A Drop of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

bedazzled arms around her knees, and starts talking. It’s like watching waves come in on a beach, or someone vomiting after a party: endless, and you wonder where it all comes from.
    Will looks over at us, slightly alarmed. Now he gets up and moves to a different sofa. Take me with you! I want to scream, but he’s not so good with mental telepathy. And Lilly’s nowhere close to done.
    She talks about baking quinoa vegan brownies. Her alternative-hippie homeschooling parents, whom she clearly adores. A 3-D-looking tattoo of a fly on her arm, which she now realizes was a bad idea because it makes her look like she has the plague or is demonically possessed. She was grounded for getting that tattoo, and when she was done being grounded she got a secondtattoo on the sole of her foot. She sang The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” in her high school’s talent show and didn’t win. She doesn’t actually show me the tattoos. And why is she still in high school ?
    I throw my head back and stare up at the little lights in the ceiling. Lilly’s barely even breathing between paragraphs. She’s definitely too enraptured by her own stories to care that I’m being socially abominable. Her voice becomes a buzz in the background. Everything becomes a buzz. Air systems, jet engines, the clinking of glass—all of it fades into a single flat line of sound.
    I sit up. Glance around. It’s so weird. Like an eerily slow-moving dream. Hayden is lying on a sofa, sipping Orangina through a straw. Will and Jules are next to each other, and Jules seems to be trying to make conversation, and Will seems to be trying not to die of awkwardness. I look to the sliding panel that separates us from Dorf and the rest of the jet. The glass is frosted, shot through with clear strips. I see a sliver of Miss Sei—a leg, some skirt. One eye wide, watching me.
    There’s a beeping, sudden and shrill, and sound envelops me again. The captain’s voice breaks through the speakers: “Miss Sei, Professor Dorf, we’recoming up on some turbulence. Would you like to—”
    A commotion on the other side of the glass. The speaker goes off in our compartment, but I can still hear it, muffled, in the one ahead of us.
    I shiver. Lilly looks over at me, questioning. I slide my earphones back on and turn the music up loud.

Aurélie du Bessancourt—August 29, 1789
    Mama returned to her chambers well past midnight. I heard her on the stairs, the noisy clatter of her shoes as she hurried up, her door creaking shut. An airy, velvet hush descended. But still the château seemed to groan and shift, as if some small object at its heart were pacing, unable to come to peace.
    The next morning Mama joined us for breakfast. Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes oddly watery. I should have realized something was not right. Were I not such a fool, I would have silenced my sisters with a severe look and we would have eaten quickly, communicating solely through glances and the tapping of silver, and then fled to dusty, unused guest rooms where we could discuss the matter in private. But I wanted dreadfully to hear tales of the new palace. When my sisters crowded around her I joined them, asked Mama if the palace was very large, and how many candles it must take to light the hallways, and was it warmin the depths, or bitter cold, and was there a salle d’Apollon like the one in Versailles?
    She would not speak a word. She sat gingerly at the table, peeling an orange with a paring knife, cutting it into neat, jewel-bright wedges, and when the servants brought her a bit of fried liver in a painted china dish, she blanched and pushed it away. We continued to chatter mercilessly. We would not cease. And after a while Mama began to weep, putting her hands to her ears, and the orange lay on the table, a knobbly spiral of peel, and the rich flesh within hacked to bits.

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    Exhibit A—I had a boyfriend once. I