‘Go on,’ one of them whispered. ‘Hurry.’
Robin stepped up to the door. ‘Robin Swift,’ he said, softly but clearly.
The wards recognized his blood. The lock clicked.
Robin pulled the door open and paused for the briefest moment on the doorstep, just long enough for the figures behind him to slink into the tower. He never saw their faces. They dashed up the staircase like wraiths, quick and silent. Robin stood in the foyer, shivering as rain dripped down his forehead, watching the clock as the seconds ticked towards the five-minute mark.
It was all so easy. When the time came, Robin turned and strode out the door. He felt a slight bump at his waist, but otherwise perceived nothing: no whispers, no clinks of silver bars. The Hermes operatives were swallowed by the dark. In seconds, it was as if they had never been there at all.
Robin turned and walked back toward Magpie Lane, shivering violently, dizzy with the sheer audacity of what he’d just done.
He slept badly. He kept tossing in his bed in a nightmarish fugue, soaking his sheets with sweat, tortured by half dreams, anxious extrapolations in which the police kicked down his door and dragged him off to gaol, declaring they’d seen everything and knew everything. He did not fall properly asleep until the early morning, and by then he was so exhausted he missed the morning bells. He did not awake until the scout knocked at his door, asking if he’d like his floors swept that day.
‘Oh – yes, sorry, just give me a moment and I’ll be out.’ He splashed water on his face, dressed, and dashed out the door. His cohort had arranged to meet in a study room on the fifth floor to compare their translations before class, and now he was terribly late.
‘There you are,’ said Ramy when he arrived. He, Letty, and Victoire were all seated around a square table. ‘I’m sorry I left without you, but I thought you’d gone already – I knocked twice but you never answered.’
‘It’s all right.’ Robin took a seat. ‘I didn’t sleep well – must have been the thunder, I think.’
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Victoire looked concerned. ‘You’re sort of...’ She waved a hand vaguely before her face. ‘Pale?’
‘Just nightmares,’ he said. ‘Happens, um, sometimes.’
This excuse sounded stupid the moment it left his mouth, but Victoire gave his hand a sympathetic pat. ‘Of course.’
‘Could we start?’ Letty asked sharply. ‘We’ve just been dithering around with vocabulary because Ramy wouldn’t let us go on without you.’
Robin hastily shuffled through his pages until he found last night’s assigned Ovid. ‘Sorry – yes, of course.’
He’d feared he would never sit through the entire meeting. But somehow, the warm sunlight against the cool wood, the scratch of ink against parchment, and Letty’s crisp, clear dictation pulled his exhausted mind into focus, made Latin, not his impending expulsion, seem like the most pressing order of the day.
The study meeting turned out much livelier than expected. Robin, who was used to reading his translations out loud to Mr Chester, who drolly corrected him as he went, was not anticipating such hearty debate over turns of phrase, punctuation, or how much repetition was too much. It quickly became apparent they had drastically different translation styles. Letty, who was a stickler for grammatical structures that adhered to the Latin as much as possible, seemed ready to forgive the most astoundingly awkward manipulations of prose, while Ramy, her polar opposite, was always ready to abandon technical accuracy for rhetorical flourishes he insisted would better deliver the point, even when this meant insertion of completely novel clauses. Victoire seemed constantly frustrated with the limits of English – ‘It’s so awkward, French would suit this better’ – and Letty always vehemently agreed, which made Ramy snort, at which point the topic of Ovid was abandoned for a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars.
‘Feeling better?’ Ramy asked Robin when they adjourned.
He was, actually. It felt good to sink into the refuge of a dead language, to fight a rhetorical war whose stakes could not really touch him. He was astonished by how ordinary the rest of the day felt, how calmly he could sit among his cohort as Professor Playfair lectured and pretend that Tytler was the foremost subject on his mind. In the light of day, the exploits of last night seemed a faraway dream. The tangible and solid consisted of Oxford, of coursework and professors and freshly baked scones and clotted cream.
Still, he could not erase the lurking dread that this was all a cruel joke, that the curtains would come down any minute on this charade. For how could there not be some consequence? Such an act of betrayal – of stealing from Babel itself, the institution to which he’d literally given his blood – should surely have made this life impossible.
Anxiety hit him properly midafternoon. What had last night seemed like such a thrilling, righteous mission now seemed incredibly stupid. He couldn’t focus on Latin; Professor Craft had to snap her fingers in front of his eyes before he realized she’d asked him three times over to scan a line. He kept imagining horrible scenarios with vivid detail – how the constables would burst in, point, and yell, There he is, the thief; how his cohort would stare, stunned; how Professor Lovell, who was for some reason both prosecutor and judge, would coldly sentence Robin to the noose. He imagined the fireplace poker, coming down again and again, cold and methodical, snapping every single one of his bones.
But the visions remained only that. No one came to arrest him. Their class proceeded slowly, blandly, uninterrupted. His terror faded. By the time Robin and his cohort reassembled in hall for supper, he found it astonishingly easy to pretend to himself that last night had never happened. And once they were seated with their food – cold potatoes and steak so tough it took all their might to hack off chewable bits – laughing at Professor Craft’s irritated corrections of Ramy’s embellished translations, it indeed felt like only a distant memory.
A new note awaited him under the windowsill when he returned home that night. He unfolded it with shaking hands. The message scrawled within was very brief, and this time Robin managed to decode it in his head.
Await further contact.
His disappointment confused him. Hadn’t he spent the day wishing he’d never been ensnared in this nightmare? He could just imagine Griffin’s mocking voice – What, did you want a pat on the back? A biscuit for a job well done?
He now found himself hoping for more. But he had no way of knowing when he might hear from Griffin again. Griffin had warned Robin their contact would be sporadic, that entire terms might pass before he was in touch again. Robin would be summoned when he was needed, and no sooner. He found no note at his windowsill the next evening, or the evening after that.
Days passed, and then weeks.
You’re still a Babel student, Griffin had told him. Act like one.
It turned out this was very easy to do. As the memories of Griffin and Hermes receded into the back of his mind, into nightmares and the dark, his life at Oxford and at Babel rose to the forefront in glaring, dazzling colour.
It stunned him, how quickly he fell in love with the place and the people. He hadn’t even noticed it happening. His first term had him spinning in place, dazed and exhausted; his classes and coursework formed a rote pattern of frenzied readings and late, bleary-eyed nights against which his cohort was his only source of joy and solace. The girls, bless them, quickly forgave Robin and Ramy for their first impressions. Robin discovered he and Victoire shared the same unabashed love of literature of all kinds from Gothic horrors to romances, and they took great pleasure in swapping and discussing the latest batch of penny dreadfuls brought in from London. And Letty, once she’d been persuaded the boys were indeed not too stupid to be at Oxford, became a great deal more tolerable. She turned out to possess both an acerbic wit and a keen understanding of the British class structure by virtue of her upbringing, which made for infinitely amusing commentary when it wasn’t aimed at either of them.