He can’t tell. He can’t fucking tell. He’d thought he’d be able to. The blur of before feels solid.

  A particularly large swell sends Theo grabbing for the guardrail by the window. He gasps, feels the stickiness of fresh blood soaking into the bandages around his hands. He knows they’re watching him. Tristan and Min. The other people on the ferry. That even when he’s still, his energy is wrong and not like theirs. He needs to run and draw and sit by the pebbled shore of the bay. And now he’s moving further and further from Seannay. His salt-sweet room, crammed with things from the sea.

  Iris.

  He needs to get away from all these people.

  He’s pitched again into the guardrail and this time he hears the metallic sound of his flask hitting it. He exhales shakily. He positions himself so that he can drink from it – drain it – without anyone seeing him.

  Darcy sleeps. Or feigns sleep. Darcy has gone, as he occasionally does, far away from the rest of them.

  Theo swallows, closing his eyes against it all until he feels the alcohol kick in. His breathing evens out; the pain in his hands dulls. Then a strong, warm arm loops around his back. Min’s head rests on his shoulder. Her fingers drum against his ribs. The ferry. The ocean. The plane. London. He can do this. He can do this.

  It’s late by the time they get to London. Darcy is bright-eyed but oddly absent, Min quiet and Theo utterly exhausted. He had very nearly lost his mind on the plane – only Min keeping a hand on him (even when he told her to leave him alone, almost mad with panic), only Darcy (awake now, thank Christ) quietly reading to him, only Tristan watching, had gotten him through without shattering.

  They’re in a small hotel fifteen minutes from the conference venue. The hotel smells of fabric softener and cigarettes. In the reception area, Darcy gazes out the window at the busy street, unfazed. Min huddles close to him without realising it.

  ‘They screwed up the bookings,’ says Tristan. ‘Or, more likely, I screwed them up. Anyway, draw straws. Someone’s going to have to share a room with me.’

  Theo looks up. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Do you snore?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I can’t deal with snoring. If you snore, I may end up smothering you.’

  Darcy glances at Theo, who looks particularly out of place in the hotel. He looks less human than he ever has before. Theo, who knows so little of what humans are capable of. It brings Darcy back to himself, out of the stony place. ‘No, I will,’ Darcy says.

  They all look at him. Theo shrugs. ‘Okay.’

  Tristan narrows his eyes and points at Min and Theo. ‘The door between the rooms stays open.’

  Min laughs. ‘Seriously?’ She glances at Theo and Darcy and then back to Tristan. ‘Are you blind?’

  ‘Why does it have to stay open?’ Theo asks.

  ‘Use your imagination, Theo. And if I get even a whiff of alcohol from you two …’

  Min rolls her eyes. ‘We know.’

  London in summer. They wear t-shirts. They eat dinner at a cramped, noisy pizza restaurant across the road from the hotel. Theo doesn’t eat much. He gazes at the crowds. The mixed accents and unfamiliar languages. The sense of motion sickness has not left him.

  Words tangle themselves into meaninglessness on street signs and billboards. Quietly, Darcy begins to read things out to him in an undertone, so that Tristan and Min do not hear, but half of the words that Darcy reads out don’t make sense to Theo. In London, he is a foundling all over again. He is nothing. He is lost. He can’t stand to take the elevator – sprints up the stairwell instead. He can’t sleep, aware of people above and below him on other floors, listening to the sound of each passing car. He wishes the windows would open. He drinks the vodka and craves the roughness of salt.

  During the day, Darcy uses Tristan’s extra conference pass to get into lectures on debitage and electron scans. He makes sure to take notes at two talks that touch on things related to the periods that have so entranced his mother. Her witch stories. Women. He is captivated by the talks, by this first true taste of what the world beyond school could be like for him, but part of his mind keeps circling helplessly back to Theo. The way Theo studied the London crowds hopefully. His silence. His palpable disappointment. How is it possible, Darcy thinks, that they can work out what a man ate five thousand years ago and yet still not know where this living, breathing boy came from?

  In one lecture, and then the next, he sits next to an academic named John, who’s from the medical school at King’s College. He’s a professor who’s here because he’s fascinated by forensic pathology. They walk together to the main hall during break, John listening intently to Darcy. They are joined by a woman from Inverness who is an expert in Pictish language and a man who has worked for four decades on various stone circles.

  ‘Where are you studying?’ John asks Darcy once they’ve settled with cups of fruit salad in the noisy main hall. Tristan sits across the table, eating his way through several slices of pizza.

  ‘I’m still in school.’

  Eyebrows are raised, glances exchanged.

  ‘I wouldn’t have guessed that,’ the stone circle man says.

  ‘He’s very clever,’ Tristan says, and smiles.

  ‘Tell them what you were saying about your friend,’ John says.

  Darcy feels giddy. He tells them about Theo. They have all heard of Theo. Everyone’s heard of Theo. Darcy tells them that he’s going to find out where Theo came from.

  They nod, like it’s possible. Like it’s something that he can do.

  Tristan doesn’t say anything else, but he watches Darcy closely from across the table. It feels like a dream. Darcy is handed business cards. He is given email addresses. He and his body, working in unison. Ears and thoughts and fingers and eyes. He stops obsessing over the stupidity of agreeing to cut the webbing of Theo’s fingers. Sitting in the domed function room, listening to the hum of people’s talking, discovering Theo’s origins feels suddenly vital, necessary.

  Wildly, dizzyingly possible.

  Cassandra always has the sense that Father Lee drops in not out of some misplaced sense of duty, but as one used to battle always does with one they suspect to be an enemy.

  ‘To what do I owe this delightful surprise?’ Cassandra asks when Lorraine leads Father Lee into the front room. Lorraine tries not to smile, but says nothing. Lorraine attends the kirk with her rabble of grown sons, mostly because she can sometimes imagine Father Lee’s figure at the pulpit into Father Frank, particularly if she doesn’t wear her glasses.

  Besides, it never hurts to remind energetic lads like hers about hell.

  Father Lee smiles at Cassandra, pats her hand very gently, and sits down on the couch opposite her.

  ‘Just wanted to see how you are. Is there anything you need?’

  ‘Och, a younger body would be nice.’

  He laughs, although it’s not a particularly funny joke.

  Cassandra tilts her head. She misses Wilhelmina’s easy liveliness. In her absence, Cassandra feels particularly insubstantial. Slow.

  She straightens as best she can, looks Father Lee in the eye. ‘Have you spoken to Bryce Reynolds lately?’

  Father Lee’s smile stays in place, but she can see his eyes harden. ‘We’re all praying for them.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘Aye, I have. He and Violet aren’t doing so well. It’s unimaginable, isn’t it? Losing a child like that. It’s early days yet, though. I keep reminding them that the pain will lessen.’

  ‘I don’t imagine it will.’

  ‘Of course it will.’

  ‘In my own quite extensive experience, the pain stays the same; we just adapt to it. Our capacity grows, the pain doesn’t lessen.’

  Father Lee looks thoroughly uninterested. ‘Regardless, it’s only been five months.’

  ‘Aye.’ Cassandra smooths her skirt. ‘Are you aware Luda went out to their farm?’

  For a moment, they just stare at each other. He does this sometimes. As though expecting her to drop her gaze or to become frightened. But it’s been a very long time since the Father Lees of the world have been able to scare Cassandra.

  ‘Aye,’ he says curtly.

  ‘And you’re aware Bryce attacked her?’

  ‘She wasn’t welcome.’

  ‘You might want to give him a What Would Jesus Do bracelet, Father. Or some remedial sermons. I don’t think he’s quite got the gist of things.’

  Father Lee flushes. ‘He was within his rights to protect his family.’

  ‘From a five-foot-five skinny woman who’d gone over there to apologise? Come on, Marcus.’

  He stiffens. ‘He’s grieving and he was provoked. The Managan woman understands she was in the wrong, or she would have pressed charges.’

  ‘The Managan woman is it now?’ Cassandra folds her hands in her lap.

  Father Lee glances at the door. ‘Aye. She’s not a parishioner.’

  ‘She might’ve been, if you weren’t such a painful bastard, Marcus.’

  Father Lee blinks at her, and then quickly recovers. He glances at the door, as though to ascertain that Lorraine is out of earshot. ‘You make things very difficult, Cassandra.’

  ‘Aye.’

  He looks on the verge of saying something unpleasant, and then catches himself. He stands, pats her hand. ‘I’ll pray for you.’

  It rains softly in London that night. The sound of a siren. Someone calling down on the street. The drip of water landing on the windowsill. Tristan comes out of the bathroom and lies down on his bed, yawning. Darcy scrunches his eyes shut and takes deep breaths. He touches his hand bones through his skin. Phalanx. Metacarpus. Lunate. He had seen them cast up on the projector screen today, illuminated by a new radiography technique.

  The light is switched off. ‘Bed, you two!’ Tristan calls, thumping the wall separating their room from Min and Theo’s. Then Tristan speaks more quietly, in a voice intended only for Darcy. ‘You don’t trust me.’

  Darcy says nothing and burrows further under his blanket. Triquetrul. Hamate.

  ‘I hope you know that … you can.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Darcy feels his ears redden in the dark. His panic at the invitation to the conference; his stepping in to take this space in Tristan’s room.

  Tristan sighs and it’s a resigned sound; a sad one. ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Darce.’

  Theo had told himself not to expect anything. That if he had no memory after ten years, a trip south would hardly bring everything flooding back to him. And yet.

  He’s quiet at breakfast. He is quiet as Darcy and Tristan walk to the conference and he and Min head to the library and museum. He cannot stand the idea of the underground and so they walk and they sprint. He has run out of vodka. His hands throb constantly. He feels scratchy-eyed and scratchy-throated from the air of the city. Even breathing here is different.

  He searches. Even a fragment of something.

  Please.

  Anything.

  The disappointment of it quickly turns molten. He cracks his knuckle joints. He flexes his fingers hard, making them bleed. He knocks them against bicycle racks and light poles until Min grabs his wrist and holds it firmly in her own warm fingers.

  Cassandra is at the Blue Fin, staring down at her whisky, letting the bubbling late-afternoon chat and laughter and sense of people in motion wash over her like the tides. The smell of deep-fried fish; oily dressing; stale beer and aftershave and sweat. She ruminates on Father Lee, his fickleness, his unpleasantness. She marvels that he has the power to rouse her ire like this. She is secretly pleased – the last time she had been this irritated by somebody was a very long time before Father Lee.

  ‘You’re looking particularly morose,’ Iris says.

  ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Aye. We agreed I’d pick you up, remember?’

  ‘Oh, aye. But I thought you might burst into flames entering a pub on the Sabbath. I thought I’d have to sweet-talk a young lad into carrying me out in his arms.’

  ‘Picked one out already, had you?’ Iris sits down opposite her.

  ‘Aye.’ Cassandra waves at Louise’s cousin, a strapping young red-haired lad who’s come up from Glasgow. He blows her a kiss and Cassandra makes a show of pressing it to her heart. He grins and goes back to wiping down the bar.

  Iris’s mouth tightens, but she’s not paying much attention to Cassandra. She looks quite grimly pleased with herself.

  Louise brings her over a tea.

  ‘Thank you,’ Iris says. ‘You make surprisingly good tea, Louise.’

  ‘I know you mean that as a compliment,’ Louise says as she walks back to the bar.

  Cassandra raises an eyebrow at Iris.

  ‘I had a discussion with Bryce after mass today.’ Iris studies her cup of tea. Knowing Louise, it’s likely still too hot to drink comfortably, but Iris has never minded too-hot tea.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Cassandra has a sip of whisky. ‘A productive talk, was it?’

  ‘Aye. Quite.’ Another sip.

  Cassandra imagines the kirk office. Bryce. Iris shutting the door behind him. Violet watching from the transept, pale-faced. Her clothes hanging too loose on her. Bryce’s rough-edged shirt in Iris’s fingers, holding so tightly that Iris could feel the pulse of her own blood in them.

  ‘I reminded him – very politely, of course – that there will be severe repercussions if I ever hear of him touching anyone ever again.’ Another sip. ‘The thing about being a woman and getting old, I told him, is that nobody really sees you anymore. You become invisible. And when you’re invisible, you can do all sorts of things. It’s amazing, I told him, what nobody notices when you’re an old woman.’

  Cassandra imagines Iris’s face very close to his. Bryce staggering out of the custodian’s office, eyes wide. Violet catching Iris’s eye, her expression dark but not hostile. Cassandra glances down at her whisky, trying not to look too pleased. Iris is always irritated if she pleases Cassandra too much.

  Expression carefully in check, Cassandra looks up. She can’t help it; she immediately feels her whisky-slick lips curl up into a grin. ‘Sometimes, Iris, you’re so like your mother.’

  On their last night in London, Tristan goes out to have a late dinner with a friend he hasn’t seen in years. Min falls asleep quickly, exhausted by the rush of the city. She sleeps clutching an old flannel shirt of Joshua’s. Tristan had made each of them swear not to leave the hotel and has called to make sure they are still there and behaving themselves.

  In the other room, Darcy and Theo sit on separate beds. Theo cracking his knuckles, frowning out the window. Darcy watches the action movie playing across the screen on the opposite wall.

  Darcy pauses the movie mid-explosion. ‘You don’t like action movies?’

  Theo blinks. ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t like this movie?’

  ‘I don’t really like any movies,’ says Theo. He glances at the screen. ‘Or television shows. I’ve never really gotten the hang of them.’

  Darcy lies down on his stomach, his chin propped up in his hand. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t follow the stories properly. It’s like I’m too aware of each frame and where the actors are and how they’re moving and I get disoriented when the shots change.’ He shrugs. ‘Iris doesn’t have a television and I’m not the sort of lad people invite over for a movie night.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I don’t like them much either.’ Darcy studies Theo. The way Theo sits with his hands resting palm up in front of him, tense and exhausted and lost. Darcy feels mostly relaxed in London. Softened in a way that makes him feel generous. His mind hasn’t stopped ticking over; making connections between the different things he’s learnt. Always thinking, Why? Why? Why?

  He stands up and moves across the room. ‘I am going to find out where you came from, Theo,’ he says, his voice low and intent. ‘I promise.’

  Further down the river at a small restaurant in St James’s, Tristan settles back in his chair and tilts his glass of pinot up towards the light. ‘Dear Maria, that was truly the finest salmon I’ve ever had.’

  The woman opposite him laughs. ‘I’m happy to hear it. Ruby’s strictly vegan these days – says this place doesn’t have enough options.’ She waggles her fingers.

  ‘Outrageous. Dump her immediately.’

  Maria shakes her head. ‘If only I weren’t so fond of her.’

  ‘I’ll be thinking of you.’

  ‘Appreciated,’ says Maria, looking at Tristan over her wine. ‘Now, I said I’d let you know if I heard of any job openings.’

  ‘You did, yes.’

  ‘Something’s come up. Associate lecturer position in the school of classics. We’re interviewing, but if you want it, it’s yours.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘King’s College. Obviously.’

  ‘Really?’ He blinks quickly, clears his throat. ‘Figured I was too dried up these days to be considered hireable in academia.’

  ‘You’ve always been a very gifted researcher.’ Maria folds her napkin. ‘You burnt out. It happens.’

  ‘I flunked out of my post doc.’

  She shrugs.

  Tristan tilts up his glass and laughs. ‘God bless nepotism.’

  ‘Is that an acceptance?’

  Tristan has a large mouthful of wine and sets the glass down on the table. He has dreamt of this moment for so many years. Some archaeologists thrive in roles like his but he has always burned for the academy. He swallows, meets Maria’s gaze.

  ‘I can’t,’ he says, and his voice comes out a little bit hoarse.

  ‘It won’t take you long to catch up on things.’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that.’ He runs his hands along the edge of the table. ‘It turns out I don’t want to leave the islands after all.’