“About Grendel’s condition? Oh, yes. He told your mother last night.” Sebastian nods enthusiastically, a man delighted about every scientific riddle on this earth and frustrated only by his own lack of time. “We have given the boy a name. Mowgli. After a recent book, set in the Raj.”

“Mowgli.” Livia too has read it. A boy raised by wolves. The animals decide to send him to the human village so he will learn to control his Smoke. Her mother had dismissed the book. She thought it sentimental; a lie. “How old is he?”

“Hard to say. I should think he was malnourished even before he embarked on his journey. Physically he could be as young as six. Eight, nine? A sullen child. Though his disposition is irrelevant for our purpose.”

Livia takes in the man’s smooth face and clever little hands playing with his umbrella; weighs his accent, the fact that he stole a child and condemned him to live encoffined in a mask. The question comes out before she can think better of it, artless and direct.

“Who are you exactly, Dr. Aschenstedt?”

This brings a grin to Sebastian’s face, boyish.

“Who am I? A scientist.”

“Mother says you are a genius.”

“I suppose I am.” He says it lightly, almost modestly. “I am also a criminal. False papers in my pocket, hiding behind an English name. Under my real name I am wanted in much of Europe. A threat to social order! They are not wrong. I’m a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A terrorist! But I dislike bombs.” He laughs, boyish still, steps closer to Livia, and confides: “Your two gentlemen friends and I have something in common. Our alma mater. For all we know we have slept in the same beds. And listened to the same sermons. I must ask them some time, trade stories, don’t you think?”

Livia fights being drawn in by this man. A lifetime of being lied to by her elders. Charlie, chained to his teacher’s bed. A little boy stolen in the name of Theory. Emphatic lessons in suspicion.

And yet it isn’t easy.

“What are you up to, Dr. Aschenstedt? Why are you here?”