Chapter Text
Victoire stepped onto the pier. Ten years. It had been ten years since she’d last stepped foot in England. Not since her swift flight from Babel and hastily arranged ferrying across the Atlantic.
She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected to feel stepping off the boat. A sense of vertigo perhaps. Or maybe a flood of memories accompanied by some sort of perverse nostalgia. She felt none of these things though. Just tired really. It had been a long journey.
Picking up her small one-handed suitcase, she walked away from the hustle and bustle of disembarking sailors to catch an omnibus into London proper. Following a less-than-smooth ride, she hailed a cab at its terminus.
The driver cast her a thin reedy look as she climbed into the carriage. ‘Where to?’
‘Euston train station please.’
The driver grunted a brief assent before whipping the horses into motion.
Settling into her seat, Victoire cast a look through the window. Beyond it lay the streets of London. It was an awful sight.
The first time she had seen London, she had marveled at it. She had not been unused to large cities. She’d lived in Paris before that after all. But where Paris had been trapped in the past, its avenues still paved with dirt and sod, London had been the beacon of progress. With streets built in stone and silver. Where gas-lit lamps illuminated the city day and night. Where silver-lined sewers had turned sewage itself into little more than a memory of a less sanitary past.
Trains lines had spiraled out from the city in every direction. Connecting London to every corner of the country. Like the beating heart and its arteries. The telegram had transformed communication. News had never traveled faster. London had never been stronger. The city had seemed immaculate. Eternal. But then, so had Rome once upon a time.
A kind of corruption had seized itself upon the city since her last visit. Like a biblical plague, sweeping across London. As though the hand of god itself had descended from the heavens to squeeze the life out of the city.
No…it wasn’t god that did this. It was us. It was Robin.
The destruction of Babel and its treasure trove of silver and knowledge had brought ruin to London. Had plunged what had once been the opulent jewel at the center of the British empire spiraling back decades, if not centuries.
The streets were falling apart. Cracked and potholed. Stagnant and tepid rainwater pooling in every crevice. At sunset, the lights no longer flickered to life. No longer pushed back the dark shadows of night or the creatures who dwelt there within. But worst of all was the smell. The plumbing had ceased to work entirely within a year of the fall of Babel. Now the Thames was a poisonous milieu that in Victoire’s opinion, better reflected London’s true nature than it ever had before.
To their credit, they had gotten train services somewhat functional again. Sluggish and slow as it was without the magic grease of silver keeping the tracks slick and smooth.
In essence, the city was rotting. A sickly beast, unable to face sober reality. Unable to move past its addiction to silver. Even the station, not more than ten years old, was already showing signs of serious dilapidation. Crumbling without its precious silver.
Victoire booked herself onto the next available service to Oxford. The price had seemingly tripled since her last time riding the line. That was unsurprising. Without the silver on the tracks to pull the trains along, or the bars built into boilers to increase their efficiency, the trains had no choice but to operate on steam power alone. Slow and inefficient steam power.
She found herself reminiscing on the last time she’d taken the train to Oxford. At the sullen silence they’d shared on the journey back.
That was the day after we arrived back from Canton…just a bunch of scared school children who had no idea what to do next…no idea where to run to…except back to our own prison cells…
It felt strange to be standing here again. On the cusp of returning. She glanced around the platform, at the other passengers silently awaiting the train's arrival. Something felt off about the whole scene. She felt like she should have been a nervous wreck. Twitchy and terrified that at any moment she would be recognized by a passerby, or that the constable standing near the entrance to the station would squint suspiciously at her.
But she simply wasn’t. Why would she be? She was no longer that frightened young girl who had fled this country with barely any idea what her next step was. She was a woman grown now. A Hermes agent with ten years of hard experience under her belt. She felt no dread at the idea that at any moment everyone around her would drop the act and move to clap her in irons.
She wasn’t afraid of them. Of being recognized. Because, as far as everyone in Britain knew, she was dead.
Victoire Desgraves had died with Robin Swift and all his other nefarious collaborators when Babel had fallen. She was a ghost now. A phantom haunting the empire. It made her invisible. No one paid her any attention. Ironically, she felt safer here in the proverbial heart of the lion's den than she ever had out in the colonies. Out there the authorities were more likely to shoot first and ask questions later.
So, with another hour to kill before the train arrived, she strolled to the nearby newsstand, purchased a copy of The Times, found a comfortable-looking bench, and sat down to read.
The paper painted a grim picture. The headline across the front page read TROUBLE IN MUMBAI! REBELLIOUS NATIVES FORCE OUT BRITISH GARRISON!
That wasn’t news to Victoire. She hadn’t been the one to organize it, but she’d been in contact with the Hermes agents helping to orchestrate it. She’d been too busy stirring up problems for Britain in Egypt. Riling up the colonies and stretching Britain’s ability to respond.
That was how Hermes would topple the empire. By forcing it to overextend itself. Leaving it vulnerable not only to the other imperial powers now seeking ways to exploit Britain’s current weakness, but to the very people it subjugated in the first place.
What was of far greater interest was what the paper had to say on domestic issues. Over the last ten years production in Britain had collapsed. The silver looms and factories that had once powered the empire had been broken. Either by the steady decline of silver, or the much more immediate worker agitations.
Without silver, workers had found themselves empowered. No longer begging for scraps. Now it was the owners begging them to come back to work. To keep what little production still existed functioning. The papers referred to it as the UNION RENAISSANCE.
On every other page, she found news of strikes up and down the country. Workers demanding what had once been unthinkable. A ten-hour work day. Real living wages. A five-day work week. And at every turn the wealthy we’re being forced to capitulate. The police couldn’t stop them. The army too preoccupied with trying to hold the empire together.
Real change was happening in Britain. All it had taken was destroying a single tower to achieve it.
At little over ten minutes late the train finally steamed into the station. Boarding amongst the rabble, Victoire found her seat and took a breath. On the other end of this line, a mere three hours away, lay Oxford. The place where it had all started. The place where it had all ended. Where everyone she had loved had died.
She had known that one day fate would lead her back to it. That she possessed unsettled business with Oxford. And now it was time to face it.
For the agents of Hermes had heard a word being sung. A word whispered in secret. A word that was capable of undoing everything that had happened since Babel had fallen and restoring Britain to its place of preeminence. A word that had stretched across oceans and dragged Victoire Desgraves back to Oxford to uncover the mystery of what it meant. A word that could bring the very world to its knees. Harmony.