“As long as I’m alive, you’ll never go up there,” Mediana whispered to her, pinching her chin to turn her eyes from the globe. “Let’s make a detour, my vescica is fit to burst.”
Ophelia followed her under the peristyle and waited outside the door to the restrooms, as would an obedient dog. Never had she felt so humiliated. Her anger with Mediana didn’t, however, compare with that she felt with herself. She exchanged a stern look with her reflection, on one of the mirrors she could see through the half-open door to the toilet stalls. She had compromised Thorn, no more, no less.
“I’m not going to beat about the bush. You are not productive.”
Hearing Lady Septima’s voice ringing through the peristyle’s arcades, Ophelia stood to attention. In her haste, she scattered all her index cards at her feet. Not saluting a teacher, or, even worse, a Lord of LUX, meant instant punishment: she’d learnt that lesson through chores and detentions. It was not, however, to her that Lady Septima had just spoken, but to the old sweeper of the Memorial, who was methodically dusting each flagstone on the floor.
“It is the subsidies generously granted by LUX that maintain this building. Our Memorialists rely entirely on automatons’ orders. Accept it, their productivity is a hundred times yours.”
Ophelia raised her eyebrows, as she gathered up the cards she’d dropped. Lady Septima was waving a file under the nose of the sweeper—she was as short and muscular as he was tall and thin.
“We are grateful for your loyal and faithful service, old man, but it is time to make way for the future. Sign this paper.” Lady Septima was the embodiment of authority, her eyes and gold braiding making her blaze like a sun. And yet the sweeper simply shook his head.
Ophelia felt an instant, irresistible liking for him. Inside the pocket of her uniform, Thorn’s watch opened and closed its cover with a resounding click. The impertinent noise made Lady Septima swivel round.
“Apprentice Eulalia, do you not have work to do?”
If Ophelia’s hands hadn’t already been occupied picking up her cards, she would have squeezed the watch tight to stop it reoffending. It was becoming animated with increasing frequency, snapping its cover all over the place. For a poor, broken mechanism, it wasn’t short on repartee.
“I do, madame.”
“You don’t look as if you do. I was proud of your slight progress at the end of your probation period. You have slackened lamentably since then. Do not rest on your wings—they can be withdrawn from you at any moment.”
Ophelia held Lady Septima’s piercing gaze through the dark rectangles of her glasses. If this woman was as observant as her family power predisposed her to be, she would have suspected what was going on within the division of Helen’s Forerunners.
Maybe she did know about it.
“I will see to it that Sir Henry increases your reading group’s quotas,” Lady Septima declared, moving off with a military step. “Your colleagues will be most grateful to you, Apprentice Eulalia.”
A group punishment—Ophelia really needed that. Even so, she couldn’t refrain from giving a quick smile to the sweeper, who turned his big beard almost imperceptibly toward her without stopping his meticulous dusting.
“I’m going to end up thinking that you like being punished, signorina.”
Ophelia’s muscles all tensed at once. Having just come out of the restrooms, Mediana had leaned against her back with all her weight, so as to keep her kneeling in the middle of the scattered cards on the floor. Ophelia couldn’t see her smile, but could imagine it from the feline purring of her voice.
“Watch out,” she whispered in her ear. “Jinx straight ahead.”
Ophelia looked up, mortified. Blaise had abandoned his returns trolley right in the middle of the atrium to make a beeline for her. Mediana backed away as he got nearer. The assistant’s bad luck was notorious: wherever he was, whatever he was doing, a bookshelf would always collapse, or a lamp explode, as he passed.
Blaise crouched down to help Ophelia pick her up her cards; in his haste, he banged his forehead against hers. “Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he greeted her with a hesitant smile. “I tried so hard . . . You were never . . . Bon, I’m pleased to speak to you at last.”
It was, indeed, the first time they were speaking since their encounter in the birdtrain. And for a very good reason: Ophelia had scrupulously avoided bumping into him at the Memorial. She absorbed herself in her cataloguing when she heard his timid step close to the reading cubicles; she turned back whenever she came across his trolley around the corner of a corridor. He seemed so anxious to engage in conversation, he whose company everyone shunned, that she despised herself a little more every time she avoided him.
“Sorry,” she muttered, not daring to look him in the eye. “My apprenticeship takes up all my time.” She silently implored him not to persist, to leave it at that. How could she make him understand that he mustn’t confide in her anymore? Sensing, out of the corner of her glasses, Mediana’s thrilled interest in the two of them was unbearable.
Blaise leaned even further, his moist, hedgehog eyes obstinately searching for hers. “Mademoiselle Eulalia, if you would just accept to grant me even but a moment . . . ”
Ophelia took her cards out of his hands with such brusqueness that Blaise wouldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d torn his heart from his chest. “Sorry,” she repeated. She couldn’t be more sincere.
He raised his shaggy eyebrows, dumbfounded, and then a flash of understanding crossed his eyes. A painful understanding. “No,” he said, slowly moving backwards. “It’s I who am sorry.”
He went off again with his trolley, back hunched, but not without accidentally wheeling it over the foot of a visitor in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right then, Ophelia would have liked to have her formerly long hair back again; the disadvantage of short curls is that one can’t hide behind them.
“Aha, might I have missed a passing fancy among your countless secrets?” Mediana whispered to her, leaning on her shoulder. “Your poor husband, if he knew . . . ”
Ophelia couldn’t contain the deep dislike she felt any longer. Her claws had proved powerless before a dozen assailants, but they repelled Mediana with no trouble at all. The tomboy steadied herself with a pirouette and burst out laughing, as if she had just experienced a mere amorous rebuff.
“Ah, yes, I was forgetting. A little bit Dragon, our Animist.”
“One word more,” Ophelia said, through gritted teeth, “and I will put a stop to this blackmail myself.”
Mediana’s smile twisted into a pout of sincere sorrow. It always went like that with her. One moment masculine and insolent, the next sweet and feminine, as if she wore two carnival masks in turn. “I think it’s time we had a little talk, noi due. Let’s go and do our holes.”