Thick fingers find the sack’s hem and drag it off my head. I am standing in a dark room, a jewelry box of red plush and smoldering gilt. My sisters are with me. The ceiling is tented, a canopy of ribbed silk. Dim lamps hiss softly along the walls. Father sits at the center of the room like a troll king in his lair, huge and hulking upon a delicate chair, one leg hooked over the other.
He is as enormous as Havriel, but that is where all similarities between them end: where Havriel is a mountain of calm and shadowy grace, Father is like a boar after the hounds have caught it, heaving and fighting and grasping for life, though the chance for that has long since fled. He wears a splendid coat of cherry red. On his head is a chalk-white wig. His mouth is in perpetual motion in his powdered face, shivering and twitching, forming silent words that he does not utter, and he holds a small brass mask full of herbs and perfume to his face even as he speaks. He has always done this, for as long as I can remember. The doctors say it will stop the plague, influenza, any sort of sickness from befalling him, but he looks a fool for it.
His hands have begun to tremble, the rings on his fat fingers clinking against the arms of his chair.
“My wife,” he says again. “Where is she?” He attempts to rise, collapses. Small black eyes skip across our faces and linger on the empty air at my side, as if he expects to see someone there.
Havriel’s knuckles tighten around the blindfold in his hands. “Frédéric?” he says gently. “Frédéric, you must listen to me—” He goes to Father’s side.
“Where is she, Havriel?” Father hisses, and beside me Delphine jolts upright. She must have been dozing as she stood.
Havriel lays a hand on Father’s shoulder. Father shrugs it off. Again he tries to stand and again he fails. “Where is Célestine? It promised we would be safe, the wicked thing, it promised—”
“The guards are with her as we speak,” Havriel says quickly. “She did not want to leave the chateau, but they will no doubt bring her safely down—”
“They shot her,” I say. My voice is just a thread, but it jerks Father’s head up like a puppet. Havriel does not turn. He has gone deathly still.
“She did not want to come,” I go on, louder now, and my voice turns taunting, bitter. “She was afraid. She was so afraid she was willing to die rather than come into your paradisical underground realm. Why might that be, Father, pray do tell?”
But Father is no longer listening. He is shrieking. He curls in the chair, his spine contorting, his hand scrabbling up the cushion as if he seeks to climb over the back of it, and Havriel is gripping him, and Delphine is whimpering.
“Frédéric, calm yourself! They are bringing her to safety as we speak! We do not know the extent of the damage—”
“They shot her!” I shout. “They shot her, and if they had not, she might have done it herself!”
I’m crying, and as I move toward Father, Havriel spins.
“Stay back, Aurélie,” he spits. “Stay back.”
Havriel’s bell rings. A door opens. Someone is here. The sack falls again over my eyes. I’m being bundled away, and I don’t know where my sisters are, but suddenly my body is wax and twigs and straw hair; I am a drained, brittle husk, too tired to fight. I walk on and on, through echoing halls, my feet aching inside my shoes. It feels as if I walk for days, soft hands guiding me through the dark, and yet I can still hear Father screaming.
We stagger away from the wires, examining our bodies for wounds. My foot feels like it’s been sawed off. I pull up my pant leg, bracing myself for partial amputation, exposed muscle, the works. I’ve got a cut just above the knob of bone in my ankle. It’s tiny, the size of a fingernail clipping. The definition of anticlimactic.
I collapse against the wall next to Jules. He’s testing his hand, watching it swell red and shiny where it caught his fall. Lilly’s on her knees in front of the wall of wires. Her head’s slumped to her chest, hair hanging lank over her face. I can’t see if she’s hurt. She’s breathing, at least.
I lean back against the wall and close my eyes.
“What do they want from us?”
It comes out in a rasping, grating croak.
No one answers. I roll my head to the side, try to catch Jules’s eye. “I’m serious, what the hell. Why didn’t they just kill us in the mirror room? Or at dinner? Or on the freaking airplane? And why are there traps? Dorf said they could see us, they know we’re here, so why did they stop the wires? Why didn’t they just finish us off?”
Will eases himself down next to us. He has a cut on his arm. One of the long sleeves of his T-shirt is sticking to his skin, soaked dark and glistening. He rips the other sleeve along the seam at the shoulder and starts tying a tourniquet above his bicep, the knot held between his teeth.
“They don’t want us dead,” he says.
I see the barbed nozzle, sliding into Hayden’s skull.
“They don’t want us dead yet,” I say.