the beam of my flashlight I see the door to the magnetized billiards room. The wood is barnacled with metal trinkets—a snuffbox, a small clock. I watch a long hairpin turning slowly, floating toward the door as if through water.

“Maybe we can do a decoy or an ambush,” I say. “Plan out as much as possible in advance. And we'll need more weapons.”

“And when they're all dead?” Lilly asks. “Like, hypothetically, we're standing on a mountain of corpses; but then what? We're still stuck down here.”

“Hostage,” Will says. “If Dorf is there, or Miss Sei, we could take one of them alive. We would have a bargaining chip.”

“So are we doing this?” Lilly asks. She doesn't look opposed. She looks like she's bracing herself for the answer, armoring herself, battening down the hatches. “We're fighting?”

“Looks like it,” Hayden says. His arm is limp at his side, but his fingers are tapping a nervous beat against the floor. “If we're going to die, let's do it splattering Dorf all over a wall in the process.”

Lilly throws Hayden a concerned look. I turn to Jules. “Jules?”

“Well, we're not finding the exit without Perdu—” Jules starts.

Hayden pounds his hands together. “Unanimous.” He stands, and faces the dark. “And now we need a new
base camp. Pronto. Check out the chandelier.”

I glance up. The chandelier is turning slowly, rotating down its chain with a soft creaking sound. Its arms are blades, folding outward in elegant swoops, reaching almost to the corners of the room.

We crawl out of the chandelier room, pick ourselves up, and run
six rooms farther. Will swings us to a stop in front of a pair of ornate doors carved with golden petals. I peer up through the gloom, squinting at the scroll above them. “‘Chambre de la Rose,'”
I read out loud. “‘For my darling, my heart, my treasure, Madame Célestine.'”

“Sounds like a safe bet,” Will says, and we push in, light beams swinging through the space. It's a bedroom. Beautiful. Everything is small, not quite child-small, but like it was built for a very short person. The wallpaper shows massive blooms, huge, abundant leaves, no thorns, makes you feel like you're a tiny bug right inside the rosebush. Pale wood tables and flowery upholstered chairs look like they're sprouting right up out of the floor.

This does seem like a safe bet. No one wants My
Darling, My Heart, My Treasure tripping a wire and blowing herself up, right?

Hayden slams a dainty white writing desk against the door, and we congregate around the bed. I drop onto it, dragging my legs up. Jules kicks off the pillows, hurling them at the wall.

“Hall of mirrors,” I say. “We need to get there. We need to get in. And then we need to take it over.”

Will hangs his flashlight from a tassel and gets on the bed, too. Lilly follows. Hayden throws himself into one of the tiny chairs. It creaks under him, the dainty legs bending.

“How are we going to find it?” Lilly asks. “It might be miles from here.”

“I don't think so. It's obviously not to the north. They said we'd have one safe direction to travel. They're basically rolling out a carpet for us.”

“What about weapons?” Jules says. “I'm sorry, but if we're hacking at the trackers with swords, this is not going to be a successful endeavor. It's just not.”

“Wait.”
Lilly sits straight up. “Rabbit Gallery.”

“What?”

“It's full of weapons. It's like a weapons buffet.”

“That hall is at
least
a mile back, and there were trap
rooms between here and there. Remember the room Will got all excited about?”

Will does that barking non-laugh thing and looks at the ceiling.

“We'll take a different route,” Lilly says. “We can go six or seven rooms west. That should be far enough from the perimeter. Hopefully. And then we can head south. We'll be fine.”

“What's Rabbit Gallery?” Hayden asks. He's tugging at something at the bottom of his leg, like he's got an uncomfortable wrinkle in his sock.

“It's an exhibition hall full of weapons and stolen art somewhere south of here,” I say. “But I'm not sure if we can make it that far.” I glance at the others.

Lilly nods. “We can. It's either that or we find swords and letter openers and, like, joke them to death.”

Hayden grimaces. I look over at him. He's still pulling at something inside his shoe. When his hand comes up, it's holding a waxy yellowed strip of skin.

Jules's eyes widen in disgust. “Leprosy much?” he says.

Lilly swallows loudly. “Hayden, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, but he looks confused. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

We stare at him a second. I shake my head. “We make a run for it, then? All in favor?”

Nodding all around. We grab our flashlights.

“Leave the food and anything we don't need,” Will says, dragging the desk away from the door with his good hand. “We'll come back here.”

I dig the compass from my sweater. Lilly shines her light at it. We head out.

We're going west this time, away from Jellyfish Hall and toward what we assume is the center of the palace. At the very first door we all stop. Listen. No sound. We open the door and step over the threshold, and it feels like walking toward an oncoming truck, staring down those glaring headlights and sixteen growling wheels, and being like:
Psh
.
I got this.
We're heading straight for Dorf, straight for the trackers and whatever it is we were brought here for. It feels like tempting fate. So, about 30 percent exhilarating, 70 percent stupid.

After five rooms we turn south again, through the dark, echoing halls. No traps so far. Dorf was telling us the only safe way to go was toward the palace's center, but I don't think he counted on us backtracking. We start to run, lights flashing, our feet quiet on the polished floor.