Sergei had expected old age to protect him, but it didn't. Stepping into a room that contained Ellini Syal was like experiencing a mild brain fever. He felt as though all his nerves were firing at once, calling up every memory and sensation he associated with love, causing his entire romantic life to flash before his eyes. But fortunately, he was a scientist, so there wasn't a lot to get through.

He was dimly aware of the skimpy summer dresses worn by his older sister's friends when he was fourteen. He could smell sand and pine needles—that must have been from the time he sat on the sand dunes with Elisabetta and explained to her about entropy. And he could taste cherry pie—tooth-achingly sweet, with a kick of almonds that went straight up his sinuses and almost knocked his head back. He had no idea what that was about.

He clapped his hands to try and dispel his confusion and turned to Jack. "Would you mind bringing Alice up here? I think she's in the glass laboratory."

Jack gave him an ill-tempered shrug. "Why can't you ask Danvers?"

"Why do you think I can't ask Danvers?"

Jack sighed, raised his eyebrows at Ellini as though to say, 'you see what I have to put up with?' and slouched out of the room.

Sergei shut the door behind him and gave Ellini the least threatening smile he could muster. It probably didn't fool her.

"Jack's a fascinating case study," he said, "as I'm sure you can appreciate. Perhaps you are wondering why he doesn't remember you?"

"No, I—" Ellini had wrapped the fingers of one hand around her wrist. It was probably meant as a casual pose—something non-committal to do with her hands—but, in fact, it looked as though she was trying to slow her pulse by squeezing. "Well, yes, it did puzzle me at first. But perhaps it's a good thing."

Sergei didn't know what to say to that, so he took refuge in scientific explanations. "In fact, his memories of you—and most of his emotional responses—have been chemically blocked by a compound not dissimilar to the medication which prevents him from thirsting after violence."

"You should put it in the water," said Ellini, with a half-hearted attempt at a smile.

"That might be a bit premature. But it seems to be working rather well. Of course, the brain being the tangled place it is, forgetting you has led to the loss of other, seemingly unrelated, functions. His intelligence has decreased by about ten per cent—although I don't consider that to be a big loss, because I've always felt he was too intelligent for his own good anyway."

"Surely you can't believe in being too intelligent for your own good here? In Oxford?"

"Very well," said Dr Petrescu, smiling. "He's too intelligent for our own good. It comes to the same thing. We look after him now."

Ellini nodded, and began to wander around the room, avoiding the patches of sunlight streaming in through the windows.

"Oh, he's also under the impression that he can't speak French," Sergei went on, "which is very amusing, because, when you speak to him in French, he understands you—and even sometimes replies in the same language. But, because he doesn't remember learning French, he just assumes we're all speaking English. I can only surmise that skills are stored in a different part of the brain from the memories of learning them. One day, I shall write a paper on it."

"Did he... volunteer for this procedure?"

"He gave his permission," said Sergei, perfectly well aware that this wasn't the same thing.

Again, she gave him a polite nod, and he decided it would be expedient to change the subject. He took a letter out of his pocket and unfolded it with almost reverential care. "I must admit, when you first applied to help with my research, I thought that having you here would be far more trouble than it was worth. But then I read your notes. You have been some kind of a doctor for the new breeds yourself, I think?"

"I fell into it," said Ellini.

"And you think the violence-suppressing medication which has proved so effective at keeping Jack on the straight and narrow will not work for all new breeds?"

"No, sir," she said, still absent-mindedly squeezing her wrist. "It's the Atropine you listed as one of your key ingredients. Some new-breeds—somewhere close to half, in my experience—are immune to its effects, even in poisonous amounts."

"I'd love to know how you came to find that out."

"I'm one of the immune ones," said Ellini—and he wondered whether she was changing the subject or answering his question. "So I thought, if you experimented on me, we could find a substitute for Atropine, and ensure that your wonderful cure works on everybody."

Sergei raised his eyebrows. The words 'wonderful' and 'cure' were delivered without apparent sarcasm. Of course, it was a wonderful cure—or would be, if he could get it to work correctly. But in his experience, when the British said 'wonderful', they usually meant the opposite.

"Why are you so interested in helping me with this?" he asked.

Ellini gave him a mild, enquiring look. "So that we can peacefully coexist with humans, sir?" When he continued to look expectant, she added, "Isn't that reason enough?"

"I don't know," said Dr Petrescu, scratching his moustache. "Did you know Jack was here when you applied to assist me?"

"No." She held his gaze for a moment. "Do you believe me?"

But he never got to answer her question, because Jack chose that moment to slouch back into the Jigsaw Room, wearing the expression of unsettled defiance that always appeared on his face when he had spoken to Alice Darwin.

"Well?" said Sergei, as Jack shut the door with rather more force than was necessary.

"Her Majesty wants you to come to her," he said, scowling. "Apparently, she's got some kind of presentation for you."

"Ah." Sergei smiled and turned back to Ellini. "Please indulge my colleague, Miss Syal. She's quite... passionate... about our work here and wants everyone to understand its importance."

He noticed that Jack was trying to sidle away, and grabbed him by the collar with one hand, opening the door to the stairs with the other. "She'll want you to hear it too, Jack."

"I've heard it," he protested.

"It may be different this time."

"Oh, Faustus wasn't a brilliant man who's been misunderstood by generations of wilfully ignorant religious despots? We shouldn't all try to get along and lay aside our differences for the sake of scientific progress?"

"Just get down those stairs," said Sergei.

Alice's laboratory was the only place in the Faculty that was wired for electric lights. They shone with a hard, cold intensity, generated a constant buzzing sound, and glinted off the glass vessels that lined every shelf and covered every table. There were beakers, test tubes, flasks with long, twisted necks, and whole labyrinths of glass tubing, along which mysterious liquids surged and bubbled. Their secrets were known only to Alice.

In fact, Sergei wouldn't have been surprised if they were simply there for show. The effect was the important thing. The bright, hard sparkles created webs of light which sapped the spirit of every servant or colleague who wandered in here. They gave the whole laboratory the appearance of an ice palace.

Alice was standing at the back of the room, examining a test tube by holding it up to the diamond-hard lights. When she heard them come in, she slotted it back into its rack with an efficient clink.

"Ah, Miss Syal," she said, winching a brief smile into place. "Thank you for coming."

She sauntered towards Ellini—her billowing skirts always managed to avoid knocking things over—and deftly plucked the ruby-studded comb out of her hair. "Forgive me," she said, "but I believe this belongs in our offensive weaponry display."

"It's a comb," said Jack, under his breath. But Alice was supremely skilled at ignoring him.

"I would like," she said, laying aside the knuckle-duster-comb, "to speak to you about Doctor Faustus today. If you don't mind. You see, if you understand Doctor Faustus, you'll understand Oxford, and it is imperative—if we are to avoid unwelcome disturbances—that you understand Oxford."

Ellini, who seemed to have been temporarily robbed of speech, nodded her head.

"Wonderful," said Alice.

She ushered Ellini onto one of the stools which lined the work counter, leaving Jack and Sergei to find their own accommodation.

"Now, in many respects," said Alice, picking up a glass flask and toying with it reflectively, "Faustus was not a good man. But I find that good men are seldom efficacious enough to change the world."

Her eyes settled on Jack as she said this, and he raised his eyebrows, caught between amusement and irritation. "Um—thank you?"

Sergei heard Ellini make a sound that was either a stifled laugh or a stifled sneeze. Alice didn't even glance at her.

"But, leaving aside good and evil," she said, smoothing down her elaborate skirts, "Faustus was remarkable. What the average man condemns about him is precisely what the scientist should admire. I don't know if you're familiar with the story?" she asked—and then swept on before Ellini could stammer out an answer.

"He was trying to summon a succubus to share his bed when Eve appeared to him. She was indeed very beautiful, but she seemed savage and confused, and so Faustus concluded that she was one of the many demons who preferred to kill their victims before—or even instead of—copulating with them."

"He considered this tiresome, but not worrying. She was standing right in front of an East-facing window, so he decided to keep her talking until the sun came up and put an end to her. She was extremely curious about the astrolabe on his desk, and his many astronomical charts, so it wasn't difficult to hold her attention. But she asked so many stimulating and insightful questions that, when dawn approached, Faustus found himself drawing the curtains so they could continue their discussion throughout the day."

While this well-known story was washing over him, Sergei noticed that Jack was doodling on a piece of paper. He did this a lot, mainly because his restive brain couldn't stand to be doing only one thing at one time. There had to be some kind of a bet, some kind of a game, some kind of a challenge, passing through his mind and under his fingertips.

He was watching Alice and Ellini with his eyes while his left hand darted randomly across the paper. And this was especially odd because Sergei knew for a fact that he was right-handed.

"They formed a perfect partnership," Alice went on. "Those people who read too much into the mythical significance of Eve's name have seen in them a perfect allegory of the union of man and woman. Their relationship wasn't even romantic, as far as we know, but they completed each other. Unfortunately, Faustus didn't use her fresh eyes for anything but academic problem-solving. In his personal life, he only ever listened to himself."

Sergei couldn't help smiling. There was always a kind of metallic enthusiasm in Alice's voice when she spoke about Doctor Faustus. She liked him, as far as Sergei could tell—she certainly spent enough time studying him. But, as with everyone she liked, she couldn't refrain from criticizing him.

"His major failing," she went on, "was not pride or ambition—or even despair—but a lack of understanding. He assumed that everybody would be as logical as he was. That's why he invited the demons into Oxford, and expected everyone to welcome then with open arms as long as they could solve differential equations. He gave them positions within the Faculties, beside human professors, in the hope that working together on the same academic problems would unite them."

"You see, he had the right idea, but the wrong methods. You can educate people together, but that won't remove the urgings of their nature. As long as demons hungered for violence—and as long as the humans feared they might let their hunger get the better of them—there was always going to be war. That is why Dr Petrescu and I have been working so hard to remove the hunger. Faustus thought people would lay aside their differences in the face of a satisfying mathematical puzzle. Well, that's neither human nor new-breed nature. That's Oxford nature. And Doctor Faustus may have been blissfully unaware of it, but there is a world outside Oxford."

Sergei smiled again. Like him, Alice came from the world outside Oxford—where preachers were fiery, new-breeds were persecuted, and academics were despised. You could hardly tell, these days, because the city had civilized her so completely. But a hint of that religious upbringing crept out when she was speaking passionately. She had the fire and brimstone of those childhood preachers in her soul.

"When Oxford was inevitably overrun by religious armies who wanted the demons driven out, he couldn't imagine what they wanted, or why they were so angry. When he fled with the demons, leaving Eve behind him, he doesn't appear to have been very concerned about her. He hadn't left her with any weapons or bodyguards, but she had an abacus, and a stack of brilliant mathematical papers, and he naturally assumed that these would be weapons enough."

Alice moved closer to Ellini Syal. "The point of this lecture, Miss Syal, is that Dr Petrescu and I are aiming to continue Faustus's work while at the same time reforming his methods. Please do not believe that all of Oxford is in thrall to tradition and snobbery and pointless rituals. A sizeable portion of it is, but at its heart, this city is about progress. And we cannot let pitifully archaic things like love, or magic, or even the settling of old scores, get in the way of progress. Can we?"

Sitting on her stool, with her hands in her lap, and the full weight of Alice Darwin's conviction bearing down on her, Ellini nodded. "I agree with you," she said. "That's why I'm here."

"Oh, that's why you're here?" said Alice, raising her eyebrows and glancing delicately at Jack. "I'm delighted to hear it. In that case, I'm sure we'll get along famously. Let me show you to the operating theatre where we'll be performing the majority of our tests on you."

***

Sergei, left alone in the laboratory, gravitated towards the notepad on which Jack had been scribbling. In theory, everything Jack did was evidence of the effects of the medication, and therefore fascinating. But in practice, the things he did were so inane and inexplicable that Sergei tended to screen them out.

He was feeling jumpy today, however. Perhaps it was the taste of cherry pie, or the fire-and-brimstone quality of Alice's speeches. It had just occurred to him that he'd taken the only person in the world who knew what to expect from Ellini Syal, and erased his memory.

He picked up the paper and squinted at it. At first glance, it appeared to be a bird's nest of scribbles—just wild lines piled on top of each other until the mass of ink they formed was almost opaque.

But the more he looked at it, the more Sergei began to see the same letters—or rather, the same phrase—written over and over again, crisscrossing and overlapping until each one was all but illegible.

It said, 'Help me'.

He stared at it until he heard Alice coming back—the efficient click of her heels was unmistakable—and then tucked the sheet of paper into his jacket.

"It wasn't necessary to be so blunt with her," he said, when Alice had closed the door behind her.

"I'm never blunt," she said, sliding a test tube out of its rack with her familiar, bird-like alacrity.

"She really might have been here because she wanted to help."

"Well, whyever she intended to be here, she will help. I'll see to that. Her notes were very insightful. And I have no time for people who waste their insight on emotional crusades."

Sergei smiled faintly, despite his worries. It was strange, but that was the most damning indictment in Alice's vocabulary. When she really disapproved of someone, she 'had no time for them'. She wasn't speaking literally, of course, because 'having no time for them' entailed going to the greatest lengths to make their life a misery, but it was a useful little phrase, nonetheless.