Chapter 31 #2
“There’s a special railway that comes directly to this building.
It brings constant deliveries of fuel, which is fed to the boilers, where every hour two hundred thousand liters of water are transformed into steam.
The steam is then carried through pipes to the ground floor of the palace.
” He stomps his foot to indicate that the real work is happening beneath us.
“Once there, it drives engines attached to powerful dynamos. Those produce a current with the force of forty thousand horses!”
He rattles off other numbers I have no context for, but the meaning is clear.
Never before has so much electricity been channeled through a single building.
Nearly every international pavilion around us is contributing, too.
He seems rather put out that the Germans are contributing on average far more than the French, and lingers on those statistics so long I can no longer feign interest.
“And where is it all controlled?” I ask, trying to get him to move on from listing the brands of engines each country is using.
“In a room beneath us, one man at a switchboard controls all of this.” He sweeps his arm out to encompass the Palace of Electricity, the Palace of Water, and beyond.
“He pushes a button, a rod descends, and with a sizzle and pop and bright arc of light, electricity flows where we want it! Different amounts, depending on which rod he chooses. Which reminds me!” He moves us to the center of the goddess’s rotunda to where two metal poles are waiting.
They’re startlingly plain compared to everything else in here.
“A demonstration! Come,” he says, grabbing my hand.
Diavola steps forward protectively, and for the first time he notices her.
I think she makes him notice her. She can control whether she is perceived, at least on some level.
Which is interesting. Maybe she’s making it easier for me to see her.
But then why wouldn’t she make it as easy for Maher, too?
Sometimes when I meet him at the end of one of his shifts, he seems genuinely startled to discover that Diavola is still with him and has been the whole time.
“Yes, you, too,” our guide says, adjusting his tie. “You hold here.” He fastens my hand around the pole.
“Wait.” I’m suddenly nervous. “Will this hurt?”
“No.” He pauses, frowning. “Not exactly.”
“I’m not exactly reassured,” I say, trying to cover up my alarm. So many people are watching us. Diavola isn’t concerned with anything except staying close by. She grips the other pole.
The guide grins. “Now take each other’s hands.”
I’ve brushed up against her accidentally-on-purpose, and there was our clandestine cellar meeting, but to deliberately reach out and take her hand for the first time? It’s dangerous. She’ll know exactly how much I want to lace my fingers between hers and never let go.
Diavola is hesitant, too. I wonder if her reticence is because she feels nothing. Whatever this demonstration is meant to be, it won’t work on her. I’m making too much of it. It’s just a simple electricity experiment. I take Diavola’s hand in mine.
The moment of contact jolts through me, setting every nerve ending alight. It’s as though all my life I’ve been asleep and suddenly I’m awake. I can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t do anything but feel this current connecting us.
My eyes are the only thing I can control, so I look at Diavola to see if she’s feeling it, too. But she’s gazing down at our hands with a strange, unreadable expression. There’s a flush in her cheeks, and she lets out a little gasp.
The guide throws a switch and control returns abruptly to my limbs.
I don’t know how long that lasted. It felt infinite, but I think it was mere seconds.
And still, where my palm touches hers and our fingers interlace, I can feel that spark between us, as fragile as faith, as miraculous as electricity.
Diavola lets go and walks away without a word.
Our guide doesn’t even notice her absence. “The current was able to travel between them when their bodies connected both poles. Can you describe what you felt when your hands touched?” he asks me cheerily.
“No,” I say. How could I ever explain it to someone like him?
I rush out after Diavola. It’s like she’s trying to disappear; even I have a hard time focusing in on her. But I can always find her, and I see her standing next to one of the pools, staring down. She looks bereft.
I hurry to her side. “It’s all right,” I say, my voice low so I can control the emotion threatening to overwhelm me. “I felt it, too.”
This is it. This is the moment I release all remaining loyalty to my father and give myself fully to this impossible thing between Diavola and me.
I don’t know what it means, and I don’t care.
She’s been my torment and obsession for ten years, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
I want her like I’ve never wanted anything else.
But Diavola won’t look at me. She’s staring at the dancing water, cascading down in sheets, headed toward the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
“Is the Watcher nearby?” she asks.
I don’t want to talk about the Watcher. But of course we should; that’s why we’re here.
Humiliated and ashamed of my absurd fantasies getting in the way of our actual work, I nearly answer.
But then I think of something. Until the other day, Diavola had no idea I recognized our devil by his scent.
So why was she so confident that I’d be able to pick him out of a crowd without her?
“Why do you think I’ll know him when I see him?” I ask.
“Because you can see me,” she says with a lift of her shoulders.
“Why would that be the same?”
At last she turns to me. The bereft expression hasn’t left her face. Something has changed between us. I don’t know what, and I’m terrified.
“It’s not the same,” I answer before she can. “I see you because you changed me. You say you move through the world like a ghost, changing nothing and being changed by nothing. But that’s not true. I know you down to my bones, Leda.”
She flinches, closing her eyes. But she moves imperceptibly closer to me. “That’s not it,” she says. I could wrap myself in her voice and live forever in its soft embrace.
“It is,” I insist.
“Death nearly claimed you as a child when it took your brother. You devoted your entire adult life to studying death, watching it, examining it. Growing so close to death, inviting it to be your constant companion and your singular focus, made you capable of seeing it in all its forms. Including mine. You don’t see me, Anneke. You see death.”
I take a step back, stung by her dismissal.
But…is she right? I did almost die as a child and grow up in a home choked by the aftermath of death’s visit.
And I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand death, trying to see evidence of it where no one else did.
Is that really why I can see her? Would I see the Watcher just as clearly?
Have I imagined the bond between us, the intensity, the meaning?
No. Because Diavola sees me in a way no one else ever has, either.
That’s why I couldn’t let go of her letters.
Why I read and reread them, why I hid them away and kept them to myself.
I saw myself through her. Even when I hated her and wanted her dead, it meant more to me than I could ever admit to be studied and appreciated by someone so remarkable.
“You’re wrong.” I reach for her fingers, needing to feel the spark between us the electricity revealed. It didn’t create that spark, though. It’s always been waiting there for us.
“No.” Her words sting as though she’s slapped my hand away. “You should go home.”
I clench my hand into a fist. She’s rejecting me, and I don’t understand why. My impulse is to flee in humiliation, but I dig in, instead. If she’s scared of what’s between us, I’ll show her I’m not. “Our shift isn’t over yet.”
“Not back to the house here. Back to Amsterdam. Leave the rest to me. If you stay, you’ll only get more friends killed. Wasn’t losing Dávid enough?”
I stagger back, gutted. I open my mouth to lash out at her, but then I notice the details.
I always notice the details. The intense loss is gone from her face.
She’s wiped it clean. Gone, too, is the flush I know I saw back in the Palace of Electricity.
She’s withdrawing from me faster than I can chase her.
Becoming the monster I once thought she was so I’ll forget the woman I know she is, too.
“Why are you trying to hurt me?” I ask.
A crack in the ice of her expression forms. Her fear seeps upward, pooling in her eyes. She can’t hide it, not when I’m looking at her. “I’m trying to save you.”
“From him?”
“From me. I want to consume you, Anneke Van Helsing, and it terrifies me more than anything.” Her hand hovers a heartbeat away from my face.
I tilt my head like I’ve seen her do so many times.
My cheek against her hand. I know she doesn’t feel anything, but surely, surely she feels this.
What’s between us transcends senses, transcends the divide between life and death.
She stares deep into my eyes, and her own go flat and empty, like a door shutting between us. “I release you from my curse. Be free.”
The fountain goes off behind us in a great crash of water. The crowd cheers and someone bumps into me, trying to get a better view. I stumble. When I look back, it’s too late.
Diavola’s gone.