Now You See Me

Forty-Seven: Her Eminence

"They had the tiniest feet I've ever seen."

I looked back. Chris was staring into a cabinet display in the atrium, looking mystified, with his pointer finger pressed to the glass. He caught my glance in the reflection.

"Look. They're like friggin.... Pencils, or something."

I rolled my eyes, and turned back to stare out into the main corridor, trying to dissect this misgiving that I had. No matter how long I stood here, and no matter how hard I stared, I didn't ever catch any definitive movement. I just couldn't shake the idea that someone – maybe something – was in here with us.

I really didn't want to contemplate the idea that after all this, I really was going insane.

"Do you think we're alone?" I asked him, when I heard him approach from behind.

"I haven't seen anyone." He cast me a worried look. "Have you?"

"No...."

"It might just be echoes," he suggested, "I get them still. When you've been pursued for a long time...or you've lived in fear for weeks and months...you imagine things, you know? Like hallucinations. Because you're too scared to fully believe that the danger's gone." His gaze became vague. "You just keep turning it over in your head until you're convinced that everyone's out to get you."

He was disturbing me, at the same time as he was making points that I reluctantly agreed with, but I wasn't ready to face the nervous wreck my mind had become just yet.

"I don't want to stay still for too long," I said, ignoring his worry again as I went down the steps and began to walk away up the corridor. I didn't think the compulsion to keep moving was all that irrational, considering that every time we'd stopped for any length of time, something weird had happened. I didn't want to give Vashde the chance to twig at what we were trying to do.

Leia, please, I begged silently, glancing up a statue as I passed it and almost imagining that its eyes were following me, Get us out of here.

"Well, I'm not going in anything we have no control over," Chris said, steering us away from the lift even though I'd had no intention of going inside.

"Not gonna fight you on that one," I muttered, following him at a more leisurely pace as he went down the stairs in a hurry, probably to try and put as much distance as possible between himself and that lift. He ducked inside another exhibition, and once he was through the doorway, he relaxed a little.

"This is better," he said. "It's lighter in here."

He wandered away, hands shoved in his pockets as he affected casualness, but I could see from the set of his shoulders that he was just as tense as I was, half-expecting something to happen around every corner.

"They weren't the best at portraits, were they?" he mused, stopping at another cabinet and peering inside with a small frown, "The early Europeans?"

I snorted. "Since when were you an art critic?"

"Since now."

He wandered off with a small smile on his face, but it was tense and fixed in place just like mine was.

"No, they weren't," I said, looking in at it myself. "And apparently they were always miserable."

He chuckled, but didn't say anything. We wandered about for a while, but I wasn't really taking anything in that I was looking at; my senses were all concentrated elsewhere in the building, listening for signs of danger. I jumped every time one of us tripped or scuffed a shoe on the linoleum flooring, and turned to run when Chris sneezed.