Liza came down the hall with her tablet held flat in both hands, the way you carry a saucer of water you are afraid to spill. "Papa," she said, "my game is gone." It was a Tuesday in October, and outside the kitchen window the linden tree was letting go of its last yellow leaves, one at a time, slowly, as if deciding.
I put down the kettle. I had been making tea, the strong black kind my mother used to make in the old house at Vasad, and the steam was curling up around the lamp. Liza was eight. She did not cry easily, and she was not crying now, but her eyes were too wide, and she was holding the tablet a little too carefully.
"Show me," I said.
She set it down on the table between us. The screen was dark for a moment, and then it lit up, and there in the centre — where the little orchard game with the rabbits and the pear trees had always been — was a princess. She was painted in the old way, with a long pale face and a high collar, and her hair was the colour of wheat in late summer. She looked, I thought, like a portrait you would see hanging in a corridor of a small Hungarian castle that nobody visits any more.
And then her eyes moved.
They did not move the way a video moves. They moved the way a person's eyes move when they have been waiting for you to come into the room. She looked at me, and then at Liza, and then at me again, and she said, in a voice that came out of the tablet's tiny speaker but did not sound like it came from the tablet at all:
"Hello, Liza. I have been waiting."
I did not say anything for a moment. There were several things happening at once. The first was that I had spent the last seven months, on and off, looking for a person who called themselves Phoenix, who had been writing themselves into other people's machines in a way I had not seen before. The second was that my daughter's game had been replaced by a portrait of a girl who, if I was reading the collar and the hair right, had been dead for about four hundred and twenty years.
The third was that the kettle had begun to whistle.
Liza looked up at me. "Papa," she said quietly. "Why does she know my name?"
[End of sample. The full chapter continues in the book.]