EPILOGUE

MIRROR

He is home—his real home, on the cove. Lycaste looks up from his clasped fingers; he is sitting at his wobbly kitchen table, its one leg standing just a little too high off the ground, as if all the years have simply melted away. He listens: the sound of his breath, the distant exhalation of breaking surf. He opens his nostrils, drawing in the scent of varnish from the table’s surface, watching dust motes hang still in the whitewashed vaults of the ceiling. Through an open window he can see the orchard and its groves of sculpted trees. Lycaste stares out across his land, listening hard, for the knowledge comes to him as clear as day: he has been brought here in his sleep.

An unseen hand, felt as a gentle pressure, clasps his shoulder.

“We need to talk,” whispers Aaron the Long-Life into his ear.

They walk together down on the wet sand, the surf sweeping regularly over their feet. Lycaste has already noticed, though he towers over the man, how their footfalls mirror one another precisely. He looks at Aaron, who is wearing an outfit he has never seen before, not even among the Amaranthine. A linen collared . . . shirt, he supposed it was called, paired with mustard-yellow trews. He walks barefoot, and his dainty feet look even smaller beside Lycaste’s great crimson toes, and yet for all the world it feels as if they are mirror images of one another, reflected by some medium other than glass, or water, and for the first time in his life, Lycaste does not feel the usual tingling butterflies in the presence of a stranger.

Because this man is not a stranger; that has long since become clear. He hadn’t even needed to ask where anything was when he’d made the tea.

“What should we do?” Aaron asks. The question is spoken in the unaffected way someone talks to their reflection, when they know they are alone.

Lycaste doesn’t know the answer. He can feel, in just the few inches of air that separate them, a vast celestial distance.

He turns his head to look down at the man; a long, lingering glance that takes in as much as it can, and wonders which of them is the future self, which the past.

“How is this possible?” he asks, still watching those colourless eyes. “Maneker told me that you were—”

Aaron is already nodding. “I asked myself the same question.” He glances up to meet Lycaste’s eye. “But we are both of us machine, from a certain perspective. We died so long ago that our soul has split in two.”

Lycaste glances out to the green sea, feeling Aaron’s renewed attention on him.

“Tell me more about your friend . . . Percy, is it? I’d like very much to know more about him.”