The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia pushed her vertigo to the back of her mind. She grabbed a cushion from her bed and threw it outside. It fell right onto the façade, just below the window, defying the gravity that should have sent it hurtling down.

  A transcendium.

  Taking a deep breath, she hoisted herself onto the edge of her window. She did her best to ignore the din her blood was making. All her instincts screamed that she would fall, and the night already seemed to be pulling on the foot she dared to stick outside.

  It was a transcendium. A transcendium. A transcendium.

  Ophelia’s knee leant against the stone. She focused only on the cushion lying on the façade, not far from there. Just forget what was up and what down. The only law that existed, here and now, was the one that kept that cushion in place.

  After endless maneuvering, Ophelia found herself kneeling on the wall.

  No, not a wall, she told herself with conviction. Ground.

  Resolutely, she turned her back on the void—the horizon—and went up—walked—along the façade. She had taken transcendiums hundreds of times at the Memorial, and at the Good Family, but none had made her feel as thoroughly unnerved as this one. What if the observatory building also had some manufacturing fault? What if just one misstep could cancel the effect of this artificial gravity?

  Ophelia felt the rough texture of each brick on the bare skin of her feet. She finally reached the cornice of a roof. She was almost there. She had to wriggle around to go from vertical facade to horizontal roof, and once she had made it, she remained for a moment, flat on her back, gazing at the stars, legs shaking. Her pajamas were drenched in sweat. She thought of those sections of arks that had fallen away, and of the airships sent into the sky regardless of the danger. It was much more, even, than a thought. It was something etched onto her body, from now on.

  The stepped roof descended toward the cloister, terrace after terrace. Ophelia twisted her ankle several times, but finally landed on the flagging of a gallery. Returning to her room would be another challenge; she’d think about it when the time came.

  She ran through the labyrinthine shadows of the cloister. She didn’t care about either the small stones under her feet or the mosquito bites on her arms. She didn’t stop running until she had reached the feet of the colossus, at the entrance of the tunnel that cut through the statue’s base.

  A shadow among the shadows welcomed her there with the click of a watch.

  “We have six hours and forty-seven minutes before the first gong of the morning.”

  Ophelia advanced slowly. The moment Thorn’s arms closed around her, up, down, left, and right returned to their rightful places. She had found anchorage, at last.

  THE SHADOW

  Inside the kaleidoscopic tunnel, it was total darkness. Despite the walls being crazed with countless mirrors, they reflected nothing of the two figures feeling their way along. Although Ophelia kept tripping on the tracks, she preferred the dark. The last time she had been through this tunnel in daylight, the flashing of all the mirrors had made her black out. To keep going, she relied on the mechanical grating ahead of her. Thorn’s leg didn’t lend itself to being discreet. If he had needed to tackle the maze of the containment zone to reach Ophelia’s room, the whole observatory would have heard him coming.

  Still, he walked jolly fast, regardless of his disability! Ophelia followed him without asking any questions, at a reasonable distance from his claws, but she wouldn’t have minded a longer rest. Thorn’s hug had lasted five seconds, watch in hand, before they had set off.

  He came to a halt right in the middle of the tunnel. Electric light bounced off the surrounding mirrors. It had burst through a door set into the wall, a door so low, Thorn had to bend double to get through it. Ophelia hadn’t noticed it on her journey in the wagon. She, in turn, entered a side corridor, closing the door behind her.

  Just as she was straining her eyes to get the measure of the place, in the flickering light of the bulbs, a weight on her nose made her jump. Leaning toward her, Thorn’s face suddenly appeared to her in minutest detail. The steeliness of his eyes. The scars cutting into his skin. The stern furrow across his forehead. And, underlying all this severity, an indefinable raw energy that affected Ophelia to her very bones. By restoring her glasses to her, Thorn had restored her sight, and so much more.

  He also returned her reader’s gloves to her.

  “They will have to be hidden. They were in a cabinet in the admissions office. I replaced them with substitutes that should fool them. And talking of substitutes . . .”

  Thorn held out his fob watch. At first, Ophelia thought he was showing her the time, then she realized it was about their reflections on its face.

  “Always check that your interlocutor has one. Don’t drop your guard, even for me. Eulalia Gonde and the Other will assume any face to deceive you.”

  With this advice given, he continued along the corridor at a hurried pace. He couldn’t stand fully upright without banging his head on the ceiling.

  “Let’s not waste time. There’s one thing that I must show you.”

  Getting her fingers into each glove was a tricky exercise for Ophelia, but she was keen to put them on to conceal Cosmos’s bite. Thorn knew what had happened; he didn’t need to see it. But would she ever, one day, be able to use her family power again? She hadn’t read another object since that exhibit from Anima’s Museum of Primitive History.

  “There’s one thing I must say to you, right now. They know who I am. Who I was. They may know about you, too.”

  If Thorn was surprised or bothered by this, he didn’t show it. Quickly pointing his finger, he indicated to Ophelia to watch where she put her feet. The corridor had just opened out onto an underground pool in which water, green with algae, stagnated. One more step and Ophelia would have fallen in.

  “If that is the case,” he replied, “they haven’t used it against me up to now. They are going all out to impress me, opening all doors to their departments, but keeping me well away from what’s essential on a pretext of medical secrecy.”

  Thorn made them skirt the pool along a border that seemed thousands of years old. His leg brace vibrated against the ancient carved stone.

  “However, the observers are not as well informed as they would have us think. They have no real decision-making power. It’s clear that each person working here only has a partial view of everything, unaware of what his or her neighbor is doing. The young girl observer who is my assigned guide is either the most ignorant of them all, or a better actress than my aunt. She reveres the very uniform I wear, bores me with praise, and never answers questions. In fact,” Thorn said, catching Ophelia as she skidded on the border, “I am scarcely more informed than I was at the start of my inspection. I don’t even know what’s going on beyond these walls. The radio sets no longer work, and the Official Journal is out of date when it reaches us.”

  “I have a lot to tell you.”

  Which Ophelia immediately did, as they entered a security passage with multiple doors that each had to be opened, and then closed.

  The summons to the amphitheater. The forced expulsions. The implosion of the automaton. The general rioting. The frantic escape with Octavio, Blaise, and Wolf. The unknown figure in the fog. Sanctuary at Lazarus’s factory. Arrival at the observatory, thanks to Ambrose. The admission test. The faulty objects. Cosmos’s secrets. Second, and her strange drawings. The telephone in the cellar. Elizabeth’s decoding work.

  It was a hasty, breathless, but pretty complete account of events. Thorn hadn’t stopped walking—he only slowed down when Ophelia described her visions of Eulalia Gonde’s past—but she knew he had registered each sentence as surely as a nanny-automaton’s recording spool.

  They now emerged onto a gangway overlooking a basement, where impressive machines steamed away like stationary locomotives. The temperature here was extreme. Ophelia
was still in her pajamas, but she wondered how Thorn managed not to roast under all the gold decorations of his uniform.

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “No. I’m making the most of a detour to check something.”

  Thorn lifted the cover of a container of meters, at the edge of the gangway. Despite his patent disgust at the grease and dust, even covering his nose with a handkerchief to examine the dials up close, he nodded with satisfaction. Taking a phial from his pocket, he disinfected his hands.

  “I’m done here. Let’s go up.”

  At the end of the gangway, a stone stairway was sunk into the rock. Lightbulbs flickered, almost giving up the ghost, just as they did all over the observatory. The walls were veined with interlacing pipes and roots.

  Ophelia started to climb the steps, not taking her eyes off her feet to keep them synchronized. Spiral stairways were the worst. And her toes, no longer very clean.

  “Are we still inside the statue?”

  “Yes. The observatory was built on the ruins of an ancient city. Several secret passages remain from it that are no longer used. I memorized all the plans.”

  Thorn’s voice sounded even lower in the stairway. He was holding the handrail firmly, only letting go to release the articulation of his leg brace, which sometimes seized up. Ophelia thought to herself that for him, too, going up couldn’t be easy. She sensed he was tense. She had already sensed it when in his arms. His claws were buzzing all around him like a swarm of wasps.

  After numerous spirals of stairs, and then a final secret door, they reached an anteroom with gleaming tiles. An elegant elevator allowed official access to it, certainly more comfortable than the stairs they had just come up. The anteroom led to a large ebony door with no handle, on which a golden plaque declared:

  DIRECTORS’ APARTMENTS

  VISITORS PROHIBITED

  Ophelia hadn’t expected to visit the homes of the directors of the observatory. Didn’t they risk coming across them? She had never met them, but wasn’t particularly keen on making their acquaintance that night.

  Thorn went over to a wall mirror in the anteroom.

  “Wait for me here.”

  Ophelia was struck by the uncompromising look, entirely devoid of pride, he gave his reflection before plunging into it. It was the first time he was resorting to his mirror-visiting ability in her presence. This power demanded confronting one’s true self. Thorn managed to do so, but didn’t appreciate what he saw, for all that.

  The door to the apartments opened onto him. Although it had no handle on the outside, but it did have one on the inside. Ophelia anxiously scanned the furthest reaches of what seemed to be an enormous library—barely visible due to the weak nightlights. The ceiling was so high as to disappear. All aspects of the décor were as refined as they were practical: clearly labeled shelves, aligned furniture, old-master paintings, clocks that purred, perfectly balanced busts on their pedestals, and not a frill pointlessly to overload such elegance. The exact opposite of the containment zone, with its deluge of faulty objects. But were the apartments unoccupied?

  “There’s no one here,” Thorn assured, closing the door.

  “What if the directors return?”

  “There are no directors. These apartments are used as a façade, and for storing archives. The real brains behind the observatory remain in the shadows.”

  Ophelia blinked. The collaborators were working for observers who worked for nonexistent directors?

  “What if Eulalia Gonde were the brains?”

  “I have considered that, so similar is this opaque, pyramidal system to her own, but I strongly doubt that she knows what is going on here. It is not in her interest that others should know how to replicate what she once did.”

  With these words, spoken harshly, Thorn opened one cabinet among the many making up the library. He handled everything with precision. Expertise. He would leave not a trace of his visit behind him. Ophelia noticed a fine standing mirror, which reflected back to her a little woman in mis-buttoned pajamas, and with curls sticking out in all directions. So it was through this mirror he had gained entry. It wasn’t the first time he had come here.

  While Thorn methodically examined the cabinet, Ophelia stood right up to one of the vast rose windows. What she saw through the stained glass took her breath away. She was looking down on the esplanades and pagodas of the entire observatory. They weren’t just rose windows; they were the eyes of the colossus. From here, now she had her glasses back, Ophelia could even distinguish the stars from the lights of the city. The minor arks formed a constellation all of their own, in which she spotted the Memorial’s beacon, the more discreet lighting of the Good Family, and, in the distance, a sea of clouds absorbing Babel’s brilliance.

  What had become of Blaise and Professor Wolf? And the scarf? Were they still staying with Ambrose? Had the hunt for outlaws continued? Had Octavio managed to tell the citizens what had taken place?

  Ophelia suddenly realized the degree to which the observatory shut them away, inside a kind of parenthesis.

  “It’s curious,” she murmured, against the window. “Never a high tide here. The sea of clouds keeps its distance. As if we’re forever in the eye of a cyclone.”

  When, pensively, she focused back on the observatory, she noticed an enclosure. Were those monoliths she could make out in the dark? They were tombs. Cosmos was right: the institution had its own necropolis. Ophelia couldn’t help but suddenly think of the third protocol from which, according to him, no one had ever returned.

  She turned away from the window and inspected the frames arranged on the large desk. The photographs in them were old, faded by time. She noticed one in particular. Former inverts, recognizable in some cases by their malformations, were posing in front of a carousel. What had caught Ophelia’s eye was the hole in the middle of the photograph. A whole silhouette had been cut out, erased from the group. Along with it had gone an arm, wrapped in a friendly way around its shoulders, belonging to a young boy who himself seemed somehow familiar. Who were they?

  “Here.”

  So absorbed was Ophelia in the photograph, she hadn’t heard Thorn approaching. He handed her a file.

  “What’s this?”

  “Medical images. They concern you.”

  Ophelia’s hands shook inside their gloves as they opened the file. It was noticeably thick. Inside, there were envelopes containing photographs, some enlarged. Ophelia featured in each one, in profile, from the front, and from the back.

  The photographs taken in the dark closet.

  Did they reveal what Ophelia hadn’t yet admitted to Thorn? Did they make clear that anomaly that would prevent her from being a mother, him from being a father? The thought of him finding out in that way, rather than directly from her, weighed on her.

  Ophelia examined the photographs beside a nightlight. She was so surprised, she forgot all her previous thoughts.

  A shadow.

  Blurred due to the flashes, it spilt from her body like ill-defined smoke, varying from one picture to the next. It was more extensive around Ophelia’s hands. Even more peculiar: the shadow seemed slightly out of line with the edge of her body, as if they didn’t quite match. Could that be linked to her inversion?

  “Those pictures were taken on the day you were admitted,” Thorn commented. “Now look at this one,” he said, indicating another photograph. “It was taken the following day.”

  The shadow was still there, but the mismatch had increased. In the space of just one day, a real separation had occurred between Ophelia’s pale body and her dark aura. Was that down to all those dissymmetrical movements she had been asked to do? On each new photograph, day after day, the separation increased.

  “I don’t know what they are doing to you,” said Thorn, “but it is changing you. A little more than that, even.”

 
His voice had become leaden. His tension was contained there, in these photographs.

  He began a gesture to stop Ophelia, but she was already making straight for the cabinet. He had taken infinite care to extract the file without disturbing, by even a millimeter, those beside it. Ophelia was incapable of doing this. She emptied the shelves, one after the other, scattering half of the files on the way, under Thorn’s frozen gaze.

  She absolutely had to see for herself how things were for the other subjects of the observatory.

  Each photograph had a shadow, but it was thinner among the powerless (as specified in their files), and only separated from the body among the inverts on the alternative program. It differed from one individual to another—more extensive around the ears of this person, around the chest of that one, around the throat of another one. Why these differences? Why was Ophelia’s shadow concentrated around the hands?

  “These shadows reflect our family powers,” she said, finally understanding. “That’s why my Animism and my claws are disordered. Because of the separation.”

  “That’s not all,” said Thorn, who, file after file, shelf after shelf, was trying to restore order where she had created chaos. “The Deviations Observatory holds a whole arsenal of measuring instruments, more or less concealed, in order to count the echoes. Not only those perceptible to eye and ear, but also, and especially, those that elude our senses. I studied these statistics closely.”

  Between tidying two files, Thorn handed Ophelia a piece of paper, traced with his compact, nervy handwriting. It featured mainly graphs, drawn with precision.

  “First notable fact: the echoes have multiplied since the collapse of the northwestern district.”

  Ophelia nodded. Yes, she had realized that.