‘Ada! Get this unlocked!’
But Ada had frozen. Dread surged through her as violent and obliterating as the water surrounding them. They’d gone south. Towards the edge of the Île de la Cité. Towards the river. She’d blown a hole in the wall holding back the river.
It was the Seine flooding in.
‘Ada!’ Guil had climbed on top of a barrel, holding the musket aloft.
She jerked into action. Her ears were ringing from the explosion, making the rushing water sound far away and inside her head at the same time. Guil’s voice was muffled, his lips moving out of sync with the words. She waded through the water, reaching for her pins, kneeling by the lock. The water thundered against her back. It was up to her chest now that she was on her knees, so cold it stole her breath, made her body ache and numbed her fingers. She pushed too hard against one tumbler, and the pins pinged out of her grip and into the churning water.
She’d just killed them all.
Al’s hand under her elbow brought her back to herself. He pulled her up out of the water and pushed her onto a barrel next to Guil.
‘What happened?’
‘Lost the pins,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
Guil gave her a bony-fingered prod. ‘None of that now, Adalaide. You are the cleverest of us. You can figure this out. This is simply one of those puzzles you like: we are locked in a room that is filling with water, we cannot unlock the door and we cannot breathe underwater. What do we do?’
Ada tried to think, tried to feel the shape of the room in her head, play the options and weigh up their best chance of survival. But all she could think of was Camille’s stupid smirky smile when she had kissed her goodbye and how angry she was going to be if Ada got herself killed. And how disappointed that everything they’d worked for had been ruined.
She shook her head.
‘All right,’ Guil said quietly, and patted her hand as the water lapped at the top of the barrel. ‘If I may, I might have a bad plan to offer.’
‘Go right ahead,’ said Al. ‘I think we’re due to rename ourselves Battalion of the Bad Plans anyway.’
‘How long can you hold your breath?’ asked Guil.
Al stared at him miserably. ‘Oh, no. No, I don’t like where this is going.’
Guil edged along the tops of the barrels and then launched himself over to the dividing wall. Closer to the hole they’d blown out.
‘When I was a soldier, we knew if you were injured you had to keep moving. If you stopped moving, you’d die. If you tried to wait out the pain or the sickness, you’d die. If you tried to wait out the enemy, you’d die. No matter how painful or how frightening it was, we had to keep moving. Get out of danger, get back to your comrades, get back to help.’ He slid off the wall and waded through the water that reached his armpits. ‘Never. Stop. Moving.’
He hooked one hand around the edge of the hole. The force of the water was pushing him away, but he held on. Ada followed him and held onto the other side of the wall.
Al hesitated, then plunged into the water with a muttered, ‘Blaze of glory.’
‘Wait until the water has filled most of the room,’ said Ada as the water lapped her chin. ‘There should be less of a current to swim against then.’
They bobbed with the water as it rose, holding on to the wall, taking shallow, gulping breaths. Finally, when there was only a hand-span’s worth of air left in the room, Guil took a breath and ducked under the water. Al snapped a jaunty salute and followed him.
Ada was alone, struggling to tread water as the sodden skirts of her dress bunched around her legs. For a moment, she considered diving and searching for her pins. She could try the lock again – but she knew she wouldn’t be able to pull the door open against the weight of the water.
There was only one way out.
In the last moments of air, she ripped at her skirts, pulling them off so her legs were free to kick. She thought about Camille eating strawberries in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the juice staining her lips as red as the sunburn on her forehead. She thought about her father lining up all his fossils for her to play with. Her mother fanning herself on the porch of their house in Martinique, stretching her bare feet.
She’d survived the sickness that had taken her mother. Survived running away from her father. Survived the Revolution. She could survive this. They were the Battalion of the Dead. There was no fate, no destiny. Everything was a choice.
Gulping a lungful of air, Ada launched herself into the water and swam into the river.
Today she chose to live.
PART TWO
Who Shall Hang the Bell about the Cat’s Neck?
