He remembered his own advice to Miss Temple in the silence of the spiraling airship, that she ought to face Roger Bascombe while she could, or she might forever regret it… and the girl had killed the man. Had he known that would happen—had he spurred her on to murder? Bascombe was nothing. What pricked his conscience was the burden the death had set on Miss Temple's soul. Doctor Svenson recalled every death—far too many—he himself had managed, with a mortified regret. Yet he knew his advice had been correct. If Miss Temple had simply let the man drown, some vital question for her character—one that their entire adventure had, like some enormous alchemical equation, served to compound and lay before her—might not have had its answer. Did his own journey demand a similar accounting with Elöise Dujong?

HE GROUND the butt out with the toe of his left boot and returned to the doorway of the compartment, signaling with a jerk of his chin for the two young men to return to their compartment. Svenson smiled bitterly that his adoption of the behavior of braver, harder men—like Chang or Major Blach—was so successful, for the pair did exactly as he demanded, sullen but fully deferent. He stood in the corridor until the far door had closed, listening to the muffled racket of the train and fighting the urge for yet another smoke.

Slumping onto a seat opposite the sleeping woman, Doctor Svenson reached into his tunic and pulled out his crumpled and bloodstained handkerchief, unfolding it carefully on his palm to reveal the broken sliver of blue glass he had removed from Elöise's flesh. The sliver had been altered—no longer merely a smooth shard snapped from the rendered page of a glass book. One side now bore a whorled ridging grown from contact with Elöise's body, her blood congealing like stiff beads of sap on a newly sliced wedge of oak. He picked up the sliver between his forefinger and thumb and held it up to the dim light. Svenson felt a pressing behind his eyes and the urge to swallow, as if his throat was suddenly dry—but the glass did not absorb him. It could have been the size of the fragment, but he sensed at least some of what Elöise had said, that its contents were not whole, and as such perhaps offered no real point of entry. Svenson sighed. He pulled up the sleeve of his tunic and then the shirt beneath it, exposing his left arm—above the wrist, well clear of the artery. He took the glass piece delicately in his right hand and, with a quick glance to make sure Elöise still slept, stabbed the sliver's tip firmly into the meat.

THE PRICK of pain was immediately swallowed by a freezing sensation that spread with astonishing speed, and with such chilling force that Doctor Svenson very nearly lost his ability to think. He fought the sudden certainty that he had done something incalculably stupid and forced his eyes to focus on the wound: the gripping cold, though he felt it extending along his veins, did not mean the flesh of his entire arm was being turned to glass. On the contrary, the altered area was actually quite small, perhaps the size of a child's fingernail. Svenson's relief came with a growing dizziness. He blinked, aware that time had become unnaturally expanded with sensation, that each breath felt trackless, and fought down another rush of panic. There… at the edge of his attention, roiling like rats in the hold of a ship, lurked the visions he had sought—but the worlds they contained were utterly unlike the seductive realms he had found in the blue glass before. These were sharp, even painful, unhinged, without coherence. Again Doctor Svenson was sure he had made a grave mistake. Then the visions were upon him.

The first was a thick black slab of stone, carved with characters Svenson did not know (and the person whose memory this was did not know either), at once overlaid, from another mind, with a harsher carving on paler, softer stone, a creature from some primitive time, with a bulbous head and too many arms—and then overlaid again with a fossilized stretch of an enormously large cephalopod, with suction cups wide as a grown man's eye… and then strangest of all came a sound, a chanting he understood was a wicked, wicked prayer. Each element bled sharply into the next, colliding in nauseous diagonals, as if the scattered bits of memory had been sliced with a scissors and reshuffled at random, or hammered together like a ball of wire and nails. Even as he winced, Svenson knew the strange carved language was located on a different stone altogether, that the music had not been heard on a deserted rocky shore at all, but in the close confines of a thickly carpeted drawing room, that—

Just as the entire head-splitting and meaningless sequence was about to be repeated in his mind, Svenson sensed another strain in the mixture—a different, palpable quality altogether… female… though the woman's presence was the merest impression, a whisper in his ear, his senses cleaved to those of her body—her own inhabitation. And finally, like ghosts taking shape from the fog on a fearful heath, Doctor Svenson isolated three successive instants, clear as whip cracks, three tableaux so sharp in a maelstrom of lesser visions they might have been etched by lightning…

A uniformed man in a side chair waiting, head in hands, as a woman's voice rose in anger on the opposite side of a door—the man looked up, his eyes red—Arthur Trapping…

Francis Xonck within a grove of trees, kneeling to whisper to three children gathered around him…

Holding the hand of a nervous, determined Charlotte Trapping, a servant opening a door to reveal another woman waiting at the far end of a table, her dark hair tied simply with a black ribbon—Caroline Stearne, and in her hand—

DOCTOR SVENSON opened his eyes. The frost in his arm had reached his shoulder, the arm gone numb. He flung the sliver of glass away and with a grimace worked the thumb of his right hand beneath the button of congealed flesh that surrounded the puncture. With a wrench that hurt far more than he was prepared to withstand, the lump of crystallized flesh came free. The Doctor stabbed his handkerchief into the wound and then tightly held it there, biting the inside of his cheek at the pain. He shut his eyes and rocked back and forth in his seat. Already the cold was ebbing away in his arm, and he could flex his fingers. He let out a long and rueful sigh. He had taken a terrible risk.

He looked up and found Elöise staring at him.

“What have you done?” she whispered.

“I had a small idea,” Svenson replied with a tight smile. “It has come to nothing.”

“Abelard—”

“Hush, now. I promise you, there is no harm.”

She watched him closely, hesitating on the edge of difficult questions. It was evident to them both he had not told the truth.

Yet as he watched Elöise settle back to sleep, Doctor Svenson knew he should have confronted her. The final three tableaux were memories from Elöise herself, transmitted through the congealed residue of her own blood. Were these memories she herself recalled, and had hidden from him—or had they been hidden from her as well, buried like a hidden seam of silver in the fibers of her body? It was another fundamental question about how the blue glass worked. Elöise was missing pieces of her mind, given over to a glass book…but what if memories taken into a book disappeared only from the forebrain, from a person's ready memory, but not necessarily altogether? Did that mean the minds of men like Robert Vandaariff or Henry Xonck might be reclaimed?

And if those experiences could be restored… what sort of person would Elöise be? Did she even know herself?

THE DOCTOR woke to brighter light and a canal streaming past the window, a shining ribbon between the rail tracks and a dense green forest beyond. Elöise still slept, rolling partially onto her side to face him, which—as he could see no bleeding on her bandage—spoke to a lack of discomfort with her incision. He sat up, the pistol still in his hand but the hand itself half-asleep, tucked into an awkward position between his torso and the seat. How long had he slept? It could not have been more than a doze, and yet, he ruefully realized, however short or long, such laxity would have given Xonck ample time to eliminate them both. But they both lived. Even if Xonck was kindly disposed toward Elöise, did it follow he would scruple to kill Svenson? It did not.