Headington, Oxford, 1882:

Robin sat on the floor of his room in the lodging house, watching rain spatter against the window pane. He was balancing Gram in his hands, resting the blade on one palm and the handle on the other.

For the past half hour, he'd been counting the notches carved into Gram's handle, reciting the names of the victims they represented. He had no idea why. It couldn't calm Gram's remorse, because Gram wasn't troubled by remorse. But it felt like a kind thing to do for his oldest friend – the kindest thing he could do now, since he'd given up cutting people.

They'd been strangers for almost a year – albeit strangers who understood each other perfectly. Ever since he had woken up in the ice house last July, Robin had been distant with Gram. He still felt his moods and his hunger – they were almost as irritating as his own – but he ignored them.

Gram felt the hunger, but not the consequences of it. He couldn't feel his victims' pain rounding back on him. He couldn't see it coming from the moment it was let loose, like some hellish boomerang. And he couldn't understand Robin's admiration for Ellini. None of the things he did these days would make sense without that.

Right at this moment, Robin hated it – whatever it was that had wormed under his skin while he'd been dead, and made him see that he was bad, without giving him the strength to amend it. The damned imperfect revelation that had made him yearn for things he couldn't get, and wouldn't have known what to do with if he could. What was the point in giving a man half an epiphany?

Still, he couldn't deny that he'd been happy in his delusions, for a while. Lambeth had been the longest, strangest stretch of peace he'd ever known. He had enjoyed fending off the advances of the maid-servants. He had enjoyed puzzling Ellini, as she was every day disappointed in her expectation that he would attack her. He had enjoyed mentioning Jack and watching her flinch.

None of it had been part of Myrrha's plan. He had locked himself in his study, run his hands over the spines of the books on his shelf, and made-believe that they meant something to him. He had taken all those pointy surgical implements out of his bag, thought about the terrible things he could do with them, and revelled in the thought that he wasn't doing it.

And he had revelled in Ellini: her coldness and exasperation, her growing strength. The delicious knowledge that, while she was here before him, Jack was writhing in the torments of his own personal hell.

He had known it wouldn't last. She was no tormentress and he was no doctor. She couldn't hide from her merciful nature any more than he could hide from his murderous one. But it had been fun, while it lasted.

All that time, he'd been conscious of Gram the way an amputee might be conscious of a missing limb. He had felt aches and tinglings that weren't precisely part of him, but were too intimate to belong to another.

He had taken Gram out of his jacket and tried to explain that everything was different now – people were people, even though they were horrible, and murder was murder, even though it was pleasurable. But he didn't understand. It probably didn't help that Robin barely understood it himself.

"Gram?" he said, breaking the silence that had prevailed between them for months. "I know you hate me. I know you think I've starved you, neglected you, and betrayed you. Maybe I have. I just want you to know that you're the only reason I'm not afraid. You're my life. I know that, because I couldn't die as long as she kept you. You don't have a soul, I think..." 

He hesitated, because he thought he detected a sullen note in Gram's silence. "That's not a bad thing – at any rate, not for me. It means, if we die and go to hell, it won't be hell, because we'll be together. And if I somehow manage to get to heaven, it won't quite be heaven, because you'll be gone from me. I could never believe in an afterlife of extremes, but I could believe in one of small imperfections or small consolations. I could make my way in a world like that."

Gram made no answer. In the dim, wintery mirk coming through the window, Robin couldn't even judge his mood from the way the light glinted off him.

But Gram must have known he was telling the truth. He couldn't understand fear or remorse or love, but he knew what they were to each other. Robin told himself that would have to be enough.

Small imperfections or small consolations, remember? That's your world. You'd drown otherwise. So get on with it.

He stood up and replaced Gram in his box. Then he put on his coat and hat and left the lodging house for the street outside, where the rain was just beginning to slacken. The sky would clear soon. Perhaps he'd get to see the sunlight glinting off Gram's blade before they said goodbye.

All the way into town, he could feel the combined gaze of the men Jack had set to watch him. He even spotted them once or twice, the ones who weren't very good at hiding.

They were probably quite good shots, though.

He saw the creature they called Elsie and the man they called John Danvers walking arm-in-arm up Holywell Street. He had been looking for them, but he still gasped. He still felt a hot little shiver crawl up his spine as he realized how vulnerable they were, how little they expected violence, how much damage he could do right now if he whipped Gram out of his box and made some sharp, sudden introductions.

Not her, though. A weapon made from the stone of the demon realms would sooner bend itself into a circle than consent to harm Eve. Anyway, she came back, endlessly, and – as Myrrha seemed to think – pointlessly.

But Danvers – oh, how much damage he could do if he introduced Gram to John Danvers! The Eve-creature would go mad. Her demons would come running. The mountains of hell would pierce the pavement and keep rising until they dwarfed the dreaming spires.

For a moment, he was dizzy with the consciousness of the harm he could do. He saw the chain reaction, like a line of tumbling dominoes, spreading away from him and into the future: a trail of destruction that began at his own feet. Kill John Danvers, kill the world.

Would Myrrha be proud of him if he did? Would it make any difference if she was? Even if she gasped – which had never happened before – and exclaimed with delight, and threw herself at his feet, she would still be Myrrha and he would still be Robin, and they would be stuck in their grooves till judgement day. If he ever wanted to escape her, he had to escape what she'd made him into. He had to escape himself.

He stopped. The Danvers-and-Elsie pairing had spotted him. He couldn't help smiling at how green they looked.

He came closer, but not too close. He maintained a carefully-calculated distance from them, and watched for any sudden movements from out of the corner of his eye. Very slowly, so as not to provoke the snipers, he raised his hat.

"Mr Danvers, Miss Elsie. I've been looking for you."

Robin's carefully-calculated distance was too close for Elsie. She took a step backwards, leaning heavily on Danvers's arm. "Oh no – oh, Mr Danvers, it's horrible! He's horrible!"

Robin's winning smile slipped for a moment.

"It's all right, Elsie," Danvers muttered. He turned to Robin with a look of constipated indignation. "Sir, if you have something to say to me, you will kindly leave this lady out of it. Can't you see you're distressing her?"

"You needn't be distressed, either of you," said Robin, trying to keep his tone light. "If you can bear to take your eyes off me, I suggest you look up at the first-floor window of the house on the other side of the road. And then behind you, on the remains of the old town wall? And, oh–" Robin flashed a grin. "The window of the porters lodge in New College. I didn't see that one before. He's good."

"What is it?" Elsie hissed. "What's he talking about? Oh, Mr Danvers, he sets my teeth on edge!"

"It's–" Danvers hesitated, clearly unwilling to alarm her. "Gunmen, Elsie. Three of them."

"Oh, they're not mine," Robin assured them. "Jack's. They've been following you since he left the city. His idea of protection, which sort of makes you wonder what it is to be important to a man like that..." Regretfully, Robin waved this point aside. "They won't let me get closer than five paces to you, anyway. Closer than that and they can't be sure they'll hit me instead of you."

Elsie had turned her face up to the window of the house opposite, as though she could see the gunman. "If that's the case, then we could kill you just by taking one step forwards," she suggested.

"You could, O grand exalted Mistress of the demon race, but could you be sure I'd stay dead? I came back from it once, didn't I? In very mysterious circumstances."

"Can we stop talking about death and killing?" Danvers exclaimed. "This is a highly respectable neighbourhood!"

"I wish I could oblige you," said Robin, with a slight bow, "but it's actually the topic I came to talk to you about. Death, anyway. No killing necessary." He gave Danvers a brief, distasteful glance. "I wouldn't have come to you for that."

"What do you want?" Elsie demanded.

"I want to give you this," said Robin, taking Gram's box out of his coat and laying it carefully on the pavement at his feet. He flipped it open, so that the snipers could see it contained no dynamite, or pressurised gas canisters, or other modern weapons of destruction. Just a serrated knife, gleaming in the sun.

The gleam was quite painful to Robin, who knew how to interpret Gram's gleams. It was sickly, uncertain, braced for the separation ahead. He had to fight hard to back away from the box, his hands raised in a gesture of submission.

Elsie tilted her head. "What is it, Mr Danvers? It feels like a living thing. No, it feels like–" Her mouth twisted. "–some kind of clipping from him. As though he's cut off one of his hands but it's still alive."

"It's that ghastly knife of his," said Danvers.

"It's a contingency plan," said Robin, rattled more than he liked to admit by the demon-mother's reaction, and by Gram's sickly gleam. "This is how she brought me back to life when I was dead before."

"She being-?" Elsie began, but she stopped when she felt Danvers shudder.

Robin looked at him with a creeping sense of respect. He recognized – well, not a kindred spirit, it would be the most laughable thing in the world to say that – but somebody else who had been sickened and bewildered and whirled about by Myrrha until he hardly knew who he was anymore.

"If you recall, Elsie," Danvers mumbled, "Jack said he saw Madam Myrrha's associate call down Mr Crake's spirit using this knife. She said – oh, some platonic nonsense about becoming so attached to a physical thing that your soul creeps into it."

"Well, it's effective nonsense," said Robin, trying to smile. "She can always bring me back if she has this, and there might come a time when I don't want her to, so I'm giving it to you for safe-keeping." He took a slight, hissing breath through his teeth. "I may be able to send you something else, but I can't make any promise–"

He stopped, and wrenched his smile back into place. "His name's Gram. He is evil, but only because I am. Whatever it is that makes me not want to be evil doesn't seem to work on him, but I can't blame him for that because it didn't even work properly on me."

He took another step, keeping his eyes all the time on Gram's glinting blade. He swore the light flickered, as if the knife was winking at him.

Robin remembered that the point of all this was to escape himself, so he said something so un-Robin-like, it set his teeth on edge. "Please be kind to him."

And then he turned – slowly, so as not to provoke the snipers – and walked away.