She drew them around a corner and, in the next instant, felt a blow to her chin, a knee to her leg. The breath wheezed out of her, and when she finally inhaled, dazed and on the floor, there was the smell of laundry and starch. A young girl, a maid, was sprawled out on the floor in front of them, her uniform ripped at the skirt and slightly askew from where she’d slammed into Etta.
Julian had managed to stay upright and say something to the maid in halting Russian. The maid pointed, her whole arm shaking, toward a door at the end of the hallway.
The maid took the opportunity to scamper off, picking up her small valise and all but running down the hall in the opposite direction, her blond braid streaming out behind her. It was the last clear sight Etta had before the electric lamps around them surged with brightness, and, with a hiss, flashed out completely, leaving a few scattered candles in sconces to light a hall bigger than Etta’s whole apartment building in Manhattan.
“Well, that was bloody ominous. She said to go this way,” Julian told her, jerking a thumb up ahead, to where the small hall dead-ended at the nondescript door Etta had seen before.
“You speak Russian?” Etta asked as they began to run again.
“Er, just barely. She either said this was some sort of inner servant hall, or their quarters, so I guess we’ll be in for a surprise, won’t we?” Excitement bubbled out of him, giving him a slightly breathless quality.
The door flew open then; the sudden light momentarily blinded Etta, who threw up an arm to shield her eyes. The silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway, a box-shaped flashlight in his hands—it wasn’t until he made a noise of surprise and turned the light away that Etta saw it was one of the men who had met them outside, still wearing the palace’s ornate livery. He adjusted his grip on the light so they could see him press a finger to his lips and wave them forward.
Etta and Julian exchanged a look.
“What are the chances…” he began.
“…we’re about to be murdered?” Etta finished as they made their way forward. “The better question is, what do you have on you to defend yourself?”
“Um…besides you? Did I need something else?” he whispered. “You won’t let them take us alive, will you, kiddo?”
At any other moment Etta might have laughed, but the truth of it landed hard: there was only so much Julian could do to contribute to their survival. If it came down to it, she would be the one fighting. And she had no doubt that if things went badly, he’d leave her to deal with the mess.
But she also knew that if anyone was going to help them get back to the passage in the woods, it would be him.
In exchange for something else, I’m sure, she thought grimly. Not for the first time, she felt her heart crimp at the thought of how much easier this would be, how much safer she would feel, if it were Nicholas at her back. Even if neither of them knew where to go or how to find the passages, there would have been an equality between them. The thought of putting herself in the hands of a born-and-raised Ironwood again, even temporarily, made her feel sick to her stomach.
“Come, come, this way—” the man said in heavily accented English. “This way—”
Julian’s pace eased off long before Etta’s; she reached the man first, her fingers curled into fists at her side, trying to read his face in the darkness. The man studied her with open horror. “Is he dead?”
Etta hesitated before nodding. The man closed his eyes, turned his face upward to steal a calming breath. Then he stood at his full height and pressed the handle of the flashlight into her hands.
“Follow this hall to the end,” he said haltingly. “There is a window left open. Go now.”
“Wait a tick—” Julian started, but the man pushed past them both, and went the opposite way.
“All right,” Julian said after a beat of silence. “Have to admit, I’m still waiting for the firing squad to spring up and take us out, Romanov-style.”
“That is not funny,” Etta said sharply, stalking down the hall.
“Lighten up, Linden-Hemlock-Spencer,” he whispered back, jogging to catch up to her. The inner hall muffled the chaos outside of it, but only just. The gunfire was endless, blurring into thunder. “Maybe we should just hide—stay here until the trouble passes?”
“Until someone finds us and finishes us off?” Etta said, catching the first hint of the open window’s freezing draft curling toward them. The way they probably grabbed Henry. Every time she blinked, the explosion seemed to set off again behind her eyes, blinding, disorienting, incinerating her from the inside out.
Did I really leave him?
With a start, she realized she was crying.
Did I leave him there to die?
“Come now, old girl, it’s not as bad as all that,” Julian said. “We’ll be fine. I can get us out of here in a jiff. There’s a passage at the Imperial Academy of Arts, just across the Neva River. How do you feel about sunlight and warmth and a charming lack of Gatling guns?”
FROST COVERED THE WINDOW; at some point, the dark sky had begun spitting down snow. Some of it had blown inside through a small crack, leaving a mess on the floor. A few different sets of footprints were already pressed into the slush, leading away from the window—clearly, others had taken the chance to leave.
Outside, she heard that same phrase being chanted in the distance: “Ochistite dvorets!”
Etta got her hands under the window and tugged it up high enough to slip through. The chill cut straight through her flimsy dress and the silk slip beneath, but it was a good sort of cold—it lifted the mental fog, sharpening her thoughts.