Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [131]
“Whoa! Tuck those back in!” I say. Breasts don’t usually scare me, but I’m still flinchy from my walk through Deadville.
Amadé just waves her away as if this happens to him all the time. He’s walking fast. I have to trot to keep up with him.
I see carriages go by. They look as if a fairy godmother made them. There’s no curb, no sidewalk. There’s only the street and it’s muddy. How can it be muddy? There’s no mud in Paris because there’s no dirt in Paris. It’s a city. The streets are asphalt. If they weren’t, the cars would get stuck. But there are no cars, either. No cabs. No buses. No mopeds. There are no signs, no traffic lights. There are a few streetlights, and they have flames burning inside them. The buildings look shorter. There are no airplanes in the sky. And it stinks. It stinks almost as bad as the catacombs did. Of old cheese and feet and rotten cabbage and sewers.
It’s not a rave; there’s no music. It’s not Halloween, because it’s not October. And it’s not a costume party, because there’s no guy in a gorilla suit. So what the hell is going on?
“Come on,” Amadé says, tugging on my arm.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” I ask him.
“It’s not good to be seen. To get in their way.”
And then I get it. And it’s so obvious I start laughing at myself for being so weird and stupid. This whole thing is one big movie set. They’re shooting a night scene in some big historical epic and the extras are running around and Amadé knows we’ll get yelled at if we mess up the shot.
And the dead people were all props. That’s why Amadé and his friends didn’t get upset at the sight of them. And the stink? Probably some kind of method-acting spray-on stuff to keep the actors in the moment.
I start looking around for the giant lights that crews use to shoot night scenes. And the big fat cables and generators and the burly tech guys who operate them. I look for the trailers that shelter the stars between takes. And the tables covered with food in case the crew gets hungry and the angry little peons whose job it is to keep the great unwashed away from Rob Pattinson. But I don’t see them. I only see skinny, dirty kids swarming all over the place.
“Isn’t it kind of late for child actors to be running around?” I ask Amadé.
But he doesn’t hear me. He’s halfway across the street. I catch up. And then we’re at the entrance to the Palais-Royal.
“Hey, it’s been real,” I tell him.
“Have something to eat before you go. Please,” he says.
“I’ve got to make tracks,” I say.
“I fear for you. If the guards see you with blood on your face, they’ll want to know what happened. They’ll detain you. At least come inside and wipe the blood off.”
Maybe he’s right. I really don’t want to get stopped by the police. “Okay,” I say, following him.
The Palais courtyard is busy and raucous and filled with extras dressed as film characters. There are drunks and dandies and gamblers. We get to the Café Chartres and that’s hopping too. The studio must’ve hired it to be the canteen. As we sit down at a table, I look around at the actors. They have bad teeth. Scars. Zits. Greasy hair. Dirty nails. It all looks so real. Makeup’s got the Oscar nailed for sure. I look around for some sign of modernity—a cell phone, Gitanes, a wristwatch, a pen. I can’t even find the espresso machine. It’s remarkable. Every trace of the twenty-first century is gone.
Amadé orders food. I tell him I’m not hungry but he insists. The waiter brings wine. I don’t want any. My head’s still woozy from the wine I drank at the beach. I push the glass over to him but he doesn’t drink it. Instead, he takes out a handkerchief, dips it in my glass, and rubs at my forehead with it.
“Have you ever heard of water?” I ask him, wincing.
He snorts. “You know as well as I do that you don’t want to rub your head or any other part of you with Paris water. The wound would be rotten within a day.”
A man comes to our table. His clothes are covered with food stains. Amadé greets him warmly, calls him Gilles.
“What happened to