Svenson returned to the car for a lantern, but the hook was empty. One of the businessmen looked out of his compartment, blanching to see Svenson advancing at such speed.

“Where is the conductor?” the Doctor called, his voice low but sharply urgent.

“I—I have not seen him this hour,” stammered the man.

But Svenson was already past, convinced the conductor had been thrown off the train or beneath its wheels after inadvertently discovering Xonck's hiding place. And if Xonck was hiding under the coal wagon, what did that mean as far as the Contessa's fate—or Miss Temple's? Had they been dispatched like so many others? Or could they be on the train? That would put Xonck in the same situation as Svenson with regard to the freight cars and the caboose… unless— and Svenson cursed himself once more—Xonck had not been asleep when they'd stopped. Of course not—Xonck would have been waiting, leaping at once from hiding and loping like a wolf down the length of the train. Perhaps even now he was warming himself at the stove in the caboose, having slaughtered every other occupant! And if Miss Temple or the Contessa had sought refuge there—was there a thing they could have done to stop him?

Svenson stalked through to the second car without finding a lantern. Upon reaching Elöise's compartment he found its door open and one of the young men traveling to the southern mills standing inside. Beyond the man, Svenson saw Elöise, the bandage in place, her hands held tightly together. The young man spun to Svenson, eyes caught by the pistol in his hand.

“I—we heard the lady cry out,” he managed. “For help.”

“Elöise?” Svenson called past the man to her, fixing the interfering fool with an openly vicious gaze.

“I was asleep… I do not know… dreaming—perhaps I did.”

“Excellent. Most kind of you to help.” Svenson stepped aside with all the crispness of a Macklenburg soldier on parade to allow the man to exit. “If you will excuse us.”

The young man did not move, his gaze still fixed on the weapon.

“Is there something wrong on the train?” he asked.

“I cannot locate the conductor,” replied Svenson, in as mild a voice as he could manage. “Perhaps he walked up to the engine when last we stopped.”

The young man nodded, waiting for Svenson to say more, and then nodded again when it became clear that Svenson had no plans to do so. He edged into the corridor and walked quickly away, looking back once, to find Doctor Svenson glaring. The man bobbed his head a third time as he left the car.

“I am sure he was only trying to help,” whispered Elöise.

“A man of his age alone with an injured woman,” observed Svenson, “is no more worthy of trust than an asp let into a child's nursery.”

She did not reply, giving him the clear impression that his entire manner only made things worse.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I have been thinking,” she replied, not to his question at all. “You asked me of Francis Xonck. Whatever glass he used to stab me, I know it was from a book that had been imprinted. Because I felt myself— my flesh, but also my mind—being penetrated, not by a blade, but by… experiences.”

“Do you recall them?”

Elöise sighed. “Will you not put that thing away?”

Svenson looked down at the pistol. “You do not understand. The conductor is missing.”

“Yet if he has only gone to the engine—”

“Xonck is on the train—somehow—I am not certain where. The conductor may have discovered him and paid the price.”

“You should not have lied to that boy—you ought to have enlisted his help!”

“There is no time, Elöise, and too much to explain. He and everyone else on this train would think me mad—”

“It would be mad to face Francis Xonck alone when there is no need! Or are you set on some ridiculous notion of revenge?”

Svenson swallowed an angry reply. That she could so easily mock the very notion of revenge, that he might be owed anything, or that he was incapable of taking it… or even that despite everything she might be correct—he slapped the metal door frame with an open palm. The anger was pointless, and he let it go, his emotion stalling like a Sisyphean stone at the crest. She was waiting for an answer. Svenson seized on the first unkempt thought that came to mind.

“You… Yes, before—you mentioned the glass, dreaming—the fragment. Do you recall what you saw?”

“I do,” she sniffed, shuffling to a sitting position. “Though I cannot see it helps us.”

“Why?”

“Because it was broken. The thoughts inside, the sense of the memory… the content of the glass had been deranged. Like the ink running on a waterlogged page, but in one's mind… I cannot describe it.”

“It was a very small piece—”

Elöise shook her head. “The matter is not size. There was no logic—as if five memories, or five minds, were overlaid one on top of another, like patterns of paper held to a window.”

“Was there any detail to suggest who might have been the source?”

She shook her head again. “It was too full of contradiction—all tumbled into one place, which was not one place… and all the time… I had forgotten, music…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It means nothing—though I'm certain the memories themselves are true. Each portion flickered… overlapping the seams between them.”

“And none of these… elements seemed… significant?”

“I do not believe so,” she said. “Indeed, now that I try, I can scarcely recall a thing.”

“No no, this is useful.” Svenson nodded without conviction. “A wound with the blue glass—as contact with blood creates more glass— necessitates some exclusive contact between the glass and the victim, do you see? Blood congeals against the original glass and is itself crystallized—the flesh becomes solid. But what is the nature of this newly made glass? Since it is in—is of—your body, does it contain some memory from you? How is this raw glass different from that smelted by the Comte?”

Svenson's mind genuinely raced with the consequences of Elöise's broken shard, and what this implied about the structure and workings of the glass books. A torn piece of paper would show only the fragment of type printed upon it, but a similarly sized spear from a blue glass page apparently contained an overlay of multiple memories. It meant that the books were not read (or “written”) in any linear way, but that the memories were shot through the glass like color in paint, or seasoning in soup, or even tiny capillaries in flesh. Whatever aspect of the glass normally allowed a person to experience the memories in sequence had been dislodged on the broken fragment, and the different memories it contained had been jammed into one jagged, unnatural whole.

He looked over at Elöise. “On the airship, the mere touch of a glass book on her bare skin drove the Contessa to distraction.”

“She killed the Prince and Lydia for no reason but pique—”

“Francis Xonck has used broken glass to cauterize a bullet wound, and now carries that glass within his body. He may well be insane.” Svenson winced to think of it. Given the wound, the lump of glass would be the size of a child's fist; what visions gnawed—no, tore—at Francis Xonck's mind? “He also possesses a glass book, saved in particular from the wreckage. I do not know what that book holds, I can only say that a perfectly sound man who did look into it was turned to a gibbering wreck. That Xonck has selected this of all books must mean something.”

He knelt near her. “Elöise, you may be closer to his thoughts than any other soul alive.”

“And I have told you—”

“He knows the glass will kill him,” said Svenson sharply. “In the Comte's absence, he will attempt to find the man's notes, his tools— anything to reverse what has been done. I must find him.”