Chapter 33
Maher and I push our way through the crowds at the gate and are waved in by one of my Swallows. “If any of us have children,” Maher starts.
“Which seems unlikely,” I interject.
“There’s still some hope for Inge, but yes, in the unlikely event any of us have children,” he amends, “we must name them after Louis Lumière. All of them. Male, female, one or twenty. Each and every one will be named Louis Lumière. Louis Lumière Van Helsing. Louis Lumière Idrissi. Louis Lumière Van Engelenhoven.”
“I appreciate that in this scenario, neither Inge nor I have succumbed to marriage, choosing to have and raise our own Louis Lumières on our own.”
“We’ll have a compound. The Louis Lumière Center for Communal Child Rearing. And they’ll all learn photography.”
“Can we also name a few of them Camille?”
“I’ll take it into consideration.”
I share Maher’s sentiments. Not only has Louis gone out of his way to help us, giving us contacts and letting us attach his name to a fictional camera device, he also connected us with a woman from Cameroon named Camille.
She’s a genius in wiring, machines, and electricity.
She didn’t ask any questions about why we wanted to electrify a cage kept in our cellar, her gaze steady through small round glasses over large round eyes.
She merely took it as a challenge, muttering to herself the entire time, disappearing and reappearing with wire and bits and bobs as the men who worked for her lugged down a heavy but compact engine.
I have no idea how any of it functions. But this afternoon, with a shout of triumph louder than any noise we’d heard from her yet, Camille declared it done. A low hum in the air was the only evidence.
“Please take my word for it when I say this works. Don’t test it yourselves,” Camille said, showing us how to switch it on and off.
“At this high voltage, you have about an hour of electricity. Maybe less. Then you’ll need to refuel.
The engine must be shut off while you do that.
Please contact me in the future with any similar tasks you might have.
That was fun. I hope whoever you’re trying to kill is deserving of their fate.
” Then she put her hat back on and left.
Maher must be thinking of her, too, because he says, “I can’t decide if Camille is terrifying or one of the more attractive women I’ve ever met.”
“Both,” I say.
We’re giddy. To go from despair to certainty in just a couple of days has been heady.
We’re so close. Everything is in place. All that’s left to do is find the Watcher.
With the other miracles we’ve pulled off, I feel certain we will.
It’s only a matter of time, and not very much time at that. We’re going to get him.
I’m going to get him.
And Diavola, wherever she is, will know that I did what she couldn’t.
She’ll know that these attempts to cut me off, to push me away, to protect me from him or her or whatever else, were insulting.
I can’t decide whether I want her to come back and apologize, or to linger out of sight forever.
I can’t decide if I’m more furious with her for leaving, or with myself for caring so much.
I broke myself trying to earn my father’s love even after he was dead. Even when I knew he never would have given it anyway. I can’t do the same with Diavola. But I don’t know how to cut out the part of my mind that has been devoted to her for so long.
I’ll figure it out. I’ll have plenty of time, once the Watcher is dead.
“We’re late,” I say, but we’re both practically skipping with excitement.
“Inge will forgive us when she hears it works.”
Inge’s visiting the Palace of Electricity to double-check the numbers on the demonstration Diavola and I participated in.
She wants us to be running ten times that amount of current, just to be certain it will render the Watcher incapacitated and vulnerable.
She and Camille got in an argument, with Camille insisting the current she was producing would be enough to knock out an elephant, Inge demanding a more specific metric so we could adjust based on results, Camille informing Inge that a more specific metric would be unintelligible to her, Inge saying nothing is unintelligible with enough study, and Camille declaring that elephant incapacitation made just as much sense as a unit of measurement as horsepower did.
Camille had a point, in my opinion, but Inge was as flustered as I’ve ever seen her.
“I’ll meet you outside the Palace of Electricity in two hours,” Inge declared to Maher and me before shouting in the direction of the cellar, “where I will learn an actual metric for repeatable experiments!”
I don’t doubt that in the last three hours—we really are quite late—Inge has learned the entirety of what it takes to generate, sustain, and transmit electric current. Probably just to spite Camille, a woman she’ll likely never see again.
The Palace of Water is bustling now that it’s dusk and the lights are coming on to full effect, dancing along with the water. But as we get close, my steps speed up. Something’s wrong. Something’s—
I grab Maher’s wrist. “He’s here.” The smell is as strong as I’ve encountered since the cave. It stabs my sinuses, making spots dance before my eyes. “Put the wax in your ears.” I do the same and we rush toward the fountains.
“Inge!” I don’t care if we’re making a scene. I shout her name as loudly as I can.
“Inge!” Maher moves to separate, but I won’t let go of his wrist. I won’t risk splitting up. We should never have let Inge come here alone. I should never have let her out of my sight.
But with so many people here, surely she’s safe. She’s smart, she knows what she’s doing, she knows to be wary. She’s not in any type of pain that would draw the Watcher to her. Is she?
“I don’t see her anywhere,” Maher says.
It’s dark now, but the flashes of electric light make it even harder to pierce the evening. Maybe she got tired of waiting for us. Maybe—
My eyes stop on a table. All the others are occupied by weary sightseers enjoying a few minutes to rest their feet and watch the water. This table is empty because it looks taken. Someone has left a large, cloth-bound folio on top. A folio I know well, down to the embroidered initials.
I tug Maher’s arm. He sees it, too. We should run, but our steps get slower in unison, dread creeping outward from our hearts into our limbs. On the table is Inge’s work. Her lists, notes, maps, and details. All the information she gathers and stores away until it’s needed.
Inge would never leave it unattended. That’s enough proof of something terrible, even without his lingering stench.
We take the wax from our ears and I lift the folio to reveal a flyer. Diavola stares up at me from the paper. Someone has rendered her in near-perfect detail: a dreamy, sensual version floating on a sea of dark hair, staring outward.
“The artist’s initials.” I trace the subtle “MM” in Diavola’s locks. “Inge was right. The artist was the key, after all, and she found it. We know where the Watcher is now.”
“The House of Curiosity,” Maher whispers. “Who is that woman, though? She looks familiar.”
“It’s Diavola,” I say.
Maher’s face goes darker, red flushing beneath the brown. “She’s been playing us the whole time. Lounging in the cellar laughing at us. And all those days we spent walking the fair with her. She was probably steering us away from him.”
“She hates him,” I say softly. “I know she does.”
“She abandoned us. If she’d stayed, Inge wouldn’t have been here alone in the first place. And besides, Diavola hasn’t told us everything. We can’t trust her. We’ve been fools, because we failed to ask one simple question and demand an answer.”
“What?” I know I’ve been a fool, in so many ways. But what is the one question that would have protected us?
“She said the Watcher feeds on pain. But what does she feed on?” Maher picks up the flyer, holding it so tightly the edges crumple in his fingers. “How does she survive?”
I asked her, once, and she never answered.
I had so many other questions that I never thought to ask again.
And now she’s gone, and the Watcher has Inge, and maybe Maher is right.
Maybe Diavola was working against us this whole time.
Maybe it was all an elaborate setup, a game they play as the only way to entertain themselves after so long wandering the earth.
My panic and desperation are both rising, filling me with a sound like the hum in the Palace of Electricity, a current of pure need. I have to get Inge back. I have to. But something is bothering me about that flyer.
The image staring back at me isn’t quite right. The hair and the eyes and the features are accurate, but there’s something mocking in Diavola’s expression. And as much as she has teased, plagued, and even criticized me, I don’t think she’s ever outright mocked me.
So why did the Watcher want her to look that way?
“Maybe,” I say, “it’s Diavola on the flyer because the Watcher is trying to do exactly what we were: catch the attention of one special monster. He thinks he’s the only one in the world who knows what Diavola looks like, and he’s baiting her. Trying to get her to find him.”
“Why, though?” Maher asks. “If he wanted revenge, he could have stuck around Lesvos and waited for her.”
I shake my head. I can’t breathe, I can’t think. I’m trembling with this horrible desperate terror that I’ve already lost Inge forever and I just don’t know it yet.
All those years of wishing Joren were my father, of wanting what they had, and I’m going to be the one to break it.
I’m going to cost the best man I’ve ever known his only child.
She’s my responsibility. They’re all my responsibility.
All you’ll do if you stay is get more friends killed.
Whether it was a threat or a warning, Diavola was right.
I should have taken Inge and Maher and run.
I won’t give up. Not if there’s any hope of saving Inge still. “Diavola doesn’t matter. All that matters is the Watcher has Inge. We have to go to The House of Curiosity, now.”
Maher shakes his head. “It’s a trap. If we go there, he has all the power.”
“I know. But it’s Inge. Our Inge.”
He closes his eyes, defeated, and then he nods. We’re in agreement.
“Which way?” I ask.
Maher lets out a dark laugh. “Inge would know. But I think—” He squints, scanning the area around us, then points. “That’s the exit that will put us closest to the street we need to find.”
“Let’s go.” I’m getting Inge back. I’ll do whatever it takes to save her, and keep Maher safe, too. Myself? That’s negotiable.
As we turn, a figure in white careens toward us like a ship in a storm, crashing against everyone in her way, unheeding of the destruction she’s causing as she sends people flying before coming to a stop right in front of us.
Diavola’s hair whips around her, her dress already ripping at the hem from the force of the gale only she can feel. Her pupils are blown out, the black eating away almost all the whites of her eyes. She’s exquisite, and I hate her, and I’m so relieved to see her again I could cry.
“You needed me,” she says. No apology, no explanation. But she’s not wrong.
Diavola hasn’t looked away from me. Maher quickly folds the flyer and tucks it in his pocket.
For once he knows exactly who Diavola is, and he doesn’t trust her.
He’s right not to. If we hope to have a chance at distracting or fighting the Watcher long enough to rescue Inge, though, Diavola is right. We need her.
“He has Inge,” I say. “And we know where he is. Come on.”