“That, signorina, is for our cousin.”
That sentence, even more than the pain, shocked Ophelia. Zen’s fearful attitude and Octavio’s insinuations suddenly appeared to her under a devastating new light. Her fellow students didn’t subscribe to the coincidence theory, either; they thought that she was the guilty one.
Ophelia opened her mouth, but the Seers’ hissing voices didn’t give her a second to stick up for herself:
“First Signora Silence, and now Mediana?”
“She sure moves presto, the new girl!”
“You’re no longer benvenuta in the Good Family.”
A silence ensued, during which Ophelia heard nothing but the drip-drip of the showerhead and the crunching of glass under her bloodied feet. She was shaking. The winged boots were still there, beneath the panel of the screen.
“This evening, signorina, you will go to the Secretarium.”
“This evening, signorina, you will again meet the automaton.”
“This evening, signorina, you will hand in your wings to him.”
It wasn’t a prophecy. The Seers’ power didn’t allow them to see the future beyond three hours. Ophelia still took the warning very seriously. Once the boots had departed with a jangling of silver, she remained standing in the middle of the glass, her blood mingling with the water from the shower.
THE AUTOMATON
Ophelia moved stiffly along the gangway. She hoped the bandages under her uniform would stop the blood from reappearing, at least until she got through what awaited her. Every movement pulled at the cuts in her skin. They weren’t deep, but they reopened at the first opportunity.
In actual fact, she felt no pain. Right now, she was conscious of just one thing: the globe of the Secretarium, in front of her, kept getting bigger as she moved forward. Even the void that stretched beneath her feet seemed abstract to her.
She was going to see Thorn again.
When she reached the globe’s reinforced door, Ophelia glanced over her shoulder at the transcendium at the other end of the gangway, where Lady Septima had entered her key to allow her access.
She was going to see Thorn again, in private.
Ophelia entered the Secretarium. As on her first visit, there was that same bizarre sensation of moving inside a replica in miniature of the Memorial. An identical atrium, an identical cupola, identical galleries, and, floating weightlessly in the air, a terrestrial globe that was the same, in every respect, as the one containing it. Ophelia knew perfectly well that this globe was purely decorative, but she couldn’t help imagining that there was another globe inside it, containing yet another one, and so on, ad infinitum.
She walked on, in the cold light of the bulbs. The freezing-cold room reserved for consulting fragile documents lay straight ahead. Was Ophelia supposed to go straight there to study the manuscript? She would be incapable of concentrating on anything at all until she had, at last, had a proper conversation with Thorn.
She ran her eyes along the stories of galleries encircling the atrium. In the eastern hemisphere, the glass cabinets of ancient collections glimmered between the columns. From the Secretarium’s western hemisphere there arose a click-clicking chorus: it was the thousands of cylinders of the database rotating on their axles, processing all those bibliographical-note punchcards.
As she was looking for Thorn, Ophelia jumped on hearing his voice right behind her: “Coordinator Room. Last gallery on the left.” The instruction had come from an acoustic pipe.
Ophelia went up, following the vertical wall of a transcendium. The wings on her boots clattered like spurs with her every step—wings she was supposed to hand in to Sir Henry, along with her resignation, if she didn’t want to suffer the reprisals of her division, but right now, that was the least of her worries.
She was going to see Thorn again, properly this time.
Although she knew the temperature of this place was strictly maintained at minus eight degrees, Ophelia felt as if it were fifteen degrees warmer. Never in her life had she cared about appearances, and yet she ran a nervous hand through her hair to tidy it up. She came across a few splinters of glass, and quickly got rid of them.
Once on the top floor, she went past the tall rows of cylinders; the mechanical racket they made hurt her ears. She finally spotted a door, with bolts and a sealed frame like the entrance to a submarine cabin. Instead of a cabin, Ophelia discovered a vast office, all wood and copper, and, at the far end of this office, a back.
Thorn’s back.
He was sitting on a swivel stool, with radio headphones over his ears, facing an immense console riddled with holes. It was the Coordinator, the only machine in the world capable of searching a database. Thorn was continually disconnecting and reconnecting a tangle of cables, lowering a switch here, lifting another there, like some instrumentalist tackling the most complex of scores.
Ophelia knocked on the door to announce her arrival, but Thorn didn’t appear to hear it. She was afraid of distracting him. She was afraid, period. Afraid of what would happen here when, at last, they would both be able to express their true feelings, freely.
She was afraid, yes, but she wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.
Turning her attention back to her surroundings, Ophelia observed that the Coordinator Room was barely more welcoming than the Secretarium’s industrial galleries. There was no chair to sit on, other than the stool at the machine, nothing pleasing to look at except for shelves overloaded with documents, punched paper, and an array of time dials. This perfect fusion of austerity and organization was undeniably reminiscent of the Treasury, in the Pole.
Thorn suddenly swiveled his stool, checked the yellow tape that a mechanographic machine had just punched, and pressed the button of a microphone.
“The reference requested is ‘note No. 8.174, civil-engineering collection, 1S067.’ Over.”
As a tiny voice was responding through his headphones, he noticed Ophelia’s presence and indicated the sealed door to her, which she rushed over to bolt. With every turn of the crank, the deafening humming of the database outside became increasingly distant, finally becoming inaudible. Soon, there was total silence in the room.
“The apprentice virtuoso has just arrived,” Thorn then announced. “I have instructions to give her. I will return to processing the bibliographical requests as soon as that is done. Over and out.”
He switched off the microphone, removed the headphones, and finally turned his stool around. His stillness was so abrupt and so prolonged, Ophelia wondered whether he was waiting for some initiative from her, but then realized that he was studying her in detail, from head to toe. He lingered on the braid of her uniform and the wings pinned to her boots. That piercing gaze made her feel as if her cuts were reopening, one after another, under the bandages, as he examined her.