"I don't know! It's not my job to fix people," I said. "It's not my job – "

" -- to put a collar on Lucas?"

"Nameless," I said, before I thought about it. He laughed and I wanted to hit him, but – he was just a kid. He looked like one, anyway.

"What did you want to say to me?" I asked coldly. He twitched his fingers, still outstretched for my hand. I hesitated, but it was obvious he wasn't going to move or speak until I did what he wanted. I stretched our my arm and put my wrist into his hand. He turned it over, studying the bandage across my palm.

"Lucas is a mystic," he said, tracing the fingers of his other hand in the air above mine, not touching, following the lines of the bandage. "But you don't believe."

"I believe what he's done is real," I protested.

"Only 'cause you've seen it. You make an exception. Doesn't matter, I guess," he added thoughtfully. "That kind of thing...it's not just believers. You can touch it too."

"I don't want to," I said, scared now.

"You will," he said confidently. "Let me give you something," and he pressed his hand flat over my palm. Under the bandages, my skin tingled.

"You don't have to believe. But you do have to care," he said. He let go of my hand and slid off the counter, walking around me to the door. I turned, but only in time to see the door close. When I looked out the window I didn't see him at all.

I stood there for a while, the palm of my left hand still extended and upturned, then closed my fingers as far as they would go and rested the knuckles on the counter.

I left the lights out in the shop, though dark was falling on Low Ferry pretty quickly. I didn't want to answer the same questions over and over, not until I'd had a good night's sleep, and I thought – hoped – that Charles had warned people to leave me alone for the evening. Eventually I walked into the back storage room and leaned against a bookshelf, forehead and nose pressed against an uneven series of book-spines, smelling of binding glue and paper. It felt like I'd been gone for weeks instead of a single day.

I wanted to help Lucas. I did. For all his assurances that he wouldn't try anything again, I knew that if he didn't fix the broken thing inside him he would. I wished I knew how to help him. Obviously he'd placed all his hope in Nameless, in somehow being able to join everything he was excluded from if he could just change his shape.

It hadn't worked. I'd told him as much. Not any more than coming to Low Ferry had kept me safe from my own heart.

It was almost as if all his maskmaking was to compensate for something, some missing part of him. Some invisible mask everyone else had, a protective shield that we're born with but he seemed to have missed. Lucas turned a very wise, very clever, but very naked face to the world. It was too easy to hurt someone so unprotected.

My hand still felt strange under the bandage, a pinprick tingle that wasn't the throbbing pain from the bite but was becoming impossible to ignore. I flexed my fingers a few times, leaned back from the bookshelf, and looked down at my palm. The bandages were tight and pale against my skin, wrapped awkwardly around the base of my thumb and extending up past my knuckles.

If I could make Lucas a mask, an invisible mask he could always wear – if I could give him the means to protect himself instead of protecting him...that would be a fine thing. Even just a symbol would be something.

I walked out into the dark shop and reached for a piece of paper on the desk, then stopped. I wasn't an artist, and paper masks are children's toys anyway. I looked up, casting around the shop, and the Dottore mask hanging over the fireplace seemed to leer knowingly at me. I ignored him and went to my workbench, where my bookbinding tools lay – scissors and glue, clean waxed thread, needles, punches, sharp scalpels and dull bone paper-folders. There was nothing there that would help. I was a book-binder, not a maskmaker.

But I had my hands and they weren't unskilled. If Lucas could make a mask in his desperation to be loved, I could make one in desperation to save him. Without his book (which I had never believed in) and without his tools (which wouldn't be of any use in my hands) I could make him something. One thing, even if I didn't believe. For Lucas, because I loved him.

I clenched my left hand as tightly as I could, which made the lacerations under the bandages throb and pull away painfully from the sterile cotton. But I could feel something hard and solid in my palm, something forming to the shape of my fingers. When I opened my hand again it rested there like a weight even though I couldn't see anything.

I picked it up in my right hand – invisible, but for a strange shimmer of light across it from the streetlamp through the window. I pressed my hands together and it flattened, slowly, stubbornly. When I ran my thumb over it, shaping it, it seemed to smooth and stretch.

I don't remember much about that night, except that I worked through it, exhausted, still filthy from the mud and the hospital and the train ride back to Low Ferry. My left hand was almost useless in the bandage and I do remember eventually finding scissors at the workbench and slicing the cotton off, unwrapping it from the bite and drawing fresh blood when the scabs pulled away. The blood dripped onto the mask I couldn't see, spattering briefly or smearing under my fingers and then disappearing as well.

I wanted it perfect. I wanted to make it beautiful, even if it couldn't be seen.

I know it sounds insane. I know that. It sounds as if I had some kind of breakdown, and perhaps I did, but I know what I felt, too. There was something real under my hands, something solid. It had weight, it had a smooth texture like glass, and it fought me every step of the way – sprung back when I tried to press it out, closed over when I tried to mold holes in it for eyes. It may have been shaped under my hands but it was slow going, and my shoulders and wrists were aching in earnest around the time the sun was coming up. My fingertips were already raw and bruised.