When Sokolov leaves, Jindosh isn't sure why he's unnerved. It's certainly not any love or fondness for the man, but rather that he's lost another coordinate in this strange world, another reference point to gauge the present by the past.

Hypatia smiles gently at him from her study. He doesn't know how he got there, but it's nice to have an anchor. And by her desk, as she answers letters, time has become a fluid thing in his head: once agonizingly marked out in milliseconds and ink, it now settles through him, as his thoughts swim. Blue beetles, the translucent curl of their wings against his palm, the thin lines of his hand, copper circuitry.

"Would you like to read a book?" Hypatia says softly, a hand on his shoulder. "I've picked up a few on natural history, and you might like the one on beetles."

It's been a few weeks since anyone's thought he might like to read something, or rather, capable of reading anything. The paper is sturdy under his touch. Hypatia sits beside him on the floor, and he's not sure where to start: everything feels intimidating to him.

"The Serkonian Green Beetle was first discovered in 1653, by the late…" Hypatia begins. She keeps her finger on each line of the text not for her own attention span, but to help him follow along. As she reads, he traces the sketch with his porcelain prosthetic finger, an unconscious imitation.

"Want to try this section?" she asks, pointing to a short paragraph about the habitat of the Grey-Winged Serkonian Beetle, and moves the book so he has better access to it.

He takes it as an order and begins. "In 13, 134, 134, 1346, the Grey-Winged Serkonian Beetle was first docu-docu-docu—"

"Documented," Hypatia offers.

"Docu-men-ted," Jindosh repeats slowly and laboriously. He tries to hold this new word in his mind. "Documen-ted."

"You're doing well," she says to stave off the distress building inside of him as he struggles to retain this new word. But he closes his eyes tightly in frustration, raising his hands to his head. Then, the thoughts slip and tension leaves him: he goes quiet again.

"You did well," Hypatia says. "Let me find a better book for next time."

He looks down at the book with the puzzled gaze of someone who can't remember opening it. And he searches for something he does remember instead.

"I would like to see the ferns again," he says carefully.

Hypatia sets the book aside and humors him, leading him over to her makeshift greenhouse. And Jindosh reaches out a hand to grasp the fronds and let them fall between his fingers. He marvels at the contrast between the feathery pinna of the fern and his flesh.

Hypatia guides his hand to the soil, gently running his fingertips against the soft earth. "Look here," she says, brushing his fingertips against an emerging fern, curling up from the quiet darkness of the soil. "A new shoot."

He looks back at her in childlike interest.

Hypatia separates the fiddle head from the rest of the fern, showing Jindosh the clumps of roots as she divides them.

Segments, he thinks in one of his strange bursts of thought. Is there nothing whole? But it fades away, as everything does, slipping out with the tide.

And this time it's Lucia who slips into the room. "Alex," she says. "It's almost time to go down to see the miners."

Hypatia pauses thoughtfully. "Would you like to come with me?" she asks him gently. "I'm going to see the miners with Lucia, and we could always use a third person."

Jindosh doesn't really like the idea of venturing beyond the walls of his cottage. He knows that he's different now, changed somehow, and he's afraid of what awaits him outside. He doesn't want to be laughed at.

Lucia watches Hypatia. "I'm not sure he's into altruism, Alex."

Hypatia takes his hand in hers after a moment of deliberation, her soft fingers against his warm porcelain ones. "You don't have to say anything while you're there. And if you get afraid again, just let me know and we can go back home."

He watches her carefully. "Will they laugh at me?"

He means to ask if everyone in Serkonos knows what's happened to him. It's humiliating to have your most painful day be the domain of cheap headlines: something to snicker at and call it justice. He's beginning to suspect that everyone knows that there's something wrong with him and even worse, they find it satisfying. That vague thought stops him from wanting to explore the area around his cottage—the worry that his humiliation is already known.

Hypatia thinks a moment. "I don't think so. You'll be safe with me," she reassures him.


Hypatia guides him through the streets by holding his hand. "Don't let go," she says to him. "It's easy to get lost."

And he follows her obediently, a life-sized doll wearing the face of someone who might be mistaken for the Grand Inventor. Down in the square, it's terribly bright, and he's confused by the many people who pass him. She leads him into the examination room, and sets him down in a chair. He stares at the wall, his mind dreaming of the blurs of people, the dust on their kerchiefs and shirts, the hard lines around their mouth, trying to find some sense in it all.

Hypatia sees her patients dutifully and introduces him dutifully to them as well. He always stirs when he hears his name, but then falls back into his dreaming. Sometimes he tells them about the beetles, and that is the wrong way to answer, but he forgets that every time. He likes the beetles. Sometimes, the disdain of the miners turns into pity or sadness, not out of any fondness for him, but rather the general sadness of seeing something irreparably broken. More often than not, it's schadenfreude for another arrogant man cut down. But he never notices.

And Hypatia, in turn, keeps up her hope that he'll slowly get better by seeing and interacting with other people, that maybe he'll start to understand things better, and get a feel for human interaction. Isolation can't be good for him. Nothing grows quickly, she says to herself. And if he is with her, perhaps they will understand that he's different now.

One of her patients, a Gristol native working down in the silver mines, hands her a letter to read. She's no stranger to reading correspondences for those who cannot, and as she looks down at the simple lines, she has an idea.

"Kirin," she says softly, "Would you like to read the letter for Mr. Bradshaw?"

He complies.

It's only a few lines, simple enough for him to read. He pauses in parts as his thoughts slip, and he begins to keep his place on the page by placing his finger at the end of the line when he feels it start to happen again. The miner fortunately mistakes his periodic confusion for an eccentric thoughtfulness. By the time Jindosh reaches the end, his head is in dull agony, and he can't remember what was in the letter, but the miner is smiling in his rough way. And he senses that this time he has succeeded somehow.

"My little girl's come safe into the world," he says. "Ah, I'm so glad."

Hypatia beams wearily, while Jindosh watches him, thoroughly confused by the man's affection. When the miner leaves, Hypatia lays a hand on Jindosh's shoulder. "And how are you holding up?"

"The copper wire has a thermal conductivity of..." He looks at her. "No, that's not right either." He shouldn't be saying all of this, but he can't remember what she asked him. Copper wires, burst pipes, crackling electricity, floors that hide and rotate: these flow through his mind, as it leaps from association to association in a free fall.

"It's ok," she says softly. "Do you want to lie down for a little? I have a few more people to treat and then we can go back home. "

His mind keeps crackling, and he puts his hands to his head to try to contain it all. The ocean, orange and shining in the morning sun; the black and white stripes of his bedsheets in the Clockwork Mansion; the bright wood of the half-built Clockwork Soldiers, standing in a row, docile and blind; a silver mask with a strange eye piece—

"I shouldn't have pushed you so hard," she says, rubbing his arms gently to bring him back to this moment. But his mind keeps spinning: tiny gears the size of an insect, the curled corpse of a wasp, overripe figs.

Hypatia guides him out of the examination room to Lucia, who's taking a break.

"Lucy," she says softly, "I think Kirin needs some quiet. He's a little fragile right now. Can you put him on the cot in the back? I only have a few more people to see. Maybe another hour or so, and then we can go back home."

Lucia sets down her mug of fresh tea. "Only for you, Alex," she says, reaching for Jindosh's hand and leads him to one of the backrooms, where there's a cot Hypatia rests on from time to time, when her body gives out from exhaustion and she can't make it back to her apartment. Soon after he enters the room, Jindosh doesn't remember how he got there, and he's afraid that no one will remember to look for him. He'll be stuck in this room forever and ever.

"I'm afraid," he tells Lucia, crossing his arms tightly. "I'm very afraid."

Lucia's gruffness fades a little. "You seem to spend a lot of your time afraid now, hm? Alright, what's going on?" She pulls up a stool beside the cot. "Did Alex give you a conscience?"

"I'm afraid," he repeats miserably. But he can't bear to confess that he doesn't know where he is, or how he got here, how afraid he is that he's been left behind, or that he feels sick and he doesn't know why.

He's left a world of hard certainty, where he looked down at the rabble and saw only rats burrowing in their filth, leading their petty lives at their tedious pace, for this persistently unfamiliar one that resists his attempts to understand it. His cold independence had always been a shield from his own humanity, and now, back down in the world of flesh and bone, he's hopelessly lost.

"Why are you afraid?" Lucia replies, confused. "Have you never seen a miner before? Surely your life couldn't have been that sheltered."

He holds on the idea of a miner and turning it over, compares it to the nameless terror inside his gut. "Not that," he says.

Lucia exhales. "I can't believe I get to play twenty questions with the Grand Inventor on my break."

The lines on the wall remind him of a circuitry board of a machine. "Copper has a thermal conductivity of... of..." he says distantly. "And when combined in an alloy—and when combined in an alloy…" The thought slips past him again.

Lucia stares at him, and he flushes with embarrassment when he understands that she's baffled by him—not humbled by his intellect, but surprised by something wrong in him. He's failed again. This stings even worse now after his success. He doesn't understand the rules of this capricious world.

"Maybe Alex can find out why you're not feeling well," Lucia says at last. "She was always better at this than me. You'll just have to wait until she gets back."

And Jindosh suspects that he knows where he is now. "She'll be at the séance tonight," he says, as a matter of fact.

"Séance?" Lucia repeats in disbelief.

Her confusion stings him. He guessed wrong.

"You're probably just tired," she says at last. "That can't help your brain." She pulls at a faded, folded wool blanket. "Lie back," she says firmly but more gently than before. "Just close your eyes for a little. It'll do you some good. We'll be back in a little bit." But as her hand falls across his shoulder, the sudden pain makes him pull back from her touch with a wince.

She regards him more carefully now. "Did you run into something?" she asks, pointing to his shoulder.

He shakes his head, not in disagreement, but in confusion. His shoulder flares with an unremembered hurt. A fleeting anomalous sensation in his body, with no point in time to affix it to. He curls on himself under the blanket even as this fear fades as well, replaced by a familiar, more comforting thought.

"The forewings of a beetle aren't used for flight," he says to himself. "Only the hindwings."

Lucia looks at him with pity in her eyes. "You really don't know, do you?" And with that small revelation, she leaves him there to rest and dream a while.

And he does.


He dreams of a place cut through with cold angles, where a moonless eternity stretches and hangs.

"Kirin Jindosh," the Outsider says, raising his arms in mock welcome. "Abandoned by your mother in all but name, raised by your older brother—a duty born not from love, but necessity. Expelled from the only place where you ever wanted to be." He smiles. "I've watched you for a very long time. You've been so dull for so long: now you're finally interesting enough to me.

"There is a certain symmetry in life mistaken for justice," the Outsider continues, pacing across the black, angular planes. "Hypatia asks herself in the quiet moments of the night why she wasn't put down like a threat, like you were. She wants a world governed by righteousness, and she thinks that if she can just give it a nudge in the right direction, all will fall into place. She thinks that by saving you, by making you whole again, she can redeem herself and justify her own existence. But it's never that simple, is it?

"You coveted the unrequited, mindless adoration of fame given to Sokolov, longed for a rival even as you despised everyone." He pauses, hands clasped behind his back. "What you've sent into the world cannot be undone. You have given terror a new language to speak, and its tongue cannot be so easily cut.

"Now, you find yourself unmoored and hapless. Cared for and loathed by those closest to you. You know something was stolen from you, plucked out of your head and sent into the ether, and it can never be returned. That will always be an open wound for you.

"For all of your life, you've measured the world and found it wanting. The present could never be enough for you, and so you looked to the future, towards posterity, to assuage your own desperation. You've used your brain as a shield between yourself and humanity. And now, you're left with nothing.

"But what will you find in its place? Life is not a river, but an ocean, and some currents run deep. The world of Serkonos is moving, and you must sense this by now. I'm curious to see what you'll do, Grand Inventor."

The Outsider smiles, pale and harsh. "Would you like to receive my mark?"