I get a quick blur of kebab restaurants, bright signs, and concrete-block houses as we pass through a town. Jules starts talking about bands I’ve never heard of. I wonder if he’s just trying out subjects until I latch on to something. Sorry, my life consists of reading Tolstoy in original Cyrillic and watching foreign-dubbed Hollywood movies on repeat until I understand the dialogue through context. Also dreaming up Machiavellian revenge. I don’t think we have anything in common.
I slip the blue folder out of my bag and page through it. Jules starts talking about a book, still staring at the ceiling. (“It’s called The Beauty of Chartreuse on the River Styx, and it’s about quirky teens who fall in love and die.”)
I see Lilly’s one-sheet:
Lilly Watts—skill set: audio and visual sensitivities.
What does that even mean? That she can see and hear?
I flip further. I really want be sleeping right now. I didn’t even doze on the flight over. I changed out of my pointy witch shoes at the Paris airport in favor of some sensible-looking crepe-soled brogues, but my toes still hurt, and all I want to do is stretch out on the black leather seat and conk out.
Very few records of the Marquis du Bessancourt and his family have survived. Much of their papers were no doubt destroyed to avoid capture and the widespread repercussions against aristocrats during the Reign of Terror. Surviving documents show that Frédéric du Bessancourt was born in 1734 as the only legitimate child of a local nobleman, later rising to prominence as a banker and businessman under Louis XV of France. He also gained a reputation as a scientist, natural philosopher, and a frequent lender to the king and his successor, Louis XVI, financing much of the monarchs’ lavish lifestyle. In 1774, the marquis married Célestine Gauthier. They had several children.
All records of the Bessancourt family cease after 1789. They are never mentioned again, either in revolutionary propaganda or in prison registries in and around the city of Paris. It is at this time that we assume he and his family fled underground, escaping France shortly afterward and reestablishing themselves under other names in England or Germany. Construction on a below-surface palace may have begun as early as 1760 in the vast caverns below the ancestral chateau. The palace, known at the time for unknown reasons as the Palais du Papillon (Palace of the Butterfly), has sat untouched for two hundred years. It lies below the water table, in bedrock, inviting the possibility that some areas are partially or entirely submerged. We have no definite idea how large the palace is, how structurally sound, how safe. Regardless of its current state, it will be a treasure trove of Revolutionary Era detail and perhaps the most significant discovery from eighteenth-century Europe in history.
We are pleased to have you with us on this momentous expedition and hope that this project will be a rewarding and enlightening experience to every one of you.
It’s signed with an illegible scribble. Underneath is written, helpfully:
The Sapani Family
“Hey?” Jules is looking right at me. I wonder how long I’ve been ignoring him. “You okay?”
I drop my head against the window again and make some indeterminable noise against the glass. For some reason he takes that as a no.
“You know,” he says, as if pondering some major philosophical revelation. “You’re a weird one. Normal people would be like, ‘Yayyy, going to France with an awesome person named Jules and also exploring a two-hundred-year-old site, yayyy!’” He waves his hands with each yay. “I can’t figure you out.”
“Good.” I watch a twisted old tree by the side of the road grow closer, larger, gone. “Also, normal people didn’t go on this trip.”
“I don’t know; you’re pretty regular. Garden variety, some might say.”
“Excuse me?” The words drop with a cold, dull thud.
“I’m kidding, gah.”
He’s probably making a face, furrowing his brow, being weirded out. I don’t care. I do care, but at some point you have to stop caring or you become Chernobyl-dead-zone levels of crazy. Of course I’m excited to be here. I can’t wait to get into the palace, start discovering things, forget about New York, forget about college and the next sixty-plus years of my life that I still have to muddle through. I just don’t know how to communicate that to people.
“So, what are you here for?” Jules asks. “What are your stakes?”
I jam my feet up onto my seat and stare at the tips of my sensible brogues. I can’t actually tell him. What am I going to say, that I’m being all Huck Finn and running away? Rebelling against the status quo, searching for redemption, trying to find an identity outside of being a punching bag for my dysfunctional family’s psychoses? Because that’s what I’m here for, and I don’t need him to tell me that what I really need is therapy/some people have actual problems/those shoes are Prada; how could you possibly be unhappy?
“I’m here for the experience,” I say. Lie. Wow, I can’t even be a not-sociopath right. “And to practice my signature forging.” I sling a wrist across my forehead. “Those selection rounds, whew! Got any dotted lines requiring signatures from parents and guardians? I’ll sign them for you.”
“You forged your parents’ signatures? Wait, do they even know you’re here?”
“They think I’m in Azerbaijan. I left a note.”