“What’s at the tip?” Lilly asks. “What’s your theory there?”
“I don’t know.” He starts rubbing his thumb furiously along the leather hilt of his sword, as if the fact that he hasn’t figured this whole place out yet is mildly embarrassing. “The thing that got Perdu. The thing that killed those trackers and wrote on the wall. I don’t know.” He looks away, and his voice becomes even quieter. “But whatever it is, it’s bad enough that the Sapanis are afraid of it. And they keep it locked underground behind traps and blast doors. It’s out of their control.”
“And we’re just stuck in the middle?” Jules asks. “Just kind of arbitrarily?”
“No,” Will says. “They brought us down for something, but it wasn’t so that we’d lock ourselves in their palace and end up as food for whatever they keep down here. I think we screwed up their plans a lot.”
A chill runs down my spine. I glance up at the ceiling, plaster moldings, arched like the top of a pale, sickly mouth.
“Well, the enemy of our enemy is our friend, right?” Jules asks.
“No, Jules,” I say. “Something that can kill a room full of superhuman soldiers without making a sound: not our friend.”
I’m suddenly afraid to look back, to look anywhere except straight ahead. I think of Perdu cowering behind the chair in the library, his trembling finger extended toward the doors. L’homme papillon.
“The butterfly man,” I say quietly. No one hears me. The gallery seems to lick up the words and swallow them whole.
We’re climbing a wide marble staircase. I’m thrilled, because anything leading upward is good, means were getting closer to the surface, Wi-Fi, police stations, sanity. . . . We reach a landing. The stone balustrade is carved with writhing, white marble sea creatures, twisting around each other like they’re in the process of devouring themselves. I glance back over the huge hall we just crossed, an empty expanse of diamond-shaped tile, dozens of square yards of fresco paintings. The staircase splits in two after the landing, jutting out at right angles. We take the left one, and I get this irrational hope that there will be doors at the top, maybe the exit Perdu was talking about––
Nope. We reach the top and we’re looking down an exhibition hall. Glass cases stand in rows down either side. Hundreds of feet away, at the end, a pair of double doors, flung wide. I can see more rooms through them, gold and paintings and decadence, stretching away. The palace just keeps going.
“How many floors d’you think this place has?” Jules asks Lilly.
She shrugs. “Will?” He doesn’t answer. “Will?” Nope. “Wi-ill!”
At the third ‘“Will”‘ he finally looks over, startled.
“You study architecture,” Lilly says, the way dumb people say “‘You’re American”‘ when wondering about hamburger recipes or how to do a rodeo. “D’you have any idea how this place is designed?”
Will shakes his head. “I thought maybe it was based on Versailles, but . . . it’s not. It’s like they just kept building in every direction. If the folder was right about this place being inside natural caverns, they probably just built until they ran out of space.”
I watch the needle jiggling inside the compass. Listen to Jules and Lilly murmuring behind me. We’ve slowed down a lot.
“Maybe this whole thing is an experiment,” Lilly says. “Like, maybe they’re total GMO pushers, and they’re testing a virus on us. We had to send in medical documents and get tested for Ebola. That could have been part of the requirements. Maybe they shot us up with something.” She pauses, says thoughtfully: “Or there’s something else, something we don’t even know about.”
“Could be psychological,” I say, turning and walking backward a few steps. “They do it all time with rats. Get control groups with animals from different environments. Put them in a labyrinth and see what happens. Maybe Perdu was from a previous group. And maybe we all come from terrible families and they’re seeing how we react to trauma, who survives and who goes insane.”
Crickets. Jules looks like he’s about to laugh. Lilly is peering at me curiously. It sounded reasonable in my head.
“Um, I have an awesome family,” Lilly says.
I turn quickly and keep walking. “Oh. Cool.” Awkward.
“It could also be hallucinogens,” Jules says, and his voice is quiet, because he’s only talking to Lilly now. The conversation moves on to zombies. The apocalypse. Time travel and aliens and elaborate retreats for wealthy serial killers. It all sounds ridiculous. I glance over at the displays, kicking at the embarrassment clawing up onto my shoulder, laughing at me. Don’t care. Not caring.