He blinks, surprised that his cynical little joke didn’t have the desired effect. He studies the instrument in his hand as if he’s considering using it right this very instant. When he looks back at me, his expression is infinitely less sympathetic. “You say you wish to know the truth. The reasons behind everything. But you will not understand. You will find it difficult.”
“You think?” Fury, blistering hot, scalds my throat. “Yes, I find it hard to understand why you think you can drag us down here and kill us, yes, that’s HARD TO UNDERSTAND.”
Dorf clicks his tongue. “So angry,” he says. “As if simply because you are a mass of cells capable of rudimentary thought, the universe must bow down and make sense to you. You are not owed anything, by anyone, neither happiness nor safety nor life. And you must realize that just because you are too foolish to understand something does not mean it makes no sense. You are not here for nothing. And you are not dying for nothing. You are dying so we might live.”
“You’re insane. What are you, the Countess of Báthory bathing in the blood of virgins for eternal youth? I hate to break it to you, but that’s not—”
“Anouk, be quiet,” Havriel snaps, and there’s a razor edge to his voice. “Listen for once, and keep your clever bits of skepticism to yourself. All five of you carry in your veins a priceless genetic code. It has no outward effects on you. If not extracted, it will pass into dormancy between the eighteenth and twentieth years of your life. Before that time, these genes have the ability to regenerate human cells and stall their division. In essence, biological immortality.”
Okay, that was a lot. I don’t have any clever bits of skepticism. At all.
Havriel isn’t finished. “The genes were stolen from us. Injected into the bloodstreams of your ancestors and allowed to escape. The one who invented it refuses to cooperate. Entire labs of scientists cannot replicate the genes. And the dosage only lasts a lifetime. Sixty years at most. Then we require more. So we find the carriers still in existence and we harvest them. We, the Brothers du Bessancourt, have lived nearly five hundred years combined, and I’m afraid the only way we can keep living is by carving up your pretty young bodies and extracting every drop inside you.”
I stand perfectly still. I feel like the room is tipping around me, or maybe I’m tipping, falling. “Who?” I say. “Who allowed the carriers to escape?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know.” Dorf’s eyes pin me to the chair. “The same one who cut the camera feed, helped you escape the trap rooms, holed you up somewhere we couldn’t find, massacred our teams. For a while we thought it was a series of flukes, beginner’s luck, but no. He has been helping from the moment he realized you had breached the palace.”
The butterfly man. He’s talking about the butterfly man. “We haven’t seen him,” I say. “I swear, we never met him once.”
“No?” Havriel seems to calm down again. His gaze softens. “He is a great danger. A liability and a blessing, in one. My brother became obsessed with immortality long ago. He was terrified of disease and revolted by death and dying. And when he realized it was beyond his grasp to find a cure for this most human ailment, that eighteenth-century science could never hope to unlock life’s secrets, he created something that could. An artificial human. Perfect and logical, unfettered by the physical and mental limitations of man.”
Perfect? The thing that clawed the walls outside the library, killed the trackers in complete silence, burned Perdu’s arm open? That was perfection?
Havriel keeps talking: “Our petit-ma?tre, we called him. Our little master. We grew him in a glass cocoon, killed to make him. His skin is as delicate as an insect’s wing, fragile as paper, but he is more powerful than any man. He can calculate possibilities and variables into infinity, invent technological wonders. He made us rich beyond measure. But he has grown unruly. He is the reason for this great ruse and the cause of this bloodshed. If you are angry at your fate, blame him.”
“None of this works.” I feel pathetic, but I say it anyway. “Artificial people, fine, whatever, but you can’t live that long, okay? The body breaks down; it’s called cellular senescence, the second law of thermodynamics. It doesn’t work, and even if it did, you can’t just kill other people so you can live. You can’t go around kidnapping and murdering just because you feel like it—” I’m rubbing frantically at the side of my nightgown, my skin burning. “None of this is possible, okay? Scientifically it’s not possible.”
“Science is a process, Anouk. A river, always twisting. Everything you dream of is possible. Sometimes you have simply dreamed too soon.”
I watch him lift the nozzle and step toward me.
“What are the greatest mysteries, do you think?” he says. “Life, of course. And death. We have solved them.” He smiles, quick and pointed, his lips curling back from his teeth with a wet sound. “But for everything there is a price.”
Palais du Papillon, Chambres du Morelle Noir—112 feet below, 1790