Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [117]
Please, Fauvel.
He picks up the bracelet, examines it.
Twenty of your best rockets. The finest you’ve ever made. Fine enough to shame the stars.
Still he says nothing.
Please, Fauvel.
He pockets the bracelet and the coins and kisses my cheek. And I know what’s coming. I know. But he can do no differently now. And neither can I.
In the end, at least, I got what I wanted—a stage to stand on, an audience to applaud. For all of Paris watches me now. They talk of nothing else. In the Assembly, in the coffeehouses, in the laundries and factories and market stalls, they talk of the fireworks. The broadsheets are full of my doings, every one. No player has ever managed that, not even the great Talma himself.
But there is only one in the audience I care about now. Only one.
It’s for him I move through the night streets. For him I climb the steep rooftops. For him I run away after, only one step ahead of the guards. It’s for him I scramble and hide, nurse my oft-burned hands, sleep with the dead.
I know it cannot last. I know my time comes soon. My treasures dwindle. Bonaparte rages. Fauvel beetles off to the guard.
But still I go forth with my rockets.
For oh, how it grieves me to think that Orléans might be right.
How it grieves me to think that the world always wins.
58
I turn the page. There’s one more entry. Only one. The last one. It’s dated 1 June 1795.
And it has blood smeared across it.
“No,” I say. I slap the diary shut. “No.”
What a fool I was to hope. The ugly smear is blood. Alex’s blood. Something terrible happened. The guards got her, I know it. She was cornered or wounded, but survived long enough to write one last entry. What does it say? That she died in agony? Alone? That she died for nothing?
As I look at the smear, I realize that the diary is shaking. No, it’s not the diary. It’s my hands. My whole body. The Qwells I took when I got up aren’t working. I go to my bedroom, grab the bottle, and take another one, then pace around waiting for it to kick in.
Ten minutes later, I feel worse. The pills are doing nothing. I look at my hands. They’re still shaking. There’s a rumbling inside my head, a roaring. It sounds like an earthquake. The pain is seismic. It’s going to shake me until I crumble and fall to pieces. I have to walk. Somewhere. Anywhere. I have to stay ahead of it.
As I’m standing in the entryway, deciding where to go, I hear footsteps on the landing and voices and then a key in the door. It’s Dad and G.
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound normal.
“Hey,” Dad says.
“Hello, Andi,” G says.
G looks awful—tired and rumpled and bleary-eyed. A strange guy walks in behind him. The guy’s wearing a dark suit, an earpiece, and sunglasses. He’s huge. I can see his biceps bulging under his suit jacket. He nods at me. Doesn’t smile. Dad tosses some folders on the table in the hallway, drops his briefcase on the floor. Pulls his sweater off and drops that on the floor, too.
“Um, Dad? Who’s—”
“This is Bertrand. From the French secret service,” he says, yanking the door to the hall closet open.
“The secret service? I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
He pulls a blue blazer out of the hall closet, shrugs into it. “We finalized the results. On the heart. Just this morning,” he says. “And then somebody leaked the damn data. In another hour or so it’s going to be all over the Internet. Everything’s screwed up.”
“The president wants a briefing,” G adds. “Immediately. He doesn’t want to get the info from CNN. His office sent a car for us. After we finish that, we’ve got to do the press conference at St-Denis. The Trust is scrambling like hell to pull it together.”
“Wait … how did you even get here, G?” I ask. “The airports are closed.”
“I drove.”
“All the way from Germany?” I say in disbelief.
“I started out yesterday morning. The trains were impossible, so I rented a car.”
“Andi, have you seen my yellow tie anywhere?” Dad asks.
“It’s here,” I say, grabbing it off the back of the sofa. He takes