I haul myself upright. The sabre is still stuck in the butterfly man’s leg, reflecting the darkness flowing off his body. He’s starting to twitch. Will looks over at me, confused. I grab his good arm and together we stagger after Lilly and Jules.
We reach the bottom of the stairs. Lilly and Jules have already started up them, and Lilly leans over the railing. “Hurry,” she gasps. “You guys, run!”
And now we’re clattering up the metal corkscrew, on and on. All I can hear is our breathing, the ring of the grating under our feet. Maybe the butterfly man is still talking to Havriel, maybe they’re arguing, but I can’t hear them. We come to the tunnel. Hurry down the walkway, lights blinking on as we pass.
Just keep running, Ooky. Just keep running.
We’re at the pool of black water. We start up a second staircase cut into the stone, the ones Havriel and his henchmen probably took, so that they wouldn’t have to plunge forty into pitch-black water.
We burst out into the salle d’opéra, gasping.
Lilly and I skid to a halt. The boys stop behind us. The woman in the red dress is standing on the stage, right at the center. But she doesn’t turn to us, doesn’t even seem to hear us. She’s facing the theater, her arms spread wide. Her face is tipped up toward the ceiling, like a singer basking in her applause.
Everything is so silent. Deathly still––
I feel the first detonation in my fingertips: somewhere faraway in the palace, a long, pulsating rumble. Dust sifts down from the ceiling high above.
“Who’s that?” Jules mumbles, and we shush him, start running along the orchestra pit toward the pillar with its gold-encrusted shield.
Lilly drags open the panel. Behind it is the mirrored passageway. We start up it. I look back, see the woman on the stage, the curtains wrenching from their moorings and falling, swirling around her tiny form like swaths of deep blue clouds.
Another explosion nearly throws me off my feat. The walls of the passageway are shaking, the glass ringing. Up ahead is a circle of blue metal—a door like a bank vault. A ladder. We start up it. A third explosion, closer this time. Smoke billows up after us, enveloping us. The air is becoming hot. Too hot. The shaft shakes.
“We’re going to make it!” Lilly’s yelling. “We’re going to make it!”
We climb faster. Jules, Will, me, Lilly. Below, the explosions keep coming, endless and teeth jarring. I imagine the ceilings cracking, the chandeliers tinkling and falling into Jellyfish Hall, Razor Hall, Rabbit Gallery. The earth burying everything, swallowing crystal and brocade, the blood and death and secrets.
We keep climbing, keep climbing, and listen to it all fall away.
Palais du Papillon—112 feet below, ten seconds before the detonations
Jacques lies against the wall of the empty panic room. His blood is a red-black mirror beneath him, still as glass. The light buzzes. The distant sound of running feet reaches his ears. But it is echoing away, leaving him behind.
A shivering jolt reverberates in the walls of the capsule. He thinks of the girl with the black hair, a steel girl with a tiny wounded heart. He thought she was Aurélie at first. But what a foolish dream that was. Aurélie is gone. Aurélie is free.
The jolt comes again, closer. The entire capsule shakes. Jacques’s thoughts turn to home. The dry clack of his mother’s knitting needles. The smell of drying herbs and tallow candles and damp wood. He hears the creak of a hinge and looks up. A face is peering in at him through the hatch. At first he does not recognize it. But now she smiles. . .
“Jacques,” Aurélie says, and hurries for him. She kneels beside him. “Come, Jacques, we must go! Can you hear not them? They are waiting to see you! The fair is here and the jugglers.”
And suddenly the stuttering light, the cold metal and the blood, all of it twists away and fades. He can hear the waterwheel, Madame Desjardin’s voice calling across the fields. Aurélie is pulling him to his feet and he is on the green outside Péronne. In the distance he can see his brothers and sisters just as they were when he last looked back at them in the road, not yet wizened and old, but young and smiling, raising their hands to him, and he cannot say if they gesture in farewell or welcome.
Jacques can feel the sunlight flowing over his skin. . . .
Palais du Papillon, 96 feet below—1790
“Careful,” I whisper, one hand on Charlotte’s back as she grips the iron rungs and begins to climb. “Quick and careful.”
Bernadette goes next, then Delphine, and I make my way up the ladder last, now and then giving Delphine’s heel an encouraging squeeze. Our feet tap up, up.
“There is a door here!” Charlotte calls down.
“Open it!” I shout. “Open it!”
The shaft has become wider, blooming into a small chamber, a tulip atop a long stem. We all reach up, hands grasping. We slide back the door, a square of iron into the stone.