Oxford

'Honestly, Judy, if you don't ask him out soon, I will.'  Judy Beckley is chatting with her friend Miriam in the kitchen of their shared flat.

'It seems so clichéd.  That whole doctor/nurse thing.'

'Who cares?  He's gorgeous, isn't he?'

'In a funny kind of way, yes.'

'And you fancy him rotten, don't you?'

'It's not like that!'

'Yes it is.  It's bloody obvious.  Like I say, if you haven't asked him out by…' Miriam checks her watch, 'six o'clock tonight, I'm going to.  And don't say I haven't warned you!'

She would, too.  'All right, you win.  Now, are you making us some coffee, or what?'

Oxford

An unaccompanied woman may not occupy a table at Brown's, so Lizzie has to wait outside in St Giles.  Her daemon Parander is wrapped elegantly around her shoulders – in fact Lizzie is stylish and elegant from the top of her well-coiffed head to the toes of her fashionable shoes.  She sits on a bench and watches the people and traffic passing up and down the wide street.

'Come on!'  Parander is impatient, but they don't have very long to wait.  A figure appears in the middle distance, walking towards them.  It is Lizzie's half-sister, Lyra Belacqua.

Lyra is wearing, as is appropriate, academic dress – a long dark skirt, white blouse, full-length gown and mortarboard.  Her sensible shoes tap rhythmically on the pavement as she strides towards them; her tawny hair tied up in a bun at her neck, her daemon Pantalaimon trotting at her feet.

'Lyra!'

'Lizzie!'  They give each other's cheeks a light peck.

'Come in.  I've got us a table.'  They enter Brown's and take a seat in the window.  Lizzie orders tea for them both and Lyra asks for a currant bun, from which she feeds crumbs to Pantalaimon, who has a weakness for them.  It is not generally considered good manners to do this, but allowances are made for the eccentricities of the academics who form the greater part of Brown's clientele.

To begin with, their talk is light and inconsequential.  Lyra is cataloguing some early 16th century documents relating to the Liber Angelorum.  Lizzie has an active social life and the running of her late father's and uncle's estates and business interests to keep her occupied.  The superficial nature of their conversation is, as ever, intended to insulate them for a while from the matters which both unite and separate them.

They make a striking pair – the serious, bespectacled Lyra, sober and intense, and Lizzie, beautifully, expensively, dressed and the image of her departed mother, Marisa Coulter.

Sooner or later, Lizzie must come to the point.  'Lyra, I was talking to Will…'

'You were?'

'Yes, last night.'

'How is he?'

'Well.  Tired.'

'Thank you for telling me.'

They are silent.

'Look; he was asking a favour.'

'Yes?'  Lyra's face is flushed.

'Can you… could you do a reading for him?'

'A reading?  You mean, with the alethiometer?'

'Yes.  It's the Knife.  He's worried about it – he thinks there's something wrong.  Maybe someone has taken it or it's being misused.  Could you find out where it is?'

'And you'll let Will know what I discover?'

'Yes.  Lyra, he sounded worried.'

'All right.'  Abruptly, Lyra stands up.  'Thank you for the tea.  I'll let you know what the alethiometer tells me.'

'Goodbye, Lyra.'

'Goodbye, Lizzie.'

Lyra leaves Brown's and turns right, heading towards Jordan College.  She is blazing with anger.  She has no idea how she managed to keep her temper so long.

'You're not being fair on her.'

Lyra stops and stares at Pantalaimon.  'Fair?  What, exactly, do you mean by fair?'

'You know what I mean.  It's not her fault.'

'Why did it have to be her?'

'The angels never made any promises.  You know that.  Imagination – it worked, didn't it?'

'Yes, but it didn't work right.  It should have been me and Will; not her.'

Etiquette requires that passers-by ignore the sight of a person and her daemon quarrelling in public.  Lyra and Pantalaimon stand on the pavement isolated in a bubble of space and time.

It is the same old sore spot that Lyra has been scratching at for over five years.  The power of imagination did not work as she had hoped.  It linked Will Parry with her sister Lizzie, not her.  She can exchange messages with Will, but only via Lizzie and Parander.  Every time it happens, she feels humiliated.  Every time she feels, as she did at their forced separation at the Botanic Garden, the manifest unfairness of the world.  The Botanic Garden…

'We have a tutorial at two.'

'I know.  But we're going to the Garden now.'  Lyra's chin is jutting forward.  Pantalaimon knows better than to argue with her any further.

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Mary and Roger meet up at lunchtime.  It has been a busy morning, made harder by their headaches.  Nevertheless, some good work has been done.

Roger's ardour, Mary notes with some relief, has cooled.  Perhaps, she reflects, he has already lined up his next target.  Someone younger and blonder, no doubt.  Still, he comes up with the goods just the same.

'Try this lot,' he says, beaming contact and location details from his phone into hers.  'It's funny, really.'

'Funny, what?'

'Funny you coming all the way to Sri Lanka looking for fullerenes, when most of the UK research is being done just down the road from Oxford.'

'It is?'

'You'll see.'  He nods towards Mary's phone.  'It's only twenty minutes from you, along the A34.'

Near Cittagazze

Marco and Sophia are old and poor.  They own a few hectares of scrubby hillside which yields a meagre crop of olives and tomatoes, which Marco takes into Cittagazze every few weeks to exchange for rye flour and the occasional chicken or cheap cut of meat.  Apart from that, they grow some vegetables for their own consumption and graze a few goats on the thin grass that covers the slope above their cottage.

But, like poor people everywhere, they have a strict code of hospitality, and when Giancarlo Bellini, red-faced and exhausted, knocks on their door they do not turn him away, even when he tells them that he has a sister too, who needs help.

Together they carry Guilietta into the cottage.  Inside it is bare, as only the houses of the very poor are, with earthen floors and wooden shutters over the unglazed windows.  Sophia goes out to draw water from the stream which runs past the house and is, indeed, the only reason that it was built here at all.

'The poor thing!' exclaims Sophia, seeing how dehydrated and hungry the girl has become.  She takes her onto her lap and offers her sips of water from a clay cup, carefully, slowly at first, for too much water too soon will make her sick.  Guilietta, waking, sees Sophia's face above her and cries out 'Mama!'

Sophia, who had a daughter before the Spectres took her, feels a hand clutch at her heart.  Marco turns his face away and only Giancarlo sees his expression.  He gratefully accepts their offer of food and somewhere to sleep for the night.

Later, after a supper of ciabatta soaked in olive oil and rough red wine diluted with water from the stream, Giancarlo and Guiletta lie on straw mattresses in a little room under the eaves of the cottage, waiting for sleep to come.  Below them, they can hear the soft muttering of Marco and Sophia as they talk.  Remembering their lost child, thinks Giancarlo, seeing again the bleak sorrow in their faces at his sister's cry.  Marco had explained how it was, that their beautiful daughter, the joy of their lives, had strayed all unknowing into the path of a group of Spectres.

And lost her soul, Giancarlo said to himself, hearing the familiar sad story.  There is no family that he knows that did not, at one time or another, lose a loved one to the Spectres.  No family that is not haunted by the ghosts of what might have been.

Brother and sister fall asleep, and they never hear the visitors who knock peremptorily on the door, demanding information and offering both threats and promises.