The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

  “How is he?”

  Berenilde had been concerned neither about her nor her fingers, but Ophelia felt a wave of gratitude sweep over her. She was the only one to have spared a thought for Thorn, and didn’t seem to doubt for a moment that Ophelia would have found him. And yet, what could she say in reply to her? That she had lost him once again? That he now only existed as aerargyrum, somewhere in the Wrong Side? That soon there would be neither Wrong Side nor Right Side, if the two worlds continued to collide? That the only person capable of preventing the catastrophe was right here, in this Memorial, and that Ophelia absolutely had to speak to him? That made for a lot of explaining, and time was short.

  A tiny murmur spared her from trying:

  “M-a.”

  All eyes turned to the carriage. Victoria, her cheeks hollow, shadowed, waxen, had sat up inside it. Her mouth twisted as she managed, in a broken voice, to get the same word out, the very first one Ophelia had ever heard her say:

  “M-a!”

  Berenilde considered the little girl in the carriage with bafflement, as if her own child had been exchanged for another, and then her chin quivered, and she let out a stifled cry from the very depths of her lungs. She lifted Victoria up in her arms, reeled under her weight, fell to her knees as her dress billowed around her, and hugging her tight with a love full of rage, she burst into both laughter and tears.

  “It’s incomprehensible,” whispered Aunt Rosaline, her voice shaky, her hands on her stomach. “Only an hour ago, we could barely get her to swallow a spoonful of soup.”

  The whole family crowded around Berenilde and Victoria. Ophelia took advantage of this diversion to give them the slip. Later—if there was a later—she would celebrate their reunion properly.

  She made her way between the patches of fog, bumping into terrified Memorialists dutifully filling trolleys with books. She recognized the patent section, where she had spent hours cataloguing, along with her division colleagues. She went past several people in the uniforms of the family guard and the security-service Necromancers, but this time no one asked her for her identity papers. It was panic all around.

  Ophelia’s gown was restricting her movements—a fastener had come undone and she couldn’t rectify it alone. She wasn’t that keen to witness the end of the world in her underwear.

  As she leaned on a guard rail overlooking the atrium, she saw the void down below. The real void. It had swept away the entrance to the Memorial, its high glass doors, an entire section of wall, the forecourt with the mimosas, the statue of the headless soldier, and right up to the birdtrain station. The interfamilial airships were drifting off, their moorings severed. Ophelia better understood the panic of the Memorialists. The inversions were assuming cataclysmic proportions, and her whole family was trapped on a piece of ark that was crumbling away like sugar. Soon there wouldn’t be enough ground left to support the weight of the tower. Through this opening, and two waves of clouds, in the distance, the city of Babel appeared even more fragmented than ever, eaten away by an invisible evil that was destroying it, district by district.

  Ophelia thought of Second, out there, in some basement, alone among a crowd of echo-automatons, waiting for her brother to be saved. She had undoubtedly pushed Thorn into that cage for a good reason. But what was it?

  Ophelia leaned further over the guard rail. She spotted the family spirits right down below, in the middle of the atrium. Reunited where they had spent their childhood, for the first time in centuries, they formed an almost perfect circle.

  If Ophelia hadn’t miscalculated, the person she was looking for was right there, before her very glasses, among them.

  From the level she was on, it was hard to see them clearly, but she recognized Artemis by her long red braid, Farouk by his immaculate whiteness, and Pollux by the sparks shooting out of his eyes, even from a distance. She may have never seen the other family spirits before, but she had studied their portraits, and so managed to identify them, one by one. Ra, Gaia, Morpheus, Olympus, Lucifer, Venus, Midas, Belisama, Djinn, Fama, Zeus, Viracocha, Yin, Horus, Persephone, Ouranos . . .

  Absent at roll call was just Helen, lost forever. And Janus.

  Ophelia was overcome with anxiety. Had she got it wrong, in the end?

  “They’re waiting.”

  Fox had just leant his elbows on the guard rail, beside Ophelia, to join her in gazing down below. Aunt Rosaline hadn’t exaggerated: he had really changed, too, but whereas Berenilde and Victoria had become more fragile, he had become excessively sturdy. It was as if his body had absorbed theirs, and then some, to become more muscular than ever, so that his buttons were ready to pop. He was carrying an enormous hunting rifle—a model intended for big game—that would have got him instantly arrested in Babel, had things not been so chaotic. It was the first time Ophelia was seeing him armed. Fox was more a man to use words, or, if pushed, fists. It was his eyes that struck her the most, buried deep under his knitted brows, burning with such intensity, it consumed their greenness like a forest fire.

  “They’ve been like that since we arrived in Babel. An interminable meeting. One might think that they’re grieving over the death of Mrs. Helen, but I know they’re still waiting for someone, at their little reunion. The big boss.”

  Fox had said that last word as if it pained him, like a raging toothache.

  “I’m waiting for him, too, that big boss,” he added, scouring every corner of the Memorial from his observation post. “Oh, yes, you bet I’m waiting for him. He’ll soon be among us, he might already be so.”

  “You’ve met him,” stated Ophelia.

  The fire in Fox’s eyes intensified.

  “In Citaceleste, on a pavement corner. I was on guard while Mr. Archibald was visiting Lady Berenilde. We had just found LandmArk, and sir wanted to convince her to go there, too, to help us influence Don Janus. Gail . . . she’d stayed over there. She’s still there. With him. He took my place, my face, my cat, and I can’t even get back to them.”

  His Northern accent seethed with contained rage.

  “And you?” asked Ophelia. “Were you—”

  “Hurt? No, and that’s the worst of it. He took on the appearance of a Narcotic. Sent me fast asleep. Should have seen the way he looked at me, just before. As if . . . as if I wasn’t really a person, as if I was so insignificant in his eyes, he wouldn’t have even considered getting rid of yours truly. I was nothing to him, you understand? Nowt. I’ve served minor nobility nearly all my life, but never have I felt nonexistent like that, and yet I’ve done my time in oubliettes. Soon as he comes out of his hole, that one, I’ll show him who I really am.”

  Fox clasped his enormous hands to calm himself, and then suddenly noticed Ophelia’s. The angry barrier of his eyebrows softened, and without comment, with a slightly gruff tenderness, he readjusted her gown, which was threatening to fall around her sandals.

  “And you, kid, what are you going to do?”

  “Reestablish a truth,” Ophelia replied, without the slightest hesitation. “In the hope that that truth reestablishes all the rest.”

  From the atrium, Elizabeth’s tiny but distinct voice reached Ophelia. In the middle of the circle of family spirits, she seemed punier than ever among their imposing figures. None of them paid any attention to her, not to her, not to her LUX insignia. She was showing them, insistently but with no authority, the gaping hole in the entrance wall. “My friend is still over there . . . She’s in danger . . .” Ophelia bit her lip. My friend. Elizabeth thought she was still in the Deviations Observatory, with Thorn and Lazarus, at the mercy of the Genealogists. She hadn’t abandoned her. She was concerned for her. Sincerely.

  As Ophelia turned her head, looking for the nearest transcendium to get down all those stories, she froze.

  Thorn stood there, drawn up to his full height, between the patent shelves. He had knocked his forehead on one of the suspended
lamps, and its copper shade was swinging like a pendulum, throwing a frenetic light across all the surrounding display cabinets.

  He was there. He, too, had managed to get away from the Wrong Side.

  Ophelia was incapable of speaking to him. She had a sponge instead of a throat, a nose, eyes; all of her was turning into water. She no longer had any but the fuzziest notion of anything that wasn’t Thorn, here, now. She saw him again inside that cage, vanishing from her sight in an explosion of particles. She had felt as if she were disintegrating at the same time as him.

  He brought her back to reality with just one question:

  “Did you find him?”

  He limped in her direction, leaning heavily on the bookcases, at the risk of toppling them. Without its brace, his leg seemed dislocated, as if all its fractures had returned under his trousers. He unfolded an arm, his thin wrist sticking out of a sleeve that was too small for him.

  “The Other,” he said, with difficulty. “Did you find him?”

  He was about to keel over. Ophelia held her fingerless hands out to him, but Fox beat her to it. With a single swipe, he swung the butt of his rifle so hard that Thorn’s head was flung backwards, with a cracking of vertebra.

  “The bookcase glass, kid!”

  Ophelia was horrified. By Thorn’s broken neck, first. By his lack of reflection on the bookcase glass next. This man with the shattered leg and ill-fitting shirt was a version of Thorn that was three years old, from the time when he was still in prison. The day when “God” had paid them a visit.

  Ophelia had seen what she had wanted to see.

  With a twist of the arm and a few bone-cracking sounds, the fake Thorn put his head back in place. He lowered his pale eyes on Ophelia, conspicuously ignoring Fox, as if he rated his butt swipe on a par with a gnat bite.

  “I wanted us to gain some time, but never mind. For sure, nothing and no one will have trade my mask . . . made my task of saving this world any easier.”

  His angular forms rounded until they had assumed the appearance of an unknown woman wearing a very colorful uniform, and with a dozen compasses dangling from her belt. It was now a fake Arkadian who was standing between the bookcases of patents.

  “Janus gave me this useful, but tardy, little present,” she said, indicating her own face. “May I present Carmen to you.”

  “She” vanished, only to reappear instantly on Ophelia’s left side, mouth pressed to her ear.

  “I have the final power . . .”

  She disappeared and then reappeared, right beside her other ear.

  “. . . that was missing from my repertoire.”

  “Move away from her!” Fox growled, under his breath.

  He now had his hunting rifle on his shoulder, and it was clear, from his whole posture, that he had been drilled in this maneuver a thousand times. He was suffocating with rage.

  “If you’ve touched her. Even lightly. I swear to you.”

  Ophelia knew that it was no longer about her. Fox needed just one excuse to pull the trigger. The fake Carmen, little inclined to take him seriously, pointed out a fixed sign saying “SILENCE, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT.” Ophelia saw Fox’s eyes bulge with fury, and then saw him no longer. There was no more Memorial. A dazzling sky was reflected in kilometers of terraced paddy fields. In the middle of them, puncturing the landscape like some ravenous maw, a chasm was spewing out reams of clouds.

  The fake Carmen stood right beside Ophelia, calf-deep, like her, in the mud of a paddy field. It was her family power that had brought them here.

  “The ark of Corpolis. A charming place, not so long ago. But we can timely fork . . . finally talk without interruption, at least.”

  “Until the next inversion,” Ophelia countered.

  The sponge in her throat had completely dried up. Without her fingers, she couldn’t control the furious flapping of the scarf, contaminated by the turmoil of her emotions. The fake Carmen threw her a sidelong glance. Her eyes, as black as Mother Hildegarde’s had been, reflected no light. Nothing about her was authentic, neither her grotesque way of jangling her compasses nor her voice devoid of expression.

  “It’s long gone, the time when, like you, I was just a limited little woman. From now on, I can do anything and go anywhere. There’s just one dead angle to my new power, and it’s right there, in that Wrong Side, where you had to go and stick yourself. I had to wait until you deigned to emerge from your hiding place. I sense that you’re on edge. Would you prefer a more familiar setting?”

  A light autumnal drizzle tapped Ophelia’s cheeks. The change in temperature was stark. She was now sitting on a public bench. The street before her was deserted, but she recognized it immediately. She was now on Anima. A carriage without a horse, driver, or passenger was struggling to extract one of its wheels, wedged in a ditch. They were everywhere, across the street and the gardens: countless underground chimneys, with silvery vapors rising up from them. It could have been a bombsite. Opposite the bench Ophelia was sitting on, there was a row of houses, all made of bricks and tiles. The lit lamps behind the curtains indicated that they were occupied, but no one dared to come out anymore, even if there were holes everywhere, including in the roofs.

  “It was more animated in the past,” commented the fake Carmen, sitting on the bench beside her. “I remember enjoying my stay, when I came with the Caravan Carnival . . . the Carnival Caravan.”

  Ophelia was barely listening to her. In one house under the rain, all the lights were out. The home in which she had left her childhood. There was a crater, right in the middle of the path. Its diameter was such that it could have swallowed up her brother and sisters at the first stumble.

  “You’re lucky, my dear, it’s still a charming neighborhood. I, personally, grew up in a military orphanage. I daresay I’m not telling you anything new, you did your little inquiry into the Eulalia Gonde that I was then. Is that your bedroom, up there? The little upstairs window, with the closed shutters? Was it there that you released my reflection from the mirror?”

  Ophelia turned from the crater in front of her house to look straight at this Arkadian who wasn’t one.

  “You were unable to locate the Other, despite all your powers. Do you know why?”

  The fake Carmen remained impassive on the bench, but Ophelia sensed she had riled her. She was preparing to do far worse; to risk more than her fingers.

  “Me, I do know why,” she continued. “It was pointless taking on Thorn’s appearance to get that information out of me. You only had to ask.”

  “Where is the Other?”

  There was more than impatience behind this question. Ophelia took a deep breath, full of drizzle, and replied:

  “Here. It’s you.”

  IDENTITY

  The Other looked blankly at Ophelia. The rotation of her head toward Ophelia bore no relation to the alignment of her shoulders and chest, and would have resulted in a neck injury for any normal person. Even her eyelashes, hung with beads of Anima drizzle, didn’t move.

  “Are you insinuating, my dear,” she said, stressing each syllable, that it’s me you released from the mirror?”

  Ophelia was uncomfortably aware of the lack of space between them on the public bench. For a long time, she had thought that the Other had been trapped in the narrowest in-between. She hadn’t known, then, of the existence of the Wrong Side, she hadn’t known that the Other had been born there, and had never been its prisoner.

  “No. The person I released from the mirror, and became mixed up with, is the real Eulalia Gonde. She was confined to the Wrong Side, by her own choice, since the Rupture. You had both changed places, for all that time. For Eulalia to be able to invert, along with herself, half of the world, there had to be a symbolically equivalent counterpart, something coming out of the Wrong Side to redress the balance. That was you. An echo endowed with speech, conscious of itself, that was
outside the repetitive cycle, but an echo all the same.”

  “Where is my Book?”

  The Other managed an impersonal smile. She stood up and, without the slightest modesty, and with a jangling of compasses, got undressed in the rain, to display Carmen’s naked body. No sooner removed, the uniform just disappeared, like smoke. Ophelia noticed the faces of several neighbors—all relations of hers, more or less distant—pressed to their windows along the street. Their fear of coming outside remained stronger, however, than their curiosity.

  “If I’m really just an echo, as you suggest,” said the Other, turning slowly on the cobbles so as not to conceal any part of her, “where is the code that keeps me incarnate in matter?”

  “I wondered about that myself,” Ophelia admitted. “I think that that’s what differentiates you, fundamentally, from the family spirits and all the forms of materialized echoes. By sustaining a dialogue with Eulalia Gonde, you ended up crystallizing yourself. You woke up to yourself, while you were still in the Wrong Side. You developed your thoughts, with your words, within a dimension devoid of its own language. You don’t need a code. You do, on the other hand, need Eulal . . .”

  Ophelia’s breath was cut off. The Other’s arm had suddenly stretched, in a supernatural elongation of muscle and bone, to grab her by the throat. She still had the Arkadian’s naked body, but her flesh had taken on the rubbery consistency of a Metamorphoser. She wasn’t gripping Ophelia to the point of strangling her, but how firm her grip was! The strength of a crowd concentrated in just one individual.