Since their return from Paris a week earlier, the autumn nights were turning inky and the days had a scent of wet fallen leaves about them.

Lily sat in the old armchair in the tower room of Brackenbridge Manor with her feet up on the steamer trunk, staring out the east window.

Half-bare trees filled the landscape. Their branches were a patchwork of sparse yellow and russet foliage, like the last fading thoughts of a summer long gone. She put a hand to her chest and could feel the wealth of life running through her with every tick of the Cogheart. The weight of it, and the truths it had led her to tell, made her wonder where things would go from here.

She picked up her new notebook and ran her fingers across the ammonite on its front cover before turning to the first fresh page, which crackled in protest.

She took the cap off her fountain pen, and in the middle of the page printed three letters:

For Lily Rose Hartman.

At the top of the next creamy slice of blank paper, in her own strong round handwriting, she wrote the date.

After that, she had no idea what to write. She glanced out of the window, and thought about Papa, Robert and Malkin, Tolly and Anna, then all her friends in the circus, and everything that had come to pass since she was last here.

Life had changed from the moment they got back. The article Anna had written for The Daily Cog and the others that had appeared in the French papers about her had blown things up in a massive way. Since then, every other newspaper in Britain had taken up her story. Journalists had come daily and rung on the doorbell at all hours, wanting to speak to her about the Cogheart and Papa and Mama and the other hybrids. She was so famous now, people looked at her differently in the street.

At least at home things were quiet. In the rose garden she could see Captain Springer with his rake, collecting up the leaves, and Papa walking across the gravel path to speak with him.

She watched them for a moment, thinking of nothing much, letting her worries fade away, and then a cough echoed behind her.

Lily turned from the window to see Robert and Malkin coming up the stairs.

“What’re you doing up here?” Robert asked.

“Thinking,” Lily replied. “D’you want to know why? Because I’ve no idea what to write in my new notebook.”

“What exactly is the problem?” Malkin said, settling down at her feet like a furry rug.

“Well,” Lily said, “I’m not sure if I want to write about the past…or the strange things that have been happening since our return. I’m not even sure I want to write about the future.”

“Then don’t write about any of that,” Robert said. “Write what your dreams are. What you wish for.”

He sat down on the edge of the chair beside her, and Lily suddenly saw how different he was to the boy she’d first known. He was taller, braver, more hopeful. And he was beginning to hold himself like a man.

“What do you wish for?” she said.

He thought about it for a moment. No one had ever asked him that before.

“When I was little,” he told her at last, “I wished I could be anything other than who I was. Anything other than the clockmaker’s apprentice Da wanted me to be. I used to fantasize about running away, signing up as a cabin boy with air-pirates, or joining a circus.”

Lily smiled at that one.

“It’s true,” he said. “Back then I’d a notion I wanted adventure. But now I’ve had a few, I’ve realized something about them…”

“What’s that?” Lily asked.

“They can be overrated.”

She laughed. “I quite like them,” she said. “Even when they go badly, somehow I always feel that there’s time to save things and turn them around.”

“I suppose so,” he sighed. “But at home, you’ve the people you love around you. Or at least,” he said, thinking of his da, “you have a piece of their memory in the places and things that remind you of them.” Robert touched the repaired Moonlocket around his neck. “But out on an adventure you don’t have those things, and there are days when you feel so alone.”

“You’re right,” Lily said. “Sometimes I feel the past is too heavy. That the wounds never fully disappear – they may fade over time and heal, but the evidence of them is still there, like old scars.”

“That’s how you know you’re strong,” Robert said. “Those scars are the healing; the reminder that you survived and that you’re powerful.”

He glanced at Lily. She seemed – almost in the last week – to have grown into someone quite altered from the girl he’d first known, with her bluff and bravado – that old bravery on the outside that had covered the fear beneath of a little girl lost. This new Lily was not like that. She seemed clear and open, truly confident.

“Your scars, Lily, are the map of your past and the key to the future. A future where you can fly high. And you were born to do that, I know it! To be spectacular and unique. To be who you’re meant to be.” He put his arm around her. “Remember, you’re not alone. You never were. And no matter what happens, as long as I’m around, as long as we’re friends, then you never will be.”

“Is that a promise?”

“I think it might be.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“Cross my heart and hope to live!”

He took her hand, and squeezed it, until he could feel the tick of her heart, soft as a chronometer, her pulse reverberating with his own.

“Go on then,” he said. “Write something.”

Robert was right, Lily realized, she should write about her dreams and aspirations, what she wished for in the future. But to begin with, she would say a little about who she was.

She took up her pen and began.

The words, which had seemed small when she’d thought them, looked bigger on the page, and the truth they contained seemed so large it filled her heart with unparalleled joy: