“All that for a drawing.”
Thorn had made this statement without a hint of feeling. And yet, barely had he made it before his rigidity broke down. The hard lines of his face gave way, one by one. The brace on his leg bent as if no longer able to bear the weight of this body that had become intolerably heavy.
With a clatter of steel, Thorn let himself fall to his knees.
He clung with both hands to Ophelia, so hard she almost lost her balance. She stood firm. Here, now, as shaken as she was inside, it was up to her to be solid for them both. Thorn continued to collapse in on himself, head drooping, shoulders tense enough to snap. He was clasping Ophelia as if he wanted both to hang onto her, and keep her apart.
To stop his claws from creating a new victim.
The abyss he was sinking into was like the void between the arks. An endless fall from which none returned.
Ophelia would not allow it.
She gripped Thorn as hard as he was gripping her. She closed her eyes, the better to visualize their claws, which were throbbing to a chaotic rhythm. Her own, warped by the observatory; Thorn’s, sharp as thorns. They weren’t harmful in themselves. They were him, they were her. Using an instinct that came to her from an unknown family power, Ophelia tried to connect her nerve impulse to Thorn’s, to defuse it. She had to make several attempts, due to that gap between her and her shadow, but she did, finally, succeed. She felt Thorn shuddering against her, and the muscles of his shoulders tightening even more. She thought for a moment that he was going to pull away, furious, but then his shoulders finally relaxed. That permanent tension besetting his big, bony body fell away for good. He had stopped fighting against himself.
He didn’t move anymore, kneeling on the tiled floor, his forehead buried in Ophelia’s stomach, which was in knots. He was sobbing.
Second’s crumpled drawing lay on the floor.
A rabbit leaping from a well.
Bloodred.
(PARENTHESIS)
Eleven months, four days, nine hours, twenty-seven minutes, thirteen seconds earlier.
Thorn was sitting on a gilded chair. Eighty-four centimeters high, forty-eight wide, forty-two deep, excluding decimal places and the level of the actual seat. He didn’t calculate deliberately. Measurements just came to him, unbidden, intruding whenever he engaged with his surroundings. They were there, in the mesh of the mosquito screens on the gilded windows, in the gap between the legs of the gilded furniture, in the volume of liquid in the gilded carafe, in the geometrical patterns on the golden carpets.
They were particularly there in the hands, also gold, of the lounge’s clock.
Thorn had been waiting on this chair, on the first floor of the Genealogy Club, for two thousand three hundred and eighteen seconds. These people showed no respect for punctuality. It was worse than rude; it was illogical. While he was wasting time, they were, too. He could have used these two thousand three hundred and eighteen seconds (thirty-eight by now) to continue with the mission they had themselves given him.
He wasn’t naïve. He knew full well that the waiting was part of the game. Of their game.
One thousand six hundred and sixty-eight seconds had been added to those that came before when, finally, the Genealogist couple entered the lounge. The first time Thorn had met them, he was but a filthy fugitive, racked with fever, dragging a shattered leg. They presented themselves to him just as they did at all their meetings, forever wrapped in their golden cloaks.
“Bienvenue, Sir Henry,” they said, as one.
It was they who had given him this name. Thorn still didn’t know their own names, but he didn’t need to, to know who they were. He had known that even before arriving in Babel, before escaping from the Pole. He had memorized the political intricacies of all the arks, and had kept abreast of interfamilial news for years. Yes, well before meeting them, he had understood that, of all God’s servants, these two served only themselves. No need to be a great psychologist to realize that.
The man and woman settled on a sofa, so close that any space between them was impossible to quantify. Thorn turned his attention instead to the anteroposterior, transverse, and epiotic diameters of their craniums. He could take all their measurements at a glance, but he couldn’t have translated these figures into any aesthetic evaluation. Were they beautiful? He found them repulsive. A little more than that, even.
“I come here as agreed.”
His hurried words delighted them. With studied slowness, the man took the carafe from the pedestal table and tilted it to his wife’s lips, without taking his eyes off Thorn. Provocative. A strong smell of wine hung in the air. Alcohol was forbidden in Babel, just as tobacco, obscenity, gambling, noise music, and violent novels were. All of that could be found at the Genealogy Club, but who would go and denounce the city’s highest representatives?
Unimpressed, Thorn checked the lounge’s clock (four thousand three hundred and sixty-two seconds). He had seen far worse at the Pole’s embassy.
“Ask me the question.”
The Genealogists pretended to hesitate, and then said, in unison:
“Have you succeeded?”
There were only two replies to this question. “Not yet,” “soon,” or “almost” didn’t feature.
“No,” he replied.
His failures were their failures, but they both nodded their heads with undisguised satisfaction. And yet they sought, as much as he did, if not for the same reasons, to discover what had allowed God to become God. The mission remained unchanged since their very first encounter, when Thorn had spontaneously presented himself to them, right here, in this lounge. They gave him the means, he put them into practice; they opened doors to him, it was up to him to go through them. They used him just as he used them. And if, one day, Thorn should push on one door too many, one that closed on him without possible retreat, then the Genealogists would get rid of him as fast as they had hired him. They would take back his name, disown him, deny ever having had any dealings with him, and hand him over to God like worthy, virtuous children.
That was the rule of the game. One of the rules, at any rate.
“Come closer, cher ami.”
Thorn brought his chair forward by two hundred and sixty-seven centimeters, and sat back down, with a grating of metal. He was now very close to them.
The woman slid forward, all rippling hair and fabric. If Thorn had even a modicum of imagination, he would have thought her made of liquid gold. She held her arms out to him in invitation. The first time she had done this, he had been unable to interpret it. Today, he knew exactly what she expected of him, just as he knew he couldn’t get out of it. He held his own hands out to her. As soon as the woman’s golden fingers combined with his, he felt his stomach heave. Physical contact disgusted him. There was just one exception to this rule, but he certainly didn’t want to think about that—not here, not now.
“It’s not important,” whispered the woman. “Ce n’est pas grave. We know you’re doing your best.”
Ensconced among the sofa’s cushions, the man was observing the scene with a certain relish. Beneath the gold tint, their skin was covered in goose pimples, visible to the naked eye.
Thorn asked himself the question very seriously: had he done his best? It seemed to him that, since escaping from prison, his existence had amounted to just repeated improvisations. He had resorted to his new family power to pass through the reflective surface of his cell, with no guarantee of it working. From there he had reemerged through the mirror in the library of his aunt, whose manor house had been uninhabited for weeks. Had he calculated that he would find provisional sanctuary and a reliable telephone line there? Absolutely not. It was animal instinct that had made him return to what, for him, came closest to a home. When he had contacted Vladislava, had he been convinced that the Invisible would help him to leave the Pole, in exchange for the services he had rendered
her clan? A hundred times he had thought she would betray him. Indeed, he still struggled to believe that she hadn’t. As for his choice of destination, he owed it simply to the unblocking of Farouk’s unpredictable memory, which had been passed on to him.
The more Thorn considered the question, the more he felt that, no, he definitely hadn’t done his best. He had been content, at most, to massage the statistics.
“We know that you are a highly resourceful man,” the woman continued, tightening her fingers’ grip. “You have already proved that to us, you will prove it to us again.”
Thorn felt the first effects of the family power. It was as if needles were pricking into every pore on his hands. He forced the muscles of his face not to tense up. Not to show any discomfort. He must keep the woman and the man within his field of vision. Lie to his own family power.
“Dragon through your paternal line. You are, sans doute, thinking right now that this (the woman barely tightened her grip on his hands) is but an appetizer compared with the claws of your family.”
Thorn thought nothing of the sort. There was no possible comparison between the pain inflicted by a Dragon, and that by a Tactile. The former comprised false information conveyed to the brain that the body then made manifest. The latter was an actual impulse transmitted from epidermis to epidermis, without anything showing on the surface.
The sensation in his hands intensified as it spread along his arms. It was no longer needles, it was nails. Rough, white-hot nails. Thorn focused all his concentration on the lounge clock (four thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine seconds), trying to persuade his claws that nothing special was happening, that this aggression was consented to, that he accepted this abuse of his body.
The woman studied his face avidly, searching for a crack in his impassive mask. She knew that Thorn couldn’t use his claws against her, and, above all, that he needed them both too much in order to attain his objective.
“They say that Sir Farouk’s daughter has really grown,” commented the man, from the sofa cushions.
“Rare are the chosen few who have had the privilege of seeing your young cousin,” added the woman.
“Dame Berenilde hides her from the world like her most precious treasure,” they said, in unison.
For two seconds, a single tick and a single tock from the clock, Thorn’s concentration slipped. Two seconds during which the pain penetrated deeper into his skin. He had to use all his cerebral control to stop the memory process that would take him back to the time when he was the indispensable pillar on which his aunt had rebuilt herself. He had been replaced, that was in the natural order of things. No one was waiting for him in the Pole anymore.
“Ask me the other question,” he said.
The woman broke into an ambiguous smile. The pressure of her fingers became firmer around Thorn’s. It was as though stinging nettles were growing beneath the skin of his entire body.
“Will you see your mission through?” asked the Genealogists.
“Yes.”
“Gentil garçon.”
The woman released his hands and, as ever, Thorn couldn’t help being disconcerted that his skin remained unblemished. The Tactiles’ touch never left the slightest trace. After a final look at the clock (five thousand six hundred and two seconds), he turned his back on the two bodies entwined on the sofa, no longer paying any attention to him.
Their combined voices reached him one last time, just as he was closing the lounge door:
“We eagerly await your next visit.”
Alone in the middle of the corridor, Thorn methodically unscrewed the stopper of his phial and disinfected his hands. Once. Twice. Thrice. The dirt was invisible, but he felt it in his very nerves, in his very claws, which quivered with contained hatred all around him.
No, no one was waiting for him in the Pole anymore, and that suited him.
As long as one particular person would be waiting for him elsewhere, that would suit him.
THE CONJURING TRICK
The parched lawn crunched under Ophelia’s feet. As she made her way between the tombs and the fireflies, her pupils were as dilated as the moon in the sky. She had visited the cemetery in Anima in the past, and each time, upon entering, a great silence had descended on her. It was neither really serenity nor anxiety. It was more like the concentration of the tightrope walker, advancing on a wire between two absolutes.
What she felt here, in the observatory’s necropolis in the middle of the night, was even less definable. She was almost forgetting to breathe. It was a very old military cemetery; indeed, the grid layout of the gravestones recalled the ranks of an army. Given that all those words were forbidden in Babel, Ophelia thought it couldn’t be easy mentioning a place like this. No doubt it was never mentioned. It was enough to tolerate its presence, in a distant corner of the ark, like a neighbor one can’t get rid of.
And yet, even here, the paths were cluttered with unusable objects, as if the Deviations Observatory was flooded by an excess of which it was itself the source.
Fascinating as the place was, Ophelia’s eyes kept returning irresistibly to Thorn, who was leading the way in front of her. He had uttered not a word since they had left the antechamber. After descending the secret stairway of the colossus in silence, he had skirted the carousels in the old amusement park, crossed the rose gardens, away from the windows, and then pushed open the gate of the necropolis. He was now advancing with long strides, obliging Ophelia to double her own.
She was avoiding thinking about the blood that had stained his uniform, on the side Second had rushed at to give him her drawing. Thorn had been pretty laconic when telling her the circumstances of the accident, but Ophelia knew the essentials. Second had triggered the claws without him realizing it, and, although her life wasn’t in danger, she would be permanently scarred. As would Thorn. Witnesses to the scene couldn’t understand what had happened. No one would hold him responsible, but Ophelia knew him well enough to sense that he would have preferred to be. He saw himself being burdened with a guilt he could never clear himself of.
Changing how he saw himself, after that, was going to be trickier than ever.
They scaled a high wall that served as a barrier between the land and the void. Up there, on the sentry path, the wind was blowing wildly. Ophelia felt it slapping against the bare skin of her cheeks, arms, and calves. She didn’t miss her long hair, or her old skirts. But she did miss her shoes: after all that running around, her feet were burning.
“Oh!” she blurted out.
She was struck by the view of the Good Family beyond the crenellations. Never had the minor ark seemed so close as from this observation point. One could see clearly the contours of the two twin islands, the one reserved for the Sons of Pollux, the other assigned to the Godchildren of Helen, linked by a highly symbolic bridge. The windows of the domes, the amphitheaters, and the gymnasium all reflected the moon.
Octavio must be sleeping somewhere, beneath all that brightness. Unless he was tossing in his bed, wondering how to change the world from the inside. How would he react when he saw his little sister wounded? Ophelia’s heart sank at the thought. Octavio’s friendship was the best thing she had taken away from her time at the Good Family. How aware was he of Second’s role at the Deviations Observatory? The inverts’ fate depended on her next pencil mark, determining who remained in the first protocol and who left for the second, who would spin on carousels to the end of their days, and who would end up chained to a kneeling stool. Second was an accomplice of this place—whether voluntarily or not was another story. Was Lady Septima aware of this? Had she knowingly placed her daughter here, or had she lost control from the moment she rejected her?
In front of Ophelia, Thorn pointed at their destination: a pagoda that served as a corner tower to the wall. It fitted in so well, one barely noticed it. Wreathed in moonlight, it seemed surprisingly ordinary compared wi
th the excessively florid architecture of the rest of the observatory. And yet, upon closer inspection, a very faint light was filtering through the shutters of its stacked stories. The light felt bright when Thorn slid open a door; Ophelia felt as if she were entering a lantern with him.
“It’s here,” he finally declared.
They were standing at the center of an octagonal room that formed the base of the pagoda. The light was coming from nightlights placed in cavities in the walls. Each one lit up an urn bearing a photograph. There were a considerable number of them.
A columbarium.
“All these ashes,” continued Thorn, “belong to subjects who died at the observatory. They have never been claimed by any family.”
Ophelia felt herself freezing up, as if necromancy were still having its effect on her. She had already experienced the dungeons in the Pole, but what surrounded her here was even more sordid. Were these urns where those who moved to the third protocol ended up? There were so many of them! The alcoves rose up over several stories, right up to the top of the pagoda, with dozens of stairways to reach them.
“Are we looking for . . . someone?”
“Something,” replied Thorn, with a snap of his watch. “But first, let us pool our findings.”
He’d certainly reverted to public-official mode. Ophelia was right about that. There was a newfound modesty to the way he shrank from her glasses as soon as their focus became too intense.
She decided to go first.
“We were right. The observers’ black lenses allow them to visualize our family powers. But that’s not all.”
She swallowed. Eulalia Gonde’s memory had enabled her to interpret the research she’d read in the collaborators’ quarter. Now she had to translate all that into her own words. And doing so in this columbarium, surrounded by funerary urns, gave her a very peculiar feeling.
“Those shadows that encircle us, they are . . .” Ophelia searched for the right word. “. . . projections of our selves. When our shadows don’t quite match, I think our projections likewise don’t quite match, and end up returning to us in the form of echoes. A bit like an . . . a . . .”
The Storm of Echoes Page 22
