Walking in the open feels awful. Like leaving the house in your tiniest, flowiest party dress and realizing your front door opened straight into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Which is possibly something only I’ve ever worried about, I don’t know. We’re in a high, narrow gallery lined with doors. The lights are low and the floor is carpeted with an endless, purple-black Persian runner, embroidered with profusions of bronze flowers and satyrs. The carpet gives the space a weird feel, like it’s supposed to be homey, but my body knows I’m underground, in a windowless hallway below a trillion tons of soil and rock. It knows I’m trapped. It puts a little itch right in the center of my skull, impossible to scratch. This must be what insanity feels like.
Behind me Lilly and Jules are talking in low voices. “Seriously, there’s no reason all of us were picked for this. My dad’s from Egypt. We don’t come from remotely similar cultural backgrounds and we’re not even polar opposites, either, like a test group or something. We’re just random middle-class American kids that they picked up for some reason.” A pause. “I mean, I’m sorry, but when I saw you guys at JFK I was regretting signing up.”
“And now you’re not?” Lilly’s voice is scared.
Jules doesn’t answer. We get to the end of the gallery. I shift the compass into my other hand, my throat dry.
“Are we just going to hope Perdu was right about the exit?” Jules asks, his voice rising a notch. He’s talking to me. “The secret exit that we’ll totally find on our own?”
“When you have a better plan you can tell us, Jules. No really, I’m on pins and needles.”
The next room is a study, a shimmering box of a chamber paneled entirely in polished squares of amber. We cross it in ten steps.
“We could try negotiating,” Jules says.
“D’you want to offer yourself up so the rest of us can go free? Because I don’t, either.”
“I’m just suggesting maybe—”
“No, Jules, you’re being a whiner.”
“You guys, stop—” Lilly says nervously.
Jules throws his head back and guffaws. Who does that? Who laughs that loud when there could be literally anything right around the corner listening? But he’s got a wounded look to him now, injured pride, and he says: “Who are you calling a whiner, Miss-I’m-so-saaaaad-I-have-to-forge-my-parents’-signatures-just-to-get-out-of-the-house?”
Oh, he did not. I’m going to slap that kid’s face off, little punk hipster with his ink sleeve––
I spin on him. Lilly jams between us. “Stop,” she snaps, and Will moves in front of Jules, saying, “Come on, bro,” really softly.
I try to get Lilly out of the way.
“Seriously, stop it,” she hisses. She braces herself against me. The top of her head barely reaches my collarbone, but she’s strong. “Us fighting each other is the last thing that’s going to help us get out of here. Okay? You need to quit.”
Jules and I glare at each other. And now Jules is getting awkward and apologetic, and I hate that. It’s like cheating. You can’t punch someone in the throat and say you’re sorry and think that’s all it takes.
But Lilly’s right. Fighting each other is straight-up stupid. I raise an eyebrow in what I hope is a devastatingly condescending gesture and head down the gallery.
Jules comes after me. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t want his placating. I don’t want any of them to think I actually care what they think. “I’m just saying, maybe there are other options. We’re walking around hoping some insane person was telling the truth, and in the meantime they’re chasing us—”
“Who is chasing us?” I slam into the next set of rooms. “Not those trackers anymore. And why us? Why fly U.S. citizens to a different continent to murder them? And why are we all teenagers?”
“Maybe they have preferences.”
“For what? Stupid spoiled brats?”
Everyone stares at me.
“Sorry.” I look down at my shoes. “Never mind. What I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty sure stabbing people with gas nozzles has the same effect whether you’re American or French. You don’t need to import your victims. You definitely don’t need to invent a complex ruse to get them to visit you.”
We walk in silence for a minute. Pass under an archway and into a dim, grotto-like room with drifts of embroidered pillows and a tiled fountain in the middle. It looks like one of the courtyards at the Alhambra in Granada. We all check for traps, moving slowly across the floor. We practically dive into the fountain, drinking greedily. There’s no door in the north wall. We have to turn west.
As soon as we start moving again, Will clears his throat. “I have a theory,” he says, and it’s like we even try to walk quieter just so we don’t miss anything he says. Apparently not talking often has the awesome side effect that when you do decide to talk, people actually listen.
“Not about why we’re here, just . . . you know, about the palace. I think we’re running from two different things.” His voice is low, and he looks at us one at a time, earnestly. “It’s like a triangle. Here’s us at the base on one corner. And Dorf and the trackers on the other corner. And at the tip is something else.”
I blink. That was a lot of sentences at once.