I’m passing more modern weapons now. Mortars and shells morph into high-tech warheads, night-vision helmets, body armor. Body armor like the trackers wore. Sleek and angular. A helmet stands on a display arm like a severed head.
I focus on the pictures on the walls. At least they’re gorgeous. The one nearest me shows a woodland clearing full of people having a country lunch. The sky is almost completely blocked out by leaves, but the light’s finding a way through anyway, dappling everything in mottled gold. The people in the painting are draped artfully over a blanket, plucking things from a woven basket. They’re dressed in late eighteenth-century costumes, obviously wealthy, but with little hints of carefully tailored farmer chic. A straw hat here. A striped apron there. It looks like a family. A really beautiful, happy family.
I take a step toward it and I feel something like nostalgia, which is strange because God knows I’ve never been on a picnic like that. I catch details: the wine, glossy red inside crystal goblets. A spot of sunlight on a silver fork, almost hidden inside a fold in the blanket. The smiling lips of the woman holding the cake. There’s a glow to her, like the painter wanted to make her look even more beautiful than she already was––
Her teeth are bloody red, her smile stained.
I blink.
No. Her teeth are normal. White and small and delicate, like chips of bone.
I tear myself away from the painting, keep going. What is wrong with you, Ooky? The others are ahead of me now. I hurry to catch up. They’ve congregated around a painting of a rabbit. We should be moving, running, not hanging around art browsing. I reach them. Jules is right in front of the painting, staring up.
“Are you sure?” Lilly’s saying, incredulous. “It could be a copy.”
“It’s not a copy; look at the brushstrokes,” Jules says, doing some sort of indignant, expressive hand gestures up at the canvass. “You can’t copy that kind of motion. I know this one. I know it!”
Okay, Jules, calm down. I look up at the painting. It’s not even that interesting. Definitely doesn’t grab me and shake my brain around like the meadow scene did. The rabbit is standing against a brown background, draped silk, I think. Its back is to the viewer, its head turned over its shoulder. It’s looking at me.
Okay, maybe it’s a little bit interesting. Something about the rabbit’s gaze is heartbreaking, a sort of reproach in its almond eyes, maybe inevitability, like the rabbit is going to a horrible fate and it’s partially my fault.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s lost is what it is.” He looks over his shoulder at us, eyes wide. “Or it should be. It’s by Kanachev. The Russian master? They only have black-and-white photographs of it, and his pictures were stolen during the siege of Leningrad. He disappeared during World War II, died in a concentration camp or something. This was his masterpiece.”
“So what’s it doing here?” Lilly says.
Exactly. What is it doing here? I don’t even want to know. I don’t want any more revelations and I don’t want to know who these people are, because every time we get another inkling, they get more nightmarishly awful. I start walking toward the doors at the end of the gallery, fast.
“Oh wow,” Lilly whispers behind me. “Anouk, wait. Look.”
I glance back. She’s pointing up at another painting, a small gilt frame high on the wall. I stop dead in my tracks.
The painting is of a girl. She’s wearing a gray silk gown with a blue sash, and she’s standing, one arm resting on a marble bust. Her fingers are curled around a key and a sprig of something, a daisy maybe. A gauzy shawl hangs from her bare shoulders. Her hair is dark. Her eyes are piercing blue. Her face is sharp, angry.
It’s a portrait of me.
I hear the others congregating behind me, rustling like birds. I feel my face rearranging itself into an expression of abject horror. “What’s that?” I squeak. “What—?”
Jules breathes out: “Whoa.”
My knuckles go white. I want to hold my skull, squeeze it like a lemon and feel the craziness drip out, bitter and golden between my fingers. I’m hallucinating again. Pressure sickness. Bad air. It’s been happening a lot lately.
I drop my head, breathe.
I look back at the portrait. Still me. Still my thin arms protruding from the dress, snaking around the bust. Still my angular, closed-up face, looking miffed even when I’m not. My eyes are narrowed, a spark of rebellion in them as if I was angry at the person painting me, and now I’m angry at the person watching me, I’m angry at me––