The voice in my head is changing, getting shrill: You can’t stay here. You’ve been kidnapped by psychos. RUN!
But I don’t move. My body feels a thousand miles away. Lilly and Jules are both on the floor now, dazed. I’m just standing, stiff and scared, my hands clenched at my sides.
“We should hide,” Will says. “We don’t know who might be down here.”
“Down here?” I mimic. My voice sounds spiky, mean. It’s not supposed to. That’s the only way I know how to talk. “How do you know we’re down anywhere, Will? How do you know where down is?”
“The butterfly—” he starts, gesturing at the floor, and I laugh at him.
“Already saw it. The Bessancourts’ coat of arms. But you’re assuming the Bessancourts ever existed in order to own a coat of arms. You’re assuming we weren’t lied to every single second by the Sapanis.”
Will moves a little closer to me. He’s wearing a watch, one of those bulky mountaineering ones. He sidles up slightly cautiously and hits a button on it. Shows me the green-glowing screen.
Elevation: 88 feet above sea level
“So?” I say. I don’t know what that means. I’m an art history major, not a freaking Boy Scout.
Will hits another button. Coordinates appear on the tiny screen. “I checked them when we got out of the cars,” he says. “The coordinates are the same. We’re right where we were yesterday. Except Péronne is two hundred feet above sea level.” He looks up at me. “We’re a hundred and twelve feet underground.”
Lilly’s standing, craning her neck to get a view of the watch, still bawling.
Will shows her. A second later he switches off the screen. “The battery’s solar-powered,” he says quietly. “It’s going to die soon.”
I have the urge to scream Just like usssss! while spinning maniacally over the marble.
Instead I mumble: “I don’t get it. They didn’t have to do all this. They could have just dragged us off a street somewhere, or hacked us up in a parking garage—”
Will doesn’t answer. Something else does. Somewhere in that huge, unbroken silence, something is creeping over the floor toward us, skittering like an animal. Lilly breaks out in a fresh, high-pitched sob.
Images rush into my mind: huge, muscled zombies dragging rusted chains. Carnivorous plants. Shape-shifting insects. Every cliché I’ve ever seen on one of my late-night movie-watching binges. Please don’t let there be carnivorous plants down here. Please don’t do that to us.
Click.
The skittering breaks off. A red pinpoint of light pops up about thirty feet down the hall, glimmering.
I stare at it, holding my breath.
The light’s in the wall. A panel snapped back, and now a square of embedded machinery is exposed, coils of gray metal tubes and that red lens, staring out like an eye.
“Sealed for two hundred years?” Jules breathes. “Really?”
To the right, I hear a second click.
I jerk around, staring through the dark. Another red light has popped up on the opposite wall. A steady, round glow. And now the red light buzzes out of it, slicing across the hallway in a pure, thin cut, as if someone slit open the darkness. A hologram springs up in the center of the hall. We gape at it, huddling together on the floor.
“Children.”
It’s Dorf. The hologram isn’t detailed, no eyes or nose discernible, but I recognize the sloping shoulders, the hugeness. “Reopen the blast door.” His voice is low and quick and utterly clinical. “This is for your own safety. Reopen the blast door and let in the security team—”
The hologram casts a grainy, fuzzy red light over our faces.
“Can you hear me?” Dorf says. “We have a visual on you. Open the door and let in our security team. I cannot guarantee your well-being otherwise.”
“Our well-being?” I almost choke on my own sarcasm. “If you were concerned for our well-being maybe you shouldn’t have murdered Hayden, how’s that for an idea?”
“Anouk,” he says. He can hear us. He pauses. Turns, maybe to someone else in the room he’s in. “Listen to me,” he says, in that same cold, urgent voice. “This should not have occurred. It is vital that you follow my instructions exactly. Turn around. Return to the blast door. Unbar it as quickly as you can. If you do not open that door, you will die. There is nothing we will be able to do to help you. You’re being clever now, thinking, ‘Well, I’ll die either way,’ but believe me, there are ways to die so terrible you cannot possibly comprehend them.”
“Yeah?” I say, and I feel a hysterical thrill rising in me, making me brave and giddy. “Well, we’re not opening that door.”
The hologram seems to stiffen, darken. “Anouk, this is not a game. You have not locked us out; you have locked yourselves in. You have approximately three minutes to live—”
“And if we let you in, we have one,” I say.
“What happens in three minutes?” Jules whispers. “What are they going to do to us?”
“He’s bluffing,” I say, like I have a clue.