“So who will you summon when you encounter trouble you can’t face on your own, Jem?” She fastened the pendant around her neck, and Zachariah felt a sliver of relief. At least he’d accomplished that much.

I don’t anticipate that.

“Then you’re not paying attention.”

She touched him on the shoulder then, unexpectedly, and with unexpected gentleness.

“Thank you for trying,” she said. “It’s a start.”

Then he was watching her walk away.

Brother Zachariah watched the water stream beneath the bridge. He thought about that other bridge, in another city, where once a year he returned to remember the man he’d once been and the dreams that man had once had.

At the far end of the Pont des Arts, a young street musician opened a violin case and raised the instrument to his chin. For a moment, Zachariah thought he was imagining it—that he had conjured up a fantasy of his former self. But as he drew closer—because he could not stay away—he realized the musician was a girl. She was young, no more than fourteen or fifteen, her hair swept up beneath a newsboy cap, a neat, old-fashioned bow tie at the collar of her white blouse.

She bowed the strings and began to play a haunting melody. Brother Zachariah recognized it: a Bartók violin concerto that had been written well after Jem Carstairs had put down his violin.

Silent Brothers played no music. They didn’t listen to music either, not in the ordinary way. But even with their senses sealed off to mortal pleasures, they still heard.

Jem heard.

He was glamoured; the musician must have assumed she was alone. There was no audience for her music, no possibility of payment. She wasn’t playing for spare change but for her own pleasure. She faced the water, the sky. This was a song to welcome the sun.

Distantly, he remembered the soft pressure of the chin rest. He remembered his fingertips capering across the strings. He remembered the dance of the bow.

He remembered how, sometimes, it had felt like the music was playing him.

There was no music in the Silent City; there was no sun, no dawn. There was only dark. There was only quiet.

Paris was a city that luxuriated in the senses—food, wine, art, romance. Everywhere was a reminder of what he’d lost, the pleasures of a world no longer his. He had learned to live with the loss. It was harder, when he immersed himself in the world like this, but it was bearable.

This was something else, though.

The nothing he felt, as he listened to the melody, watched the bow waltz up and down the strings—the great hollow it opened inside him, echoing only with the past? That made him feel utterly, dismally inhuman.

The longing he felt, to truly hear, to want, to feel? That made him feel almost alive.

Come home, the Brothers whispered in his mind. It is time.