Versailles

by Yannick Hill

  This edition first published in 2016

  Unbound

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  All rights reserved

  © Yannick Hill, 2016

  The right of Yannick Hill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed

  on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text Design by Ellipsis

  Art direction by Mark Ecob Cover illustration by Yehrin Tong

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78352-230-9 (trade hbk)

  ISBN 978-1-78352-231-6 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-78352-301-6 (limited edition)

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Yannick Hill was born in 1980 and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia.

  Versailles is his first novel.

  A Novel

  By Yannick Hill

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

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  For Milena

  For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of ­– to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others . . . and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

  Prologue

  Somewhere in America, at the limits of a silver city, a giant monitor lizard is making his way through Versailles, a one-hundred-room mega-mansion set back from the ocean. The human that tends to him was fired for not wearing her complete uniform. In her absence, the six-foot monitor made his escape from a makeshift cage of chicken mesh and rough cuts. His lizard eyes dart from thing to thing but there is no meaning really, only forward movement and a hunger that is fast turning a tame animal into one ready to bite the exposed flesh of those not feeding him. Most of the people living in the residence do not know the monitor exists. The yellow and blue-black scales that make up his hide reflect the low light coming in through a window. He is in the Grand Ball-room now, his lizard brain detecting the change in texture from soft to hard under his belly. He makes a decision on direction based on faint smells and the distant sound of clinking, metal on porcelain.

  Elsewhere in Versailles, Casey Baer is waking up. He is the man of the house, CEO of the internet’s pre-eminent social network. A man for his times. His dreams were of mass murder, the silk sheets under him lightly damp with clean sweat. But there is no lingering guilt. Casey slips out of the bed, careful not to disturb his beautiful wife, former chief design officer to the world’s leading tech company. Standing up straight, he extends his left arm out at ninety degrees to his torso and makes a fist. A charisma without witness. His tall, lean, forty-two-year-old body is that of the modern sprinter, youthful, uncanny in its construction. With his right hand he finds an invisible bow string, draws back, left eye closed, right eye focused on a target somewhere well beyond the bedroom wall.

  His daughter, Missy Baer, turns sixteen today, but her birthday won’t be announced on the network because first thing this morning she deleted her online profile forever. That was her first act. Her second was to run away from home, never to return. Versailles is missing its princess.

  part one

  Escape

  1

  Missy walked the beach alone, sword angled down in line with her mesh skirt, black baseball cap pulled over her eyes like she’s feeling the future. Waves broke gentle, the sun rising. All summer long she’d practiced on the sand, boys watching through their phones from the low dunes, boys drinking vodka till the fade. They always kept their distance. Saw a girl preparing for battle. The war inside.

  Today was her birthday. Sixteen candles. But Missy wasn’t coming home. She thought about the gleaming palace, her sleeping parents king and queen, twin brother deep in the west wing, four out of seven screens telling him the same thing. River didn’t sleep. His room so big you could play hide-and-seek and win. Her little brother, younger by ten seconds. Missy remembered. Magic candles. His tears when the flames kept coming back.

  Facing the water, she made a circle in the sand with the tip of her sword and struck her first pose. Eyes closed. It was like slow motion. No one to see this now. This time alone was molten, an arc of quicksilver. Second pose, the blade passing close by her left cheek, her long blonde hair and skinny wrists tied with black ribbons. Her mind played the right music. Third Pose.

  Missy sheathed the sword like a pro, relaxed the muscles in her shoulders. She walked back through the gardens to her car, a crystal black SUV, unbirthday gift from her father. The PX8 paint was the blackest on the market. She remem-bered the monitor lizard, wondered if someone thought to feed it with Leticia gone. Nanny Leticia was like a second mother, singing lullabies in her own language. Missy turned the key in the ignition. The engine vibrated through her bones. The car telling her it would be okay. But she had a bad feeling all the same. She made sure to frown to herself just in case. The electronic gates opening at their own pace. Versailles in the rear mirror. Her car moving out of frame.

  The link turned up in her email back in June. No sender, no subject. A video of Missy’s favorite singer, pop princess Scout Rose. But this was crazy. Scout had been missing for almost a year. The most downloaded artist of all time had disappeared without a trace but here she was, in a new video. Missy waited for the music but the music never came, just the sound of wind moving past a
n unprotected microphone. She was dancing in a desert with her eyes closed, gray mountains in the distance. The sword made it ritual, a rite of passage, but she was dancing, enjoying herself, taking pride in her every move. There were other figures in the back-ground. They wore plastic animal masks, the kind you saw at kids’ parties. But they were out of focus, their attention on Scout and her performance.

  Missy watched all seven minutes. According to the counter, she was the first person to ever view this video. Her impulse was to share it to her network, but something gave her pause. This was a new feeling. Of wanting to keep this close. A secret crush. My inspiration. She knew it would blow up in no time, but she would always be the first, the very first person to see this video. She watched it again. And again. There was something about it, seeing her hero without the music, this newfound grace, like courage, her command of a new language. But why? And what did this have to do with her disappearance? Missy noticed Scout’s black base-ball cap had a white star over the peak. All Missy knew was she loved what she saw, and wanted more.

  capturethecastle 5 seconds ago

  If this is the future, I want to leave now

  In the days after watching the video, she hadn’t slept too well, dreaming in wide neon beams of pink and green and blue, no story, no control, like falling in love. Next thing a package arrived with her name on it. A long wooden box from New Zealand. Missy didn’t know anybody in New Zealand but she loved getting packages in the mail so she ran up the stairs to her bedroom, locked the door and knelt on the pink carpet. When she saw what was inside she had to cover her mouth to stop herself squeaking. A sword. But not just any sword. The sword from the video. It was perfect. She balanced it on her knuckles and couldn’t stop smiling. So lucky!

  Since then she’d practiced every day on the beach, switched her phone to silent, muted all her group chats, told friends she was with other friends. They were used to it by now, Missy not hanging out like before. She’d been like this for a while, finding more time to be alone. She’d lost a lot of followers this summer, but she didn’t care, not really.

  Her dreams were of falling, falling upwards into a dark, dark sky, and when she opened her eyes the fading light from outside would tell her it was late, too late for Saturday, for swimming or seeing friends. Her friends told her she’d changed; they didn’t understand. There were rumors it had something to do with her mom. Missy stayed silent. The sword came at the right time. She felt alive again. Going to the beach every day. Practicing her moves. It felt so great to be doing something. By late summer she was better than the video. Now she needed a new routine. Her own moves.

  And right on cue another late-night email. No sender, no subject. The message itself was two words:

  Level up!

  She clicked the link and nothing happened. Then out of the corner of her eye she saw her phone light up on the bed. It was downloading an application out of nowhere. The icon was a white star against black. She touched it. Custom GPS. Her location marked by a blue dot. Then a voice from the handset. A man’s voice.

  Congratulations, Missy, you leveled up. Gather your things, your sword, your thoughts. Be ready to follow in Scout’s footsteps. Your adventure begins tomorrow, at first light.

  Missy felt the sun pass across her face and for three or four seconds she was driving blind, the world beyond her eyelids rendered in a dark, coral pink. The summer was almost over and she might never see her friends again, her brother, her mom – her mom would be so upset when she found out, so upset, and that made Missy upset. Missy didn’t know what would happen, she didn’t want to think what her mom might do, she really didn’t know. The thought nearly made her turn the car around, her mother still asleep, still asleep and not knowing she was gone, then waking up on her daughter’s birthday, waking up in her dark, dark bedroom, the late morning light pressing on the heavy curtains. Her beautiful mother, all the unworn clothes in her wardrobe. Her mom was always elegant, her voice low and slow, the words she used, like an actress in a movie. These perfect words, as though they’d always been there, before she even spoke. And now. Her mother was still calm, but in a different way. Those pills in the white boxes. Not calm. Lost.

  The thought nearly made Missy turn around but she didn’t, her car traveling at high speed with her in it, her car, her car, her journey into the unknown, away from the past, from Versailles, and into the future. If this is the future, I want to leave now. She’d been ready to go for some time, even before the video. Her father’s betrayal. What Casey did. What Casey did had cast a shadow over Missy. The sword video had shown her there was light behind the black curtain. And now the voice on her phone guiding her out of the city, like a robot voice but more real. It was like someone calling from the other side of her reality. The start of a video game. Her sword, the sense of being chosen. She was like, Yes!

  She was out of there, away from Versailles, and everything looked different: the tall palms and city streets, it all played like a movie outside her darkened windows. All these years. The police escorts to and from school. Bodyguards outside classrooms. Boys too scared to talk to her after a kid nearly got his arm broke for asking her to prom. All these years. Versailles itself, house of a thousand cameras. Her every move recorded and now, here she was, out of frame, out from under watchful eyes, music up loud on the 5.1, cruising like there was no yesterday. Missy put on her sunglasses and for a split second her mind’s eye is a camera outside the car, pointed in through the windscreen. In that second she is watching herself like on film. The speed of the car, the thrill of escape – she gave a scream of delight that cut through the music like a silver coin into a deep swimming pool.

  This was all so perfect and gorgeous, the landscape playing like a movie outside her window. If only they could see. Her millions of followers. Missy Baer. #RunningAway. If only they could see her, with everything that was happening, right now, the passing seconds, minutes . . . One last status update . . . But she’d deleted all her profiles. Her father’s network gave you thirty days to reactivate. Her father . . . CEO of the world’s fastest-growing social network and here was his daughter, running away from home. What a story. It would break the internet! Missy took the phone from its cradle and swiped for the camera. One last picture, her eyes in the rear mirror. She took off her sunglasses. #NoMakeup #MissyMissingNow. Snap. Filter. Share this moment. All she had to do was log back in. It was all still there, the glowing embers of her user data: every photo, every like, every comment.

  No. Missy put her sunglasses back on. She hadn’t posted anything in months. So why do it now? This was her. This was escape. Escape from everything. Under the radar. Going dark. Offline. The space between. Missy missing. She tapped cancel, returned the phone to its cradle. This was her, no one to see this, an arc of quicksilver, a dream in neon beams of pink and green and blue, no story, like falling in love. This was her, all her. Away from Versailles, no cameras on her now. Missy at the controls!

  Pretty soon it was time for breakfast. No one to tell her she was late. She pulled into a truck stop, wondered if it was too early for a cheeseburger. Yeah, she could do a cheeseburger and soda right now. Come to think of it she’d never been this hungry in her life.

  Turned out this was a great truck stop. It had a good feeling for some reason, everybody in there chatting away and friendly. Missy noticed two young dudes by the window eating pancakes with their tops off and painted faces. Not like clowns but sort of like clowns. Kind of handsome in a weird way. She overlapped her hands on the counter, leant forward and ordered a coffee.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up, honey.’

  ‘I’d like a coffee, please.’

  ‘Coffee. Coming right up.’ The nice lady with the turquoise eyeshadow placed the cup in front of Missy and gave her a second look. ‘You come far today, sweetheart?’

  ‘Not far.’ Missy raised her eyebrows in anticipation of the next question, but when it didn’t come, she was quick to close the gap: ‘Can I please get a cheeseburger, or is
it too early in the day for that?’

  ‘Darlin’ you can have a cheeseburger whenever you want.’

  Missy smiled. This was so nice. Everybody being so nice to her. ‘Where am I right now? I mean, am I still in the city?’

  The nice lady took a beat to answer, lips slightly parted. ‘Highway 5, honey, you out in the country now! You sure you’re okay? Anyone you need to call? We got a telephone out back if you need.’

  The kindness of this stranger. ‘Oh, no, that’s okay,’ Missy said, showing the lady her cell. ‘I have this, thank you though. I. . . I never left the city before, I—’ She was saying too much. She saw the lady’s name badge. ‘I think you have beautiful hair, Nora,’ Missy said. ‘And I love your smile. You smile with your eyes.’ She saw Nora’s wedding ring and pictured a Disney prince ascending a white marble staircase, a bouquet of flowers in his arms. ‘Your husband must be very happy he found someone like you.’

  ‘Why, thank you, what a kind thing to say to a person. What’s your name, sweetheart?’

  ‘Scout,’ said Missy, ‘My name’s Scout.’ She sipped her coffee. Why did she have to lie? She felt like saying something true to make it right. She could say it was her birthday. No, that would seem silly. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She wasn’t a kid, but she did miss her mom, the way she kissed your forehead when she said goodbye. ‘This coffee is delicious!’ Missy said.

  She looked over her shoulder for the shirtless clowns but they’d gone already. The coffee really did taste good. The film of light brown foam and dark liquid underneath. So alien and adult. She took a picture in her mind and sent it to her mom. #coffee #delicious. She shifted focus, the clowns walking to their car outside the window. A big, wide, beat-up car from the 1950s, she didn’t know anything about cars but it looked cool, there was no roof and they drove off in the direction she was heading. Some kind of music festival maybe?