As he walks through the now immobile mansion, its clockwork soldiers confined to the backrooms, lest one of them malfunction and kill everyone in sight, Sokolov steels himself against the rising terror of the place he was once held captive. And perhaps he returns here now, not out of any goodwill for Jindosh nor schadenfreude at what he's become—blubbering shell of his former self, as the Silver Spike so gleefully put it—but out of a resolution that in his old age, he wouldn't let the Clockwork Mansion continue to haunt him.

He's old enough to know that one day the Silver Spike will write an equally gleeful article about his decline: genius turned senile, drooling and dreaming of his youth, perhaps.

And he's old enough to know what he should have done instead, what he should have been. Oh yes, he was a genius and a creator of machines and children alike, but what was left for him in the end? His children were unknown to him; his machines in other hands now, endlessly tinkered with and refined; and Meagan was gone again too, called back to her other ruinous father. His pupils? Dead or mutilated—only Hypatia seemed to have escaped that particular curse on a whim of fate or Corvo.

He looks around the mansion with its glass roof and pulleys and rooms all tucked away in the space between the walls, and all he can see is the eventual decay of it all. One by one of the clockwork soldiers will break down, the rooms will get stuck mid-change, the electrical generator powering it all will fail. And it's not as if Jindosh himself is in any condition to repair it when it does. From what he's read, dubious as it may be, the man can't even affix a bolt anymore. If this is Jindosh's legacy, then he too might not fare any better.

It's all gone, and he is walking in the ruins still to come.

He knows there's talk of sending Jindosh to stay at Addermire permanently, but the servants were worried about being dismissed and no one could figure out what Jindosh wanted, aside from more beetles. So, once a day, a maid would come to take him on a walk to see them. And once a day, he would pull off the beetles' legs—trying to figure out how they worked, Sokolov supposes.

He finds Jindosh a little way from the mansion, plucking beetles from their hideouts in the tall tansy that sways in the salt breeze.

"Do you remember me?" Sokolov asks at last, as a means of a stilted introduction.

Jindosh stares at him. "Anton Sokolov," he says at last in a distant tone. "The Academy. You wouldn't help me, help me with the—the clockwork soldiers—" For a moment, Jindosh looks as though he is almost himself again, as he tries to hold onto this train of thought, different this time, shot through with memory. There is a bitterness in his strained voice. "We were so close: an age of invention—but something was lost—"

"I know," Sokolov replies lightly.

"The beetles," Jindosh says in a different tone, this one absentminded, "I wonder where they all go?"

"Where we all go in the end," Sokolov replies lightly, but Jindosh doesn't get it.


In the study, he helps Jindosh pin the dead beetles. As bitter as Jindosh seemed, he can't hold onto it, and he lapses into an odd, childlike state of glee whenever the beetles are brought up. And so, Sokolov uses that to bridge the past between them. He listens to Jindosh talk about how to find the best beetles, where they laid their eggs, how they molted. And as Jindosh does so, Sokolov's mind begins to whirl again, not half as ready for retirement as he is. Long-term memory for Jindosh seemed to a strong point, but also a deficit: he didn't seem to be making any new ones after the electroshock machine, but the ones he had appeared to be a sort of temporal anchor for him. Could he coax his mind into making new ones?

Sokolov labels the beetles in a carefully steady hand. "There," he says. "Now if you want to know what kind of beetles these are, all you have to do is look." And read, he privately adds, but Jindosh completes his hidden task with no further prompting.

"Serkonian Green Beetles," he says with some difficulty, his prosthetic porcelain finger tracing along the words.

"Good," Sokolov replies almost automatically from his years of tutoring Emily, and he doesn't know how to feel when Jindosh unabashedly grins back. On one hand, it's useful to have an accurate gauge of how he's feeling at any time, but on the other, he doesn't think the old Jindosh would have been so unselfconscious.

Genius turned senile, he tells himself, trying to prepare himself for a future he cannot face, a future perhaps that he sees in Jindosh's fate. Treated like a potted plant.

Dinner is pork and cabbage, and Sokolov relishes the simple meal. After years of living so lavishly, he's grown weary of it all. Sokolov tries to play a game of cards with him later, but Jindosh's mind wanders too much and Sokolov resigns himself to this new reality.

Night falls, and it's time for sleep, or whatever sleep can be managed. Jindosh lies in his bed, tucked between the bleached sheets, and Sokolov sits beside him, not yet ready to be whisked off to his own bed yet. And for a moment, gazing down at Jindosh's prone body, Sokolov wonders if it would be kinder just to smother him with one of the pillows. He doesn't think Jindosh would stop him. He doesn't think anyone would stop him. They'll call it an accident, an unfortunate outcome of the brain damage, and it will be one more secret lost to the mansion.

But Jindosh grimaces in pain, and the moment is lost. Sokolov is only an old man once again, not the esteemed Royal Physician of yore, weighing lives like chemical reactants. He leans closer now.

"The muscles con, contra—they tighten," Jindosh says. "It hurts."

Sokolov thinks of how he might have spun this into a different ending long ago, given into his lascivious middle-age nature, but now, he places a hand on Jindosh's shoulder. "Where?"

It's half curiosity, satisfying his wonder at what Jindosh's body must feel like, and half a wish for companionship. The muscles in Jindosh's back slowly yield under his applications of varying pressure, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't feel a twinge of pride at Jindosh's soft intake of relief. Haven't lost the touch just yet, he tells himself.

Gazing at the nightstand, he wonders if anyone has tried reading to Jindosh yet. Perhaps he'll try that one next. There must be something to work with in there. But the night is calling and his own body aches, so he tucks himself away in the hastily thrown together guest bedroom (the old Jindosh was far too prickly for overnight guests). And in the darkness, he thinks of the Dreadful Wale and the nights he'd wake up disoriented and seasick on the ship.


He awakens in the early morning to dim but unmistakable howling.

One of the dark-haired maids moves past his room, and upon noticing him, only remarks, "Please don't worry, sir. We have this."

Sokolov hadn't become a leading figure at the Academy by leaving things to other people, but when he gets to Jindosh's bedroom, he wishes he had. Jindosh is hideously vulnerable in his white nightshirt, sobbing as he screams hoarsely at the half-circle of maids that have surrounded him on the balcony.

"Please," one of them starts, but he cuts her off.

"I've lost it," he screams, blood coming down his forehead, and there's a corresponding red smear on the broken plaster of the wall. "It's gone! It's gone—and I can't find it!" His muscles are tense from stress and fear beneath his loose nightshirt, and Sokolov begins to understand why he suffers the way that he does. Sokolov would give anything not to have to bear this scene.

But it's time he bore something.

"Well, then," Sokolov says, more gruffly than intended. "Let's look for it."

And Jindosh turns towards him, confused and wide-eyed under the blood. He wonders if Jindosh will hit him in his fit of anguish, wonders if he'll even react to the blow or if his old flesh will merely crumple to the floor, but it never comes.

Before Jindosh can say anything else, Sokolov heads off another potential challenge. "Let's have one of the maids show us through the place, so you don't get lost." He searches the gathering of servants. "You," he says, pointing at the same dark-haired maid from earlier. "You'll do."

They start in the bedroom, as the morning sun fills it with orange. The maid tidies up the room, as Jindosh checks the cupboards and Sokolov rifles through the desk. There are half pages of new theorems, theorems he's never seen before, never dreamed of, but they always trail off into another one, so as to be useless to him. Horror and pity twist in his gut at the sight of them, and he pushes them to the back of the drawer.

"Not here, I'm afraid," he says.

And as they continue to search, Sokolov slowly puts the events of the morning together: Jindosh had awakened with some new theorem in his head and had wanted to jot it down before the thought left again. But he couldn't remember where he put the paper and had the thought that it might be in another room. So he pulled the lever next to the bed and had trapped himself on the balcony as the theorem slipped past him.

"Gone," Jindosh says bitterly, kneeling next to a cupboard. "Gone, gone, gone." He sits back, his shoulders heaving as he fights off another fit of anguish. "It will never come back. I don't want this. Kill me. I don't want this, not this."

"It'll come back," Sokolov lies. "Let's look for it again after breakfast. You can't expect an old man like me to run on nothing, can you?"

The maid takes this as her cue to lead Jindosh away to a private room to prepare him for the day, and when he re-appears at the table, he's been combed, cleaned, and dressed in a loose white shirt and tan trousers. There are scars on his temples and the fresh mark from this morning next to older ones on his forehead, and Sokolov suddenly can't bear to look at them. The maid leads Jindosh to the table, and Sokolov is bemused and quietly horrified at his newfound docility.

There's a conciliatory apple pudding at the breakfast table, but Jindosh doesn't touch it.


Maybe this was his final test of genius: to rebuild a ruined man.

He tries formulating maps of the mansion, but no matter how much he simplifies things, Jindosh cannot follow them. He's getting better at defusing Jindosh's fits of frustration and anguish, though, small mercy that that was.

There's a half-dissected corpse in the lab, reeking sharply of formaldehyde and untouched since Jindosh's meeting with Corvo, and Sokolov has him interred in one of the local cemeteries, not the anonymous mass graves that his own were thrown into. Perhaps this is for their own restless spirits, still trapped behind the bars they died next to. I'm changed, I'm changed, he wants to tell them, but he knows what an easy thing that is to claim.

"Everything changes," Meagan had said with just the slightest bit of sharpness, as she stood in the garden of the Clockwork Mansion with him. "You, me,"—she gestures towards Jindosh, who is searching the tansy plants for beetles—"him."

"I'm certain the Outsider's laughing now," Sokolov replies. "Never could find out what makes him tick."

"You're better off for it," Meagan says. "Not everything should be known." She leans against the stone wall, never taking her eyes off Jindosh. "What are you going to do with the place?"

"The Duke wants to turn it into a museum—a 'testament to the Academy and the marvels of Serkonos.'"

Meagan shifts against the wall. "What are they going to do when it breaks down?"

He shrugs. "Melt it down for parts, perhaps. Have the new crop of Academy students puzzle over it. Fix a part here and there, and eventually there'll be no original part in the end; just something entirely new and remade in the image of the old."

"Is that what you think about your own work?"

There is a pause as he considers what he has done and what he will leave. "I don't know anymore. If you had asked me sixteen years ago, I'd have told you that my name and my work would live on forever. Now? Now, I am not so sure, and not so sure that is a bad thing. I-I have done things I'm not proud of now."

"We all have. It's the price of living."

"Not like that, Meagan. Not like that." He holds himself steady. Void, how weak he's gotten in his old age: he can feel his muscles trembling, the pulse of his heart. "I can see all I should have done differently—what was in my power to do differently—and how that failure echoes around me." He doesn't tell Meagan that he thinks it highly possible he could have gotten Jindosh's fate if he had not been useful to Corvo. A little quirk of fate, then, that he should meet his unlucky double.

"You couldn't do differently by me," Meagan says, quietly but determinedly.

"You've always had a kind heart. Me, not so much." He collects himself. "But enough of an old man's recollections. I am not so very near the grave that I should be obsessed with it."

Meagan gives him a small smile. "Found a new lease on life so soon?"

"I'm allowed to," he counters, with a smile of his own.


They move Jindosh out of the mansion into a small cottage outside of town, just big enough for him and a few of the maids. Sokolov goes through the mansion, tagging this and that to be moved, to be sold to the Academy, or to be kept on at the mansion as part of the décor. The laboratory is particularly hard for him to be in, but he does so anyway, least of all because stepping foot in there provokes strange, hurried, and strung-together words from Jindosh, a jumble of provoked and repressed thoughts. Sokolov can hardly blame him.

The final time he was allowed in the laboratory, Jindosh had stood in front of the electroshock machine. He ran a finger over the metal and whispered to himself: "But what does it do? If I combine an acid against a copper plate... I knew it, but it's gone... The copper plate... the difference engine is inscribed in copper... The copper plate..." Sokolov listened to his associations, how his mind strained to hold a thought for long.

In the end, he gently steered Jindosh away from the laboratory. "I can handle it," he said, meaning instead that he'll bear it, certainly not for old times' sake, but because someone had to.

The move goes well. The majority of the servants are dismissed with a full month's pay and, to assuage the grumblings, a letter of reference from the Royal Physician himself. The guards and a few of the servants are kept on, to keep the mansion clean as a museum now.

When he moves into the cottage, Jindosh checks the rooms one by one for something, pushing against the walls in places, and it takes a few moments for Sokolov to understand why he's doing so.

"No levers," he says, and Jindosh looks relieved.

"I think I'll like it here," he says in a pleased but distant tone. His strange vulnerability still takes Sokolov by surprise.

"I hope so," Sokolov replies.

"And are there beetles?" Jindosh asks. "I would like to see the beetles."

"Lots of them," Sokolov says gently.

"That's good. I would like to see new beetles. When they're pinned, I can look at them any time. They're beautiful. They fly. Not en-encumb—they're not stuck to the ground." He pauses in distant thought. "I think there must be new beetles out there to pin."

He pauses, then takes out his sketchbook. "Tell me when you find new ones. I would like to pin them, and then draw them. You only need one if you pin them."

"I thought we're both fighting against the tides," Sokolov says at last. "But maybe it was just me." Maybe I'm still trying to hold on to the past.

Jindosh looks up from his sketches, looking for the tides, a bemused expression crossing his face. "The sea is far away," he says. "You'll have to ride the carriage down if you want to see it." He ponders this in his dazed way, and then abruptly returns to the beetles.

Sokolov smiles and sets up his easel, finding a need to express with paint the collection of feelings he cannot contain: the twisting of pity and horror and fear and regret and the hope that it might all be different yet.

And he paints Jindosh there, among the delicately flowering sea lavender and shiny green beetles of Karnaca.