“I was remembering the first time Victor left me to go to school. That was when he was thirteen, and it was just the local school in Geneva. He brought back all his books so I could study, too. And he brought back the most wickedly funny reports of his poor schoolmaster.” I could scarcely believe that was only five and a half years ago. Now Victor was nineteen, and he had not brought back anything, not even himself.

“Oh!” I set down my spoon and abandoned my cold tea for good. “His schoolmaster! I have just thought of our next clue. In one of his earliest letters he describes two professors at length. He seemed particularly keen to work with one, though both had knowledge he hoped to gain. Surely they will be able to direct us to him!”

I pulled out the meager collection of letters I had from Victor. Four, total, and three of those from his first month away. After that, seven months passed until the next. And after that, nothing.

I had Henry’s letter, too, from six months previous. But there was only one, and I did not care to read it ever again. The least he could have done was give me Victor’s new address before abandoning us both. But my anger had cooled after steeping for so long, to be replaced with gnawing fear. Victor’s extended silence could be attributed to any number of his less pliable traits. After all, I had been the one to gentle him. So long in my absence was not good for him. Or for us.

I stood, anxious for the day’s work to be done. “Let us visit some professors.”

Chapter Four: Half Lost, I Seek

PROFESSOR KREMPE WAS NOT nearly so unpleasant to look at as Victor had written. But Victor was so precise, so meticulous in his pursuit of perfection in all things, that someone with features as lopsided and coloring as uneven as Professor Krempe’s would be nearly unbearable for Victor to converse with.

If Victor could not fix it, he could not be around it. It was the fear of being unable to fix things that had driven him from Geneva. Had he found the answers he sought here?

Professor Krempe offered as little in the way of hope as he did in physical beauty. But his voice was kind and his expression apologetic. “He asked me for more chemistry books than a dozen students could need, and wrote me feverishly intense letters filled with the most astonishing and frequently absurd questions. But that all stopped more than a year ago. Indeed, until you young ladies knocked at my door, I assumed he had left his studies and moved on.”