Perdu rises slowly, facing us. “I crawl through the dark,” he says. “Through the forest of gilt and crystal I wander. Friend to the friendless, savior of dead and broken things. I am the watcher in the treetops.”
I turn to the others. “He’s crazy.”
“Great,” Jules says. “No, really, that’s good to know now that we’re locked in here with him.”
I spin back to Perdu. “You said you would help us,” I say in French. “Does this room have another exit? Do you know the way out?”
Perdu’s watching me, wheezing. I can’t read his gaze. Usually I feel like all those books about psychos paid off and I have a really good idea of the depths of people’s depravity, but I can’t tell with him. I don’t know if that gaze is dangerous or imploring.
“If you leave now,” he says, and saliva flies between his lips with each breath, “You will die. You will step through those doors and he will see you. His eyes shall eat you like mouths, and you will lie on the floor, and ants and wasps and nits will crawl from your wounds like drops of night. Four little plums, all chewed up.”
He says that last sentence so casually that for a second I swear he’s sane. And now his hand swings around, smacking Will right in the temple, and he scuttles away, cramming himself into the space between a chair and the wall, like he’s trying to hide. He looks out at me from under the armrest, eyes glinting. “I am the only one you can trust,” he hisses.
I look over at Will. “Are you okay?” I ask.
He nods quickly, like he didn’t even feel it. “What was he saying?” he asks. “Prunes maché, what does that mean?”
“That if we leave now we die.”
“All those words meant ‘You’re going to die’?” Jules says.
“Basically.”
Lilly nudges me sharply. “He’s moving. What’s he doing?”
Perdu is out from behind the chair, standing up. Will is about to dive after him. I grab Will’s shoulder, stopping him. “Wait.”
The shadows swallow Perdu. He’s just a slight variation now, another shade in the dark-to-black spectrum. It sounds like he’s pawing through a drawer. He’s coming back toward us, and he’s holding something tightly in his fingers. He walks up to me. Opens his fist. It’s a compass, the surface scratched and pockmarked in a million places, like a pirate’s.
“A token,” he says, and his voice is human again, gentle. “A token of my loyalty. I will lead you to safety. There is a secret way. A way they cannot know. Due north as the wren flies, straight as an arrow and straight as string.”
I don’t take the compass. “Then why are you still down here? You said you don’t want to stay, so go. What’s stopping you?”
“Everything,” he says, looking terrified again. “Fire and blade and bolt and poison. The palace is not easily breached, neither from within nor from without. But my time here is coming to an end. My usefulness is spent. He will kill me soon. But you will help me.” His gaze flicks from me to the others, and he smiles that awful, limp-lipped grin. “You will take me with you, oui? You will not leave me behind.”
“When does he want to go?” Will asks. “If it’s up to him, when would we leave the library?”
“Perdu,” I say. “Combien du temps voulez-vous que nous restions ici?”
He holds out the compass, trying to get me to take it. “In the morning,” he whispers. “Tomorrow is a new day, a bright day.”
“How do we know when morning is?”
“The hands will tell you. Seven times they will turn, round and round. On the eighth it will be morning.”
“You mean in eight hours? We’re supposed to stay in here eight hours? What makes you think we’ll be safe that long?”
“I will keep you safe,” he says. “I will hide you in the shadow of my wings.”
That’s not comforting at all. Perdu’s eyes are alight, fingers squirming along the edges of the compass, leaving a greasy film. I grab it and turn to the others, translating as fast as I can. They listen, their faces getting darker by the word.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Jules says. “What if he’s lying? What if he just wants to keep us in one spot until the trackers can get here?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Look, it’s up to us. We can either wait with him, or go and risk whatever’s out there. They’re both worst-case scenarios, so take your pick.”
I already know my answer. There’s no telling what Perdu would do if we dragged him out there now. We’d have to leave him behind and then we’d be running blind, pushing off into the palace on a teeny-tiny slice of hey-let’s-hope-we-don’t-die. We’ll be doing that either way, but the slice seems bigger with Perdu. We need to trust him. We need to trust something down here, even if it’s just an insane bleeding guy.
“If we wait, someone’s going to have to be awake,” Lilly says. “The whole time.”