"It's all right, Jean," Lucien said softly, placatingly, but Jean hardly heard him; her eyes were focused, unblinking, on the still form of Sergeant Hannam, sitting on the floor with his hands bound behind his back and a stony expression on his face. Her hands were trembling, still, and she was so focused on the crisis they'd just survived she could not feel anything, not the prick of Halcyon's talons where he gripped tight to her shoulder, not the warmth of Lucien's hand against the small of her back, not the pounding of her heart, not anything but the terrible, bitter stinging bite of fear, even now, when the the threat had been neutralized and the storm had passed.

It was Halcyon who'd alerted her to the Sergeant's presence in their home, and he had gone with her to fetch Christopher's gun, and flown by her side as she raced to save Lucien from certain death. The vision of that moment, Hannam's fist tight around Lucien's neck, Lucien fecklessly attempting to free himself, would remain burned on her mind forever, a memory of terror, and almost-grief, a grief that could have been, had matters turned out only slightly differently. Lucien had bound the man's hand behind his back and called for Matthew, and Nemea was keeping watch over him, silent and furious, for the man had kicked her soundly in the head just before he sprung at Lucien, and left her reeling and wounded. She'd rallied around the time Jean and Halcyon arrived, and between the three of them they had cowed and subdued Hannam, forced him to release Lucien and submit to his own capture, but Nemea's pride had taken a beating, and that would take longer to heal than any physical hurt.

"Jean?" Lucien called her name again, and this time she heard him, looked up through her eyelashes to see the blue of his eyes, bright and full of life and focused on her. His broad hands reached for her, gently took the gun from her grip and placed it down upon the desk, and as its weight was taken from her Jean's whole body seemed to go slack, releasing the tension she'd been holding since she and Lucien had arrived at the Royal Cross earlier in the evening.

"Are you all right?" she asked him sharply, raking her gaze over him, over the thick line of his neck, reddened from the crush of Hannam's hand, though not yet bruised.

"Fit as a fiddle," Lucien answered, and his voice only shook a little.

What a mess, Jean thought. This Hannam, he hadn't been working alone. He was responsible for the death of Bert Prentiss, for the theft of that poor deserter's body from the morgue, but he had not been acting of his own accord. He had been following orders, and the person most responsible for ordering him about was Lucien's old friend Derek Alderton. It was a terrible thing, Jean thought, to discover that a friend was in fact a foe, to learn of the deception and cruelty wrought by a man Lucien had once considered good as a brother. His heart must have been aching, she thought, and in that moment her own ached to hold him.

"Lucien," Nemea called softly, her low voice hardly more than a growl. "Where is his daemon?"

At the question Halcyon took flight from Jean's shoulder, fluttered round the room as if in search of the daemon in question, though there was no sign of a third creature in that place. Lucien watched the kingfisher's progress with a troubled expression on his face.

"I don't know," he said heavily. "I didn't see a daemon in the car with us. Did you?"

"No," Nemea answered, turning her golden eyes on Sergeant Hannam, baring her teeth just a little.

"Sergeant Robert Hannam," the man said dryly, as if he had seen a question in those eyes. "3rd Regiment, 4th Division."

That was all the answer he intended to give them, apparently.

"Right," Lucien said, and then he tugged at his waistcoat for a moment before crossing the room to squat in front of the Sergeant. With careful hands he patted at the man's pockets, but beneath his beard a frown tugged at the corners of his lips. He slipped his hands into those pockets, searching, searching, but he came up empty-handed; there was no daemon to be found.

"He has to have a daemon," Halcyon said, fluttering over to Lucien and perching precariously on his shoulder. "There is no man without daemon. He'd be dead if he didn't have one."

The Sergeant just stared at Lucien with dead eyes, unspeaking, leaving the rest of them to muddle through this quandary on their own.

"You and Nemea can go apart from one another," Jean said, and Lucien looked up at her sharply, and a blush stained her cheeks because it wasn't until that moment that she realized Lucien didn't know about the evening she'd discovered Nemea alone in the sitting room. It felt like a gross invasion of privacy, carrying on a conversation with his daemon when he wasn't present, and she meant to apologize for it, but they had bigger problems at present.

"We can," he allowed. "But only for a little way. If Hannam had a daemon it would have to be close by. But that doesn't make any sense. It wasn't in the car with us. It couldn't still be at the Royal Cross, that's much too great a distance. They wouldn't survive."

"Suppose it was very clever," Jean said, all in a rush. "Perhaps it was hiding in the car. Perhaps it's still there."

"It would have to be something rather small, and rather nimble," Lucien mused.

"A stoat?"

Having ascertained that the Sergeant was not hiding a daemon in his pockets - and that the Sergeant had no intention of speaking to him - Lucien rose to his feet then, his eyes snapping to Jean's face with a curious sort of heat. While he moved Halcyon clung to him, and Jean would wonder at that later, the easy way her daemon had gone to him, the familiar way they touched, as if they always had done, as if they thought nothing of it. And she would wonder, too, at the way her own hands reached for Nemea, at the way all four of them seemed bound, somehow, despite having only known one another for such a little while.

"What makes you say that?" Lucien asked her urgently, rushing across the room towards her. Nemea sat still by the Sergeant, but her tail began to flick agitatedly.

"We saw a stoat, in the garden," Jean said. "Just the other day. It seemed...I know this sounds mad, but it seemed to be watching us. Could it belong to him?"

"No," Lucien said heavily. "No, she belongs to someone else. Doesn't she, Sergeant Hannam?"

No response came from the man sitting on the floor, and Jean's heart clenched in fear. I should have told him sooner, she thought, but truth be told she'd all but forgotten the stoat; life had become rather chaotic, of late, and it had slipped her mind.

"But if she was here, they must have found a way…" Lucien mused, mostly to himself, running his fingers over his beard in the way he sometimes did when he was thinking his way through a particularly thorny problem.

"Must have found a way to what?" Jean demanded, trying and failing to hide just how cross she was growing him, with this whole bloody mess.

"Since the war began, people have been trying to find some way to separate men from their daemons."

Nemea had told her as much. Three hundred feet, that was the greatest distance allowed between man and daemon. Not so very great, all things considered.

"Why-"

"There are some who think it might make the soldiers safer," Lucien told her. "And there have always been men who sought to sever the connection, to learn what would become of us, without the daemons. If we would be better, stronger, somehow. Or if might be possible to kill one and not the other. If a man's body could be killed but his soul yet live on. Or if a man can be a man at all, without a soul. It used to be philosophers who asked those questions, but I'm afraid it's generals, now. And I worry what that means for us."

Yes, that was precisely the sort of thing that would trouble him, Jean thought. The idea that questions of humanity might be answered by men who were in the business of war, not the business of thought. It was, however, a bigger problem than the sort Jean was used to wrestling with, and she was more concerned with the safety of her household than with the safety of the whole world, at present.

"Do you mean to say...Lucien, do you think this man has been separated from his daemon?"

Surely, Jean thought, surely there was no life for a body without a soul. Surely it wasn't possible. But if she were forced to imagine it, for a moment, what a man without a soul might look like, she supposed it would look rather a lot like Hannam, who followed orders without question, who killed without remorse, who even now was not trying to save himself, but was instead sitting stony and silent. Then again, she thought, perhaps she was being unfair to him. Perhaps he did have a conscience; perhaps he believed he'd done the right thing.

"I don't know," Lucien answered her. "That's what worries me, though. I would like to dismiss the idea out of hand, but I simply can't. The stoat, she belongs to Derek. When did you say you saw her?"

Jean answered him, and his frown deepened.

"Derek and I were drinking at the Colonists' then," he told her darkly.

But if that were true, that meant Major Alderton and his daemon had been rather a lot more than three hundred feet apart, and had not perished. That called everything they thought they knew about men and daemons into question. Jean's hands began to shake again.

"How-" she started to ask him.

"I don't know, Jean," he answered. "But I mean to find out."

"It can't be, Lucien," Halcyon chirped, and Lucien reached for him idly, then, brushed his fingertips against the kingfisher's little head in a reassuring sort of way. "It's too awful. I couldn't bear to be apart from Jean. What sort of daemon would let this happen? What sort of man would do such a thing?"

"A very determined sort," Nemea said darkly from behind them.

"That's what worries me," Lucien agreed.

And it worried Jean, too, now. She held out her hand and Halcyon took flight, recognized the need in her and came to her at once, and settled upon her palm, and let her pull her in close to him. She needed the nearness of him, now. Never, not once in all her life, had Jean considered the possibility that someone might take him from her, but she was staring all sorts of unpleasant possibilities in the face just now, and the world seemed to shift dangerously beneath her feet.