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Lying clothed in Griffin Harley’s bed with his head on the stiff pillows and a corked, smuggled vase of beer in his hand, Sterling Jones mumbled: “I love you.”
The first thing Griffin thought about was how much of a lie that was. Sterling ensconced himself in Griffin’s covers without permission, which Griffin didn’t mind considering how long they had known each other. However, when Griffin finally allowed his hair to fall over his assigned page of translations and asked Sterling to leave and let him sleep, Sterling answered no. Drunk or not, Sterling would have given the same answer. No state of mind ever dulled his need for possession and that night, after receiving a clandestine offer from Hermes that finally explained the true unalienable flaws of colonialism that he’d searched blindly for for years, Griffin was not fond of Sterling’s avarice.
Sterling loved Evie, who would someday represent the splendor and excellence found in Babel. Someday, he could smother the brilliance out of her and collect it for himself. Sterling wanted to love Griffin so that he could keep lounging on the dreamily soft cotton sheets Griffin spent hours scavenging for.
“No, you don’t. Don’t say that again,” Griffin snapped in response, shooting out of the wooden chair beside his desk. “Now, get out of my bed. I need to sleep.”
“But I do Griffin,” Sterling countered in between laughs. Instead of leaving, he rolled his frontside onto the mattress. His umber hair bristled in all the wrong places, but for once he didn’t smooth it back into shape—he was too wasted. “I like the way your voice sounds during lectures. You’re always so sure of yourself when you talk. God, Griffin you’re so—“
“Get out of my room, Sterling,”
“Don’t be such a dick,” he slurred instead and his entitlement sent a hot pulse into Griffin’s temple. With his face in the pillow, Sterling missed the expression on Griffin’s face before he snatched his coat and trundled out of his own room.
A piece of Sterling’s voice floated out before Griffin closed the door and remembered the address given to him by Hermes: the only people who seemed capable of giving his thoughts some value.
The Twisted Root, he recalled, was a fifteen minute walk from the edge of campus.
“Griffin.” He heard again, the voice peering out from his door now left ajar. Ironing the intoxicated hitches and swings out of his voice, Sterling asked. “Where are you going?” His hand gripped the doorframe to keep him steady and his eyes failed to match the rigid lines of his face. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. I meant for that to be a joke.”
Griffin sighed and paused his walk. In thirty minutes, he needed to meet his liaison in Hermes—this perplexingly meaningful apology from Sterling would need to be brief.
“Are you okay?” Sterling asked, noting how Griffin’s shining gravel eyes glared upwards while the rest of his body stilled.
With another sough and a tilt of his chin, Griffin replied: “What did you mean when you said that?” The confession still bewildered him and his rapid blinks did nothing to goad anymore words out.
“Well…”
“You didn’t mean it, did you?” Sterling swallowed and shifted back behind the door to place down the vase of alcohol.
“Probably not,” he muttered, “I’ve just been thinking about you often. I’ve heard that people pay more attention to people when they become distant.”
“It’s our third year, Sterling. Of course, we’re busy.”
“Not as busy as you are apparently.” Griffin shot him a glare. “I mean. Mentally, we don’t seem as busy. You’re stressed, Griffin, about something I don’t know.”
The fit of Griffin’s coat abruptly tightened around his shoulders as they remembered how Lovell seized each of them a day ago in exasperation. Silver involving Chinese worked inconsistently with Griffin, meaning the half of him that Lovell wanted had faded. Of course Griffin was stressed, and the feelings of desperate hands on his shoulders told him he was right to be tense.
“So what? Is that why you ‘love me’?”
Sterling frowned, his dimples flashing in and out of view. “I said that because I wanted you to know that you aren’t on your own, Griffin. You’re my anchor you know, so I don’t want you falling off of the ship and rusting to death alone. I need you,” he answered, subtly covering his flushed face throughout.
An abeyance passed before Griffin nodded and gazed at Sterling, wondering if anyone else had ever heard those types of words from him. His parents certainly hadn’t—they were too rich to know how to love—and he acted flamboyant yet hollow around most others. Griffin didn’t know what he did to elicit anything delicate from Sterling Jones.
“Thank you,” he responded anyway. “I think I need you too.”
No amount of affectionate words would ever spur Griffin to tell Sterling about Hermes, but maybe he could spare him from whatever they planned to do.
—
“We have these global standards now for living, speaking, and owning that nobody else can meet other than Britain and two countries it thinks of as allies instead of slaves. They take minerals from all over the place, give it value, then call us stupid for not having any. They’re taunting us with it—asking us to stand up and do something about it just for them to have an excuse to torch us all and just steal from our corpses—no, they’d torch us and then say it was a mass suicide. Some racial disorder they made up to settle the ignorant minds of the people in their nation admiring things that aren’t theirs. They love our wares, they love our jewelry, they love our creativity, but they hate us. So they take and take and try to trick us into thinking what was ours is their own,” Griffin ranted, finishing off with an almost conductor-like slice of his arm.
“God, that’s terrible,” whispered Evie Brooke.
“Trust me, I know. If I could put a bullet in one person’s head and stop all of this, I would. But it isn’t that simple. There’s a whole society of awful people keeping this going.” He deflated now that he found a place for the latent rage shivering through him for years. “It’s all wrong, Evie. Now that I think about it, I’m sure shooting the right little group of people could fix things. Most people are followers anyway.”
She nodded very subtly while leaning against the plushy side of the diner’s booth, her food left unbothered. “And you’re certain of all of this?” she confirmed, in a fainter, lower tone.
“It only makes sense,” Griffin answered with a sardonic shrug.
Evie stared down at her plate again, and found herself instead just pressing her hands into the sides of her mild, freckled face. Her curt nails pressed into her face, and started to craft shapes. Sometimes, Griffin suspected she was visualizing match-pairs when she did that. “I can’t even begin to imagine how far it must go,” she murmured and Griffin strained to hear her underneath the buzz of the room. “Where’d you learn all of this?”
“Research. And from Lovell’s atrocious rambling,” he lied. A week ago, he met with the representative from Hermes, yet so far, he failed to garner another invitation to a rendez-vous. Since then, he had ached for more unassailable truths about the corruption of Britain. Nothing else drew his attention as fervently anymore after knowing it all hailed from the spoils of thieves.
“I never understand why he must be so cruel to you, Griffin,” Evie admits, shaking her head. “It doesn’t seem like either of us are eating. Maybe we should just head back to campus.”
“I suppose.”
“Wait a second. You’re not really going to kill somebody, right?” While asking the question, she occupied herself with straightening her sleeves and patting her red hair down.
Griffin swallowed back his first answer, leaving a delay to sully what should have been an instant reply. “It’s not like they wouldn’t deserve it,” he muttered and Evie froze, “but I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“Okay,” breathed Evie, before fidgeting with her face again. “Let’s head back.”
—
After eleven months in the Hermes Society, Griffin earned the assignment of taking and delivering texts from Babel to obscure locations almost biweekly. Early in the morning, when the moon teetered directly above his head, Griffin traipsed to the tower of Babel with too much willpower to be afraid. The door swung open for him and he climbed up its stories on the balls of his feet.
He parsed through the shelves of the fourth floor with the moonlight from outside as his only light source. Typically, finding three books in the library would be menial work, however Griffin’s sleep deprivation proved to slow the process down. Every spine he roved his eyes over once would need a second glance in order for him to be certain of what it said.
An echo resounded through the tower: the sound of the door unlocking. Griffin undoubtedly spent half an hour skimming through the titles, yet he still only found one of the books he needed. After recovering from the initial hitch in his heartbeat, Griffin skittered behind the moving chalkboard in the east side of the chamber. Suppressing a grunt, he hauled himself up onto the stubby bookshelves placed underneath it. What could he do if someone found him? He didn’t bring a weapon outside of the hefty tome he just snatched from the shelf.
Griffin recognized the dull, vast sounds coming from the boots of an Oxford student. That small comfort allowed his heart to quiet and better his attempt at hiding. The person nearly tripped and squeaked afterwards—actually Griffin once made fun of Anthony for his habit of screeching whenever surprised. Hearing the person’s grumble afterwards assure Griffin that it was Anthony Ribben—the best person he could have hoped for.
Anthony paused his footsteps and went wordless, so Griffin pulled his collar up to his mouth to mute his breathing. He flipped himself in the other direction with haste and a pit hollowed out Griffin’s stomach. A second later, Anthony already made it to the stairs; he knew someone was in the tower. If Anthony noticed something was amiss and reported an issue with the library, Griffin would fail an assignment from Hermes for the first time. Ruining their plans might discourage them from contacting him ever again and all his critiques and his lifelong yearning for liberty would continue to rot in his mind. There would be no more outlets for his misery and the fantastic ideas that resulted from it.
With a trembling sigh, Griffin unlodged himself from behind the chalkboard. “Anthony!” he called in a coarse whisper and the building went silent.
“Griffin?” Anthony replied, ascending the staircase again. “What are you doing here?” Some seconds later, Griffin regarded Anthony’s upturned, puzzled eyes.
“Getting some books for my research,” Griffin tested. He cradled the cover of the book with crossed arms and offered a fleeting simper.
“I was planning to as well,” the brunet said with a slow cadence. With a new hint of tranquility in his mind, Griffin started to toss around if Anthony really was here for research either. He obstinately studied in the early mornings, refusing to ever stay awake past eleven at night when he could instead wake up at two in the morning. It was midnight.
After nodding, Griffin started to wend between the columns of the chamber, pacing yet steadily taking an extra stride towards the exit after each repetition. “Were you looking for anything…Greek?”
“Not today.” he answered, still somewhat bemused at Griffin’s behaviour. No Hermes affiliation then.
“I don’t know. One of the second-years said they saw you reading some Greek mythology. I figured it was just a rumor, but I wasn’t sure.”
Anthony scrutinized him with his hands in the pockets of his coat. A roguish smile grew on his face. “Have you been responsible for all the book disappearances Professor Playfair’s been acting rabid over?” He offered it as a joke, yet Griffin took too long to respond with a smile. Both of their pates washed into a blank expression.
“What if I were doing it for a noble cause?” Griffin laughed afterwards.
“What sort of noble cause?” Anthony pressed humorlessly. If anyone in his cohort could understand Hermes’ mission, it would be Anthony. Sterling and Evie poured their hearts into attempting to understand the slights him and Anthony endured, but neither of them truly knew how it attritted their sense of identity: how steely the filter into their minds were in order to hear a thousand cheap things about where they hailed and absorb as little of it as it could.
“Anti-colonialism, you know,” he forced out, trying to mirror Sterling’s listless confidence whenever he spoke. That parlance didn’t fit his voice, so Griffin spoke differently when he continued: “I’m trying to prevent that from being a myth.”
“It isn’t,” corrected Anthony, “it’s just a slow process.”
“I know, but I'm helping it move faster. There are people who need these books more than Babel does, so I’m getting it to them.”
Griffin dared to fix his gaze on Anthony as he spoke, so he earned the sight of Anthony nodding, beaming his drowsy, closed mouth smile.
“Okay then. Good luck on your hero mission, Griffin.” Anthony winked afterwards, and Griffin almost collapsed with relief. “And if you end up needing help, you can ask me.” Anthony was certainly going to receive a Hermes invitation, it was only a matter of when.
—
Griffin padded into Babel for the fortieth time without permission from the professors. The process of regaining the power stolen from him by Babel recently gifted him with a ray of satisfaction nothing else in Oxford could compete with. By now, Hermes had offered Griffin more hints of information about themselves, as though they finally considered him prepared to accomplish more in the society. Lovell wished his half-assed apology held the same effect.
He slipped through the door in absolute silence and raced through the floors without a single sound that grated against the patina of the tower. After the near-catastrophe he endured when Anthony caught him, he brought himself a weapon in the form of a silver bar. With steady breaths, he soared his way up to the eighth floor.
A figure lounged by a desk on the top floor, though thankfully Griffin viewed them from the bottom of the top staircase. Since he began his adventures, he learned to sigh with an inhale rather than an exhale.
“Griffin.”
He blanched, transfixed on the steps that escorted him to the narrow cliff of the gallows. Blunt tapping and scratching hissed from the table and Evie’s voice continued on.
“Come up here.”
Mrs. Piper and her mellow sage dress burst into his thoughts; years ago, Lovell ordered him to choose a name for himself.
‘I can’t do it under pressure,” Griffin replied curtly, only to be stunned by the deluge of outrage that sparked in him. That day, Mrs. Piper raised her voice to the very slightest decibel.
‘A name is very important, Mr. Lovell. You are giving this boy something irreversible and precious. Should you rush him, he might name himself something like Dirt, and I don’t think you would be pleased with that.’
Afterwards, Lovell paused and without a single blink answered: 'Don’t ever get clever with me again.’
Despite his polite nod and his refusal to cry after Mrs. Piper wrapped her arms around him, he mused: ‘I feel a bit sick, Mrs. Piper. Since I’ve been here, I think I’ve been sick more often.’ She forwent a reply and simply held him tighter. ‘Sometimes I wish I could fly away from here,’ he mumbled, inspired by the many melodies the sailors chanted when he departed from China, ‘like a bird. Mrs. Piper, what’s your favorite bird?’
‘I admire canaries.”
‘Oh.’ Evident disappointment hung onto his reply.
‘I like griffins too. I know they aren’t quite birds—’
‘Then why mention them?”
‘Well, they’re mostly birds. Half eagle and half lion.’
Mrs. Piper couldn’t help the broad smile that bloomed on her face after he laughed (cackled honestly). ‘That’s hard to imagine,’ he sighed, ‘I like how it sounds though. Should I call myself Griffin?’
‘I think it’s a lovely and suitable name for you. You are very brave and I believe there is much you will accomplish in your life.’
Griffin could fly away right now—glide down the floors and deprive Evie of proof he ever entered. His courage—Mrs. Piper claimed over the years—was enough to usher him anywhere he desired. So he started down the steps—
“Don’t leave, Griffin,” Evie implored, hanging her gaze over the edge of the stairs and down at him. He stared at her over his shoulder, wanting her to take the time to reconsider. “Please.”
He trundled up the tower again, his chest carved hollow and drowning in a frigid lake. “What,” he drove, “are you doing here?”
Evie shook her head with her round eyes fixed on him. “What you’re doing isn’t right.”
“I have told you everything,” Griffin insisted with a pause between each word. “You think I’m wrong,” he scoffed as his mouth twisted into a dazed smile. Wordless moments passed and Griffin’s denial shirked away. “Look at me, Evie. Why?”
“You’ve taken your ideas too far. Is that not true? You once told me you would kill someone if you could for the sake of this obsession you have.”
“An obsession. After everything I’ve told you, you think what I’m doing is just part of an obsession.”
“Yes!” Evie declared, yet she ignored his demand for eye contact. “It’s all you think about. You use that excuse to commit crimes. My God, you’ve been stealing for months–”
“How do you–” Griffin could die from a shove. His ribs would implode and puncture his overworking heart. This was not an intervention between classmates. This was the result of Evie prying open and selling Griffin’s petrifying sorrows—listening to his rants against Lovell and dispensing them back to their catalyst, comforting him when a tear in his voice matched one in his heart each time an atrocity was supplanted by another, insisting, preaching, promising, swearing to him that the world toiled too slowly to ever repair what it had damaged in him. That his fury did not contort him into a monster in a world like this one.
Griffin’s attention flickered back to life when she claimed: “You’re betraying the land that gave us everything!”
“Oh, so if I’m not fond of Britain, you think it’s an affront towards you? Are you the Queen or something?”
“No, Griffin! Why do you think you’re above the system? Why can’t you just protest properly?”
“Because I’d rather not get shot for no reason and branded into a villain later!”
Furious, Evie accosted Griffin until her finger reached directly at his chest. “That won’t happen. People are good—”
“Not good enough,” he reproached, staggering away from her. “You aren’t good enough. Here I am hurting nobody, just sending a message to the ones in charge, and yet you still insist that I’m stuck in some moral abyss—Don’t look at me like that.”
“You’ve lost it,” she hissed and sped towards the stairs of the tower.
“Are you going to report me?” Griffin asked, stunned by her obstinacy. After she refused to change the pace of her gait, he raced down the steps after her. “Do you not understand how many people are dead because of the cruelty I’m trying to end? Imagine Oxford has twenty-thousand students in total—you saw all of them at that parade. Imagine all of those people. Imagine double that amount of people. Then double that number. And then double that one too. Evie!”
“Turn yourself in or kill yourself! It’s up to you!” she bellowed in response.
“I’m not going to some court full of windbags to beg for my damn freedom. I haven’t done anything wrong!”
Evie laughed without restraint, her head thrown back in a roaring taunt.
All of it was a performance. Griffin seized a silver bar from his pocket and pressed the tepid metal to her throat.
“BÀO!—BURST!”
The silver listened for once.. Her cackles ended as though cut dead by a conductor's stick. The crimson shade of hell surged forth, staining his face and the gray of his clothes. Listless, Evie’s body leaned down the newels of the stairs, led by a web of bone crawling from her torn ribcage. Griffin’s breath stuttered as the blood winded into the interdigits of his fingers and soaked through the cotton of his robes. A trail of it pooled into his eyes and he bursted, frantically swiping the metallic smell away from his nose. Evie continued to droop downwards until her shoulder banged between the pillars of the railing, echoing a haunting siren through the tower.
“Evie?” he whispered as her shoulder dragged down another one of the bannister’s posts. This time his silver-working acted when he ordered it to, just for the sake of killing her. Another echo thrummed through the room and Griffin slipped down to sprawl across the stairs. With a shivering hand, he gripped Evie’s arm before she could tumble down the steps. Her wrists cooled every second, fading into the winter. Just like he would be in the gallows, less bloody yet more alone.
She had no eyes to close anymore, so he placed his hand over his own while his left hand held Evie in place. Evie’s confrontation represented the climax of an operation she was assigned to, therefore the next step was likely marked as an arrest. Soon enough, whoever tasked with the mission would enter the tower in concern. Griffin needed to get out.
He steadied Evie, adjusting her vacant limbs to let her lay down across the steps. Swallowing against the lump in his throat and ignoring the glossy jouncing of his vision, he ascended the tower again, returning to the silver workshop.
At the back of the silver-working atrium sat pilasters of metal bars. Working match-pairs huddled on the right side of the collection. Griffin realized he still had a trembling vice still curled around his weapon, so he forced himself to slip it into his pocket. Breathing without ease, he scanned through the stacks of silver for a match pair that might allow him to escape. Rivulets of sweat and blood washed down his neck, digging in, tying around it like rope.
Finding the match-pair for invisibility revived him and seeing hanzi on the back of it finally brought the world out a haze and allowed him to determine his next steps. With the amount of gore on him, anyone who noticed him would surely report him to the police, so the first priority was removing it (Why did he stop thinking about her death so quickly? Did he even care?). Griffin would need to go to his room and wash all of the blood off.
He pinched the edge of the silver bar and dislodged it from the rest of the pile without upsetting its balance.
“Wuxing—invisible,” Griffin stated, yet his form continued to wade in the shadows. “Wuxing. Invisible,” he urged again, once again to no avail. With a tang of disappointment, shallow after months of feeling it, Griffin stared at the bar of silver. With his incapacity to summon the powers of silver consistently, he would never have earned a place among Babel’s alumni; his current stay at the university simply would end when Professor Playfair someday failed him. After that, Lovell would enroll Griffin’s younger replacement instead, and blame Griffin for the mistake of having been swiped after China before its language truly branded his heart.
He repeated the words of the match pair again, messing with how much conviction he spoke with each attempt.
Anthony and the match-pair he hoped would incite a waterfall of fog at will cruised past his mind. His limbs floated into transparency, leaving the tower lifeless as he dashed down the stairs. The silver spell, like all of the others, vacillated on the edge of spontaneous failure every second they lived. While sprinting through the musk of Evie’s blood (why didn’t he slow down?) and curving through the spiral staircase, Griffin lodged his coat underneath his arm. The sprint to the dormitory piled him with dread up until the spell vanished in the hallway leading to his room which squeezed him sick with adrenaline.
Sharply, he tore the door to his room open. Sterling tensed into a sitting position upon noticing Griffin.
“Why the hell are you in my bed?!” Griffin roared.
Sterling blanched, his eyes scattering over the blood carved across Griffin’s pate. A smear of it tainted the left side of his face while the right held drizzles of crimson also with two rivulets dripping down from his waterline like tears.
“What did you do?” Sterling whispered, shuffling out of Griffin’s bed and stepping out of his haze. To his frustration, Griffin only offered wordlessness which flared Sterling’s every preventive instinct. “Did you kill somebody?” he hissed as he accosted Griffin who refused to budge from his face. Even as Griffin hesitated, he watched Sterling calculate his fate using a thousand assumptions.
“Why are you assuming I killed someone?” he murmured, staring into Sterling’s wavering eyes. Was the viciousness carving through Griffin's mind so obvious? “I could’ve gotten mugged in an alley or something—”
“No.” Sterling’s hand leapt into Griffin’s pocket, where the gleam of the murderous silver bar shone from. Before Griffin could withdraw, he gripped the bloodied patch on his vest and his thumb dug in to hunt for an open wound. “Did you use this?”
Griffin choked out a laugh, desperate to defuse the other’s boiling suspicion. “Christ, I could never kill someone. Come on, Sterling. You know I would never do something like that right?”
“Who did you kill?” Sterling ordered anyway, as the years of learning the pattern of Griffin’s eyes, what it meant when he curled his fingers versus flicking them through his thumb, knowing when he craved to scratch his neck yet refused to in hopes of appearing stable all coincided and crafted a tell for his lies. Griffin shivered, raising his chin to keep a tremble out of his voice.
“I did it for a good reason,” he whispered and against Sterling’s crumbling apprehension, he emphasized: “There are good reasons to kill.” Sterling’s mouth hung ajar as breaths struggled to drive through him. “I had to. Babel is a dark market where we make miracles from silver stolen and carved out of the dead, severed hands of good people. It isn’t right, Sterling.” Acting as a mouthpiece for these objectives helped his heart to pump out cold blood like a syringe with tranquil precision. “I was making a difference. You know the blood of slaves is ingrained in our floors, yet I suppose you’ve never thought about that in a negative light. I killed someone who couldn’t stand the thought of that changing.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, Sterling! God! Have you been listening?”
“Just tell me who you killed?” Sterling pleaded.
Apprehensive, Griffin threw out another sob of a laugh and his fingers drew to his neck. “You’re not even listening to me,” he rasped. “I can’t tell you.”
A pause dragged on until, with the silver bar in hand, Sterling sprinted out of the chamber. Griffin cried out for him “Please! I didn’t even want to,” he begged between faint breaths. The summer rays of redemption abandoned him as well as the griffin’s promise of prestige.
Cursing, he dashed out of the room with new garments underneath his arm to get to the community washroom because he truly would not make it out of Oxford without ridding himself of all the blood. After spraying himself with frigid water and replacing his clothes, he scavenged through his coat’s pocket for the concealing silver. Surviving the most frigid hollows of the winter would be a challenge for the coat he snatched from his closet, but he lacked better options.
So with a single silver bar in hand, Griffin deserted the campus of Babel, never to regain the life and bliss now drained away.