“How what, my darling?” She laughs. “Why are you making these silly faces?”
I am close to laughing, myself, close to leaping up and embracing her and smothering her in kisses. I feel her hand on my cheek. It is cold, colder than ice and marble. I look back at Father.
“Do my sisters know? Delphine and Bernadette and Charlotte, have they seen her?”
“No,” Father says, licking his lips. “You are my eldest. I wanted you to be the first. Is she not sublime?”
“They must know! She is their mother and they think she is dead; can you not understand how they must have wept—”
I look back at Mama. She reaches out to touch my cheek again, but this time she misses and her hand drops to the armrest, a deadweight. She does not attempt to raise it again. She continues to sit, slumped in the chair, smiling.
“Mama?” I say, and now to Father: “What did you do to her? Father, she is not the same.” Panic is gripping me. I blink away the tears, but they are forming too quickly, flooding their dams. “Father, she died, I saw it, she was dead.“
Father looks on, his mouth twitching into a smile, his gaze crawling over my face.
I crouch next to Mama and grip her arm. “Mama,” I say. “Do you remember the chateau, Mama? The tree we used to eat under in the arbor, what sort of tree was it? Mama, what was it?”
She continues to smile. “Aurélie,” she says, and her voice is low, a thread of wind in the shrubs, in the rosebushes. “My beautiful, beautiful daughter . . .”
It is as if she is asleep. She sees me, but it is as if I am a dream to her, a wisp of thought somewhere deep in the vaults of her mind. I clench her poor, cold arm. “Mama, do you remember the tree? Please remember?”
And all at once, she twitches, like an animal with its back broken.
“Mama, what’s the matter?”
Havriel takes a step toward us.
“Mama?”
Her eyes begin to change. I see veins in them, strands of black, spreading through the blue. She seems to realize something is wrong, and it is as if she is surfacing, her head coming up out of a deep inky pool. It is my real mother, Mama, awake. Alive. She looks directly at me, and she sees me.
“Aurélie?” she says. Her voice is panicked. I smell smoke and flames, see her pale hand coated in her own blood, wearing it like a gory ornament. “Aurélie, my daughter, do not leave me behind.”
Now the veins spread like a wild thicket, unstoppable, and her eyes flood black.
I jerk to my feet, backing away. Mama writhes, contorting in her chair. “Father, what did you do? What did you do to her?” I scream.
Father is shaking, crying. “We brought her back,” he says. “We found the key, hidden in the branches, and we gave her life. . . .” He stops shaking. His gaze drifts far away. “We made her eternal.”
A cold hand clamps my wrist, and I spin to face the thing that was my mother. It is staring at me. It is still smiling, but there is no kindness left there. Only hunger.
Its head tilts oddly. It opens its mouth. A long tongue slides out, purple and mottled. “Aurélie,” it whispers. “Aurélieeeeeee.”
Havriel pushes past me. He grips Mama, and she shrieks, slashing at him with hands that are suddenly clawlike, white skin stretched tight over bone. She struggles. Havriel is stronger. He is strapping her to the chair, and the chair has wheels, and he is leaning it back, pushing it away, and she is thrashing, her head whipping like a snake, smiling eyes, smiling lips, and that great purple tongue.
The doors slam behind her, and I still hear her screams, echoing through the palace.
“It was an apple tree,” I whisper, when she is gone and it is only Father and I, standing in the red glow and the shadows. “We used to eat under the apple tree.”
Click. The lights in their helmets ignite. Another click. The trackers start toward us, fast.
I bring up my gun in an arc, my finger on the trigger. A split second before I shoot, the mirrors swing around. The whole space rearranges itself, revealing the trackers, obscuring them. The spindly gilt poles aren’t supports. They’re hinges, and what used to be one long hallway is now dozens of tiny blocks—passages, corners, dead ends.
A maze.
“Move, Lilly,” I whisper. “Anywhere, just move.”
We start for the nearest opening, my hand scrabbling across the glass. I glance over, see my reflection hurrying next to me, a whole row of me’s. I hear the trackers, I think, on the other side. Pounding boots and the soft creak of body suits. I can’t hear Jules or Hayden or Will. No voices.
We turn a corner and almost collide with a pair of trackers. Before I can even react, one of them lashes out, tarry fingers pinching into my throat. I try to bring my gun up. The tracker catches my wrist with its other arm. I kick out desperately. My foot connects with its shin. Pain explodes in my jaw, fear and shock—it’s trying to lift me by my head—and I hear a gunshot, so close it’s like a punch to the ear. The hand around my neck loosens. I drop, start crawling over the floor. A second gunshot.