Page 183 of Babel

‘I didn’t,’ she said; and Robin could tell from the way she narrowed her eyes and drawled her words, punctuating them just so, like daggers, what was going to come next. His own words, thrown back in his face. ‘I didn’t think at all. I panicked. And then I killed him.’

‘Murder’s not that simple,’ he said.

‘It turns out it is, Birdie.’ She cast him a scornful look. ‘Isn’t that how we got here?’

‘We loved you,’ Victoire whispered. ‘Letty, we would have died for you.’

Letty did not answer. She turned on her heel, threw the door open, and fled into the night.

The door slammed shut, and then there was silence. They weren’t ready to take the news upstairs. They didn’t know what they could say.

‘You think she means it?’ Robin asked finally.

‘She absolutely does,’ said Victoire. ‘Letty doesn’t flinch.’

‘Then do we let her win?’

‘How,’ Victoire asked slowly, ‘do you think we make her lose?’

An awful weight hung between them. Robin knew his answer, only not how to utter it. Victoire knew everything in his heart except this. It was the one thing he’d concealed from her – in part because he did not want to make her share this burden, and in part because he was afraid of how she might respond.

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Robin.’

‘We destroy the tower,’ he said. ‘And we destroy ourselves.’

She didn’t flinch; she only seemed to deflate, as if she’d been waiting for confirmation. He hadn’t pretended as well as he’d thought; she’d expected this from him. ‘You can’t.’

‘There’s a way.’ Robin misinterpreted her words on purpose, hoping, rather, that her objection was one of logistics. ‘You know there is. They showed us at the very beginning.’

Victoire went very still then. Robin knew what she was imagining. The shrill, vibrating bar in Professor Playfair’s hands, screaming as if in pain, shattering into a thousand sharp, glinting pieces. Multiply that over and over. Instead of a bar, imagine a tower. Imagine a country.

‘It’s a chain reaction,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll finish the job on its own. Remember? Playfair showed us how it’s done. If it so much as touches another bar, the effect transmits across the metal. It doesn’t stop, it just keeps going, until it renders all the silver unusable.’

How much silver lined the walls of Babel? When this was over, all those bars would be worthless. Then the cooperation of the translators wouldn’t matter. Their facilities would be gone. Their library, gone. The Grammaticas, gone. Their resonance rods, their silver, useless, gone.

‘How long have you been planning this?’ Victoire demanded.

‘Since the beginning,’ he said.

‘I hate you.’

‘It’s the only way we have left to win.’

‘It’s your suicide plan,’ she said angrily. ‘And don’t tell me that it’s anything but. You want this; you’ve always wanted this.’

But that was just it, Robin thought. How did he explain the weight crushing his chest, the constant inability to breathe? ‘I think – ever since Ramy and Griffin – no, ever since Canton, I...’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve felt I didn’t have the right.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s true. They were better men, and they died—’

‘Robin, that’s not how it works—’

‘And what did I do? I lived a life I shouldn’t have, I had what millions of people didn’t – all that suffering, Victoire, and the whole time I was drinking champagne—’

‘Don’t you dare.’ She raised a hand as if to slap him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re just some fragile academic who can’t handle the weight of the world now that you’ve seen it – that’s absolute tripe, Robin. You’re not some foppish dandy who faints at the first mention of suffering. You know what those men are? They’re cowards, romantics, idiots who never did a thing to change the world they found so upsetting, hiding away because they felt so guilty—’

‘Guilty,’ he repeated. ‘Guilty, that’s exactly what I am. Ramy told me once that I didn’t care about doing the right thing, that I just wanted to take the easy way out.’