The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Cosmos hurled himself at Ophelia so violently, they fell together onto the gravel. He gripped her shoulders to keep her face a breath away from his own. His slanting eyes bulged, his breathing was rapid, his lips curled back on teeth full of lentils.

  “Calm down!”

  Ophelia wasn’t sure anymore whether this order was directed at her, or at himself. She was totally flummoxed. She tried to push away this body crushing her own, but the more she struggled, the more Cosmos dug his fingernails into her shoulders. He was shaking her so vehemently that she was stunned by the impact every time her head hit the ground.

  “Calm down!” he roared. “Calm down!”

  She slapped a hand on Cosmos’s chin to push him away, but in vain. Trapped under him, she looked around for help. Some collaborators—to her, merely gray figures—were watching the scene while still taking notes. The inverts had gathered around in alarm; among them, Second was manically drawing, as if she feared Ophelia and Cosmos breaking the pose. As for the nanny-automatons, they made very sure not to move, as if this situation wasn’t part of their remit. Wasn’t one of them going to intervene?

  Instinctively, Ophelia turned her claws on Cosmos, just as she had on the crowd in the amphitheater, but despite how close they were, she missed him. That power was as off-kilter as her Animism. She yelped when Cosmos bit her hand. He seemed compelled to tear her to pieces.

  Ophelia stared, wide-eyed. They were going to let him get on with it. They were going to let him kill her.

  Cosmos’s teeth and fingernails finally let go. A collaborator had grabbed him at the waist.

  “Move away, Eulalia.”

  A female voice. Ophelia didn’t wait to be told a second time. She dragged herself on the ground, her wounded hand pressed to her stomach.

  The woman collaborator restrained Cosmos’s raging body as best she could, while he screamed and foamed at the mouth. An elbow in the face knocked back her hood.

  It was Elizabeth.

  Ophelia had completely forgotten her being employed by the observatory. She was bleeding at the mouth. The blow had split her lips, maybe even broken a tooth, and yet she kept her cool. She gripped her arms around the middle of Cosmos, whose movements were gradually losing their violence, and whose features were slackening one by one. His empathy was absorbing Elizabeth’s calmness like a sponge. The anger gradually faded from his eyes, leaving just vacancy.

  Finally, he let himself fall, limply, forehead to the ground.

  “Sorry,” he stammered. “Sorry . . . Sorry . . . Rosy . . . Sorry . . .”

  Elizabeth released him, gently. Her weary gaze, weighed down by heavy eyelids, turned to Ophelia, ignoring the collaborators, who had stayed back and were coughing like stern judges.

  “You’re not looking too presentable.”

  Ophelia pointed at the spatters of blood mixed in with her freckles. Even without glasses, she could see that much.

  “You’re not looking too great, either.”

  They exchanged a smile lasting but a twitch of the lips. The nanny-automaton pulled Ophelia by the ear. Fighting against a machine, even a dolled-up one, was a lost cause. Ophelia could only stumble through an endless maze of carousels, galleries, and stairs to her bedroom, in which she was locked up.

  “YOU HAVE BEEN DISOBEDIENT, CHÉRIE. YOU WILL BE DEPRIVED OF GAMES AND MEALS UNTIL . . . UNTIL TOMORROW.”

  Once alone, Ophelia spent a considerable time barging into the room’s rickety furniture, pacing feverishly up and down, wrestling with all her questions, listening to the gong on every hour of the afternoon, and then, battle-weary, she sank into the suds of a bath. Her shoulders were covered in scratches, her hand was swelling around the bite, and, from the mirrors’ distorted reflection, the mechanical fingers of the nanny-automaton had left a pinch-mark on her ear. It was the back of her head that hurt most: among all the gravel she kept finding in her hair, she could feel the contour of a massive bump.

  Fine.

  Entire days without event, and now, in a matter of minutes, she had discovered the true nature of the Other, and triggered Cosmos’s fit of rage, along with the displeasure of the observatory.

  Now that she considered the situation with some hindsight, she understood that her biggest mistake was what she had said into that telephone receiver. She had asked the Other to meet with her again. What if the message really had reached him? If he took her at her word, decided to accept her invitation, and turned up at her room, devastating everything on the way? She might know more about him now, but she still hadn’t a clue how to go about defeating an echo capable of destroying entire arks.

  Ophelia was just putting her pajama top on back to front for the fifth time, patently incapable of telling left from right, when she heard a scraping noise. Hurried steps could already be heard, disappearing down the corridor.

  A folded piece of paper had been slipped under the door.

  As soon as Ophelia opened it up, dried fruit rained down onto the floor. She had to bring the page right up to her eyes to decipher the minuscule handwriting.

  So sorry.

  Now you know why no one’s waiting for me outside.

  But someone is waiting for you this evening.

  A doodle accompanied the note; it vaguely resembled the statue of the colossus. Ophelia’s pulse started racing. Thorn! Had he used Cosmos to arrange a meeting with her? How? The observatory had kept him apart from the inverts from the start.

  She screwed the message into a ball and disposed of it in the toilet. A sunset blazed between the slats of the shutter. And her? How would she get herself out there this evening? Thorn was doubtless counting on her Animism to unlock the door of her room, as at Berenilde’s on the night of her getaway. What he didn’t know was that her family power was no longer working normally. The handless clocks in her room spat their parts in her face whenever she went past, and she had abandoned propping her bed up with books, since these just had fun pulling away in the middle of the night.

  “Eulalia?”

  Ophelia quickly pressed her ear to the door. That voice . . .

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Not so loud.”

  The whisper from the other side was beyond quiet. She had to bend down to the keyhole to hear it properly.

  “I’m not allowed to be here. I wasn’t allowed to intervene earlier on, either. No interaction with the subjects, that’s the rule for all collaborators.”

  Behind the calm tone, some emotion was discernible. Ophelia knew Elizabeth well enough to be aware of how important hierarchy was to her. That she had broken the rules, first to come to her aid, then to visit her, was totally unexpected.

  Ophelia gazed at the scattered dry fruit she had forgotten at the foot of the door.

  “How is Cosmos?” she asked, anxiously.

  “Better. He’s having his meal in the refectory right now. His empathy suffers from a rare deviation. He doesn’t merely pick up the emotions of others. He feels them and amplifies them, like a resonant chord, until it becomes a chain reaction. Next time you’re in a bad mood, avoid him.”

  Ophelia pressed her forehead to the door. Today she had lost control, and, worse, she had made Cosmos lose it. This was basically what the observatory hoped for. They were infantilized, isolated, and deconstructed, to be reshaped at will.

  She had let this place get the upper hand. And she hated that thought.

  “Elizabeth, can you open the door to me?”

  “Sure.”

  Ophelia’s relief was brief.

  “I’m kidding. I’ve disobeyed enough for you, Eulalia. Do you know that, right now, Sir Henry is carrying out an inspection of the observatory?” she continued, to stop Ophelia from insisting. “The incident between you and Cosmos reached even his ears. Normally, he isn’t authorized to infringe medical secrecy, but they agreed to make an exception, given the se
riousness of the situation. Sir Henry asked to question Cosmos himself, following your . . .”

  Elizabeth searched at length for a term that wouldn’t contravene the Index.

  “Our fight,” Ophelia said, impatiently.

  “Your disagreement,” Elizabeth corrected, reprovingly.

  So that was how Thorn had been able to convey his message. For that alone, Ophelia didn’t regret having got herself a bit roughed up. She stared at the blackness within the keyhole. But what about her? Could she use Elizabeth to communicate with Thorn, without the observatory knowing? Up to what point did the two of them mutually trust each other? Beyond their apprenticeship at the Good Family, they had nothing in common.

  “Elizabeth, why are you here?”

  “You know that, don’t you? You saw me signing that contract with the Genealogists. It’s rather I who should be asking you that question. Finding you in this observatory, among the inverts, was pretty surprising.”

  Ophelia remembered the procession of collaborators she had encountered on the first day: one of them hadn’t been able to resist turning around as she passed.

  “I meant now, outside my room.”

  “Ah.”

  A slight jolt indicated that Elizabeth had leant against the door.

  “One day you asked my advice, Eulalia. Do you remember what I replied to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Remain neutral. Observe without judging. Obey without arguing. Learn without taking a stand. Take an interest without becoming attached. Fulfill your duty without expecting anything in return. That’s the only way not to suffer. The less one suffers, the more efficient one is. The more efficient one is, the better one serves the city.

  Ophelia had learnt this advice by heart. It was some of the worst advice she had ever been given.

  There was hesitation in Elizabeth’s breathing, through the keyhole, and then the words tumbled out, whispered reluctantly:

  “I can’t cope anymore. I can’t tell you about the work I’m doing here. I don’t even have permission to talk to other collaborators about it—the containment principle applies to us, too. We’ve all sworn allegiance to the observatory. But equally, I’ve sworn allegiance to the Genealogists. They . . . they expect me to inform them as soon as I’ve managed to decode everything. They tell me it’s my duty as a Forerunner. Hierarchically, they’re my superiors, but professionally, the observatory is my employer. Whom must I obey, Eulalia?”

  Ophelia was overcome by profound pity. She couldn’t see Elizabeth right now, but it was almost possible for her to imagine her long, flat body pressed to this door like that of a child. She was the same age as her, was more intelligent than her, but making her own choices terrified her to the point of asking her, a virtual stranger, to make a decision for her.

  “You must find the answer to that question yourself. What do you, Elizabeth, want?”

  “To make myself worthy of the helping hand Lady Helen offered to me when I was in the street. I have never felt more able to help her than here.”

  This time, there had been no hesitation. Ophelia was puzzled. In what way did Elizabeth think she could pay her debt to the family spirit?

  When the latter spoke again, her voice had recovered its seeming composure:

  “The Genealogists are Lords of LUX, and Lords of LUX know better than anyone what is in the general interest. So I’ll leave it up them to decide, as I always have. I shouldn’t have lowered myself to doubting them; I’ll confess my sin to them next time we meet. This observatory shouldn’t have anything to hide from them, either. Thank you for your advice. I’m now going to return to the collaborators’ quarters.”

  Ophelia frowned. Thank you for her advice? Elizabeth hadn’t understood a thing she had tried to tell her. Once again, a missed opportunity between them.

  “Thank you for intervening despite the rules,” she said, with a sigh. “I appreciated that side of you.”

  “Violence is prohibited in Babel, and, protocol notwithstanding, you didn’t seem to be particularly consenting.”

  Ophelia picked up the rustle of a habit on the other side. A hood pulled down. The signal of departure. She might not get a second chance to broach the subject.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I know about Project Cornucopianism. Have you seen it yourself, this Horn of Plenty?”

  Such was the silence through the keyhole, Ophelia thought Elizabeth had gone. But her reply finally came, more weary than annoyed.

  “I repeat to you: I can’t say anything. Not only because I don’t want to, but also because we, the collaborators, have no overall view of the project. I devote myself to the task I have been assigned, period. You should do the same. Ah, before I forget.”

  A sound of paper under the door. Ophelia squinted at the sheet. She immediately recognized Second’s style; it was probably what she was drawing during Cosmos’s attack, but it wasn’t a new version of Octavio. She had done a self-portrait that faithfully, and somewhat cruelly, depicted the disproportions of her face, with its unequal eyebrows, deformed nose, first pimples, irregular lips, mismatched ears, and that eye devoid of its iris. She had added, for some reason, a big scratching-out in red pencil, covering half of her face.

  Ophelia turned the sheet over and was surprised to find another drawing. She stared, wide-eyed. This one depicted her, for the first time; a tiny her in the middle of the white paper. Two characters stood beside her: a very old lady to her right, and an unidentifiable, monstrous creature to her left. That wasn’t all. Second had wielded her red pencil on Ophelia’s small body, so that it virtually disappeared. Blood.

  “Second was determined to give it to me,” said Elizabeth, behind the door. “I think she wanted me to pass it on to you. I’m counting on you, obviously, to hand it over to the collaborators tomorrow. Don’t ask me why, but the observatory keeps all of Second’s drawings in its archives. I must leave you now. Knowledge serves peace.”

  With this parting shot, spoken with renewed fervor, Elizabeth went off, steps fading away at the end of the corridor. Ophelia couldn’t help but feel disappointed in her. Octavio had gone through the same crisis of conscience, but, unlike him, she had made the choice not to choose.

  Having said that, she had divulged more to Ophelia about her work than she thought she had. The use of the verb “to decode” wasn’t insignificant. This Forerunner had transformed the Memorial’s database thanks to the single language, from concave to convex, of punched holes. If she had been capable of inventing her own code, she was surely capable of breaking someone else’s.

  Furthermore, she seemed convinced that her work would be of service to Helen. But what could a family spirit desire most if not understanding her own Book? The observatory expected of Elizabeth the same thing that Farouk had expected of Ophelia, and that no one had, to this day, managed to accomplish: deciphering the language used by Eulalia Gonde to create the family spirits.

  Ophelia still didn’t know why or how, but that, too, was an integral part of Project Cornucopianism. She had so much to say to Thorn . . .

  Pensively, she watched the light fading between the slats of the shutter. Night really had fallen, and she still didn’t have a clue how to meet him at the designated place. She had been unable to bring herself to make Elizabeth her messenger. She was far too indoctrinated a citizen; she could have given herself up, straight after helping her.

  She would have to manage on her own.

  Ophelia stopped herself from looking at Second’s gift, in the bulbs’ flickering light, from again seeing herself covered in blood. She refused to think about the nail incident. No, this drawing had nothing to do with her vision at the glazing-and-mirror store. That old woman didn’t represent Eulalia Gonde, that monster didn’t represent the Other, that white expanse of paper didn’t represent the void that would swallow them all.

&
nbsp; That certainly wasn’t the hidden meaning of the story.

  Ophelia tore up the drawing and threw it into the toilet—too bad for the archives! She pressed her ear to the door’s keyhole. First, a succession of soft thuds: the bare feet of the inverts, each returning to their room. Then a metallic clicking: the nanny-automatons locking all the doors before leaving the residence.

  Once all was silent, Ophelia went over to the shutter. She slid all her fingers between the slats, for the strongest grip. She pulled hard, again and again. All objects in this place had flaws. She hadn’t found that of the door, but she would find that of the window. One hinge gave way, then a second. A final tug threw Ophelia back on to the bed, shutter in hands.

  She leant out into the night. The warm wind lifted her hair. It was the first time she had a view of the back of the residence. Its façade was sheer as a cliff. Ophelia could just make out, a few meters from her window, the shutters of the neighboring rooms. Out of reach. She looked up at the higher stories of the residence. Inaccessible. She then peered down, toward the ground, to gauge the distance. She couldn’t see it. She squinted, hoping to dispel this myopia that turned the stars into a vague froth of lights. Down below, there were neither cobbles nor grass nor roofs.

  There was nothing there.

  The window of her room looked out onto the void.

  Ophelia walked slowly backwards, as if the rug, the floorboards, the bricks were about to disintegrate beneath her feet. She huddled in a corner of the room, as far as possible from this square of night, and the draft it had created. The feeling of vertigo made her spin within her own body.

  She would never be able to climb down this wall, not with the certainty of the void if she fell, not with two hands that were clumsier than ever. She would not be able to join Thorn, not tonight, not ever.

  This place was stronger than her. Stronger than them.

  Ophelia pinched the bite mark left by Cosmos. The pain felt like a welcome release. She surely wasn’t going to give up so fast, when Thorn had gone to such trouble to arrange a meeting with her. She had to get a grip on herself, and think. Reason like a Babelian. The city was made up of many minor arks; being next to the void had been part of daily life for so long that the architecture was adapted to it. The observatory would never have risked lodging study subjects so close to mortal danger.