Ophelia at least agreed with that. She connected her claws to Lazarus’s nervous system, and he let go of her shoulders due to the electric shock. She didn’t allow him time to recover from his surprise before giving him a second electric shock, which threw him backwards. Then a third that flung him against Walter. Then a fourth that made him roll on the floor. Then a fifth that stopped him from getting back up.
At each shock, Ophelia was counting inside.
The Knight.
Blaise.
Elizabeth.
Ambrose.
My museum.
She hurled Lazarus against the back wall, and all the shelves, thanks to the animism working in the room, tipped all the pottery they held down onto his head.
Thorn and me.
Ophelia was overcome by profound disgust as she contemplated this old man curled up on the floor. The silver of his hair had turned into rust. It was she who had done that to him. However much she repeated to herself that he deserved it, there was an acrid taste in her mouth. She swallowed it as soon as her eyes met Thorn’s eyes, which had lost all murderous rage and were staring at her in astonishment.
No, it wasn’t always him who had to dirty his hands. She accepted what she had done.
“You are going to take us back to Babel and lead us to the Horn of Plenty,” she ordered Lazarus.
He looked up at her with a face contorted with pain, but in which fear was absent. Even in this state, groveling amid the broken pottery, he was consumed with curiosity, as if the experiment was taking an even more fascinating turn than expected.
“Bien sûr! That was my intention, Mademoiselle Oph—”
“Over there,” she interrupted him, drily, “you will give me back my echo. It is not, and never will be, the property of the observatory. Game over.”
At this precise moment, just as Walter was pathetically flicking a feather duster over his master’s bloodied head, an unexpected voice burst out from his middle:
“WHO IS I?”
THE REUNION
The bench stood in the shade of a giant fig tree. Ophelia recognized the backs of Blaise and Wolf, although it took her a few seconds to be quite sure: the former was far less hunched than usual, the latter, on the contrary, far less rigid. They weren’t talking. They just sat side by side, jackets over arms, gazing together at the vineyards that stretched out from the edge of the village. Wordlessly, they shifted a little to allow Ophelia to sit between them. It was so peaceful on this bench, she forgot, momentarily, what she had come to tell them. She watched, with them, the languorous procession of clouds; breathed in, with them, the sweet scent of grapes and figs; felt, with them, the flashes of sunlight filtering through the foliage; and welcomed, with them, the breeze, as it slipped through her hair, beneath her gown, and between her sandals.
“We will miss you, Mademoiselle Eulalia.”
Blaise’s watery eyes seemed about to spill over, but it was hard to tell whether from sadness or joy, or both at the same time. Ophelia didn’t need to say a word.
“You shouldn’t go back to Babel,” grumbled Professor Wolf. “If the world is doomed to collapse under our feet, we might as well be on this bench, glass in hand.”
He handed Ophelia what was probably stolen liqueur. Coming from him, it came close to a real declaration of friendship, so she accepted taking a swig. She found herself enjoying it.
“You know,” Blaise murmured to her, “my bad luck hasn’t struck once since we crash-landed near this ark. The tiles remain on the roofs, the benches don’t break, and the weather’s fabuleux! I’m starting to feel hopeful again, and to believe in a future without landslides or expulsions. A future, Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he concluded, squeezing her little hand in his, “when we will meet again.”
Ophelia would have liked to tell them, him and Wolf, that it was precisely to put an end to the landslides that she was returning to Babel, but to do so she would have had to admit the whole truth to them—a truth still incomplete, a truth that would dent their trust in Lazarus—and she no longer had the time. And yet they deserved it, that truth.
“My name is Ophelia. I will return,” she promised, as their jaws dropped, “and I will tell you the rest of the story.”
She left the bench, and the serenity she had felt on it. As she walked through the ghost village, she was struck by the new activity in its streets. Music was being played, fruit handed out, flirting going on, squabbling going on. The Babel exiles had launched into mimed dialogues with the locals, since they couldn’t converse with them. They emptied their pockets to show them, proudly, some specialties from back home: a weightless fork, a phosphorescent razor, a chameleon-mouse . . . One man had even managed, when Pollux’s guard came for him, to shrink his house to the size of a thimble and take it with him—but, he admitted, looking pained, he feared he had left his cat locked inside it.
Ophelia had to admit that the inhabitants of this twenty-second ark were very receptive. They showed the keenest interest in whatever was put before them, examining, prodding, sniffing each item, wide-eyed, as if nothing in the world was more extraordinary, and all without showing any covetousness.
She slowed down as she went past a pottery, abandoned, like all the buildings.
She didn’t even look at the lovely plates gathering dust inside. She saw only her reflection on the window. She raised a hand; it raised a hand. She stepped back; it stepped back. She stuck out her tongue; it stuck out its tongue. It was behaving like a normal reflection And yet.
WHO IS I?
The echo hadn’t remained at the Deviations Observatory, as Ophelia had thought. It had followed her, without her realizing it, like a second shadow, even into Walter’s recording mechanism.
She now understood that she owed it her life.
In the airship, it was the echo that had drawn her attention to the belfry, just before a collision that would have been fatal, to her and all the other passengers. She found it frustrating not to manage to communicate with it; terrifying, too, to succeed in doing so; and particularly satisfying to imagine the observers hitting a little metal parrot that was now mute.
But what if Lazarus was right, she thought, as her face darkened on the pottery’s window. If she was, indeed, following the same path as Eulalia Gonde? If, by imparting some of her humanity to her echo, it would pass a little of its nature on to her, in return? If she started to take on the appearance of every person she met?
Her eyes slid from her own reflection to that of Elizabeth, behind her. She hadn’t noticed her, but the young woman was perched on the low stone wall around the garden of the house opposite. With one leg folded up against her and the other dangling, she looked like the grasshopper that had alighted on her knee, and at which she was staring, pensively.
“I come from a large family.”
For a moment, Ophelia wondered whether it was her or the grasshopper that Elizabeth was addressing. Her eyelids hung heavy over her eyes; she seemed to be somewhere between asleep and awake.
“I was neither the youngest nor the oldest. I remember our house, always very noisy, the jostling on the stairs, the smells from the kitchen, the raised voices. An exhausting house,” she sighed, “but it was my home. So I believed.”
Elizabeth turned from the grasshopper to stare straight at Ophelia. Her long tawny locks, her finest feature, were in serious need of a wash.
“One night, I woke up in the home of complete strangers. My family had got rid of me. One mouth less to feed, you know? I ran away into the street. I’d still be there without Lady Helen.”
She gave the wall a gentle kick with her boot, as if to make the Forerunner wings, which were no longer there, tinkle.
“I was so close to decoding her Book, so close to giving her back her memory . . . I couldn’t care less who the family spirits really are. I just wanted her to remember my name.”
Elizabeth bit her lip, revealing the gap left by the incisor Cosmos’s elbow had knocked out. She had lost that tooth to come to Ophelia’s rescue; Ophelia should be grateful to her for that, but all she felt was a desire to force her down from that wall.
“Is that really what you want?”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, taken aback by the harsh tone of the question.
“Hmm?”
“To stay here: is that what you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to return to Babel with us?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where I belong anymore.”
Ophelia thought how they at least had that in common, but, unlike for Elizabeth, the person who was her anchor was still alive.
She softened.
“There are still twenty family spirits whose memories you could restore.”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth merely repeated, returning to the grasshopper with a perplexed look.
Ophelia left her to her dithering and made for the large fallow field full of flowers at the back of the village. Ambrose had parked his wheelchair there, in the middle of the dandelion clocks. He must have blown on quite a few to kill time while he waited: the scarf, around his neck, was covered in downy seeds. He had a start when he heard Ophelia’s steps approaching. She scanned the sky as carefully as he did, which saved them both from looking at each other. It was still a little too soon to see the Lazaropter arriving. The camp where Lazarus had left his flying machine was beyond the fields, and Thorn, not trusting the professor, had insisted on accompanying him, despite his troublesome leg.
“It was a grosse bump my father had on his head.”
Without averting her glasses from the sky, Ophelia rolled her eyes to their blind spot, toward that presence with its blurred contours. It was the first time Ambrose had spoken since their meeting with Lazarus. He had done so quietly, almost timidly, as if he sensed something had changed between them.
Should she tell him that he was the echo of a man who had been missing for forty years, and that his father had never been his father?
“I got a bit carried away.”
“He didn’t seem to be cross with you. Quite the opposite.”
Lazarus had kissed Ophelia on both cheeks the moment her echo had made its presence known, through Walter. He hadn’t taken her at all seriously when she had told him not to count on her for his utopian dreams. But after all, as long as he led them, her and Thorn, to the Horn of Plenty . . .
Ambrose’s eyes fell to his reversed babouches.
“Father confides little in me, but I know he expects a lot of you. Too much, no doubt. I don’t dare to imagine how much pressure you must have felt, all alone, to find the Other, since the first landslide. When I think,” he added, a little awkwardly, “that at one time I thought the Other was you.”
Ophelia couldn’t resist a glance at what showed of his nape, between the shiny black hair and the old three-colored scarf. Somewhere on that back, a code that Ambrose was unaware of kept him materially present. She should have felt uncomfortable about it. She felt only sadness, not because of what he was really, but because he was doubtless happier not knowing about it. Basically, Ambrose wasn’t so different from Farouk, who, despite the political tensions he had caused to decipher his Book, was just a being in search of answers—answers that were bitterly regretted afterwards. They were two echoes who owed their arrival in the world to just a few written lines, on the back of the one, in the Book of the other.
Did Eulalia’s echo also need a code to materialize? Or was that the fundamental difference between an echo born spontaneously from a crystallization, and all those that had come into being artificially?
“I have already found the Other,” Ophelia declared, to Ambrose’s amazement. “I found him and I didn’t even realize it.”
If she believed the Shadow, at least. Someone who resembled her.
What if the Other was actually me, she thought.
Ophelia’s self-mocking smile at this hypothesis fell fast. Pass through. On that night, when she had encountered Eulalia Gonde’s echo for the very first time, in her bedroom mirror, she had entered into him, and he into her.
But had he actually ever exited?
Feet in the dandelions, Ophelia didn’t move anymore. She was petrified. Her heart was in her mouth. Her hands froze under her gloves. First she felt very hot, then very cold, as if her organism had abruptly registered the invasion of a foreign body.
“Mademoiselle, are you alright?” Ambrose asked, anxiously.
Ophelia barely heard him over her chaotic breathing. No, she couldn’t be the Other because she would inevitably have realized it, because the landslides had always occurred without her knowing about it, and because, quite simply, she didn’t want to be. She rolled that thought up into a ball, as she would a piece of paper, and threw it as far away as possible. She was already stuck with one echo too many, she didn’t need a second.
“I’ll be better when everything’s over,” she replied.
She was relieved to hear the approach of the Lazaropter. Like a giant dragonfly, it soon stood out against the intense blue sky of the afternoon. The draft from its propellers blew the dandelion seeds in all directions as it landed in the field. Walter activated the mechanical gangway.
“Bienvenue onboard!” Lazarus shouted from the cockpit.
Inside, the Lazaropter was as dark, creaky, and cramped as the hull of a submarine must be. Blinded by the change of light, Ophelia found Thorn by bumping into the arm he was holding out to guide her to her safety harness. He was sitting on a sprung seat, with one hand gripping the security handle on the ceiling, and legs folded right in to avoid his feet being run over by Ambrose’s wheelchair. The journey promised to be a long one.
“Wait!”
It was Elizabeth, hoisting herself up onto the gangway that Walter was bringing back up, and then taking up what little space remained to them. A new pride shone from under her heavy eyelids.
“I am a citizen of Babel. I belong over there.”
They took off. Ophelia had already travelled by mirror, airship, train, sandglass, lift, birdtrain, and wheelchair; the Lazaropter was the most uncomfortable mode of transport of them all. The vibrating of the propellers spread to the security harnesses, shaking the bones, deterring any conversation.
But the Lazaropter was fast and, after a few hours, Babel could be seen.
“Sacrebleu!” Lazarus exclaimed.
Ophelia, Thorn, Ambrose, and Elizabeth undid their harnesses and twisted round to look at the windshield, on which the wipers were battling with the elements. The sea of clouds had gone crazy, here raising great walls of vapor, there hollowing out troughs of nothingness. In the space of two nights and two days, Babel had become barely recognizable. Gaping holes had appeared right in the middle of the major ark, one of them taking half a pyramid with it.
“The landslides are accelerating,” said Thorn.
Elizabeth’s pursed lips whitened.
“Lady Septima promised the citizens that they would be safe in the center of town. She . . . she was wrong.”
Through the swamp of clouds, the Babelians, their cries drowned out by the propellers, could be seen jostling each other in the streets, and desperately gesticulating up at them, in the Lazeropter. The ground beneath their feet had become their worst enemy.
Not the ground, thought Ophelia. The Other.
She refused to ask herself why she hadn’t yet been able to identify him. Mustn’t think about that rolled up piece of paper at the back of her mind.
In the meantime, she couldn’t see anywhere they could land in town, to drop off Ambrose and Elizabeth, as had been planned. Neither of them knew that they had both, in a different way, been Lazarus’s playthings. Ophelia didn’t want to drag them deeper into the machinations of the observatory
.
“Look!”
Ambrose twisted in his chair to indicate some shapes through the windshield, blurred by the mist. They were all hovering around the huge, still intact, tower of Babel’s Memorial.
Lazarus, who was tirelessly pulling levers and cranks, pressed his face to a periscope.
“Airships,” he said, “and not any old ones. They all bear the arms of the family spirits of Corpolis, Totem, Al-Andaloose, Flora, Sidh, Pharos, Zephyr, Tartar, Anima, Vesperal, the Serenissima, Heliopolis, Leadgold, Titan, Selene, the Desert, and even of the Pole. An interfamilial meeting on this scale in Babel, it’s never been seen before!”
Ophelia’s pulse had quickened at the words “Anima” and “Pole.”
“Our family spirits are here?”
Since the foundation of the new world, none of the spirits had ever left the ark for which he or she was responsible. Lazarus was right: it had never been seen before.
“They are probably there for Lady Helen,” Elizabeth managed to get out, wedged as she was against Walter’s unwieldy frame. “They must have felt her loss deeply. The family spirits are linked together by their Books, that’s one of the few things I grasped from studying that code.”
Ophelia felt hypnotized by the damp blobs through the windshield. One of them was Artemis’s airship, another Farouk’s. They must have mustered all possible resources, both technological and supernatural, to cover such a distance in such a short time. It was torture not to be able to join them and ask them if her family were all well.
Thorn leaned over her, as far as the cramped Lazaropter allowed. Despite the bristles invading his jaw and the shadows drowning his eyes, he was bursting with energy.
“Let’s stick to the plan,” he said into her ear. “If all the family spirits are at the Memorial, Eulalia Gonde will soon emerge from the wings—and maybe her echo will, at the same time. It’s now, more than ever, that we need the Horn of Plenty. Take us straight to the observatory,” he ordered Lazarus, raising his voice.
The Storm of Echoes Page 36