“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I can work out how to—” He paused, skin tingling as the possibilities hit him in a rush. He pictured himself slipping unseen past armies of opponents, creeping undetected into the most guarded strongholds, and he stiffened in alarm as another thought came crashing in. “But what if I can’t work it out and it happens again? What if I can’t . . . get back? What if I get stuck being invisible?”

“Alex.” The old man tutted. “I don’t see the need to dwell on the negative side.”

Alex scowled, then turned to check he was still there in the mirror. He rolled his head on his neck. The woman’s slap was still fading on his skin. “She almost knocked me out,” he muttered, more to himself, then paused. Almost knocked me out. There was something there, a dim idea trying to form.

Once before when the tablet’s power had suddenly protected him, Alex recalled, he had been nearly unconscious: dozing almost passed out from exhaustion on a train, when bullies had targeted him. Similarly, when he had finally managed to communicate with the golem itself, he had meditated on the problem so long and hard he finally reached a near-hypnotized point where he had stopped thinking altogether. In fact, the very first time he’d noticed anything strange about the old toy robot at all was when he’d woken in his bedroom to discover homework he’d been struggling with had been finished while he slept.

He turned to tell his grandfather, but stopped. The old man stood with his back to him, pressing his whisky glass against his forehead as if to cool a fever. His shoulders were slumped. Everything about his sagging posture looked achingly weary.

“Are you okay?” Alex said.

“Hmm?” His grandfather straightened and looked around, smiling. “Oh, yes. The woman jumped at me as I was coming in the window.” He gestured with the glass. “I was out on the ledge, peeking in. She was in here, ransacking Harry’s things, then she went running toward the front. Figured I’d take my chance and sneak in, when she came tearing back and caught me. She’s an incredible fencer.

“We ended up stuck fighting in the corridor between here and the showroom quite a while. Her companion eventually joined in. Couldn’t see who was who, pitch-black. All got rather hectic. But I suspect it was her who got me: got me rather nicely.”

He raised his arm to display a bloody slash from knuckles to wrist. With a wince, he splashed whisky over the wound.

“It might not have been her,” Alex said with a start. “I saw him.”

“Hmm?” The old man began tying a handkerchief around the hand, wriggling his fingers as if to stimulate feeling.

“The tall man. Didn’t you see him?”

His grandfather’s head snapped up. “You saw him? Where?”