Paris Exposition Universelle, May 10, 1900
Paris Exposition Universelle,
Inge taps her fingers impatiently on the table, tuning out the sounds of the dancing fountains and the endless crowds. The others are late. She can’t abide lateness. Especially when she knows where to find him now. She’s done what no one else could.
It will be difficult not to gloat. But Inge has a lot of practice suppressing her emotions. She’s always forcing herself to be as calm and placid as the reflection of a full moon on a dark lake, with no indication of what’s happening beneath.
It’s part of why she works so hard. Why she obsesses about things outside her control. Her control is so rigidly applied to herself at all times, she finds tremendous freedom in tracking horrors and atrocities that have nothing to do with her.
Anneke hates that they can’t do anything about the people who have already died. Inge finds it peaceful. She loves researching and studying things that have already happened. The past is settled. It’s finished. There’s no use fighting it. It’s the present and the future she’s always up against.
Someone stops near her table. She knows without looking that it isn’t Maher or Anneke. There’s a sweet scent, like a garden rose but subtler, and something so cold it burns her sinuses. A glance to the side reveals something else surprising. Whoever is looming over her isn’t wearing any shoes.
“Hello,” a voice like morning fog murmurs. “I believe you’ve been looking for me.”
Inge thought he’d have a hateful face, that cruelty and malice would be etched into his features. But she should know better than anyone what pleasant faces can hide. His isn’t pleasant so much as blank, though. A clean slate, ready to be written over with whatever anyone might need or want.
“Come with me,” he says. The fog intensifies. It wraps around her, caresses her skin, seeps into her pores as it infiltrates every sense and makes it impossible to think or feel or see clearly.
Poor, sweet Dávid. She understands now. He never stood a chance.
“No, I don’t think I will.” Inge blows out a long breath and expels him the same way she expels her own demons whenever they’re threatening to overwhelm her.
His laugh is much, much worse than the sound of his voice, because he isn’t angry or upset. He’s delighted.
“You are something different, aren’t you?” he murmurs. “Come along, child.”
“No.”
He gestures lazily toward the Palace of Water with its infinite jumping streams. Standing directly in front of the fountains is a tiny girl with her hair in tight coiled curls already escaping both braids and hat.
“Come with me now, or I’ll make that one drown herself in the fountain while the entire crowd watches, unable to move. In fact, I’ll make them think they wanted it to happen. And she’ll die face up, watching as no one helps.”
“I suppose I have no choice then.” Inge makes a show of standing and straightening the tie around her neck, then smoothing her skirts.
It’s to distract him, so he doesn’t notice that she’s left her notebook behind—and the flyer she was so desperate to show her friends, the one drawn by the artist who smashed his own hand.
She thinks she’s triumphed until a breeze picks up the flyer and flings it away from her things.
He stops, watches it blow away, and then turns toward her slowly. Too slowly. None of his movements make sense. They’re too fast or too slow. He doesn’t even try to blend in. What would that be like, she wonders.
“Can’t let them miss that.” He pulls another flyer from his flowing white shirt and tucks it carefully beneath her notebook.
“Forgive me,” Inge whispers as she follows.
She’s the lure, tugging her friends to their deaths.
Perhaps it was always going to end this way.
Perhaps someone in the future is already researching, tracing the evidence of their fate.
(It will be her father, and that makes her sadder than anything else.
He deserves better.) She wishes she could see all the details laid out herself so she’d know which decisions led to their deaths, and which, if any, let Anneke and Maher survive.
Inge would like to survive, too, but she’s not sure there’s any future where that’s possible, given what she’s planning to do as soon as she has him alone.