The Good Family had disappeared.
Just then, the emergency sirens blared across the entire observatory.
IN THE WINGS
On top of the columbarium pagoda, on the highest of its stacked roofs, perched on the pinnacle like a heron, he listens to the sirens. An explosion of echoes. At once a song and a cry. One less bit of world, one!
He smiles at the dawning day.
Poor Ophelia, what a face she must be pulling . . . Can’t say she wasn’t warned.
VERSO
THE UNSPEAKABLE
The plummeting of the ark into the sea of clouds had triggered an upsurge such as Ophelia had never witnessed before. It was an almost static tornado, roaring with thunder and lightning, dense as a volcanic eruption, that formed a chasm of darkness against the pale light of morning. The very temperature of the air had fallen by several degrees.
Collaborators, inverts, and automatons were all jostling to evacuate the buildings. They were charging in all directions, screaming under the sirens, issuing contradictory orders—in short, panicking. The Deviations Observatory, until then all hushed voices and closed doors, had turned into one almighty din.
“I underestimated the Other,” Thorn admitted.
Ophelia tore herself from the apocalyptic spectacle to turn to him, squeezed into their hiding place. They had hurriedly left the columbarium and necropolis, fearful of being discovered over there, and, especially, of being discovered together. They had then found themselves stuck in the middle of the old amusement park, where a group of collaborators had gathered to gaze at the column of clouds cleaving the sky. They had had no choice but to hide in the stand known as “the Fakir’s Game.”
“Until today, Eulalia Gonde was, for me, our most toxic enemy. I shall consider revising my priorities.”
Thorn’s sangfroid impressed Ophelia. She, on the other hand, was shaking all over with a mix of fear, exhaustion, and rage. Particularly rage. An internalized anger that darkened her glasses, hummed like a hive under her skin, and covered up what, above all, she didn’t want to feel.
“That intruder I saw at the columbarium, he’s been hovering around me since the first landslide. He always knows where to find me, and then promptly disappears. I’m really wondering whether it isn’t . . .”
Her throat tightened so much, the end of her sentence got stuck there. The loathing she felt for the Other constricted her lungs. Her trapped breath screamed, like the sirens, inside her, clamored for justice, demanded vengeance, despite Ophelia banishing from her thoughts the very origin of this pain.
He was alive. He had to be. As long as his name wasn’t spoken, he would continue to be.
“Certainly,” said Thorn, “‘that intruder’ seems to be taking a close interest in our investigation. Maybe he, too, is searching for the Horn of Plenty. Whoever he may be, and whatever he may want, it’s up to us to find him before the next landslide.”
Ophelia couldn’t help thinking they had wasted too much time. They should have already sent the Other back into a mirror and put a stop to his crimes.
She also couldn’t help thinking of that reflection in the window. Of the blood. Of the final reunion. Of the void everywhere, all around, within. What if some echoes really did come from the future? Should she speak to Thorn about this?
He was just unfolding the plan of the observatory, which he had kept with him. Too big for the restricted dimensions of the stand, he was struggling to avoid the nail-covered planks surrounding them. The first light of day filtering into the tent made his scars, and ascetic emaciation, more prominent, as though he were the Fakir himself.
“The columbarium was our best lead,” he said, pointing at the pagoda on the plan. “We explored every level and saw nothing noteworthy. Nothing,” he added, his voice leaden, “apart from the funerary urn of a kid who manifestly is no kid.”
Ophelia nodded. It had been a shock, falling on that forty-year-old photograph. Ambrose was also linked, one way or another, to Project Cornucopianism. Lazarus likewise. She would have a few questions to ask them, once she was out of this confounded observatory.
She peered through a gap in the tent. Those evacuated were all gathering near the tiger carousel, but the sirens prevented her from hearing them. Someone would end up noticing that Ophelia was absent at roll call. She must decide quickly. Once the sirens stopped, everything would return to how it was: the programs, the protocols, the screenings, the photographs, the carousel circuits, the adulterated food, the silence, the secrets, the solitude . . . The whole world could collapse, but the Deviations Observatory would continue its quest for the absolute to the end. It alone contained the solution to the problems, but Ophelia seriously doubted that their motives were the same.
“The second protocol,” she declared. “I’m going to return there and find out what they are doing to Mediana. I can’t see her among those evacuated, she must still be in the nave. The observatory wants to use her for the Horn of Plenty; I need to understand how and why.”
To her great surprise, Thorn agreed without even attempting to dissuade her. At that moment, she felt a boundless gratitude toward him. She was grateful to him for being so steady in front of her, so present among those absent, so alive, above all.
“From the second to the third protocol, there is merely a step,” he reminded her, all the same. “We don’t know what became of the ‘people whom the public think dead but who aren’t.’”
“I have no intention of allowing myself to be indoctrinated,” Ophelia assured him. “I’ll return to the first protocol, wait until this evening, and from tonight, go over the wall. Literally,” she added, with an apprehensive thought for the transcendium bordering the void. “I’ll meet with you again before dawn, in the directors’ apartments. With a bit of luck, I will finally have discovered how to put an end to . . . to all this.”
With her chin, she indicated the black clouds endlessly accumulating in the sky. A stormy gale, similar to the one rumbling inside her, began to lift the flaps of the tent.
Thorn studied Ophelia more attentively, as if he sensed that what was essential hadn’t been expressed.
“Where is the second protocol located?” he asked, handing her the plan.
Try as she might to lighten the glasses on her nose, it was no good.
“I can’t locate it,” she said, pointing at an empty area beside the collaborators’ quarter. “It should be just there. There were endless stairways, and then the nave. I walked along it for tens of meters without even glimpsing the end of it . . . Could it be a distortion of space, like Mother Hildegarde used to do? I know she once lived in Babel, but I wasn’t expecting to find one of her doings here.”
The shadow between Thorn’s eyebrows increased, but he folded away his plan with the same care he took with everything.
“Whatever happens, I won’t be far away. I am going to take advantage of recent events to prolong my on-site inspection. Proceed with an inventory of fixtures, check the state of the ark, those kinds of duties.”
The sirens went quiet. The silence was almost a blow.
“I must rejoin the others,” muttered Ophelia.
“And I must leave right away,” declared Thorn, with a snap of his watch. “I’m not supposed to be in the containment zone.”
Contrary to his own words, he didn’t move a muscle. He frowned at his large, inert feet that refused to obey orders. Yet again, there they were: two conflicting forces pitted ruthlessly against each other, making Thorn’s attitude to everything strangely subdued. The muscles in his neck had tightened once again around what he didn’t want to say.
Seeing him like this, Ophelia felt her legs, shoulders, eyelids, everywhere go weak, as the same unspoken words gripped her inside. Let’s run away. Now. You and me.
She pulled off her gloves, removed her glasses, which finally became clear again, and gave them back to Thorn.
“Before dawn,” she repeated.
“I won’t be far away,” he repeated.
They separated. Ophelia gripped the ground with all her toes, determined not to give this ark a single reason to weaken like the others, and then she ran off to join those assembled. Now that the sirens had stopped, the air hummed with answerless questions. What was the extent of the latest landslide? What had caused it? Who had been affected by the catastrophe? Was the Deviations Observatory still a safe place? Should one stay or leave? None of them dared raise their voice anymore.
Ophelia had to elbow her way between the collaborators, all whispering so quietly among themselves that it was impossible to hear what they were saying. Some were in pajamas instead of the formal habit, but they had all found time to pull on their hoods during the evacuation of the quarter, professional to the end. At least Ophelia was able to slip among the inverts on the Alternative Program without attracting any attention.
Only Cosmos turned his almond-shaped eyes toward her, as if watching out for her. He approached her, while still keeping a distance; he was weighed down enough with his own anxiety, without having to take on that of all the others.
“Where were you? They triggered the automatic opening of the doors for the evacuation. When I went to rind you in your fume . . . find you in your room, you’d disappeared.”
“I was here,” Ophelia replied, evasively. “Do we know who was . . . over there?”
She couldn’t detach herself from the hypnotic escalation of the clouds, darkening the sky and seeming about to crash down on the observatory like a tidal wave. She tried not to put into precise words what had caused this phenomenon; to banish images of the ark—for a time, her home—that had vanished; above all, not to name those—the one—who had been swept away by the sinking of the Good Family.
“No, mademoiselle. No one’s saying anything. Apart from him.”
“Him” was the old man on the Alternative Program. He was standing a few steps away, very calm in the midst of the general bustle. His white hair danced in the wind and fell onto his craggy face. It was the first time Ophelia was seeing him not hitting his left ear. On the contrary, he appeared to be listening, with total serenity, to the whole of space behind the whispers, and kept repeating, at regular intervals, the same sentence:
“They went up down below.”
As for the nanny-automatons, they just stood around, swinging their arms and awaiting instructions. They made an incongruous spectacle, with their broad, fake smiles surrounded by terrified faces. They were so full of echoes that all that came out of them was “CHÉ . . . CHÉ . . . CHÉ . . . CHÉ,” never reaching the “. . . RIS . . . RIS . . . RIS . . . RIS.” Their recording mechanisms had probably stopped working, which was no bad thing in itself.
As discreetly as possible, Cosmos rubbed some soil between his hands and smeared enough on his shoulder to cover the “AP” tattoo.
“Time to pack the bags, mademoiselle.”
He indicated a small segment of sky that was still blue, behind the giant head of the colossus. By screwing up her eyes, Ophelia could make out a strangely glinting dotted line. Airships. An entire fleet of airships.
“The spoilt brats on the standard program will be fermented by their calories . . . collected by their families. It’ll be chaos, all doors flung open. Won’t get a chance like that again. You with me on this?”
“No.”
Ophelia had replied without hostility, but also without hesitation. Her objective was to melt into the background until the following night. This definitely wasn’t the right moment to get involved in an escape attempt.
Cosmos came closer, despite the risk of emotional contamination.
“The observatory is in crisis, mademoiselle. They’re going to accelerate everything. I’m not the ideal friend, but I’m still less dangerous than war that rotates you leer . . . all that awaits you here.”
Ophelia didn’t need her glasses to notice the guilt making his ink-black eyes shine. It was right here, beside this carousel, that he had attacked and bitten her. Did he think she was angry with him?
“You told me you had nowhere else to go,” she whispered to him. “If one day you get the chance to visit Anima, a door there will always be open to you.”
Cosmos gave a faint smile that briefly uncovered his white teeth and put a little color back in his cheeks. Then he left the assembly walking backwards, one step after another so as not to be noticed, becoming increasingly blurred in Ophelia’s eyes, until he had disappeared completely. He was gone.
In the distance, the first airships were preparing to land. One could almost hear from there all the most prestigious families of Babel charging around the corridors of the observatory to get their children back home. Now was no longer the time for re-education. Territories were collapsing, one after the other; all families wanted was to stay together and never be apart again.
Ophelia focused all her attention on her bare feet in the middle of the gravel. Don’t think about Thorn. Don’t think about mother, father, sisters, brother, great-uncle, Aunt Rosaline, Berenilde, little Victoria, Archibald, Fox, Gail, Blaise, the scarf, Ambrose, whoever he really was—about all the people she desperately wanted to be close to right now.
Don’t think about him.
There was another long wait, during which several rumblings of thunder crazed the sky, and then, finally, someone appeared. What, to Ophelia, was just a vague yellow figure had just climbed onto the platform of the carousel and now stood among the wooden tigers, looking down on everyone. Seeing this, the whispering, guiltily, stopped.
“I have two statements to make to you all.”
It was the voice of the beetle woman. Ophelia hadn’t heard from her since she had given her that strange advice that she still couldn’t fathom: “If you really want to understand the other, first find your own.”
“The first is a reminder,” the woman continued. “All of you here present, both subjects and collaborators, are contractually bound to the Deviations Observatory. You will therefore remain within this containment zone for as long as the Alternative Program continues. D’accord?”
Ophelia couldn’t see her face clearly, partly due to the pince-nez, but her voice seemed to have lost its confidence. The mass intrusion of families into the Standard Program wing probably had something to do with it. Cosmos was right, the observatory was in crisis. But if the directors didn’t exist, who was managing this crisis?
“The second is an announcement. We have just received a visit from an official representative of Sir Pollux. He is not authorized to enter the containment zone to speak to you all, but, given the exceptional nature of the situation, I have agreed to be his spokesperson. I have the painful duty to inform you that a climatic event, of as yet indeterminate origin, has swept away the Good Family ark. Along with all the students who resided there,” the woman added, after a pause. “Our beautiful city has lost not only its future virtuosos, but the very place that allowed them to achieve such excellence. It is an immense loss to us all. To those who had loved ones among the victims, we convey our deepest sympathies.”
The silence that followed took on the consistency of rock. Hard and dense. Barely affected by the nanny-automatons’ “CHÉ . . . CHÉ . . . CHÉ . . . CHÉ”s.
Even the old man shut up, after a final, “They went up down below.”
The beetle woman’s black lenses were then lowered toward a particular point, and all eyes swiveled in the same direction. Squatting on the ground, face shrouded by hair, Second was drawing away, indifferent to the attention suddenly being turned on her. She was dressed in a simple infirmary shift.
Ophelia felt as if she were taking on the same consistency as the silence. It was no longer saliva she was swallowing, it was stones. Despite all her efforts not to name him, to give him a last chance to exist, Octavio had fallen into the void.
&nb
sp; “That is not all,” continued beetle woman, her tone even more ponderous. “I regret to inform you all that, malheureusement, Lady Helen was also on site when the tragedy occurred.”
“No!”
The cry had burst out from the hood of a collaborator. It was Elizabeth. She was bent double, clutching her arms, as if she had been punched in the stomach. Her yelp of pain soared right across the amusement park, bounced off the metal frames of the carousels, and caused the panicked flight of a flock of pigeons. It shot right through Ophelia, causing her actual pain. This distress overwhelmed her, replacing the distress she wasn’t able to express. And yet, as the other collaborators turned away from Elizabeth, she was the only one able to understand her.
Today, the two of them were both orphaned of someone.
The three of them.
Ophelia felt compelled to go over to Second, who was drawing feverishly. She was in her own world, as usual. There was no one to say a word to her, no one to make a gesture toward her, no one to tell her the truth.
Octavio would have hated that.
Ophelia leaned over Second.
“Your brother,” she said to her.
How? How to speak the unspeakable? The clouds just wouldn’t stop darkening over the world.
“He won’t come back.”
Second finally looked up. Under that mane of dark hair, her dissymmetry was more startling than ever. Half of her face—the half with the gold chain linking eyebrow and nostril—was convulsed with nervous tics; the other half, contrastingly still, featured a wide-open, inexpressive white eye. And bridging the two, a dressing soaked in blood ran across her nose and cheeks, from ear to ear. Merely opening her mouth must be horribly painful. Thorn’s claws had left her with a scar that would be part of her from now on.
Ophelia swallowed another stone. She recalled the drawing she had thrown into the toilet. Second had done a self-portrait, scored with a long, premonitory red-pencil line across it; the same red pencil with which she had scribbled over Ophelia’s body, stuck between the old woman and the monster, on the other side of the paper.
The Storm of Echoes Page 24
