Charlotte Grey heaved herself up onto the sill and opened the window, but it was Ellini Syal who climbed inside.

The transition was only in her mind, of course, but she really was beginning to feel like two different people these days—mainly because Charlotte Grey was empowered to do something about her miserable situation, whereas Ellini Syal just had to shrug and be polite and deflect dangerous questions.

The first thing she did when her bare feet touched the carpet was draw the curtains. Then she crossed to the washbasin and scrubbed off the sandalwood perfume she used to lure the gargoyles. Next, she peeled off the black ribbons that were twisted round her arms. This was hard work. What with the sweat and damp and desperation, the ribbons had usually become fused to her skin by morning.

She shrugged off her black dress, washed herself as best she could from the basin, because there was no time to have a bath, put on her nightgown, and tried to ruffle up her hair before the maid came in, to make it look as though she had been in bed all night.

Her mind wandered down dark roads if left to its own devices, so she tried to concentrate on these physical details and tactical necessities. It was a technique she had learnt from Jack, although he would never call it a technique. It was just the way he lived his life.

She lowered herself stiffly onto the bed and tried to persuade her muscles to relax. But unfortunately, they were linked up to her head, and her head was buzzing with too many worries.

God, she had been skin-to-skin with one of those things! Even colliding with them made her stomach heave. And the Inspector had probably recognized her. Of course, it had been very dark, and he'd suffered a nasty crack on the head a few moments before, but Ellini had no optimism left. And determination could only do its job up to a point.

She didn't even know why she'd done it. She'd been through this. She had accepted long ago that she might be responsible for the deaths of strangers. But, somehow, watching it happen hadn't seemed like part of the deal. That was too much.

She hadn't been lying in bed for more than five minutes when she heard the sound of the sash window sliding upwards, and Jack tumbled in through the curtains, smiling innocently, as though they'd just bumped into each other on the street, and bedroom break-ins hadn't been in any way involved.

Ellini struggled into a sitting position and drew her knees up to her chest, but this kind of unwelcoming body-language only seemed to please him more. He kept on grinning.

"You know, I can't imagine you ever sleeping," he said, sitting down on the carpet, and tugging absent-mindedly at a few loose threads. "It seems too much like relaxing to suit you. Do you ever do it?"

"Not very much," she admitted, with a rueful smile. "How was Cambridge?"

"Oh, very interesting." He looked for a moment as though he was about to say more, but seemed to decide against it, and went on picking at the loose threads in the carpet.

Ellini was pleased to see him, despite the unorthodox entrance. He had always been good at distracting her from the black, treacle-thick misery that made up her day-to-day life. And this Jack—with no memory of her, and with something indefinable that he was lacking—distracted her even more, simply because she had no idea what he was thinking. She didn't know whether he was her friend or her enemy. She just knew that she wanted to spend a lot of time with him, and that, sometimes, he made her wish she had more than twenty-eight days left to live.

And, in a way, this Jack was exactly what she needed. A platonic friend. Someone who nudged her instead of caressing her, who pulled her hair instead of pulling her clothes off, who wanted to talk about battles rather than love.

Still, in a treacherous, unsettling way—a way that made her hate herself even more than she usually did—it was upsetting to see him so indifferent to her. To see the way he looked at Alice.

The horrible thing about being a living, breathing creature was that it was never over. At least, not until it was really over. After what she'd lived through, there shouldn't have been a bone in her body that still wanted some men—the handsome, polite, soft-spoken ones—to find her attractive. She shouldn't have still been able to feel things like desire, or vanity, or hope.

"Now, Miss Syal," said Jack, in that playful, businesslike way that always made her laugh. She realized she had been half-expecting him to call her 'little cricket'. "I've been thinking."

He paused for a moment, then added, "No, let me expand on that. In between solving riddles, hearing disturbing revelations about our past, meeting aggressive female scholars, and trying to keep a lid on Sam's temper—which is pretty much the bare minimum I require each day to keep me entertained—I've been thinking."

Ellini smiled with something more than politeness and waited for him to go on.

"It's quite a long thought," he admitted. "I don't think anyone but you would have the patience to hear it through to the end. So I would have saved it for you even if it didn't concern you, but fortunately, it does. Maybe that's why it concerns you—maybe it's the patience as much as the dark. Anyway, mouse, the fact of the matter is, I think my demon ancestors must have made their homes in the darkest, most inaccessible underground caverns."

This was sufficiently unexpected for Ellini to forget about keeping her knees clamped to her chest and uncoil herself in curiosity.

"Because I have a real love of dark places, and a terrible aversion to the light," he went on. "I feel like I can see better when I don't actually see, if that makes sense. I can't sleep if it doesn't get properly dark at night, and all the smog and street-lamps light up this city like a bloody Christmas tree."

"Why did you decide to come here?" she asked.

"I didn't decide it," said Jack, picking gloomily at the carpet-fibres. "The British Government decided it when they took me prisoner. And then it was Alice who decided I should stay. I don't know if you've noticed it yet, but people tend to do what she says."

"Yes," said Ellini solemnly. "It must be a terrible affliction."

Jack smiled and sat back, with the palms of his hands flat on the carpet. "It's not so bad really. There are worse prisons. I get on well enough with Sergei and Sam, and Alice usually keeps my thoughts occupied." He noticed her fleeting frown, and said, "Oh, don't misunderstand me. You and I both know I hate her. But you can still hate a person and find them extremely compulsive company."

"Yes," said Ellini, in a non-committal voice.

"It was a game to start with. I thought she was snooty, and I wanted to humble her. I've got many a snootier girl into bed before. I'd been at the Faculty for two years before I realized she'd been playing a game of her own. It's called 'Keep Jack from Realizing he's Already Lost'."

Ellini didn't want to hear any more, but still, she couldn't keep herself from asking, "How do you play it?"

"Well, you're a nice girl. You wouldn't know the tricks, and I don't want to corrupt you by pointing them out. The fewer women who know, the better."

She laughed wretchedly.

"Anyway, that's not the point," he said, shaking himself as though he'd been lured off the beaten track by marsh lights. "Or maybe it is the point. You know men are supposed to see whatever they want most when they look at you? Well, Alice is the opposite. Everyone who looks at her turns into what she wants most. She has this way of making you into the kind of person she wants you to be. She made me feel like I'd been an idiot playing soldiers all my life—like I had to question every one of my instincts, because everything I'm naturally drawn to is unscientific and childish. And I learned all this under the bright lights in the glass laboratory."

He looked up from his systematic dissection of the carpet. "You see, everything's bright in Oxford. There're lamps and candles and mirrors and glass. God, you can't get away from the glass. Everything's in a bloody glass case here, even the Little Mother. And then there's Alice, with her electric lights and her white teeth. And that dome of orange-coloured smog over everything, keeping the real darkness from getting through."

He frowned, as though he was having to chase these words through the corridors of his head, and they had almost slipped away from him. "And I feel as though all this light and science has bleached everything in my life, and the only pocket of resistance—the final obstacle that everything's been reduced to—is you. Your liquorice hair could swallow light—like that wolf that's supposed to eat the sun at the end of the world in Norse legends."

"Yes," she muttered nervously. "Was it Fenrir, or—?"

"I don't know, mouse. Don't interrupt me when I'm complimenting you."

He took a deep breath, and then went on, in far more ordinary tones. "So, even though I don't find you very attractive, and you seem to have no discernible breasts, I'd appreciate it if you'd stay, just to remind me who I am every once in a while."

It was such an underwhelming end to such a lovely speech that Ellini—miserable as she was—couldn't help laughing. Jack looked at her but didn't say anything. He seemed to be expecting some kind of a reply.

Ellini straightened her face, suddenly shy. She tried to examine the pattern on the bedlinen, but her eyes were blurring—and, anyway, she didn't want to look down, in case the motion dislodged tears.

He had just said—amidst some very depressing remarks about how attractive he found Alice Darwin—that he needed her. He didn't know who she was, or what they'd been to each other, or what it was like to want her, but he needed her.

She knew she ought to say something. For a moment, she teetered dangerously on the brink of saying everything—all at once, in a desperate tangle, hoping that incoherence would be her best defence. But you never knew what kind of tangles Jack's mind could unravel.

She wanted to tell him everything—where she'd been, who she was running from, what she was doing it all for—but something held her back. Telling him all her secrets now would be like dragging him to Pandemonium all over again. He'd meet people far worse than Robin Crake, fight more battles than he'd fought in India, lose his customary optimism about the human race. And he'd be doing it all without her beside him. She was going to die in twenty-eight days, and, if she kept him in this cheerful state of oblivion, her death would never get the chance to hurt him.

She mustered a smile from somewhere and drew her legs back up to her chest. "You've got me for about another month," she said, matching his cool, businesslike tone. "Since I have no discernible breasts, I assume you'll be tired of me by then."

Jack smiled and kissed her on the forehead. "Get dressed. We're going to the Grand Cafe for breakfast."

"But I'm not supposed to leave the Faculty."

"We'll be really apologetic when we get back."

Ellini decided not to argue. She got up, crossed her arms over her chest, and muttered something about getting dressed. Jack didn't offer to leave the room, so she went behind the screen and struggled out of her nightgown. It didn't take her long to slip on her terracotta day-dress, but she lingered there for another minute or so, with her hands clamped over her mouth and her shoulders shaking, trying to suppress the sobs.

When she had arranged her face and her dress into respectable order, she came out from behind the screens, to find Alice standing in the bedroom doorway. She had clearly silenced Jack with a look, and was leaning against the doorframe, breathing hard through her nostrils, and smiling with a kind of suppressed triumph.

"Ah, Miss Syal. The Inspector is downstairs, with a warrant for your arrest. I'll tell him you'll be down directly, shall I?"