Fleeting images, and broken questions obsessed Garekyn. He saw jungles in his dreams, jungles through which they’d walked together, he and his companions, struggling against insects and reptiles and the curious savages who had invited them into their villages and offered them abundant food and drink. He saw a vast glittering city beneath an immense transparent dome. Everything depends on your getting into the city itself. Nothing can be achieved unless you do. He recalled the faces and forms of the others, beloved Derek, the boyish one, and Welf, gentle, patient, and ever-smiling Welf, and the brilliant and commanding Kapetria, who never raised her voice in anger or enthusiasm.

The Parents had said to them all: You have been created for this one purpose and you will perish as you achieve your purpose, and without your perishing it cannot be done. Derek had cried when the Parents spoke those words. “But why do we have to die,” Derek had asked. The Parents had been surprised by the question. Kapetria had taken Derek in her arms. “Is it necessary that this boy suffer so?”

Prince Brovotkin died in 1913 on the voyage to Brazil, leaving his entire estate to his adopted son, Garekyn. For a time, Garekyn had been lost. It was agony to see the Prince’s body committed to the ocean deep, and he wept nightly for months afterwards, even as he traveled the length and breadth of the American continents. Even music did not comfort him. Garekyn had never experienced the death of a loved one, or grief. And he had to learn how to go on in spite of it. The search for his lost brothers and sister soon came to obsess him.

Even now as he walked up Fifth Avenue in the bracing cold air of mild winter, Garekyn wore an old military coat of fine black wool with brass buttons given to him by Prince Alexi. And in his vest, he carried the Prince’s great pocket watch with the quotation from Shakespeare engraved inside the cover: LOVE ALL, TRUST A FEW, DO WRONG TO NONE.

Garekyn had never found any evidence anywhere of the others, his kin, as he called them. But he had never given up searching. If he was alive, they might still be alive. If he had been locked in the ice for thousands of years, so surely might they have been locked in the ice. And indeed, they might be locked in it still or only just released thanks to the strange phenomenon the world called “global warming.”

And Garekyn’s memories were increasing, bit by bit, and growing ever more detailed and disturbing.