Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

My original upload on our domestic site, just in case anyone thinks this is ripped from somewhere

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Hannah Relf had of course heard a lot about Lyra Belaqua over the years, the pranks and nonsense that the girl quite literally attracted had made the rounds among the professors of most colleges. Accordingly, Hannah had experienced Lyra rather differently at their first private meeting with the headmaster of Jordan, and she had simply thought she was tired.

But a few weeks later, when she starts school and moves into the boarding school, that girl from the old stories is still not standing in front of her. And probably never will. Those times had passed.

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As they climbed in through the pantry window with the loose latch, they found the remains of an apple pie on the marble worktop.

"We must be lucky, Pan," Lyra said, as they carried it upstairs. "See, that's another thing it means."

When Lyra slipped back into her dorm room only one of her three flatmates was waiting for her. And Zelda was used to Miss Silvertongue's outings. Bundled up in her bathrobe, she sat on her bed with Inesto, her chameleon-shaped dæmon, surrounded by the usual collection of various notepads.

“I've finally got an idea of how to kill Mrs Goodwill so that the evidence points to Lady Brunswald.”

Lyra could only roughly guess which of her at least five different crime stories she was currently working on. Too often people were shuffled around between the different stories, more notes were made in one of the notepads, new ideas and things that came to her in everyday life. Zelda, just like Lyra, was 15 years old and despite her age a little fond of everything that had to do with heists, intrigue and crime. At least in written form. She had probably had to start writing herself because she had already read all the novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, her great role model. There was no question that being a detective, a criminalist, was her dream job, even if her mother preferred to see her to grow old alongside a rich man.
Lyra handed her the tray of cake.

“Where are you coming from? I thought you were going to Michael Choke's concert. Wega and Læna went with a couple others.”
“No, I was searching for an alchemist and someone tried to kill me,” Lyra told her in a casual manner.
“Again?”
Lyra fished her unfinished Latin translation out of her schoolbag, sat down on her bunk of the bunk bed under Zelda's and began to tell her about the day's events.

How she and Pan had once again been on Jordan's rooftops without permission, when suddenly something strange happened above their heads. They witnessed a fight between a whole flock of starlings and something, no, someone else. The dæmon of a witch, who called himself Ragi, had set off alone to find Lyra and, with her help, the last alchemist in Brytannia, as he was the only one who could still help his terminally ill witch.
Lyra had believed him and had spent the whole of yesterday searching for the gold maker, leaving an embarrassingly obvious trail for everyone to follow, and had finally arrived at the man's house, at the place if Sebastian Makepeace. She had been supposed to leave Ragi there, but, as so often, her curiosity had won out. Looking through the window of his house, she had seen the alchemist unconscious on the floor and sensed that something was wrong. Before she knew it, she was facing Ragi's rather chirpy witch, who attacked without much ado. Lyra wanted to fight, as Will had done, and not run away. But at the very moment the witch came dangerously close to Lyra, a swan had swooped over from the canal, pounced on the witch and fatally wounded her.

Makepeace had appeared dazed at the back door of his house and invited Lyra inside. The witch, Yelena Pazhets, had once been his mistress, or he her lover, as the case may be. They had had a son together who had died in Lord Asriel's war for his cause. It was probably even his mother's arrow that had taken his life in the turmoil of battle. And Yelena now blamed Lyra for everything, wanted to kill her and then frame the murder on her old love as revenge for his failure to protect the boy and his seduction to Lord Asriel's cause.

Just then, on her and Pan’s way back to St Sophia’s, down in the park, Lyra had noticed that all the birds in Oxford seemed to want to protect her during the day, the starlings over Jordan, the screaming pigeons in the streets, and finally the swan by the canal. And so she tipped the last crumbs of cake onto the windowsill for them.

“My goodness, you really do experience crazier things than I could ever dream up.” Zelda joked, loudly clapping shut one of her notebooks.

She knew the story of Miss Silvertounge's life in great detail. She knew about Lyra's seduction to London, her liberation by the Gyptians and the events in the far north, in Bolvangar. She knew that the Magisterium had been looking for her, that she played some important role in the war that Lord Asriel had waged in a distant world. After all, he had recruited young men everywhere, even here in contemplative Oxford. They had set out northwards in lockstep and with singing. Few had ever returned. No one knew whether that war had been won, and if so, for which side. Not even Serafina Pekkala, who reach out to Lyra from time to time.

The witch from the far North reported to Lyra on the progress of her task of closing the windows and abysses in the different worlds. An almost impossible task, as there were so many of them. And they could only even reach the worlds that were connected to Cittigazze. After Lord Asriel's Svalbard portal had been reduced to the size of a kitchen table, they could travel from there to the other worlds, close all the windows, and then return. Some witches and angels had already made the mistake of closing the one window that ensured their way back. If they were not lucky enough to reach other worlds through other windows that led back to Cittigazze, they were lost.

Far greater damage than the small windows that the magic knife (and its equivalent brothers, which seemed to exist in some other worlds) had cut into the multiverses, was caused by Lord Asriel's grand bridge in the Arctic Circle and, much worse than that even, by the weapon that the Magisterium had detonated. Like laddering in a pair of tights, both events had opened up holes and cracks between the universes. The small ones seemed to be closing up by themselves, perhaps a sign of the restoring balance after the opening of the World of the Dead, much like the scratches and bruises on all those involved did; but if the wounds were too large, in both cases the healing hands of witches and angels were needed. But the bomb of the Magisterium had also caused something else: it was responsible for the Abyss that had opened up before Lyra and Will in the realm of the dead, deep below the earth, and numerous similar holes in other universes. Like the end of the abyss, there was also a window, a portal, into the space between the worlds, into something that was barely imaginable. In their mathematics class, their professor had once presented the principle of mathematical singularity to the students by typing the simple equation ‘one divided by zero’ on a mechanical calculator. The rollers had begun to rotate, the numbers had shot up, without end, without meaning, until their professor had braked the machine with a specially attached lever. The rattling machine, trapped in the endless task set for it, had reminded Lyra so much of the feeling that the endless abyss, torn open by the weapon, had evoked in her.

According to the witches‘ and angels’ findings, this opening was rather choosy. Normal matter passed through it, but Dust, light and anything other than matter fell into nothingness. If a person passed through it, only their body appeared at the other end, as a lifeless shell of bone and flesh. Mind and soul disappeared or fell endlessly into nothingness; no one could say.

The abyss in the realm of the dead was closed by the hands of witches. Underneath it, on a mountain of debris, they were to find the rigid bodies of Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulters, tightly entwined. They took the corpses back to the former Republic of Heaven and buried them in a shared grave under a large tree. They could not have separated the two bodies if they had wanted to.

Lyra, of course, only learned of all this from Serafina's stories. While she continued her adventure, the girl had begun a new life in Oxford. As they had discussed with the headmaster of Jordan, Dame Hannah Relf had accepted her as a student at St. Sophias. She was one of two students to join the sixth-grade classes of the preparatory school, and she was surprisingly well received. Even her unusual basic education, which consisted only of private lessons from university professors who were completely unsuitable for the purpose, was able to hold its own quite well against her fellow students, most of whom had attended public primary schools from the age of seven, were partly taught at home by their parents or had even had a personal home teacher.

Lyra shared a cosy room with three of these girls for almost three years now. Zelda, who was finishing the last of the cake with her, belonged to the first group. Although was blessed with noble Swedish blood through some family connections, she had been sent to the public St Barnabas primary school near the harbour earlier. A wish of her father. Even though his position as ambassador of the Swedish kingdom allowed him and his family access to Britain's most privileged circles, he had wanted his children to have as normal a life as possible, like the one he once had as a boy back home in Sweden, much to the chagrin of Zelda's mother.

She didn't have to wash the mountains of dirty clothes herself, there were servants for that, but she was the one who sometimes had to explain to the posh house guests why it was perfectly normal for the Stansted offspring to hide from gangs of college children in a dung heap.

Lyra could still remember the primary school Zelda dimly. Then as now with white-blonde curls and green eyes, and always a little more elegantly dressed than the other city children. Wasn't that why some of Lyra's boys had teased her with the title ‘queen’? Something like that. Today Zelda was well on her way to becoming a very attractive woman. Her curls usually reached mid-back, her eyes were large and curious, and her figure was similar to Lyra's, but a little more shapely, more feminine. It was easy to see why some boys couldn't take their eyes off her. And also that some of her quirks, like her passion for criminalistics or the old pipe she occasionally puffed on, confused them a little.

Læna, the third girl living in room 38, was a little different. As the youngest of four children, she had been taught at home and perhaps had too little contact with outside peers during her childhood as a result. At the age of ten, at the behest of her parents who taught at other colleges, she had entered St. Sophia's preparatory school as the youngest student at the time.

In her appearance, she matched pretty much every description of Snow White in fairy tale books. Shiny black hair, pale skin and a delicate smile that was sometimes complemented by rosy cheeks. Cute was an apt word. She had not gone unnoticed by the opposite sex either. Unfortunately, her innocent appearance had so far only attracted the wrong kind of guys, namely those who expected an equally innocent, one could say naive girl behind it. And unfortunately, this was a little the case. Læna was smart and hardworking, there was no question about that, but she was also always a wee bit gullible.

She was someone you could rely on, which some people had known to use for their misdeeds. Like the story with the schnapps. It had caused three students to be kicked off out of the school, and given the college an almost free room 38. Læna's childish, somewhat immature nature saved her from a similar punishment. Like her parents, her teachers were sometimes worried that even her dæmon had not yet settled on a form, which was rather noticeable in a girl of fifteen. It kept changing between a meerkat, a lemur and a dove still.

The second newcomer and forth person in this room had a similarly unusual story to Lyra, and reflected the turmoil of the events that had taken place three years earlier.

Wega was a ‘window orphan’, an example of a phenomenon that had happened so often that the witches had given it a name. The windows between the universes, whether they were the windows of the subtle knife, the seemingly natural ones like the one in Lyra's Oxford that had led to Will's Oxford that Lord Boreal had used, or the holes produced by the bomb: They all seemed to have a peculiar attraction to children. And too many of those that crossed could not find their way back to their home worlds alone. The witches did their best to bring the young wanderers back, not always with success. Although Wegas' story was slightly different, she was just one of many children in foreign climes.

When Wega met Lyra, on their first day at St. Sophia's, she was quiet and frail. Her great aunt, who lived in Bryton and was the last relative remaining in Brytain, didn't have much time for the child, who was also still a little young for an apprenticeship in the Jonassen trade. That's why she entrusted the girl to the care of St. Sophia's.

Today, Miss Jonassen appeared as an astonishingly mature young woman. She was tall, taller than her three other companions, despite the distinct Asian features she owed to her mother. Rather athletic than gracile, she formed an antithesis to her more feminine friends. Only a few knew about her physical and mental scars, but they kept rearing their ugly heads. The small, plump cross, without which she would not leave their room, her unease at showing too much skin even in front of other girls, the nightmares that haunted her some nights, even her tightly bound reddish-brown hair, that did not obstruct her vision and hearing, were for those in the know remnants of her odyssey.

She was the only one here in the room next to Lyra to have a full scholarship. Probably, Lyra often suspected, not so much because of her good performance, even though she achieved it. Rather, it was because of the similarity of their stories that Dame Hannah found Hannah so appealing. So that they, Lyra and Wega, could support each other and understand what the other had experienced. And last but not least, a window orphan was a good match for the unorthodox girls of this college.

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Despite the windows being open, the smoke hangs heavily in the large salon of Oriel College. A young woman sits at the grand piano and fills the little silence with a gentle piece by Reginald Dwight.

Young men and boys from Oriel’s boarding school and young women and girls from the surrounding schools try their hand at awkward small talk. In the middle of it all, on the sofa corner near the south windows, sits the small community of room 38. It is their first time at such a social evening, and yet they feel old compared to this childish whispering, gossiping, anxious glancing for the teachers present, and the puffing and sucking on the long bamboo, wood and ceramic sticks with a cigarette glowing at the end. Lyra can hardly wait to finally be old enough to visit all the dive bars and seedy joints with her school friends, which her urban and Gyptian friends so often rave about.

But here, like children at the fence of a chicken coop, they watch the spectacle and comment on it. And they wait for the fourth in the group.

She attracts everyone's attention when she finally appears, pulling the finely crafted China White pipe from an inside pocket of her dress. Deeply sunken into the sofa cushions she adds a soft, exotic fruit aroma to the acrid clouds of smoke.

Chapter Text

Provocative... courageous... fascinating... terrifying. His congregation whispers as they leave. Something that has never happened before after the Sunday mass. Reverend Puddlemore of Dunsfold dared to go off script, addressed taboos, made his congregation think with his sermon, and with the reading. A Bible reading in the language of the people, not in Latin. And of this text, from an apocryphal gospel that was once removed from the Bible at the behest of Pope Innocent VII, as he considered it to be in conflict with it. The pagan Gospel of Luke, which anyone outside the highest theological circles of the Committee for the Propagation of the True Faith could only get hold of on the black market. Just a few years ago, Reverent Puddlemore would have been hauled before a magisterial court for this act, sent to another parish or even sent on a mission. Fortunately, today those at the top were much too preoccupied with themselves.

These times allowed for change, things that had been needed for a long time. And for the first time in a long time, Father Puddlemore is content, and at peace with himself and his faith.

He takes his journal and pen, picks a plum from the small tree to the right of the gate of his church, and sits down in the vicarage garden. There’s already plenty of ideas for next Sunday. Again in English. Again with Luke.

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Sunday mass was still compulsory for all students. Like every week, Lyra was sitting in St Lazenmoore Church with her friends and the other girls from St Sophia's at ten o'clock sharp.

The order of service had been the same since forever:

Greeting, song, prayer, song, Bible reading (in Latin, of course), song, sermon, prayer, song, announcements, and finally a blessing, with a Holy Communion inserted now and then. Everything was routine. Lyra appreciated this time nonetheless. It gave her time to reflect. While Father Fahrdorf was once again preaching about the danger of temptation and explaining everything through his constantly rehashed parable of the seeds, she was thinking about all varieties of things.

Like one thing she couldn't really grasp still: Without windows, the angels were unable to visit other worlds in their full form. Nevertheless, there was a Bible in Will's world like in hers, which only differed in minor details from that of her world. Jesus' dove dæmon was missing in his, and some gospels were written by other people. But on the whole, everything followed the same narrative threads, and somehow angels had also appeared there and so on, at a time when the knife had not yet been invented. How had they come to the other world? Did all the Bible happenings happen simultaneously in all the worlds? In which world were the angels at home anyway? Was there some power above them that had made the exchange possible?

Lyra was always surprised herself where her mind drifted.

Or she read in that very Bible that was laid out in every pew, despite being in its for most incomprehensible old Roman language, and not in English, like the one she had to read with Professor Trelawney back at Jordan. Fortunately, Latin had become one of her favourite subjects. The stories and tales in this old book, which every clergyman liked to refer to in every situation and every discussion with verse and paragraph, always gave her curious mind new food for thought. Her Sunday studies had also taught her how the witches came to call her the new Eve, as she had learned. She understood that Mary, with her own story instead of a fruit, had taken on the role of the seductive snake, and Will that of Adam. The Fall of Man was a parable of the end of childhood, or at least that was how Lyra thought she could understand it. And all what followed the fall could be meant to illustrate the settling down of the first humans, going from hunting & gathering to having to farm for food. Sinful thinking, she laughed to herself, any pastor would have given her a stern talking to for this interpretation, actually just for the arbitrary attempt at all, and invited her to ‘private tuition’ alone in his rectory.

After each mass, the obligatory confession followed. Lyra hated this part deeply. They had to line up in two rows in front of the confessionals. Every week it was the turn of a different year group, and each person had about two minutes to go in, present their sins and be forgiven. The excuse ‘I have not sinned’ was not accepted, so if necessary one would spontaneously invent something like ‘swearing’ or ‘lying’. Some of the girls made a real sport out of thinking up hair-raising stories to get Father Fahrdorf or his assistant Bilby in the other chair to utter some sounds other than the usual ‘Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis’.

Things had clearly taken a different route than Lyra had feared, back then in the headmaster's office at Jordan College. She had already seen herself, straightened out, robbed of her quirks, among all those girls whose only real goal for their time at school was to be married to a wealthy bachelor. In the end, only those who didn't get a husband would graduate anyway.

In fact, this was more the rule than the exception, and most womens' colleges, including the ones in Oxford, saw their role as preparing the young ladies for their future married life rather than imparting deep intellectual knowledge and something the women could live of afterwards. At most, they were supposed to be educated to an intellectual standard so as not to appear stupid next to their educated husbands.

But St. Sophias was different from all these institutions, commonly known as ‘Goodwifeschools’. Put in a nutshell, Dame Hanna’s college was a place where all the rejects ended up: Girls, who, like Lyra, had their rough edges and were to keep them. Lyra didn't have to worry about fitting in, and was accepted as she was into the community of around 300 female students, teachers and professors. She had even known some of them from somewhere, like Zelda, against whom she had once fought in the clay pits.

Of course, Dame Hanna also saw it as her duty to prepare her protégés for their position in society, which was simply different from that of men. But for her, this was always of lower priority than the education and realisation of their dreams.

Like the other headmasters, she organised social evenings, but these did not degenerate into pure bride shows. Profiles for the visiting bachelors, with photograms, age, measurements and parental home, like at a cattle market these evenings seemed to go down at Magdalen College. Dame Hannah just shook her head when she heard something like that. In her school, these evenings always remained in her emancipated female hands; the men and boys were guests, not bidders.

And sometimes some really nice boys came along after all. Once, Lyra almost gave in, felt feelings arise within her that were supposed to be reserved for just one person. Will was far away and yet so close. If he had really moved in with Dr Malone, he lived just a stone's throw from her room. Mary Jane's cosmetics boutique was located on this site in Lyras Oxford. In the morning, she could see through the window as the shopkeeper opened up her business.

Today, on Sunday, the shutters remained closed. After lunch at Zelda's parents' house, Lyra and Zelda and Læna wandered the cobbled streets of Oxford, which were much pleasanter in the sunshine of the coming summer than they had been the night before. The three approached Juxton Street cautiously, and the police van could be seen from a distance, still apparently dealing with the evidence. Zelda couldn't resist the temptation and joined the investigators she knew, as always with her notebook at the ready and an Inesto, currently bright green, on her shoulder.

Lyra preferred to keep her distance. Together with Læna, she followed the road past the University Press and then took the footpath down to the canal. Gyptian boats were moored there, but none of the family crests belonged to a clan she knew. They walked as far as the corner of Worcester and Park Street, where Læna went home. From here, it wasn't much farther to Jordan College. The warm lead roof awaited her.

Lyra had dozed for an hour when a familiar figure appeared at her feet. She had been a rare visitor in the last two years.

“Serafina, what brings you here?”

“I need to get a picture of what happened last night. I visited a sorcerer from Zealand, and rumours spread quickly among my people.”

She sat down next to Lyra on a ridge of the roof, and the girl began to retell the events of the previous night a second time. Pantalaimon chased after a flock of sparrows and soon escaped her sight.

Serafina listened attentively, although Lyra sensed a certain tension in her. Yelena's tribe was not necessarily peaceful towards Serafina, and so further investigation on their part was difficult. But it was very unusual for one of their witches to act alone. Even in personal feuds, they usually always appeared in groups. Maybe there was more to it than just the relationship between Makepeace and Yelena. Something she could only investigate in her home country.

“How is Wega?”

Serafina still cared a lot about this girl. She had been the first child from their own world that she had found in another. The first window orphan accompanied by a dæmon. Wandering the foreign world for almost a year, alone and always on her guard.

Wega had sailed with her parents on their yacht through the Arctic Ocean, on the way to Quebec. Testing a new trade route through the newly warm Arctic Sea. When they reached the other coast, they found themselves in a strange, dark environment. ‘Is this what Quebec looks like?’ she had asked her father. But he had to say no. Wherever they were, he had never seen this country before. Noise filled the air, flying machines, a hundred times faster than the fastest zeppelins, ploughed through the sky, following their route up the river estuary. When they went ashore at the nearest port to inquire, they were seized by soldiers, tall men with a strange language that somehow resembled Hungarian. They seized their parents‘ dæmons, their father's husky and their mother's snow-white fox with their bare hands, defying every taboo. And they had no dæmons of their own.

They did not see Vicino, Wega’s dæmon, because he had changed himself into a snake and was hiding, coiled around her arm. The family was locked in the cargo hold of a vehicle despite all their pleas, her parents hardly able to fight through the weakness the taboo touch caused them. The dæmons remained under the control of the soldiers, outside the vehicle. Then it started moving, accelerating powerfully, and seconds later their parents' bodies fell lifelessly to the floor.

What followed, Lyra and Serafina only knew in fragments, Wega still found it difficult to talk about it. She was sedated and woke up in a laboratory. Somehow she managed to escape from there. The only goal in this strange world for the mind, body and soul of the twelve-year-old child was the place from which she had come, the sea outside the northern bay. But the laboratory was far from there. She found a map and had a destination. Her odyssey was just beginning. Wega's half-Javan descent gave her an appearance that was very different from that of that strange country's inhabitants. She looked different. Perhaps like the enemy. And as such was damned to a journey in solitude.

“Her nightmares are becoming fewer. The more she remembers and tells us, the better she seems to feel. And school and work at the market give her something else to think about.”

“Where is she now?” the witch asked.

“I don't know. I haven't seen her since mass. She left as usual before confession. Dame Hannah ignores it with her.”

Lyra was silent for a moment, then she continued.

“And she finally did something about the strange bars her captors had tattooed on her shoulder. She had them covered up with an image of her cross.”

Serafina smiled gently.

“The Meschiahs created an island of peace and love for her in that other world, even if only for a short time. I wish more of the children had been so lucky.”

Serafina paused.

“What will happen here now?” Lyra asked, more to herself than to the witch. “The war may be over, but the Magisterium still exists. It no longer has such a strong influence because people are increasingly resisting. But the old structures are still intact, as I saw just this morning. Somehow, father's fight didn't get us much.”

“It was never supposed to. Lord Asriel fought for his convictions, his beliefs, not for you or me. He risked our deaths to achieve his goal.”

The conversation came to a halt again. Everything seemed so long ago and far away. But the effects could still be seen every day. The protests, the newspapers that renounced the Magisterium, the unusual words of power from the royal house, the diminishing fear of the omnipresent institution. The increasing influence of the distant states in politics. The world seemed to be opening up a bit. Perhaps more than Lyra assumed?

She had heard little from the Nordic peoples of the witches and the Panserbjørn, whom she had come to know and appreciate, except for Serafina herself. Even with the Gyptians, there was hardly any contact anymore.

“What will you witches do now?”

“We are undecided. Our task is still not finished, and we don't know if we ever will be able to. The paths to many of the worlds are closed for us, and in Cittàgazze we seem to have done everything that was possible. When I was there last time, citizens had actually started to return to the city. They have already completely demolished the cursed tower, some did it as a kind of sacrifice to their god or gods. But as you know, a kind of self-healing seems to be taking place. As if the universes have gained strength, perhaps thanks to the opening that you and Will created back then.”

She looked down and stroked the flowing folds of her black robe.

“And it seems we were wrong.”

Lyra looked into Serafina's face, undecided, until she no longer avoided her gaze.

“The Prophecy. We thought it was complete, but apparently we were wrong. It has no end, but we don't know in what role you, I, and everyone else once involved will continue to participate in it. We know nothing about it, except that there is no conclusion. Our seers lack clarity.”

She looked at Lyra's hip, where the bag with the Alethiometer had been. But there was nothing. The golden compass was safely stored in her room at St. Sophias, along with the books that now belonged to it.

“It's no use. I can't read it anymore like I used to. The angels have taken that power from me.”

“I know. I guess we have no choice but to wait. When your destiny follows a path, you will find it yourself.”

“...like I did four years ago. I only asked the alethiometer for advice, most of the ideas were my own - I believe, I hope. Somehow I'm quite glad that I can't read the golden thing the way I used to.”

Lyra pulled her legs up to her.

“It scares me a little today. Did I ever have any choice in what I did, or did something guide all my actions and those of the people around me?” Lyra asked quietly.

“The prophecy didn't predict the future, it just provided a framework that we had to interpret, like the alethiometer.”

“But all those things,” Lyra sighed deeply, “people in Jordan used to say that I had a mind of my own, that no one could tame me or control me. And then everything happened exactly as predicted in that prophecy. Somehow, everything I did had a deeper meaning, as if I were being controlled from afar. If I hadn't fled from Mother's penthouse, the Gyptians wouldn't have found me; if I hadn't led Iorek to his armour, he wouldn't have been able to save my life; if I hadn't followed my father through the window, Will and I would have never f-”

“Stop!”

Serafina had gone to her knees before Lyra and placed her hand on her head.

“You mustn't think like that. You allowed the prophecy to happen, you triggered it. Your existence allowed the prophesy to happen, not that prophesy your existence. You are the source, the beginning, Eve if you will. You must not worry about what has happened; our minds are not made for that. What is done is done, what will happen will happen, when you and everyone else goes their way. Just follow your heart.”

Serafina's words and touch worked wonders on Lyra. She closed her eyes and let her head absorb the warmth of the witch's hand. The touch had something maternal about it, something that Lyra sometimes missed. Lyra and Serafina remained on the roof for another half hour, during which they both talked about the more mundane things in their lives, until dark clouds gathered and announced rain.

“Whenever you need help, call on me. You still have my flower, don't you?”

“Yes, but it dried up.”

“I'll bring you a new one the next time I come from the north. But I'll stay in the area for a few days and investigate the incident with Yelena Pazhets. Perhaps Makepeace can shed some more light on it. If he lets witches near him now. Take care, sister.”

She caught hold of her cloud-pine branch and vanished into the low-hanging grey-white clouds. Pantalaimon came back from some distant part of Jordan and leaped into Lyra's arms. A glance at her pocket watch told her that it was almost time for dinner again and that she was expected at St. Sophia's.

After the generous lunch at the Stansted house Lyra only needed a small plate. With Sicilian Caprese on it, she sat down at an empty place and had just started eating when Zelda sat down on the chair next to her. Under the disapproving gaze of Miss Conchord, she put her bag under the chair and turned to her stew.

“The police are assuming it was an accident so far, just a wild animal,” she mumbled with the corner of her mouth in the direction of Lyra.

“They found bite marks on the swan's neck, right on the arteries, from those small teeth. Either it was an animal or someone who went to the trouble of making a weapon out of a swan's beak, they say. But the residents didn't see anyone. They just heard the beast.”

Well, so Lyra didn't have to worry about being interrogated too. She wasn't as good at lying as she once was.

“And that Makepeace bloke, whose house it happened in front of, is out of town. He asked the police if he could leave.” She took a spoonful of potatoes and beans that was too big and shoved it into her mouth.

“Do you know where he's going?”

“He told them he was going to Blackpool for a medical conference. It's a real thing, I asked Dr Wesling. It'll last two weeks.”

Zelda was in her element, one could tell.

“Do you think he's important in some way? Next week is the trip to the Blackpool Opera House, and there are still places available, so we could follow his trail. It's less conspicuous than if we went there alone.”

Lyra stirred the non-mixing layer of vinegar and oil that covered the bottom of her plate, trying to keep the green and black separate, but it didn't work.

“I don't know. Serafina and I are sure that there is more to it than just the personal feud between the witch and the guy. And I don't understand exactly how I fit into it either. He had heard of me, who hadn't, but otherwise I don't see any direct connection between us. And I didn't see anything conspicuous at his house.”

Lyra tried to speak quietly and casually, unobtrusively, as she always did when she talked to Zelda about her books. She was a little more careless.

“Did you know what you were supposed to be looking for, and how?”

A little too conspicuously, she pulled the leather case for her magnifying glass out of the pocket of her dress. Susan Mahoney, who was sitting opposite them, shook her head knowingly.

With a nudge in the side, Lyra instructed Zelda to wait with her plans until later in their room.

There, within earshot of Wega and Læna, they decided to wait until Friday night to go to Makepeace's house; they shouldn't risk being caught out after dark in the last week of school before the summer holidays. If they found anything at his place, they could look for him in Blackpool the next day. If there were no clues, they would visit the opera, museums and piers with the others and then start their holidays as they had in previous years. Lyra would work part-time all over Oxford, Wega would help out at her aunt's company and Zelda would pursue her social duties, which mostly consisted of travelling and attending balls. Læna would, as always, decide spontaneously from day to day.

The next few days went by as usual. Wega registered room 38 for the excursion and Lyra spoke to Serafina Pekkala again. She had also learned of Makepeace's travel plans and had actually intercepted him in Birmingham. But she hadn't been able to get much out of the man. He said the congress had been planned for a long time, that he had developed a new mixture for dental fillings for it, and was even able to show her jars filled with the silvery-milky mixture. And then he asked her to leave. He could no longer tolerate the presence of witches.

Lyra had mixed feelings about Friday evening. What could they find, would she stumble into another adventure? Did she even want that?

Zelda, on the other hand, couldn't wait. She had packed one of her bags in advance with her criminal investigation equipment, including a magnifying glass, paint brushes, lock picks and indicator tinctures, which she had gathered from various sources. She was thrilled to finally be able to put her knowledge into practice, and her friends and Inesto found it difficult to keep her grounded.

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The light is still on in room 38. It's Friday evening and there’s nothing scheduled for the next day. Lyra is sitting on her bed reading a Latin book about the travels of a Roman cartographer. Across from her, at the foot of the same bed, Wega is sitting and flipping through a magazine. Læna is already asleep, snoring softly. The girls' dæmons are dozing on the rug in the middle of the room, nestled together. Zelda is standing on the small balcony, sipping her pipe and looking up at the stars. She dreams of travelling to distant lands and worlds, like the ones Lyra has told her about. Below her, the city lies murmuring in the night.

Chapter Text

The Southside Club is one of the most select addresses in Oxford. Those who gain entry here can be sure of belonging to the city's most important minds, to the elite. All headmasters are among them, including those of the smaller colleges. An old tradition.

At a table decorated with ornaments, inset jewels and gilded feet, as can be found here in abundance, some of them sit and exchange views. The headmaster of St. John's and the headmistress of Queen Philippa's toast each other. Two of their students, children of good families, the son of an industrial magnate and the daughter of a lord, got engaged yesterday. Generous donations for the matchmakers can be expected. One exchanges information about one's students. Dame Hanna begins to talk about her protégées. Some are aspiring to become doctors, diplomats, authors, a pianist, a criminalist, even the first alethiometrist in decades could be among them... the list of her girls' goals is long and diverse. But her female colleagues seem uninterested. She had not mentioned any marriages.

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Friday came with a certain air of solemnity. The previous evening had seen an extravagant social evening with visitors from Somerville College, and the teachers took their last lessons at a leisurely pace. They had already handed out their school reports on Wednesday. Lyra had only skimmed through hers, there was nothing critical anywhere, and she was not demanding anything more of herself. And the last person to exercise any kind of custodial care over Lyra, the headmaster of Jordan, got everything that could be important to him lukewarm from Dame Hannah herself, at their meetings at the Southside Club, for example.

Late at 11 o'clock at night, the time had come. Lyra had spent the hours between dinner and now in the library, flicking through Dame Hannah's alethiometer literature and dozing a little with Pan as a pillow. The way from here to her dormitory rooms led, according to the shortest route, across the dark courtyard. It was easy to instead climb over the short end of the fence between the school building and the caretaker's shack with Pan as a spy, and in no time she was standing on the deserted street.

This was the agreed meeting point with Zelda. Actually, Lyra would have preferred to carry out the whole operation alone, but Zelda had the knowledge for such a quasi-burglary and also the ambition, which she herself lacked right now. For a moment, Lyra peered down the street uneasily, but she couldn't see anyone. Was her friend late? But she was already several minutes behind schedule herself because she had let herself be persuaded by Professor Janus to have a short chat about Svalbard.

While she was still searching, Pan noticed something. In the corner of a house, less than four yards away from them, something twinkled. A black something, like the grim reapers in the world of the dead, nestled with its dark outline against the nearby brick wall. As Lyra followed his gaze, the figure stepped into the light of the nearby street lamp and revealed herself as her noble roommate, with her bright green eyes standing out unrealistically from the dull black.

“You really didn't see us?”

Lyra and Pan shook their heads in disbelief and cast their eyes at her. The bright violet dress Zelda had worn during the day had given way to a black velvet cloak, and her legs were wrapped in equally dark wide trousers. Her blonde hair was tucked away somewhere in the large hood, and the collar was popped up to the tip of her nose. They only noticed the perfectly adapted Inesto on her shoulder when he snapped at some mosquitoes with his bright red tongue.

“I usually only wear this to funerals, used to belong to my mother,” she said, folding back the collar into a more civilised form.

They quickly reached Makepeace's house. They hardly met any other people on their route, far from the boulevards, only a few drunken guests staggered around the pubs. As if followed by a shadow, Lyra walked quickly ahead and found the hidden path that led along behind the gardens. Carefully, they climbed over the low garden gate and entered the dark property.

In the pale moonlight they tiptoed through the rows of beds to the back door of the house. Zelda rummaged around in her coat, pulled out the shoulder bag hidden underneath it and began to examine the door with her silver torch. She probed the door lock with a small wire that might once have been the antenna of a radio, shook her head briefly, and put it away. Finally, she got an idea and whispered to her friend.

“Lyra, hold onto this.”

Lyra did as she was told, reaching for the knob. Zelda had meanwhile pulled another thin tool, a long screwdriver, out of her bag, and stuck it into the small gap between the door and the frame, allowing a little moonlight to fall into the room behind it. She stretched up to the top of the door, slowly pushed the tool further in until finally a soft ‘tock’ could be heard from inside the house. She bent down, repeated the same procedure a second time, and again, this time much quieter, something inside the house fell onto the wooden floor.

“Now, hold on.”

Zelda pushed against the door, but on the wrong, fixed side. Yet it moved. As soon as the gap allowed her, she reached into the opening with her hand, gripped the upper edge of the door and pushed it fully open, but still in reverse. Inesto took the chance and, in keeping with his form's nature, teetered into the house.

‘”The lock is too modern, I couldn't have picked it easily, but the door itself is much older, its door bolts aren't fixed at the bottom. I was able to simply push them out with this. Just like the door to the map room last year.”

They were in. The girls carefully lifted the door back onto its hinges and put the bolts, which now, in the light of the lamp, looked like large nails without tips, back in place. The key was inside the door, so they would definitely get out.

But first they were in the house, and Lyra still wasn't sure what exactly they wanted to look for. With careful steps and their shoes in hand, she and her companion wandered through the gloomy rooms.

“I think he's planning to be gone for more than a week.”

Everything pointed to that. The furniture was covered with large white linen sheets, windows and cupboards were locked wherever possible. The sideboards and the frost cabinet were empty. It wouldn't work without ambaric energy anyway. It had been turned off.

The situation upstairs was similar. The house looked as if it was ready to move into. Only in the second room upstairs did it look very different. A thick layer of dust covered everything in the room, although it looked the most lived-in of all the rooms in the house, thanks to strewn about books, clothes and general youthful disorder. But Lyra thought she understood why. It was the room of the man's son, who had died in the war years ago. And Makepeace hadn't changed anything since that day.

“His son died in that war?” Zelda asked gently.

Pan nodded in answer. They left the room and pondered. Except for this room, they hadn't found anything truly personal or revealing so far. But what about the laboratory, the cellar where Makepeace had led Lyra that evening?

It took them some time to find an entrance from the interior to this vault, under the rug, which Zelda said was very unusual and striking in the middle of a kitchen. Following their dæmons, they descended a narrow wooden staircase.

The air down there was as heavy and chemical as it had been two weeks before, constricting their vocal cords and making their eyes water. Viols and flasks, bottles and cylinders, filled with liquids and powders, filled the makeshift shelves made of wooden boards.

“Sodium, caesium, oh look, a whole litre of mercury!”

Zelda had seated Inesto on one of the shelves, lit for him and had him read the contents of the cylinders standing there, while he tried unsuccessfully to imitate the reflective surfaces of the metals. Lyra wandered around with her torch and looked around further, away from all the chemicals. Something had caught her eye.

This room was more of a depot or storage room than a workshop, there were no real work surfaces. Just a tiny secretary with an excuse of a chair in front of it and the now empty flask of water on top. She couldn't imagine Makepeace doing all of his mixing up in his kitchen upstairs, besides, it would have smelled up there like it did down here.

“I think there's another chamber around here somewhere where he actually brews all that stuff…” Lyra mumbled into her collar.

Zelda carefully got down on her hands and knees and felt around on the dusty floor. Pan and Inesto did the same and crawled around with the junior criminalist in front of the wall of glass and alchemy.

“Zelda, there are scratch marks here!” Pan finally exclaimed. At the foot of one of the shelves, deep grooves could be seen in the worn wooden floorboards. The chameleon ducked under the lowest shelf, only to reappear a moment later and address the girls. “There's a door behind here!”

The two of them quickly moved the shelf. In fact, only the front row of glass was filled with something (Zelda suspected flour), and even those were glued to the oak planks like the rest. Obviously to be light and easy to move.

Behind the door was a room, even larger than the storeroom they had just come from. It was surprisingly empty. Periodic tables, mixing tables and other charts, such as could be found in any laboratory in the colleges of Oxford, were revealed by the light of their torches as wall decorations all around.

A huge laboratory table, built from simple bricks and tile scraps, had apparently been poured with molten glass, and now offered a perfectly smooth, even, acid-resistant and easy to clean work surface in the middle of the room. The mountain of paper stacked at the far end caught Lyra's attention. She asked her friend to light the Naphtha lamps on the walls and began to browse through the records:

Sebastian Julius Makepeace, that was his full name, had apparently had a convoluted career. She found letters that were only a few weeks old, inviting him to the medical congress that Makepeace had mentioned to the police and Serafina. Colleagues congratulated him on his new formula and looked forward to trying it out in practice.

Other documents took a look at times long past. Years ago, when Lyra was still fighting mud wars down by the river with her friends, Makepeace had received his salary from Jordan College. A letter from the head of Experimental Theology regretted Julius' decision to end his involvement in a project. He emphasised that they regretted his personal decision of conscience, but understood and accepted it, and wished him good luck in his future career. What exactly this project was, was not apparent from the letter. But Lyra’s reading eyes lingered on the words ‘decision of conscience’. What kind of projects could do that? And in Jordan? Was it the research on Dust that her father had once begun there? It would fit the time frame.

She dug deeper into the mountain of paper, looking for Jordan's typical ornate letterhead, but found only more letters from other colleges and hospitals where Makepeace had worked as a chemist and pharmacist, some in French. She folded Jordan's letter small enough to be hidden in her jacket pocket and turned to Zelda. With a long pair of tweezers, which she had borrowed from their natural history class, Zelda combed through the depths of the dustbin. It seemed as if Makepeace had simply swept everything off his work surfaces into the metal bin, which the blonde ambassador's daughter was now picking through piece by piece. Lots of shavings and metal fragments, shards of glass and ceramics. Most of the time, Lyra could guess what she would find by the sound of impact when Zelda dropped it on the stone floor. Until these fell silent.

“I think he came around here once in a circle and just shovelled everything in. Starting from here and then going all the way around,” Zelda said.

“What makes you think that?” Lyra replied without looking up from the letters.

“Well, from here at the other end, there's the vice, and in the middle of the rubbish was this.”

Lyra looked up and was shocked. It had been years since she had seen what was now on the table in front of her friend. A human skull.

“I'd say this one was clamped back there to be able to work on it. Look, the dust and shavings back there are the same beige colour. He sawed out the upper skull plate.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Maybe it's just a model that he's converted for an exhibition or something like that, he did go visit a dentists' conference after all,” said Zelda, grabbing her bag and starting to rummage through it, “if this is really real bone from a dead human, then this stuff should turn it purple. Reacts with the blood protein residue.”

She pulled out a small cryptically labelled bottle and used its pipette to drip a few drops into the chip on both sides of the chuck and on the skull itself. The bright violet colour left no doubt: this was human bone.

“Where did he get the skull, did he steal it from a tomb?” Lyra wondered.

“I don't think so. If he really was involved in dentistry in some way, he could have gotten it from one of the colleges. With the number of donated corpses that are dissected by medical students every day, something would have been available. But why did he carve this thing up?” Zelda took the piece of the skeleton in her right hand and swung it in Lyra's direction, who took a surprised step back.

“And isn't that a bit much shaving for that one hole here? Whatever happened to the piece that was cut out?” Her pose was uncannily reminiscent of a scene from Shakespeare. She turned the skull in her hand and winked at Lyra through the circular cutout.

“Almost as big as the palm of my hand.”

It was true. Lyra's hand could just about cover the cutout. Before she knew it, she was holding the piece of bone herself, examining it, searching her memory for anything that had anything to do with skeletons and bones, in school knowledge and experiences from her travels.

Holes in skulls, she had heard that somewhere before. High in the north...

“Will's father had a hole drilled into his skull to make him receptive to Dust.” It was just an idea, but possibly the way to an explanation.

“Maybe Makepeace did something similar.”

“Can't imagine it was that big. Your brain would fall out if you bent down.” A gruesome image formed in Lyra's mind's eye and a queasy feeling spread in her stomach. She shook her head and said no.

“Lyra, I have another idea. Do you remember telling me about that tower room in Citygassé?”

Her friend's eyes wandered through the entirety of the underground workshop, drawing Lyra's and those of the two dæmons with them. There was a certain similarity, as far as Lyra could remember, between the two places.

“You mean he forged a knife? I don't see a forge here...”

“He could have forged the knife somewhere else, maybe a long time ago. I'm thinking more of decorations and a handle. All those expensive hunting knives have handles made of ivory, bone, and similar rare materials. Or he inherited the blade and carved the handle out of the previous owner's bone, to be magically accepted as the carrier...”

Inesto shook his head, as he always did when his girl let her imagination run too wild. But the truth wasn't far off, Lyra sensed. A feeling spread inside her, an inkling that reminded her of her long adventure. She would have loved to have asked her alethiometer at that moment, as she was able to do back then, but it was slumbering in its case next to her bed in room 38 with her two other friends who were also asleep, as it had done for so long now.

While Zelda continued to poke around in the contents of the trash can, Lyra was drawn back to the front room, the storeroom. They hadn't yet examined the small secretary further.

The antique, soft bronze lock offered no resistance to Lyra, who approached the old piece of furniture with an iron pipe. With just a soft crunching sound, the cover gave way and poured another mountain of paper at the feet of the astonished girls.

But this one was different.

Not as neatly and tidily formatted as the letters in the next room. Handwritten notes, sketches, fragments of maps, scribbles, runic writing, on cheap, flimsy recycling paper. Evidently stuffed into the secretary in a rush. Lyra and Pantalaimon set about sorting through the heap. Zelda, still holding the skull in her hand, joined them and helped. While the pile of mathematical calculations, completely incomprehensible to the girls, grew rapidly, Lyra devoted her full attention to the rarer maps.

They found maps that Makepeace had drawn over and over again. A few of Britain as they knew it, and many of a foreign country that Lyra could not identify.

Each version was a bit different, the coastlines, if they were coastlines, a little different. Some had place names written on them, some of which sounded British but still foreign.

The words recurred on each slip of paper. And on this one inconspicuous slip of paper, which roughly sketched the west coast of Brytania, they were finally found neatly separated by arrows.

Oxford -> Blackpool -> Moonshine Hotel -> Sand/Port -> Lake of Men -> Teslapolis -> Nosinas -> David

David. The name was the only one in the series that didn't appear on any of the maps found.

“Could be a person. Maybe he wants to meet him,” Pantalaimon interjected.

“But what about Sand and Port?”

“Look,” said Lyra, pulling two cards towards her, “these two are exactly the same, except that one says Sand and the other says Port. Sandport, Portsand. I have no idea what he means by that.”

“The maps show the coast off Blackpool,” replied Zelda, “we used to go there a lot when I was younger. Here, the line probably represents the large pier where the big cruise ships dock. Port and sand are each to the left of it, in the middle of the sea. Perhaps a ship named like that, Portsand, could be Irish.”

They sat brooding for a moment. A glance at Zelda's pocket watch showed them that it was almost half past two, definitely time to start the journey back; they had to leave early the next morning after all.

What they had found here had raised more questions than it had answered, and there was only one person who could answer them, Sebastian Julius Makepeace himself.

They packed up what they considered important in some way, went back to the ground floor of the house and left it through the same backdoor they had entered through, locked it and pushed the key back through the wide gap in the door of the house.

The way back flew by as Lyra and Zelda hurried back to St. Sophia's.

Pan, as the advance scout, led the way and was supposed to warn them of unwanted passersby (with their 15 years of age, they were still subject to the 11 o'clock curfew), but he didn't have to fulfil his duty. They met absolutely no one.

They entered the St. Sophia's through the delivery entrance of the pantry, the lock of which Zelda could now open with a pick and four flicks of her wrist. They crept through the dark corridors and stairs, as they had done in Makepeace's house, sock-footed and undetected, past the rooms of their unsuspecting teachers and fellow students.

Their roommates were fast asleep when they entered the room. They both took great care not to wake Wega and Læna, but Wega's trained reflexes still forced her out of her sleep, albeit no longer with fists raised in a defensive manner. She merely gave the two night owls a brief nod and sank back into her pillow. There would be plenty of time tomorrow to question them about their findings.

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It is the summer solstice. Lyra is sitting on a bench in the botanical garden. She is crying. Not for Will. No, for herself. It has only been a year or so, but she realises that he is increasingly eluding her mind. There are too many days when she does not think of him. When she is happy and looks to the future without seeing his face in front of her. But why is she crying? Would Will have wanted her to? What would he say to it? How is he? Does he still think of her every day? Or has he found a new life like she has, with new friends, tasks and goals, girls? She listens to the wind, waiting for a wisp of an answer.

Chapter Text

The others were ordered to leave, only Læna is still rocking on her chair in front of Dame Hanna's desk. She is not angry with her, no, she is just disappointed. Her being such a wonderful young girl from a good family, a good student, unlike the three who were allowed to leave the room with the expulsions imposed on them. How did she come to take part in this nonsense? How did she get into such circles?
Læna can't say. One thing led to another, she was right in middle of it all, and then the bottles were found in her cupboard. And she doesn't even like whiskey.


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Early the next morning, Læna's old alarm clock woke the girls from what had been a short night for two of them.
In their usual school day routine, all four of them went through the small bathroom like in a torch relay, got dressed properly, and went down to the dining room with their bags they had packed the day before. As they ate fried eggs and hash browns, Lyra and Zelda told their friends what they had seen the night before. They didn't have to worry about unwanted eavesdroppers. Because the summer holidays had already begun, most of their classmates had left for home, and of those who wanted to go to Blackpool, many were, as expected, still busy packing and choosing clothes for the opera. Læna, Wega, Zelda and Lyra had completed this daunting task in peace the day before. Dame Hannah herself came by their table and praised them for their punctuality. Perhaps partly because some of her colleagues were also still absent.

Half an hour later, they finally set off together in the direction of the train station. It took the group of about forty young women another half hour to reach Oxford Station on foot. In part, they followed the same route that Zelda and Lyra had snuck along the night before. What a difference daylight made compared to the dim light of the lanterns. Some corners were barely recognisable in the light.

“Sometimes I think Oxford has two souls, a day soul and a night soul,” Pan blurted out as they turned the corner past Maid Antonia's Maternity Wear. The pot-bellied mannequins, who were demurely draped in nightdresses over their displayed underwear every evening, looked quite ghostly from a distance then.
“If the city has a soul, does it also have a dæmon? What do you think Pan?” Lyra asked shrewdly.
“Maybe it's like in Will's world, and the dæmon lives invisibly in it. Maybe we are all a little dæmon for Oxford.” he philosophised back.
“I think you two have spent too many hours with Prof. Janus and his Roman thinkers,” Wega chuckled over her shoulder.

They continued bickering until they reached the station. Their baggage had already arrived here a few minutes earlier with a cart and was being loaded into the baggage car. As previously discussed, the girls distributed themselves alphabetically among the compartments according to their names, so that Lyra, officially still a Belacqua, shared hers with Professor Bittermann, Ruth Bowlees and some older female students. Thanks to the teacher, the topics of conversation did not get too personal, except when Ruth let slip that not only Michael Cokes flute play had found a place in her heart. Lyra used the shallowness of the chat to catch up on a little sleep during the long ride.

When they arrived in Blackpool, Miss Belacqua was still a little drowsy. She took with her compartment to the baggage claim, which was then also done in alphabetical order, and then waited with Miss Jonassen, aka Wega, for the other two. Miss Mentora and your royality Stansted appeared after a few minutes. Together they set off for their place for the night.

The students had been spread across a range of hotels and guest houses in Blackpool. In addition to pure entertainment, there was also an underlying pedagogical motive for this trip for Dame Hannah. She wanted to give all the young women an opportunity to practice independence and self-sufficiency on a small scale. Looking at the huge wheeled suitcases that some of them had brought for this mere two-day trip, Lyra thought that some of them seemed to be in desperate need of that. She and her three friends set off with their luggage for ‘Prawn Cottage’, a small bed-and-breakfast that had once been the base of a shrimp fishing boat. Room 38 had been booked here with another group of four.
They quickly moved into the double bed rooms, and after the landlady had once again warned them to show modesty and strictly forbade any male visitors, Lyra and the others set out to find a place for lunch and to explore the place.

Blackpool Sea Park, a small amusement park on the northernmost of the piers, was their first destination after a portion of fish'n'chips, most properly with malt vinegar. Many carousels and rides invited the young and the still-feeling-young to have a good time. Since each of them had to be paid for separately, the visitors apparently approached with restraint, and the lines remained short. Lyra and her group only rode one of the rides, the biggest one, because many of the young children and their parents didn't dare to go on it and so the queue was shortest here.
Lyra herself didn't really find the ride exhilarating, while the other three beside her howled. A ride on Iorek or a flight in Lee's balloon were much more exciting, albeit far more dangerous. In fact, as the train reached its highest point and the carriages in front of her rushed down the slope, she thought back to her conversation with Serafina a week earlier. Strapped in, with a predetermined route, it went down. Of course, it was exciting, but you knew where you were going in advance, and there was no possibility of changing direction at any point. You could ride it several times, depending on the number of passengers and other factors, you might be faster one time, or it might buckle differently than on the ride before, but you always arrived at same destination. Lyra still wondered in silence whether her life followed a similarly predetermined path.

Fittingly, the second attraction they visited was bumper cars, where Lyra was able to fully express her urge for indeterminacy, and with a screaming blonde passenger, she went on the hunt for the cool blokes who rode in their bumper cars standing and smoking, in reverse, through the bustling crowd. After that, there was a little time to get their feet wet in the still cold waters of the Irish Sea, swimming was out of the question. And after a last attempt by Zelda to see the distant Isle of Man with one of the coin-operated telescopes, it was back to the small guesthouse at a stroll to get ready for the opera

A good forty minutes after arriving in their room, all four were ready to go. The other group had needed the whole of the time since their arrival around noon to get ready. And despite their efforts, they had all ended up looking sligthly out of place. The smallest of them, a plump student with Cypriot roots, looked as if she had fallen into a pot of paint. Not with a paintbrush, but rather with a spatula she had smeared the make-up on her face, Beloz scoffed a bit too loudly, and thus earned a slap from his Læna. She herself kept it with the Rouge like her friends, very discreet and accentuated. She had chosen a black and purple dress for the evening that accentuated her waist and hips with integrated feathers and bamboo. It was still comfortable enough to survive the hours of sitting. Wega didn't think much of such frippery. Her long, narrow dress made of colourful New Dutch fabric was mainly intended to cover all her scars and the tattoo. So that no one would mistake her for a harlot. Her hair remained as it always was, only the bow was a bit more opulent.
Zelda had as usual been spoilt for choice. Besides the dresses in her own wardrobe at her parents' house, she now fitted into many of her mother's dresses. But as for public appearances like this one, she had quite a bit of experience and chose a pale blue costume with ruffles. Airy and comfortable, and the sleeves large enough to hide a handkerchief or two. And only an expert would be able to tell that the buttons and ornaments were made of real gold and silver.
Lyra didn't have much of a choice. She had rarely let the others persuade her to go shopping in the big city, or rather, let them drag her along, and had, among other things, come back with that red velvet and brocade dress that she was now wearing. Gold-coloured embroidery and a light gold border rounded it off. Lyra had taken out the chest pads in the meantime, fortunately those were no longer necessary.


That evening's opera, Songs for the Doves, was a new modern piece whose writer and producer, Joshua Hommes, had come over from the distant southwest of North America, from a place bordering the Nipponse colonies. The basic plot of the play, which follows a young man who, while fleeing from criminals, takes on the role of a woman and in this disguise turns the heads of several gentlemen & ladies, was peppered with all kinds of allusions and criticism of everyday things, always with a lot of humour and a twinkle in the eye. And the music was something they had never heard before. In addition to the obligatory classical orchestra, the programme included the strange sounds of Patagonian lutes, an a-cappella quartet that imitated instruments, Zimbabwen bongo drums and even a new New Danish device that was described in the programme as a ‘synthesiser’. In terms of sound it was somewhere between an organ and a contra bass. And the rousing rhythm was infectious; again and again, Lyra found herself tapping her feet and bobbing along. Even Zelda seemed to be having a great time.

“I thought you didn't like music?” Læna remarked as her blonde companion swaggered towards the foyer with the other audience members at the end of the performance.
“I never meant it that way. I just said that a piano and a guy with a flute wouldn't blow my mind,” Zelda replied, alluding to the concert from a week ago, which she, like Lyra, had successfully wriggled out of.

For a moment she seemed to toy with the idea of taking out her pipe, surrounded by all the people lighting up, but Lyra urged her to hurry; the curfew was almost upon them. And so all four of them found themselves back at the small Prawn Cottage more or less on time, while the occupants of the two neighbouring rooms had defied all modesty and disappeared into one of the dance halls.

Day went to sleep and woke up as morning. The four of them quickly packed their few belongings again and finally set out to find the Moonshine Hotel. The separate garment bag with their costumes from the previous evening had been brought to the train station and into the care of the local baggage supervision, as suggested by Dame Hannah, so that they only had to carry the bags with their everyday clothes, and in Zelda's case, her selection of forensic equipment. Lyra relied on a sturdy backpack that she had bought second-hand from a royal army soldier at the bazaar.

According to the vendor of a small stall, the Moonshine Hotel was at the other, southern end of the seafront, where there was less entertainment and more business. Along with the Frisian Leda-Hlér, from which a large part of the Roman-German merchant fleet was controlled, the Danish capital Helsingør and the Portuguese Portimão, Blackpool was one of the most important maritime trading cities in Europe. This was evident here in the south of the city. Lots of glass and fine marble adorned the chic shipping villas.

“There's so much marble here, there wasn't even any four years ago. Prices must have gone down since the Ministry stopped building so many churches,” Zelda remarked in amazement as they approached a building studded with iron anchors, in front of which even the clinker of the promenade had been exchanged for the expensive noble rock.

Lyra noticed that the passers-by had changed too. An astonishing number of them relied on non-leisure white coats. Apparently, they had come quite close to the medical congress. They found the Moonshine Hotel on the corner of Osborne Road, a small guest house like their Prawn Cottage. A small plaque told the story of the house, which had once been the hideout of a illegal distiller. Which took away some of the romance of the name. Lyra preferred to go in alone, while her friends remained outside.
Inside, just the lady of the house was waiting, whistling as she carried the last plates from the breakfast table to a back room. Her duck dæmon saw Lyra and a moment later her reappeared behind the counter with the matron.


“May you excuse me, I got a question.”
Don't go wrong now, Lyra thought to herself.
“My godfather, Sebastian Makepeace, wrote me that he was in town for the convention and staying at your place. Is he still here?” Godfather sounded good. Father would have been too obvious, and friend or acquaintance might have raised certain suspicions, like Wegas's tattoo.
“Yes, a Mr Makepeace was here, but only from Monday to Wednesday. I'm sorry, he said he had an important appointment.”
“Do you know where he was going?”
“No, but he had a lot of luggage with him,” said the woman. Squinting, she glanced at her guestbook for a moment.
“I offered to let my son drive him to the station in the car, but he declined.”
“Did he perhaps take a ship? Or a zeppelin?”
“Hmm, I don't know about airship traffic, but this morning the Lelystad from Holland docked at the mainland pier, otherwise all the Blackpool ports have been empty all week due to the easterly tide. And with the wages he paid our maid, I can't imagine that he felt uncomfortable here and moved to another hotel. Besides, it's almost impossible to get a room on short notice anyway, because of the doctors and all the guests who came here just for the American nutcase. Men in women's clothing, ugh!”
Lyra was tempted to laugh, but pulled herself together. She politely thanked the matron for the information and went back outside to the others.

Uncertain and a little surprised by what the woman had said about Makepeace and the empty harbour, they took the next tram to the airship anchor mast in the north as a last resort. Located at the end of the promenade on Central Drive, directly opposite the huge Magistral Court House, its copper-plated framework made it just as much a symbol of the city as the oversea-pier and the white and red clinker brick promenade.

But their hopes were dashed here as well. The last zeppelin had taken off over a week ago, and the mast had remained empty until today due to the strong offshore winds. And so the trail went cold. No ship, no airship. And the four weren't even allowed to enter the tower just for the views. Without a reservation at the Blackwater Inn, half way up the tower, one of the best (and most expensive) addresses in town, they couldn't get up to the viewing platform above the restaurant.

“Well, we're not getting anywhere like this,” Læna said, dropping onto the wicker chair of a café. Her dæmon Beloz, once again in the form of a lemur since the previous evening, was playing around in her hair.
“Then we might as well go to the Marinar Museum with the others, I mean none of us has second sight.”

“Well, actually, one of us does.” Pan said what Lyra was thinking. Zelda pricked up her ears.
“You brought your truth meter?”
“Yes, I did. Somehow it felt wrong not to.”
“But you can't read it without your books.”
“Not with books either, really. For a series of four symbols, three books have five different interpretations.”

Just as every captain had their own way of reading the weather and the waves. And every alethiometer, she suspected, had its own unique characteristics that led to different readings. No two were the same. Lyra would have loved to feed the same line of symbols into two different ones, just to see how much the answers differed. A pipe dream, when so many of them had been destroyed by the Magisterium. There were probably more than the handful of devices she had been told about a few years ago; many had been hidden or taken to faraway countries. But she had never seen any of the other instruments.

“Try it once, it's the only thing we can do now.”

This was the only chance she had. Reluctantly and cautiously, Lyra pulled the watch-like device made of shiny metal and porcelain out of its case, aligned it in her lap and grasped two of the three golden wheels. She tried to clear her mind and become receptive to the strange power of Dust, which wanted to speak to her through this delicately crafted machine with its gears and springs. She tried to think as she had done in the past, freely and without restraint, like a child, which had become increasingly difficult for her in recent years. The logic she had learned had become too intrusive, the knowledge from the books in which all the great alethiometrists had written and immortalised their own laws, too insistent. Perhaps this was one of the main reasons, besides her fear of the device's power, why her private lessons with Dame Hanna and her attempts to operate the Golden Compass had become increasingly rare.

But this was important, not just pure training. It was about something big. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and looked down at the thirty-six small icons.
She moved hand one to the cauldron. It represented research, the search for knowledge through trial and error, the alchemist, Makepeace himself.
The second hand moved to the globe, for the foreign lands in which he must be. It was surprisingly easy, Lyra thought, as the third hand stopped on the anchor as if by itself, the means of the journey, the ship, the Irish Portsand, as Zelda had interpreted the two words.
The fourth hand began to move, drawing paths, rhythmically, dancing before her eyes. Lyra felt light, disconnected, like before. The signs she was given were as clear and distinct as they could be, building mosaics in her mind that showed him, the mysterious laboratory assistant, standing here in Blackpool, on the beach at dawn, looking out to the open, stormy sea. Hourglass, compass, moon, dolphin. Out there was something, barely visible and yet so close and inconspicuous. It drew him to this something. Sand.

Lyra gasped.

Sand. Port.

It was not a ship he had been looking for.
She jumped onto the small wall of the embankment and scanned the surf again. Out there, in a line with the large overseas pier, the sea was beating up foaming waves. Sandbanks.

“We have to get out of there!”
Læna, Wega and Zelda grabbed their bags in surprise and followed their friend, who resolutely followed the seafront and walked from there to the majestic pier. The pier was relatively deserted; there was no ship at its end, and since both the water and the fish had retreated with the low tide, most of the many fishermen had taken a break, left their equipment behind and were now getting a late breakfast at one of the many snack bars on the promenade.

The few who had remained, old gentlemen who did not let trivial things like the changing tides ruin their relaxing day, paid no attention to the group of young women who were eagerly heading for the end of this tropical hardwood boardwalk. A narrow staircase, intended for the crews of the small pilot boats, led them down to the damp, firm sand of the shoal, which stretched a few hundred metres south along the coast and protected the beach from the waves that had been blown up by today's westerly wind.

Lyra had an idea of what she was looking for, but she held back. It was too unreal a thought, too much of a fond hope from years gone by.

“What are we doing here? There's nothing here, just water and sand.”
Beloz had changed back into his meerkat form and was bouncing along next to his human. Lyra couldn't answer him. Her eyes scanned the sand out to the open sea, searching. Wega walked beside her, Vicino at her feet. The otter with the deep voice never spoke much, and when he did, it was mostly to Wega. Very rarely to Lyra directly. Like now.

“There, to your left, Lyra.”
She spun around quickly and looked at the city with its promenade. In the midst of the uniform white and red of the distant clinker buildings, there was something else. A bright glow, like a hole in the cloud cover, only at their height.

The girls approached. The bright glow lit up the sand at their feet, lost in the diffuse light of the overcast Blackpool sky. Lyra had been right with her suspicions.

They were looking through a window, a gateway to another world. A portal. Its edges were more blurred than Lyra seemed to remember, like watercolours the strange image flowed into the reality of their world here. Like a mirror, it showed a beach with a roaring surf, like the one behind them. Warm sunlight radiated across and tickled pleasantly on the girls' faces.

Lyra and Wega were frozen. For one of them the way into incredible adventures, for the other the long awaited release from such, both had never believed to ever find a window into foreign worlds again.

“Is this what I think it is, Lyra?” Zelda asked into the wind.
Lyra nodded back. The lump that had formed in her throat was too big and her voice, breathing and heartbeat failed her.

“I had somehow imagined it to be more fantastic.” Zelda said and grabbed a long brush from an inside pocket of her coat, and poked into the window as if she expected a boundary, a firm resistance.
“What do we do now? Should we go through?”
Lyra seized her friend's arm. Something was different than before.
“We don't know what to expect on the other side, if it's a world like Wega was in back then-”
“From here it looks quite peaceful and empty over there. I can't see anyone or anything that looks like a person. But I can smell the other sea.”
Zelda closed her eyes and stuck her snub nose further into the alien summer, as far as Lyra's hand allowed. She had often dreamt of such a situation, had set out with her friends into strange worlds and had experienced adventures like those with Will, Iorek and the others. Whatever happened, she would only have to wake up to save herself and the others. Before she knew it, she was holding her alethiometer in her hand again. The three pointers found their places on the sun, angel and anchor with surprising ease.

The answer was a single symbol at 6 o’clock, the nautical compass. The feeling it created was so diffuse. It spoke of the hand of a navigator who prepared the way for great voyages, but also of familiarity with the school and the life they would leave behind in this world. And something else, confusingly direct, seemed to be contained in the sign.

“Lyra, let's take a quick look, then. If we don't find any sign of Makepeace, we'll come right back. It'll be at least another hour before the tide comes in here,” Zelda suggested, still within stumbling distance of the alien world.
That Makepeace might be in possession of a subtle knife was something Lyra had suspected ever since the sentence with which he had seen her off a week ago. 'No one can turn lead into gold. But if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing'. The sound of his words had encouraged Lyra to hope for further contact. Perhaps he had, knowing Lyra and her kind, deliberately left the all clues, the maps and notes. Chosen this hidden place for his window and left it open for her.
More questions without answers arose in her mind, and while her blue eyes looked into the green of her companion, she felt herself nodding ever so slightly.


Lyra let herself be pulled by the familiar hand and dared to take a step forward with her. The excitement did not allow her to keep her eyes open, and so it was not only the warm, sweet summer air but also the soft, mealy sand under her first steps that greeted her in the foreign land. Carefully, she dared to blink and take a first quick look. In front of her lay the sea, or rather an ocean. To the left and right of them stretched beach, and in the distance, the light of a lighthouse seemed to be signalling.

“Maybe I really was too scared, Pan,” Lyra whispered. Slowly she turned around to the blonde on her left, who had squatted down and was also admiring the fine sand. Where were the other two?


“STOP! STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

The shout froze Lyra in her tracks.

“Don't come any closer! Something's wrong here.”

Wega and Læna had apparently also wanted to go hand in hand through the window, Wega backwards as the first of the two, but only she had arrived on this side.
And there was no window here.

Læna's hands and the tip of one of her shoes were visible, as if appearing out of nothing. Hands that frantically reached for Wega's and tried to pull her back across, ghostly and immaterial. In Lyra's mind, thoughts tumbled and choked each other. What had happened?

“Stay where you are, there is no window in this world, I can't see you and our world anymore! It's different from the ones Lyra told us about, I can't go back. No, you can't pull me over, you're just reaching through me like a ghost. Now go to Dame Hanna and tell her what happened! In detail! Tell her that we were guided by Lyra's alethiometer! Tell her to alert the witches, Serafina Pekalla, Lyra's confidante, you know her. NOW!” Wega shouted.
But Læna refused. Her shadowy hands continued to clasp her at friend's fingers until they slid through them like smoke.

“I'm sorry...” Wega said bitterly, twisting out of the desperate grasp and pushing the hands away with all her might. They and the tips of the shoes disappeared completely. And with them, every sign of the passage that had just brought them here.

Then it was clear to Lyra. The compass, the confusing directness. It wasn't the meaning of the symbol. It was the position. The bottom one. The one pointing away from the window when Lyra had been standing in front of it.
It had been a warning.


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Thursday morning, ten minutes to ten. Surely an unusual time to run a bath. But Wega didn't take the Latin course, unlike the other three. Two hours to herself. The door is locked, the key is in the lock, the curtain is closed, although the house across the street doesn't even have a third floor. She quickly undresses and looks at herself for a moment in the full-length mirror. She scrutinises her scars. The large one on her back from the fall in the fog. The bump by her left ear from the night she rolled into the embers in her sleep. That was a close shave. And the hair grew back quickly. The fine bristles on her right thigh from jumping over the barbed wire. The branched ones above her belly button from the wolf that surprised her while she slept. Maybe she wouldn't have those today if she had just stayed lying there quietly back then.

Chapter Text

Every second counts. A few seconds too long in the fire, and the wonderful taste of fried bacon gives way to that of charcoal. A little too short, and it tastes like slightly salted butter. Also nice, but little Wega prefers bacon. She wouldn't know what she would do without these mushrooms, which can be found everywhere in the strange forests here. It has a thick stem and an equally impressive cap. Around the cap is a wreath of thin brown felt. That's why Wega has named the mushroom the fat monk.

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“... and then she told us that the Van Hovens actually have separate bedrooms because her husband snores every night. But they're both quite happy with that because they get up at different times anyway, and then start the day much more refreshed. I couldn't do that, and Annina feels the same way, not to mention what the children would say, wouldn't they think that mum and dad no longer love each other. - what's that splashing?”

“Oh, that's just a stream. I'm standing here at an inlet of the Soetsee.”

Phew, that was a close call. And not even a fib. Camilla doesn't need to know that her husband uses their daily breakfast phone call for a quick pee.

“... I've just come from the ferry to a farmer in the Lower Frisian Börde. He's already got the third harrow from us. It must be really good potato country over there. I think I can make it to Camelot by midday, a customer there is waiting for his new cultivator. Then I'll pick up the fermenter from Agritech in Whitehaven, and I'll be back home around six.”

It's a real round trip through the whole Lake of Men district.

“Camelot? Then you can bring turnips and carrots from the market, and cauliflower. And spinach. Annina always says you should always have something green on your plate. If you only see green on your plate, you digest differently, the brain is tricked. It's exactly the same with colours, as I told you the other day, if we painted the bathroom yellow or red, we'd be awake much faster in the morning.”

“And what about the evenings? I'd prefer it to be more restful then.”

“Hmm, I hadn't thought about that yet. Maybe you could change the light, so that different lamps are on in the evening than in the morning. Blue and green are the colours of calm. Or wait, we'll leave the walls white and only do it with the lamps. I saw something at the hardware store the other day that might work. It's not expensive either. There were also these tiles that you liked so much at the Mullers last year, they would go well in the small bathroom. As old-fashioned as it is now, you really can't let any guests in, and the new neighbours are coming over tonight.”

“Really?”

“Of course, I have told you about that! The Djurens, the ones with the two children. I cancelled Amy's sports group on purpose, I want her to get to know them properly, it's so important to have a lot of contact with people her own age at that age. Maybe the two of them can walk to school with Amy, then they will also have a good start here in Withorn. It helped me so much when we moved to Scilly, just having someone there who took me by the hand and said, there's the school, there's the tram stop, this is where I have to get off, children are still so much more open and quite different from adults. I want to go shopping with her later on, buy a new dress, the old one from your mother's birthday doesn't really fit anymore, and the colours are so old-fashioned...”

Robert Fairlane was so busy trying to fend off his wife's torrent of words that he and Abidy didn't notice the three girls who had crept up to his truck, loosened the tarp a little, and disappeared into the back of the trailer between the cultivator and some pallets.

They had waited for another hour at their destination, the beach here behind the dunes, had held out, unsure of what to do next, and cried. Not Wega, but none of them had ever really seen her cry. She sat on the sand, still and rigid, until she became convinced that on the other side, in the Blackpool of her world, the water was now rising with the tide over the shallows, and there was no sign of it here. The window was gone. Wega had gotten up and climbed the dune, which was as high as a house. To her surprise, she found a small country road and a car park right under her nose, on the other side of the dune, along with a typical Brytish coastal landscape. Wooden benches and a table invited her to linger, and a sign in English asked visitors to throw their rubbish in the bins, relieving Wega of her fear of having landed back in that foreign language world of her odyssey.

With a little persuasion, she got the other two up on their wobbly legs, and when she had conquered the dune a second time with them, they were no longer alone. A vehicle, an angular tractor unit with a semi trailer, had stopped in the car park. A rustic looking man in dungarees jumped out, leaned against the cab next to the front tyre and began to speak with his hand, or something in it. And Vicco, Pan and Inesto noticed something. It wasn't a pet that had jumped out of the vehicle with him, but one of their own. A dæmon. So they could not be in Will's world either. But where were they?

There was no telling how far they were from the next town, or when the next visitor would happen by, so Lyra suggested that they hitch a ride in one way or another. Zelda, still with cheeks red from crying, answered her with an incredulous laugh. Just climb onto the back of the truck? That was one of the clichés by which you could recognise bad stories. But Wega and her Vicco were adamant. This here wasn't one of their novels. This was reality. And for every missed opportunity, there was no author to imaginatively come up with new possibilities.

While the man moved further away from the vehicle and then went to answer the call of nature, all three crept down the dunes and found a gap in the tarp on the side facing away from the driver, through which they could climb into the trailer. They tried to make themselves comfortable between the lashed-down agricultural implements, which also existed in their world. Fortunately, the fine weave of the canvas allowed plenty of light inside. After a few minutes, they could hear the driver getting back in, and after starting the engine, the vehicle finally set off, albeit smoother and quieter than they would have expected. Almost like the Blackpool tram.

During the first miles of the ride, none of the three, or six, depending on how one counts, said a word, but then something came to Lyra's mind.

“I think we should not tell anyone where we come from. If everyone in this world has a dæmon, then we won't stand out, unlike what happened to me in Will's world.” That Wills Kirjava had taken the shape of a cat, a common pet, must have been quite practical for him in everyday life. Imagine if she had become a big cat, like Lord Asriel's partner. How would you have explained that to the people of his world?

“Hopefully. Perhaps dæmons are a little different here, we'll have to observe that,” a rust coloured Inesto answered from the metal floor, “but at least she's about the same size as the three of us, in the driver's cab up there.”

“And Makepeace will probably have taken the same route. We're now heading in the same direction that you could see the lighthouse from the beach. Even if Makepeace had to walk, he would have taken that direction,” Zelda continued.

“I think so too, he's not a stupid man.”

He was definitely not. Still, Lyra wondered about the source of his information, of which she probably had only a small fraction on the notes in her backpack. Maybe he had a helper?

She took her alethiometer out of her pocket again and started turning the cogs. But somehow it felt different than just under two hours earlier. She set the pointers to Alpha and Omega, the Bear and the Lyre, but not with the same ease. Rather, she remembered reading about this constellation in at least two books in the section on personal questions. And the answer, a tap on the three symbols next to each other, was always more positive, regardless of these, and to be interpreted as a yes answer. Hmm, a bit disappointing. But at least Makepeace might have had help.

But did this apply to this world, or to her home, and at what time? Perhaps the compass had answered with its ‘yes’ for a situation that had occurred years ago. Theoretically, the helper could even be Lyra herself, if you only looked back a week. And the act of helping was her handing him the glass of water. She hadn't considered any of this when she asked the question, and actually needed more questions. But without books and probably hours of trial and error, this couldn't be done. Especially not here during the journey.

“Well, what does it say, Lyra? You've been looking at it for half an eternity now.”

“Uh, I don't know.” That was the truth. “It's best we try to get off at the next village and look for the words on the piece of paper. At least Teslapolis sounds like a city.”

“I already knew that too,” Wega snapped back, but one could tell that she meant no offence.

The roads became bumpier and the landscape more agricultural. They passed through a series of smaller farming villages, whose colourful wooden houses reminded Zelda of her father's Nordic homeland, and finally reached a larger town. The facades here were greyer, stonier, and the further they drove into the city, the slower the driver had to manoeuvre his truck through the narrowing streets. Actually, the streets reminded them more and more of Oxford and its traditional medieval buildings, and just like there, they apparently relied on cobblestones. A reliance that made their teeth rattle.

“So, now, Abidy, here we are. What should we bring again, carrots, rose sprouts and, bugger, what was the third thing?”

“It was some vegetable you don't like. Something green!”

“You're one great help, you know that? Something green! It's all green! What don't I like again? Oh, it'll be fennel.”

Laughing, the driver and his dæmon crossed the street onto the market and left their truck parked at a wall. For Wega, Zelda and Lyra, it was easy to climb back up from the trailer through the same gap, and so they too found themselves facing the sea of market stalls in the marketplace of this strange city.

Judging by the colours, there were all kinds of fruits, vegetables and flowers. Typical wooden and metal stalls, protected from the noon sun by umbrellas and pavilions, invited shoppers to browse. The three girls didn't hesitate to join the crowd.

Blue broccoli, red lettuce, hairy cucumber-like fruit that some small children were scooping out with spoons while sitting at a fountain; apparently there were some things here that they hadn't yet discovered in Lyra's world. But otherwise it was almost like the local markets back home, with just as much chatter and laughter from young and old, and dæmons scurrying around each other. Only one typical thing was missing, and it took Lyra quite a while to figure out what: the jingling and tinkling of money. Somehow you had to pay here, after all there were prices on the displays, but how she couldn't see. Maybe it had something to do with the rather bulky wristwatches that each of the sellers seemed to wear.

Suddenly Wega stopped as if rooted to the spot, and stared at the table of one of the traders. She slowly stretched out her hand, lifted one of the crops in front of her face and silently formed the words ‘fat monk’.

“Oh, hello, this is a little speckling,” the woman at the stand greeted her, “we just got those in.”

Her English was easy to understand, but it had a strong accent that leaned towards Scottish. Lyra wondered how the three of them must sound to the locals.

“A traverser just brought them from their homeland, a wonderful mushroom. When you fry it -”

“- it tastes just like bacon,” Wega finished the sentence stoically.

“Ah, so you've heard of them? Wait, darlings, I'll pack you a few, then you can try them at home. On the house.”

She took two of the large mushrooms, put them and the one Wega held in a small paper bag, and handed it back to the still perplexed Wega with a smile. Lyra took over the thanking and dragged Wega a short way with her arm hooked around her.

“What's the matter?” Lyra hissed at her.

“That... that mushroom, the fat one, it's from the world where I wound up back then. How did it come -“ Wega stuttered back, not taking her eyes off the small paper bag that she was still holding uncomfortably high in front of her.

“Well, they have potatoes here too and all the other things from ours. And they speak English, so you don't need to be afraid.”

“That's easy for you to say, she can't just turn it off. We haven't seen the mushroom since, it triggers a lot of things,” a trembling Vicino grumbled back from Wega's arm.

“Then distract her somehow.” Lyra had to help them somehow. For now, it was probably better to sit down, and so she pulled Wega out of the market turmoil to a small cast iron bench. The third in the group, too fascinated by the unknown displays, didn't even notice what had happened.

“Hey, there you are, over there they have a mint-flavoured smoke leaf, I really must try that sometime -“ but she stopped when she understood Lyra's hand signal. She knew that in situations like this, Wega always just needed a few minutes to herself to tame the storm of old impressions and memories. But she had not expected it to happen on a market, considering that Wega worked on the Covered Market in Oxford every Saturday.

But Zelda couldn't blame her; after all, she felt the same way, if not worse, a little over two hours ago. Without an obvious way back, she had ended up in a strange world, something she hadn't read in any books, or written herself. Perhaps it was the prospect, the trail of the stranger that had remained for them, that had turned her mood during the journey on the truck into the hyped-up good.

She saw Wega's break as an opportunity to learn a little more about this strange city, and at the top of the steps next to Wega's bench, she saw a stand with various free brochures. She grabbed one of each of those whose display was the emptiest and sat down with them next to Wega and Lyra. After some reading and browsing, her gaze turned in disbelief, and she began to read aloud to them both.

”.. Camelot, as the capital of the former Celtic-Frisian Empire, presents itself today as a modern centre of North Avalon trade. As a pearl of architecture and history situated on the Lake of Men, it attracts tourists from all over the world year after year, never losing the charm of days long gone by... Camelot, Avalon... I feel like I'm in one of my books!”

“I thought you only read crime novels?” Pan interrupted her somewhat bluntly.

“Yes, today I do, but not in the past, the Arthurian legend, I practically learned to read with the books. My father always read them to me in the evenings because it helped him to improve his English. And now you're saying it all actually happened?”

“I think you have to see it differently. Imagine you live in the Middle Ages, and you know the legends of a secret city in the mist, not as a book, no, someone has told you, as if it had actually happened. And then you come across a foggy path to an area that looks exactly as you imagined this legend, how would you call it then?” replied Lyra, and sounded like her Prof. Janus.

“I get what you mean.”

Hadn't they once in geography class talked about the more than a hundred different Paradises, Himmelsthürs, Edens and so on that European immigrants had once founded, full of hope, in the new American world? Probably some Arthurian fans of this world had done the same.

Zelda turned the pages and mumbled the incomprehensible descriptions written on the following pages. Apparently she had been lucky and had found a tourist guide, and from the muttering she could accompany them to three different galleries of modern art. Or to the local theatre. Or to this traditional weekly market where they were currently sitting. But then Zelda found something more interesting.

“...with the construction of the first transcontinental steam railway in 1380 between Camelot and Teslapolis, then still known as Aneikas' Akadir, the foundation was laid for the later unification of the Avalon Republic. This first opportunity for fast travel beyond the sea routes can be admired today in the railway museum. You will find us at Metrofunk Street 2, right next to the new main station.” she read.

“Then we can take this train line, it doesn't get any better than that. Zelda, is there any way you can tell from this thing how to get from here to the station?”

“No, there's just a small sketch of the area around the museum. Nothing else. And what could Maglev mean?"

Lyra solved their problem by asking the next stranger for directions. The stranger pointed to the long street, along which the market was situated, and added that it was only a five-minute tram ride. And the next stop was right under their noses.

It was actually hard to miss. The tracks were sunk into the normal road, as they had seen it only this morning in Blackpool, and the Amberian supply was, as usual, via a trolley system a couple feet above the cobblestones. At the station, there was a proper high platform, like in a normal train station, and black panels showed the next stops of this line with a mosaic of lamps. Central Station was right at the top of the list.

“Lyra, how are we going to pay? We can hardly pay with the few Sovereigns we have,” Pan whispered into Lyra's waiting ear from her shoulder.

“Shh, we'll have to risk the few minutes without it. Look, all those people are waiting along the whole length of the platform, so you can't have to pay at the front with the driver.”

At that moment, a gong sounded and a female voice warned the waiting passengers of the train's arrival. It looked a little different, rounder and wider than the trams on the British coast, but with its single large round headlight and the large front window, behind which a driver sat, it was immediately recognisable as a tram. With the other people, they quickly streamed into the carriage, anxious not to be separated, but this fear was unfounded. Inside, it turned out that there were no doors between the individual carriages; the tram was like a pipe on wheels.

The tram, which drove as smoothly and evenly as the lorry, followed the long road through the centre of Camelot city, and a few minutes later it came to a smooth stop at the ground-floor forum of the main station, which seemed to be located under the tracks. Stairs on both sides of the tram station led up to the actual platforms.

“The railways should be up there, now we just have to find out where the train to Teslapolis stops,” Zelda remarked.

“And when. But as crowded as it is here right now, I'd guess that a few trains will be leaving soon,” Wega added, “people are either standing around down here or going up to the tracks. But nobody seems to be in a real hurry.”

That was true. As on the market square, people were strolling through the forum with their dæmons, many sat in the small cafés or shops. There must be more of them down here than in all of Brytanian Oxford.

“This station seems to be at least as big as King's Cross in London, so there must be a timetable display somewhere like there.”

While they looked around and missed the countless smaller, unknown screens, Zelda's chameleon Dæmon lurched from side to side on her shoulder. Then he spotted something and flicked his long tongue.

“You three, look, back there.”

Inesto’s right eye looked over his shoulder into the depths of the station halls. There, in a break in the tracks, above the hustle and bustle of the countless travellers, a huge painting rose into the dome of the suspended roof. It was a map that radiated a sense of familiarity from afar, so that as they approached, Lyra felt more and more reminded of Will's futuristic home world. The closer they got, the clearer the familiar outlines of the northern Atlantic, Europe, became, drawn with earthy brown shades on the light ground. A few yards closer, small designations became visible.

“There must be tons of islands here, Lyra, just look at all the names in the sea,” Pan exclaimed.

But then another important detail became visible. It was adorned with a fine wave pattern, the brown of the continents. And there were no names in it. Instead, lines connected the many different names in the sea, branching out in a different way to the curved symbolic ferry lines on the maps in Lyra's world.

And the large bright triangle in the Alps was not a mountain, but the sail of a sailing ship, depicted only as a silhouette.

“It's all backwards! The opposite!” Zelda exclaimed, her big green eyes fixed on the relief, which, thanks to this realisation, turned out to be an oversized artistic line network map. Camelot, her current location, was exactly where the Isle of Men was in her world. But instead of this island, here there was a lake, the Lake of Men, whose name had seemed strangely familiar to her when she had read it in Makepeace's cellar. And this pattern continued everywhere. The entire area known to them as the Irish Sea was dry land here, flanked by two bodies of water that occupied the place of Ireland and their native Brytain. Yes, the entire North Sea was criss-crossed by cities and railway lines, and lost itself in ramified fjords and bays, exactly imitating the coast of Scandinavia. There seemed to be small differences though. Not much was left of the outlines of Denmark, as a small extension of a German sea, it had been pushed back by the connection of the North Sea. And the Baltic Sea, and Lake Constance, around whose shallow waters Germans, Hungarians and Swiss were still quarrelling in their world, could not be found here as an island.

Lyra almost forgot to breathe in her amazement. She would never have dreamt of such absurdity, but it reminded her strangely of the many-worlds theory Lord Asriel had once explained to her, at the beginning of their first adventure. People without dæmons, dæmons without people, anything was possible, anything existed, somewhere. Was it not an almost equally incredible coincidence to stumble into a world, Will's, that was so strikingly similar to hers? Judging by the similarities, the split in their two worlds must have occurred fairly recently, perhaps just before the first humans evolved. With Lyra's world and this one, it must have happened so much longer ago, perhaps at a time when the planets had not yet formed; all the more astonishing that there were people like them here with dæmons, who even spoke the same language.

“It's like a mirror image of our world. I thought I was looking in a mirror on the beach in Blackpool,” Wega admitted thoughtfully.

“Not only you. And Teslapolis is down there, to the left of Morocco,” remarked Vicco, apparently the only one still able to think strategically.

“Oh God, that's half way around the world,” groaned Zelda, “it would take days, if not weeks.”

“But look, the connecting line between Camelot and Teslapolis, there are hardly any stations on it. And at that scale, there should be one every hand width, at least if I imagine the railway to be like the one at home,” Inesto appeased her, “maybe this is just the map of the long-distance network, like we have the zeppelin network. The trains are probably much faster than ours. And otherwise there's night trains.”

Her dæmon had found a good explanation. But where did those long-distance trains go?

The solution was painfully simple: They just had to turn around. On the equally high wall behind them, they found the timetable display they had originally been looking for. In this station, unlike King's Cross, the destinations, times and platforms were not displayed on folding panels, but with illuminated mosaics, as in the small tram. In the upper section of the list, next to Zelda's ominous word Maglev, they finally found what they were looking for.

Teslapolis, via Dheas Thule, +2 :: Departure 13:40 :: Platform 3.

The platform was quickly found, but the question of how to pay for the journey still had to be resolved. This time, Zelda didn't miss the chance to ask an older traveller about the location of the ticket office. At least, she wanted to find out what kind of ticket was used here; maybe you could travel on invoice. But the older traveller just laughed. They weren't 18 yet, and as such didn't have to pay anything yet, just like on the regional trains. Mum and Dad would do that with their tax payments.

On platform 3, in addition to a lot of other passengers and the summer sun, another surprising insight awaited them: The local railway company had somehow managed to rationalise away the tracks and sleepers.

Only white troughs, somewhat reminiscent of casserole dishes, lay on either side of the platform. But nobody seemed to be bothered by it. And a few minutes later it became clear why when the train rolled in. But ‘roll in’ was the wrong word.

It floated. Accompanied by hissing sounds that seemed to come from the platform, not the train itself, this marvel of technology glided past them. It couldn't be compared to even the fastest amberic trains in their world, except for the fact that it had windows and doors and stopped at a platform. Rather, with its soft contours and the arrow-like appearance even when stationary, it resembled the thick knitting needles that Læna had begun to use during the last six months.

The thought of the red-cheeked girl stung Lyra's heart. Where was she now, and had she done what Wega had asked her to do?

Somberly, Lyra followed her two remaining companions into the open door of the carriage and sat down with them in an empty compartment. Then the train picked up speed ever so gently, carrying the three of them and their dæmons even further into this twisted world.

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Læna's head is still in a whirl from the words of the explanation she thought up to explain what has just happened to her friends, when she and Beloz spot the headmistress in front of the entrance to the Blackpool Museum Of Maritim Creatures. But just as she manages to get a grip on the situation for a moment and addresses her teacher with the shaky words “Miss Hanna, I need to speak to you”, she senses something big. And the very next moment, when Dame Hanna turns to her pupil with concern, Læna knows that her dæmon will from now on always be by her side in the form of the yellow-eyed lemur with the black and white ringed tail.

Chapter Text

Prof. Janus has invaded the library of Wordsworth College, which specialises in linguistics, with the whole class and set his students a simple task to practise how to use a library like this: find the meaning of your name. After two hours, it's time to evaluate the results. And not everyone is satisfied with their interpretations.

Zelda, short form of Griselda, which in old Germanic means something like ‘grey warrioress’. Not very nice, and not very fitting for the lively girl. But that was just her grandmother's name, too.

Læna's name is an abbreviation of Magdalæna, which just means ‘from Magda’. Rather boring. And for Læna, only ‘from stemming’ remains.

But two of them report an amazing find in the astronomy section, where they weren't even supposed to bother looking. In the introduction to a book about constellations, they found a sentence about Wega, the main and fixed star in the constellation of Lyra, the brightest in the northern sky and a bringer of good luck to travellers.

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“I feel like I'm in the gondola of a zeppelin. So smooth and so fast.”

Zelda was just as fascinated as her two companions. After a short, slow ride at ground level through the city and the suburbs of Camelot, the train had climbed in an incredibly long arc, encircling several villages on a kind of aqueduct, and had not stopped accelerating since. But the passengers hardly noticed the speed, it was that smooth. At a height that Lyra estimated to be a quarter of a normal zeppelin flight, even though she had only experienced one of those, they flew through the countryside, high above streets, fields and villages. The two screens built into the wall facing the aisle below the windows probably even showed them the speed, but they were using completely different units than at home. '350 Lh' felt very, very rapid anyway.

“Did any of you check when we'll arrive in Teslapolis?” Pan asked from the comfortably padded bench next to Lyra, looking around at the others. But none of the girls had paid attention to any numbers before they had just learned that they had landed on a mirror world, a negative of their own world, and had barely caught the right platform. They were already having the greatest difficulty telling what time it was at the moment. Twenty minutes past two, it said on Zelda's pocket watch. But was the same time zone even valid here as in Oxford?

“I'm sorry, I did not. But there were like four stops between Camelot and Teslapolis, the next one should be coming up pretty soon if I've got the map on the wall right in my head,” Inesto replied. His left eye flicked briefly to the door, behind which a man in a conductor's cap had stopped, looked into the compartment, waved understandingly and immediately disappeared again.

“We've been luckier than clever so far!” Wega exclaimed, still holding the small bag with the three mushrooms in her hand.

“We can only hope that it continues like this, after all, we're still travelling here without money and valid papers. A medieval world would have been almost better, with a bit of luck we could have passed ourselves off as witches or something.” Lyra scoffed.

“Yes, you and Pan perhaps. I think the four of us would have had a few problems with that. And I suppose we'll stop soon, the train is slowing down again,” Zelda replied. And indeed, the numbers on the screen became smaller again, at the moment they were just falling below the 300 mark. A few minutes later, while the landscape outside the window changed to mountainous and it started to rain, they entered a new, unknown city with quaint black slate roofs. The train remained on the aqueduct, even when it unexpectedly entered a platform hall at a good 40 yards above the strange city. Apparently, this station had simply been placed on the roof of a high-rise building.

They could hear the doors opening with a slurping sound, and then some of the passengers poured out onto the dark marbled platform of Dheas Thule, and a considerably larger number poured back in. And as was to be expected, they were not left alone in their compartment either.

An elderly gentleman with a majestic owl dæmon stopped in front of the compartment door with his suitcase held together by belts, then opened it and greeted the three girls.

“A pleasant day to you, madams. Would you happen to have a seat to spare?”

His voice sounded deep and reassuring, almost a little coached. Lyra and Zelda didn't say anything, but nodded almost simultaneously. Actually, there was room for at least three more passengers here.

“Grant!” He pushed his suitcase under the bench seat and sat down next to Lyra and Pantalaimon on the aisle side of the compartment, opposite Zelda and Wega. With his outstretched index finger, he touched the screen to his left, whereupon the glass of the door and the windows to the aisle became more opaque. They could still see the people passing by, but only as silhouettes.

“There, much more comfortable now. Where are you travelling to, if you don't mind me asking?”

“To Teslapolis,” Lyra replied.

“Oh, Teslapolis,” he emphasised the ‘–polis’ much more than she did, “I'm going there too. I visited my daughter and grandchildren in Saltmaker's Dingle, and now I'm heading back home. Well, then you can wake me up when we get there. But do not let yourselves be bothered.”

He rummaged around in his jacket pocket, pulled out two tied together nubs, put them in his ears and leaned back, relaxed. The owl demon had settled on top of the luggage rack and now closed his big eyes as well.

For a few minutes, Lyra, Wega and Zelda sat expectantly and also a little anxiously, watching the gentleman, whose head rested comfortably on his double chin and his folded hands on his prominent tummy. Then he began to snore.

“Um, do we have to be quiet now, or can't he hear us anymore?” whispered Pan.

“I think the things in his ears are hearing mufflers. Let's give them a try.” Zelda clapped her hands briefly but clearly, but the man didn't move. And the owl, which she had completely forgotten about for the moment, only twitched her ears briefly in its sleep. It was fortunate that the dæmons didn't take on every quirk and ability of their animal role model.

“Phew, I wouldn't have felt like keeping quiet the whole time,” Pan said with relief.

“We all know how hard that is for you,” Vicco commented maliciously. Pan didn't let it go and gave the otter a nip on the ear.

“And I thought we'd have to chat with him the whole trip. We can't even tell him the name of a place when he asks us where we come from,” Wega whispered to the group.

“We could still say that we're straight from Camelot. Or wait, there must be other place names in this thing.” Zelda replied just as quietly, and dug the brochures from the market out of her bag again.

“But will he believe us? We sound completely different from the locals there. It would be like a Texan trying to convince you that he's from France. He might not immediately realise that we're from a different world, but he'll still think we're strange.”

“Hmm, so what should we tell him then? Or should we just keep quiet?”

“No, that's not right either, it's not polite. Let's just hope that he is very tired and sleeps for a long time. Maybe we should do that too,” Lyra concluded, pulling her backpack onto her lap, quickly checking that the alethiometer was still there, and then making herself comfortable as well, gazing out of the window at the forest of oak and pine trees that was passing by at a dizzying speed.

However, Lyra's plan did not work out. Soon after, the train made a second stop, in Biscayan Mondieu, as a tiled mosaic at the station displayed, and a large number of passengers boarded again. A Nipponese-looking couple with huge hiking rucksacks occupied the last two free seats more or less without asking, and after a brief introduction in broken English, they sank into a never-ending dialogue in their mother tongue.

Similar to many Eastern European and some German languages, it was incredibly difficult to interpret the content of the conversation just by listening to the tone of voice. Seeing their beaming and laughing faces while they locked horns verbally was stressful, and on top of that, none of them knew what to make of the fluffy yellow figure of the one dæmon. With its jagged tail, it had swung itself onto the luggage rack with Vicco, Pan and the owl, and now sat grinning dimly in their midst. Fortunately, both of them, including the yellow rat, got off at the next stop, Puerto al Peregrino, an hour later.

“By the gods, I don't mind tourists, but some people,” said the gentleman, shaking his head as the blabbermouths left the compartment still talking, and turned back to the three girls.

“I've got it much better with you. What are you actually doing in Teslapolis?”

“Uh, us? We want to visit some friends.” Crap, they should have prepared better for this question.

“With so little luggage? My daughters had to pack at least a suitcase this size for a sleepover just down the street. And every time, my wife had to unpack half of the clothes, clean but crumpled, later. I thought that's what all girls did.”

“Yes, we know that from our classmates, they always pack way too much too,” Zelda replied, trying to sound casual.

“You three don't sound like typical Lakers, more like people from the Jaanooger Platte, are you from around there?”

“Yes, exactly, we just changed trains in Camelot.”

Suddenly the gentleman started to chuckle. Lyra was startled, but it was a friendly laugh.

“I have to admit that I tricked you. Your accent is about the opposite of that of the Lower Frisians, and I can't think of any place where people, especially those your age, speak as distinctly as you do, and if you really came from the Lower Frisian Lake District, you would have had to get on in Dheas Thule. There is no direct rail connection with Camelot because of the Soetsee in between.” He took his glasses off his nose and, still smiling slightly, cleaned them on his shirt.

“Am I right in assuming that you are world traversers?”

Pardon? Lyra went pale and dug her fingernails into Pan's fur until she felt his pain herself.

“I didn't think I'd have the honour of meeting some in person in my old age. I've always been told how special it is when you discover someone from another world for the very first time. How did you end up here?”

“W-we went through a window between the worlds, on the beach near a place called Blackpool, and e-ended up on a beach near Camelot. And now w-we are following s-someone else from our world, who must have ended up here t-too,” the blindsided girl replied stuttering.

“Another traverser? Wouldn’t you believe that. When was this, roughly?”

“Sometime last week, we're not sure exactly. He left us a message to come to Teslapolis.”

At that moment, there was a knock on the door. A pretty young woman in a kind of futuristic maid uniform peered in and asked in a friendly manner,

“Can I get you something to eat or drink, a coffee, sir?”

“Oh, could you bring us a round of tea, please?”

“What flavour would you like? We have Siam Grey, Fryfrisia, Cuarenta, Carrot-”

“Cuarenta sounds fine.”

“With milk?”

“Yes, please.”

“Very well.”

She opened the door a little further and turned to her well stocked serving trolley. Her dæmon, a pine marten like Lyra's Pantalaimon, but with darker fur, helped her to fill a meshwire ball the size of a plum with loose tea. On a small chain she lowered the ball into the glass pot, filled it with hot water and placed it on the narrow compartment table along with a few cups and a small milk jug. She held out her wristwatch to the man, who touched it with some sort of card, said a polite goodbye and closed the door again.

For a moment, everyone in the compartment seemed to be paying attention to only the teapot, from whose metal tea strainer an orange cloud was slowly billowing. Their native fellow passenger sat relaxed, petting his owl dæmon and adjusting his glasses. Then he began to speak again.

“You're probably a little surprised that I believe your story. But that's how it is for everyone who lands here in our beautiful big world in modern times. I don't know what it was like in your home world, but world traversers like you have been showing up here all the time. And we have to thank them for many things. Take this wonderful tea, for example. It was brought by a whole nation that stumbled into our Siam fleeing from a war a thousand years ago. Or this magnetic levitation train, which we call Maglev, in which we are currently sitting. We owe its technological foundations to a pioneering explorer, who, by the way, gave his name to your destination. Without him, today's infrastructure of this world would be unthinkable. Or the language that we apparently have in common. Perhaps someone from your world brought it to ours.”

“... or the other way around,” Zelda interjected.

“Well, I'm afraid not.” He picked up the teapot, swung it back and forth a few more times, and began to pour, and then finished each cup with a good dollop of milk.

“The portals between the worlds are only ever passable from the other worlds to ours for a short period of time. It's a one-way street. And there aren't any known to exist in the other direction. Even if someone had ever crossed one of those, out of here, they wouldn't be able to come back to tell anyone about it, wouldn't they.”

A slightly playful but friendly grin spread across his face and fell back on the girls. So that was what happened with Makepeace's window. Was this behaviour a peculiarity of this world? And how did the alchemist react to it? Again, questions upon questions. Now, don't blabber. To distract herself, Lyra was the first of them to dare to approach the strange drink.

By its looks and preparation it reminded her of the strong, cloudy tea that the Gyptians used to drink on their travels. Bitter and invigorating, and a guarantee of hyperactivity in children. But the scent that rose here promised something completely different, rather fruity. Lyra took a sip.

The first impression was vanilla-sweet, but then more flavours emerged: orange, cinnamon and the taste of various Mediterranean fruits, even a little of the aroma that Zelda's oriental pipe tobacco sometimes exuded, and a honey-like aftertaste. Were that forty three aromas start to finish, if the name really had its origin in a language like Portuguese? Maybe. It was a nice tea that she could get used to. Her companions now dared to approach their cups as well.

“How did you know that we're not from around here?” Zelda wanted to know. In her criminalistic honour, she had to be quite offended in regards of this early discovery.

“It was a lot of little things that came together. Your accent, your somewhat unusual fashion, very pretty, yes, but hardly anyone here takes the train in something like that, or the fact that you left the glass on the door transparent. Anyone who takes a train in this country tends to switch them because then you can see if a compartment is already occupied. But the most unusual thing about you was that you didn't ever have these things in your hands for all these hours. You never see people your age on the train without them.”

The old man reached for the screen to his left and, to the amazement of the three of them, removed it from the wall. He began to wipe and type on it with his free right hand.

“Let's see which world you come from.”

The second screen next to Wega quickly changed the images and finally showed the strange topography of this world in its centre.

“How does your world compare to this one? Anything stand out, big countries, how many continents are there?”

“Our maps look like this one, but the other way around, where there is land here, we have oceans and the seas are land,” Zelda replied, moving forward a little in her seat to get a better view.

“Ah, one of the many negative worlds. As far as I know, there are 128 different ones known so far. What, well, distinctive features does it have? Governments or the like?”

“Muscovy, Norroway, our Kindom of Sweden, Swiss South Africa, the Magisterium comes to mind.” Zelda replied thoughtfully and added a few more.

“Since time immemorial, people here have been collecting everything that traversers have brought and reported from their worlds of origin. With this computer, I can access the digital databases. Every citizen can do this, for these situations...”

While he was speaking, the gentleman tapped around on the screen again, making letters appear and disappear, then a blue bar covered the image, slowly filling up, and then revealing a map of the world that was all too familiar to Lyra. Brytain, Lappland, Quebec, Texas – she recognised these national borders immediately.

“Well, we rarely have migrants from that world, only about 300 in the last 100 years, but it is also very far from ours.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lyra. Weren't the worlds all somehow inside each other?

“Well, far away means very unlike ours. Our scientists developed a system of formulas and equations that calculates a ratio from the differences and similarities between our world and the foreign one. I can't explain the background and the weightings and such things to you, I'm not an expert, just a simple teacher. I learned this at school like all children back then and later taught it myself, and the database here gives me the numbers. Your world will reach 32% commonality, mainly because you have dæmons like us, which is a little odd among the negative worlds. In most of them, you carry this part of yourself within you.”

Suddenly, the train's exterior windows turned milky like the ones to the walkway, and the cabin lights came on. Wega was particularly frightened, but the man was able to calm her. The train would shortly be entering mountainous terrain, and at the high speed, which was hardly noticeable on the previous aqueduct-like route through the flat landscape, the frequent change from light to dark through the many tunnels would have almost the same effect as a stroboscope. Whatever that was, it could lead to nausea and headaches. He handed the screen tablet to Wega and encouraged her to try the device to pass the time. In a few minutes, one could then see out the window again.

Wega and Zelda quickly got used to the intuitive controls and curiously browsed through the file of different worlds. Now and then, Lyra picked up some of their murmured words, names, places; Arda, Terra, Nekkepenn, New Amsterdam, Okinawa, Carn Dûm. Wega seemed tempted to find the world of her first traverse, as they called it here. Yet this was just background noise at the moment. Lyra’s attention was focused on the old man, whose vivid words in conversation with her created a lively and fascinating mosaic of this alien world in her mind.

This world was so different, had developed so differently from the counterparts from which all the world traversers had originated. It was fresh, new, young, and invited its visitors to experience it. With its 70% land mass, to which the 30% of Lyra's Earth seemed almost puny, it offered its inhabitants near endless space to find their own, so to speak.

In fact, there were still many blank spots on the map, and the words ‘Unexplored’ hid landings that would easily cover Brytain in size. Unlike in Lyra's world, where oceans and their winds had carried explorers to the farthest corners of the globe since mankind began, travelling overland or on rivers, if their currents allowed it, was much more arduous and tedious.

Even aeroplanes were long without a chance against the 11,000 yard high bastion of rock and ice, which, somewhere behind the right horizon, separated the Atlantic Plain into two halves unknown to each other. On this side, near the ocean, nature flourished in the moisture flowing in from the east; forests and fertile soil offered a good life. Behind the steep face, however, only dry steppe and desert awaited you.

In the meantime, the windows had cleared again. The tunnel and forest-rich landscape had given way to incredibly extensive green pasture land, with occasional paths and roads winding through it. On the horizon, where the rainforests must be, the green became darker, and behind them, foothills of the Atlantic Ridge rose into the cloudy sky. Isolated farmsteads added splashes of colour to the uniformity.

Lyra wondered what it would be like to live so far from civilisation. Were there children there, and how did they go to school? Perhaps with the technology that they had here on this train? Were they locals, or did they also come from other worlds? The fascination of this alien world slowly took root in her mind.

“... and you should know, I'm definitely not the only one who knows about your otherworldly origin. Traversers like you are almost always drawn to the major transport hubs, which is why researchers have installed sensors there. I'm sure there's one in the compartment here too; these things are no bigger than a matchbox. Every traverser, except for small children oddly enough, gives off a special radiation that is detected by it. There will probably be a small committee waiting for you on the platform later.”

Lyra's heart seemed to stop. But why was she surprised? In this high tech world, she should have expected to encounter obstacles sooner or later. And Makepeace, following whatever plan, must have a similar level of knowledge due to his background, and thus fall into the same traps as they had now. Maybe this all would actually bring them closer to him.

“You will have to stay in an adaptation centre for a few days. If I'm not mistaken the one in Teslapolis is right next to the train station. But don't worry, the stay is only to prepare you for this world. They will also take care of all the little invisible things that make you sick,” the man continued in a grandfatherly tone.

“Invisible things? It's about Dust, isn't it?” Pan blurted out. The man looked surprised and adjusted his reading glasses again.

“Dust? As long as none of you girls are allergic to it, a little dirt shouldn't be a problem. No, I mean all the bacteria and viruses that you have brought with you from your old world, and all those to which you are inevitably exposed here.”

He paused for a moment, apparently hoping for understanding faces. But Lyra, Wega and Zelda just stared at him sceptically.

“Hmm, apparently you have a different medical system. Well, besides the large landmass, there is another reason why our world here is so sparsely populated. It just so happens that each of the other worlds, no matter how close and similar it is to ours or yours, still differs in many small details. And one detail that should not be underestimated is the diseases that exist in each world. Take, for example, kleuter pox. Here, in this world, this disease strikes kindergarten and primary school classes every year. The children develop red pustules all over their bodies, they itch violently, but after a week the nightmare is over and you never get the disease again. Because then the immune system, the body's own disease defence that every human has, has adjusted to it and can fight it. And every child born here has already genetically inherited a little of this immune information from their parents, so that the immune system has a little help when the disease breaks out for the first time.”

Lyra thought she understood. She had never heard the word ‘immune’ used that way before, but she still remembered when she and Roger were sent to other children whenever those lay sick in bed. To cheer up the patient, and to toughen themselves, as Roger's aunt had called it. It had not been uncommon for both guests to be bedridden themselves for a few days afterwards, and to receive visitors in return. One of the illnesses could even prevent Lyra from ever having children if she only had it as an adult, Ma Costa had once explained, and had taken the girl all the way to the neighbouring Thrupp to infect her. For a week afterwards, her abdomen had pinched and tweaked.

“Now it could be that this simple childhood illness does not exist in your world. Your body would never have learned how to deal with this type of illness, and you might die from it. Something that we cure with waiting and daily baths. And the danger is just as great the other way around. You could have brought pathogens with you that never existed here before, that are completely harmless to you but deadly to us.

Not even a hundred years ago, a family traversed into our world. They appeared to be completely healthy and travelled extensively in their new home. A few months later, residents of the places they had visited began to show unknown symptoms. The new disease spread quickly. Three years later, a third of the population of this country was ill or had already died from the immigrated disease.

And cases like this have occurred again and again in the past, and are one of the reasons why all the different peoples of this world have remained isolated from each other for so long. Because any contact with strangers posed an immeasurable risk.

But don't worry, our medicine has made a lot of progress in the last century. Today, a drop of your blood is enough to determine what diseases you once had and what ailments you are likely to get in old age.”

He took the tablet from Wega, wiped and tapped on it again, and seconds later he was able to show them a list of illnesses and symptoms, some of which were familiar to them. Rubula Delphis, so that was the name of the one Ma Costa had once warned Lyra about.

“And the machine knows that just because we held it?” Zelda asked anxiously, checking her hands for pinpricks. The old man chuckled slightly and shook his head.

“No, no, don't worry, the little thing can't do that. This is just a list of typical childhood illnesses that were brought back from your world by other traversers before you. We're apparently quite well prepared for you, but you three will need a few vaccinations. A few little stings and you'll be on the safe side. And the sensors won't pick you up anymore either.”

Lyra nodded. They apparently had no choice but to agree to the procedure. And if it meant they could really move around freely afterwards, it would only help them in their search for Makepeace.

The train had slowed down noticeably as a strange forest became visible outside the window. Bright white, with strangely uniform branches whipping in the wind. But as they got closer, Lyra recognised the ‘trees’: they were hundreds of windmills, the same ones used to generate amberic energy in Will's world, only much larger. Windmill was not really an appropriate name. These structures bore little resemblance to the old grain grinding machines that also turned on the banks of the Isis in her native Oxford. Rather, they reminded Lyra of the wind wheels that Tony Costa had once taught her to fold from paper.

“The Madeiran windworks, always in the constant easterly winds of the Kubra trade winds. Before the invention of fusion power, they alone supplied the city with energy. We'll be there soon, you better get ready to disembark.”

With a tap on the screen, he made the windows to the corridor transparent again, allowing them to see the city that had appeared at the far end of the bay, which the train was following at a more moderate speed now. Huge, colourful cranes were loading ships in the harbour, and behind them, sparkling facades of metal and glass stretched into the bright summer sky. As in Dheas Thule, the train remained on the aqueduct for a long time, flying over uniform suburban settlements, between which the greenery became less and less the deeper they entered the city. More and more tracks and Maglev troughs joined the route like strands of hemp on a rope walk, weaving in and out of bridges and tunnels, and then the train glided into the station at Teslapolis with its steamer-like calm.

Lyra, Zelda and Wega had no eye for the architecture, which resembled a giant scallop shell more than a building. They shouldered bags and rucksacks, tugged their dæmons, and took each other's hands firmly as the train finally came to an almost imperceptible stop. Only when the largest flow of passengers had subsided did they slowly make their way to the door and step out into the dry, warm, strange climate of this city.

Zelda didn't dare to blink, and even though Wega's face remained expressionless, the throbbing of the veins in her hand, which Lyra could feel over her own pressing heartbeat, spoke volumes. The old man and the young stewardess followed them calmly, beckoning a waiting group of elegantly dressed people over to them.

The three girls were surrounded by onlookers, who paused, looked over, and began to whisper. A mother had knelt down and spoke to her two small children, whose eyes were fixed on the three girls with the same fascination as theirs had been on the large map in Camelot.

Finally, the officials had reach the girls. A woman stepped forward and said, bowing slightly:

“Welcome to our world.”

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No, this is most probably not a false alarm! The three young women in compartment 7, carriage 2, are dressed rather unusually, in a posh way. They understand English and are chatting and drinking tea with the older gentleman sitting with them. He has a valid ticket and travels the route regularly. She herself has tried unsuccessfully to engage them in conversation, and her dæmon Bambina is currently eavesdropping at the door. Luckily, her staff compartment is right next to compartment 7. Yes, she expects them to get off at Teslapolis, platform 3, second level, 19:30.

The recipient of the call thanks Haley Dippet, and wishes her a pleasant journey. And there had been no need to whisper.

Chapter Text

Life could not go on like this. The peddler down on the street corner outside of the New Yorker now charged twenty dollars for a single cigarette. And tomorrow it would be thirty, or maybe even in an hour. It was hopeless. Not that this affected this gentleman personally; no, Westinghouse guaranteed him a lifetime of financial security. Payment for ‘consultation’ that no one had bothered with for years.

This nation was at an end. Everything revolved around money, which was worth less by the hour. There was no longer any room for innovation; citizens no longer longed for progress or technology, they longed for a full stomach, coal for the stove and a permanent, paying job.

His time here was over. A contact had gotten him a place on a ship, nothing luxurious, but a way out of this misery. Back to his Serbian homeland. Little awaited him there, a lonely rural life in the inherited house, perhaps a small job as a teacher, but a man of his seniority didn't need much more.

He had passed on his endless lodgings in the New Yorker to an acquaintance, a penniless writer and tinkerer like himself. They always looked similar, especially the moustache, and both came from the same country. Who knew how long the deceptive act would work, but for that time, that friend had a roof over his head and a full plate again.

And so, on the evening of the 23rd of November 1929, Nikola Tesla went out onto the pier for a last look at the majestic silhouette of the city he had called home for so long before boarding the ship. One last gaze, one last breath of New York air.

Then he sees something. Out there, at the end of the pier, a crack, a window, is suspended in the still air of this night. Behind that window lies the wood of another pier, of another city, whose light shimmers and flickers differently as that in New York does.

A mirror into another now, only his reflection is missing. Nikola hesitates, but grabs his suitcase tied together with a belt and string, straightens his hat, twirls his beard once more, and strides across.

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“It's really incredible what this Tesla guy has given to this world. Without him, the Maglev trains wouldn't exist, nor light bulbs, these tablets, really anything that uses Anbaricity. He left his country to retire and instead became an icon in this world.”

Lyra nodded in agreement, even though she knew that Zelda was talking more to herself and hadn't looked up from the tablet. Of all the technology they had been presented with in the last few unbelievably filled weeks, this inconspicuous piece of plastic and glass was still one of the most amazing. Infinite books in a device that wasn't any heavier than the small slates they had used to practise their ABCs on in primary school.

Otherwise, nothing was new. It was just that there was Anbaricity in everything here, even in the toilet, which had heated seats at the push of a button. Not only their bathroom was full of Anbaricity, but practically everything in the room that had been assigned to Lyra, Wega, and Zelda was, including three wonderfully comfortable beds with adjustable bedside lamps on three of the walls and floor-to-ceiling glass on the fourth, offering a view of the city's canals and railway lines and darkening automatically in the bright sunlight. And the room was at least four times the size of their room back at St Sophia's.

The people at the Adaptation Centre took good time for all the new things. Celes Moon and her dæmon in the form of a jackdaw had been the first to meet them at the train station. Now she looked after the three girls, empathetically and sympathetically. This woman in the neat, concierge like uniform and plaited hair had brought the three of them to the centre, had accompanied them through the initial examination, the data collection and the move into this apartment, explaining every nook and cranny and every little feature of it, from the door lock and bathtub to the laundry chute and blackout blinds. Always patient, always friendly.

But there was something artificial and rehearsed about all this closeness and understanding; no question or oddity seemed to surprise her. It was as if Miss Moon were following a ‘Manual for Small Groups of Young Women Travelling Alone from World Second-from-the-left’. What Lyra noticed, for example, was how deliberately she avoided the topic of family. As often as she asked questions about the world, the countries, the religions or even the school, she never asked direct questions about the families of the three. No one seemed to be interested in the fact that Lyra and Wega were orphans, while Zelda had two loving parents and a brother waiting for her at home. There was no looking back on these matters, which conjured up some memories of Bolvangar in Lyra.

Though considering what they knew about this world so far this made perfect sense. It did not matter if one had a family of twelve or just an empty room waiting in whatever one called home, returning to this home was impossible. They knew nothing of the North Pole machine, their father's bridge, or Æsahættr, the Subtle Knife. All that was known here were one-way windows that led people from other worlds into this one. And Lyra thought it wise to leave it at that. She hadn't forgotten their destination, the man who had ultimately led her, however unwittingly, into this world. But she approached it differently than her eleven year old self would have.

Back then, no amount of persuasion would have kept her in a room for this long, no matter how big and beautiful it was. She had always only seen the next step, the next goal, which she had relentlessly pursued, whether it was escaping from Mrs Coulter or saving Billy; her thoughts and ideas followed one another like the words in a book. But something had changed during her journey with Will, and it had continued to develop over the years. Putting this development into words for herself was difficult, but usually Lyra had two things in mind that she could compare it to:

One was a picture, perhaps a drawing, of Oxford, with its turrets and towers, painted from a single perspective. The other was a model of the same place. With its fixed perspective, the drawing suggested a single perception, a single point of view. Certain things were always in focus, while others were always in shadow or on the edge, and yet others were not painted at all. One could always edit it with an eraser and pencil, but you would quickly forget what it had looked like before.

The model, on the other hand, offered an infinite number of perspectives and points of view. If you moved just a little, everything suddenly looked very different, maybe better, maybe worse. Other things came into focus or disappeared. One step back and everything was just as it was before.

For Lyra, it was sometimes as if her mind had been two-dimensional as a child, and now at least three-dimensional. With the concept of drawing and model, she had found a pretty good explanation for herself, one that had earned her an unexpected top grade in her philosophy class.

And now this room, this city, this country and its inhabitants, this world was the model. From one perspective, they were prisoners; from another, they were saved, safe and cared for. And somewhere in between, Lyra waited for the right moment to follow the one-dimensional trail that Makepeace had left them.

“You're pretty far away right now, aren't you?” a voice pulled Lyra out of her thoughts. Taking a deep breath, she focused her gaze and looked at Pan, who was crouching in front of her on the glass table.

“Yes, I was,” she gathered her words. “I was wondering how we should proceed, how we could get from here to Makepeace, and to Nosinas, whatever or whoever that is. I drifted off.”

“For the time being, it's probably best if we just wait. Until this immunisation is ready, we'll always be found, like on the train. Even me.” Vicino, Zelda's dæmon, joined the conversation. At the moment he lay before Zelda, his chameleon skin in the checkered pattern of the tablecloth. Doctor Grimaldi, the lovable, chubby doctor with the snow-white moustache, had tried to explain the situation to them. At regular intervals, the three of them received vaccinations in his small practice room, which would protect them from all kinds of dangerous and deadly diseases. Zelda had made the mistake of looking for some of them on the tablet – endless amounts of images of pustules and swellings. The girls also noticed the vaccinations themselves; they felt warm, as if they had a slight fever.

“I'm curious to see how it goes. When Doctor Grimaldi has finished the treatments, we'll be able to move around freely.”

“That will take a while... but Miss Moon has announced that we'll soon be allowed out into the city to look for new clothes.”

In addition to the basic equipment that each of the three had found in their own closet when they had moved into this room: skirts, trousers, shirts, underwear, pyjamas, sportswear, socks, all in plain colours and the right sizes. One was generous.

“I wonder what the youth here wear? Back in Camelot, I didn't pay any attention to that.”

And again, Zelda's nimble fingers typed new words into the search engine of the screen tablet. Wega and Lyra were very careful with their third friend; out of the three of them, Zelda had lost the most, and had the least experience with such a loss. In spite of that, she was almost overly cheerful, absorbing everything new around her like a sponge. Neither of them knew how long this would continue, whether she would crack at some point.

Good values, indicating good basic health and thus a healthy life, quite contrary to the assumptions he had based on other traversers from their world. Dr Grimaldi had nothing but praise for them during the daily check-up.

“No worms, no fleas, no lingering infections, no deformed fractures – it almost seems as if we have to rewrite the expectation sheets for your world.”

“Better not,” replied Wega, while Grimaldi was taking her pulse. “The place we come from, Oxford, is pretty much the cutting edge of medicine and science. You can't find better doctors in our country. Elsewhere, people still rely more on God's mercy and prayers.” Vicco nodded in agreement.

Grimaldi shook his head with a sigh and turned to his clipboard for a moment to write down Wega's values, then it was Zelda's turn, same routine as with all of them: heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, respiratory composition and finally something that had to do with a large device suspended from the ceiling and their heads. After that, there was another injection, but the needle was so fine that, almost like a bee's sting, it didn't need any kind of bandage and didn't hurt. All routine by now. At the end, he pushed the new papers through a fast photocopier, filed the originals in a separate folder and put the copies in his outbox, wishing them a nice day and ‘see you soon’.

“I wonder if that means something,” Zelda murmured on the way back to their room.

“What do you mean?” Lyra asked back.

“Grimaldi's files. Did you notice how different the thicknesses of our files are? Wega? Definitely a finger thicker than mine... yours, Lyra, is also much more extensive, although Grimaldi says that the three of us haven't had much besides the childhood diseases...”

Racking her brain, she pulled a face that was only missing her pipe for the perfect Sherlock impression. “I have a feeling that his programme is more than just immunisations... I can't say why... like in ’The Man with the Twisted Lip‘, where Holmes exposes the barracks doctor and reveals his secret agenda.”

“I think everyone here at the centre has a secret agenda, or whatever you call it. Behind every word they say to us, there are three that they keep secret,” Lyra agreed.

“I still don't understand how the sensors work, that the gentleman on the train told us about, and how it relates to immunisation.” They had reached their door, Lyra pressed her fingertips on the field next to the handle, and with a clack it unlocked. “Okay, I don't understand how this works either. The machines in this world are so... different.”

“Maybe the sensors measure our brains and register when we don't feel at home here yet,” Pan replied.

“I can't imagine that, Pan. But there must be something else that makes us different from the people of this world.”

“And all the other ‘traversers’, not just us... I think the old man on the train even mentioned it, in a side comment... but I wasn't paying attention.”

At that moment, there was much more on their minds. That evening, the three of them stayed among themselves, while outside a light storm made the sunshades over the large windows rattle.

The next day, after a few lessons with Miss Moon, they went a little earlier to their daily examination, as the first supervised trip into town was planned for the afternoon. Zelda was very cooperative and interested, was the first to undergo the routine, and kept herself neatly in the background during the other two, inspecting the plants and the medical equipment...

It was only when they were back in their room that the reason for her manner became clear:

“Picked out while he examined you with his giant antenna and copied in the moment he was busy with your pulse, Lyra. The pump of the measuring device is so loud that it drowned out the whirring. His dæmon doesn't have good ears between her spikes either, she was too busy with you, Pan.”

And with that, she handed Lyra four sheets of paper and Wega three. It seemed her friend's criminal skills were not limited to old locks.

“Zelda! That's theft!”

“Actually, it's more like espionage, Wega, and it's our stuff, so we have a right to it! ... uhh, espionage...” She obviously liked the last word.

Instead of arguing about terminology, Lyra sighed and turned to her notes:

First name, last name, presumed age, eye colour, hair colour, height, sex, and some more. This was followed by a list of the typical childhood diseases, rubulas like the Delphis one, Kleuterpox, various forms of flu and one Hepatitis, which they had collected and detected during the first cautious treatments with Doctor Grimaldi. After that, progress bars for all the vital signs measured during each session.

Below that, a list of the vaccinations that had already been given and those that were still outstanding. Here Lyra was taken aback for the first time, because there were considerably fewer vaccinations already given than treatments they had had. Of course, maybe some of the vaccinations took several days and injections... Doctor Grimaldi never specified the individual injections.

Then she turned the page and saw a graph. Negative exponential, it started at the origin of the x-axis at a value of 100 on the y-axis, and fell sharply at first, then more and more slowly, exactly exponentially, towards zero. For an x-value which probably corresponded to yesterday, the y-value was still at 33%.

“33% of what?” Pan asked loudly from her shoulder.

“Look closely, there, under the graph.”

There, under the graph, was her full name again, and behind it the words 'Initial Frequency' . Below that was a long, confusing number with a symbol behind it. A Ԅ, more of a glitch than a letter, nothing that even she, as a friend of foreign languages and scripts, had ever seen.

“Lyra, are you also two-five-four-four-five-eight-zero-zero-and-so-on squiggles?” Zelda asked pointedly, having also flipped to page two of her own document. Lyra took a closer look and nodded in agreement.

“Maybe that's the philosophical name of our world,” Pan murmured.

“I don't think so, the world maps in the tablets have different, much shorter names, ours is called ND 14. This reminds me much more of the Anbaricity teachings and the squiggle of the Ohm.” Wega interjected.

“And now, both of you, please turn another page,” Zelda directed with surprising aplomb, holding her two pages between her fingers.

Lyra turned the page.

Additional sub-frequencies (observation required)

Two graphs like the ones on page two, with similar curves, but much lower starting values, somewhere around 22 for the first and 10 for the second, and each with a sub-frequency stood another long number with a squiggle at the end. A third graph with a starting value of 7 awaited her on page three, and below it the small addition:

Below threshold: 4

Could it be? She started counting in her head, then turned to Wega, who was studying her paper with the same concentration.

“Wega, Vicco, how many sub-frequencies do you have?”

“One with a graph, starting at 35, and two ’below threshold‘.”

“And do you remember how many windows you and Serafina used to get back to our world?” asked Lyra.

“There were... three. One out of the world, one into a world full of green water two weeks later, and then the one into the forest near Inverey.”

It made sense.

“Zelda, you don't have any sub-frequencies, do you?”

“No, nothing,” she said, raising both hands holding just her two pages.

“Then that's how it is.” Lyra took a deep breath.

“The sub-frequencies represent the parallel worlds we've been to.”

“But what does that mean, why frequency? I'm not a radio.”

“No, you're not Wega, but maybe... it's precisely these frequencies that are detected by the sensors. There has to be something.”

“And about the threshold,” Zelda speculated, “...maybe that's the limit below which the sensors no longer detect us. Maybe all the graphs have to go below this threshold, and then we can move around freely.”

Lyra hesitated, but then went over to her bed, and took her alethiometer out of its case for the first time since they had moved in. She sat down at the table in the middle of the room with it and instinctively reached for a non existing book.

“You'll have to do without, Lyra. Clear your mind and think like a child,” Pan implored her.

Like a child. Free thinking. She turned the right pointer to Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, the left pointer to the loaf of bread, which with its cut edges symbolised a sharp boundary or a threshold. She hesitated for a long time with the third, lower pointer. On the one hand, she wanted to turn it to Alpha and Omega as well, to focus the question and provoke a clearer answer. But this was again knowledge she had read and learned. Something Dr Relf lectured on. Nothing childishly intuitive.

And so the pointer ended up on the spider instead, which Lyra immediately associated with the web they were caught in here. That's how childlike Lyra must have thought back then... not even four years ago.

The fine hand moved very slowly, seeming to stop almost imperceptibly on the chameleon, the cooking pot and the lute, and it continued to do so, changing the order. The answer was as weak as Lyra's faith in it.

And then there was a knock at the door.

Within moments, Zelda had gathered up all the paper copies and stowed them under her bedspread, while Lyra hastily put her truth meter away in its case.

But at the door it was only Miss Moon, picking them up for the shopping trip.

“Oh, you can hardly wait, can you?” she said in response to the three pairs of red cheeks and hustle.

“Before I let you go, there is something very important that you need, without which you can't do much in this city.”

And then she pulled three of those ‘playing cards’ out of an envelope, these cards that the girls had seen at the market in Camelot and on the train.

Lyra took hers, the light card made of colourful plastique, and grinned inevitably to see her name as Lyra Silvertongue. All Brytish authorities had so far accepted that surname only as a stage name and would not change it to her proper surname until Lyra came of age. Instead, ‘Belacqua’ was still written everywhere, that strange Italian-sounding name she had kept from her father. Belacqua, bella acqua, beautiful water, how had they come up with that construct? Now, in its place, clearly visible for all to see, was the meaningful title Iorek Byrnison had bestowed upon her. Next to it, her face was emblazoned as a hologram, and by tilting the card, one could admire her ears and even the back of her neck.

“In addition to your official identity card, this card also serves as your wallet. Cash was abolished in this country ten years ago; since then, these cards, in conjunction with one’s fingerprint, have been the means of payment for everyday transactions. You, as underage traversers, have been granted a starting balance of one thousand Avalon Pence, although you are not yet able to dispose of them completely freely. Today, you are allowed to spend fifty pence.”

“Fifty pence, you might get half a box of eggs for that in Oxford,” Lyra spoke to herself, grinning, but the grin died when she realised what a big step this was: they were now clearly official citizens of this still very foreign country. Lyra Silvertongue, Wega Jonassen and Zelda Stansted, residence: Teslapolis.

While she was getting ready for the excursion, Lyra noticed that the place of birth she had given at the admission interview, after the train journey, was actually recorded there. Lyra had given Oxford, more out of conviction than knowledge, because much about her earliest childhood was rather still unclear. And now that familiar Oxford was written on the card, with a small, delicately drawn (T) behind it. The traversers were not denied their origins, but they were sealed in plastique.

Lyra looked to Zelda, who just two hours ago had been brooding over how best to dress in order to avoid attracting attention in the city. Now she, too, had a pensive expression on her face, but not her usual ‘criminalistic’ one, but a rare one that showed that her thoughts went deeper, were personal. Outside in the hallway, Lyra put her arm around her shoulder comfortingly, whereupon Zelda only briefly showed her card.

“Place of birth: Paddington (T).”

was all she could utter through the lump in her throat. Nevertheless, steeled by the countless injections and taught by the crash course in Avalonian lore, they now went out into the city for the first time. Down the stairs, into the huge foyer – where someone else was apparently waiting for them.

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Old Ibrahim is always happy to see her. She is like a blooming flower in a wheat field, he says, referring to the young woman here in the market hall. Not as old and withered as he and his friends at the stands. Everyone laughs. Everyone here is familiar with the harmless flattery with which the ripe gentleman sweetens his old days. He hands her a small parchment bag of the finest goods from Cypriot gardens and gratefully accepts the few Sovereigns in return.

Chapter Text

The old channels still exist. The dead drops, the bulletin boards, code words and meeting places. But since the Magisterium began losing power, they have become increasingly deserted. Academia is no longer synonymous with danger.

The real channels, on the other hand, continue to channel the waters of Isis and Thames to Oxford as they have done for centuries.

It had been a long time since they had let through that little blue canoe that had brought them together many years ago, before the great flood. Not that it was necessary any longer. Oakley Street no longer needs the espionage of an eleven-year-old. Oakley Street no longer needs to exist. And that former eleven-year-old is now a postgraduate student at Jordan.

So their meeting on this day was a private one. Mr Polstead follows the invitation that reached him by the old route, rolled up in that small metal acorn with the left-hand thread. Was it necessary? Neither of them knows. What they do know is that Lyra, their Lyra, has disappeared, walked through a window, along with Zelda Stansted, daughter of the Swedish ambassador, and Wega Jonassen, the window orphan. Two of her friends. They followed a certain Sebastian Makepeace, and Lyra's alethiometer. All the supervision, all the caution, it was no use, Miss Silvertongue still attracts adventure like a magnet attracts compass needles.

Hannah Relf opens the door, greets Malcolm Polstead, and invites him in.

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“Mister Latvalla, glad you're on time.”

A young man was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs. About half a head taller than Wega, and thus a whole head taller than Lyra and Zelda, with his brown hair lying somewhat unruly, and shirt and trousers casually, not as if he had been checked by a mother before leaving. Very different from the finely groomed young men at Oxford's social evenings, but perhaps that was simply the fashion here. And as he greeted Miss Moon with a handshake, Lyra noticed an unusual trait in him that made her wonder. There was something about his face that reminded her of the far north... it was his eyes, somehow elongated, almost somewhat muscovitean - that was it, he reminded Lyra of a Tartar.

“These are Zelda, Lyra and Wega,” Miss Moon introduced them briefly.

The bloke's gaze followed the names around the group, lingering on Wega for an unusually long time.

“Pleased to meet you. I'll be accompanying you into town today – I'm Veikko – and this is Catalizza.”

A little awkwardly, and clearly nervously, he pointed to his red vixen dæmon, who was sitting on the floor next to him.

“It is a pleasure for me, too.” the vixen replied with a deep voice. She and Veikko had a completely different accent than Miss Moon, but not a Tartar one.

“I thought we were going with you?” Lyra asked practically immediately in the direction of Miss Moon. But she just shook her head with a smile.

“No, that's not how we do it, my duties are here in the house. To introduce you to society, you need other people, and especially someone closer to your age. I have complete confidence in Mister Latvalla.”

Closer in age, that was true, Veikko was certainly older than her, but not by much. Strictly speaking, their age difference was exactly within the window in which, in the most old-fashioned of Brytish societies, you were no longer allowed to spend time together without a chaperone. Moral guardians of the Magisterium had once written down exactly what did not conform to the rules of churchly courtship, and Lyra had read those inspiring lectures in detail. According to them, great caution was required to avoid temptation. However, their Tartar here looked far too nervous to get up to any mischief with the three ladies.

Instead, he led them outside the door, out into the fresh air. And warmth. Sunlight bathed their three faces pleasantly, and Zelda's choice of clothing for them three was absolutely appropriate. With flowing skirts, they began their walk, and, to their relief, they didn't stand out. They walked back towards the train station along the wide footpath, the same path they had been led along weeks earlier from the train station to the adaptation centre. But instead of turning towards the huge shell-shaped station, they went up a hill, which soon turned out to be a very wide bridge. In the middle, trams ran on four tracks, just like in Camelot, and on the sides were wide footpaths, trees and benches that made this bridge a place to linger. Below them, the Maglevs hissed through their white channels, while above them a cool sea breeze drove the clouds inland.

Veikko led the way, telling them the same things they had already learned in Miss Moon's class. But here and there he knew more. For example, that the city's original name, Aneikas' Akadir, came from the fact that traversers from another world had seen it as a mirage, a reflection of their hometown of Akadir, through a window that had existed for decades. Instead of sending undesirables into exile, they sent them through the one-way window into the mirror world until the city on the other side finally shimmered so attractively in its subtropical savannahs, that people began to walk through the mirror voluntarily. And the renaming to Teslapolis had been the consequence of the success of Nikola Tesla, who, here in this city, founded the first major solar and wind power plants in Avalon, thanks to the constant wind and sun. After his death, he was posthumously honoured by the renaming.

“He's a bit shy, isn't he?” Zelda murmured to the black and white spotted Inesto on her shoulder, one step behind him.

“And I think he's afraid of Wega, he avoids her gaze.” he replied.

2Are you sure it's fear? If boys like you, they either stare at you like a mouse at a piece of cheese or they try to ignore you like him. Maybe she's exactly his type.” Zelda had some experience with that.

“I'll keep my eyes open.”

Zelda and her dæmon did that anyway. In every dark corner, every alley and every scrap of conversation, Miss Stansted found something that made the cogs of her criminal mind turn. Wega was just as attentive, but for different reasons, always on guard, always alert. And Lyra? She and Pan felt a sense of responsibility that had been completely foreign to young Lyra back then. They felt guilty, because without their innate talent for adventure, she and Pan would not have ended up in Makepeace's basement. And as a result, they would not all be here in this strange world today.

“You've told us a lot about the city and the country now, but nothing about yourself yet... who exactly are you, and why are you leading girls like us around the city?” Zelda asked coquettishly, after further consultation with Inesto.

Veikko smiled shyly to himself before answering.

“I do this because here in Avalon, everyone who comes of age takes on a service for the country, which you will also have to do. There are all kinds of tasks, of varying lengths, and well I have applied to work with traversers, now during the summer holidays and whenever I find the time next year. I could also have spent a year caring for the elderly. Or join an expedition. Or a the Maglev construction site. There are many different options.”

“And why did you choose us, then?”

“I didn't choose you, I didn't even know you existed until three days ago. And working with the traversers is a great honour, like Tesla they have done a lot for this country and this world, brought a lot of knowledge into this world... everyone wants to do their part. But not everyone is accepted.”

“And why did they take you then?” Zelda didn't let up.

“I don't know exactly, I guess I was just right for the job. I was registered with the centre and waiting to be assigned to a traverser. That's what the three of you are now.”

“You're the right guy for the job,” his vixen demon added sternly, which sounded kind of weird.

Meanwhile, they had arrived at the main shopping street, which was full of young people thanks to the holiday season, and the four of them didn't stand out at all. The shop windows were full of fashion that somehow reminded Lyra of Will's world, but it was still rather different. Not quite as gaudy and colourful, but full of other unusual things. Women showing their shoulders, for example, seemed perfectly normal here, whereas in many places in Lyra's world this was still considered half-naked and was limited to swimsuits.

The first shop they actually entered after a long stroll was a smaller shoe store. Vicco had dragged his Wega into it. The saleswoman was very surprised by Wega's 'manufactured' sandals, but seemed to make sense of it, and made some assumptions when she measured Miss Jonassen's feet in a special box, but without directly saying the word “traverser”. She then diagnosed her as having ‘Neo-Makassarese’ feet in size ‘ten’ and disappeared into her storeroom, returning with a whole armful of boxes. Each of which actually fitted, making the purchase purely a matter of taste. After much discussion between the three girls, from which Veikko gracefully abstained, she chose a turquoise leather laced shoe, which went wonderfully with Wega's plait band due to its braiding. After that, she was asked to pay for the first time: she tapped the card on the till, whereupon the price of 10,22 pence was displayed, and confirmed it with her bare finger.

“In Oxford or Brighton, no shoemaker had moulds that fitted my feet, nothing ever fit properly. And here, the first little shop has them.”

Wega was amazed and danced around in her new shoes... something the alert girl never did otherwise. Vicco followed her and looked up at his other half with a sense of pride.

Next, the group ventured into a huge fashion store.

Floors full of mannequins in all kinds of clothing, and compared to anything the girls knew from Britain, with a great deal of freedom for shoppers. You didn't enter the store and were greeted directly by a salesperson; no, you had to look for them if you had questions. And the fitting rooms: instead of their own, lockable rooms, here they were only small cubicles separated from the sales floor by a simple curtain that didn't even reach the floor.

Lyra and Zelda, and after a little coaxing Wega too, tried on a selection of items until each of them, also out of consideration for their carer, finally decided on one item each. A summer dress for Lyra, a jacket for Zelda, and a blouse for Wega. After confidently paying for the items, they went back outside and, fittingly for late lunchtime, to a food stand that offered many varieties of a form of open pie filled with meat, sauces and green salad. And it had an oriental flavour, Zelda tasted cinnamon in it.

After the exotic lunch, they continued through the city. They passed an equally large store for ambartronic devices, which was very fascinating, even if the three traversers rarely understood what kind of devices were in front of them. And everything showed moving pictures. Of course, there were cinemas in Lyra's world, movie theatres, that had only really begun to flourish in recent years, freed from the shackles of the Magisterium. But moving pictures in a picture frame for the home, or even on small tablets? That showed you whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted? Those were not yet known in Lyra's world, which surprised Veikko very much, but then again, this world could hardly be considered standard, given that it ‘siphoned’ so much knowledge from other worlds.

Finally, the young man led the girls to something surprising in its familiarity: the public library of the city. Written words on pages that you could feel and smell and let slide through your fingers – it was like a journey home.

On three main floors and further side wings, shelf after shelf was lined up, large signs indicating the category and, for larger ones, the alphabetical subdivision. Of course, instead of walls full of cookbooks and handicrafts literature, which were obviously popular here and therefore placed right near the entrance, the libraries in Oxford were certainly even larger, more imposing and offered in-depth scholarship. But at the same time, even students of higher education, such as the three of them, had never felt entirely welcome there, as if only graduating from high school gave you the right to browse the shelves. And here, there was a supervised play and reading corner for the very young right next to the handicraft books.

Before the three of them disappeared into the literary depths, however, Veikko held them back; they didn't have much time left, and he didn't want to be late on his first day.

So they stayed in the entrance area and searched the shelves where the returns that had not yet been sorted back were collected. Lyra found a book with detailed illustrations about the history of the city, Zelda a literature guide, just to see if works by a certain Arthur C. Doyle were known here as well, and Wega, despite all the selection, picked up a large work on the Avalonian Republic's faith structures.

They again signed out with their new IDs, whereupon the librarian at the desk very kindly welcomed them to this city and this library.

“Did the till tell her that we are traversers?” Lyra asked Veikko as they finally made their way back outside.

“Yes, it did,” their male companion replied. “She was shown that you belong to the centre here. Until your treatment is completed, you are not allowed to leave the city, and if you somehow make it to Ponte di Messicala or to Labrador City and do something with your ID there, the person there will be shown where you belong.”

Behind him, Vicco whispered confidentially with Wega.

“And after the treatment?” Lyra asked.

“Then you can travel wherever you want and nothing will be reported anymore.”

Except for the little T, forever embossed in plastique.

“But you mustn't forget that you are still minors in this country, so be careful not to fall out with your host families and go on adventures without telling them.”

“...Host families...” The word was quite self-explanatory, but still, a vague panic rose in Lyra and Pan as she repeated it.

“The families who will take you in. You can't, and certainly don't want to, live in that room in the adaptation centre for the next three years. No, you are allowed to choose families who will become your home and guardians for the years until your eighteenth birthday. The requirements are high and it is a great honour to take in young traversers, so I'm sure you'll be in good hands. Whether you want to stay here in Teslapolis or prefer to go north to the Lakers, where you know the climate, is something you'll have to find out for yourselves. And don't worry, you three won't be torn apart; in each of the larger towns there should be enough applicants for all of you.”

Lyra swallowed. Miss Moon had already explained the same thing in bureaucratic language, but it sounded much more... real and closer coming from their companion.

“Don't worry, you'll have to stay in this city and at the centre for a few more weeks anyway.”

They were back at the centre right on time, before the sun came too close to the distant mountains. Miss Moon waited for them like a hotel receptionist, asked about everyone's well-being, praised the three of them for their restraint in terms of shopping, and then dismissed the girls to the mess hall for dinner. Veikko stayed behind, obviously to report a little more about his personal experiences of the day.

Later that evening, the trio found themselves in the bathroom of their apartment. Wega was just staking naked over Zelda who was busy with pedicures, and then carefully dipped into the foam-covered bathwater, Vicino slipping after her in his otter form. Meanwhile, Lyra and Pan were struggling with Lyra's curls, trying to tame them somehow, because if they were allowed to go out more often from now on, they wanted to look presentable. After almost three years of living together in St. Sophia's room 38 with its tiny bathroom, a lot of modesty between the three of them had given way to daily practicality. And none of the daemons had to close their eyes to their other half – after all, why should the soul be ashamed of the body? And as always at such grooming sessions, everyone quickly started talking.

“Actually, Veikko still hasn't told us much about himself,” Inesto said to his girl and inevitably to the whole room.

“I told you he's shy and just dazzled by our beauty,” Zelda replied, fluttering.

“But think about it, we only know his name and roughly his age,” Wega interjected.

“He said something about holidays, so he must still be at school himself. And otherwise, what else does he know about us? Our age, our names, Wega's shoe size...” murmured Lyra through her reddish-blonde hair.

“And everything else the centre has passed on to him. He'll know where we come from, and he's just being careful in light of that, maybe he's afraid he'll say the wrong thing and plunge us into a trauma or something.” Wega replied.

“Let's give him a few more days to settle in, he's just started his service and he's got the three of us right away,” Lyra agreed.

“Would he have preferred an old lady, like the one who always sits silently next to us in the dining room?” Zelda asked back.

“I think he's quite happy with the three of you. Can hardly take his eyes off you,” a bright orange Inesto spoke from the carpet.

“Especially from one of us…” Zelda purred in the direction of the bathtub. Wega reacted by disappearing completely into the foam.

It was the usual kind of banter they had so often had in their tiny bathroom, about their teachers or the latest flings, or about Oxford's social evenings, the clouds of smoke each of them used to wash out of their hair before going to bed. But Læna and her innocent nature were missing today, and again the thought hit Lyra like a stab in the heart.

“Another question, Zelda, how do we proceed with Doctor Grimaldi?” she asked the blonde girl.

“I want him to tell us what's going on. What are these frequencies, and why are they being kept secret from us?” she replied grimly.

“If he's allowed to. Grimaldi is just a cog in the whole system, just like Veikko,” a female voice spoke from the foam. “But I actually quite like him, the doctor.”

“I'll do it, I'll ask him. After all, it was me who got the files,” Zelda replied, to which Lyra nodded thoughtfully. An idea had come to her that took her back to the very beginning of their adventure, the photograms in the director's rest room, where golden Dust trickled from the boundary between the worlds, fractured by the aurora borealis. Perhaps a good starting point for further questions or rather innocuous answers. She still thought it safer to keep everything about Makepeace and the cut windows secret somehow.

After their personal hygiene, all three turned to the borrowed books, lay in their beds and tossed interesting facts back and forth:

Teslapolis, then still under its old name, was hit by at least three epidemics and had lost huge parts of its population each time. And was then ravaged in a big fire. But since the founding of the power plants and the renaming, further disasters had so far been avoided.

The country's literature, on the other hand, had a huge flaw: there were no Sherlock Holmes thrillers, not by Arthur Connan Doyle, not as a pastiche by another author. The closest thing in name were the novels in a series called Sherly Holdme, but these were categorised under ‘erotic’... according to the synopses, Sherly didn't solve any crimes but rather unfastened the belts of her lovers... But there were enough crime novels, in all shapes and colours, and languages, because in this country called Avalon alone, a dozen other local languages were spoken alongside English.

Wega didn't say much, although she flipped through the pages and read extensively, almost as if she was looking for something. But she was able to report that there was no state religion in Avalon, no all-encompassing church, no Magisterium. There were religious communities, apparently in the hundreds, but in terms of importance they did not rank higher than sports clubs.

With her, the bedside lamp was the first to go out, then the others followed suit. But Zelda still rumbled restlessly in the dark for quite a while, and Lyra whispered with Pan for a long time before sleep took her into his realm.

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The beauty of social gatherings such as these was the wide variety of people you could observe. Women with strange hats that reminded you of dead animals, men in fine, perfectly ironed suits. And no one seemed to mind that Zelda was making notes in her notepad, spinning crime stories around them in her head. Perhaps the adults also thought she was just drawing. After all, hardly anyone would have thought the delicate girl had such keen interests.

At some point, a group of young men sit down at the table with her father; they are students from the London Academy, and one of them starts talking to Zelda. He has noticed what she is doing, that the movement of her pen is more suited to writing texts than to drawing pictures. Zelda is surprised, but he tells her that this is part of his job. He is a student with the police, with the department that no longer goes on patrol with a uniform and helmet. Zelda's eyes widen, and she starts bombarding him with questions about criminalistics, as she knows it from her Sherlock Holmes books. But he dismisses them with a laugh. Reality is never as spectacular as literature, and neither is the work of an investigator, but it is still exciting.

Observation and patience are the most important things he has had to learn so far. And how to blend in, adapt, and hide in a crowd. He talks about waiting for hours for a suspect who was then found to be innocent. And about writing the long reports. But Zelda listens with fascination nonetheless. Eventually, the student and his friends say goodbye and disappear into the crowd. But since that conversation, Inesto has always remained a chameleon.

Chapter Text

It happened many moons ago. It was then that the voice of the god of thunder was heard for the first time. And since then, it has been heard at least twice every day. At first, the villagers were very afraid, but then they realised that this greeting from the heavens meant them no harm.

Every now and then, the god of thunder goes to war against the god of lightning, and the two chase each other across the sky, fighting for supremacy. But so far, the god of thunder has always won and had the last word. He protects the little tribe. So they built him a shrine high up on a mountain, and they respond to each of his daily thunderclaps with a verse. The conflicts with the neighbouring villages, which had previously claimed many lives, have long been forgotten in the face of this divine power. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, you can see its white veil passing by in the sky.

When the supersonic corridor was built, no one knew of the existence of the small tribe living hidden in the endless expanses of the South Atlantic jungle, far away from the modern cities of St. Helena and Ascension. It was assumed that animals and nature would not perceive the noise pollution any differently than the regular thunderstorms, and the go-ahead was given. Now the planes only need two and a half hours to reach Teslapolis further north.

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The next morning, breakfast was followed by a few lessons in which a teacher with raspberry-red hair tried to teach them the peculiarities of Avalonian grammar, all the Celtic, Frisian and Germanic influences, followed by geography with Miss Moon. Mountains and seas, something they had already explored on their own on the tablets, but of course there was so much more. Especially the height of the mountains. The Atlantic Ridge, known in their home world only by name and through sporadic sonar measurements, rose over ten kilometres into the sky here. And elsewhere on this globe, too, such as in the Peaceful Plains, where the negative of the Mariana Trench separates Asian countries from each other. Many of the countries remained spatially, economically and culturally isolated from each other by these natural boundaries. And then there was the weather. Thanks to the topography, the climate zones were different, and a phenomenon equivalent to the Gulf Stream pumped warm water into the north-western reaches of the sea that lay in place of Europe. Another similar current flowed in the opposite direction in the African Ocean, drawing cooler water and air from the south, which meant that this piece of land they were currently on was not a desert despite its subtropical location. Elsewhere, it was apparent that the balancing effect of a global ocean was missing, the climate zones were much more sharply defined, and continental climates, as found in their home world, especially in the deep Muscvo-Asia, were abundant here. Sultry hot summers, bitterly cold winters. But there were also endless rainforests that no one had yet mapped. Miss Moon suggested some books they could borrow on their next visit to the library.

She also told them that Mr. Latvalla would take them on a bike ride after lunch. Exercise was always good, and it would give them a chance to finally get to know other parts of the city.

Following the school lessons, they went for their daily check-up with Doctor Grimaldi, and there, after they had been called in a different order than the day before, Lyra went first, then Wega, and finally Zelda, who ended hers with the planned punchline:

“Now, how are my additional subfrequencies today?”

The words came out so skilfully that Zelda must have practised them silently all morning. Grimaldi paused, and his porcupine daemon, which had been barely noticeable all day, raised its quills in alarm.

“You know.”

And before he could say more, Zelda held one of her spied-on copies under his nose.

The doctor sat down, obviously contemplating how to proceed in the face of the three tense faces. Then he looked up.

“Before I tell you more... do you understand what is written there?”

“No,” Lyra answered for them, “not everything. But we have some guesses.”

Careful, Lyra, don't give too much away, she thought to herself.

“This graph with the initial frequency... it has something to do with the machines that found us on the train. And it also represents our home world. So it must be something that only humans have and not the air or water that comes through a window, which is why we had the idea... that it has something to do with Dust.”

Grimaldi narrowed his eyes in interest.

“What meaning does this word 'Dust' have in your world?”

“Dust... it's an invisible substance that sticks to every human being once they are no longer a child. It can only be seen with very special photograms and binoculars.”

Grimaldi followed the strange terms with interest.

“In your world, they know about the existence of shadow particles?”

“Yes, that's another name for it, but it's commonly known as Dust. The scientists in our city have been researching this field. And only been publishing about in in the recent years, as the influence of the Church has weakened.”

“Amazing, I wouldn't have expected that from what we know about your world. According to our information, you still have a very strong religious authority that hinders science and ensures that the average person is scared away by too many details. But if that's no longer the case, then I suppose I'll be allowed to go into a little more detail.”

He thought for a moment, apparently arranging his words, then picked up his dæmon and began to explain:

“In all known worlds, the basic building blocks of matter are the same. Electrons, neutrons and protons, and everything in between. They are the same everywhere and indistinguishable from world to world; every element in the periodic table has the same structure.

“But the shadow particles are different. We researchers have not yet fully understood how they are composed. For a long time, their existence was only proven mathematically, but then we, or rather scholars from other worlds who brought this knowledge with them, discovered that the shadow particles of each individual world have a property that allows them to be distinguished from one another, and from the worlds themselves.”

Again he paused for a moment, and then began to imitate the up and down motion of a wave with the fingers of one hand.

“They oscillate. And every known world has its own unique frequency.

“When shadow particles from other worlds are carried into this world, they gradually adapt to the local frequency in a process that scientists call a ‘quantum leap’. The same process happens in every lamp and produces light. However, the shadow particles generate a form of more uneven, very high-energy radiation, and this radiation, just like the radiation from your atom power, can damage the body. Short-wave gamma and lambda radiation in particular leads to malignant mutations of the body's cells, a deadly disease known in many worlds with our common language as cancer.”

Lyra swallowed. Although most of the words coming out of Doctor Grimaldi's mouth were a mystery to her, she thought she understood. So this was behind the mysterious illness that meant she couldn't stay in Will's world forever, or he in hers.

“For a long time, nothing could be done about this. Some traversers, especially those of advanced age, fell ill after only a few months, while others, younger ones, only after several decades. It also varied from world to world; it seems that some initial frequencies harmonise better with the frequency of our world than others. Only children who had little or none of the particles in them were always safe and remained healthy.

“Then, around 40 years ago, a group of scientists from a previously unknown world crossed over into this one. In their homelands, which lay in ruins after a nuclear war, they had developed a method of suppressing the effects of radiation sickness. After many years of work, this method was adapted for the shadow particles and then shared with all countries and reception stations.

“You may have noticed that the space between the floors here is much thicker than usual. That's because there are machines installed in it that carry out the actual adaptation. They are antenna systems that generate invisible fields, very similar to radio waves, which can be used to direct the conversion so that it is no longer harmful. In addition, the adaptation is much faster than it would be naturally.”

“And it doesn't make you sick?” asked Zelda.

“No, it's simple physics. The dust, as you call it, releases its energy into the field in the form of heat, which is just also a form of radiation, but at the other end of the spectrum, so little that it is hardly measurable. At most one or two degrees Celsius above normal body temperature, you may have noticed. We could also set the machines to produce light instead of heat, but that would only frighten most people when they glow in the dark. That's also one of the main reasons why you unfortunately still have to spend so much time in your room and are not allowed to enter the rooms of the other traversers. Only your room is precisely adjusted to you.”

Thoughts raced through Lyra's head so fast that she had to sit down. Grimaldi's words filled in the gaps left by all the events of three years ago. Will came to her mind, an image that had been distorted by the years. They had accepted the painful separation of their young love, the angel's instruction, and now a little doctor was explaining the medical reasons why they had to return to their home worlds back then, and that a simple radio would have helped them. Of course, it wasn't quite that easy, but still...

“And the threshold value... is that the value at which we can move freely?” asked Wega.

“It's primarily the value below which foreign frequencies are considered completely harmless, but you're right. Below that, you need sensors like these to detect them,’ he pointed to the arm hanging from the ceiling, which each of them had held to their heads in the last few days, ‘the small traversion sensors in the trains and cities aren't accurate enough for this. They only detect that someone with a different frequency is nearby, but not what it is or where the person comes from. As young as you are, you haven't brought much foreign... Dust with you into this world anyway, but with three traversers in one compartment, Miss Dippet's display must have lit up like a Yule tree. It's for the best of all traversers, you were lucky to know the language and be familiar with dæmons, other traversers are much more helpless and lost after their traverse...”

“Yes, and we were following a trail,” Lyra thought to herself. And with a nod, she and Zelda simultaneously recognised the name the doctor had carelessly mentioned.

Doctor Grimaldi apologised again and promised to adapt to the girls' actual level of knowledge from now on. No more secrets. In this context, he also explained that the daily injections, in addition to the vaccines, mainly contained mineral salts to support the transformation.

More traditional nutrients were served shortly afterwards in the dining hall. At their now usual table next to the silent elderly woman, there was little appetite among the group. The meeting with Grimaldi had taught them a lot, and Zelda, as so often, had started a new section in one of her notebooks.

“It actually went very well, we're still together, we weren't punished or treated badly in any way. It's business as usual, only now they tell us what they're actually doing. Vaccinations and conversion,” Vicco said to his partner.

“Lyra, what do you say to that, conversion of our Dust? Did you learn anything about it on your travels?” asked Wega.

“I have no idea. During those two years, it was always about something that Dust does to us humans, but somehow never really about what Dust really is,” Lyra sighed. Even Mary Malone could only tell them about evidence of its existence at the time.

“Grimaldi didn't say anything about the subfrequencies, despite my prompting,” Zelda interjected.

“He was so taken aback... but he'll know that we know. And everyone else here will know, Miss Moon and the other staff, Veikko too, somehow,” replied Lyra.

“When we moved into the room, she asked which of us would sleep where. Maybe the radio around each bed is tuned to one of us specifically.” Zelda replied.

“Quite possible.”

For a moment, all three of them focused on their soup bowls. Then Lyra met Zelda's eyes again.

“You... you also heard the name that slipped out of Grimaldi's mouth, didn't you?”

“Of course!” What a question, Miss Stansted rolled her eyes playfully. “Look at the bottom of the first of your notes.”

Lyra pulled the papers out of her pocket and read. There, in the footer and in extra small print, was a name, Haley Dippet, followed by the title ‘Initial Contact’, along with other names and titles of employees.

“I thought she was one of the women here at the centre, didn't think anything of it. But in the context in which he let it slip, I think she's...”

“The stewardess from the train,” Lyra finished Zelda's sentence.

“Exactly!”

Okay, they had the same idea. But how could they use it?

“If Makepeace took the train... then maybe she knows something about it,” Zelda pondered, twirling her spoon between her fingers as she sometimes did with her smaller pipe. “If she found us, maybe she found him too. Or a colleague, perhaps. Everyone here is so proud and welcoming to traversers, it will have gotten around.”

“If he took the train,” Lyra mused.

“There's really no alternative,” said Wega, “it's more than 1,700 miles from Camelot to Teslapolis, I've studied the maps. You could take a flying machine... but I can't imagine that was any easier than taking the train, without any ID or money. We were able to just walk into the station and up to the platform.”

“It's not that easy in an aerodock; Pan and I tried it often enough back then.” Travelling to Dublin by zeppelin was once the goal of several plans and pranks for her 9-year-old self. After two weeks, she had given up.

“And if this women doesn't know anything about him, then we know he probably didn't take the train. Or he skipped Teslapolis altogether and is now in Nosinas.”

“He's obviously not here in the centre, otherwise we would have come across him,” Zelda stated again. None of them had asked directly about the alchemist or dentist though.

When they had finished eating and were carrying their dishes to the trolley, Lyra saw something that made her act on impulse. On one of the tables, not far from where they usually sat, someone had left a screen tablet. Ms Silvertongue let the other two go ahead and then grabbed it without hesitation, as if it belonged to her.

“What are you doing, we already have two of those upstairs in our room!” whispered Pan, like the proverbial little angel on her shoulder.

“Exactly, the other two were given to us personally. I just want to check if ours are censored. If Grimaldi is withholding things from us, maybe the tablets are too.”

Now that they knew about the machinery in the walls, it was actually very obvious that there were an astonishing number of stairs between the floors. They reached their floor, Wega opened the door, and as soon as she had closed it behind them, Zelda whirled towards Lyra.

“I see I'm a good teacher – but what do you want with it? Miss Moon surely would have given us a third one if you had asked.”

“Sure, and it would have been just like the other two,” Lyra justified herself. “I want to see if they're hiding anything from us on these things.”

Zelda nodded in appreciation and sat down with Lyra at the table in the middle of the room. Wega kept her distance. A press of the button on the upper left corner lit up the screen – but instead of the usual dark background with a handful of icons that took them to the encyclopaedia, image search, map or world list, they saw the name Dr Maregiglio. And below it, an input field waited for the doctor's fingerprints.

“Were you expecting something else?” Wega summed up their disillusionment with a rare smile. “Every professor has locks on their desks.”

Of course, it would have been too easy. But then Pan scrambled up from her lap onto the table. And pointed one of his paws at the small ‘Log out’ button. Because the tablet didn't respond to Pan's touch, Lyra pressed the word instead.

The current content of the screen, with the name and the number field, shrank and revealed another screen showing four icons with names, the doctor from earlier at the top, then two more without titles, and in fourth place ‘Waiting Room 3 (Guest Access)’.

“Press that!” Pan instructed her excitedly.

Lyra pressed it, and the familiar dark background with the symbols appeared. But there were many more of them than on their two tablets.

“You were right!” Pan remarked excitedly. But Lyra wasn't sure yet.

She pressed one of the unknown symbols, and promptly something colourful filled the screen, which turned out to be something that read like a timetable for the local railway company. Another opened something with tax and pension forms in extra-large letters. A third started a puzzle game for toddlers.

“Well, that doesn't look like anything that needs to be kept secret from us... more like junk we just don't need,” Wega concluded. Zelda had taken over the tablet and found another programme that showed them the arrival and departure times of the local aerodock. For once, it was relevant to today's excursion. Flights from a certain St. Helena and Hirilandhoo were flashing on the screen. Inesto now joined in, fixing one eye on the board while the other darted back and forth between the three girls. “Zelda, what's that one with the little figures?”

She pressed the symbol that resembled a collection of wooden game pieces, opening a programme that called itself ‘Citizen Database’, with a simple input field below, like in the image search.

“Citizen Database... is that a list of everyone in the city?” Lyra exclaimed.

“Or in the country?” added her dæmon.

“Hmm, we're citizens now, too,” muttered the detective, quickly typing the beautiful name Lyra Silvertongue into the field. A page appeared with a very blurred, unrecognisable version of Lyra's ID photo at the top, as if it had been washed three times, with her name underneath, but nothing else. The same was true for Wega and Zelda. Celes Moons' page showed a clear portrait of her in her usual uniform, revealing both her middle name, Aélis, and her place of residence, Tamrichiro. The name Grimaldi, whose first name they did not know, yielded more results for Teslapolis alone than could fit on the screen. Sebastian Makepeace, on the other hand, yielded no results at all. Then Zelda had an idea, and the name Haley Dippet found its way into the search field.

There were a number of women with that name, and Zelda scrolled down the list, finding several grandmothers and older women, and more presumably younger Haleys that had their profile photos anonymised in the same manner as the three of them had. And then, just as she was about to give up hope of finding the right one, a profile page literally jumped out at them.

It seemed as if every citizen could decide for themselves what information about them would be displayed on the site and in what form. And this Haley liked it much more colourful than the uniform black and white.

“I think that's her.”

Instead of her ID photo, she had chosen one taken while dancing or partying, with her hair blowing in the wind and a cocktail glass in her hand, but even without her maid's uniform and with a different hairstyle, her cheerful smile was unmistakable. And in her description below, there were more words than in all the previous Haley Dippets combined. She apparently lived in Dhea's Thule, worked at A.L.M.C., whatever that abbreviation meant, she was a fan of at least a dozen musicians, and on top of that, she was ‘solo’, but ‘open to anything ;-)’. Next to it was a small envelope.

“Is that her postal address?”

Inesto asked, and Zelda pressed it. A smaller window opened in the middle of the screen with more new symbols. At the top was a stylised little house. Pressing it suddenly filled the entire screen with green flashes, which faded after a while.

“What was that, and where's the address?” Lyra asked disappointedly.

“There were more icons in the envelope.”

Instead, Lyra's gaze fell on the top edge of the screen, where the time was displayed in the centre. It was almost two o'clock, Veikko would be waiting for them downstairs, as yesterday had made them want to explore more of wolrd outside of this building. They could continue searching for Haley's address later in the evening; Dhea's Thule was hours away from them anyway. And they hadn't yet learned how to send letters in this world.

They got ready, stowed the stolen tablet safely in one of the cupboards, Wega happily slipped into her new shoes, and then they left their transformation room and headed out of the centre.

They found Veikko on the right-hand side of the forecourt. Three bicycles were waiting for them there, and he pushed a fourth one over.

“Ah, you're right on time, good to see you.” Still reserved, but a little more relaxed, he greeted them and shook their hands.

“I hope you know how to ride bicycles...”

All three nodded back. Even if what stood before them was rather different from what they had in Oxford in the shed at St. Sophia's. The frames looked much more delicate, as if made from a single curved tube, and beautiful large baskets hung from the front of the handlebars, in which their dæmons could sit.

“I thought we'd head west out of the city, first along the canal and then along the banks of the Sarahigzar.”

They set off in the opposite direction to the day before, but for the first few metres they hardly noticed because they were so busy getting used to their new rides. Compared to the heavy, rickety bikes at St. Sophia's, these were light and their frames were shaped like horseshoes, which made them feel soft and springy to ride. How would these bikes fare on Oxford's rather bike-unfriendly cobblestones, they wondered?

The ride along the canal was nice and flat, the fine gravel crunching softly under the tyres. As the minutes passed, the houses on either side of the canal grew smaller and smaller, and when it finally flowed into the large river, gnarled cork oaks and cedars had replaced the architecture. Veikko cycled ahead, Wega, the most athletic of the three, followed, and a few yards behind them, Lyra and Zelda pedalled hard. They took their first short break at the top of a dike, where Veikko showed them on a tablet how far they had already travelled, where they wanted to go, and where they were at that moment. According to him, they were riding parallel to the so-called ‘transit area,’ where cargo was loaded from old-fashioned, non-floating trains onto ships to be transported further south across the African Sea. So far, neither Avalon nor the South Atlantic Federation had decided to lay 1,000 leuga of track through the jungle that separated the two countries.

Another way to overcome this distance was by air. And they were getting closer to the aerodock, because the aeroplanes were flying lower and lower above them. Then something unknown announced itself with a distant double clap of thunder.

“That's a supersonic aircraft, coming from further away, I think from St. Helena or from the east,” explained Veikko, even though only Wega was close enough to hear him.

The thunder was followed by a constant dull rumbling until the white machine, like a cordless kite clawing into the wind at a hair-raising angle, flew past them and disappeared behind the dyke on the other side of the river.

Shortly afterwards, they reached the destination of their trip. Veikko called it an amusement park, but here it was obviously something different from what that meant in Blackpool. First of all, the whole thing was basically a kind of tree nursery or plantation, located in the middle between two of the aerodrome's runways. However, everything had been built somewhat differently. Tables and chairs stood on the large wooden storage area in the centre, carts sold ice cream and food to go, and next to them was a huge half-tube made of polished parquet flooring, through which teenagers and children whizzed on small bicycles, roller skates and other wheeled devices.

“You can be as loud as you want here and no one will bother you.”

Veikko cycled them around the entire park, leaving their impressions uncommented.

“Look at that!” Zelda exclaimed as they passed a young couple making out in the grass right next to the path in broad daylight. Of course, people were allowed to love each other in Brytain, and no one adhered to the unofficial church's rules, which allowed unmarried couples to hug for up to three seconds. But all this took place in private, in the dark of night and behind closed doors. And here they were, lying together in the grass, and no adult had a problem with it. In fact, there were no adults here. At least none that could be recognised as such at first glance, no supervisors or teachers.

“And people like us can just come here without our parents or teachers?” Zelda finally asked as they scrambled up the hill in the middle of the park.

“Of course.” There was a hint of surprise in his voice. “Places like this are where young people can be themselves. But there's so much going on here because the holidays have just started and the weather is so nice.”

He went on to explain that this was actually, as they had guessed, a tree nursery, but that this secondary use was also perfectly permitted. Initially, it had developed into a meeting place on its own, underground, first for roller skaters and their sports equipment, then painters and craftsmen had followed, and finally, since the trees didn't seem to mind, the city council had given it the stamp of approval and legalised the whole thing. Even the large murals with which the artists immortalised themselves on the walls of the wooden warehouses – until someone else painted over them with their own art. At the moment, a larger-than-life, impressionistic ice skater was beaming from the hall closest to the hill.

“I'm not used to this anymore, Pan, my legs are burning,” Lyra complained, not entirely seriously, when they reached the top of the small hill.

“I feel it too, Lyra.”

They laid down and sat in the grass, following the bustle in the park and on the sprawling aerodock grounds from their elevated position, letting the sun scratch their elegant pallor. Veikko sat politely beside them, spooning two of those strange hairy cucumbers they had encountered in Camelot. They were apparently called gooseberry. After a moment, Lyra and Wega set off for the hall to attend to a certain need, chatting on the way there and on the way back, until Wega suddenly disappeared from Lyra's field of vision. Pan noticed it first.

“Oh, no!”

As if time had stopped just for her, the tall young woman stood frozen in the middle of the crowd. Vicco at her feet bristled his fur as much as an otter can, and like his girl, he trembled like a leaf.

“Wega, what's going on, what is it the matter?” Lyra asked cautiously, but her friend couldn't utter a sound and didn't move an inch. She didn't even seem to be breathing. Lyra followed her gaze and at first glance didn't understand. There was nothing there, no mushrooms, no soldiers, just the painted concrete wall and young people around them, nothing had changed since their arrival. Pan tugged at Vicco, but to no avail.

“Zelda, can you see what it is? I don't understand!”

The young detective had jumped to her side. She stood on tiptoe and put her head over her friend's frozen shoulder.

And wondered. There was nothing in front of them, only the painted wall, the lines of the painting just as clear, showing a young man doing a kind of one-handed handstand. But... that was exactly what it was, lines... the figure had fine, uneven lines on his shirt, thicker and thinner, the same kind that the residents of Room 38 saw at least twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, in the bathroom. And one of them only in the mirror.

“It's the branding mark!”

Veikko stood next to them, not understanding, and instead acted pragmatically, picking up the shocked girl and carrying her into the shade of the trees, his dæmon Lizza dragging hers behind.

“Could one of you explain to me what's wrong with her?” he asked seriously.

“The branding mark on that figure, it reminded her of something.”

Lyra pulled Wega's top down a little at her shoulder, revealing her tattoo. Fine lines of varying thickness, recently covered over with the image of her little cross.

“Wega and Vicco... have been through a lot,” Lyra explained vaguely.

The young man's expression changed to one of astonishment.

“That's a...”

“A branding mark!” Lyra interrupted him stubbornly.

“A tattoo... a branding mark... is that what you call it? ...but it's a barcode. An encrypted number. When there was still cash here, codes like this were used everywhere,” her companion contradicted her, carefully lowering Wega onto the grass and standing her legs up, as if following a first aid course for circulatory problems.

“Depending on their thickness, the lines represent different numbers, and they are easier to recognise with cameras than written numbers,” he continued. “Why did she get that done, and at your age? You have to be of legal age to get tattoos here.”

“They did it... to mark her!” Lyra replied indignantly, having to restrain herself so as not to draw even more attention to the four of them.

Veikko's gaze followed her, and hundreds of questions ran through his mind, but instead of asking any of them, he pushed his rolled-up jacket under Wega's head and then rummaged in his bag for a bottle of water.

“But it's nicely done, the cross,” he said afterwards.

“The cross... I chose that myself,” Wega said flatly. “That was my decision.” And then she stubbornly pulled herself up into a sitting position, but gratefully accepted the bottle from Veikko.

“Yes, ...and the other one?”

“That was not my decision.” Her tone made it clear that the subject was now closed. She sat there for a moment, drank, looked at the mural from a distance, then stood up to go to her bike. Suddenly, she paused.

“I'm sorry, but it's not easy to talk about that.”

Lyra and Zelda were speechless, because this was an incredible opening for Wega, who never apologised for such moments.

They took a slightly different route back, not along the river, but following a series of paths that connected the freight terminal and the entire aerodock area with the city centre. As the path was higher than the river and the canals, the sun behind them now offered a completely different view of the city and the sea shimmering beyond. Zelda had the idea of driving north another time, towards the skyscrapers and the windmills further behind them. Veikko promised to remember it, but first he had something else in mind, which he didn't reveal right away, but he hinted that this time it was more of an evening plan than a daytime one. What did he mean? Were there social evenings in Teslapolis? What did people do here in the evenings, apart from watching screens or reading in their own homes? And what was there specifically for young people their age, given that they already had so much freedom during the day? In Brytain there were really only private get-togethers, school events or perhaps club meetings – nothing like they had here yet. At the centre, he revealed that he wasn't cycling home afterwards, but to his dormitory. His home was much further away.

After dinner, the three girls were found back in their room, each engrossed in something to read.

And then the smuggled tablet suddenly started ringing.

~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~

He makes an exception for her. Normally, Gijs' working day only begins when the sun goes down and the skippers, sailors and Gyptians arrive at the harbour. Some of them only agree to come by after a few drinks, but that doesn't matter to Gijs as long as they can pay. He sees his work as art and himself as an artist, and his canvas stays much stiller when it's had a few drinks anyway.

This young girl, who knocked on his window two days ago and made today's appointment, seems to have been through a lot. She showed him a small amulet, the image of which she wants on her shoulder to cover something else. Strange lines of varying thickness, engraved with hair-fine precision. Gijs wanted to know who had made it and what it represented, but the girl couldn't give him a precise answer. Women who wanted to hurt her, and it was a branding mark, like the ones they put on horses.

Now she sits in front of him, not even flinching when he pricks her with the needle for the first time. Clearly, she is used to pain.

Chapter Text

In October 1908, a young Mister Hitler began studying art in Vienna, graduating with good grades a few years later. He then lived a modest, hard-working life as an illustrator for publishing houses, specialising in ostentatious buildings and landscapes. After the Great War, from which he returned with only one leg, he despised the government and never voted again. Soon afterwards, he moved to Innsbruck with wife and children. The neighbours liked the young family.

Eighty years later, all life on planet Earth was wiped out in a war between the Soviet Union and the Allied Powers.

~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~

The thin device made of smooth plastique and glass rang like the payphone on the corner of Banbury and St Giles and pulsed in the same green light as earlier that day when they had tried to find Haley Dippet's address. A moment later, Lyra and Zelda were bent over the device. And in the middle of it, the image of a dancing Haley appeared.

“Maybe this thing finally found the address.”

The flashing green light seemed to swing from left to right, so Lyra followed it with her hand. But instead of a street name and location, she suddenly found herself looking at a surprised, grinning face.

“Oh, it's you! There was a message here saying ‘Waiting Room 3’ tried to call me – I don't know anyone with that name!” the maid from the levitating train laughed at them, her voice as clear and sharp as if they were looking through a window and not at a screen. Haley had her hair tied up like when they met in their compartment, but she was no longer wearing a uniform.

“‘You can see us?” Lyra exclaimed in amazement and looked around frantically.

“Of course, there's a camera in your tablet, I can see you just as well as you can see me,” she laughed back and waved. “It must be so incredibly exciting to learn all this new stuff, I grew up with it all!”

She picked up her tablet and lifted it off the table. After a few wobbles, the image stabilised and showed what must have been her kitchen.

“I hope you don't mind, just going to cook something, we've just got home from work,” she said, positioning her tablet so that she could see or at least hear them while she chopped.

“You discovered us on the train? And then reported your findings?” Zelda asked cautiously, and the woman across from her nodded clearly as she quartered a parsnip with a large knife.

“Something like that. As a train stewardess, I have a display that shows me how many people are in a compartment, whether they want to order anything, and so on, and it also shows me when the system detects that there is a traverser in the compartment – it was so exciting, I had never experienced that myself yet!”

“And then you notified Teslapolis?” Lyra asked.

“I followed protocol exactly – first I checked discreetly myself, I think I brought you tea, right? Then... Bambina listened in a little, she heard you talking to your fellow passenger about the world. And then, because we had already gone past Mondieu, I contacted Teslapolis and passed on the message.”

She tossed the parsnip pieces into the pan and began peeling another orange root vegetable.

“They prepared for your arrival there and then let me know they were ready. I got off the train after you and went to the centre, but you were probably too excited to notice.”

“Really?” Zelda exclaimed.

“Yes, but with a little distance, I had to arrange for my car to be handed over to the replacement first. I then went to the centre and handed in my report to a woman with a very short name... I also added her here in the database as an acquaintance, maybe I drew the circle wider than I thought, because no one I don't know should be able to call me from there…”

She put the peeled tuber aside and picked up another tablet next to her on the kitchen counter, which, however, still had an ‘old-fashioned’ keyboard next to the screen, like a typewriter or ordinator terminal used.

“Hmm, I see,” she confirmed after typing a few words. “I added her as a ‘friend’, and that automatically made the whole traverser centre with all its users ‘acquaintances’, oops... I should probably change that...” She continued typing while her dæmon, the dark, graceful tree marten, grabbed the wooden spoon and saved the parsnip pieces from burning.

“But your waiting room will now also become a friend... there, now we'll be able to find each other again. I'm not actually allowed to do that – but it's so exciting!”

“Why aren't you allowed to?”

“Hmm, I can't remember the exact wording, but it was something about ’hindering the settling-in process' – in any case, initial contacts like me are supposed to keep their distance at first and not disturb anyone. I think it's also because many traversers are looking for a way back.”

“We're looking for someone else.” Zelda quickly switched gears and steered the conversation back on track. “There must have been another traverser about a week before us who also travelled from Camelot to Teslapolis. We're looking for him.”

Haley's eyes widened in amazement, but then she nodded in agreement.

“There was a traverser...” she murmured and began to cut the tuber into strips.

“Did you talk to him, where was he going?” Zelda interrupted her hastily.

“Oh, I have no idea, I didn't meet him myself, I was on shift on the Brooklyn Bay line that week, I only heard about it second-hand. A man, much older than you, very quiet and not at all fearful. And I think it was actually on the Skjöld-Teslapolis line, your line... I'll have to check.”

“That would be wonderful. He... must be on his way to a place called Nosinas.” Lyra had almost said he opened the way into this world for us.

Haley furrowed her brows. “I don't think there's a place called that, at least not with a train connection, here in Avalon. I make timetables for travellers so often that I know my way around pretty well. But it's a common surname.”

Before Lyra or Zelda could say anything else, Haley had turned back to her other tablet and was typing on the keyboard. “Yes, right near you, in fact. Here's a report about a Dr Sawyer Nosinas who works right in the centre of Teslapolis. Although, the article is more than two years old...” She continued typing, while her dæmon, visibly annoyed, took care of the pan.

“Very strange, the citizen database doesn't list anyone with that name. And even if he emigrated, there should be a reference. Even if he had passed away.”

It was like the riddle in Blackpool, where what they thought was a name turned out to be a place. Now there was a place instead of a name? Was everything exactly the opposite in this world?

“I don't think I can do anything more for you from here, I'm sorry. But I'll try to find out if anyone can tell me more about this traverser. I'm alone on the Frisian line with the short train this week, but next week I'll be back on the long train Skjöld – Tesla, where there will be more colleagues.”

For the moment, she took the spoon and pan back from her dæmon, pushed the sautéed vegetables to one side and added a piece of fish.

“Did the three of you arrive here safely? You hear so much about traversers and read stories, but I don't think I've ever spoken to any newcomers directly. Or if i did, they didn't reveal it to me.”

Lyra and Zelda gave her the same brief summary of their arrival that they had given Veikko. They told her about the vaccinations, the lessons, and even about the Dust, because Zelda couldn't keep it to herself, and about yesterday's and today's excursions. Meanwhile, Haley and her dæmon had finished cooking and moved from the kitchenette to a small table, where they listened with fascination as she ate. She also asked a few questions, such as whether the food was different, how different the clothes were, and whether there were any other things that struck them as newcomers. And indeed, there were quite a few. Lyra told her how unusual they found it at first to be allowed to walk through the city alone with a young man and no other supervision, and what ideas such a constellation triggered in the authorities of their home world. Haley couldn't believe it and felt sorry for the kind-hearted men and boys in Lyra's world. She then asked nonchalantly first if and then why the same rules didn't apply to women, because after all, there were also women who loved women. This in turn caused astonishment among the three women.

“Here, there's no difference, everyone is equal. Men can love men, women can love women, I'm somewhere in between, sometimes I fall for men, sometimes for women, it doesn't hurt anyone as long as both are okay with it,” she grinned mischievously at the camera.

This brought them to Haley's life. It was Wega, of all people, who asked, after silently following the previous part of the conversation out of sight of the camera. But Haley was happy to answer. She was 23, an age at which old Brytannian minds surely saw the decision between marriage and career as slowly looming for women. But Haley didn't think much of that. After school, she had gone into nursing for her republic service, and then, because she had enjoyed the contact with people so much, she had started an apprenticeship at the A.L.M.C., the Avalonian Long-Distance Maglev Cooperative. She had moved from Ponte di Messicala to Dheas Thule on her own and now lived there in her own four walls, far away from her parents and family. And she was in no hurry to settle down. She enjoyed her work and her life, which took her all over the country, and everything else would fall into place without any pressure to follow a strict time line.

“I'd love to invite you girls out to party here in Thule. I have lots of friends around and know some great places... but you're too young for that, I guess? You can't get into most places under 20... Never mind, we'll find something else.”

They chatted for a while about their free time; Haley liked to photograph musicians at concerts all over Avalon and then post the pictures on the Rouedad, the network, that radio-like technological thing that connected them here and that was also responsible for the fact that the little tablets could show them absolutely everything if you asked the right questions. So the tablets weren't actually omniscient, they just knew where to find the information you asked for.

Finally, she gave the three of them some names of musicians they absolutely had to listen to, and then said goodbye because she had to get ready for a date. And didn't reveal whether it was a man or a woman this time.

Once again, they were one step closer. Lyra pulled the small piece of paper out of the alethiometer case and read, for what felt like the hundredth time, the short list of stops Makepeace had left them. Eight terms, separated by arrows. Casually, she pulled out her Golden Compass and, without concentrating too much, set the hands to the cauldron, the dolphin and the owl. The alchemist, the submergence, and the calmness he apparently radiates. Lyra tried the exact opposite of her childish trance. Instead of falling completely into reflection and the logic that inevitably came with it, she relied on intuition, making quick decisions without looking for trapdoors, like a blitz chess player. And that was exactly how she tried to grasp the answer, fleetingly, without even fixing her gaze. A brief pause on the globe, then alternating taps on the bird and the bare tree. Onward, not far, away from the water and to where the birds fly. She pulled the tablet closer again and opened the map application.

Away from the water meant west, and bird migration meant south. Both together from this city led first to a heavily farmed area, but then the roads and rivers literally ran dry until, at some point, it became greener again and the rainforests began.

“You haven't given up yet?” Wega commented tersely, but then sat down next to her friend.

“No... I just had a thought.” The alethiometer was still in front of her, its pointer continuing to display the sequence, but slowing down.

“So, do you understand the answer?”

“I don't know, it's very vague, I try something new here, just had some idea to approach the symbols in a different way. I think Makepeace was here in the city, but only briefly. And now he's south-west of here, somewhere where there's little water.”

“In the desert? That's huge...”

“No, little, not any. I would associate “none” with the skull, but the pointer is pointing to the dry tree.”

“That makes sense,” she peered over Lyra's shoulder at the screen, “and narrows the search to an area about the size of... Brytain.”

Lyra sighed, missing the table-sized maps from her geography lessons.

“My brain works better with paper, I can't do it on tablets.”

For the time being, night fell, a little earlier than usual after the day's physical exertion. Wega and Vicco even fell asleep before turning off their bedside lamps.

All the new knowledge from the previous day filled Lyra's night with the strangest dreams. She fought her way through mountains of tangled cables to reach knobs with which she then had to regulate her own body temperature. Another dream processed her bike ride and combined it with the various faces she had encountered on her travels. Will appeared, but he spoke with Farder Coram's voice; Mary appeared, but she was shapeless like an angel and wouldn't stop talking about Celtic culture; an unknown woman's face tried to kiss her. Then Makepeace stood in front of her, motionless as a pillar of salt. It was a hopeless mess in Lyra's head, and it didn't make for very restful slumber. The next day began with a little surprise, because the silent elderly lady at the next table greeted them with a ‘Good morning’. And then, in very broken English, and after three attempts, she explained that her old head had not much room for the new language.

This was followed by the most wonderful school subject in the world: mathematics. Lyra, Zelda and Wega had actually considered themselves very educated in this discipline, but when their teacher that morning, a Mr Hogn, explained to them that there were number systems in which you didn't count to ten, but to sixteen, or even another one in which there was only zero and one, he might as well have continued writing in Nipponese from that point on. At least Lyra remembered that the zero-one system had something to do with microscopic on-off switches, and that almost all the technology that surrounded them was based on these switches. The tablets, the screens, even the lamps.

Doctor Grimaldi eagerly awaited his patients, seemingly still feeling guilty, and this time proceeded very transparently. He explained exactly what he was doing, including the concept of half-life and the distribution of shadow particles, or Dust, in their bodies. First, it gathered in the head, then in the central organs, and finally along pathways in all limbs. And, of course, in the dæmons.

From there, they somehow arrived at the science of dæmons in general – and here, this world surprised them. Even Avalonian researchers could not really say any more than the Brytannian vernacular. Dæmons had mass, they moved like their animal forms, but unlike them, they could speak, even though if the physiology of these form should actually prohibit it, they had no need to eat, and had no metabolism whatsoever. Children's dæmons changed shape and mass at will, which contradicted every law of thermodynamics. None of this mattered to normal people, but the deeper one delved into the sciences, the more one had to shake one's head at one's dæmonic partner. And ethical rules prohibited more intensive, aggressive research into the human-dæmon connection. Where possible, however, data was collected, and so, for example, it was discovered from a sportsman from a world with non-corporeal daemons that a human with a creature-like daemon had a higher basal metabolic rate and consumed more energy. So there was something in every human being that created the daemon, like a projector in a cinema.

After lunch, the three of them went into town alone for the first time to visit the library, this time with no time pressure to find more reading material. Right at the beginning, Lyra set out to find the largest atlases she could find, so that she could look for clues in them later after hopefully receiving more information from Haley. Otherwise, crime novels and non-fiction books found their way into their baskets, and with bright red cheeks, Zelda also checked out Sherly Holdme's Temptation in the Moonlight and Autumn of Happiness out of ‘pure curiosity.’

They spent the rest of the afternoon and the beginning of the night with all those books. The next day, Veikko revealed what he had meant by ’evening plans.’

With Miss Moon's explicit recommendation, he would take the three of them to the ‘Casa de la Polysemia’, the house of multiple meanings, that Friday evening as a further introduction to the local youth culture. Miss Moon described it as a mixture of cabaret, theatre and concert, but in a relaxed way that the girls would probably not be familiar with, especially as the three of them immediately began to regret leaving their dresses behind in Blackpool. No, they would be out of place there in opera costumes. Just dress normally, don't forget your ID cards, be there on time and be back before midnight.

Of course, a lot of time was spent in the bathroom afterwards trying to look ‘normal’. Zelda used the tablet's image search again to find out how people dressed up in the evenings here, but found far too many variations to be really sure.

Finally, after careful consideration, they found a combination of their Brytannian everyday clothes and the newly purchased items. Zelda wore Lyra's London dress, which was a little tighter on her and therefore more Avalonian, while Inesto adapted and changed into a matching floral pattern.

Mister Latvalla, with his hair neatly styled and matching trousers and shirt, also clearly dressed up for the evening, welcomed his companions in the entrance hall of the Traverser Centre, and, as expected on such an occasion, there were a series of instructions from their guardian before they left, above all: Behave yourselves and be back on time.

Then they walked the short distance to the Nicolai Bridge over the railway station, where they boarded one of the ubiquitous trams for the first time.

“Are you going to tell us what exactly awaits us there?” Zelda asked briskly after they had taken their seats on the benches opposite each other – the three of them plus their partners on one side, Veikko and Lizza on the other. He grinned back.

“I don't know. And no other guest knows either, that's the principle of that place. There's always a mix of music, theatre and comedy, but we don't know exactly what or which artists until it starts.”

The tram filled up from station to station, and then the predominantly young audience disembarked after the announcement for Earnhardt Plaza.

“It looks like Cittegazzè here,” Lyra murmured. Opposite them stood a magnificent building bathed in the glow of the setting sun, perhaps an opera house or a government building, but Veikko pointed them in another direction, towards a palm-lined park road on the edge of the plaza.

“There's a lot going on here,” Inesto remarked from behind Zelda's shoulder.

“Not really at this time of day, it'll be busier in two hours... but on weekends people like to come here from the surrounding area, and especially today because...”

“Yes, it's the start of the holidays,” Zelda added mischievously.

“Exactly...”

And then they stood in front of a corner building with the name of the establishment written in letters that were almost faded away: Casa de la Polysemia

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Single traversers are disproportionately younger in age. There is much research and speculation about the reasons for this. In particular, it is noticeable that younger people, from small children to teenagers, feel attracted to windows, experiencing a positive excitement that ultimately leads them to walk through.

In older people, on the other hand, external triggers are much more frequently cited; they were in danger, they were seeking refuge, and the window offered a way out in the situation at hand. There are often reports of an inexplicable aversion, a deep, intangible fear that could only be overcome in the face of a greater local threat.

One leading theory is that the shadow matter, Dust, already absorbed by the body is responsible for this effect. Like repulsive electric or magnetic fields, it counteracts the differently vibrating shadow matter on the other side of the window. Children and adolescents lack this polarisation.

Chapter Text

With the flip of a symbolic lever, the EEFR begins feeding the first clean, hydrogen fusion based electricity into the European grids. The live broadcast shows the swirling flow of glowing plasma held in place by surprisingly simple magnetic fields inside the reactor. The secret was not the magnets, but the shape of the fusion chamber. And now simple helium, like the kind you get in balloons at the fair, is the only ‘exhaust gas’, apart from the slight radioactivity that builds up in the ceramic in the plasma chamber. But compared to the waste of old fashioned fission reactors working with uranium, this is absolutely negligible. His physics teacher is completely fascinated and, like many teachers at other schools, has interrupted normal lessons for this monumental moment after fighting for the mobile TV set in the staff room. Some of the students are equally fascinated, or simply happy for the distraction from normal lessons, but only Will is once again amazed at the enormous influence Lyra's father has had here in his world.

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Veikko went ahead to the check in, showed their tickets, and the girls followed with their ID cards. A quick glance, a casual nod, no congratulations or even a mention of their origins, instead there was a blue paper ribbon for Lyra and Zelda, and a green one for Wega, which they were to tie around their wrists.

The former looked a little surprised. “You got a green one.”

“No clue why,” replied Wega.

“It's simple, you're older than 16, so you'd be allowed to come here without an adult, and you can also buy drinks with ethanol, wines and cervisias, the light ones,” Veikko explained to them.

“Oh, there are laws about that?” asked Lyra. She hadn't expected that, as there seemed to be hardly any restrictions for young people in this country.

“Of course, was it different where you come from?” asked Veikko, even more astonished than usual.

“There aren't any, as far as I know... at mass, everyone who could hold a cup sipped the wine at communion. I could do that when I was four,” explained Zelda, and the other two agreed. Lyra remembered her escapade with Roger in the catacombs of Jordan, two children and a bottle of port wine, and the hangover afterwards. And the sweet vinos and liqueurs of London's high society, which were more to her taste.

When Lyra had heard about this outing that morning, she had immediately thought of the big-city colourful world that Marisa had thrown her into when she was twelve. But this here was different. The people around her, some probably her age, but up to over forty, all looked completely normal by what they knew about the local fashion so far, dressed in everyday clothes; with their opera costumes, the three of them would have stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Veikko scored a small cocktail table for them, then excused himself for a moment and gave the girls time to take in the Casa. It was a strange mix. At one end there was a small stage, in front of it rows of chairs and benches, much simpler and more spartan than even the small stages that Gabriel's and Durham College provided for their theatre groups. The bar at the opposite end of the room was set up like a pharmacy, as found in Oxford and other places, but probably considered nostalgic in this guise here in Avalon. hosepipes connected colourful glass flasks to taps, which were used to serve the waiting customers. Then Zelda's gaze happened to wander upwards, and she was startled and then burst out laughing when she noticed the old sofa hanging directly above them, upside down, as if it had been nailed to the high ceiling. Next to it hung bicycles, cupboards and, on closer inspection, what appeared to be an entire household turned upside down, including a bed with bedding and a washing machine with its drum turning slowly. They were just looking for the bathtub when their companion reappeared, bringing drinks for the four of them and two new faces to the table.

“These are Armelle and Bernhard, two friends of mine.”

Just as reserved as Veikko, the dark-haired young woman with the sparrow dæmon and the young man with the brown-spotted dog offered their hands for a welcome handshake. The dæmons in the group greeted each other in their own way under the table.

“Oh right, you don't disappear once you drop us off at the centre,” Zelda put into words what Lyra was thinking. Veikko had a completely normal life here, and the three of them had only been a tiny part of it for a few days. Then they introduced themselves to those new faces.

“Veikko told us a lot about you. Once more, welcome to Teslapolis from us too,” Armelle beamed at them.

“How do you all know each other?” Zelda asked rather directly. It probably still bothered her that they knew so little about Veikko.

“We go to the same school and live in the dormitory on the same floor, for almost exactly a year now.”

“And what kind of school is that?”

“The Madrasat Alzirea, not far from your centre. It's a school for land cultivation.”

“Agriculture?” The term land cultivation reminded Lyra of the German language.

‘Exactly, that's what it's called too, oh, your English is so different even from Veikko's,” Armelle enthused until Bernhard nudged her. “But it's very beautiful... it sounds a bit like I imagine old plays to be. Not old, but... just different, like from another time...”

“So, old after all,” laughed Bernhard.

“Nooo, it was definitely meant as a compliment! Anyway, we should drink to that. To old English.” She raised her glass and everyone else followed suit. Without thinking much about it, Lyra took a sip of the drink, expecting juice based on the shape of the glass. Then, in unison with Zelda, she grimaced slightly.

“Oh, I thought you were used to wine,” Veikko apologised when he saw their faces, but Lyra shook her head happily.

“Wine, yes, but I've never had one like this before. What is it?” Still on her lips, the liquid had a sharp acidity and biting sweetness, but then went down as smoothly as a light Madeira. Pretty much the opposite of a Tokay.

“A Fisterra... the third from the left on the bar,” said Veikko, pointing to the glass flasks.

“Oh, do they have that here now? Then it must have fruit from our plantation in it,” Bernhard interjected.

“What kind of fruit is it?” Lyra asked.

“Those are granadillas, right?” Veikko guessed, but it was Wega who answered Lyra:

“Where we come from these are called passion fruit. Many years ago, I ate so many of them that I felt sick... on a trip with my parents, far away in the southern oceans.” With these words, a gentle, rare smile spread across Wega's face, and she raised the glass to her lips for a second sip.

Bernhard nodded and told them about his parents’ plantations. He came from a family of fruit farmers who lived ‘not far from here’ in the north, a mother, father and two older siblings. Armelle on the other hand was an only child from even further north and had moved to Teslapolis to study applied biology, where she had bumped into Bernhard in her first week – and hadn't let him go of him since. And then there was Veikko's family, which lived south of here and ran a buffalo farm, which was why he studied livestock management. Apart from the distance from their parents' homes, their three lives were not so different from those of Lyra, Wega and Zelda in Oxford: a dormitory, a college, professors and professoras. However, the rules and culture surrounding them were very different, not least when it came to evening entertainment for young people.

“Of course we have theatre too... but it doesn't look like ...that,” said Zelda, pointing towards the stage and then to the household items hanging from the ceiling.

As so often, Wega kept quiet, listening attentively, her hands clasped tightly on the edge of the table and her eyes wandering around the room. When Armelle turned around for a moment to join Bernhard and Zelda in their search for the bathtub on the ceiling, Wega's gaze fell on the dark-haired girl’s back and lingered there in a way that was dangerously reminiscent of her episode two days ago in the tree nursery. Both Lyra and Veikko noticed how Wega literally froze in her movement. But then she began to speak haltingly:

“Was... that... your decision?”

Armelle turned her head back over her shoulder, hesitant at first, but then she seemed to understand.

“You mean me? And my little box? Yes, now that I'm old enough, I was finally allowed to!”

She lifted the strap from her right shoulder, revealing a tattoo, still new and shiny against the reddened skin around it.

“What does that portray again?” asked Veikko, obviously trying to keep the conversation going, given it seemed to help Wega.

“A flower box with roses growing out of it. My parents have a plantation for decorative plants, and I've hauled so many of those over the years… it's where I come from, and I liked the idea of immortalising it.”

During Armelle’s explanation one could literally see the life flowing back into Wega, letting her take a deep breath and then reach for her wine glass. Next to her, Lyra followed her every breath. Even though none of them would have blamed her for it, of course, or could in any way read her and Vicino's minds – the last thing they needed that evening was another panic attack from the tall window orphan.

“Are you thinking of getting one done later?” Armelle asked cheerfully and unaware of the currently hidden tattoo Wega had on her shoulder, but she just shook her head silently, and before anyone else in the group could say anything, the dull sound of a large gong summoned the audience to take their seats. When she hesitated for a moment too long, Veikko reacted pragmatically as before, took Wega's hand and led her to their four seats in row ten, where they sat down in the order Zelda, Lyra, Wega and Veikko, with his two friends in the row in front. Before the normal lighting dimmed, Lyra caught a glimpse of Wega's face, which, contrary to the almost shock-induced paralysis of just a few moments earlier, now had a soft red glow on her cheeks – because, no matter what the circumstances, no boy had ever taken her by the hand before.

Then they sat for a moment in the dim light that shone down from the upturned lamps and equipment on the ceiling.

The curtains parted, revealing another right-side-up bed in which a dark-haired, slightly overweight man was sleeping. Complete with sunglasses. An alarm sounded, which he exaggeratedly ignored in typical theatrical fashion, until suddenly a second actor jumped out from behind the bed.

“Get up, the sun is shining, happiness is calling, you're out of milk, mustard and eggs.”

He was dressed in a black outfit that looked like a romper suit, and his face was painted grey and stuck in the middle of what looked like a grey serving tray.

“You have four appointments today, the bank at ten – third payment reminder. Your mother at 12 – boy, get in touch, and at three your proctologist wants you to come in for the big harbour tour!”

A surprising number of older men in the audience found this extremely funny.

“Malloz, it's only six o'clock!”

“On a glorious day like this, one just can't get up early enough!”

The sunglasses-clad man groaned and moaned as he struggled out of bed fully clothed, stumbled across the stage to the right towards a makeshift sink, dragging the man in the romper suit with him as he crouched on a roller board.

“Are you brushing your teeth? I hope you're using the new Dant Oralis 42. Now available in selected shops!”

The entire audience laughed, that is, everyone except Lyra. She looked around questioningly and met Wega's gaze.

“I think he's a tablet,” she whispered in Lyra's ear.

“What?”

“The man on the roller board, he's playing a screen tablet.”

That made sense. The figure followed the man with the sunglasses through his morning rituals and had something to say about everything. While making coffee, it happily recited medical journals and warned of heart problems; while pouring juice, it recited an encyclopaedia article about the fruit; when opening the newspaper, it was immediately offended and declared every article outdated. The tablet was all-knowing and showered its owner with knowledge, even if he didn't want it. A bit like my alethiometer, thought Lyra.

“I need to get to the bank as quickly as possible.”

“All right – 1300 leuga, Labrador City Municipal Bank.”

“In this town, you tin can!”

“The train is already booked! Your account balance is now minus 30 pennies!”

And here, too, it was a question of how you phrased your question and then interpreted the answer.

“I think the tablets can do a lot more,” whispered Zelda, while the tablet man argued with his owner about the right message to send to his mother, to the loud laughter of the audience.

“I think they can show you anything... if you know how to ask” Lyra mumbled back.

“Hmm... not just picture books and encyclopaedias.”

Straight from this short piece, the welcome and moderation of the evening suddenly began, with the man in sunglasses proving to be the guide through the programme.

Without a real break, he handed over to another artist who, at first glance, could have come straight from the Oxford in Lyra’s Brytain. Dressed in an elegant tuxedo and top hat, he appeared in the spotlight on the left side of the stage, sitting at a grand piano. He introduced himself briefly, gave his name as ‘Pelotage’, and then began directly with a love poem

... Fate, oh, it tore you

from my arms, treacherous

and deceitful. Merr... I

miss you…

At a literary evening or in an Oxford writing circle, she would have expected something like this, but not here. And this poem then became a song, as Pelotage gently began to play the piano. From poem to song, the lyrics became increasingly direct, increasingly explicit, describing the longing and love between two people, and all in a wonderfully old, familiar way that seemed to become more and more indecent, no, that was the wrong word, more intimate with every line.

... w hen our bodies against each other lay...

And move in gentle waves and dare to sway...

We are completely in sync...

And then, as the song approached its proverbial climax, the artist suddenly turned it on its head.

Freed be I! From all the weight of time

Here are us two – you heart of mine!

Opposites, yet forming a thing

When we are like this......

together......

dancing..

Suddenly, the pitch changed and the whole song erupted into a brilliant piano inferno, to which the couples in the audience lay in each other's arms and swayed along, including Armelle and Bernhard right in front of them. It was a different life for lovers in this world, there were no moral guardians far and wide to express their disapproval of the artist's implied obscenity by ringing bells or turning on the lights. Despite this freedom, however, society had not ‘degenerated’ to the point where it could no longer appreciate harmless, thought-provoking language games like this, at least not the small audience here in this theatre. How often had Reverend Fahrdorf preached about ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, which would come to pass if humanity strayed from God's path. How all reason and morality would be lost without the guidance of the Church and the Bible... here in Avalon, it seemed to work rather well without those books and upper echelon... if she'd ever make it back to Oxford, Lyra would certainly not allow herself to be dragged back to church ever again.

Pelotage continued with another song in which he portrayed himself as a coward and a yes-man to a tyrannical woman, planning his escape in the verses only to back down again in the chorus with ‘Yes, darling, you're right, of course’. This was followed by a third, very lively piece about some other, apparently well-known artist and his fickleness. Whatever it was about, the audience swayed and laughed along.

After the song, the pianist and poet disappeared into the shadows as the spotlight turned off, and at the other end of the stage, the man in sunglasses reappeared, sitting with the personified tablet on the ground next to him, as if he were sitting in a tram. The former appeared very exhausted and leaned against the stylised train bench.

“Finally, some peace and quiet.“

“Exactly, this is not acceptable! I have two hundred and thirty-four music stations for you here.“

The tablet then cheerfully listed a seemingly endless series of music genres and artists.

“I said QUIET, I don't want to hear anything!“

“I see... here are three hundred and fifty-three newspapers and magazines, sorted according to your preferences!“

Another endless list followed, half of which was drowned out by the laughter of the audience and the nagging of the bespectacled man. Those kind tablets... all three of them had become so accustomed to the ubiquity and possibilities of the devices... but perhaps they had been too careless with them. So many questions and keywords they had typed in to get an immediate answer... someone or something was surely writing them down and could trace the knowledge journey of the three traversers in detail, just like the librarian at St. Sophia's, who seemed to have every student's loan list in her head. What purpose could this collected knowledge serve, for good or for evil? Sunglasses and Tablet Man were still riding the train during these thoughts and were now planning their evening.

“How about some human interaction?“

In a tone reminiscent of any romantically enraptured grandmother, the tablet suggested taking ‘Jenny from the reception desk’ out on a date. Mr. Sunglasses pretended not to understand. But the tablet knew that he had visited her profile in the citizen database four times in the last week, each time for 30 to 55 seconds, pausing on her portrait before breakfast. What's more, he had been lingering at the reception desk for an average of half a minute longer each day since Jenny started working there, looking in her direction. If that's not love... The audience laughed, but in a different way than they had at the previous corny jokes, more like they had been caught doing something embarrassing. Then a woman wearing sunglasses walked onto the stage from the left, pulling her own ‘tablet’ person on a roller board, got on the pretend tram and sat down next to the man, so that both tablets stared at each other like two grinning lapdogs, until tablet number one finally asked tablet number two:

“Is she single?“

Lights out, the stage sank into darkness, and instead the lights in the hall came back on.

“Oh, was that it?” Zelda asked, a little taken aback, but Veikko next to her and Armelle in front of them shook their heads.

“No, that was the first section of three. Now there's an intermission, and then it continues,” the latter explained.

The group of six made their way to the back of the venue, found a free bar table, and began discussing the programme. Veikko was very curious to hear how the three traversers liked it so far, and to what extent it could be compared to theatre and stage performances they were familiar with. The three of them hadn't experienced much that was comparable, so fast and abrupt, and then again so contemplative, like the poet at the piano. In distant cities like London or New Amsterdam, you could experience something like this, but not yet in cosy Oxford. The concept of not telling guests in advance which artists they would see was completely new, but fascinating, especially for the art-loving Zelda. She and Wega disappeared to the bar for a moment to get them new drinks, Wega another Fisterra and Lyra the sparkling water she wanted, but Zelda somehow managed to stray on the ten yards between their table and the bar. A few moments later, she rejoined them, her face almost disappearing behind a red-filled goblet.

“Is that wine? Where did you get that?” Veikko's tone was not exactly friendly.

“A woman has her ways,” she coquetted, batting her eyelashes, and then got a rebuke from her Inesto.

“Behave yourself, you're only halfway to being a woman,” he snapped, leaning over her shoulder and speaking into her ear.

“Anyway, it's like Oxford here – one twinkle with the eyes and someone buys you a drink. It always works. And isn't it actions that make a girl a woman?” she said in a sugary tone that Lyra and Pan knew all too well from social evenings.

“Maybe... but tonight, it's the piece of paper on your wrist that counts. I shouldn't even have let you two have the first glass,” said Veikko, unimpressed and looking a little contrite. “It'd be better if this is your last, okay? We don't want the wrong person to see and all get kicked out.”

“But she can?” Zelda asked again, pointing to Wega and her second glass of Fisterra.

“She's sixteen, so yes, anything under five percent ethanol. For the three of us, twenty percent is the limit, and after age twenty there are no more limits,” he replied, and a banana-yellow Inesto nodded in agreement.

“And now when does one count as a real woman here then?” whined the blonde girl.

“Pff... you can do a lot at eighteen... but I'd say twenty, because that's when you're allowed to get married,” said Armelle.

“There's a law for that too?” Zelda exclaimed incredulously. “Where I come from, it was physical maturity. Old enough to have children – old enough to get married!”

“That's how it used to be here as well, but at some point psychologists and educators set the lower limit at twenty, because before that age the psyche is still developing too much, and too many marriages broke apart because the partners weren't mature enough. I mean, no one stops you from being together and moving in together earlier, but you can't get the stamp of approval until you're twenty.”

With these words, Armelle pulled Bernhard's hands towards her and gave him a kiss that suggested that both of them were already blissfully looking forward to that day. Unless one of them matured in a different direction.

Thoughts of Will made themselves known in Lyra's head, not with pain and sorrow, but rather with questioning feelings. If they had ignored the angel's instruction and the subsequent, now explainable illness, and had stayed together... what would it be like between them today? Lyra's physical development alone, from ‘just thirteen’ at the time to ‘almost sixteen’ today, was enormous, and her mental development was certainly just as great. In the past, Pan had been needed to curb her irrepressible zest for action – today it was the tree marten figure that drove them forwards when Miss Silvertongue hesitated. It wasn't just Mrs Lonsdale who had noticed that their roles had been reversed. Was it the same with Will? Would he still be the fearless and strong Will she had fallen in love with back then? And would her current self still fall in love with the Will of the past? More time had passed since their break up than they had been together before. Even though they had had enough adventures for three lifetimes during that time.

Meanwhile, the gong had sounded a second time and everyone had returned to their seats. Armelle and Bernhard had swapped places with the couple to Veikko's left, so that the six of them were now all sitting in the same row. The second section began again with the two people wearing sunglasses. Instead of the subway backdrop, they were now sitting where the pianist had been playing, under the spotlight, at a small round table with a vase of flowers, candles and elegantly folded napkins. It was clear that they were on a date, a rendezvous – if it weren't for the two tablet persons. Against the dark background of this corner of the stage, their rompers were almost impossible to see, but their grey-painted and mask-extended faces peered through cut-outs in the tabletop and grinned at their owners, who held them in their hands and pressed and wiped all over their respective faces, ignoring their date and looking just as dumb as before. And it was quiet. No music, no conversation between the two dates; instead, the rustling and clearing of throats filled the silence, which lasted so uncomfortably long that each member of the audience seemed to become aware of their own noises and, in an attempt to be even quieter, rather grew louder and louder.

“Ah, it was so nice to meet you, shall we meet again, say, the day after tomorrow, same place, same time?”

“Oh yes, it was wonderful, I'm looking forward to it, I feel we're on the same wavelength!”

At first, the man startled them with his sudden exclamation, then the woman amused them with her unexpectedly positive response. Finally, both of them walked away beaming, hand in hand, through the rows of the audience, each pulling their tablet person behind them with their free hand.

Then the centre of the stage slowly lit up to reveal two new musicians. One with a hat and a trumpet, and a second sitting on a bar stool, holding only a microphone in his hand. He greeted the crowd, introduced himself as Iteration and the trumpeter as Brassnote, with an accent somewhere between the soft French and the harsh Dutch. Armelle squealed with delight:

“The evening has already been worth it!”

And then the performance began, and it began very unfamiliar, but the three traversers were reminded of the A-cappella group from the opera of Blackpool. Using only his mouth and hands, the man on the bar stool formed a rhythm out of sounds, and with a kick on something in an open suitcase lying at his feet, which the girls hadn't even noticed at first, this basic rhythm continued by itself. Gradually, the mouth acrobat and the trumpeter added elements to this basic rhythm, hums, clicks, snaps, until, when they closed their eyes, it felt as if they were sitting in front of a mysterious orchestra. And then he began to sing. Like another instrument, his melancholic voice and then the trumpet wove their way perfectly into the music, so that it took an astonishingly long time for the three traversers to notice that the language being sung was not English – or any other language they knew.

Armelle must have noticed their bewilderment and leaned over.

“Do you understand him?”

All three shook their heads.

“The language is from where I come from, in the Beskay plain. It's called Breton, and it's spoken by a people called the Bretons, who crossed into this world about 500 years ago.”

“What's the song about?” Veikko asked quietly, since the conversation was taking place over his lap.

“It's about losing yourself in the music with someone else... difficult to translate. On the Rouedad, they are available with subtitles, Iteration is well known!”

Armelle, Veikko and Wega continued to whisper about the subject, while Lyra and Zelda simply closed their eyes and let the music wash over them, regardless of what the lyrics said.

There were no real breaks between the songs. Gradually, elements were removed, leaving a minimalist basic sound, once a deep bass note from the trumpet, then a snap, and the next piece was rebuilt on top of it, not so different from a real symphony orchestra.

“They're not stopping,” someone murmured from the right.

Lyra glanced to her left and found Veikko and Wega almost head to head. She tried to listen, even though that wasn't really proper, but it seemed that the two were only talking about the music.

Iteration was followed by a very short sketch by the man with the sunglasses, who took his mail out of the letterbox, among it a large envelope, commented, ‘Oh, my ballot papers!’ to then pull a roll of paper out of it and promptly unroll it several yards across the stage.

Then a middle-aged woman entered the stage, a little plump, her flowing hair tucked into a knitted cap, and began to philosophise about the politics of the country. Lyra, Wega and Zelda had learned how this country was organised and that its structure, with its hodgepodge of sub-states and local representatives, was somewhat different from the combination of royal house and chamber parliament they were used to in Brytain – but it was perhaps a little too early to understand the nuances of the local political cabaret. The basic themes seemed to be all the peculiarities and contrasts between the individual states and parties (every now and then there were particularly loud laughs from different corners of the room) and, geared towards the younger audience, the duties of every citizen. The general consensus seemed to be that the republic gave a lot, but also demanded a lot in return. Could six months of railroad construction work be offset by 18 years of free train travel? Given the low pay, you apparently had to travel a hell of a lot by train to make it worthwhile. Bernhard and Armelle still had their respective services ahead of them and had not yet decided how they wanted to do them. Six months of physical labour in infrastructure, or twelve in less demanding areas such as childcare or elderly care? Where would they even be accepted? And how would they as a couple survive a possible long-distance relationship?

The next break followed. Armelle immediately darted off to get something, Bernhard following her. Veikko and the girls strolled back towards the tables, Zelda somewhat reluctantly. She obviously wanted to ‘disappear’ again for a moment, perhaps to mooch wine off some poor bloke again, but Inesto thwarted her plans with a well-intentioned nibble on her ear. Instead of wine, Lyra and Wega brought them a round of sparkling lemonade. Soon after, Armelle reappeared and beamed at them eagerly.

“Isn't this great? It was the last one left in my size!” she said, pointing to her T-shirt, which was printed with Iteration's name and a stylised microphone. The printed microphone cable twisted around her waist as if she had wrapped it around herself.

“I already have three more from him, but I think I like this one best!”

After the break, the man with the sunglasses was waiting for them again, this time sitting on a sofa, without a tablet or a woman. Then the doorbell rang behind him, he stood up and opened the door.

“My brother, may the Gods bless you!”

It was the same actor who had played the tablet earlier, but now without make-up and also wearing sunglasses. And his hamster daemon was on his shoulder.

“My goodness, we haven't seen each other in ages. How long has it been?”

The brother looked at his watch.

“About 12 hours.”

“That long? Let me give you a hug!”

It was a somewhat strange humour based mainly on the fact that both did and said exactly the opposite of what was expected. And endless puns – the House of Ambiguity living up to its name.

Lyra had kept a watchful eye on Wega all evening, fearing that something or someone might push her back into a state of panic. But then Pan stretched up from her lap and whispered in her right ear.

“Something's strange about Zelda and Inesto, Lyra.”

She looked over to her right and almost jumped out of her skin. Inesto was standing on Zelda’s shoulder, listening intently and following the silliness on stage, but Zelda's head was hanging down eerily, staring into the gap between the rows of seats.

“Zelda, what's wrong, are you feeling unwell, are you sick?”

Had the two glasses of unfamiliar wine been too much? The blonde haired girl slowly raised her head, almost as if she was surprised that someone was talking to her.

“Every—thing's — fine,” she said stiffly, with an audible lump in her throat. Something was going on inside her, something that was uncharacteristic of the lively girl with her quick wit.

“You may be my brother, but I'm not doing that!” came from the stage.

Lyra took her in her arms, as much as was possible where they were sitting. Should they get up now and draw everyone's attention to themselves? Lyra took out Zelda's pocket watch and read the time as best she could in the dark – no, there wasn't much time left, and they had to be back at the centre soon anyway.

The admittedly somewhat shallow chamber play was followed by one last piece of music, Pelotage on the grand piano, Brassnote on the trumpet and Iteration on the suitcase. What began as a song about sudden love escalated into pure improvisation, with the three artists throwing musical balls at each other and trying to outdo one another. At one point, the pianist lay face down on his piano, but didn't stop playing, while Iteration descended into such a fast Breton chant that even Armelle, a native speaker, couldn't keep up. Zelda was at least watching again, but she wasn't really participating, unlike Wega, who was bobbing along to the left of Lyra.

After much applause for all the artists involved, the evening came to an end at the House of Ambiguity. The group made their way past the pharmacy bar and reception back out onto the street. And then something strange happened.

It was as if Lyra's eyes had already adjusted to the darkness of the night, but when she stepped outside, she was suddenly blinded by green.

“Lyra, look up, it's unbelievable,” Pan squealed from her feet. She reacted, turned her head upwards and almost fell backwards when her gaze focused and she understood what she was seeing.

“Oh my God, Pan, how is that possible?”

Above them, the green and yellow veils of the Aurora Borealis hissed and crackled.

Did it follow me? What have I done? Her brain went into chaos mode, and as if she had been shocked, Lyra stumbled backwards, straight into Wegas's helping arms.

“Don't panic, that's completely natural,” Bernhard tried to reassure her.

“But I know the aurora, I've seen it and felt it – but here, this far south...” she stammered.

“Didn't they tell you about it?” Her companions' calmness had an effect, and Lyra at least managed to find her feet again.

“It's happened several times in recent years,” the aspiring fruit farmer continued. “According to scientists, it has to do with a temporary weakness in the Earth's magnetic field. Something deep beneath our feet has affected the magma currents, and it's probably happened every few million years. At the moment, our sun is more active than usual, and when everything comes together, you get a spectacle like this even here in the far south.”

They sat down on one of the low walls for a moment and only then noticed that the street was full of people admiring the spectacle, with small groups sitting everywhere, looking up at the sky.

“And look, Lyra, they've turned off the lights in the houses and street lamps so you can see it better,‘ said Pan, and the three agricultural students confirmed that the city around them was darker than ever before. Only traffic lights and train displays stubbornly shone against the glow in the sky.

“I've never seen it here in Teslapolis, but I have in my homelands,” murmured Bernhard.

“...some 300 leuga north of here,” added his dæmon. Zelda next to them also looked up at the sky, but her gaze, as much of it as could be seen in the greenish-yellow darkness, had not changed for the better. It remained disturbingly empty and indifferent. Inesto lay on her lap like a banana instead of resting on her shoulder as usual. They needed their bed.

Armelle took her screen tablet, a much smaller model, out of her bag and looked up the tram times for them, because no matter how beautiful it was here right now, the clock was ticking, and someone at the reception desk of the traverser centre was waiting for the three minors to return on time. There were warm goodbyes, wishes for a speedy reunion, thanks for the lovely evening, and plans with Veikko for the coming hours, because with legal age, the nightlife was only just getting started at this hour.

A quarter of an hour of tram ride later clouds rolled in, the lights came on, and then they were dropped off at the Nicolai Bridge. Veikko took them to the centre, then said goodbye, this time even with a hug... which felt he held a little longer for Wega, and on a good day would certainly have been noticed by Zelda.

But in their room, the usual bathroom round, where such details could have been discussed, was cancelled on this evening. Zelda half-heartedly peeled herself out of Lyra's dress before sinking into her bed like a stone, and Lyra and Wega stood at one of the long windows instead, watching the approaching bad weather in silence for a while, as the impressions of the evening settled. There was no need to wash their hair, because only now did they realise that no one had smoked in the theatre.

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Among the researchers in Oxford, too, the day is turning into a celebration of research and progress. Mary and her team are just as excited as the schoolchildren about the ignition of the 400-megawatt power plant in the central German province, and other tasks for the day take a back seat. So she doesn't notice that one of the new stacks of neutrino sensor readings from the South Pole is not dated more than three years ago, as usual, but only a few weeks ago.