I hear the candelabra snapping again. I brace myself. Muscles tense. I leap.
For a millisecond I’m suspended in the air, high up in that hallway of gold and marble. Now my hand catches on the overhang and I swing. My fingers almost wrench out of their sockets. I smack my other hand onto the ledge and lift myself up. Gasp for breath. There’s not enough space to rest. Sweat is dripping down my forehead, stinging my eyes.
Without another thought, I launch myself off the plinth.
I’m going for the chandelier. The huge rack of gold and crystal balloons in front of me. I slam into it and the chandelier swings dangerously. I realize too late that it’s set up like a shell, hollow on the inside. I’m slipping through strands of crystal, falling into the center of the chandelier––
I flail, reaching for anything I can hold on to. My fingers wrap around the golden frame. My foot finds one of the tines, and my fall jerks to a halt. I hear the doors to the ballroom burst open. I see the floor bobbing below. Nausea sweeps over me. Don’t be sick. You don’t have time to be sick.
The woman in the red dress is hurtling down the ballroom. I see her through the tinkling crystal beads, her gown swirling across the marble.
Did she see me jump? I glance around. My toes are fitted on either side of the lower bubble of beads. The woman’s directly below me, sweeping away the fallen bits of crystal, murmuring.
“Aurélie?” her voice echoes up to me. “Aurélie, ne me quitte pas. . .”
I feel like I might sneeze. I remember watching a YouTube clip once where a bowler-wearing guy explained how you could stop yourself from sneezing by licking the top of your mouth so I do that, running my tongue frantically over the arch of my mouth.
Below me, the woman throws back her head. Lets loose a series of hawking, raptor-like cries:
“Aurélie! Aurélie!”
She’s looking straight up at my chandelier. The ropes of crystal cut the scene below into ribbons. I hear running. Pounding. The woman stiffens. Now she leaps away, racing for the far end of the ballroom like some sort of red gazelle. She skitters through the doors. I stay where I am, trying to steady my breathing, the shivering beads.
Trackers are filing into the ballroom through the green doors I came in through. A swarm of them, glistening black and tiny red lights. They’re passing under me––
The gilt prong I’m standing on is bending. I feel the chandelier shiver around me.
“No,” I whisper. “No!”
The prong snaps. I’m sliding through the crystal threads. They’re breaking against my back. I’m falling, tumbling through the air.
I slam against the floor so hard, it’s like a white spark exploding in the center of my skull. My brain goes out before my eyes do. I see a pair of velvet shoes approaching between all those black boots—old-fashioned block heels, bows, red as poppies. And now a second pair arrives, plain and dark, standing next to the first.
“Welcome home, Anouk.”
Palais du Papillon, Chambres Jacinthe—112 feet below, 1790
The servants’ passages are mirrored, floor, wall, ceiling, and it is an odd sensation, like running down the neck of a lengthy glass bottle. The ceiling is low, the walls uncomfortably close.
“They are in the western wing,” Jacques says, breathless, and we turn a corner, my skirts billowing behind me. “The exit is at the northern-most point of the palace, in the salle d’opéra. Your sisters are very nearby.”
“Why did they ever separate us?” I whisper. “What was the point?”
He looks at me over his shoulder, a wry smile on his lips. “The point was no doubt to avoid this happening. You all conspiring together to escape. Little good it did them.”
He says it lightly, but there is tenseness to his face, and fear, and I do not understand it, for I feel nothing but excitement.
We leave the servants’ passages behind us, stepping through the false back of an armoire into a room like a Parisian sweet box. The pillows are colored like petits fours, soft and lovely, the sofas fat as winter rabbits. We hurry to the doors. Jacques presses his ear to the wood. I wait impatiently. Now he nods quickly and we slip out into a gallery, hurrying down it.
The palace feels frighteningly empty around us, dead and lovely. Candles flicker in the chandeliers overhead, thousands upon thousands of them. I think I hear something in the air, a distant thrum, like a single buzzing note.
“Jacques, do you hear that?” I whisper, and I almost cough, I have so little breath to spare.
“What?” he asks, and together we slow.
“That sound?”
“The air is strange down here. Hurry.”