For the first time, Octavio’s eyes avoided hers. “I’m a good person,” he blurted out, reluctantly. “I’ll prove it to you.”
When Ophelia returned to the shelves where the ink balloon had burst, Blaise was no longer there. Instead, an automaton was finishing cleaning up the mess, endlessly repeating: “A LITTLE GIFT GOES A LONG WAY BETWEEN FRIENDS.”
Pensively, she wondered what Octavio had meant by what he’d said to her.
That evening, in the Secretarium’s cold room, Ophelia seriously struggled to concentrate on the manuscript. Her eyelids were burning. Her days allowed her no respite, and sharing her privacy with fifteen hostile men didn’t help with getting a good night’s sleep. She could keep sliding her fingers over the old register, where the paper barely held together, but the caretaker was no longer speaking to her. Facing Thorn empty-handed was unthinkable, but it was no good—there was just endless tattered text, and no more Mediana to finish the translation.
After persisting a long while, Ophelia let her hands fall by her sides. She dozed off without even realizing it, standing there, at the consulting lectern. It lasted but a fraction of a second, a fleeting moment during which she saw herself floating weightlessly above the old world, so high up she could see the horizon taking on the curve of the planet.
Then, in the blink of an eye, she was reading:
“Soon that blasted rainy season, and that blasted dome leaking like a sieve, yet again, and that blasted jungle invading all me bedrooms, and them blasted brats not returning. What’s the point of sending them to that blasted city? What are they going to learn there, except that our blasted world is rotten? And what if they get lynched over there, despite their blasted powers? Dammit, how empty this blasted school feels without them.”
Ophelia felt no surprise at the time. Plunged into an altered state, she suddenly found it entirely natural to understand what was written in the register. She started to turn its pages, in one direction and then in the other, no longer following procedure, just her instinct. There, in the margins of the inventories, beside the columns of accounts, were the caretaker’s comments. They were the real substance of the manuscript.
“L. is getting on my wick with his blasted lights in the middle of the night. Curfew means curfew!”
“Them blasted brats have been quarreling all day. The war was a piece of piss compared with the shambles they’ve left me. School of peace, huh? Best of blasted luck to their future offspring.”
“Shit, J. has disappeared. For real, this time. With his blasted power, it was bound to happen. Shit.”
“False alarm, they’ve found J. On another blasted island. In perfect health. They’re indestructible, them blasted brats.”
“Little A. cadged a chat off me today. Couldn’t twig a blasted word she said to me. She did me a drawing. I think she’s after a telescope. Don’t know if these kids are going to rule the world one day, but learning the local lingo would be a darned good start.”
“Shit. Lost J. again.”
Ophelia turned the pages, unable to stop. She was in a trance. She felt as if she could almost hear the caretaker’s voice, grumbling in her ear, and she could sense, behind the abrasive words, immense affection. He had loved them, those “blasted brats.” Truly loved them.
The register ended abruptly on a final comment:
“He’s watching me closely. That blasted way he has of looking at me scares the pants off me. As if I was a blasted intruder in their blasted school. He ain’t like them blasted brats, that one. Must have a word with the head about it.”
Ophelia stared wide-eyed behind her glasses, totally awake this time. The text instantly returned to being impenetrable. It was, once again, nothing but a string of nonsensical letters. A language totally foreign to her.
“Apprentice Eulalia, your session is over,” the voice of Lady Septima announced through the acoustic pipe.
Ophelia turned to her still-blank report page, placed on a corner of the lectern. She felt not the slightest hesitation. She had to find a way of speaking to Thorn in private.
THE UNSAID
When Ophelia came out of the cold room’s lift, Lady Septima awaited her.
“You took your time. Let’s get going, apprentice.”
As usual, they crossed the Secretarium’s circular galleries together. Ophelia did her best not to show the excitement that made her want to run all the way to Thorn. She couldn’t resist a glance at the decorative globe floating weightlessly in the middle of the atrium. This evening, the old world had revealed a tiny fraction of its secrets to her.
Lady Septima entered the Coordinator room and handed the evaluation to Thorn, unconcerned about interrupting him in the middle of his plugging and unplugging. Normally, Ophelia merely lowered her eyes. Not this time. She stared intently at him as he opened the envelope, unfolded her report, and took in its contents with systematic impassivity. His eyes briefly met Ophelia’s, and then he turned to Lady Septima.
“Leave us alone.”
“Pourquoi? If my pupil has made a mistake, I need to know about it and take the appropriate measures.” Imperiously, she held out her hand for the evaluation report, but Thorn put it away in one of the Coordinator’s drawers. Away from prying eyes, however powerful they might be.
“If you don’t mind, monsieur, I would like to take a look at it,” Lady Septima insisted. “I undertook to find you a translator; my responsibility . . . ”
“ . . . is not in question,” Thorn cut in, “since there is no mistake. The fact is, you just don’t need to know the contents of this report.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Ophelia clenched her toes inside her boots. It was curious to note how four words could take on the opposite meaning, depending on how they were said. Lady Septima was mortally offended. Octavio was really just as fired up inside as his mother: behind their self-restraint, they were consumed with pride.
As for Thorn, he was an iceberg. Totally still on his stool, he showed nothing more than a cold indifference. The metal tips of his fingers were drumming on the wooden console of the Coordinator. It had taken a while for Ophelia to understand that those gauntlets he always wore were made of an alchemical alloy that prevented electrocution. Plugging and unplugging cables all day long wasn’t a risk-free occupation.
“The evaluation of that manuscript was commissioned by the Genealogists,” Thorn said. “I received instructions; so did you. You had to find an interpreter and you fulfilled that task well beyond your duty. All that will be said in this room today will be of the utmost confidentiality.”
Lady Septima pointed at the stripe on Ophelia’s shoulder. “This inexperienced apprentice, who may never even become a Forerunner, would be better informed than me?”