We go down the hall to what must be her room. I’d pictured her living like a queen, given her role here, but this isn’t even as nice as the bedroom she left behind in Pennsylvania.
“Sit,” she says, pushing me toward a chair while she stares at my face. “You took quite a risk in speaking to me. What’s to stop me from killing you and taking your spark?”
I freeze. I have only the vaguest understanding of the rules of my kind. I’ve heard about this spark she refers to—the thing that keeps us going, and without which we die. I know only three people in a single family can have it—the rule of threes. I know that we can, in theory, take it from each other. But it never occurred to me until this moment that it was worth killing someone for.
“I’m terrible at time traveling,” I tell her. “I doubt my spark would be worth taking.”
She laughs. “That shows how little you know. If my body was ravaged by cancer right now and I was moments from certain death, I could stab you in the heart and be made new in seconds.”
She appears to be considering it, and she has no reason to spare me, really. All I have going for me is that we have an enemy in common. “My mother hates me, so she didn’t give me a lot of details about anything.”
The smug smile leaves her face. “Why would your mother hate you?”
“Because I’m the reason my sister is dead. Mostly, I think, because she hates time travelers. I guess the gene skipped her.”
She pauses, and then her head tilts. There’s something satisfied in her expression. I suspect she likes hearing that my mother suffered. “Your mother can time travel,” she says. “Did you not realize that?”
I stare at her. It isn’t possible. My mother can’t time travel. And if she could, there’d be no reason for her to hate me the way she does. Unless, perhaps, she thought what made me evil wasn’t that I could time travel, but that I was a Coron.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Of course I’m sure,” she snaps. “I grew up with the woman. What I really don’t understand is how you exist at all. When I left, she was dating Peter Stewart.”
I consider telling her I may be related to Coron but think better of it. Letting them know Katrin was pregnant when she left might lead them to search harder for her.
I nod. “Yes, he’s my father.”
She laughs. “Peter Stewart is not your father,” she replies. “He was a dumb local boy without a drop of magical blood. There’s no way his DNA produced a time traveler.” She taps her lip. “A mystery to solve, which I rather enjoy. I wonder, though, why you’re telling me all this? Surely you realize I have nothing to gain by allowing you to live?”
“I’m a hard worker and a good cook. I can help out wherever you need me.”
She nods, undoubtedly thinking that she still wants to kill me, but perhaps also thinking it can wait until she’s bled me dry working here first. “And your mother would hate it, desperately hate it, if she knew we were working together, wouldn’t she?”
My eyes dart to hers. “Yes.”
“Then I think I will allow you to live, niece.”
That makes one of us, aunt.
* * *
The next day the same guard who grabbed me by the hair takes me to the woman in the kitchen. “Mathilde, here’s your new serving girl,” he says.
Mathilde takes one disdainful glance my way and hands me a bottle. “Place one of these in each bowl.”
The pills are different from the ones I pilfered from the oatmeal, but that may be because they haven’t dissolved. I do everything she says, and when the other women come in, I hand the bowls out and clean up after them without being asked. It’s a long shot, but perhaps if I make her life and Iris’s life easy enough, they will start to trust me.
Mathilde sits comfortably, watching me, and when the women are pushed toward the common room, a guard comes for me. “This one stays,” she barks at him.
He shrugs and leaves us alone. “Finish up that washing,” she says, “and I’ll teach you how to make stew.”
9
HENRI
It’s February when it happens. I’m sitting at the table alone with a bottle of whiskey, no glass, when I hear the crash upstairs.
I’m just sober enough to know I’m not imagining things.
I run and arrive in Marie’s room only to stumble to a halt. For a moment, my sister is a stranger to me. Covered head to toe in dirt, her hair matted. I take two steps toward her and she collapses against me like a small child, weeping. I want to weep myself. I really thought I’d lost her.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “It’s okay. You’re safe. But where is Amelie?”
“I left her behind,” she cries, and I feel my stomach drop. No, I think, this can’t be right. If Marie is still alive and was able to get out, Sarah can still get out too.
“It was all for nothing,” she whispers, as I help her to the bed. “There were no older women there. Our mother was probably dead the day she arrived. They drugged us and Amelie…she forced me not to eat the food. When I wouldn’t listen, she—” Marie’s head drops and she begins to weep. “She pushed my gruel into my lap, I think, and they beat her.”
“So where is she now?” I demand. “Why isn’t she with you?”
Marie’s eyes shut and she begins to tell me a story so horrible it hardly seems possible— hiding with corpses, how one of them had to remain behind when the guards came too early. “I should have made her go in my place,” Marie weeps. “It was the last night to get out.”
It’s not the time for blame. It’s not the time to say you forced her to risk her life to go there and then she risked it again to get you out. But I’m thinking it. My God, I’m thinking it.
I bury my head in my hands. “What do you mean it was the last night to get out?”
“Amelie showed me the hole they were digging. To bury the rest of the dead. She said it was our last chance to escape.”
I hear the finality of those words, and my brain seems to empty, go numb, before I shake my head. “No,” I tell her. “No. She isn’t dead. She’d find another way.”
Tears run down her face. “I need the laudanum,” she says. “I can’t face this without the laudanum.”
I shake my head. “Marie, no. Whatever they had you on, you’ve got to break clean of it. I need you to focus so you can show me where you were held.”
She slides to the floor and curls into a ball, weeping and inconsolable. “She won’t be there.”
“You don’t know that!” I argue. “You were the one who was so convinced our mother was trapped somewhere!”
She looks up. “Everyone was dying, Henri. That drug made us sick, something else was making us sick too. There’s no chance someone survived in there twenty years. None.”
I feel the pulse of terror in my chest and push it away. She is wrong. She has to be. “I still need to see, for myself. Please, Marie.”
She presses the base of her palms to her eyes. “Give me the laudanum,” she finally says. “Give me one, and I’ll show you where we were held.”
* * *
The drugs in Marie’s system made it difficult to jump after she escaped from captivity, she tells me. She had to play dead until they’d shoveled dirt over her, wondering all the while if she’d suffocate before they were done.
It's a horrible story, one that makes clear how terrible things must have been on the inside. But she remembers the building they left from, near Sacré-Coeur, so that’s where we head the next afternoon.
I wear my best clothes, my father’s expensive watch, and tell Marie to do the same. She’s so pale and thin it’s hard to demand anything of her, but for Sarah’s sake this needs to be done, and done right.
“Dress up?” she asks, her words still slightly slurred. “Whatever for?”
“Because wealthy people breaking down a door can say they are inspecting it. The rest of us are merely intruders.”
“I don’t know what it is you’re hoping to find,” she wh
ispers. “If Amelie is still there, she’d be damaged beyond anything you or I can imagine. And she isn’t there. No one could have survived it that long.”
“I just need to know.”
“Know what?” she asks, staring at the table. “Shall we pull the cement slab aside and look for her corpse?”
I flinch. “Marie, I need to do something. Don’t you understand that? I have to. So yes, if all that is left is to pull the slab aside and look for her, I’ll do it.”
“She’ll be wearing the necklace,” Marie rasps, and then begins to weep again.
“What are you talking about?”
“I found a necklace that belonged to Maman in the pocket of my dress. I thought it would bring me good luck. I gave it to her before I left. Maybe it wasn’t good luck at all. Maybe it was the worst luck and I handed it off to her.”
I don’t believe in luck. I don’t think the necklace changed a thing. But it takes everything in my power not to ask Marie why she couldn’t just have left it all alone. Why she couldn’t have left Sarah alone, left the one good thing in my life with me instead of ripping it away.
Marie is tense beside me as we drive toward Paris, but not as tense as me. What will I do if I find Amelie today? Who will she be after twenty years of captivity?
I suppose the truth is that I pray I do not find her today at all. Because if her bones aren’t there, it might mean that sometime between 1918 and now, she escaped.
It’s just past dusk when we arrive in the city. Marie stares out the window as we pass landmarks I wish I didn’t need to make her face. Sacré-Coeur, Parc de la Turlure. She’s too frail for this right now, mentally and physically. If anything less were at stake, I’d never put her through this.
“She kept asking me not to run ahead that day,” Marie says, still staring blankly outside. “I can’t believe it was three months ago. It seems like a handful of days. She was so tired and I—” Her voice breaks.
I hunger for more information. I want to feed on these memories of hers, poor substitute for Sarah that they are. Except every word out of her mouth makes it too easy to picture Sarah, forcing her limbs to move despite the fatigue. That edge of worry in her voice as she cautioned Marie. I’m glad my sister has returned. I don’t want to blame her for what happened, but it grows more difficult with each story she tells.
We turn left and then right. The area is run-down. Two decades after the war, and parts of Paris are only beginning to recover.
“There,” whispers Marie. I stop the car and we both stare at the crumbling building, half of it blackened by fire and caving in.
No one could be alive inside it, but I’m going in anyway, because I have to know. “You don’t have to come,” I tell Marie.
“I’m going in,” she replies. I grab the pickaxe from the trunk and walk to the door. She follows, holding the lantern I brought along, looking so sick I’m not sure how she’s staying upright.
The lock breaks easily, worn by time, and we enter. My fist is tight around the axe, ready to fight if necessary, but the building is absent of life aside from the rats scurrying underfoot. Marie’s hands shake as she points me toward the room where Amelie showed her the hole.
We both stare at the cement slab on the floor. My stomach spins. Please God, don’t let me find her there. It takes all my strength to lift the slab and the smell that rises up makes both of us retch.
As terrible as it’s been, not knowing what happened to her…knowing could prove worse. I brace myself and look beneath me.
There are bodies. So many bodies, most of their clothes decayed away and what’s left looks as if it was burned, probably by the same fire that scarred the building’s exterior. Some are skeletons, and some retain skin, though dried and blackened. I tell Marie to hold up the lantern, and I peer more closely.
It’s only a moment before a glint of metal catches my eye. I grip the side of the hole. That glint is a knife to the gut, pure terror. A piece of me wants to walk away right now, continue to hope.
I take the lantern from Marie, though, and jump in. My knees give way as I land, and I crawl until I’m beside her, ignoring the crunch of bones beneath me. I raise the lantern.
My mother’s necklace glimmers in the light, nestled against the collarbone of a girl who was almost mine.
10
SARAH
I work tirelessly over the next few days. Morning til night, I am the new Mathilde. I do all the cooking and cleaning while she lounges, watching me. It’s not without its benefits, however—I get undrugged food, snippets of information. I also make one potentially valuable discovery: inside the pantry is a ladder and a trap door. Perhaps it just leads to a tiny loft, but it could be another floor, one with windows that aren’t blacked out, where I could call for help.
Toward the end of the week, Mathilde tells me to dish up breakfast for the pregnant woman and take it to her.
“Only one?” I know one of the pregnant women gave birth last week. We were told she died in childbirth, though I have serious doubts. But there should still be two left.
“The other died in childbirth last night,” replies Mathilde, not meeting my eye. “Child died too.”
It was certainly not unheard of to die in childbirth in 1918, but I’m suspicious nonetheless. I’d assume Monsieur Coron would pull out all the stops to save the child...unless it turned out the child couldn’t time travel.
“Was it a boy?” I ask quietly.
“Yes,” she says. “Big one too.” I hear a hint of sadness in her voice for the first time, and I file that fact away. She doesn’t care what she’s doing to the adults, but the infants…that bothers her.
I follow a guard down the long hall to get to the pregnant woman’s room. He has to unlock the door to let me in. Katrin was right. If they’d known she was pregnant she’d never have escaped.
I try to meet the woman’s eye, to let her know she isn’t alone and that I’d help her if I could. She snatches the bowl from my hands and glares at me. She sees me as a traitor to our kind, like my aunt, and for the first time I have to wonder if she’s right.
* * *
It’s just over a week later when Mathilde gives me a different tablet for everyone’s stew. I glance at her when I notice the difference, and she arches a brow, daring me to challenge her. My hand trembles as I continue to drop them in. It’s probably nothing, I tell myself. But what if it isn’t? If I refuse, they’ll kill me, and all these women will still receive the tablet—all these women who are going to die anyway. They are already dead, in my time. But I don’t want to be the one who did it. It’s probably nothing, I tell myself again.
And then the next morning, the guard bangs on the metal pipe to wake us, and I’m the only one who rises.
He and I both look at each other, wide-eyed, an odd moment of kinship between enemies. Holding my breath, I lean over the woman nearest me. She has a bluish cast, and is ice cold when I touch her.
I poisoned them. I questioned what I was doing and wanted to live so badly that I accepted the situation and moved forward. Coldly. Like Iris and Coron might.
The guard grabs my arm and pulls me from the room without a word.
“Did you know?” I ask Mathilde when I reach the kitchen.
She turns away. I can’t tell if she’s ashamed or ambivalent. “There was nothing to be done for it,” she says. “From now on, you’ll help with the meals for the staff and take care of the baby. Her highness feels it’s beneath her station.”
I hate her for her lack of shame, though I’m hardly better. I knew something was wrong and followed orders to save my skin. But my aunt and Coron actually planned this, and though I’d expected nothing more of them, my hands shake as I finish cleaning and go to the nursery where Iris waits. We haven’t spoken since she told me she was giving me a job, but when she sees me she smiles, as if we are friends.
With my jaw broken, it’s difficult to return her smile, but I try. Something comes over me as I do it. I taste metal in my mout
h, feel it sliding through my veins, and the lie becomes easier. I will kill you and I will make sure you know it’s happening, I think as my mouth moves upward.
“You’ll sleep here from now on,” she says, thrusting a swaddled child in my arms. “Keep her healthy and I’ll let you live when this is all done.”
I nod, as if I’m stupid enough to believe that, and she walks out of the room, locking it behind her.
I take the room’s only chair, holding the tiny bundle to my chest. Her eyes are closed, her rosebud mouth pursed in sleep. She may survive being raised by a monster like Coron, but who will she become as a result? What kind of power will that give him, having two time travelers under his command?
I want to save her for her own sake, but that vengefulness inside me wants it for another reason: I want to make sure Coron gets nothing when this is through.
I need to get her out, this baby and the one who is due any day now, and I can think of just one way: Mathilde. She’s the only one who still gets to leave. But what would convince someone who happily killed twelve women to help? It’s a question I can answer with ease, since I too just helped kill twelve people. What would motivate me?
If I was helping myself.
11
HENRI
My head rests on a bar. I don’t know how I got here. I remember checking Marie into a hotel somewhere, and then I was heading out, looking for anything to dull the pain.
How am I going to continue? How am I going to keep taking care of my sister, when all I want to do is end it?
“Bourbon,” I demand. “Give me the entire bottle.”
The bartender raises a brow but slides the bottle over to me nonetheless. It’s not the first bar I’ve been to today. I vaguely recall being tossed out of the last.
"Sarah,” I whisper, staring at my hands. Hands that held her fragile bones. I rock a little on my stool. I can’t stand this. I can’t survive it. I grab the bottle and drink straight from the mouth. The patrons must sense the danger leaking from my pores, the recklessness. They give me a wide berth.
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