Adrenaline burns through me. She doesn’t stop. Doesn’t turn.
I feel every muscle in my body, every tendon and ligament straining as if I’m keeping Lilly alive by sheer force of will––
“Hello?” Lilly calls out. Her voice echoes down the glassy expanse. “Dorf? Is anyone here?”
Bam. A tracker shoots out of the doors at the other end of the hall, sprinting straight for Lilly, the red light thrumming along its jaw. Lilly doesn’t make a sound. She lifts the gun and fires, and the tracker goes flipping backward, its body squeaking over the mirrored floor.
Jules throws me a panicked look. I don’t move, don’t look anywhere but down the hall of mirrors.
Lilly keeps walking.
And now the ambush starts.
Halfway between us and Lilly, one of the mirrors flips open soundlessly. Two more trackers step out and move toward her. She doesn’t see them. She doesn’t need to.
The trackers whirl, but Will and I are already on them. I zap one with the taser. The second hits the floor, Will’s knife protruding from its leg. A second later it’s knocked out, too, twitching against the glass.
Lilly’s reached the end. She waves, once, the signal that she’s coming back.
Jules steps into the hall.
There’s no way this is it. I draw out my own gun. Come out, come out whatever you are.
Lilly reaches us. She’s soaked, her hair sticking to her forehead. We start back toward Jules.
Hayden has stepped into the hall. Maybe it’s the light, but he looks sick. He’s moving over the mirrored floor like it’s thin ice. He passes Jules and heads toward the open panel and the trackers on the floor. Kneels next to one. Grabs it by the neck and rips open its visor. Slimy skin glimmers in the blue light.
“Tell us the way out,” he says through his teeth. “Tell us!”
The tracker gurgles, its eyes rolling back in its head. Hayden goes for the knife already in its leg and he twists, slowly.
That was not part of the plan. I run for him. Will’s half a step behind me. “Hayden, stop––”
He slides out the knife and thrusts it in again. I grab his shoulder. He whirls, inhumanly fast, and smacks me so hard my ears ring. I stumble back. Lilly catches me. My vision blurs, but through the neon flashes inside my skull I see Hayden stand.
He’s shuddering. His whole body is jerking, twitching back and forth like a bad frame of celluloid film. He pauses, motionless, slouched between the mirrors, head lowered, eyes turned up. His reflections extend away behind him, into infinity. They grin and he grins, lips stretching, eyes dull and fevered.
He drops the tracker. It’s dead now. Will charges toward him. Hayden’s faster. One second he’s standing, hands empty, and the next he has a gun and the barrel is jammed against Will’s head. Jules makes a cracked, frightened sound, tries to do something, maybe run. Hayden flicks a long steel blade to Jules’s throat, stopping him in his tracks.
“Hayden?” I whisper.
Will dives, tries to slash at Hayden’s stomach. Hayden twitches again. His arm sails down, up, so fast I can barely see it, and the grip of the handgun connects with the back of Will’s head.
“Hayden!”
“Give the Bessancourts my warmest regards,” Hayden says, and his voice is dead in his throat, thin and metallic. He’s holding Will up by his neck now, one arm snaked around him.
A rattling echoes through the hall. The mirrors begin to move, sliding around.
I get one last glimpse of Jules and Hayden and Will, frozen in a horrible triptych. Now the mirrors slam into place, and it’s just Lilly and me, and rank upon rank of trackers.
Palais du Papillon, Salle du Sang Rouge—116 feet below, 1790
“What have you done?” I breathe. “Father, what have you done?”
He stands behind me, one hand resting awkwardly on the back of a chair as if he is proud, as if he waits to be carved into monuments and painted on a great canvas. Little tears glisten in the corners of his eyes. He does not answer me.
I step toward Mother. It is some trickery—strings and mirrors—it must be. I saw her die. I heard the bullet and saw the blood, and Jacques carried down her lifeless body.
But it is Mama. These are her eyes, blue as cornflowers, with the little scar under one of them like a scratch of moonlight. This is her smile, shy and beautiful, as though she never saw any ill in the world, as though Father and the palace and her brief, sad life were all some strange play, and if she pretended diligently enough the curtain would fall, and the actors would vanish, the lavish sets, too, and she could leave the stage behind her and wander into the fields and the sun. “Aurélie,” she says again. I cannot stop myself: I hurry to her and kneel by her chair. “Mama?”
She gazes down at me, her face full of tenderness.
“Mama, how—?”