And for a few hours, he was happy. A little agitated, perhaps – unable to sit still, prone to standing impatiently at the window and scrutinizing every carriage that drove by, even though she couldn't possibly arrive today, if they had only just decided to admit her.

He wondered what he was going to say to her – or, worse still, what she was going to say to him. But she didn't know how to be spiteful or unfriendly or cool. All that adorable, awkward kindness would compel her to talk to him, even if she didn't want to. Oh god, that was worse, wasn't it? This was going to be a disaster.

And yet he was so happy. He had something to look forward to. For two hours, he completely failed to pour himself a drink, or light up a cigarette, or inject himself with substances of any kind. The exciting horrors of the next few days were commanding all his attention.

After lunch, Alice summoned him to the glass laboratory, and, as soon as he walked in, he began to feel the chill of dread.

She didn't look at him. She was busy arranging the glass beakers and test-tubes on the work-bench in front of her. To Jack's mind, she seemed to be arranging them so that they reflected the maximum amount of sunlight into his eyes. But, eventually, she seemed to be satisfied, and turned to him, as though she'd only just realized he was there.

"We've decided that it isn't safe for you to meet with Miss Syal, in light of your history with her. She might influence your mental state at a very crucial stage in our research."

Jack passed over the comments about his 'mental state'. The important thing with Alice was never to let her know when she was bothering you.

"Fine," he said woodenly. "Tell her not to come."

"Oh, I'm afraid that's also quite out of the question," Alice said. "The scientific arguments she puts forward are sound. We must have her to experiment on."

"Then you're getting rid of me?"

"No, Jack. We just need to neutralize your susceptibility to her."

This was where the warning bells really started to chime. He could barely hear her next sentence above them.

"Professor Carver of the Chemistry Faculty has designed an ingenious compound--"

"No," said Jack.

"--which selectively eliminates certain memories while leaving your general recollections intact."

"No," he said again.

"If we could eliminate all your memories of Miss Syal, and all your-" she rushed over the next few words, squeezing them together so they were barely distinguishable – "feelingsforMissSyal, she would cease to have the kind of effect on you which might compromise our research."

"What a pity I'm not going to take it."

Alice frowned, as though she had only just registered his reluctance. "On what grounds are you objecting?"

"This ground I'm standing on. And any other ground I happen to find beneath my feet. I'll also object at sea."

Alice crossed her arms, which had the unfortunate effect of squeezing her breasts upwards. "I don't quite understand you. Didn't she leave you? I would have thought you'd be glad to forget her. It seems she chose a prison cell over your arms, so I wouldn't have thought there was much chance of her desiring you to remember. You don't seriously think-?"

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever let her know when she's bothering you, Jack reminded himself, trying to take a deep breath without unclenching his teeth.

"I don't care what she desires," he said, slowly and deliberately. "I'm keeping my memories."

Alice sighed and leaned against the windowsill for a moment, considering him.

"I had hoped it wouldn't come to this," she said at last. "After all, it's not the poor girl's fault that you refuse to listen to reason. She shouldn't have to be punished for your stubbornness."

"What are you-?"

"I'm afraid I might have to be rather harsh with her if you go on refusing to take the serum. You know, perhaps, how harsh I can be if I have a mind to? You'd be an observant man if you'd only apply yourself to observing something useful."

Jack shook his head, half-smiling. "You need her to experiment on."

"Only her body. And it doesn't really matter what condition it's in."

Jack shook his head again, but he wasn't smiling anymore. "I know you. You'd need some kind of justification. She'd have to be a criminal or--"

Or someone who threatened the peace between new-breeds and humans, said a nasty little voice in his head. Just like Professor Burgess did.

He saw her glance absent-mindedly towards her desk, where a book was lying open among the neatly-stacked papers. And as soon as he saw it, he realized how hopelessly he had betrayed himself – and Ellini. She knew.

The Helen of Camden book didn't actually say that much about him, but Alice could put two and two together. She would match up the date of Ellini's departure with the date when he had become all noble and suicidal at the Delhi Cantonment. She would combine it with the fact that he'd behaved so strangely when Sergei had mentioned Ellini this morning.

And, for five years, he had been so careful. He had never said a word about her to anyone in Oxford. He had never so much as spoken her name – although he might have called it out occasionally, in the dead of night, when he thought no-one would be listening.

But, if Alice had read that book – and, worse, read between the lines, as only Alice could – then she knew. She knew what Ellini was to him. She knew exactly how to hurt him. And hadn't she been looking for an opportunity to hurt him, ever since he'd called her a bitch last year?

The idea that Alice could get more terrible than she already was – and that Ellini would be the focus of this antagonism – was the worst thing he could think of. And for a moment, he forgot that he was standing in front of the most dangerous woman in the world, and said, "You're insane, you know that? She's not – she's just a little girl who likes reading."

"Have you seen that?" said Alice, gesturing impatiently at the book on her desk. "Do you think I'm expecting Florence Nightingale?"

Jack's heart had sunk beyond the confines of his body by this point. From the feel of things, it had dropped through several floors, and was now shivering and aching in the cellar.

"No," he said quietly. "You're expecting Lady Macbeth. I get it. You'll be surprised when you actually meet her."

But she probably wouldn't, to tell the truth. Oxford scholars had ways of justifying their own prejudices – and no pretty girl ever looked at another pretty girl clearly.

But how quickly she would have been proved wrong if she'd seen Robin – who not only kept his shirt on, but killed people in the most shudderingly un-sexy of ways! Ellini was more difficult. He wasn't perfectly satisfied that she wasn't Lady Macbeth. He only knew that it didn't matter, because she was Ellini.

Alice leaned against the window again, her voice suddenly syrupy. "Consider it, Jack. You don't honestly think she means you any good? And wouldn't it be nice to have some dignity around her?"

Jack swept everything off the work-bench – all the long-necked flasks and test-tube racks and sheaves of notepaper. They smashed and fluttered into a glorious heap on the floor, making the glass laboratory look untidy for the first time since it had become Alice's.

It was a stupid thing to do, and it made him feel stupidly better. Some of the flasks with the twisty necks had been ordered specially from a glass-blowing workshop in Windsor. They would take weeks to replace.

But Alice would relish the inconvenience, wouldn't she? Because the whole time, she would be thinking about how she'd made him desperate – how she'd made him lose his temper.

She had taken an automatic step backwards, and she was breathing heavily, but her smile was triumphant. It said I always knew you were a barbarian without the sense to reason his way out of a problem. Go ahead and smash things. You turn to destruction when you've failed at everything else, don't you? That's why you became a soldier rather than a pianist. And you know what, Jack? If you'd gone on being a pianist, she would never have left you.

It was this thought, and not anything she actually said, which made him snatch up a long, jagged shard of glass from the debris on the floor, vault over the work-bench and press the glass-shard to her throat. 

Nobody had made him this angry since Robin, and at least he'd been allowed to hit Robin. There had to be some way to hurt her – to get under her skin the way she'd got under his.

But there was no frightening her now. She didn't even draw back from the shard of glass. The slightest tremor of his hand could have cut her – in fact, his hand was starting to tremble with the effort of not cutting her – but her face conveyed the absolute certainty that she had won, whether he severed her jugular vein or not.

It was a while before he realized he was clutching the glass-shard so tightly that blood was trickling down his wrist and into his cuffs. And when he did realize, it was just a surreal, distant detail. All his energy was focused on Alice.

"I'm not doing it."

"Yes," said Alice. "You are. And do put that glass down – you're hurting yourself."

Jack couldn't help it. His hand snapped open like an oyster-shell, and the glass shard tumbled from his fingers onto the floor. He didn't know what he'd been expecting. Maybe he'd thought that he would be able to disobey her, for Ellini's sake. He must have been thinking like an eighteen-year-old again. When you're young, you think there's nothing you can't do for your loved ones. Then, when you reach thirty or so, you discover that there are plenty of things, and you just have to pray that no-one ever finds out about them.

Alice took up his hand and examined the cut, with a look that was half-triumphant and half-sad. "Oh, Jack," she said, sighing. "You're not much – you're childish and frivolous and dissolute, and the only time in your life when you did the right thing, you seem to have done it by accident – but you're mine. Don't you understand? Not even Helen of Troy could take something from me that was mine, so imagine what little chance Helen of Camden has."

Then she told him he could leave. He didn't have any more say in that than he'd had about dropping the shard of glass, but he wouldn't have tried to hinder it, even if he could. All he wanted was to be out of her sight.

For a while, he paced blindly around the corridors of the Faculty, trailing his bloody hand along the walls, trying to come up with a plan.

He was too terrified to even be angry – and the knowledge that he was terrified on behalf of a woman who had broken his heart and left him for his worst enemy only made it worse. He wondered for a moment whether it would be an option to kill Alice.

It would have to be done stealthily, of course, because if she saw you coming, she could just order you to drop the weapon – or even turn it on yourself.

But what then? He'd have to run – he'd never see Ellini – and all this for a suspicion he couldn't even justify – a vague feeling that she was in danger, and might possibly – just possibly – want him back.

No, he would have to do what Alice said. He couldn't beat her. He couldn't find her weak spots. He had been looking for five years, and all his scrutiny had only given him an encyclopaedic knowledge of her curves.

At least, if he forgot about Ellini, Alice would no longer be jealous of her. And, besides, it would be nice to have some dignity around her – it would be nice to not hyperventilate, or trail off in the middle of his sentences, whenever she walked into a room.

But, if he forgot about Ellini, the danger would not be Alice, but him. He didn't know who he'd be, or what he'd do, without his memories – and specifically that one memory, the curtain of dark hair that fell over his eyes in moments of anger, and reminded him of things like innocence and tenderness and mercy.

Would it survive somewhere? On some level deeper than memory? Would it be encoded in his instincts? He wasn't sure.

After a few moments, he was conscious of the fact that he'd wandered into Sergei's office, and the door had been gently closed behind him. Sergei was, of course, inscrutable behind the moustache, but he seemed to be less amused than usual, so Jack supposed he had heard about the events in the glass laboratory.

"You know," he said, sitting down behind the desk, "it doesn't punish Alice when you smash up her laboratory – it punishes Sarah, who has to clean it up. Likewise, when you allow yourself to bleed all over the banisters."

"Sorry," said Jack vaguely, looking down at his cut.

"Let me see it," Sergei instructed, rummaging in his desk drawers for gauze and tweezers.

Jack sat down and proffered his hand, as though he was consulting a gypsy palm-reader. For a few minutes, they were silent, while Sergei cleaned the wound, extracted a few splinters, and then bandaged it up. Nothing hurt. This state of surreal terror was even better than opium.

Then Sergei said, "For the record, I think it's a good idea."

"Wouldn't matter if you thought it was a bad one, would it?" said Jack sullenly.

Sergei ignored him. "She was – indelicate, I don't doubt, but I think it would help if you looked on this as a security measure that could be straitened or relaxed as circumstances dictate. The amnesia isn't permanent. Alice isn't trying to cripple you."

Jack snatched his hand away and leaned forward in his chair. "You remember, when we first met, I said she had the eyes of a killer? What if I told you she's already killed? What if I said you're the cleverest man I've ever met, but simple as a baby when it comes to her?"

"Perhaps the same thing might be said of you and Miss Syal."

That was the moment when all his hopes of confiding in Sergei vanished. He must have read the book – or perhaps Alice had just summarized it for him. Either way, the lure of imagining Ellini as a damaged femme fatale was just too much.

Jack had always known – and had never minded – that Sergei was a coward. But he had never expected to find prejudice amongst the fear. It would have been a crushing revelation, if he wasn't used to being disappointed by his father figures.

No, he was on his own. But he didn't even know whether he was right, that was the infuriating thing. He didn't know that Ellini wasn't here to manipulate him and tear down the entire edifice of civilization. He just knew he had to keep her safe.

"At any rate, time will tell," said Sergei, with a sigh that ruffled his moustache. "Alice doesn't think her motives are entirely innocent. Why, after living for the past five years in prudent seclusion, does she decide to brave the outside world now? Why this sudden interest in helping the cause of science? Does she know you're here, or doesn't she? If she doesn't, it's rather a strange coincidence, don't you think? And, if she does, why doesn't she mention you? It would be an advantage, wouldn't it, to be able to appeal to someone we already knew as a character reference? Even if, in your case, we'd have to take it with a pinch of salt? Something isn't right, Jack – you must see that. Do you believe she's here simply because she wants to help humans and new-breeds get along?"

"I don't know what she wants," Jack admitted. "I never did."

"Then perhaps it is as well to be cautious. If it's any comfort, I'm rather envious. If the serum works with you, I'm tempted to try it myself."

"Bollocks," said Jack. "You're even more masochistically attached to the past than I am."

He leaned back in his chair, watching the blood soak through the bandage in his hand. "Do you think the things that have happened to you can still influence your actions, even if you don't remember them?"

Sergei shrugged. "I should think so, if it's a question of habit. After all, animals learn to associate certain behaviour with pain or rewards, even though they can't consciously remember the last time they were punished or rewarded."

"This isn't habit," said Jack, hopeless of ever making him understand. "It's just an image. See, something happened to me when I was eight. I think it's the reason why I don't go around killing people for fun... as opposed to, you know, for a living. That might not seem like an important distinction to you, but it is to me. And if I forget about Ellini, I'll forget that this thing ever happened to me. I don't even know what it means – I just know it keeps me under control."

"Well, you'll only be without it for a few weeks," said Sergei soothingly. "Just until we find out what Miss Syal's intentions are. And Alice is more than adept at keeping you under control."

"And who's going to keep her under control?"

Sergei smiled faintly. "I know you don't have much faith in sense and reason, but it's worked quite well for the inhabitants of this city so far."

Jack shuddered. He remembered him saying something similar the first time they'd met, and Sam – sitting in the corner in his Constable's uniform – had, quite rightly, sneered at it. It had been the first time Jack had seen a sensible man under all that bubbling rage. 

Sam 'the battle of' Hastings – mess with him and you'll lose more than an eye.

He sat deadly still for a moment, aware that some kind of idea was trying to work its way to the surface of his mind.

Sam knew how rotten this city really was. And he never backed down, and he could disobey Alice.

But still, if he took the serum, Alice would not be the problem. Jack Cade would be the problem – a Jack Cade who had never seen that curtain of black hair – and what good would Sam be against him? He couldn't even use the muscles he'd been born with.

Oh, wait, wait, wait – there was a handicap, wasn't there? There was a foolproof way to kill Jack Cade, in the shape of that black arrow. It was a pretty bloody desperate handicap – it was almost certain to kill him – but at least it would prevent him from hurting Ellini.

You won't care about Ellini in a few hours, his brain pointed out.

But it didn't matter. He cared now. There was no way to get through those hours without doing everything he could to save her. He wouldn't reach the other side of this minute unless he acted now. And that wasn't the curtain of black hair talking – it was everything. This was who he was. It didn't matter who he would be in a few hours. There was an eternity between now and then.

He got up, feeling the blood-loss rush to his head, and flashed Sergei a smile. "I'll be back in an hour," he said, "to take my medicine."

***

He took paper and pen to the Grand Cafe, rather than risk writing at the Faculty – although the Cafe, with all its bright lights and polished surfaces, reminded him unpleasantly of the glass laboratory. Still, it was soothing beyond belief to finally have a plan. He felt as though he was on campaign again – taking big, tangled problems, and unravelling them with patient absorption. Every hurdle was delightful, because it kept the boredom at bay.

He had injured his right hand with the shard of glass, but he'd never found it too difficult to write with his left. It was perhaps his left-hand's part in this last, rebellious act which made it so rebellious after he'd taken the serum.

He sat down at one of the shiny tables and wrote, as clearly as his left hand would permit:

Sam,

It's possible that you might have to kill me in the next few weeks. And I hope you won't think I'm being arrogant when I say that this might be difficult for you to do. After all, the Lieutenant-governor of Lucknow couldn't manage it with an army, when I was un-armed and actively trying to get in the way of his bullets. So I'm sending you this arrow. It might not look like much, but I have it on good authority that this arrow will kill me someday, so please watch me carefully over the next few weeks, and use it if you have to. You're the only one Alice can't get to, and the only one who knows how rotten this city really is. I think you know – from the fact that I'm writing to you at all – that THIS IS IMPORTANT.

He stared at the paper for a moment, and then – because he was feeling slightly hysterical – added:

Happy hunting,

Jack.

***

When he got back to the Faculty, they sat him down behind Sergei's desk and made him sign a few documents, certifying that he gave his permission for his memories to be 'temporarily suppressed'.

He signed them with his injured hand, because he felt obscurely that it should hurt. Then Alice brought out a beaker full of dark liquid and placed it meaningfully on the desk in front of him. It was blue-black, like the waters of Lethe – or, more prosaically, like ink. He could have dipped a quill-pen into the beaker and started writing with it.

"Is that it?" said Jack, eyeing the glass beaker suspiciously. "I was expecting a hollowed-out skull – or at the very least, some kind of ceremonial goblet, engraved with mystic runes."

Sergei sighed. It occurred to Jack that he wasn't looking his sprightly, genial self. "Just drink it, Jack. Then we can all get on with our lives."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to dim the lights first? Maybe try some mystic chanting?"

Alice – in what was a reasonably gentle tone for her – said, "I assure you, the process is quite scientific."

"That's what they said about leeches," said Jack, holding the beaker up to the light. He shifted his focus to Alice and Sergei, who were standing in front of the desk, in various poses of exasperation. He wondered whether they would still look the same after he'd drunk it. Surely the strongest chemical in the world couldn't alter Alice? But it wasn't that comforting an idea, now he thought about it.

"Well," he said, lifting the glass, as though proposing a toast. "To science."

And then he drank it.

***

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