The world swims, and he does not swim with it. He hasn't become accustomed to these strange spells. This time when the world comes into view again, it's the leg of a table he's looking at. He's gotten on the floor somehow, and his head is foggier than usual. Everything feels wrong: his body hurts and he's soiled himself. There's a word for what has just happened, but it's floating in his mind, just out of reach.

The maid finds him, and she does not hide her disgust. "Why do you always make more work for me?" she says to him, bending down. "Isn't it enough that you tormented me for years, and now you're what? A gibbering idiot?" She surveys him with frustration. "And after I just washed them too." She draws him to his feet. "Come on."

The water is a haphazard mix of warm and chilly, as she turns the bathtub taps in accordance with her impatience. She undresses him roughly, bundling the soiled clothing into a pile. "Get in," she says. "Since apparently this morning's bath wasn't enough for you."

He complies, because he cannot imagine doing otherwise, and she begins to aggressively scrub him clean.

"There's something wrong," he begins, by way of explanation. "The elec, electr—the current—"

She gives him a hard look. "You enjoy this, don't you?" And then, she pinches him on his upper arm, not enough to break the skin, but enough to be painful.

The look of hurt surprise on his face is almost enough to make her do it again, but this time out of pure malice.

"I don't want to hear it. I'm sick of hearing it," she continues. "You just like being a pain. You were insufferable and cruel before, and now you're just the same but useless." She pauses, gazing down at him. "But you don't even know, do you?" she says in equal mixture of disgust and frustration. She gathers up the soiled clothing into her apron. "I expect you can be trusted to stay there without drowning yourself until I come back?"

It's a practiced condescension, one born from the years of toiling under signs that reminded her of her own inadequacies, and she doesn't wait for an answer.

The water turns fully cold eventually, but it never occurs to him to leave the bathtub. Instead, he sits there, his knees to his chest to keep in the last remaining warmth, as his mind wanders blankly: beetles with green shells, beetles with no legs, seawater lapping at the shore, glass jars with fingerprints along the edge, tansy plants dozing and bending. All the mechanical clicking in his mind, but the gears don't catch.

His mind's associations are interrupted by the arrival of the younger maid, her arms full of freshly folded laundry.

"Oh!" she says, setting the stack on a side table. "Oh, Maria must have forgotten you there." She rifles through for a towel, and proceeds to dry him off. "We almost missed our walk!"

"The beetles," he says at last. "There must be more out there. Different ones."

"Oh, I bet," she replies. "Let's get you dressed and then we can go out."

But as she chatters on to fill the silence, he's once again looking out the window, and in his mind's dreaming, there is the shiny glint of the sea, steady and eternal and empty.


Anton meets him out on the walk through the garden. In the garden, yarrow sprouts in patches along the walk way, while pink-flowered rock purslane curls along the edges. Rosemary sticks out skywards, sending out delicate purple blooms. Jindosh searches all the usual places for the beetles, but they elude him today.

"Maybe tomorrow," Anton says gently.

There's a guest this time at lunch. Hypatia, Jindosh notes dimly.

"Anton," she says with a glance at him, "has asked me to check your memory and see if there's something I can do to help it." She gives Jindosh a gentle if weary smile.

Jindosh idly stares back at her, trying to place her in the shifting lines of his mind. The Academy. Yes, that was it. She had studied at the Academy too, and then she had taken part in the coup. The her that was not her. Or perhaps it had always been a part of her, and just kept tightly leashed.

He fails every test she gives him, and even as she tries to not let worry show on her face, part of him knows what this means. Halfway through the third test, he turns away and refuses to participate, his face flush with shame and embarrassment.

"Memory isn't all it's cracked up to be," Hypatia tries to console him. "I don't remember parts of my life, and—it doesn't bother me so much anymore. I'm sure in time it won't feel so bad."

He thinks of the simple bolts that are a frustrating mystery to him and the theorems he can no longer follow. "It won't. It won't ever be the same."

"Very few things are ever the same again," Hypatia continues softly. "But we can always find something."

"There is nothing. It's gone," he says to the lavender. "And it can't be found." And even as the horror rises within him at the thought of his ruined mind, as he tries to hold onto that feeling to have some kind of anchor, any anchor at all, it recedes from him.

Hypatia says something in return, but it doesn't register. There's only the lavender now, silvery and tipped purple. "They will all laugh at me now," he says in quiet horror to the lavender, only half cognizant of who "they" could be.

"I would never laugh at you," Hypatia replies, but it goes unheeded.

He is violently sick afterwards.


Anton finds him where he is lying on a sofa, trying to contain the urge to heave again. "What about a ride to the sea?" he offers at last. "Might find some beetles there."

Jindosh shakes his head. "I don't want to see new beetles," he says in his distant way. "No more. No point."

Anton sits beside him. "Well, this is serious then." He pauses in thought. "What if I show you how to press plants? You can also keep these forever too."

Jindosh watches him, considering in the brief moments he has to himself before his mind wanders again. "Press them flat? Yes, I know. It's easy with two books. The real question is if I can improve the air resistance of the—" He stops abruptly. "I can see it," he says, "it's so close." And the desperation in his voice drives him mad: he understands with this moment of lucidity what he has lost, both inside and outside of the prison his mind has become. And the longer he thinks about it, the wilder and more strained his voice becomes. He can see the way the machines must be shaped now, for better fuel usage, but the longer he gazes at it, the faster his words fail him. "No, no, it's so close!"

"Kirin," Anton starts.

But Jindosh doesn't respond to him. "A copper alloy and an acid will result in," he begins in an attempt to trigger some buried rote memory, but nothing answers him. And just like that, the plans for the machine are gone. "It's gone again! It's gone! Not again!"

And he's screaming again, like a wild creature that's been caught. He doesn't notice that Anton unconsciously backs away from him in alarm, only that there are not enough paltry words to assuage this terror moving through him that things will never be the same again and that he will always live in his own ruins.

But when it's all over, he doesn't remember why he was screaming.