Ophelia had not yet been to the censoring department. It was located in the Memorial’s other hemisphere, the one that had been entirely reconstructed after the Rupture; you couldn’t walk there without thinking of the void beneath the tons of stone. The department was deserted and looked more like an industrial site than an administrative office. Naked bulbs cast a harsh light on piles of cardboard boxes, reaching right up to the ceiling. The heat inside was overwhelming.
“It’s the incinerator,” Blaise explained, pointing at the smoked-up porthole on a pressurized door. “I’m . . . I’m strictly forbidden from going near it.”
“It’s operating at the moment?” Ophelia asked, with surprise. “I thought that no items were to be destroyed as long as the new catalogue wasn’t completed.”
“Books, yes, but not garbage. The Memorial welcomes hundreds of visitors every day, not to mention all its staff. You’d be amazed at the number of bin-loads we chuck into there each evening. The archives are this way, mademoiselle!”
Blaise opened another door, the handle of which came off in his hand. The archives room was no different from the rest of the department: nothing but boxes everywhere. If the old catalogue was a reflection of this setup, Ophelia better understood why Thorn had started compiling it again from scratch.
“I’m going to leave you,” Blaise said. “I mustn’t miss my birdtrain. I’ll trust you to turn off the lights and close the door behind you when you’ve finished.”
“You can count on it.”
Ophelia was late herself; she had no more time to lose. She pushed up the sleeves of her frock coat, scanned the labels on the boxes, and then suddenly noticed that Blaise was still standing in the doorway. A tormented expression contorted his face.
“Have you considered that Fearless might be behind . . . all this?”
“I have considered it, yes.” Fearless hated the censors; Mademoiselle Silence had died while doing that very work. Fearless had seen Mediana as an enemy; she had ceased to be a Forerunner from one day to the next. He was a man who was far less innocuous than he seemed, extremely well informed and terribly ambitious. Ophelia wouldn’t have been surprised if he, too, was searching for this book that enabled one to become God’s equal.
“Take care, alright? Don’t end up like your colleague. S’il te plaît.”
Blaise’s voice had become so imploring that Ophelia was truly moved. She didn’t know what to say. She never knew what to say at such times.
“The Deviations Observatory,” Blaise then declared, gravely. “It’s there that she was transferred. Au revoir, mademoiselle.”
“I . . . Thank you.”
The words had been blurted too late; Blaise was gone.
Ophelia forced herself to get a grip. One thing at a time: first, the boxes. She found one on which the date corresponded to that of Mademoiselle Silence’s death, and flicked through the records it contained.
“Here we are,” she whispered. On one of the records there was an entire column of “E. G.”s under the heading “author.” Ophelia scanned the titles: Journey Around the New World; The Adventures of the Little Prodigies; A Fine and Wonderful Family, and so on. These books reeked of righteousness, rendering their destruction even more incomprehensible.
Under the heading “grounds for censoring,” Mademoiselle Silence had simply written: “Vocabulary condemned by the Index and lack of educational content.”
E. G.’s books carried no publication date, as was common in older editions, but according to the record, their date of printing was estimated at the first century after the Rupture. It was a time when humanity was still rebuilding itself, and in full regeneration; so-called optimistic literature was widely available then.
Increasingly disconcerted, Ophelia pushed her glasses back up her nose. There was really nothing untoward here. Maybe, in the end, E. G.’s oeuvre was a false trail. What if the book she was looking for was in fact a Book, with a capital B? And what if God had been created just as he had himself created the family spirits? If a Book existed that conferred the power to reproduce all of the powers?
By reading the record with her hands and discovering Mademoiselle Silence’s state of mind, Ophelia could have been enlightened, but for that she needed the consent of the censoring department. The last time she had used her power without permission, she had violated Professor Wolf’s privacy—this misconduct still weighed on her conscience.
Ophelia suddenly noticed an anomaly within the record. All the titles on the list of E. G.’s books had been stamped “destroyed.” All, except one: The Era of Miracles.
Had one book escaped incineration? So that was what Mademoiselle Silence had returned to find in the middle of the night! And it was death that she found instead. But the book itself, what had become of it?
“Once upon a tomorrow, before too long, there will be a world that will finally live in peace.”
Barely had Ophelia finished this sentence before she was wondering why she’d said it. Those were the very words that had entered her mind when she had read the statue of the headless soldier. She had the feeling that she’d already seen them somewhere. That she’d learnt them off by heart, and then forgotten them.
Suddenly, Ophelia looked up from the record. She could see nothing but boxes of archives all around her, and yet, for a brief moment, she had seen a movement out of the corner of her eye. Like a shadow leaning over her shoulder. She became aware that she was drenched in sweat, and not because of the ambient heat. Her heart was racing. Her glasses had suddenly turned blue.
Ophelia felt as if she had woken from a nightmare that she couldn’t even remember.
When she saw the time on the room’s clock, she leapt to her feet. It was much later than she’d thought! Everyone, starting with Thorn, must be wondering where she’d got to. She quickly put her box back and switched off the lights, but just as she was closing the premises, she glanced hesitantly at the door of the incinerator. The porthole was glowing red like a hot plate. It was in there that Mademoiselle Silence had destroyed E. G.’s books, apart from just one. But what if The Era of Miracles had accidentally remained inside?
Ophelia was hit with a powerful surge of heat as soon as she half-opened the pressurized door. A furnace took up almost the whole room. It radiated such a high temperature that merely lingering in front of it made her feel as if she’d be reduced to ashes. She should have put on protective clothing before entering here, but she no longer had time to look for any. She had a quick look in every corner of the room, under the garbage skips, behind the coal bunker, anywhere a book could have slipped and remained unnoticed.
Nothing.
The only thing she found, when she decided that it was too hot to stay a second longer, was a closed door. On the other side of the porthole, the Seers were running off.
Ophelia worked on the door handle, which was so hot that it burnt her fingers, despite her gloves. It was no good. They had triggered the security lock.
“Evening forecast: heat wave alert.”
They knew! The Seers had anticipated this moment from the start. And, as always, they had made themselves the actual enactors of their own prophesies. Much as Ophelia banged on the door and cried for their help, no one came. And she obviously couldn’t count on her Animism to release the lock.
The heat from the furnace was unbearable. Ophelia looked for another way out, but she was well and truly trapped. Sweat was dripping off her chin. Her feet were burning in their boots. She pressed her face to the ventilation grille on the wall. She couldn’t escape that way—she’d barely have got an arm through it—but it was the least overheated place in the room. Time trickled away, and with it, all the fluid within her body.
She just couldn’t believe it. Were the Seers aware that they were putting her in danger? Apart from them, only Blaise knew where she was, and his birdtrain had flown off a long time ago.
Ophelia tugged at her collar. Panic, more, even, than the heat, was suffocating her. She wiped away the sweat that was stinging her eyes; a shadow appeared at the porthole on the door. A click. The handle turned by itself; air rushed into the room.
Ophelia rushed out of it. She coughed until her lungs hurt. Her head was spinning so fast, she had to lean against a wall. She would have cried with relief, had there still been enough fluid in her body to do so.
Who had opened the door for her? The Seers? Wherever Ophelia looked, there was no one but her in the censoring department.
She stumbled to the nearest restroom. She had to stop herself from drinking water from the tap—it wasn’t fit to drink—but she wiped the skin of her face and neck with a soaked handkerchief. She was as red as if she had been sunburned.
She must find Thorn, and fast. He must be urgently informed of the disappearance of the only book by E. G. not to have been destroyed by Mademoiselle Silence. He could be missing the very item that was central to his research.
Ophelia had barely left the bathroom before she went straight back in and vomited the contents of her stomach. Leaning over the toilet and shivering violently, she seriously considered denouncing the Seers. She would have, without a moment’s hesitation, if doing so wouldn’t mean she’d have to explain what she herself was up to in the censoring department. She mustn’t attract the attention of either Lady Septima or any Lord of LUX as she pursued her investigations.
Ophelia encountered not a soul in the galleries, apart from a few automatons cleaning the cabinet windows. The Memorial had closed its doors; the visitors and most of the staff had left. She headed for the reading cubicles to find Lady Septima. She could only hope that Lady Septima would agree to give her access to the Secretarium, despite her lateness.
The Seers were sitting at their tables, quietly bent over their books, as if they’d never left them. They returned her furious glare with ironic half-smiles. There was, however, one among them who had the decency to hang his head, visibly uncomfortable. Ophelia wondered whether it wasn’t he who, feeling remorse, had opened the door for her.
She frowned on noticing that Octavio’s cubicle, at the Sons of Pollux desk, was empty.
“Tiens, tiens, tiens!” said Lady Septima, when she saw her. “Here’s our missing person. For nearly an hour now we’ve been looking for you, apprentice. Not one of your classmates could tell us where you had gone. What is your explanation?”
“I didn’t feel well.” Which was no lie. Ophelia’s hoarse voice, ruddy cheeks, and sweat-soaked hair all backed her up.
“Well, I never. And you didn’t think it might be a good idea to let us know? Sir Henry needed your hands for a new evaluation. You made everyone late.”
Lady Septima had clicked her tongue as she spoke, but this disapproval was a mere façade. Her eyes glowed with satisfaction. She could serve back to her pupil the humiliation that she, as a teacher, had suffered the previous day. Ophelia was instantly sure that she was perfectly aware of what the Seers had just put her through. Perhaps she was even the instigator.
“I’ll make up for it,” she promised. “Could you open the access to the Secretarium for me?”
“There’s no point, apprentice. Sir Henry found someone to replace you.”
The effect these words had on Ophelia was more brutal than the heat of the incinerator. So that was why Octavio’s cubicle was empty!
“If you really want to make up for it, follow the example of your classmates,” Lady Septima recommended, indicating the Godchildren of Helen desk to her. “Maybe the extra hours of catalography you do will mitigate the bad impression created by what you didn’t do elsewhere? What a shame, just a few days away from the awarding of grades . . . ”
Ophelia sat in her cubicle, but took up neither something to read nor something to write with. She merely glared at the globe of the Secretarium, with its red-gold earthly crust reflecting the lamps of the galleries that circled it, like planetary rings. Since the cubicles were on the ceiling, Ophelia was seeing it upside down, but she had a direct view of the reinforced door.
Thorn had replaced her.
“Is the signorina going to cry?” one of the Seers whispered through the latticed partition opposite. “Would the signorina like a hankie?”
Ophelia shut him up with a single look. She was seething with anger.
Thorn had replaced her because of them.
She left her cubicle as soon as she saw the gangway to the door of the Secretarium being deployed. Lady Septima was seated at the telegram counter; if she discovered she’d deserted her post without her consent, it meant certain expulsion. “I request permission to go to the restroom.”
“Again?” Lady Septima hadn’t even looked up from her notebook, in which she was busy writing notes.
“I’m really not well. I would prefer not to vomit over Memorial equipment.” Ophelia didn’t have to fake it. She really did feel nauseous.
“You have five minutes,” Lady Septima decreed, still writing away. “And it will be reported in your file. A virtuoso must be totalement in control of his or her body.”
That was the least of Ophelia’s concerns. She went off toward the restrooms, and then changed direction as soon as she was out of view. She went along a series of corridors and arrived at the northern transcendium just as Octavio was about to bring the gangway back with a turn of the key in the post.
“I must go to the Secretarium,” she told him, breathlessly. “Just for a minute, please.”
Octavio frowned with his thick, black eyebrows. At that moment, his resemblance to his mother was more striking than ever. “Why?”
Ophelia felt impatience taking over. “Because I must speak with Sir Henry. It’s confidential.”
“You won’t find him at the Secretarium anymore. He’s just left it. He’s going into town, an airship awaits him.”
Ophelia reflected that it was decidedly not her evening. Nothing was going to plan. She went down the transcendium as fast as she physically could. Thorn was just striding through the doors of the atrium; for someone disabled, his pace was impressive. The difference in temperature between the cool of the Memorial and the night outside made Ophelia feel as if she were entering hot water.
She only managed to catch up with Thorn as he was passing in front of the headless soldier. An airship, in silhouette, was preparing its approach, its fuselage gleaming in the moonlight.
“Wait . . . ”
Thorn turned when he heard Ophelia. It was the first time she was seeing him in the official uniform of the Lords of LUX. Its gold decorations took on a silvery sheen under the haloes of the streetlamps.
“I’m in a hurry. The Genealogists have summoned me.”
“I’ll be brief. Why have you done this to me?”
“Do not forget whom you are addressing.”
The warning couldn’t have been clearer. Right now, Thorn was Sir Henry, and, even if only mimosa surrounded them, they were in a public place. Ophelia didn’t care. She could no longer contain the seething emotions consuming her inside.
“Why?” she insisted, her voice choked. “Are you punishing me?”
“You weren’t available. Waiting for you would have slowed me down in my research.”
Thorn had drawn himself up to his full height and was looking straight ahead. Out of reach. The detachment of his reasoning increased Ophelia’s rage tenfold.
“Slowed you down? For your information, I was also doing research of my own. It might interest you to learn . . . ”
“Of your own, that’s precisely the problem,” he interrupted her. “I advised you never to leave your division, and you were supposed to warn me if you discovered anything new. Nothing has changed, you still always make your decisions alone.”
“I wanted to help you,” Ophelia hissed, through gritted teeth.
Thorn looked up at the airship, now so close to the ark that its propellers were making all the surrounding mimosas quiver.
“I don’t want any of your finer feelings. I need efficiency. If you don’t mind, I now have a flight to take.”
Ophelia’s blood ignited in her every vein. “You’re an egoist.” She had wanted to anger Thorn, and she knew, by the way he had frozen on the spot, that she had succeeded. All the shadows of the night suddenly seemed to have been drawn to the center of his face. He threw Ophelia a look so hard, she reeled from its impact.
“I am demanding, a killjoy, obsessive, antisocial, and crippled,” he intoned, in a forbidding voice. “You can put all the defects in the world on me, but I will not permit you to call me an egoist. If you prefer to do things your way, go ahead,” he concluded, slicing the air with his hand, “but don’t waste my time anymore.” Thorn turned his back on her to join his airship. “Our collaboration is over.”
Ophelia knew that one move from her would just make things worse for her. And yet she couldn’t stop her hand from shooting out to grab hold of Thorn, force him to turn around, stop him from going any further.
She never reached him. A violent pain shot through her arm like an electric shock. Winded, Ophelia only just held onto the statue of the soldier to stop herself from falling. She stared wide-eyed behind her crooked glasses, as Thorn disappeared into the night with a sinister grating of steel, and without a backward glance.
He had used his claws against her.