Chapter 25
“There you are.” Gigi was waiting on the edge of her bed when Selene slipped into the room. She jumped to her feet. “Come with me.”
“Why are you still awake?” Selene said coolly. She pressed her hand to the sheaf of music tucked into her dress.
She knows.
Panic rose like wisps of shadow inside Selene. She needed her secrets kept for a little longer. This could ruin everything.
“I found something. I think I know what’s going on with Madame.” Gigi grabbed Selene’s hand, pulling her out of the room, down the stairs, and into the near-perfect dark of the sleeping opera house.
Selene practically ran to keep up with Gigi, moving as lightly as she could. Gigi’s steps were soundless, infused with a dancer’s grace and elegance and intention. “Where are we going?”
They’d crossed the back of the auditorium, down to the farthest corner of the opera house. Gigi stood in front of a door. This space was forbidden as much as the space beneath the opera house. But Selene had never dared cross this line.
“It’s in my mother’s room.”
“Is she—”
“A carriage from the palace arrived an hour or so ago and she left with it. I don’t know how much time we have.”
Gigi whispered a song into the lock. It surprised Selene that she knew it, but it shouldn’t.
Gigi had lived in this suite before she’d moved into the dormitories.
Like Selene, she’d had a life before all this.
Madame Giroux had been Gigi’s mother first, teacher second.
What she was now, neither of them quite knew.
There was a strange sadness to the realization.
Selene wasn’t the only one who had lost something.
“Come on.” Gigi was already inside. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
Selene hesitated. This felt like such a violation. But so what? Madame didn’t care about her privacy or well-being. Whatever strange agenda she had, Selene didn’t have the space to care anymore.
She stepped inside, shutting the door behind her.
The suite was simpler than Selene expected, tidy and stark.
They stood in the parlor. To the left was a small kitchen and dining area.
To the right, a study with a piano at its center and floor-to-ceiling shelves.
They were almost empty, with a few scattershot books and tidy stacks of sheet music.
Two doors waited like sentinels ahead. One was cracked enough so Selene could see the vague shape of a twin-size bed, a small table, and a rocking chair draped in a white cloth.
Tiny ballet slippers hung on a peg on the wall, next to paper flowers pinned in clusters. This had been Gigi’s room, once.
That left a single door.
It opened on well-oiled hinges. The sounds of the street drifted through the cracked window.
They were far enough from the rest of the opera house that no music would permeate this space, even if there were a full production on the stage.
Something about that made Selene sad. The rest of the room was stark and cold. It might as well be a prison cell.
Gigi shut the curtains and dropped onto the floor, pressing her fingertips against a knot in the wainscoting.
“I was always curious about this panel as a child, so much so that my mother moved her dresser in front of it. You can see the scratches in the floor from where she moved that, again and again.”
The panel slid open.
Selene sucked in a breath and dropped down to her knees beside Gigi, singing for light.
There was a space here that extended down into the dark, like one of Victor’s secret passageways.
It was cluttered with loose papers, strewn books, a torn tapestry.
A bouquet of dry flowers was half crushed by a huge, cracked wooden frame with its contents facing the wall.
A porcelain doll with a split face looked up at Selene accusingly with its single, blue eye.
Selene reached for a silver locket. The clasp was broken, and it flipped open.
It had held a mirror once. The jagged teeth still clung to the edges.
Gigi held up a yellowed newspaper clipping.
Magician Leaps from the Roof of the Opera Magique
Hopeful in L’Opéra du Magician is in the hospital after jumping off the roof of the Palais Renard.
Lamplighters found the student in the early hours of the morning and contacted the authorities.
She was transported to the hospital and is currently being treated for substantial injuries.
Monsieur Maurice de Lancret, manager of the opera house, reports that the student had been acting strangely, speaking of ghosts in mirrors.
“There is an immense pressure in this competition,” says de Lancret. “We are devastated by the loss of a talented magician. Our thoughts are with her as she heals.”
There is no statement from the student at this time.
Gigi handed Selene a second paper, pointing to a single line.
Brigitte Giroux has been removed from L’Opéra du Magician due to injury.
“Look at the dates.”
One day apart. Selene had wanted to believe this was a coincidence. But the truth of it settled beneath her skin. Madame had been the girl who’d leapt off the opera house. Madame had been the one to remove all the mirrors. Madame knew about the ghost and had tried to keep him secret from the world.
“I knew she’d gotten hurt.” Gigi put the papers back where she’d found them. “But I didn’t think she was the girl who jumped. She’d talked about it like it was someone else.”
“It probably feels like it was.” Selene shifted some of the other items, careful to note their placement.
“She’s been trying to protect us from that all along.” Terror shone in Gigi’s eyes. “It’s the ghost, Selene. It’s real.”
Yes, Selene thought. He’s more real than anyone else I know.
Instead, she shook her head. “I think the manager was right. The pressure.”
“Then why did she come back if not to save others from the same fate?”
Selene blew out a breath. “She said sometimes young girls make foolish promises.”
Gigi considered that. She pulled out one of the books. “These are older prints of some of the history texts. Odd.”
Selene leaned into the space, singing light and holding it up toward the cracked frame.
The glass was spiderwebbed in the corner, casting lines over the architectural plans of the opera house.
So much of the past, so much of what once was.
She could use this if she found the right thing.
There was a bundle of letters just beyond it.
Selene recognized the handwriting before she saw her name—again and again—a thousand times over.
Oh, to stop the world and imagine a different life with that boy. Oh, to look into his mind and trace the years they’d spent apart. Oh, to have lived a life where she knew she mattered for all this time.
A door opened. The familiar sound of Madame’s cane striking the wood floor echoed in the room beyond them.
Selene’s heart pounded in her throat. She looked at Gigi and then back around the room. She moved quickly and quietly to the window. If they could get out fast enough, they could cling to the ledge. But the window wouldn’t open any more than it already was.
That left only one option.
Gigi figured it out a split second before Selene. She was already inside the wall, gesturing for Selene to join her.
The doorknob turned.
Selene ducked inside, pulling the panel shut behind her—badly. There was a gap, small enough that Selene could just see the sliver of Madame.
Gigi reached for Selene, grasping her hand tightly.
Madame settled onto her bed. One shoe after the other fell to the floor as she let out a deep, bone-weary sigh.
Madame rolled up her sleeves, fingers tracing the constellation of scars on the back of her arms, over her fingers, her palm. A terrible knowing settled over Selene. Madame hadn’t merely seen the ghost. She knew him. She had been there. She had seen his magic. She had done it with him.
Once, there’d been a girl who’d grown so frightened of the ghost she jumped off the roof of the opera house.
Selene had always thought that the girl had died.
Brigitte must have sung her safety out of instinct.
Not enough to completely stave off injury, but enough to survive.
Selene’s eyes lingered on Madame’s cane.
Had she let the rumors of her own fall circulate to spread fear and prevent the students from going to the ghost and learning his secrets?
She wanted to scream at Madame, to beg her to let him out. But if she confirmed Madame’s fear, what was to stop her from getting rid of the mirror? What was to stop her from letting it shatter?
What now? Gigi mouthed.
Selene leaned into the framed architectural plan. She could make out this corner of the opera house, this suite, which had initially been intended for guests. The trick panel was marked, as well as the space they were hidden in.
There was a passageway that connected to the main hallway.
Selene committed it to memory. When she was finished, she put a finger to her lips.
She took Gigi by the hand, moving gingerly down the passage.
She kept her free hand against the wall, feeling for where to turn in the dark.
She wished she could bleed herself a thread to lead them out.
But with Gigi here, all she could do was push through the dark and hope against hope that they wouldn’t be caught.
There was a click.
A flood of light.
Selene pulled Gigi around the corner a beat before Madame’s voice echoed in the passage. She’d be back for the letters. She’d be back for everything if she could.
“Hello?”
Selene clung to the wall, barely moving, barely breathing.
The light faded. The panel clicked shut.
Selene had never moved so quickly in her life, twisting through the narrow spaces and around the tight corners. When they finally burst through the exit, they were both breathing heavily. Selene didn’t stop in the hallway. She ran—barely caring about the sound—back to their room.
Gigi was a few steps behind her. She collapsed onto her bed. “That was close.”
“Maybe we should go back.” Selene wanted what was rightfully hers. She wanted to sift through the secrets. She wondered if she’d find a name written on a scrap of old sheet music, discarded and forgotten. It would be so easy to save the ghost that way. But when had her life ever been that simple?
“Knowing my mother, all those things will be somewhere else within the hour. She works quickly.”
Selene knew all too well. She put on her nightgown, ran her fingers through her hair to catch the knots and spiderwebs. The adrenaline was already running down, fatigue settling in.
Gigi’s voice was edged with exhaustion. “I just wish I could talk to her about it, you know? Her life before, why she feels the need to keep it hidden. I wish I could talk to her about anything at all.”
By the time Selene thought of a suitable response, Gigi’s soft breaths had turned to snores.
Selene knew one thing for certain: the opera house had more secrets left for her to uncover. One of them would be the key to the ghost’s freedom.
And Selene was running out of time.