Ben booked the first flight he could get out of Dulles to Charles de Gaulle and hadn’t slept at all. The worst had been the waiting. He’d carried only a duffel bag with the few things he grabbed—an extra pair of jeans, two shirts, a polo, and underwear, but then time slowed and he waited at the gate, on the airplane, and in the taxi line. Now that he was here, he needed to be doing something. Expecting to be furious with Gaston and Barrow, he found that both men appeared not to have slept or showered in days.

“Espresso?” Gaston suggested.

Ben shrugged him off. “No. We need to get out and find her.”

“You’ll never last without it.” Gaston pushed the tiny cup toward him. “And you need to last.”

“We’ve tried to find her.” The other man, Edward Binghampton Barrow, removed his reading glasses and pushed the composition books toward him. “We think she may have been contacted by Le Cirque Secret. If that is the case, then she isn’t ‘in’ Paris anymore in the literal sense.”

“What does that mean?” Ben took a sip from the tiny cup after stirring sugar in it with a tiny spoon.

“The circus is in another dimension,” said Barrow.

Ben laughed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” said Gaston. “We searched her room. There was an envelope with her name on it, but it was empty. We think she had a ticket.” It seemed to Ben that this was a well-worn discussion between the two men.

Barrow shook his head. “She knew we’d never let her go alone. Lara had no intention of telling us. If history repeats itself, there was only one ticket—and it was for her, alone.”

“I never would have allowed her to go alone.” Gaston rubbed his face, his gray stubble showing.

“There was no ‘allowing’ Lara to go. No one controls her. She had to go,” said Barrow, who now seemed to be an expert on Lara after just a few days. “You can’t get a ticket to Le Cirque Secret—not after all these years—and not go.”

Ben could tell that tensions were high between the two men, but he wasn’t sure the argument was helping Lara.

“You’d have let her go, if you’d known?” Gaston had sunk back into the chair, but now he leaned forward, like he was readying for another round.

“Yes,” said Barrow. “The scholarship required it.”

“There is no fucking scholarship here, Teddy,” said Gaston, his voice rising. “We’ve left her alone in a daemonic circus.”

“Daemonic?” Ben hadn’t heard anyone use the term daemonic.

“Yes,” the two men said in unison.

Barrow’s voice rose; his clipped English accent grew more pronounced. “You can sit there all day and think that you could have held her back from going, but you couldn’t have. And you wouldn’t have.”