The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  If a man yelled in panic, the Brats would throw themselves on him, laughing like lunatics, and stuff their leaflets into his mouth. Some musicians had got their saxophones out, launching into wild jazz improvisations; one of them cracked his teeth when a jolt knocked him over. An old lady was dancing, stark naked, on a table to the rhythm of the airship’s swaying.

  Thorn wrinkled his big nose. To Ambrose’s astonishment, he grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and set off, pushing it straight ahead of him.

  “And there was I, thinking you didn’t like me, sir.”

  “I don’t like you,” grunted Thorn. “I’m using you.”

  Sure enough, he was maneuvering the chair like an icebreaker, cleaving through the throngs of passengers. Ophelia followed him closely, to ensure that no one could trigger Thorn’s claws from behind. It was doubtless an extension of her own Dragon power, but she could see Thorn’s shadow ever more clearly, crackling like electrified barbed wire. Controlling himself in such circumstances must be a perpetual challenge.

  Together, they advanced through the anarchic ebb and flow of the crowds, battling with the lurching, making their way through stinking gangways, packed dormitories, looted kitchens, trashed crew’s quarters. The lights were forever going out and then coming back on. In this shifting between night and day, sobbing combined with uncontrolled laughter. It was mass hysteria.

  And then there was silence.

  It fell on the airship, heavy as a coffin lid, and so suddenly that Thorn slammed on the brakes of Ambrose’s wheelchair in the middle of the ventilation room. Ophelia was about to ask what was up, but her question froze at the same time she did. She had felt it deep inside: the certainty of finding herself somewhere she should never have found herself.

  The portholes had turned white. The airship was sinking beneath the surface of the sea of clouds.

  Into the great void between the arks.

  Never had Ophelia been overwhelmed by such a feeling of rejection, such a visceral need to be elsewhere. It was like when she had been locked in the incinerator room; or when Farouk had unleashed all of his psychic control on her; or when she had glimpsed oblivion when facing the Memorial’s sweeper. No, it was far worse.

  It was prohibited.

  “Ophelia.”

  Thorn had let go of Ambrose’s chair to lean over her. His thumbs were pressing into her cheeks and lifting her eyes up to his, which were astonishingly steady. The sweat streaming down his scars fell in big drops onto her glasses.

  Ophelia should never have dragged him along with her. She didn’t recognize the wheeze that came out of her own throat:

  “The void . . . We shouldn’t be here.”

  Speaking had become as challenging as breathing.

  “Keep going,” said Thorn. “We’re nearly there.”

  Ophelia noticed, under the enormous copper ventilation pipes, the huddled figures of men and women. No one onboard was crying or laughing anymore. Engulfed in his oversized chair, as it veered around the room, Ambrose stared wide-eyed in horror. The scarf had curled into a ball against him.

  “Planetary memory, planetary memory . . .” he kept on repeating.

  Behind him, right at the end of a final gangway, gleamed the huge glass partition of the command bridge.

  Thorn was right, they were nearly there.

  Ophelia moved with legs of lead. She was in conflict with her whole body, a conflict more daunting than her years of disjointedness, more disconcerting than her realignment. She felt in excess. They were all in excess. None of them had the right to be here, where formerly, before being reduced to dust, the land of the old world had stood.

  On the command bridge, the instrument panels’ dials had been removed, the cockpit had lost its helm and all its levers. It was even more disastrous than Ophelia had envisaged. The sea of clouds was already seeping through the cracks in the windows, spreading its fog inside the cabin. The oppressive feeling was unbearable.

  “We can’t do a thing here without regaining some altitude,” said Thorn.

  Without niceties, he pushed away a man who had frozen at a radio receiver, and took his place. He switched the radio off and pressed his mouth to the trumpet of an acoustic tube. He swallowed several times, struggling, too, with every atom of his being, and then his deep voice rang out across every part of the airship.

  “Listen, everyone. We are too heavy.”

  Echoes piled onto his words, so he paused between each one. He pulled off his uniform jacket. His shirt was soaked, showing up the form of his spine, which he was twisting to be at the height of the trumpet. He no longer made any attempt to soften his native accent.

  “We all come from different families. You’re a Cyclopean? Make yourself weightless. You’re a Phantom? Turn yourself into gas. You’re a Colossus? Reduce your mass. If there are any Zephyrs on board, summon uplifting winds. You may no longer be citizens of Babel, but you are no less who you are. Each one of you can contribute to bringing us back up to the surface.”

  Once the countless echoes had faded, there was a very long silence. The fog was thickening, second by second. The metal structure of the gondola then emitted a sinister groan. Although barely perceptible, Ophelia felt as if she weighed more. Paradoxically, the unbearable guilt weighing down on her lessened, little by little. They were rising up again.

  “It’s working,” Thorn declared, into the trumpet. “Keep going.”

  Cries of relief erupted in all directions when the airship emerged into a vast starry night. Even Thorn allowed himself a sigh of relief.

  Ophelia gazed at this great beanpole she had married, despite the disapproval of their two families. She felt proud of him like never before. He cleared his throat when he noticed how she was looking up at him—a throat-clearing that the echoes repeated through the sound system of the entire airship.

  “It’s merely a reprieve,” he said, covering the end of the trumpet. “We’re still in the middle of nowhere, at the mercy of the winds. What should we do?”

  Thorn was naturally authoritarian; it was always he who gave instructions. For him to await her orders, with total confidence what’s more, made quite an impression on Ophelia. She shook herself. She had no desire to endure another plunge into the void and lose all her faculties.

  “I’m going to animate the airship.”

  Even to her ears, that sounded crazy. Thorn arched his eyebrows.

  “Well, not the airship, strictly speaking,” she corrected, “but its piloting mechanism. Lady Septima has sabotaged only the manual controls.”

  “Your animism can do that?”

  “Of course, since I haven’t a choice.”

  Ophelia positioned herself in front of the central stand where the helm should have been, facing the great night-black windows, in which she could see her reflection. A tiny little woman, minus one of her powers, at the helm of a flying liner.

  Not any old little woman, thought Ophelia, looking her reflection in the eye. The captain.

  She anchored her feet firmly to the floor, stood erect, and placed her hands around an imaginary helm. Now was the time to make intelligent use of her realigned shadow. Every member of her family had a talent for giving a second life to damaged objects; she would prove that she wasn’t bad at it, either.

  She made a turning movement to the left, visualizing the interior workings and wirings as if they were her own sinews. After a moment in limbo, the airship slowly changed course. She turned in the opposite direction, to rule out a coincidence; the airship veered to the right.

  Ophelia might not be a mirror visitor anymore, but she wasn’t powerless, for all that.

  There was enthusiastic applause behind her. Ambrose had caught up with them on the command bridge; the sound of his inverted hands clapping, knuckle against knuckle, sounded rather odd.

  “You would make a très respectable wh
axi driver, mademoiselle! All we need do now is pick a destination.”

  “It’s up to you to guide us,” Thorn admitted, reluctantly. “Lazarus taught you cartography. My encyclopedic knowledge has its limits.”

  “It’s hard to determine exactly where Nina’s Breath has taken us, sir. We won’t find land anywhere around here. Perhaps we should make a U-turn and go back to Babel?”

  “You’ve landed on your turban, young man!”

  Ophelia raised her eyebrows. It was the growling voice of Professor Wolf. His black jacket stood out against the half-light of the gangway, as he advanced with difficulty toward them. His goatee beard was dripping sweat over his neck brace. On his back he was carrying the unconscious body of Blaise, whose long pointed nose hung over his shoulder.

  “Leave it,” grumbled Wolf, seeing Ophelia’s obvious concern. “He passed out from the smell. Olfactory, and all that. Right now, the priority is, above all, not to take us back to Babel. Things are taking a very nasty turn back there, the city is on the verge of civil war. A war in which people like us,” he said, hitching Blaise’s inert weight up on his back, “have become the enemies to be eradicated.”

  “I also think we should seek sanctuary elsewhere,” intervened a woman passenger who, until then, had been prostrate in a distant corner of the cabin. “Totem is the ark that’s closest to Babel; we could take refuge there.”

  The man Thorn had pushed aside joined in the discussion, too, as he jumped out from under the radio receiver.

  “Totem? That’s much too far, we’ll never reach it! Not with faulty communications and without a professional pilot. The wheelchair garçon is right, we should return to Babel.”

  Within moments, the command bridge was invaded by passengers who all had contradictory opinions about which direction to take. Things didn’t take long to get heated. Ophelia was finding it increasingly hard to stay focused on her piloting job. Above all, she mustn’t break the empathetic link she had formed with the machine, otherwise she wouldn’t be piloting anyone anywhere.

  Just as she was turning around to ask for some quiet, all her attention was suddenly drawn back to the window in front of her. Her reflection showed a tousled head with a questioning look. Why had she felt such an urgent need to keep looking at it?

  “Switch off the lamps,” she ordered. “Quickly.”

  Thorn didn’t ask her a single question, which was just as well since she wouldn’t have known how to answer him. He tore a stool up from its bolts and smashed the bulb on the ceiling, to everyone’s astonishment.

  The glass stopped reflecting the inside of the bridge, to reveal, just visible against the dark night sky, the spire of a belfry. The airship was heading straight for it.

  THE ARK

  There was no more belfry, no more airship. Ophelia had stepped out of the present. It wasn’t a new page of Eulalia Gonde’s past. Neither was it a vision of a bloody future. No, this time it was her own memory, her own childhood. She was gazing at herself in the wall mirror of her bedroom on Anima. Her sleepy eyes weren’t yet shortsighted, her tousled hair hadn’t yet turned brown. Her body wavered between childhood and adolescence. A call had got her out of bed.

  A call of distress.

  Release me.

  “Sorry?” Ophelia whispered, very quietly.

  She didn’t want to wake Agatha, asleep next door. Maybe she should have. Maybe it would have been more sensible to call their parents. Ophelia was used to objects with strong personalities, but a talking mirror, that was pretty weird, all the same.

  Release me.

  Looking more closely, it seemed to Ophelia that there was someone behind her reflection. A silhouette whose outline slightly overlapped her own. She turned around, but there was no one behind her.

  “Who are you?”

  I am who I am. Release me.

  “How?”

  Pass through.

  Ophelia rubbed her eyes, which were heavy with sleep. She hadn’t yet passed through any mirror. Her father had frequently done so when young, it couldn’t be hard. But was it a good idea?

  “Why?”

  Because it must be done.

  “But why me?”

  Because you are who you are.

  Ophelia stifled a yawn, and her reflection did, too. The silhouette hiding behind it didn’t move. Nothing of all this seemed real. In fact, Ophelia wasn’t really sure she was awake.

  “I can try.”

  If you release me, it will change us: you, me, and the world.

  Ophelia hesitated. Her mother had never let her change anything at all. That’s how it went on Anima. The same domesticated objects, the same little habits, the same traditions repeated from generation to generation. Ophelia’s life had barely begun, and she could already predict what it would be like: decent work, a good husband, lots of children. In the world such as she knew it, nothing ever changed. And for the first time, because an unknown voice had conjugated the verb “to change” in the future tense, Ophelia felt a newfound curiosity growing within her.

  “Alright.”

  Ophelia focused all her animism on the helm’s mechanism, forcing the airship to swerve. She avoided a head-on collision with the belfry, but only just. There was some shaking, and a bell vibrating, and screams, and Thorn’s arms. Ophelia sensed, by the way her stomach lurched, that they were now falling. She no longer knew what to expect—fatally crashing into the ground? Endlessly plunging into the void?—but she certainly wasn’t prepared for the soft “plop” that barely jolted her jaws.

  They stopped moving. It was all over.

  Stupefied murmurs rose from every part of the airship. Ophelia carefully extricated herself from Thorn, whose bony frame had closed over her like a cage, while searching in the gloom for the glimmer of his eyes. He seemed as disconcerted as she was to be still alive. There were reeds brushing against the window of the command bridge.

  Had they landed in the middle of a marsh?

  “It’s absolument impossible,” Ambrose voice whispered. “There shouldn’t be any arks in this part of the world, the maps are categorical.”

  Thorn sat up with a creaking of metal. With his eyes, he followed the gigantic whalelike form disappearing among the lingering stars, high above the reeds. The collision with the steeple had separated the balloon from the gondola.

  “Wherever we are,” he said, “we’re here for a while. Let’s proceed with the evacuation.”

  The passengers rushed out of the safety exits and found themselves knee-deep in the marshes. Some offered helping hands to others. The Brats got together to lift Ambrose’s wheelchair, carrying him to dry land, while he hugged the scarf tight so it didn’t fall in the water. Maybe these people felt rather ashamed of the madness that had overcome them during the flight, but what had happened onboard would stay onboard.

  Not for Ophelia it wouldn’t.

  Standing quite still among the water lilies, she gazed at the airship, now more like a grounded clipper with its sails cut off. She wasn’t really sure what had happened, in that cockpit window, but it had brought a memory back to her that was still making her temples throb.

  Later. She would think later.

  In front of her, Thorn was bending back reeds as tall as him, to clear a path to the bank. The belfry stood proud, like a capital letter stamped on the dawn.

  “If you hadn’t avoided it, we would be dead.”

  He had said that as a simple statement, without emotion, yet watching for Ophelia’s reaction from the corner of his eye. There wasn’t one. She was silently moving her sandals through the murky water. She didn’t even react when Blaise, who had finally regained consciousness on Wolf’s back, started endlessly apologizing, much to Wolf’s exasperation.

  The stranded passengers regrouped around the belfry. When they pushed on its doors, only reverberations from the bells answered their c
alls.

  “Over there!” someone exclaimed.

  Ophelia saw it, too, in the early morning light: a country road winding between vineyards. And right at the end, almost as far as the eye could see, the contours of a village stood proud on the horizon. Briefly, she turned her glasses back toward the marshes, where what remained of the airship basked, and barely much further, toward the clouds of the void that they had had such difficulty escaping from. The cliff that served as a frontier between sky and land was so vast as to seem endless.

  “This,” observed Thorn, “is not a minor ark.”

  They all set off toward the village, like a stream of refugees. The less patient among them strode ahead, but many were shattered after the eventful night, and took the time to sample some grapes. The air, increasingly warm, soon vibrated to the chirping of the first cicadas. They walked around a tractor that stood in the way. Ophelia had never seen one of this sort. It seemed in good condition, and yet its driver had left it in the middle of the road.

  The road’s cracked tar made Ambrose’s wheelchair jump at every pothole.

  “Do you think . . . we could be . . . on LandmArk?” he asked, joyously. “After all . . . it’s the only ark . . . that doesn’t appear . . . on any map. Father says the Arkadians . . . can’t be found by anyone looking for them . . . but maybe they’ve made . . . an exception for us?”

  Ophelia was asking herself the same questions, and many more besides. She had so many, she no longer knew which way to turn. Just the fact of walking alongside an adolescent whose date of death went back forty years was disturbing. She glanced at the scarf, curled up on Ambrose’s lap. She knew they would have to have a serious talk, but at the moment, there were too many people around them, and not enough clarity in her mind.

  “Mademoiselle Eulalia?”

  Blaise had approached her looking apologetic, and even more so when he saw the “AP” stamped on her arm, as though he bore some responsibility for all she might have been through at the Deviations Observatory. He gripped the sleeve of his Memorialist’s uniform, which covered up an experience they now had in common.