Thorn stood up. Lady Septima, who usually looked down on people from on high, suddenly appeared tiny.
“If you have any objection to that, I would advise you to speak directly to the Genealogists.”
This prospect succeeded in convincing Lady Septima to swallow her pride. She clicked her heels, made for the exit, and then turned one last time toward Ophelia. Her complexion had turned pale and, conversely, her fiery eyes had become incandescent. She seemed to be using her family power to sear into this apprentice who dared to know something that she herself didn’t. Ophelia did her best to withstand this intrusive glare, but was relieved when Lady Septima finally left, closing the door behind her.
Thorn turned the crank until the Coordinator room was totally soundproof.
“A blank sheet of paper?”
Ophelia bit the inside of her cheek. There was no reproach in his voice, but that meant nothing. Whether his accent was Babelian or Northern, and whatever the circumstances, Thorn’s tone was so monotonous that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
“I’m so sorry. You asked me not to draw Lady Septima’s attention to us, and I’ve just done the exact opposite.”
Thorn didn’t respond. He remained standing and observed her at a distance. He was waiting for her explanation.
“The author of your manuscript,” Ophelia began. “He lived right here, in the Memorial, at the time when it was still a school. He . . . I’m certain that he knew the family spirits. I mean when they were children. And I have every reason to think,” she added, after a gulp, “that he knew God, too.” She watched for a change in Thorn’s demeanor. He didn’t bat an eyelid.
“What else did you learn?”
Ophelia certainly hadn’t expected him to swing her around in the air, but she would have appreciated a sign of approval, however small.
The floorboards creaked under her feet as she went over to the glass-fronted shelves, upon which there were rows of files and dials. She didn’t even glance at them. She saw only her hazy reflection, and far, far behind her, Thorn’s scarecrow silhouette.
“That I’m not really myself anymore. I don’t know when it started. Is it from having read Farouk’s Book? Is it from having absorbed some of your family power? Is it from having released that Other, the very first time I passed through a mirror? I sometimes feel as if I’m haunted by a second memory.”
Returning to an old habit, she gnawed at the seam of her gloves, and what she saw then, in the glass of the cabinets, didn’t please her. A small woman who, deep down, was afraid. Half a woman. “A bambina,” Mediana’s mocking voice whispered to her.
Ophelia turned away from her reflection and looked straight at Thorn. “I read the manuscript. Not just with my hands; with my eyes, too. For a brief moment, I understood what the caretaker had written. As though a part of me had suddenly remembered how to do it.”
She proceeded to tell Thorn all she had retained from her reading. The school of peace; the training sessions; the departure to the city; L.’s light; A.’s telescope; J.’s disappearances; and particularly, most particularly, the caretaker’s last words: “He ain’t like them blasted brats, that one. Must have a word with the head about it.”
“So?” she asked. “Was that what the Genealogists asked you to find?”
“Is there anything else in that register that you might have missed?” True to character, Thorn had asked his question in a methodical tone. He didn’t seem to notice that his every word reinforced her unpleasant impression of not having come up to his expectations.
“My trance didn’t last long, but I think I covered the essentials.”
“Would you be able to repeat the procedure?”
“I don’t think so. I have no control over such visions; something has to trigger them. I . . . I’ll give it another try,” she couldn’t help but promise, faced with Thorn’s intense stare.
She suddenly realized that there wasn’t much she would have refused him, had he but asked. It was ironic to see how much the roles had been reversed. Had he also experienced it, in the past, this state of permanent instability?
There was a grating of steel when Thorn suddenly ended his stillness. “That won’t be necessary,” he said.
He went over to the back of the room and opened a door; it was so well concealed within the wood-paneled wall that Ophelia had never noticed it. Thorn hadn’t asked her to follow him, but as he was taking a long time to return, she finally joined him.
The door led to accommodation that went with the job, decked in the same wood and copper as the Coordinator room. The furnishings proved equally austere: a wardrobe, a table, a lamp, and a bed. Ophelia noticed two phantogram facilities. One was a garbage chute, allowing waste to be disposed of outside the Secretarium. The other contained a dish, which itself contained a nondescript gruel. Did they phantomize Thorn’s food?
There was not a crease in the sheets, not a speck of a dust on the furniture, not a forgotten sock on the floor. There were, however, pharmaceutical bottles lined up in serried ranks on every shelf, like in an apothecary’s dispensary.
Thorn had folded up his body on a chair, facing the wardrobe, its doors wide open. With an elbow planted on each knee, and chin perched on linked hands, his attention seemed to be totally focused on the inside of the wardrobe. Ophelia’s eyebrows rose when she saw that he had pushed the shirts on hangers to either side. They rose further when she discovered an amazing quantity of punched tapes, pinned up like a collection of butterflies. They were book references generated by the Coordinator. Each one was marked with a black cross.
“So, what’s this hidden bibliography all about?” Ophelia asked.
Thorn rose as she approached, so abruptly that he almost jammed the contraption on his leg. Maybe it was to allow her to take a good look, but she thought it more likely that he wanted to maintain a distance between them.
“The Genealogists know neither the title nor the author of the work they have asked me to track down,” he replied. “On arrival, I understood that it would be statistically impossible for me to locate it using the old catalogue. I needed a database worthy of the name. The more the reading groups add to the new catalogue, the more the Coordinator’s searches gain in precision, and the more likely I am to accomplish my mission. You are looking at the selection I had put together. As you can see,” he said, indicating a tape on which the ink of the cross wasn’t yet dry, “the caretaking register was my last contender.”
Ophelia slipped the tapes through her fingers. She now knew by heart the language of those punched holes, and could decipher, almost without difficulty, the references they represented. Apart from their printing dates, which were all pretty ancient, the works here were quite different: memoirs, essays, handbooks, certificates, etc.