Jack grabbed Ellini by the waist when she reached the fourth landing, and he was surprised to find that there was no scream—just a sudden intake of breath and a kind of limpness in her body, as though she'd temporarily fled from it in expectation of what was coming next.

When she recognized him, and maybe recognized that the hands around her waist were gripping her as though she was nothing more interesting than a candlestick, he saw the life flow back into her eyes. All the guards settled back in place. But not quite as much as if he'd been Sergei, or Sam, or Alice Darwin. He was getting somewhere.

In fact, if her stomach muscles hadn't tightened under his hands when she recognized him, Jack could almost have believed his presence was a comfort to her.

"Come on," he said, patting those taut muscles in a companionable way. "We're going out."

He turned to the window, hoisted it open, and leaned out with his whole torso, balancing his palms on the sill, and breathing appreciatively.

The air was brittle with frost. He felt as though he was breathing in tiny ice crystals with every gulp. But it was just what he needed. It woke him up—to the extent that his permanent clouds of boredom and medication would allow. It didn't wake up any feelings for the skinny, nervy, intriguing little lump of flesh beside him, but he supposed it would have to do, for now.

"You did say you don't mind heights?" he added, turning back to her.

"Um," said Ellini—which was good enough for Jack. He swung his legs out of the window, let them dangle for a few seconds over the twenty-foot drop into the garden below, and then sprang sideways onto the nearest protruding ledge.

Oxford was amazing for handholds. Even the Georgian buildings—which were short on gargoyles—had cornices, pediments, lintels, and ledges to help the truly bored and desperate inhabitants of the city to escape.

And it was beautiful out there—especially to a man whose head was still fizzing from the electric lights of Alice's laboratory. All that serrated architecture rising into the sky. A crescent moon as thin as a nail-clipping. And Ellini back there on the landing, half-buried in shadow, nervous and unfathomable and desperate to escape. And it didn't matter if they never did—just as long as they had each other's company while they were dreaming about it.

"I don't think I'm supposed to leave the Faculty," she said, sticking her head out of the window.

"Because you might make all the bats up here fall madly in love with you?"

She hesitated. "You promise we're just going up onto the roof?"

"I don't like to promise, Miss—" Jack paused, looking back at her from his ledge. "Look, do you have some kind of a pet name? A nickname? I suppose they've all got bad associations," he muttered, hauling himself up onto the next ledge. "I bet it was all 'my angel', 'my darling', 'my reason for living', 'my reason for throttling anyone who so much as glances at you'."

Ellini laughed—a little against her will, it seemed to Jack. But she was still standing at the window, making no effort to follow him.

"Then I'll call you mouse," he said, stepping onto the slates of the Faculty's roof. "You can't get less romantic than mouse, can you?"

"Probably not without being insulting."

He made his way up the slates, hoping she would follow if he disappeared from view. But this probably didn't look as casual as he'd intended, because he started back as soon as he heard the sounds of climbing.

Ellini had got up on the windowsill. She was standing on tiptoe, with the heels of her ankle-boots projecting out over the sill. She steadied herself against the window-frame and stepped sideways onto the ledge. He had expected her to struggle, but she leapt from one ledge to the next like a mountain goat. When they got up onto the roof, she even knew to test the slates with her toes before putting her full weight on them, in case they were coming loose.

They made their way up the sloping roof and sat down on either side of a chimney. Behind them, in the Holywell Music Room, a string quartet was pouring its poignant notes onto the air.

"What did Sam want with you?" said Jack, lighting up a cigarette. He couldn't see much of her, because she was hidden behind the chimney, but he could see her scuffed leather ankle-boots, tapping restlessly against the slates.

"He says there's a dead girl in the canal."

"Seems to me that the tidy thing to do would be to fish her out."

Ellini didn't laugh. "I don't think he was after advice about what to do with her."

"He thinks it was you that killed her?"

"He thinks I'm involved," she said, as though this was an important distinction.

"Does he have any evidence, or is it just because death follows you around like a lovesick puppy?"

"I don't know," said Ellini, toying absent-mindedly with the buttons on her gloves.

"Did you kill her?"

"No." She hesitated, and then added, "I don't know if it matters—or even if you'll believe me—but I'm pretty much dead against that kind of thing."

"But the people who get obsessed with you—they're not dead against that kind of thing, are they? Unless they're dead against it so's they can push it forwards from behind."

She gave another of those grudging giggles. Jack was starting to enjoy them. He was suddenly annoyed at not being able to see her face, so he got up and sat on the other side of her, trapping her between his body and the chimney.

For some reason, he wanted to see her eyes too, but she had turned away from him, and was examining the crumbling brickwork of the chimney, where the moss and lichen made up a series of mad, yellow-and-green splotches.

"They locked you up, didn't they?" he said, still seeking out her eyes. "The mad, possessive suitors? I'm only up to chapter four of Helen of Camden," he added, with an apologetic shrug.

Ellini still didn't turn away from her contemplation of the chimney. "You'll like chapter seventeen."

"Oh, I will, will I?"

"Mmm-hmm. And the imprisonment wasn't so bad, believe it or not. I was imprisoned in some very nice places. And there were always books."

"And what else did you do?" said Jack, stubbing out his cigarette on the slates. "Apart from reading?"

"I felt sorry for myself. For years and years and years. Longer than you'd ever believe it was possible for a girl to feel sorry for herself."

"And what then?"

Ellini shrugged. "I stopped."

"Just like that?" He regarded her critically for a few seconds. "You're not going to suddenly go mad and scream at everyone, are you? That happens sometimes, with the quiet ones."

She finally dragged her eyes away from the chimney and gave him a smile. "For the next thirty-one days, I'm guaranteed not to do that."

"And what happens then?"

"You never see me again."

"Oh." Jack fumbled in his pocket for his hipflask. "You're extremely cryptic, I don't know if anyone's ever told you that?"

"Yes. Sorry."

"Oh, that's all right. I like it, really. Everyone's so bloody informative in this place..."

He took a slow, thoughtful swig of whisky, rejoicing in the hot, bitter taste, and the way it seemed to wake up his senses. Well, most of his senses, anyway. "I, uh—I've been meaning to say, I knew the man who killed your family. Robin Crake. Hope you won't hold it against me."

"Did you?" Her face was perfectly expressionless.

"Yeah," said Jack, trying to shrug but finding that his shoulders had seized up at the mention of him. "Toxic, overbearing bastard."

"Well, I suppose I can't argue with that," she said. "What did he do to you?"

Jack tried, once again, to shrug. Now he thought about it, he found he had no idea what Robin had done to him, apart from being generally toxic and overbearing. Those days had been a blur of—of what? Fever? He'd had a fever, hadn't he, in the early days at Pandemonium? Or perhaps that was just the effect Robin had on people—to make them feel hot and stupid and unsure. It was probably his demonic symptom.

"I was delighted when I read about his death in the papers," said Jack, clenching his teeth into a smile. "It was such a perfect way for a narcissist like Robin to die. Shot in the back over an unpaid bill. Nothing meaningful or dramatic—nothing to make him feel special."

"He probably never even knew what happened," said Ellini, staring straight ahead of her. "That's the way I'd like to go."

They were silent for a moment, listening to the ghostly sounds of the string quartet in the Holywell Music Room.

"Have you known Alice Darwin long?" said Ellini, after a while.

"About five years."

"Have you..." She stopped. She was fidgeting with her gloves again. "Are the two of you...?"

Jack laughed as soon as he understood her. "Oh, good god, no."

"Do you like her?"

He tilted his head on one side, thinking about it. "Well, that's an interesting question, mouse. I mean, she's a monster. She's a cold, manipulative, heartless bitch. She won't rest until she's sucked the marrow from my bones and drained every particle of free will from my body. But you have to understand that, to a man, that doesn't mean much."

Ellini laughed. "Oh, don't worry, I understand about men. You can't help it—although it looks for all the world as if you never try."

Jack studied her again. But the results of his studies were never available to him. He had a strange compulsion to look at her, all the time. But, if he was deriving any conclusions from these studies, his brain wasn't sharing them with him. Apart from increasing his confusion about why he wasn't attracted to her, the looking was having no effect at all.

He passed her the whisky flask, and she took a brief swig, as though it was a chore that she wanted to get over and done with quickly. Refusing it didn't seem to have crossed her mind.

"Have you ever been in love?" she asked, without meeting his eyes.

"Not as far as I can remember."

"Why do you say that—'as far as I can remember?'"

Jack gave an uneasy shrug. "There are gaps in my memory. Sergei says it's a side-effect of the medication. They're strange gaps too. I forget whole... patches of time, but also... well, sometimes, it's like someone's cut holes in a particular memory. For instance, on the 29th of May 1876, I was in Lucknow, in India, with the other Generals. I was sitting in the courtyard of the Chattar Manzil—that's a palace on the banks of the river Gomti—"

"I know where—" said Ellini, but she didn't finish the sentence, choosing instead to tuck a few loose strands of hair behind her ears.

"Well, anyway, I can see the scene to my left really clearly," said Jack. "It's a perfect Indian night. Indescribably dark." He broke off, and—on an impulse even more sudden than his usual impulses—said, "I'm sorry, can you take your hair down?"

Ellini blinked. "What?"

"Would you mind taking your hair down?"

"Why?"

"I won't know until you've done it," he said patiently.

Ellini gave him a faint, worried smile, but didn't protest. She reached up, drew out a few strategically placed pins, and shook her hair loose. It was glossy and heavy—as though from the weight of all that darkness. It made him feel that recollection was fluttering like a moth just behind his eyeballs. But it continued to flutter there and didn't come forward.

"OK," he said, after a while. "Never mind. Where was I?"

"Lucknow," she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. The moth's wings gave another flap, and then vanished.

"Right," said Jack. "Well, like I said, I can see the scene to my left really clearly. There's Joel—you've heard of Joel Parish, yes? And the Rani of Travancore, dressed like a sepoy. There's a livid bush of gulmohar, looking just like a volcanic eruption, in the garden through the nearest archway. I remember that like it's been carved on the inside of my eyelids. But, on my right, it's just... blackness."

Ellini raised her eyebrows. "Well, you said it was dark."

"I wasn't standing next to a void, mouse. There would have been something." He tapped his feet against the slates peevishly, and muttered, "I wish I had a bloody book written about my life—then I'd be able to look it up."

"Just read chapter seventeen," said Ellini, taking another swig from the whisky flask.