Ellini raised her lantern and climbed the stairs. They creaked almost as much as the grand staircase at the Faculty, but she hadn't been counting on the element of surprise anyway. Now she came to think of it, she wasn't sure what she had been counting on.

She hadn't even reached the top of the staircase when Matthi called her name. There was no urgency to the cry – more a kind of grim, eye-rolling acceptance, as if she had tripped over Robin's dead body and spoiled her favourite coat. Still, Ellini hurried. She wondered, as she hurtled out of the door, struggled through damp firs, and tripped over a flower-pot, whether she was hurrying because she was concerned for Robin, or concerned to leave Matthi for too long in his company.

She reached the glow of Matthi's lantern – with Matthi standing behind it, tapping her foot. She was beside a low, brick-lined opening, almost like an oven, set into the high bank of earth at the back of the house. A pair of boots were sticking out of the opening – expensive, elegant boots, though they were caked with mud. She recognized them instantly.

"Is he alive?" she said, trying to catch her breath.

"You think I'm going to go near 'im to check?" Matthi retorted.

Ellini knelt down by the opening. She didn't want to pull him out in case he was injured – or in case only half of him emerged. She dragged the lantern with her and crawled in on her elbows, scraping her skin raw.

It seemed to be an ice-house. She could see her breath steaming ahead of her. The lantern-light shone off slick slabs of ice. And Robin was... well, he was whole. There was blood on him. His well-cut trousers were torn. But he was moving and muttering. She would have called the movement a kind of sluggish writhing, although it had probably been more frantic before. She could see finger-nail scratches in the packed earth above his head.

"Robin?" she said, wriggling to a halt and leaning on the lantern. "Can you hear me?"

His neck was cut in several places, but not too deep, and in a surprisingly regular fashion...

Oh. Like the notches. He'd made new notches.

She couldn't make out what he was saying. It was all breathing in, and very little breathing out – a series of gasps that he'd wrapped his tongue around to make some rough approximation of speech. She thought she heard the word 'name' a few times: "No name – what name – please name" – but that was it.

And then he focused on her, and something seemed to snap into place. He was lucid enough to say, through dark lips and rattling teeth, "What think? What think, Ellie? Thisiswhere... sh'kept me on ice f'five years – five years? Three? While sh'looking for a way to resurrect me. S'as warm and comforting as her arms, believe me. They should put a plaque. Robin Crake's pen-penultimate resting place."

"Are you injured?" said Ellini. But his eyes wandered off and the lucidity slipped away. It was like when the conjuror whips away a table-cloth, leaving the glasses still standing. In essence, nothing had changed, except that everything was on a different foundation.

"Sarah Alexander," he said, in the old, gasping tone. "Scottish. Scottish screams. Never knew y'could scream inana – inanaccent. Thought it was the great leveller. Tower of Babel. Sarah Alexander, Scottish. Green ribbons – greenibbons in ha- ha hair."

"Just relax, Robin," she said, putting a steadying hand on his arm. It was like touching one of the slabs of ice. Even through his jacket and shirt, she could feel the chill. "We'll get you out."

The awareness was back, sudden as a snake's tongue. He reached up and grabbed her wrist. "We? Not him?"

"No," said Ellini, marvelling that she could tell, from that one, delirious pronoun, who he was talking about.

"The pianist?"

"No! My friend, Matthilde."

Robin's brows knotted together. "Friend?"

"Yes. Yes, she's a friend."

He gave a hoarse bark of laughter. "I know you, I know," he said, when the convulsion had subsided. "Lover, not friend. Can tell. Y'look... satisfied. Beautiful. I can tell. Who wears the trousers, though?"

"We share the trousers," Ellini sighed. "Just relax, Robin. We'll get you out. Relax."

He had passed out by the time they got him out of the ice-house, so Matthi and Ellini supported him between them, shuffling along like a spider with two dead legs. The cabbie did not seem pleased to see them.

They bundled Robin into a corner of the cab, where he slept, head lolling, as the carriage jerked and swayed. They were silent, except for his mutterings. And when the mutterings became intelligible, Matthi would raise her eyebrows, as if to say, 'Did he really do all that?' But Ellini tried not to notice.

When they got to the Academy, they bundled him out again, and propped him up between them, with one of his arms stretched over each of their shoulders – though Matthi twisted away in disgust whenever his lolling head got too close.

The cab was trundling away, its driver almost crying with relief, when they realized that Robin couldn't get through the gaps between the gargoyle statues. They held him up between them and pushed ineffectually at the air for a few minutes before conceding defeat.

"We'll have to invite him in," said Ellini.

"Rather you than me, love."

She sighed and raised her voice. "Robin, won't you come in?"

She hauled him forwards, and then stopped as the air thickened around them. It was more like fly-paper than an invisible wall – it was almost as hard to go back as it was to go forwards.

"Robin, I'm inviting you inside," she said, a little louder, but the air remained impassable. "Do you think he has to be conscious?" she added, trying to shift his weight into a more comfortable position.

"I think you don't mean it," said Matthi. "I think you can't mean it. Think of it, Leeny. Our girls are in there. You want to give a man like this licence to come an' go as 'e pleases? You can't trust 'im and you never will. Don't force the issue."

Ellini tried five more times before giving up. She tried to summon up warm feelings for him. She tried to think of all the things he'd done for her. But she knew it was useless. It was true, what she'd told Jack earlier that day. She didn't have it in her to trust him.

There was a lodging-house at the bottom of Headington Hill, so they steered him in that direction. Ellini was not built for weight-lifting, and the nervous exhaustion of the morning had taken its toll. She couldn't help thinking of the loose, glowing, satisfied feeling she'd had in Jack's room at the Faculty that morning. She wondered how long it would take him to smooth away these aches. Seconds, probably. He could have done it with a look. 

And yet, here and now, she was on her feet, feeling useful. That was worth a lot. She wouldn't say it was better. But she needed to be useful. She needed to hold up her own head, however ill-equipped she might be for the purpose.

When they got to the lodging-house, they found there was only one bed, which Matthi eventually conceded that Robin should have. The two women slept sitting up, in chairs that they had pushed as close together as possible, wrapped in each other's arms. They had slept in far less comfortable places. In many ways, Ellini was more at ease than she had been the night before, in that big, warm bed, but she still found herself wishing it was Jack's arms that enfolded her, and she squirmed guiltily as they dozed.

Robin had stopped muttering now. Once or twice, when she found herself awake, she unwound herself from Matthi's arms and went to look at him. You had to stand quite close to see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. But then she would remind herself how suddenly he could uncoil, and retreat to a safer distance.

When the room turned grey with dawn-light, and the sound of movement began to filter up from the floors below, Matthi went back to the Academy. The door had barely closed behind her when Robin spoke.

"I like her," he said, without opening his eyes. "Terrible fashion sense, but then that seems to be a deliberate choice. I don't mind people looking awful as long as they're doing it on purpose."

Ellini grunted and sank back into her chair. "You might have offered us the bed, at least, if you were awake anyway."

"I would have, if I thought I would've been allowed to stay and watch."

Ellini knew better than to rise to this. Besides, while he thought Matthi was her lover, at least he wasn't going after Jack. She rubbed her eyes. "What were you doing out there, Robin? What happened?"

His smile flickered but didn't disappear. "Relapsed."

"What does that mean?"

He sat up in the bed – and, as he did so, he reached for the new cuts on his neck. It was difficult to tell with the mess of dried blood, but Ellini thought there were six of them.

"This is my least-favourite stage," he muttered. "Before they scab over and scar, it's difficult to count them with my fingertips."

"You should look in a mirror," she said. "You enjoy that."

He gave another bark of laughter. It was like a cough – sudden and unpleasant and impossible to suppress. "Last night – no, the night before? I can't tell. I came across a coach-load of convicts being shipped to the coast for transportation. It seemed like a gift. A not-to-be-missed opportunity." He kept his tone light, but the smile looked painfully forced. "They were mostly bad men – murderers. I know a murderer when I see one, it's like a secret handshake, we always recognize each other. And I let the others go – I even gave them a sixpence each and wished them good luck. It was worth it to see the looks on their faces. And-" He looked up at her, and the smile disappeared for a moment. "And on the faces of the ones I wasn't letting go..."

Ellini wanted to feel her heart sinking, but she couldn't. She wanted to feel cold realization stealing over her, but she felt nothing. She was not surprised – and he could probably tell, because he went on with a kind of malicious, masochistic enthusiasm, as if he was trying to hurt her but knew he was only hurting himself.

"It was like eating a delicious meal that disagrees with you almost as soon as you've swallowed it. It felt so good while I was doing it – they were so frightened, it was so funny – but they hadn't been dead half an hour before their pain came back to me. Did I tell you I can feel their pain? And see the whole thing through their eyes? No, 'can' is the wrong word. Must. I can't stop it."

He glanced at her again. This time, he must have mistaken the carefully expressionless look on her face, because he added, almost in a growl, "I don't want your pity."

"You don't have it."

He relaxed a little, forced that horrible smile back into place. "No, I know," he said, in a tight voice. "Sticking around is all the mercy you can show me, isn't it? Still pretty impressive, considering."

"Why did you do it, Robin?"

He tried to shrug. She could almost hear his muscles screeching in protest. "Just wanted to feel in control again, I think."

"But you knew what would happen!"

Robin looked at her with genuine amusement. "You see, this is what you can never understand if you haven't been an addict. What good is knowing the consequences when you can't get past the moment you're living in? A horrible future seems like a luxury then. There's no future in a moment of temptation – just a present that never ends."

Ellini didn't like to be told she would never understand, which made her think about his words more than she normally would have. She suspected that, if she hadn't kissed Jack in his rooms last night, the clocks would have stopped – the sun wouldn't have risen – until she had.

"So what happened then?" she prompted. 

He gave another screeching shrug. "I writhed for a bit, cut myself, tried to find out their names. It appeases them for a moment if I say their names. I found a register in the guards' luggage – I let the guards go, I did tell you that, didn't I?" For a moment, he was childishly eager, as if expecting praise. "But it wasn't easy to match up the records to the bodies. In the end, I chose six names at random, but they can't have been the right ones, because there was no respite. And I couldn't even get drunk, because I threw up everything I tried to swallow. Then I realized how close I was to the ice-house. Nothing'd ever bothered me there."

He was stroking the new notches on his neck, rather shakily, trying to make sense of them with his fingers. Ellini took pity on him at last, and moved his hand until his index finger was positioned above the first cut.

"The first one's here," she said. "What's his name?"

Robin gave a convulsive bark of laughter again. If she didn't know better, she would have said his eyes were red with tears.

"Ned Kelly," he said, through clenched teeth. "At least – I decided he was called Ned Kelly."

"Ned Kelly," she repeated, in a soothing voice. "Ned Kelly."

She walked his fingers through all six of them, repeating their names as he told her, watching as his jaw gradually unclenched and his shoulders slumped. When they had finished, he leaned back against the headboard with his eyes closed, as if savouring something. "They are the right names. It stopped hurting."

"It's psychological," said Ellini.

Robin salvaged a smile. "That's just another type of 'physical'"

"But, in theory, one over which you have more control."

The smile broadened. "What a lovely theory. Do you believe it?"

But Ellini was already thinking of something else. "Try to get some sleep now. We're leaving for Edinburgh as soon as you're fit to travel."

He didn't seem to have the strength to bicker – or to point out that it would have been a much shorter journey if they'd travelled to Edinburgh from Northaven, rather than coming all the way South and then back again. Instead, he shuffled down into a lying position, waving away the blankets when she tried to pull them over him. He did not shut his eyes.

"Did you see Jack?"

"Sleep," Ellini instructed.

He was still for a few moments, and then wriggled around and pulled something out of his waistcoat pocket, which he deposited in her hand. For a moment, she was afraid it was an eyeball, or some other gruesome souvenir of his travels, but it was a ring. It was made of rose gold, and had the look of pirate's treasure – something you'd find glittering under the seaweed in a sunken galleon.

"One of the convicts had that sewn up in his coat," he mumbled. "I saved it for you."

Ellini gave it a cursory glance and then dropped it on the bedside table. "There's blood on it."

"S'rubies."

"On the inside?"

"Oh yeah, that's blood." He laughed again – but, because he was so weak, he had to roll onto his side and curl up around the laughter. It was dry and throaty and it racked his body like sobs. When it was over, he started muttering breathlessly into the pillows.

"Sh'said... she made me... but she didn't do it prop'ly. Sh'said I was unfinished. Half-baked. Sh'wished it was Jack that'd been picked out for her, 'cause he was smarter, stronger – he was the real commander she wanted by her side. But you got to 'im and ruined him too. Oh, she hates you. So much, Ellie. So long."

Ellini was going to tell him to sleep, but she saw his eyelids twitch and knew he was on the way, so she sat back in her chair and waited for him to mutter himself into silence. She had a few misgivings about letting him go to sleep with thoughts like that in his head, but... well, he was Robin. Where was he going to get more wholesome fare?