The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  Mediana didn’t answer. She didn’t need to be either Eulalia Gonde or the Other to represent a threat. During their mutual apprenticeship at the Good Family, this Seer had imposed her own rules on Ophelia. She had used her power to intrude forcefully on her memories, and to blackmail her, seriously jeopardizing both herself and Thorn. The last time Ophelia had seen her had been right here, at the observatory, in the visitors’ conservatory, shortly before the landslide. At the time, Mediana had been so traumatized by her encounter with the Memorial sweeper that she had been incapable of holding a conversation. Slumped on the elbow ledge of the kneeling stool, her posture conveyed the very same apathy. Her pajamas still floated around her like baggy skin.

  And yet, Ophelia sensed that she was completely different.

  “What are you doing here?” she insisted. “Are you also part of the Alternative Program? Unlike me, you’re no invert, as far as I know.”

  Mediana still didn’t respond, but Ophelia resolutely kept her distance. She didn’t trust her praying pose.

  She loathed the thought of needing her.

  “Could you at least indicate to me where the exit is?”

  A spasm lifted the corner of Mediana’s lips. Ophelia suddenly realized that she was kept on the kneeling stool by shackles around her ankles and wrists. She wasn’t deep in thought; she had been chained here against her will. EXPIATION. CRYSTALLIZATION. REDEMPTION. Was that really what the second protocol consisted of? Treating the subjects like culprits?

  “I made a mistake.”

  Mediana had spoken very quietly, but the nave’s acoustics carried her voice up to the rafters. She seemed to be dehydrated. How long had she been attached to this kneeling stool?

  Ophelia’s glasses darted nervously from one part of the nave to another. An observer could suddenly appear from a chapel at any time. She had no desire to linger, but no one, not even Mediana, deserved such treatment.

  She searched for the key to the shackles in the statue alcoves. Not finding it, she emptied a pot of incense sticks and, having rinsed it in the baptistery, filled it right up. Awkwardly, she brought it to Mediana’s lips, but she just let the water run down her chin, without swallowing any. Her wide-open eyes stared straight ahead, beyond the bowl, beyond Ophelia, beyond the nave’s walls. They shone with a mix of fever and fervor.

  “I made a mistake,” she repeated, slowly. “I spent tutta my life chasing after little secrets of no importance. I will soon be ready for the third protocol.”

  This was how Mediana had changed. Behind her lackluster appearance, she glowed with the same intensity as the illuminations inlaid in her skin.

  Ophelia leaned toward her ear.

  “Have you, yourself, seen the Horn of Plenty?”

  Mediana didn’t seem remotely interested in the question. Her gaze became even more distant, as though lost in search of inner horizons.

  “I can’t release you,” said Ophelia, sighing, “but I can try to alert your cousins, if they’re still in Babel.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what you’re being made to suffer here is unacceptable.”

  “I’m expiating.”

  “And because no one has returned from the third protocol.”

  Mediana’s mouth twitched provocatively, revealing something of the former queen of the Forerunners.

  “I won’t make the same mistake again. No more little secrets. The only one worth pursuing now is the one the observatory has promised me. But first, I must crystallize. Only then will I know redemption.”

  Mediana’s linked hands shook with conviction as she spoke words that made no sense to Ophelia. At least one thing was crystal-clear to her: she must quit the program before ending up like this. In one of the laboratory files, someone had written that she was suitable for crystallization and forecasted for protocols II and III. All because Second had drawn a split in the shoulder of her shadow.

  “What is crystallization? What use is it to them?”

  Mediana licked her dry lips. Ophelia suspected her of taking a certain pleasure in knowing something that she herself didn’t, as if even here their rivalry was back in force.

  “To them? They didn’t tell me. To me, crystallization will be of use to obtain what I have always desired. Genuine knowledge! An assolutamente new perspective on our reality.”

  Ophelia pushed her glasses up on her nose. Eulalia Gonde had come out with the same thing after her encounter with the Other on the telephone in the cellar. That echo had, one way or another, completely changed her vision of the world. Was crystallization the phenomenon that allowed one to invoke the Other? The Deviations Observatory seemed desperately in need of him, and of his knowledge.

  Mediana must have taken Ophelia’s silence for disdain. Despite her physical exhaustion and bleary eyes, she was jubilant.

  “So you reckon only inverts like you have that privilege, signorina? That’s missing the essential.”

  “So what is the essential?” asked Ophelia, impatiently.

  She couldn’t linger much longer. If she got caught here, when she should have been locked in her room like all the inverts, she, too, would end up shackled to a kneeling stool.

  “Renunciation.”

  Mediana’s reply was swallowed up by a rumble of thunder across the nave. Steps approaching. Such was the resonance here, impossible to know which side they were coming from.

  With a vague flicker of her eyelids, Mediana indicated a confessional, a few flagstones along, to Ophelia. The sound of steps was getting louder, second by second. There were several of them. Ophelia couldn’t afford to hesitate any longer. She hid behind the yellow curtain of the confessional stall just as Mediana was addressing those arriving:

  “Show me the path to crystallization. Per favore.”

  By moving the curtain slightly, Ophelia saw a gathering of observers around Mediana’s kneeling stool. It was the first time she was seeing any of them since entering the containment zone. They were recognizable by their yellow garb, shoulder automatons, and black-lensed pince-nez.

  They said nothing. They merely looked at Mediana.

  As Ophelia edged back into the stall’s darkness, she noticed a movement beside her. Where the grille separating confessor and confessant should have been—according to the religious-history handbooks she had studied, in any case—there was a mirror.

  Here, at last, was the way out she was looking for. To which destination? As far as she knew, the only mirrors in the observatory that weren’t distorting were in the directors’ apartments, and she wasn’t supposed to go there until nightfall. The directors may not exist, but someone looked after the medical files that were stored there. Going there during the day was too risky.

  In her mind, Ophelia pictured the Memorial. And inside the Memorial, the Secretarium. And inside the Secretarium, the hanging mirror. Over there, in Eulalia Gonde’s secret room, she would finally be able to think, away from prying eyes.

  She plunged deep into her reflection, slipping into the in-between as though suddenly thin as a sheet of paper, and then emerged into broad daylight.

  She found herself face to face with a flabbergasted old lady. Wearing an academic gown, she held a book in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. No less taken aback, Ophelia wondered what a professor was doing here, before realizing that is was she herself who was not in the right place. She had just burst out of an alcove mirror, straight into the Memorial’s libraries, bang in the middle of a public consulting room. All those using the facilities had interrupted their reading to peer at this barefoot intruder, who was breaking the most basic rules of the dress code. There were fewer of them than before the landslide, but enough for Ophelia not to be able to go unnoticed among them.

  She tilted her glasses up at the terrestrial globe of the Secretarium, floating weightlessly at the center of the atrium. On two occasions, she had
landed over there unintentionally, and now that she deliberately wanted to get there, she’d bungled it?

  The separation of her shadow.

  It affected not only her ability to read and animate objects, but also to pass through mirrors. Right, how was she going to get back to the observatory? Already, some Memorialists had alerted security, while the good citizens were pointing accusatory fingers at her.

  A Necromancer made straight for her.

  “This way, mademoiselle, if you please,” he called out to her. “I must proceed with checking your papers.”

  Obviously, Ophelia didn’t have them. They had remained in a cabinet, kilometers away from here, and the “AP” tattoo on her arm would be no substitute. Beyond the observatory walls, she was now nothing but an outlaw. If she allowed herself to be apprehended, it would mean immediate and definitive expulsion from Babel.

  She swiveled round to face the mirror through which she had accidentally arrived. Separated shadow or not, she had to get away. Now.

  “Mademoiselle,” the Necromancer called, more firmly.

  Already, Ophelia’s body temperature was starting to fall. She knew that this man wouldn’t hesitate to freeze her on the spot if he suspected her of running away.

  “Mademoiselle!”

  Suddenly, Ophelia felt herself slowing down. The mirror was just a breath away, but hers was already turning into condensation. Her lungs were hurting her. She saw her own face turn wan behind her glasses. In the background, the Necromancer’s uniform kept getting bigger behind her back, his hand reaching out to stop her.

  She. Was. Almost. There.

  Ophelia let herself fall, like a block of ice, into her reflection, which instantly absorbed her. What little presence of mind she had left said: “Observatory.” She crossed the in-between in a trice, and then a change of lighting indicated to her that she had emerged. She couldn’t do anything but continue her fall where she had interrupted it.

  Carpet.

  Curled up on the floor, Ophelia shook with uncontrollable shivers. She could neither stand up nor speak anymore. Breathing was torture.

  A figure, lit from a window, leaned over her.

  “Cold.”

  That was the only word Ophelia managed to get out, between her teeth. Darkness fell on her, so suddenly she thought she had gone blind, before understanding that she had been wrapped in a bedspread. She snuggled up in it. Little by little, degree by degree, her body temperature went back up. Her numb skin began to burn as feeling returned. Violence might be prohibited in Babel, but a clubbing wouldn’t have been less painful.

  She felt around for her glasses, which had fallen with her onto the carpet. When she put them back on her nose, she discovered a bedroom. Sitting on the bed, a man was humming a lullaby. A stranger bursting through his mirrored wardrobe didn’t seem to have greatly disturbed him.

  Ophelia gave him back the bedspread he had covered her with.

  “Thank you.”

  He held the bedspread limply and, not knowing what to do with it, put it around himself, while still humming.

  Ophelia lifted the mosquito screen from the window. The gardens were flooded with the intense light of late afternoon. In the distance, the giant statue of the colossus eclipsed the sun. Ophelia suspected as much: she had again veered off course. She had aimed for the directors’ apartments, and landed instead in a Standard Program bedroom. The fact that she had never seen her reflection here had made no difference. At least her host had proved very cooperative. He asked no questions, and, when Ophelia, finger pressed to lips, sneaked out of his room, he just let her go quietly. Like a bird one has nursed and then allows to fly away.

  Ophelia sped through the many stories of the residence. Sounds reached her from different rooms, music practice here, children’s laughter there. The Deviations Observatory’s gilded façade.

  But me, she thought, I’ve seen the other side of the picture. The spectacle of Mediana, chained to that kneeling stool, remained imprinted on her glasses.

  Ophelia only just avoided some nurses and some supervisors. No one here was hiding under a gray hood, but they all had whistles hanging from their necks. After some more detours, she went along a gangway that, if she could trust the signposts, led to the directors’ apartments. The gangway did, indeed, disappear into the side of the colossus, where the gate of a lift gleamed. Ophelia made a discreet about-turn as soon as she spotted that this approach was secured by two figures standing guard.

  She would have to get round the problem—once again.

  She ended up finding a service stairway, so old that it almost fell apart under her weight. It allowed her to go back down to the statue’s base. The tunnel, finally! Ophelia dived in, making sure, above all, not to stare at the thousands of kaleidoscopic surfaces flashing the light of the sunset back and forth along the walls. She found the hidden door Thorn had taken her through the previous day. She only felt really safe once she was up above, right at the top of the statue. She took cover in the secret passage adjoining the antechamber of the directors’ apartments, concealed behind the tapestry. She collapsed onto a step, out of breath and legs, and didn’t move again. For a long while, in the flickering light of the bulbs, all she heard was the stifled hiccup of her breathing.

  She had made it.

  Despite all the mistakes along the way, she had managed to get back from the collaborators’ quarter, and be at the agreed place—and early, too.

  It was only at that moment that she finally felt it, so intensely that she had to hug her chest to ease the pounding. Fear. It wasn’t just from almost falling into the hands of the observers, or ending up frozen by a Necromancer. No, this panic rose from the depths of her being. Ophelia knew only a tiny fraction of Eulalia Gonde’s secrets, but she seemed to glimpse a far greater truth, lurking in a recess of memory, with such crushing implications that it all made her feel like uncharted territory to herself.

  How had Thorn managed, all these years, to bear the weight of the memory passed on to him by his mother? He had known from childhood that their world was but a giant web, woven century after century by a self-proclaimed God, and had made it his duty, without seeking anyone else’s opinion, to put an end to it.

  Huddled on the step, Ophelia rested her head on her knees. She was longing for him to be there, to draw a little on his steadfastness . . .

  She must have dozed off without realizing as, suddenly, she was woken by the sound of the lift. Someone had just entered the antechamber. Ophelia recognized, from her side of the tapestry, the grating of steel that had become so familiar to her.

  “I will wait alone.”

  The Babel accent was one of the most melodious in the world; from Thorn’s mouth, it sounded more like a dirge.

  “Will you allow me to keep you company, monsieur? The directors are always extrêmement busy. I myself have still never met them. I know you are determined to give them your report this evening, but you may have to wait a long while before they open to you.”

  It was the young monkey girl who escorted Thorn everywhere. If she really did believe in the existence of the directors, she was very seriously misinformed. Ophelia picked up a shrill note in her voice that made her feel uncomfortable. There was far more than politeness and ignorance behind her words.

  “I will wait alone.”

  Thorn had articulated each syllable as an automaton would. Ophelia immediately regretted her fleeting jealousy. So lacking was he in indulgence toward himself that it was inconceivable to him to be considered attractive.

  Astonishingly, the young monkey girl was undaunted.

  “Perhaps . . . perhaps you should change your clothes, monsieur? I can drop your uniform off at our laundry if you . . . eh bien, if you trust me with it.”

  Ophelia felt this conversation was taking a most curious turn.

  She could almost see, through this tapes
try separating them, the pretty figure in a yellow sari, automaton on shoulder, nervously pressing a document file against her chest. She even seemed to see the eyes, dark and bright at the same time, she was turning up at Thorn, while still maintaining a respectful distance.

  “About Mademoiselle Second,” the young girl went on, “the doctor said that the wound was shocking, but not concerning.”

  Ophelia’s astonishment just kept growing. The voice on the other side of the tapestry, conversely, shrank to the level of a whisper.

  “I’m not allowed to speak of it, monsieur, but these black lenses I wear enable me to see certain things. Contrary to appearances, what happened wasn’t your responsibility. Mademoiselle Second shouldn’t have thrown herself on you like that. She is sometimes so impulsive with her drawings. The fault was hers. It doesn’t matter who you have been in the past, you are maintenant a Lord of LUX!” she said, louder, quivering with adulation. “The Lords of LUX are untouchable and they never make any mista—”

  “I will wait alone.”

  Thorn’s response was unchanged, but imbued with a hostility that deterred the young girl from persisting.

  “Good night, monsieur.”

  With a rustle of silk, she left. As soon as the lift carried her off, Ophelia pushed aside the tapestry and stepped forward onto the tiled floor of the antechamber.

  Thorn was standing in the light from the lamps. He was staring, sternly, at the ebony door of the directors’ apartments before him. Not that he was seriously contemplating it opening, rather, he seemed mainly to be avoiding his reflection on the shiny surfaces in the room. He only consented to turn his attention from the door and onto Ophelia once he became aware that she was approaching. He showed neither surprise nor anger. What emotion there was in his eyes was turned against himself. He was standing resolutely with his back to the wall, as if wanting to keep all of space within his field of vision. With his fingers, he was screwing up a sheet of paper. The gold of his uniform was spattered with blood.

  Seeing him like this devastated Ophelia.