Her shoulders crumpled. Robin held her tight against him. What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to.
‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
‘The whole tower?’ asked Professor Craft.
She was the first to speak. The rest of them stared at Robin and Victoire in varying states of disbelief, and even Professor Craft seemed like she was still wrapping her mind around the idea as she spoke its implications out loud. ‘That’s decades – centuries – of research, that’s everything, buried – lost – oh, but who knows how many . . .’ She trailed off.
‘And the ramifications for England will be much worse,’ said Robin. ‘This country runs on silver. Silver pumps through its blood; England can’t live without it.’
‘They’d build it all back—’
‘Eventually, yes,’ said Robin. ‘But not before the rest of the world has time to muster a defence.’
‘And China?’
‘They won’t go to war. They won’t be able to. Silver powers the gunships, you see. Silver feeds the Navy. For months after this, perhaps years, they’ll no longer be the strongest nation in the world. And what happens next is anyone’s guess.’
The future would be fluid. It was just as Griffin had predicted. One individual choice, made at just the right time. This was how they defied momentum. This was how they altered the tracks of history.
And in the end, the answer had been so obvious – to simply refuse to participate. To remove their labour – and the fruits of their labour – permanently from the offering.
‘That can’t be it,’ said Juliana. Her voice trailed up at the end; it was a question, not a declaration. ‘There’s got to be – there must be some other way—’
‘They’re storming us at dawn,’ said Robin. ‘They’ll shoot a few of us to make an example, and then hold the rest of us at gunpoint until we start repairing the damage. They’ll put us in chains, and they’ll put us to work.’
‘But the barricades—’
‘The barricades will fall,’ whispered Victoire. ‘They’re just walls, Juliana. Walls can be destroyed.’
Silence first; then resignation, then acceptance. They already lived in the impossible; what more was the fall of the most eternal thing they’d ever known?
‘Then I suppose we’ll have to get out fast,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Right after the chain reaction starts.’
But you can’t get out fast, Robin almost said before he stopped himself. The rejoinder was obvious. They couldn’t get out fast, because they couldn’t get out at all. A single incantation would not do. If they were not thorough, the tower might collapse partway, but its remains would be salvageable, easily repurposed. The only things they would have inflicted would be expense and frustration. They would have suffered for nothing.
No; for this plan to work – to strike a blow against empire from which it could not recover – they had to stay, and say the words again and again, and activate as many nodes of destruction as they could.
But how did he tell a room full of people that they needed to die?
‘I . . .’ he started, but the words stuck in his throat.
He didn’t have to explain. They’d all figured it out; they were all reaching the same conclusion, one after the other, and the change in their eyes was heartbreaking.
‘I’m going through with it,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking all of you to come with me – Abel can get you out if you won’t – but all I mean is . . . I just – I can’t do it by myself.’
Victoire looked away, arms crossed.
‘We won’t need everyone,’ he continued, desperate to fill the silence with words because, perhaps the more he spoke it, the less awful it sounded. ‘I suppose a diversity of languages would be good, to amplify the effect – and of course, we’ll want people standing in all corners of the tower, because . . .’ His throat pulsed. ‘But we don’t need everyone.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Professor Craft.
‘I . . . thank you, Professor.’
She gave him a wobbly smile. ‘I suppose I wasn’t going to get tenure on the other side of this anyhow.’
He saw them all making the same calculation then: the finality of death against the persecution, prison, and possible execution they would face on the outside. Surviving Babel did not necessarily mean survival. And he could see them asking themselves if they could come to terms, now, with their own deaths; if that would, in the end, be easier.
‘You’re not afraid,’ Meghana told him, asked him.
‘No,’ said Robin. But that was all he could say. He didn’t understand his heart himself. He felt resolved, but perhaps that was only the adrenaline; perhaps his fear and hesitation were only pushed temporarily behind a flimsy wall, which would shatter upon closer examination. ‘No, I’m not, I . . . just – I’m ready. But we won’t need everyone.’
‘Possibly the younger students . . .’ Professor Craft cleared her throat. ‘The ones who don’t know any silver-working, I mean. There’s no reason—’
‘I want to stay.’ Ibrahim cast Juliana an anxious glance. ‘I don’t . . . I don’t want to run.’
Juliana, pale as paper, said nothing.
‘There is a way out?’ Yusuf asked Robin.
‘There is. Abel’s men can ferry you out of the city, they’ve promised; they’re waiting for us. But you’ll have to go as soon as you can. And then you’ll have to run. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to stop running.’
‘There are no terms of amnesty?’ Meghana asked.
‘There are if you work for them,’ said Robin. ‘If you help them restore things back to how they were. Letty made that offer, she wanted you to know. But you’ll always be under their thumb. They’ll never let you go. She intimated as much – they’ll own you, and they’ll make you feel grateful for it.’
At this, Juliana reached out and took Ibrahim’s hand. He squeezed her fingers. Both their knuckles turned white, and the sight of this was so intimate that Robin blinked and glanced away.
‘But we can still run,’ said Yusuf.
‘You can still run,’ said Robin. ‘You wouldn’t be safe anywhere in this country—’
‘But we could go home.’
Victoire’s voice was so soft that they could barely hear her. ‘We can go home.’
Yusuf nodded, considered this a moment, and then moved to stand beside her.
And it was that simple, the determination of who fled and who died. Robin, Professor Craft, Meghana, Ibrahim, and Juliana on one side. Yusuf and Victoire on the other. No one pleaded or begged, and no one changed their minds.
‘So.’ Ibrahim looked very small. ‘When—’
‘Dawn,’ said Robin. ‘They’re coming at dawn.’
‘Then we’d better stack the bars,’ said Professor Craft. ‘And we’d better place them properly, if we only get one go.’
‘What’s the word?’ Abel Goodfellow demanded. ‘They’re inching right up to us.’