Ophelia stifled a nervous laugh. She kneeled down, trying her best to ignore the pain under her bandages, which returned with her every movement. When she had finished collecting the pages, she noticed that Thorn wasn’t moving anymore. Hunched on his stool, he was holding his radio headphones, undecided about putting them on. His metal gauntlets gleamed in the light from the Coordinator’s bulbs.
“And you?” he finally asked, in turn. “You have nothing more to say to me?”
Ophelia had thousands of things she could have said to him. Not one of them passed her lips. Talking to Thorn’s back was even harder than talking to him to his face.
As she didn’t reply, he put his headphones over his ears. “You will close the door after you.”
Once out of the Coordinator room, Ophelia stood still in the middle of the din of the cylinders. She bit her glove with all her might, stifling the sob that threatened to explode between her ribs.
“By the way, I love you.” Where had they gone, those six awkward words Thorn had whispered into her ear just before disappearing from her life? Had absence sufficed to erase them, like chalk?
Resolutely, Ophelia wiped her eyes. No. The most important thing was having found him. The rest would be a matter of time, for him as for her.
“To work!” she muttered, heading for the cold room.
THE CARETAKER
Sultry showers gave way to dusty winds. The Babelian summer was nearly over, but the air was barely less hot.
Ophelia didn’t notice the change of season. To do so, she would have needed the time to tilt her glasses up at the sky. She woke before dawn for the pre-morning chores, did her obligatory circuits of the stadium, ran from the amphitheater to the laboratory, gobbled up her bowl of rice while revising her notes for the side, and wasn’t allowed to go to bed before completing her evening chores. The slightest delay had repercussions for the whole week. On top of all that, Lady Septima had almost doubled the hours for the Memorial reading groups. She had instigated a ruthless grading system based on individual productivity; the higher the apprentice’s grade, the greater his or her chance of obtaining the rank of aspiring virtuoso.
The grade-awarding ceremony was imminent.
Every minute counted when working at such a furious pace, and that much the Seers had fully grasped. Since Ophelia had refused to withdraw from the competition, they targeted the most precious thing she possessed at the conservatoire. Her time. They slipped sleeping pills into her bedside carafe of water; bunged up the toilets when it was her turn to clean them; stitched one leg of her trousers to the other; blocked the mechanism of her bed—they would stop at nothing to slow her down.
At first, Ophelia saw her position plummet in the ranking system. Replacing Mediana was a poisoned chalice, and not just because it had riled her classmates. The extra hours Ophelia spent in the Secretarium’s cold room came on top of a timetable that was full to bursting.
And it had to be said: the manuscript she had to evaluate for Thorn was no piece of cake. It was a thick caretaking register kept during the last decade before the Rupture. It was written in an ancient regional dialect of Babel, with an alphabet not used for centuries: complete gibberish to Ophelia. Mediana’s start at translating it had only brought to light merchandise accounts, equipment lists, fixtures inventories, health and security instructions. Nothing that appeared worthy of interest.
Ophelia had gotten ahold of the books Thorn had recommended to her, but they were so erudite, she was unable to make use of them.
She could rely only on her hands.
Unfortunately, the edges of the pages in the register had been worn away by time, and they were the parts most likely to have been fingered. In other words, she was deprived of the part most favorable to a reading with hands. Moreover, she had to follow the scientific procedure imposed by Lady Septima. This methodology was more taxing than anything she’d ever had to do at her little museum: progressing from one page to the next took an inordinate amount of time. Ophelia examined every tiny bit of paper meticulously, and when a vision finally came to her, she hastened to record it in her report.
Little by little, she built up a basic profile of the author. The caretaker was a man. He suffered from a severe nervous condition, but didn’t lose his cool, for all that. Despite his mistrust, which permeated the register, he was keen to do his work conscientiously. Great rigor, an acute sense of discipline, traumatic aftereffects: a soldier who has returned to civilian life. Ophelia felt great discomfort in her jaw whenever she came across an imprint. The caretaker was probably a severely disabled ex-serviceman.
Putting all this in writing demanded the utmost precaution. Since the Index forbade the use of the words “soldier” and “war,” Ophelia had to resort to endless circumlocutions, such as “individual who served in a large unit for the preservation of the nation,” or “situation of conflict between several countries using equipment that is harmful in the extreme.”
Ophelia was both hoping for and dreading the moment she would meet again with Thorn to give him her report. As he had predicted, they no longer had a single opportunity to meet in private: Lady Septima ensured that she was present for every meeting, so she could judge for herself how her pupil was performing. Elizabeth was also often present, coming and going between the reading cubicles and the Secretarium, reviewing the coding or bringing endless improvements to the Coordinator.
So Ophelia had to remain forever on her guard, call Thorn monsieur, and keep her eyes lowered. It was painful every day, knowing that he was so close, and yet so inaccessible. Ophelia felt as if she hadn’t really found him again. She was so afraid of not living up to his expectations that she took the mission he had assigned her very seriously; so afraid of increasing the distance between them that she maintained the discretion he had demanded of her religiously. Every time she dared to glance surreptitiously at him, she was struck by the cold determination that spurred him on. Thorn had already set himself the objective of thwarting God back when he had sought to read Farouk’s Book, but from the start he had accepted the possibility of failure. Ophelia had watched him gradually exhausting himself, becoming stooped as the weeks went by, crushed by the weight of a burden that was too much for him.
Not anymore. His tirelessness was that of a man determined to succeed. Or rather, that of an automaton. Thorn never showed impatience, never a sign of satisfaction, never an attempt at humor, as if all human emotions hindered his productivity. Methodically, he made use of every new detail, however insignificant, that Ophelia brought to light through her evaluation. And that’s why she saw the piles of documentation accumulating, evening after evening, right across the Coordinator room. One had to wonder where Thorn found the energy to read all that on top of his work on the database! Ophelia better understood why he never left the Secretarium.
In the meantime, the weeks went by and she still didn’t know what exactly he was looking for in this caretaking register, or what his alliance with the Genealogists really consisted of.