Page 146 of Babel

‘You’re lying,’ Robin gasped.

‘I am not. Fifty seconds.’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘We only need one of you alive, and she’s more stubborn to work with.’ Sterling shook the watch again. ‘Forty seconds.’

It was a bluff. It had to be a bluff; they couldn’t possibly have timed things so precisely. And they ought to want them both alive – two sources of information were better than one, weren’t they?

‘Twenty seconds.’

He thought frantically for a passable lie, anything to make the time stop. ‘There are other schools,’ he breathed, ‘there are contacts at other schools, stop—’

‘Ah.’ Sterling put away the pocket watch. ‘Time’s up.’

Down the hall, Victoire screamed. Robin heard a gunshot. The scream broke off.

‘Thank heavens,’ said Sterling. ‘What a screech.’

Robin threw himself at Sterling’s legs. This time it worked; he’d caught Sterling by surprise. They crashed to the floor, Robin above Sterling, cuffed hands above his head. He brought his fists down onto Sterling’s forehead, his shoulders, anywhere he could reach.

‘Agony,’ Sterling gasped. ‘Agonia.’

The pain in Robin’s wrists redoubled. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. Sterling struggled out from beneath him. He toppled sideways, choking. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Sterling stood over him for a moment, breathing hard. Then he drew his boot back and aimed a vicious kick at Robin’s sternum.

Pain; white-hot, blinding pain. Robin could perceive nothing else. He didn’t have the breath to scream. He had no bodily control at all, no dignity; his eyes were blank, his mouth slack, leaking drool onto the floor.

‘Good Lord.’ Sterling adjusted his necktie as he straightened up. ‘Richard was right. Animals, the lot of you.’

Then Robin was alone again. Sterling did not say when he would return, or what would happen to Robin next. There was only the vast expanse of time and the black grief that engulfed it. He wept until he was hollow. He screamed until it hurt to breathe.

Sometimes the waves of pain subsided ever so slightly and he thought he could organize his thoughts, take stock of his situation, ponder his next move. What came next? Was victory on the table any longer, or was there only survival? But Ramy and Victoire permeated everything. Every time he saw the slightest glimpse of the future, he remembered they would not be in it, and then the tears flowed again, and the suffocating boot of grief came down again on his chest.

He considered dying. It would not be so hard; he needed only to strike his head against stone with enough effort or figure out some way to strangle himself with his cuffs. The pain of it did not frighten him. His whole body felt numb; it seemed impossible that he might feel anything ever again except the overwhelming sense of drowning – and perhaps, he thought, death was the only way to break the surface.

He might not have to do it himself. When they’d wrung everything they could from his mind, wouldn’t they try him in court and then hang him? In his youth he had once glimpsed a hanging at Newcastle; he’d seen the crowd gathered around the gallows during one of his jaunts around the city and, not knowing what he was seeing, drawn closer to the crush. There had been three men standing in a line on the platform. He remembered the whack of the panel giving way, the abrupt snap of their necks. He remembered hearing someone mutter their disappointment that the victims had not kicked.

Death by hanging might be quick – perhaps even easy, painless. He felt guilty for even considering it – that’s selfish, Ramy had said, you don’t get to take the easy way out.

But what in God’s name was he still alive for? Robin could not see how anything he did from now on mattered. His despair was total. They had lost, they had lost with such crushing completeness, and there was nothing left. If he clung to life for the days or weeks he had left, it was solely for Ramy’s sake, because he did not deserve what was easy.

Time crept on. Robin drifted between waking and sleep. Pain and grief made it impossible to truly rest. But he was tired, so tired, and his thoughts spiralled, became vivid, nightmarish memories. He was on the Hellas again, speaking the words that set all this in motion; he was staring down at his father, watching blood bubble over that ruin of a chest. And it was such a perfect tragedy, wasn’t it? An age-old story, parricide. The Greeks loved parricide, Mr Chester had been fond of saying; they loved it for its infinite narrative potential, its invocations of legacy, pride, honour, and dominance. They loved the way it struck every possible emotion because it so deviously inverted the most basic tenet of human existence. One being creates another, moulds and influences it in its own image. The son becomes, then replaces, the father; Kronos destroys Ouranos, Zeus destroys Kronos and, eventually, becomes him. But Robin had never envied his father, never wanted anything of his except his recognition, and he hated to see himself reflected in that cold, dead face. No, not dead – reanimated, haunting; Professor Lovell leered at him, and behind him, opium burned on Canton’s shores, hot and booming and sweet.

‘Get up,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Get up.’

Robin jerked awake. His father’s face became his brother’s. Griffin loomed above him, covered in soot. Behind him, the cell door was in pieces.

Robin stared. ‘How—’

Griffin brandished a silver bar. ‘Same old trick. Wúxíng.’

‘I thought it couldn’t work for you.’

‘Funniest thing, isn’t it? Sit up.’ Griffin knelt down behind him and set to work on Robin’s cuffs. ‘Once you said it for the first time, I finally got it. Like I’ve been waiting for someone to say those words my whole life. Christ, kid, who did this to you?’

‘Sterling Jones.’

‘Of course. Bastard.’ He fiddled a moment with the lock. Metal dug into Robin’s wrists. Robin winced, trying his hardest not to move.

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