He was gambling on Professor Playfair’s cowardice, on the fact that he might wield a gun, but he wouldn’t pull the trigger. Professor Playfair, like every other Babel scholar, hated getting his hands dirty. He designed lethal traps – he never wielded the blades himself. And he didn’t know how much will, or panic, it took to really kill a man.
Robin did not turn around, did not look to see what Victoire was doing. He knew. He spread his arms, keeping his eyes locked with Professor Playfair’s. ‘What’ll it be?’
Professor Playfair’s face tightened. His fingers moved, and Robin tensed, just as a shot rang out.
Professor Playfair reeled backwards, scarlet exploding across his middle. Screams erupted around the tower. Robin glanced back over his shoulder. And Victoire lowered one of Griffin’s revolvers, smoke tendrils curling up around her face, her eyes enormous.
‘There,’ she breathed, chest heaving. ‘Now we all know how it feels.’
Professor De Vreese dashed suddenly across the hall. He was going for Professor Playfair’s gun. Robin jumped down off the table, but he was too far away – but then Professor Chakravarti threw himself at Professor De Vreese’s side. They hit the floor with a whumph and began to wrestle – a clumsy, inelegant sight, two paunchy, middle-aged professors rolling around on the ground, their gowns flapping over their waists. Robin watched, astonished, as Professor Chakravarti wrenched the gun out of Professor De Vreese’s grasp and pinned him down in a messy hold.
‘Sir?’
‘Received your message,’ panted Professor Chakravarti. ‘Very well done.’
Professor De Vreese jammed his elbow at Professor Chakravarti’s nose. Professor Chakravarti lurched back. Professor De Vreese wriggled out of his hold, and the wrestling resumed.
Robin scooped the gun off the floor and pointed it down at Professor De Vreese.
‘Stand up,’ he ordered. ‘Put your hands above your head.’
‘You don’t know how to use that,’ Professor De Vreese sneered.
Robin pointed the gun at the chandelier and pulled the trigger. The chandelier exploded; glass shards sprinkled across the lobby. It was as if he’d shot into the crowd; everyone shrieked and cringed. Professor De Vreese turned and ran, but his ankle caught on a desk leg and he toppled backwards onto his bum. Robin reset the chamber, just as Griffin had shown him, and then pointed the gun at Professor De Vreese once again.
‘This isn’t a debate,’ he announced. His whole body trembled, flush with the same vicious energy he’d felt when he’d first learned to shoot. ‘This is a takeover. Would anyone else like to have a go?’
No one moved. No one spoke. They all shrank back, terrified. Some were crying; some had their hands clamped over their mouths, as if that were the only way to contain their screams. And all were watching him, waiting for him to dictate what came next.
For a moment the only sound in the tower was of Professor Playfair’s moaning.
He glanced over his shoulder at Victoire. She looked as bewildered as she felt; her gun hung limp at her side. Deep down, neither of them had expected to actually get this far. Their visions of today had involved chaos: a violent and devastating last stand; a fracas that, in all likelihood, ended in death. They’d been prepared for sacrifice; they had not been prepared to win.
But the tower had been taken so very easily, just as Griffin had always predicted. And now they had to act like the victors.
‘Nothing leaves Babel,’ Robin declared. ‘We put a lockdown on the silver-working tools. We stop routine maintenance on the city. We wait for the machine to grind to a halt, and hope they capitulate before we do.’ He didn’t know where these words were coming from, but they sounded good. ‘This country can’t last a month without us. We strike until they bend.’
‘They’ll set the troops on you,’ said Professor Craft.
‘But they can’t,’ said Victoire. ‘They can’t touch us. No one can touch us. They need us too badly.’
And that, the key to Griffin’s theory of violence, was why they might win. They’d finally worked it out. It was why Griffin and Anthony had been so confident in their struggle, why they were convinced the colonies could take on the Empire. Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.
‘Then what are you going to do?’ demanded Professor De Vreese. ‘Keep us hostage the entire time?’
‘I hope you’ll join us,’ said Robin. ‘But if you don’t, you can leave the tower. Order the police away first, and then you can file out one by one. No one retrieves anything from the tower – you walk out with what’s on your person.’* He paused. ‘And I’m sure you understand we’ll have to destroy your blood vials if you go.’
As soon as he finished, a shuffle of bodies moved towards the door. Robin’s heart sank as he counted the numbers. Dozens were leaving – all of the Classicists, all of the Europeanists, and nearly all of the faculty. Professor Playfair was carried out still moaning, slung ignominiously between Professor De Vreese and Professor Harding.
Only six scholars remained: Professor Chakravarti, Professor Craft, two undergraduates – Ibrahim and a tiny girl named Juliana – and two graduate fellows named Yusuf and Meghana, who worked in Legal and Literature respectively. Faces of colour, faces from the colonies, except for Professor Craft.
But this could work. They could sacrifice their hold on the talent if they retained control of the tower. Babel contained the greatest concentration of silver-working resources in the country: Grammaticas, engraving pens, match-pair ledgers, and reference materials. And more than that, the silver. Professor Playfair and the others might establish a secondary translation centre elsewhere, but even if they could reconstruct everything they needed to maintain the country’s silver-work from memory, it would take them weeks, perhaps months, to acquire materials on the scale necessary to replicate the functions of the tower. By then the vote would have already happened. By then, if all went to plan, the country would have already been brought to its knees.
‘What now?’ murmured Victoire.
Blood rushed to Robin’s head as he stepped off the desk. ‘Now we tell the world what’s coming.’
At noon Robin and Victoire climbed up to the north balcony on the eighth floor. The balcony was largely decorative, designed for scholars who’d never internalized the concept of needing fresh air. No one ever stepped out there, and the door was nearly rusted shut. Robin pushed, leaning hard against the frame. When it swung suddenly open, he lurched out and found himself leaning over the ledge for one brief, terrifying moment before he regained his balance.