Page 119 of Babel

‘There you are,’ said Victoire.

They both jumped, startled.

‘Who’s watching the door?’ asked Robin.

‘It’ll be fine, no one’s breaking in at three in the morning. And Letty’s out like a log.’ Victoire crossed the room and peered down at the stack of letters. ‘What are these?’

Ramy gestured for her to sit. ‘You’ll see.’

Victoire, like Ramy, started reading faster and faster when she realized what she was looking at. ‘Oh, goodness.’ She touched her fingers to her lips. ‘So you think – so they never even—’

‘Right,’ said Robin. ‘It was all for show. We weren’t meant to negotiate peace at all.’

She gave the papers a helpless shake. ‘Then what do we do with this?’

‘What do you mean?’ Robin asked.

She shot him a puzzled look. ‘These are war plans.’

‘And we’re students,’ he replied. ‘What can we do?’

There was a long silence.

‘Oh, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘What are we even doing here? What do we think we’re running back to?’

Oxford was the answer. Oxford, which was what they’d all agreed on, because when they’d been trapped on the Hellas, their professor’s corpse sinking into the depths of the ocean behind them, the promise of a return to the normal and familiar was what kept them calm, a shared delusion of stability that kept them from going mad. All their planning had always stopped at their safe arrival in England. But they couldn’t keep skirting the issue, couldn’t keep up the blind and ridiculous faith that if they just got back to Oxford, then everything would be all right.

There was no going back. They all knew it. There was no pretending anymore, no hiding in their supposedly safe corner of the world while unimaginable cruelty and exploitation carried on beyond. There was only the vast, frightening web of the colonial empire, and the demands of justice to resist it.

‘Then what?’ asked Robin. ‘Where do we go?’

‘Well,’ said Victoire, ‘the Hermes Society.’

It seemed so obvious when she said it. Only Hermes might know what to do with this. The Hermes Society, which Robin had betrayed, which might not even be willing to take them back, was the only entity they’d encountered that had ever professed to bother with the problem of colonialism. Here was a way out, a rare and undeserved second chance to make good on wrong choices – if only they could find Hermes before the police found them.

‘We’re agreed, then?’ Victoire glanced back and forth between them. ‘Oxford, then Hermes – and then whatever Hermes needs of us, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Ramy said firmly.

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘No, this is madness. I’ve got to turn myself in, I need to go to the police as soon as I can—’

Ramy scoffed. ‘We’ve been over this, over and over and over. You turn yourself in and what? Forget that Jardine and Matheson are trying to start a war? This is bigger than us now, Birdie. Bigger than you. You’ve got obligations.’

‘But that’s just it,’ Robin insisted. ‘If I turn myself in, that takes the heat off the two of you. It disentangles this opium war from the murder, don’t you see? It frees you up—’

‘Stop it,’ said Victoire. ‘We won’t let you.’

‘Course we won’t,’ said Ramy. ‘Besides, that’s selfish – you don’t get to take the easy way out.’

‘How is that the easy—’

‘You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.’

‘I do not—’

‘That’s why you took the fall for us that night. Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.’

Robin thought this was supremely unfair. ‘I was only trying to save you that night.’