The Amber Rooms

Chapter Twenty-Six

There is a realm, perhaps only imagined, of many Amber Rooms. Their walls are translucent. Through them, Saskia can see the outlines of still more Amber Rooms, overlapping into infinity. This place is a great building of buildings: a matrix whose Amber Rooms are connected by enfilades in six directions. Saskia is not a person here. Instead, she is a wisp that threads these enfilades. She knows that each Amber Room is a world. On its walls are not allegories of touch, smell, and vision but windows upon landscapes, dreams, and meaning.

This is not a museum, or a mausoleum, or an ark. Its proper word does not exist in any of the human languages that Saskia knows. This place is an equation. Certainly, it holds the beauty of an equation and the unfolding power of permutation.

A permutation might be the collective noun for this building of buildings.

Saskia appears to be alone, but there is another, unnamed something that speaks to her. Curator is not the word; neither is ghost. But it has no substance and it has all knowledge. It has told her that each Amber Room protects—or grips, or preserves, or marks the boundaries of—a reality.

She drifts on. The instants pass like the erosion of mountains. Millennia might fit between her blinks. Her thoughts are yoked to this slow time, however, and she feels no difference in her being, apart from a distant worry that she has become separated from what it means to be human.

The tour continues.

In one Amber Room, Saskia Brandt was born with fair hair. There are six exits here: the four walls, as well as the floor and ceiling. If Saskia were to float upwards and continue through the infinite suite, those other Saskia Brandts would be born with fairer and fairer hair. If Saskia were to float down, the hair of those others would darken.

Everything is here.

If this is not an ark, or a museum, or a tomb for reality, what can it be?

She drifts towards one of the small pictures, surrounded by a broken paving of amber. The artist has rendered a pastoral scene of the steppe. Close, the chimney of a farmhouse grows a lock of smoke. Its flat roof is loaded with fodder. Winter is close. On a far crag, a wolf in silhouette pulls back to howl. How distant is the tang of the Caspian? In this scene, the air would be dry. The poplar leaves are butter-coloured. They are falling in concert with a particular music known only to those who live season to season.

On the steppe, Saskia thinks, as she floats in a slow barrel turn, there is time to spare.

The wolf has been rendered mid-howl. Saskia thinks of the elements of this vast, uncountable world. She cannot know them all. She cannot predict them. It is this thought that conjures movement in the image of the steppe and the immensity of its time, small rivers, caravans of traders on battered pathways.

In the grass, there is a mark no more detailed than the brush-tick that represents a nameless bird in the middle distance.

But Saskia knows it is her body lying there.

When she opens her eyes, she understands that the floor is not grass but a parquet of exotic woods, and all her memories of these infinite Amber Rooms are taken from her, not unkindly, by something that is neither creator nor ghost.

When Saskia opened her eyes, she was once again in the Amber Room. She must have fallen on the floor. Her cheek throbbed and the base of her skull hurt, but she was otherwise uninjured. Her body recorded nothing of her fall from the balcony of the physical observatory. It was a memory. But she had no doubt that the memory was real. That Saskia had been murdered; somewhere, her body lay broken on rocks.

Slowly, Saskia gathered her skirt and stood. The room was empty. Its windows showed a night sky over the square and the palace was quiet. Her yellow-tinted glasses were crooked on her nose, and she could discern no use for them in this candle-lit chamber with its spells of darkness and sudden light, so she removed them and tucked them into her collar. The model of Frederick the Great had been pushed over and split in two. She peered into its base, which was hollow and large enough to conceal a man.

Like the room, it was empty.

She examined her reflection in one of the mirrors near the door to the staircase. The woman there was familiar, even down to the black scarf and sensible blouse. Gone was the ostentatious Allegory of the Future. She had seen this outfit before, when entering the room for the first time. She had become that reflection. This was not the reality she had left. This was a parallel version.

In the fragments of wood near the base of the model statue was a business card. Saskia crouched to take it. The card had the appearance of a business card but was too heavy and its surface rather smooth. The typeface was unusual.

It read:

Ms Tucholsky, Tutor

Mathematics; English; Physical Education

References upon request

Messages received at Hotel de l’Europe, Nevsky Avenue and Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa

The card grew hot beneath her thumb. She dropped it. A black outline of her thumbprint lingered on the surface, then vanished. The words on the card scrolled aside. An icon of a clock face appeared and its hands raced clockwise.

She smiled.

The icon disappeared.

‘Saskia,’ said the card, ‘I am back.’

His voice tantalised her with a release from the loneliness that only a taste of her own time, the twenty-first century, could bring. She put the card to her lips and closed her eyes.

‘Ego,’ she said. ‘My old friend.’

‘Saskia, we have just experienced an entanglement event. It forced my shutdown and might have caused you dizziness or loss of consciousness.’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘Before we discuss the matter, I must report that there are two men approaching from the main staircase. You need to leave the palace directly. I suggest using the Private Apartments of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna.’

Saskia unbuttoned her collar and tucked Ego into her bosom. She hurried towards the door set in the wall adjacent to the enfilade. She grasped the handle but the door would not open. Before she could force the lock, the door to the enfilade opened behind her. She skipped across the room and concealed herself in its lee.

‘… something inside,’ said a man, perhaps the junior of the two. They had stopped on the threshold.

‘Has the alarm been raised?’ said the other. His voice was at once familiar and strange. Saskia was standing with her back to the mirror. She tilted her head to the right, hoping to glimpse the men without revealing her presence.

‘I believe so,’ said the junior.

‘You believe so?’ The senior’s voice had cooled. It became less familiar. Saskia could not yet see him and did not dare move any further. ‘Why don’t you go and check?’

‘Yes, sir.’

She listened to the fading footsteps of the junior guard, which were accompanied by the soft rattle of armour. There was no sound from the senior guard other than an impatient sigh expelled through the nose. Saskia leaned over again, but the mirror was too small to reveal the man. Why was he waiting in the doorway? Did he see her? Her cheek throbbed. A dull ache grew at the back of her head; to be sure, someone had struck her there. The injuries to her cheek and the base of her skull were the only impressions, in the absence of memory, that she could use to reconstruct the moments before becoming aware in this version of the Amber Room. What had Ego meant by an entanglement event?

A flash lit the room. Her first thought was fireworks. The afterglow, however, was white and unaccompanied by the sighs of spectators. She turned towards the mirror on the adjacent wall. By tilting, she could see the reflection of the window that overlooked the square. She demanded answers from her vision and the slice of night reflected there swelled to a grey rectangle flickering with false positive shapes. Within the shapes were two constants: bold lines that described two horses, each with a rider, and all lit in the magnesium of a signal flare. Soso and Kamo were cantering into the night. As Saskia looked, Kamo’s horse tipped into a perfect levade. There was a bundle slung across the withers. This had to be the first Imperial Mail satchel from the Tiflis heist. The other satchel would be draped across Soso’s horse, which was now too far away to discern.

Saskia thought once more about the events of the evening, here, prior to her arrival. She constructed a likely version: The satchels had been hidden inside the base of the statue. Soso, Kamo and Saskia had gained entry to the Amber Room; the statue had been overturned; Saskia had been knocked unconscious, and her two companions had escaped. And yet it was not certain she had been a companion. She might have intercepted the pair and tried to stop them. In another scenario, she was a hostage.

Saskia reduced the intensity of her vision. Her perceptual world shrank once more to the confines of the Amber Room. She tensed to see the back of the senior guard—a Hussar. He was crouching, oblivious to her, at the base of the overturned model. The candlelight created pools of shade. Saskia moved through these until she was behind the man. As she shifted her weight to her right leg and coiled her left, ready to kick his neck in the unprotected gap between his helmet and his back, he turned.

‘Fuck,’ she said.

‘Ms Tucholsky?’

‘Pavel Eduardovitch Nakhimov.’

She dropped the leg and stood up straight.

This Pasha was taller than the Pasha she had failed in the original Amber Room. But of all the Amber Rooms, and all the people she might meet in them, why Pasha, here? He wore the full uniform of a Hussar of the Imperial Guard: a white, dolman jacket with gold piping, sable epaulettes, and a bearskin helmet. His whiskers, however, were too thin to complete the impression of masculinity.

‘You’re a Hussar,’ she said. There was pride in her voice.

‘And you are under arrest,’ he said coldly.

Saskia put her hands to his cheeks and kissed him three times. ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ She kissed his shocked face again, thinking of the dead boy. ‘So glad.’

‘What are you doing?’ he said, taking her wrists.

Saskia stared at her hands as Pasha removed them from his cheeks. She looked at the veins and the sudden bumps of her tendons as she rippled her fingers.

‘Ms Tucholsky, you will come with me.’

She ignored him. She made fists, then put her palms together in prayer, watching the whiteness where the fingers pressed. Pasha did not release her.

‘Ms Tucholsky?’

‘My hands,’ she whispered. ‘How could I not notice until now?’

‘Never mind your hands. Ms Tucholsky, there has been a breakin at the palace this evening and we must account for your presence.’

Saskia decided that her hands were perfect in their symmetry. She looked for the long-forgotten mole on the palm of the left one, not far from the life line. It was there. As, for this body, it had always been.

Pasha took her upper arm. He leaned into her vision and said, ‘Enough. My corporal witnessed you enter the palace along with two men. Clearly, the three of you quarrelled. They abandoned you here and escaped with stolen property. I was surprised to see you, but when I consider the events of the last few months, everything makes sense.’

‘Which events?’

Pasha gave her a disappointed look. He turned towards the door and pulled her arm. ‘You will come along.’

Saskia considered him. He was off-balance and tense. She fell into step as he walked her. At the door to the enfilade, she barged him with her hip. Pasha was heavier but she had tuned her movement to precision, and she had the surprise. He stumbled and released her arm. She watched him turn back—his mouth twisting down in irritation—and she lifted her forearm, which provided an unconscious cue to grip her wrist. He did so. Saskia trapped his hand against her wrist and, using the remainder of his turning energy, and a little of her own, steered his arm in a windmilling action. Pasha’s elbow rose until his hand had passed over his head and come to rest against his shoulder-blade. He gasped and teetered on the balls of his feet. His cheek was against the door jamb.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Quiet, Pasha.’

Still holding him, Saskia sniffed the fingertips of her left hand once more. She had it: Guerlain’s fragrance Mouchoir de Monsieur, favoured by Count Nakhimov.

‘Don’t call me Pasha.’

‘Where is your weapon?’ she asked.

‘It is within the armoury, woman,’ he whispered, as though embarrassed. ‘Where else?’

‘Get it. Then come with me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Your father is in danger.’

He stopped struggling. ‘Danger? What do you know?’

‘I was with him this evening. He helped organise the breakin.’

Pasha stopped struggling. He regarded her with total horror. In that moment, as he looked at her blank expression, and she watched him, each understood that Saskia had told the truth. It had been a weighted guess on her part. For him, she reasoned, it resolved certain ambiguities in his father’s behaviour, or spoke to a truth that he had always known.

‘I will tell you everything,’ she said, ‘but only if you arrange my immediate escape from the palace.’

‘Father is truly in danger?’

‘He is.’

Saskia was crouching in the shadow of a staircase on the side of the palace that faced the square. Between the chimes of countless clocks, which reached her through the windows above, she heard the calls and footfalls of palace staff and, beyond them, the greater confusion of the night: shouts, horses at a trot, and alarm bells. It would not take long to mobilise the troops in the barracks around the Tsar’s Village. In the meantime, police carriages had stopped at the main entrance to the palace, and its other entrances, to deploy uniformed and plain-clothes men. The confusion did not diminish. Lanterns were dropped and subordinates cursed. Saskia caught rumours of a full-scale social revolutionary attack on the palace; of chemical gas released into the Grand Enfilade by crack German troops; of an explosion within the Amber Room itself, melting the resin to burning pools. In the blackness next to the external staircase, Saskia listened to the night and its signatures. Meanwhile, she continued her whispered conversation with Ego, which was itself a confusion: the computer did not trust her and would not speak plainly in answer to her questions.

Those questions were gears that ground teeth-in-teeth. Why could Ego not talk directly to her brain, as it had done before? Another guess: because her mind was different; the encryption was undone. Why had the time band sent her to different versions of the Amber Room instead of moving her through time? Because she had been a fool to assume that the countdown had been sent by a friend. Why wasn’t she wearing the band now? Because this Saskia had not used it to travel in time; or the revolutionaries had stolen it.

‘The date,’ she said. ‘At least tell me that.’

‘I must repeat that I will provide as much help as I can, consistent with my confidence in your identity. To help you fully would constitute a risk to the mission. At present, I cannot be sure that you are Saskia Brandt.’

‘I am certainly Saskia Brandt,’ she whispered. ‘My problem is that I am one of many.’

‘The connectome of the neural network is quite different, taking the standpoint of a Euclidean distance metric, from the identifying connectome of your network that I sampled earlier this evening. In short, you are not Saskia.’

In the quietness, Saskia tried to work through the implications of her voyaging mind. She could not. Though her knowledge of physics was thorough, no theory, from 2023 or before, could explain how a malfunction in the dark band would usher her through a brief series of experiences: the soldier in the Amber Room from World War Two; the flight deck of DF323; and her time in Tiflis.

What did those moments have in common? What was there to learn? In each, Saskia had felt a growing sense of control. She had lost her sense of futility. If each moment was drawn from a universe parallel to her own—that was, a universe in which she did not come to save David Proctor—then she was freed from the bounds of her paradox. The future of that alternative universe would be unknown to her. She could have choice. Since her first experience of time travel, her will had struggled beneath the weight of the notion that certain effects had occurred; it was her duty to speak her line at the place and hour appointed.

What if the malfunctioning band had freed her from that constraint? She could act. She could do good and claim the goodness.

A second thought cooled her excitement: if she had no choice in her original universe, who said she had choice in this one? Its future must still be constrained by its past. The difference, if one existed, was that its future was inscrutable.

‘Ego, the quantum entanglement event you spoke of earlier coincided with my awareness that I had transferred to this universe. Isn’t it possible that the quantum event and this transfer are linked?’

‘Put your glasses on.’

Frowning, Saskia took the tinted glasses from her collar. Their frames were thin and the arms tipped with ivory. She put them on and her world became yellow. Shapes were immediately clearer as though the dawn had risen.

‘I’m wearing them,’ she said. ‘Now what?’

‘You will find the technology useful.’

Saskia remembered wearing smart glasses during her first investigation for the FIB. They had responded to her blinks.

She blinked twice. Nothing happened. She tried a slow, single blink. When she opened her eyes, geometric shapes and text filled her vision. The overlap was stable on the real world. It did not move with her eyes. The geometric shapes looked like those triangles and dashes that were painted on runways to help pilots judge distance and speed. The shapes painted the side of the Summer Palace and the frontage visible between her and the far wall of the square. Other polygons targeted objects: trees, doors, and people. Beneath these polygons were trivial data, such as the genus of the tree, but also more important information such as whether a door was locked, and whether a soldier was moving away or towards her. As Saskia looked around this blazing constellation of information, the shapes and text juddered to match the scene. There was a date floating near the corner of her eye. As she struggled to focus on it, the date grew larger: 1st January, 1970.

‘A useful technology,’ she said, ‘but crude in comparison to i-Core.’

‘What is i-Core?’

‘A nanotechnology that infests my blood. It repairs me and works for my benefit—or perhaps its own. At the moment, these benefits amount to the same thing.’

‘I am not aware of any technology by that name.’

‘Were these glasses provided by the Foderative Investigationsburo? In this universe, do I still work for them?’

Again, Ego said nothing.

‘Ego,’ she said, ‘given my behaviour and the quantum event, don’t you agree that there is a chance I’m telling the truth?’

‘Every possibility has an associated probability.’

‘Ego, please. Let’s start with the date. My glasses tell me it is January, 1970. I don’t believe that.’

‘In all likelihood, the quantum event has reset their fastware. The same thing almost happened to me.’ Ego paused for the length of a human sigh, but no sound came from the little card. ‘Look for the constellation Cepheus. Face north. Look directly up and a little to the east. Do you see it?’

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Within Cepheus, we find the Mu Cephei, a runaway star with a peculiar velocity of approximately eighty kilometres per second. Your lenses can use the relative position of this star against its neighbours to calculate the date.’

The portion of sky acquired a yellow rectangle. It throbbed once, turned green, and the superimposed date changed to 23rd May, 1908. Exactly the same date as the masked ball.

‘It worked. Thank you.’

‘My Saskia,’ said Ego, ‘let’s call her Saskia Beta, never thanked me.’

‘Ego, meet Saskia Alpha. Thanks.’

She blinked hard. The heads-up display faded to a ghost, then was gone. She took a long breath and raised her scarf until it covered the bridge of her nose. Tying it behind her head, she touched a tender spot, where there was a swelling. She was frustrated by the absence of any memory for this life, this body, but she had two hands. She felt doubly powerful. No longer did she need clever combinations of her teeth and right hand to conduct the basics of her life: dressing, eating. She remembered an incident two years before, when she had wept at the close of a theatre play. Kamo had been with her. He asked why such a jolly production should leave her in tears. The truth was that, while she anticipated and steeled herself against those moments when the absence of her hand would sting her, she had not concerned herself with the habit of applause. She could not clap. Ever again.

Saskia looked at her hands. She gathered her skirt at the knees and wound its edge into a knot. She tucked her glasses into her bosom. This dash—to fit within the circuit of the guard at the north-east entrance—would be a useful test of the fitness of this body.

She took a breath, held it, took another, and sprinted across the facade of the Great Palace. She relaxed as her legs extended and her arms swung. This body was fit. She was faster with two hands. Perhaps it was the balancing effect. Her stride length increased and she flew on her toes until her speed was ten metres per second. Whatever this version of Saskia had done so far in life, she had maintained her fitness. Window after window of the palace telescoped by. Fast enough. She slowed as she reached the chapel and looked for the guard, who was pacing less than fifty metres away. She focused on him. She broke down to a jog. Her long strides fell on the gravel in perfect synchrony with his. At the outer wall, the hoof-falls and wheel scrapes of the road covered her movements, and as the guard turned the corner, she skipped into shadow.

The magnificent outer gate was locked.

She looked at the wall. There were thin grooves in the cladding and a chimney gap between the chapel and the outer wall. She took a breath and dropped her shoulders and dashed into the gap. Her right foot kicked against the outer wall and she surged upward. She twisted, scuffed against the chapel wall, twisted again, and gripped the ledge of the outer wall. She paused to check the progress of the guard. He had not heard her.

She tumbled over the wall and landed on all fours next to a fine horse. After brushing the grit from her palms, she checked that Ego and the glasses were still in place. Pasha was holding the horse. He looked at her with a sour expression.

‘It’s been a while since I saw your acrobatics. You could teach my men a thing or two.’

‘Did you telephone ahead?’

‘Yes. There was no answer.’

‘Do you trust me?’

He slid a travelling cloak from the horse.

‘Put this on,’ he said, shaking it. ‘Quickly.’

Saskia allowed him to put the cloak across her shoulders. It was heavy, black velvet with a hood. She inclined her head and put her hand over his. ‘Then you trust me.’

‘I do not, Ms Tucholsky.’

Saskia sat opposite Pasha in their train compartment as they entered St Petersburg. She was counting her radial pulse. For the duration of the journey, it had not peaked above forty-five beats per minute. That satisfied her. She used the steady wash of blood to discipline her thoughts. Her mind turned to the day when she had taken Pasha—that is, she thought, Pasha Alpha—to the Tsar’s Village. Her escape through the Amber Room had seemed so trivial in prospect that she had considered it done. How horrifying that Kamo had appeared to ruin the day. She remembered the fight, the pain, and the dash from the Summer Palace. How much of this overlapped with the reality where Pasha Beta had become a Hussar? She needed to find out. But Pasha had been as reluctant as Ego to answer her questions, and now that the train was drawing close to St Petersburg, she feared that the pace of events would accelerate beyond her capacity to react rationally. She made an explicit promise to herself that she should exploit this opportunity. Her voyaging mind had taken her to a reality whose future was perhaps undetermined. She would do here what she could not do in her own reality: undo the work of Soso. She must stop him from becoming the man to conduct monologues over Russian sorrows. Her years-long goal—that of a return to the future, to 2023—would come second to this.

She tried to inventory her disadvantages: no i-Core, which meant her wounds could not heal quickly. The future of this reality might not require her actions as an older woman. She could not, therefore, count on the protection of a paradox.

She had one advantage. It swept all disadvantages before it.

She could choose.

In the compartment, rocking, electrically lit, Saskia watched Pasha. He still wore his bearskin. He was not permitted to alter his uniform in public. She said, ‘Your father will tell us where the thieves have taken the money.’

‘They can have it,’ said Pasha, spitting out the words as though the silence had been working on him. ‘I’m helping you only because of Father.’

‘You want me there to draw him out,’ Saskia mused. ‘So you can see for yourself whether he is involved in seditionist activities.’

‘I recall your medical expertise, too,’ Pasha replied. ‘You told us that you studied medicine in Zurich. Or was that a lie?’

Saskia sighed. She shaded her eyes from the bulb, which buzzed in its shade.

‘This is a great risk for you, Pavel Eduardovitch.’

‘It is not,’ he said, with an artificial smile. ‘I am an Imperial officer in pursuit of suspects. I have arrested number three in the hope of finding numbers one and two.’

‘And yet you have left your post and told no-one.’

‘That will hardly worry my superior, to whose daughter I am betrothed.’

Saskia grunted. She looked at her left hand. She put it through closing, opening, furling.

It had not occurred to Saskia that the parallel residence of the Nakhimovs would be other than the house on the Moika, but Pasha gave the taxi driver an address on Apothecary Island, where the houses were isolated, grand structures rather Swedish in style. They stopped at a gate whose white columns were grey shapes in the night. The courtesy lantern was unlit. That put Saskia in mind of the Swiss villa. The taxi rolled away and Saskia and Pasha stepped to the gate. In the low starlight, Pasha gasped at what Saskia had already seen: the gate was ajar. No St Petersburg house left its gate open overnight, even up here. Pasha swore and reached for his sword, but Saskia pressed on his hand.

‘No. They’ve gone already.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever forced the gate. Come.’

The drive wound through an apple orchard. As he jogged, Pasha’s regimental paraphernalia jangled and his fur-edge cape flowed. Saskia matched his pace. They emerged from the orchard to see a long, three-storeyed house in the baroque style. Its shape was little more than a dark outline against the stars.

‘We should check on Pyotor,’ said Pasha, gesturing at a small building near a knoll on the seaward side of the grounds. ‘There should be a light burning in his cottage.’

Here, on the exposed hill, a wind from the Gulf of Finland cooled Saskia’s skin. She bowed her head against it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The observatory.’

‘If anything has happened to my father because of you, I won’t answer for the consequences.’

‘I would not expect you to.’

They walked hillward, east of the house, to the grove beyond. An owl moved silently across their approach. There was no moon but starlight and the familiarity of home allowed Pasha to stride into the trees. The path was a pale cataract. Saskia listened to Pasha’s breaths, which came hard. It took a fit man to move with haste in the uniform of a Hussar. The Pasha she had left behind, dying, on the floor of the Amber Room matched this Pasha for height and strength of spirit, but not muscle. This Pasha had thrived in a richer soil.

Soon, the observatory appeared at the end of the path. It was set on a concrete base twenty feet high. The dome was open to the sky. Starlight reflected from the dome but it was otherwise dark.

‘Wait here,’ Pasha whispered, drawing his sword.

‘I was about to say the same to you.’

Pasha turned to her. Even with the darkness adaption of his eyes, Saskia knew he could not see her expression. His, however, was perfectly readable as one of determination and intelligence. He was the model of the man her own, dying Pasha would have wanted to be.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked. ‘Is there a password?’

‘There is no password.’

He frowned. His eyes searched the shape of her face. Then he seemed to give up on her, or remember the danger to his father. He charged on the observatory. There was something absurd about the paraphernalia of his uniform, and Saskia was doubly afraid for his life. She hurried after him.

The interior of the observatory was too dark even for Saskia. She slid her glasses from her collar and put them on. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth.

‘Near your left hand,’ she said, sadly. ‘There are matches and a lamp.’

Saskia sighed and removed the glasses. She turned to face the starfield in the doorway and considered the silence of space. Behind her, she heard Pasha strike a match. He gasped. The match went out. She heard the squeak of a lantern, another match striking, and then the light held. She watched her shadow yaw around the doorway.

A moment later, Pasha said, ‘You can turn around now.’

She did. She saw by the lantern light what her glasses had shown her. The Count was dead. He lay sideways, still tied to his chair. Much of his blood lay about him in an oily melt. The barrel of the brass telescope, which occupied the greater part of the observatory’s volume, had been dented and split open. Elsewhere, almanacs had been ripped from the shelves and scattered. The worktable had been upset and their tools spilled. Leather cases holding precision parts—screws, levers, tubing—were ripped and gutted. On one shelf, Saskia saw the glow of the radium pocket watch that the Countess had once owned. She took it.

Pasha crouched by his father and held the lantern near his face. As he sobbed, he removed the bearskin helmet and placed it on an unrolled chart.

‘What happened here?’ he said, without turning. ‘You claimed you’d been at the observatory this evening.’

Saskia worked through the possibilities. The Count looked as though he had died some hours before. It was likely that Kamo had tortured him while Soso looked on. The information they desired was, in all probability, the location of the monies from the Tiflis heist. But that made little sense if Saskia Beta had been present. Surely, she, too, had known its location.

‘I honestly don’t know.’

Pasha looked at her. His eyes streamed tears. But even as his body expressed its grief, Saskia could feel the mind coming to an assessment. This Pasha was more than worlds different from the Pasha who had died in her company.

‘What do you think, Ms Tucholsky?’ he said. His mouth was downturned and trembling.

‘This will not be easy to explain.’

The Hussar stared at her for a moment longer. His physiology showed signs that he was preparing to attack her. Instead, he looked down at the star maps, and then his forehead dropped to the shoulder of the dead Count and he wept.

Saskia watched him for a minute. In that time, she considered all those dead, all those in fear, and all those grey lives extended into a cold, waking hell beneath the amber eyes of Soso.

‘I can show you who killed him,’ she said, quietly, ‘and who broke into the Great Palace tonight.’

Pasha pressed his sleeve against his eyes.

‘Why would I believe you?’

‘You don’t need to believe me.’

Saskia blinked. She had made a mistake in her reasoning. Soso and Kamo had not tortured the Count to discover the whereabouts of the money. She already knew that because Saskia Beta knew. The Count had been killed for the secret of his contacts: the remaining participants in the game of double-cross he had been playing since his sojourn in Switzerland. To Soso, that would be equally valuable.

‘Pasha,’ she said, ‘you once told me that a man must voice his desires if he is to come to hold the object of them.’

‘If I did, I don’t remember. Speak plainly.’

‘What is your chief desire at this moment?’

‘To bury my father.’

‘And justice?’ she asked.

‘Yes, the true kind,’ he said. ‘The impersonal; the fair. I will not have revenge, if that’s what you want me to say.’

He truly is noble, she thought. Title or no title.

‘The murderers fly to Finland,’ she said, investing her voice with a passion it rarely contained. ‘Tonight. We can stop them.’

‘What revenge could you have?’ he said. ‘Why do this? Did you love my father? We all thought you laughed at him.’

‘Because …’ she began. There was no true end to that sentence. ‘Because I can.’

‘Enough,’ he said, standing. His sword remained against the wall. He did not reach for it, but his hands were loose by his sides. ‘You will come with me, and answer for your whereabouts tonight.’

Saskia stepped backwards into the night.

‘Good bye, Pasha.’

‘No,’ he said, leaping for the door.

Saskia watched from the wood while Pasha raged through the long grass around the observatory, his night vision stained by the lantern, swinging his sword and calling her name. He saddened her. He looked like the boy he was, perhaps dressed as a Hussar for a fancy dress ball, playing at soldier.

As the minutes drew on, Pasha staggered with fatigue and sheathed his sword. He searched for her with the lamp alone. Silently, she ascended a tree and held her breath. Pasha had lost his enthusiasm for the search. He returned to the observatory.

Saskia considered. Soso and Kamo would be bound for Finland. Her priority was to give chase. But without Pasha, or help from someone like him, that would be almost impossible.

‘Ego, do I have a field kit hidden somewhere, or a cache containing items like these glasses, and certificates of conduct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you tell me where it is?’

‘Certainly not.’

Saskia dropped from the tree and left Pasha in the observatory beneath the pale scintillations. She thought of Mount Tupungato in the far Andes, whose name meant “a place to observe the stars” in the Quechua language. Somewhere, she was certain, Kamo was looking up at the Runaway Star. She leaned into the growing wind and hurried down to the river. There, she found two Hacker motorboats. If she hurried, she could make the last train to Helsinki.