The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,137

says. “But I haven’t found it yet.”

She meant it to be funny, light, but Henry frowns, deep in thought, and looks around.

“Okay,” he says, grabbing her hand. “Come with me.”

An hour later, they are standing in Grand Central.

“I hate to break it to you,” she says, looking around at the bustling station, “but I’ve been here before. Most people have.”

But Henry shoots her a grin that’s pure mischief. “This way.”

She follows him down the escalator to the station’s lower level. They weave, hand in hand, through a steady sea of evening travelers, toward the bustling food hall, but Henry stops short, beneath an intersection of tile arches, corridors branching every direction. He draws her into one of the pillared corners, where the arches split, curving overhead and across, turns her toward the tiled wall.

“Stay here,” he says, and starts to walk away.

“Where are you going?” she asks, already turning to follow.

But Henry returns, squaring her shoulders to the arch. “Stay here, like this,” he says. “And listen.”

Addie turns her ear to the tile wall, but she can’t hear anything over the shuffle of foot traffic, the clatter and rattle of the evening crowd. She glances over her shoulder.

“Henry, I don’t—”

But Henry isn’t there. He’s jogging across the hall to the opposite side of the arch, maybe thirty feet away. He looks back at her, and then turns away and buries his face in the corner, looking for all the world like a kid playing hide-and-seek, counting to ten.

Addie feels ridiculous, but she leans in close to the tiled wall, and waits, and listens.

And then, impossibly, she hears his voice.

“Addie.”

She startles. The word is soft but clear, as if he’s standing right beside her.

“How are you doing this?” she asks the arch. And she can hear the smile in his voice when he answers.

“The sound follows the curve of the arch. A phenomenon that happens when spaces bend just right. It’s called a whispering gallery.”

Addie marvels. Three hundred years, and there are still new things to learn.

“Talk to me,” comes the voice against the tile.

“What should I say?” she whispers to the wall.

“Well,” says Henry, softly, in her ear. “Why don’t you tell me a story?”

Paris, France

July 29, 1789

V

Paris is burning.

Outside, the air reeks of gunpowder and smoke, and while the city has never been truly quiet, for the last fortnight the noise has been ceaseless. It is musket rounds, and cannon fire, it is soldiers shouting orders, and the retort carried from mouth to mouth.

Vive la France. Vive la France. Vive la France.

Two weeks since the taking of the Bastille, and the city seems determined to tear itself in two. And yet, it must go on, it must survive, and all those in it, left to find a way through the daily storm.

Addie has chosen to move at night instead.

She weaves through the dark, a saber jostling at her hip and a tricorne low over her brow. The clothes she peeled from a man who had been shot in the street, the torn cloth and dark stain on the stomach hidden beneath a vest that she salvaged from another corpse. Beggars can’t be choosers, and it is too dangerous to travel as a woman alone. Worse still these days to play the part of noble—better to blend in in other ways.

A current has swept through the city, at once triumphant and intoxicating, and in time, Addie will learn to taste the changes in the air, to sense the line between vigor and violence. But tonight, the rebellion is still new, the energy strange and unreadable.

As for the city itself, the avenues of Paris have all become a maze, the sudden erection of barriers and barricades turning any path into a series of dead ends. It is no surprise then when she rounds another corner and finds a pile of crates and debris burning up ahead.

Addie swears under her breath, is about to double back, when boots sound on the road behind her and a gun goes off, cracking against the barricade above her head.

She turns to find half a dozen men barring her retreat, dressed in the mottled garb of the rebellion. Their muskets and sabers glint dully in the evening light. She is grateful, then, that her clothes belonged once to a commoner.

Addie clears her throat, careful to force her voice deep, gruff as she calls out, “Vive la France!”

The men return the cheer, but to her dismay, they don’t retreat. Instead, they continue toward her, hands resting on