Although Ophelia had never seen the isolation chamber, she had heard all about it. The most dreaded room in the conservatoire, it was reserved for rebels. It was said that just a single hour in it felt like a whole day, and staying in it too long sent one mad. Ophelia had doubted its existence, but could no longer do so as Elizabeth led her to the very back of the gardens, where the jungle was but a tangled web of creepers. They arrived in front of a statue of a woman sitting cross-legged, her head that of an elephant. It was monumental enough for trees to be nestled in its crevices, their sinuous roots spilling over the stone. Elizabeth climbed the stairs of the pedestal, and then, clearing away the brambles with the tip of her boot, she uncovered a circular trapdoor in the stone.
“Open it, Apprentice Eulalia. That’s the tradition.”
Ophelia turned the handle several times. It had to be forged in some Alchemist’s rustproof alloy because, despite its obvious age, it put up no resistance. She found it harder, however, to lift the trapdoor: it was thick as her body! Her glasses blanched on discovering a dark well plunging several yards down within the stone of the pedestal.
“I really have to go down.”
It was more an acknowledgment than a question. Ophelia knew that she had no choice. Contesting the ruling of a family spirit would amount to making oneself an outlaw.
Casually, Elizabeth dropped the basket of dried fruit she had brought with her. The wicker echoed strangely as it hit the bottom of the well. “You’ll find sufficient water and light down there. At least, so I’m told. I’ve never been into the isolation chamber. I’ll come to collect you at the end of the week, to escort you to the ceremony. Be sure to ration out the food; no one’s going to bring you any.”
Ophelia thought Elizabeth would add her usual “I’m joking,” but it seemed that, for once, she wasn’t. The thought of finding herself alone at the bottom of this well for several days and several nights triggered a sudden surge of claustrophobia.
“Would you . . . would you explain the situation to Sir Henry?”
“Don’t worry about him, apprentice. He’ll replace you, just as he replaced Mediana before you.”
Ophelia tried not to show how painful it was to hear those words. “Do you think I still have a chance of becoming an aspiring Forerunner, like you?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
Much as Ophelia was used to her perpetual neutrality, she would have appreciated her forgoing it today. As she climbed down the rungs of the well, Elizabeth leaned over, pushing the hair clinging to her cheeks behind her ears. “But I have faith in Lady Helen. You should, too.”
With this advice, Elizabeth closed the well’s trapdoor. Her freckles were the last thing Ophelia saw of the outside world. Just as her voice was the last sound: the cries of birds, monkeys and insects were replaced by a stark silence. Ophelia felt her chest pounding as anxiety overwhelmed her again.
She did not want to stay here alone.
She fought the impulse to bang on the trapdoor and beg Elizabeth to reopen it. She took a slow, deep breath. The air wasn’t particularly fragrant, but it was breathable. She unclenched her fingers from the rungs, and, one foot after the other, made her descent.
A few Heliopolis bulbs cast a cold light at the bottom of the well. The isolation chamber was furnished with basic conveniences: a toilet pan, an unscreened shower, a basin, a medicine cabinet, a mattress, and mirrors. Many mirrors. Every wall was a mirror. The ceiling was a mirror. Even the floor was a mirror. When Ophelia picked up the basket of dried fruit Elizabeth had dropped down the well, her movement was endlessly multiplied. She saw herself from the front and the back at once, her reflections forever shrinking. She felt as if she were not in a confined space, but in the middle of a multidirectional tunnel populated by thousands of other Ophelias. And she couldn’t escape from a single one of them.
There was neither a telephone nor a periscope, and nothing, either, to occupy the mind. Nothing to read, nothing to write with, nothing to fill the emptiness and the silence. There was only her. An infinity of her.
An ideal place for reflection.
Ophelia sat in a corner of the isolation chamber, drew her legs up, and buried her face in her arms. Time crept over her like glue. She had no notion of the hour—there was no clock, either, in the chamber—but the longer she remained slumped, the drowsier she became. After two sleepless nights in a row, she needed to sleep. But she couldn’t. Every time she was about to doze off, her body sent her an electric shock that made her jump. She didn’t dare leave her corner of the room, tormented by the eyes of her countless reflections. It wasn’t comfortable, but the stench from the mattress was worse.
When had Elizabeth closed the trapdoor? Today? Yesterday? Was it nighttime, up there? If Ophelia could have at least heard the sound of the gong . . . The only sounds here were organic, coming from the plumbing and from her stomach.
Gnawing at the seams of her gloves, one by one, her thoughts veered in all directions: to God, to the Other, to E. G., to LUX, to the Rupture, to that mystery person who spread terror in his path.
Ophelia tried to order her thoughts, but the chamber’s mirrors distracted her. She was a mirror visitor. She should have felt in her element here, but anxiety was crippling her. The last time she’d tried to use her power, it had been distressing. She was afraid of confronting her reflection again, and she knew that the mere fact of being afraid made any mirror passage impossible.
Because Octavio was right. Because she’d become too blurry a person.
Where would she have gone, anyhow? To her knowledge, there was no other mirror on the Good Family ark. The closest one in which she’d been reflected was in the Memorial restrooms, and she was incapable of covering such a distance.
Ophelia curled up even tighter. The real question wasn’t “where to go?” but “why go there?” Thorn no longer expected her. He’d put an end to their collaboration. She had thought she could hand him the book he was looking for on a platter, but despite everything that had happened, despite all she had learnt, she had made no progress. On the contrary, she had compromised her chances of becoming an aspiring virtuoso.
She had failed to help Thorn. Again.
Exhausted, Ophelia let herself slide onto the floor. Lying on this great ice-cold mirror, she saw her myriad reflections on the ceiling as strange celestial bodies. And then she saw nothing. Her thoughts became diluted, sleep soaked her up, and she felt herself sinking.
When Ophelia awoke, she was floating in a haze in which she glimpsed fragmented images, fluctuating colors, distorted sounds, as if she were drifting beneath the surface of a lake. She felt neither fear nor amazement. In fact, she had rarely felt so calm. She felt as if she were sliding on the tensile web of space and time. She knew this place, tiny and vast, from having passed through it hundreds of times without ever stopping in it. The floor of the isolation chamber had swallowed her up while she slept and she hadn’t resurfaced. She was nowhere. She was everywhere.
She was in the gap between the mirrors.
“Why are you in Babel?”
Thorn’s voice vibrated on Ophelia as on a tuning fork. He wasn’t physically here with her, inside the gap, but his question was only too real. It was the first thing he’d said to her on the evening of their reunion. This echo from the past now returned to her with the inevitability of a pendulum’s swing.
Why had Thorn asked her why? Wasn’t it obvious that he was the only answer to his own question?
Barely had this thought occurred to Ophelia than she understood the reason for her being within the gap. This space was the very reflection of her inner state. Neither child nor adult, neither girl nor woman, she had remained stuck on the cusp of her life. She had expected words and gestures from Thorn that she had never offered him. At no time had she said “we.” At no time had she reached out to him. At no time had she laid herself bare.
The truth, the only truth, was that she had been cowardly.
This realization ran through her like a fissure; the surface of her being felt as if it were shattering, like eggshell. It hurt, but Ophelia knew that it was a necessary pain. Her suffering soared when her old identity shattered.
She could feel herself dying. She would finally be able to live.
*
When she was little, Ophelia had once amused herself by running backwards in the garden, to see the world go by the wrong way. Her foot had then skidded on a ball, and she had felt herself tipping backwards, no longer able to tell up from down.
This was exactly what she felt as she left the gap. She fell backwards with a feeling of unreality. Her back suddenly hit the ground. Her lungs emptied from the impact. For several long seconds, she was no longer breathing. Dazed, she stared through her glasses at the maze of spiderwebs glistening above her. A glimmer, pale as a moonbeam, came through an opening in the middle of a vaulted ceiling.
Ophelia may have left the gap, but she hadn’t returned to the isolation chamber.
She got entangled in the spiderwebs as she got to her feet. The place she found herself in was bathed in a nebulous twilight. Apart from the small opening in the ceiling, there was no apparent door or window. An old mirror in the room was, however, producing a vague reflection. Its surface was coated in a thick layer of dust, except for where Ophelia’s body had emerged: that dust was still floating in the air in the wake of her fall.
Where was she? How could she have passed through a mirror in which she had never been reflected? It defied every law of Animist physics.
Ophelia soon noticed that that wasn’t the only particularity of this mirror. It was hanging in the air. It wasn’t in a state of levitation, as one often saw in Babel. Getting closer to it, one could make out that it was surrounded by a panel that was both transparent and—from the way Ophelia could pass her hand through it—ethereal. Of the wall it had been fixed to, all that remained was a ghost.
Ophelia had a quick look around the room, and up at the ceiling, the source of the ray of light. And suddenly she knew where she was: at the heart of the Memorial, in the Secretarium, inside the weightlessly floating second globe. This mirror before her belonged to one of the top floors of the original building. It hung exactly where the other half of the building had collapsed at the moment of the Rupture. For some reason, it hadn’t fallen into the void with everything else. It had remained absurdly anchored in the air. Someone had had the globe constructed around this anomaly to conceal it. Was that, there, the work of God? How many people today knew of the existence of this suspended mirror?
‘The strongroom,’ she then realized. ‘The ultimate truth.’
With her glove, Ophelia gently rubbed away the dust that had settled on the mirror. If she was right, this object was several centuries old. No mirror could survive that long without losing its silvering. Normally, she shouldn’t have seen her reflection in it.
And, indeed, it wasn’t her face that was reflected. The woman facing her had the same small stature, the same brown hair, the same glasses, but it wasn’t her.
Their lips moved at the same time:
“I am Ophelia,” said Ophelia.
“I am Eulalia,” said the reflection.
Ophelia closed her eyes, and then reopened them: her image had become her own again. She unbuttoned her gloves, put them in her pockets, and rubbed her moist palms together. She understood nothing that was happening to her, but she was sure of one thing: she had to read this mirror.
She eliminated her thoughts, one by one, blowing them out like countless candle flames. When she felt ready, she pressed her bare hands against those of her reflection. The first vision to come to her was of her own fall through the mirror, as was entirely logical. From then on, nothing proceeded as expected anymore.
Ophelia felt as though she were making her own reflection suck her up. Her memory turned itself inside out, like a glove. Ancient memories, from a different era, fulminated deep in her consciousness. The memories were so forceful that Ophelia tore in two, just as the building had once done. One half of her had suddenly become a stranger to her.
That half looked exactly like the little woman she had seen instead of her own reflection. The woman was tapping away on a typewriter, facing the big mirror, at the time when there was still a wall for it to hang on. Ophelia saw through her eyes, like a spectator at the theater. Her hair, dark and unruly, hadn’t been washed for so long, it was sticking to her forehead. Her nose kept running, obliging her to use her handkerchief with one hand, while still typing with the other.
“Soon,” she muttered to the mirror. “Soon, but not today.”
Ophelia observed the scene through the eyes of the woman, with the mirror in between. At least, she tried to. The woman’s eyesight seemed to be as poor as hers, and she hadn’t put her glasses on. No one else was in the room, but there was crumpled paper all over the floor.
There was a knocking on the door. Ophelia immediately stopped typing to pull a thick curtain across the mirror, covering it entirely.
“What is it?” she asked.
The door opened, allowing a vague silhouette to be seen, which Ophelia recognized as she got closer to it. It was the caretaker whose register she had evaluated. As in her dream, he was wearing small, steel-rimmed spectacles and a turban, its scarf attempting to conceal his war-injured jaw. He couldn’t refrain from frowning on noticing the paper and handkerchiefs strewn across the floor. His rigidity was a vestige of the military man he had once been.
“No reflective material,” Ophelia reassured him, after conscientiously blowing her nose.
The caretaker removed his spectacles in an efficient manner. But that didn’t stop his old hands from shaking. “We’ve got a blasted problem.”
The dialect he spouted was unfamiliar to Ophelia. And yet she understood it without the slightest difficulty. She was even courteous enough to reply to him in his language:
“Oh dear, what’s he done now?”
“He’s killed all our blasted sparrows, that’s what he’s done. I didn’t want him going into that aviary, but he couldn’t stop himself. One day, I swear it’ll be me he kills.”
The caretaker glanced nervously behind him, toward the door, as if fearing a presence on the other side.
“Be patient,” Ophelia sighed. “He’ll learn to control himself like the others.”
“He ain’t like them blasted brats, that one.”
The caretaker disappeared from her field of vision. She rubbed her eyes, wearily. Thanks to typing without her glasses on, her eyes were smarting. And her chronic sinusitis didn’t help, either.
“His role is different,” she said. “He protects the school.”
“And I protect this blasted school, too,” the caretaker grumbled, through his deformed lips. “If those blasted soldiers reach our blasted island, I’ll chuck them right back into the blasted briny.”
Ophelia rolled her handkerchief into a ball and threw it over to join the others on the floor, prompting an exasperated grunt from the caretaker.
“You’re just a man,” she told him, gently. “And I’m just a woman. We’re limited, you and I. He isn’t. Between now and the coming of the new humanity, he’ll protect us all. Have faith in him.”
Have faith in him. Those four words resonated through Ophelia as the old caretaker, the paper, the handkerchiefs, the typewriter, and the entire room faded away, like rings in water. When she was firmly back in the present, she was stretched out in the middle of the isolation chamber, frozen and burning at the same time, like some drowned person thrown up by the sea.
She had left the Memorial’s second globe and crossed the gap in the opposite direction, without even realizing it. For a long time, she just stared at her reflection on the ground, blurred as it was by the drops of sweat dripping from her face. Her family power still quivered right across her skin.
She had never felt so different. She had never felt so much herself.
She knew everything. She knew where the book was that allowed one to become God’s equal. She knew who protected it and why. Or rather, she knew that she knew. She could glimpse all the answers pulsing through her veins, but didn’t yet have access to them.
Ophelia got undressed, took a shower, and then ate some fruit. She experienced each sensation with a new acuity. She didn’t put her gloves back on; for once, she felt like touching the world without putting up a barrier. The omnipresence of her reflections no longer disturbed her.
When she felt sufficiently rested, Ophelia sat in the middle of the mirrors and linked her hands tightly. This time, it was her own body she had to learn to read.
She listened attentively to the ebb and flow of her breathing. She listened attentively to all her thoughts, even the most trivial. She listened attentively to the silence of the isolation chamber, which, little by little, became her own. Time disappeared.
She forgot herself the better to remember.
A flood of light poured into the isolation chamber, bouncing off the mirrors with the force of a river. It carried on its waves the sounds and smells of the jungle.
The trapdoor up above had reopened.
“Still alive?” Elizabeth’s phlegmatic voice called down.
Ophelia got up slowly, blinded by the brightness of the daylight. A parcel immediately dropped into her arms. It was a fresh uniform.
“Get ready, apprentice. The ceremony awaits us.”
She did as requested. She knew exactly what she still had left to do.