Inspector Hastings was a surreal and alarming sight to see first thing in the morning, when you had spent the last ten hours sewing up a man's chest. Sergei felt like one of those overworked seamstresses in the capital – more overworked, perhaps, because sewing flesh was a lot harder than sewing cloth. It was wet and tender, and the blood rushed in everywhere you didn't want it to, as though determined to obscure your view.

He had enlisted Sarah and the cook as helpers, telling them to pass him instruments, and clean away the blood from the wounds. Their gasps, grumblings, and threats to leave his service had been the only noise in the operating theatre that night.

But always, his son's calm, dark eyes had watched him, their lashes rising and lowering like a portcullis.

Sergei didn't know what their expression was. He thought it might be lots of things as exhaustion began to work on his imagination: pride or gratitude or hostility or righteous indignation. All of them seemed appropriate at various different times. But Sergei didn't mind. He only cared that the boy was there, and he was helping him.

Now he stood on the steps of the Faculty building, looking at Inspector Hastings, who was a few steps below, but tall enough to be just in his eye-line.

It was a lovely day. Jack was too injured to work any mischief, and Sergei had been able to help his son. Looking at it symbolically, he had saved the life of a man who had saved the lives of thousands of new-breeds. Perhaps he had worked off his debt to the new-breed race. Perhaps he was forgiven.

All in all, he was feeling quite cheerful as the Inspector yelled at him.

"I can come back here with a squad and force my way in, you know!"

"I'm afraid you'll have to," said Sergei.

"I can have you arrested for refusing me – that's obstructing an Officer of the Crown in the course of his duty."

"I'm not very interested in the legal implications, Inspector. I am only interested in the fact that my patient will die if he's moved. Barristers could argue over one but not, I suspect, the other."

"Then you won't object to letting my men in to guard him, as long as we don't move him?" said the Inspector shrewdly.

"Guard him? He's more stitches than man and he has the faintest discernible pulse. What do you imagine he can do?"

"I wouldn't like to imagine! He's Jack Cade, so the very worst I could imagine probably wouldn't be depraved enough!"

Sergei sighed. "I do think arts students and police officers have a tendency to exaggerate."

This inflamed the Inspector more, as he had known it would. Sergei usually hated confrontation, but it had been a very trying night.

"How can you underestimate him like this?" the Inspector demanded, mounting another step, and pushing his red face closer to Sergei's. "You know him!"

"Yes, but I also know lots of other things, like the consequences of severe blood loss and prolonged surgery. I am also of the opinion that an armed guard in a sickroom can do little to aid the healing process."

"How do I even know he's injured," said the Inspector, "if you won't let me in to see him?"

Sergei looked down at the steps, where Shikari's bloody footprints were beginning to dry and flake in the sun. "The trail of blood which led you here would presumably have been a clue?"

"That could be anyone's blood."

"I don't keep bags of it in the cellar on purpose to mislead you."

"You know he's a threat to public safety," said the Inspector, trying another tack. "If he gets out and kills someone else, you'll be responsible."

This was quite a good argument, but Sergei had the perfect response. "Once, it was you on my operating table, and some other Inspector demanding to be admitted, in the interests of public safety."

"Well, you were right then and you're wrong now!"

"Good day to you, Inspector."

Sergei closed the door very gently – there wasn't a hint of a slam. He hadn't slept in twenty-six hours, but he was determined to be polite, if only because it would make the Inspector angrier.

He wasn't sure what would happen now. Perhaps the Inspector would come back with a squad and force his way in. He wished – and not for the first time – that Alice was still here to deal with unwelcome callers.

Still, they had perhaps half an hour to plan – and build fortifications, if necessary. Shikari wanted Jack to survive, so Sergei had to do his best. Because, at the end of those ten messy hours, punctuated only by Sarah's promises to swoon or be sick or both together, had come a moment he would never forget.

Jack had been sewn and staunched to a reasonable degree of tidiness. He'd been lying on the operating table, with a sheet covering him from the waist down. His chest and arms hardly seemed naked either, although technically they were, because they were crisscrossed with dozens of jagged lines of stitches. He looked like one of his own secret maps of the city – all rambling, unmarked squiggles that nobody but Jack could interpret. But the stitches were neat, clean, and small, and Sergei was rather proud of them.

Only the lower half of his body had escaped injury – which, knowing Jack, he would be happy about. His pulse was very faint, his breathing hardly noticeable, but he was alive.

Shikari hadn't spoken all night. But now, while Sergei was conscientiously tidying away his instruments, and Sarah and the cook had retreated to their rooms to have hysterics, he opened his mouth. "That was amazing. I thought he was dead for sure."

"He may die yet," said Sergei, closing his bag with a snap. "There's always the possibility that fever or infection will set in. The next twenty-four hours will be critical."

"Where did you learn to do all this?" said Shikari, making a motion with his hand that encompassed the operating table, the Gladstone bag, the tiers of wooden seats sloping up towards the door. It must have been a new world for him. Presumably, he had seen lots of human messes, but never anyone taking much trouble to amend them.

"Most of it is learned on the job," said Sergei. "But the principles, I learned at the Royal College of Surgeons in London."

The boy hesitated. "Could they teach me?"

"I daresay they could. The only indispensable qualification is a pair of steady hands, and you must have one of those already. A hunter wouldn't last very long without them."

"But would they-?" The boy avoided his eyes, looking half-humble and half-resentful. "Would they let a new-breed study there?"

"They would let my son study there," said Sergei, with an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry to say that's how these things work. Nepotism trumps prejudice. But, if you didn't want anybody to know you were my son, I could talk to the Principal-"

"I don't-" The boy flushed a dull red, still avoiding his eyes. "I don't mind who knows I'm your son." Then, as though the silence opened up by that last pronouncement was in danger of swallowing him, he added, "Why don't you go and get some rest? I'll watch over him. If anyone comes looking-"

"Yes," said Sergei. "I'm familiar with the procedure. It's usually some rejected lover, or her parents, but either way my answer is always the same: I don't know him, I've never heard of him, he doesn't live here. And you don't know how sincerely I wish that was the case."

He had gone to bed, but only for twenty minutes, because the Inspector had started hammering on the door then, and Sarah was refusing to leave her room. Still, the encounter with the Inspector had revived him, in a bitter, unpleasant way – like a cup of black coffee or a shot of schnapps.

Now he crept down the stairs to the operating theatre and heard the reassuring sound of Shikari's snores. The boy must have fallen asleep by Jack's bedside. Sergei had a childish desire to sneak a look at him sleeping, the way he might if he'd been a real father, looking in on his boy to make sure he wasn't eating sweets under the bedclothes, or some other misdemeanour. The loss of those lovely, mundane moments seemed very cruel to him now.

He opened the door, took one step down the creaking stairs, and then stopped, hoping against hope that he was hallucinating from lack of sleep. When he felt sure that he wasn't, his shoulders sagged.

Shikari was asleep with his head on an empty operating table. Jack was gone.

"Oh damn," Sergei whispered, behind his moustache.

***

Elliott found Ellini in the parlour of the Birdcage at five, just like she'd promised. She was sitting beside the piano, with her hands laid carefully in her lap, and her shoulders slumped. He was almost too relieved to take in the details, but he thought her eyes looked a little red – not as though she'd been crying, but as though tears had dried and hardened and formed a little film of misery over her eyes.

She was very upset, he could see that – much more so than she had been yesterday. Something had happened in the night. When he asked her what was wrong, she said she would tell him – she had promised to tell him everything, after all. But it would take a lot of explaining, so he'd have to be patient.

And then, from beginning to end – from Camden to Northaven, with stopovers in Edinburgh, Paris, and India in between – she told him her story.

And what stories! About fire-mines and rebellions and secret societies and rooftop chases! About demons who could reach inside your chest and hold your heart in the hollow of their hands! To a boy who'd grown up in Franconia, New Hampshire – and who had never particularly wanted to leave – it was a terrifying swirl of colour and violence that he wouldn't have endured from any other storyteller.

But this woman – this lovely, shy Scheherazade – held him captive. He even sometimes forgot about the horrific details she was relating, let his hands fall away from the piano, and just stared at her – until she coughed politely and motioned towards the keys. She didn't like it when he stopped playing. If he stopped playing, she stopped talking.

It was almost as though there were three people in the parlour of the Birdcage that afternoon – Elliott, Ellini, and the music. Ellini and the music were hitting it off very well, but Elliott had nothing to say to her.

At first, he had played Bach, Chopin, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies – anything he knew inside out and therefore wouldn't have to concentrate on. But now he was playing his own compositions – sometimes even making things up on the spot. And with every note, she was thawing out. It was as though all this confessing was unburdening her.

It was only when she mentioned Jack Cade that her tongue stumbled, and the frost re-formed on her face. She still loved him, perhaps. She still hated him, certainly. He was the source of whatever it was that had distressed her in the night. Elliott knew this even before she reached the end of her tale, and explained that he'd met her in this dream room and told her he was dying.

"And I don't know-" She stopped and smoothed out the creases in her skirt. This part was hard for her – well, it had all been hard for her, but nothing else had robbed her of the ability to speak. She pressed her lips together, taking a deep breath through her nose. "I don't know whether he's alive, or..."

Elliott, little as he had come to like Jack Cade, did his best to comfort her. "I've read about him, ma'am. They say he's impossible to kill."

"It's so stupid," she said, forcing her chin up and gritting her teeth. "He couldn't have really – I mean, even under that spell, how much could you really care for someone if you're able to stab them through the chest?"

"Ye-es," said Elliott noncommittally. He got the feeling she was missing the point – no, avoiding the point. She knew where the point was, it was just too pointy.

"I mean, how dare he stab me through the chest and then make me feel like the killer? All I did was leave."

Elliott said, "Of course, you have lots of history together, but how could you ever forgive him? Or trust him? He seems like a man with a very violent temper."

Perhaps this was too transparent, because she didn't answer. She just looked up, blinking a little, and turned her eyes to the piano. Elliott hurriedly resumed his playing.

"You were very kind to let me go on talking so long," she said, when the melody had thawed her out again. "You must have had questions."

Elliott didn't know where to start. He had thousands of questions, but he suspected they were the ones she didn't know the answer to herself. How did Robin Crake come back to life? Why in the world was she trusting him? Why had Jack Cade chosen to forget her? How was she going to protect herself from this diabolical Myrrha character? But in the end, he blurted out what seemed to him the most obvious question:

"Why are you telling me all this?"

She looked up as though she was startled, and then down as though she was stuck.

"I, um... well, you saw me covered in blood next to a dead body on the steps of the Music Rooms. I thought I owed you an explanation. And then I thought to explain that I'd have to explain everything..."

Elliott went on playing, in the hope that it would coax more words out of her.

"And I suppose it makes me feel less guilty," she said, in a flat voice. "I don't know why you came after me-"

"I think you probably do."

But Ellini ignored him, and went on, in a harder tone, "Perhaps you thought I was some kind of fairytale princess on the run from a terrible fate. Now you know it's not that simple. I was tortured and raped. That doesn't make an elegant heroine – or even a strong character. It just makes a mess. I don't belong in the kind of story you're thinking of."

Stories again. She was very keen on stories. He wanted to say that he'd be in whatever kind of story she wanted, as long as he got to share it with her. Perhaps the music said it for him because he switched unconsciously to Chopin – the unbearably romantic Chopin – without the intervention of his brain.

"What about you?" she asked, hunching her shoulders as if to shrug off the softness of the notes. "Will you tell me your story now?"

"Oh, it's not – I mean, it's easily told, but it's not very interesting."

This wasn't true. It had been extremely interesting in the past seven months – mainly because he'd been forced to go outside and speak to people again.

Leaving the safety of his recital room for the crowds of London had been a baptism by fire. But oddly, it had been better than those bright, tinkling soirees in Oxford, where everybody watched you like a hawk for the slightest breach of etiquette. The Londoners were usually too busy to notice you, even when you walked right into them. You could lick your knife and drop your 'H's with impunity. They only bothered about you when you didn't pay your bill.

But he didn't want to tell her about his life. He was afraid she'd think he was naïve and inexperienced, even though he'd played to thousands in La Scala and the Royal Albert Hall. It wasn't the travelling, but the lovers, he decided. It wasn't that she had seen more of the world than him, but that she'd had lovers, and he hadn't. It was strange and stupid how it always came down to that.

But to his relief, she didn't ask him any more about his life. She asked him about his music. And she started by saying, rather sheepishly, "That night when I was bleeding to death outside the music rooms, listening to you play – well, I wouldn't have got up if I hadn't reflected that the next world was unlikely to contain anything that sounded even half so good. It saved my life – for what it's worth."

"For what it's worth?" he repeated incredulously.

She lowered her eyes to her lap, and went on, "What's it about? It made me think of mountains."

Elliott's jaw dropped. "That's exactly it. The green mountains near my hometown."

And, so eagerly that his tongue tripped over itself, he began telling her about Franconia – the pine forests and misty lakes, the colours of the Fall, the fact that there was no space here, you couldn't see the wood for the trees, and he was afraid he'd never see the woods again – and how pretty she'd look, with all that dark green at her back, and how they could live in peace there, with nothing but the scenery and a piano.

She winced regularly but didn't interrupt him. He just talked and played, until both his mouth and his hands were singing the praises of New Hampshire.

And this was how Robin Crake found them. It probably couldn't have been worse if he'd found them naked in bed together.

***

Sergei found Jack trying to climb out of the window of the Faculty Lounge. The stitches were good, so there was no trail of blood, but there was a small-scale trail of destruction: chairs and tables knocked over as he had used them to propel himself across the room.

Somewhere between the operating theatre and the Faculty Lounge, he had managed to find a pair of trousers. Perhaps he had secret stashes of clothes hidden about the building still, from the days when he used to bring barmaids back here. But his chest was bare, displaying those red, raw, wandering lines of stitches. Sergei, who had worked so hard on them, began to be annoyed that he was jeopardizing them so freely.

He stepped away from the window when Sergei came in, but his legs gave out at the same time, and he had to dive for a chair-back to keep himself upright. His fingertips were buried deep in the leather, and it was obvious that he'd crumple if he let go.

He looked feverish. His eyes were over-bright, there was a sickly sheen on his skin, and he kept throwing glances of nervous longing in the direction of the window.

Still, he shouldn't have been conscious, let alone standing, and Sergei couldn't help feeling faintly impressed.

"Extraordinary," he said. "I don't know which is more extraordinary, your resilience or your stupidity. Can you understand why it's not a good idea for you to be out of bed?"

"Can you understand why it's not a good idea for me to go to prison?" Jack shot back.

"Well, no, actually, but I can understand why you might think it isn't."

Jack grimaced – although perhaps every expression would have displayed itself as a grimace at this point. The anaesthetic must have been wearing off. Pain was probably prickling through the numbness, like stubble through a sheet. "I feel the same about staying in bed," he said. "I can see why you think it's a good idea, but it doesn't take account of everything."

His words sounded thick now, as though he was forcing them out through numb lips. The first rush of energy which had helped him up here was probably wearing off. Sergei could only think to keep him talking, so he would at least be inside the building when he collapsed. It would be difficult to drag him in from the street, and Inspector Hastings was sure to be out there somewhere, ready to pounce.

"I'm amazed you pulled through."

"I had a good reason."

"Oh no you don't," said Sergei, suddenly angry. "You don't get to claim the credit for this one. I was sewing you up for ten hours. Whatever your 'reasons', you would have died without me."

He stopped and took a breath, trying to reclaim the detached amusement which had been helping him deal with Jack ever since they'd first met. "Incidentally, I found two bullets lodged in your left shoulder. Souvenirs from the Delhi Cantonment?"

"Oh – yes," said Jack, with another nervous glance at the window. "They never found all the bullets... Army doctors, you know? And enemy ones, at that. I don't think they were trying very hard." He changed his grip on the chair-back and licked his lips, as though he was trying very hard to enunciate. "Magnets stick to me sometimes..."

"I expect you're used to walking off your injuries as if they were nothing more than a grazed knee," said Sergei, "but you won't be able to do that with this. If you don't rest, you'll die. And you may die anyway."

"It's not an option," said Jack quietly – almost plaintively.

"You have another engagement elsewhere? Perhaps the Pope is expecting you?"

"Sergei, she's alive."

He said this just as quietly, as though it was an idea that could be startled away if he spoke too loud. He said it as though it explained everything – and, of course, it did explain everything, but not in the way he thought.

"Ah," said Sergei. "I see. The delirium has started. There's no way back now. We'll just have to wait for the fever to run its course." He checked his pocket-watch. "I estimate that, if you can live through the next twelve hours, you may recover permanently."

"It's true," said Jack, in the same small voice.

"You're dizzy, yes? Every movement is a supreme effort of will? Your heart's beating very fast?"

"Yes, but that's because-"

"It's not emotion," said Sergei. "It's anaemia. 'Men have died, and worms have eaten 'em, but not for love.'"

Jack looked as though he didn't have the energy to respond to this, so Sergei went on, half to himself. "You know, in spite of the pastoral setting and the multiple marriages, I often think 'As you Like It' is one of his darker plays. One day I must write a monograph comparing it to Lear – the gruesome pinnacle of hopelessness – and see if I can find any common ground." He turned back to Jack, who was still shiny-faced and swaying. "And speaking of the gruesome pinnacle of hopelessness..."

"I'm fine," said Jack.

And then he fainted.