The woman was no longer outside. She stood in the center of the room, translucent and shimmering like oil on water. She didn't scream or point to a wound. She simply held out a hand, and in her palm sat a sapphire that didn't exist—a stone so blue it seemed to swallow the light of the room.

"Identity?" Holmes whispered, his hand hovering over his magnifying glass.

"To find a boy," Holmes said, his voice unusually soft. "It seems my education is finally beginning."

The "Believer" was what the London tabloids called the specter of a young woman seen drifting through the fog outside Holmes's window. She didn't haunt the streets; she watched the glass. While the rest of the world saw a cold, calculating machine, the apparition seemed to be waiting for a soul to wake up.

"You think the world is a clock," she whispered. "But even clocks need a hand to wind them. I am here to tell you that the Great Game isn't played on a board. It’s played in the heart."

Holmes looked at the empty space, then at Watson. He didn't reach for his pipe or his violin. He reached for his coat. "Where are we going?" Watson asked.

"It is a trick of the light, Watson," Holmes remarked, his back to the window. He was furiously scrubbing a test tube. "A combination of coal smoke, a slight imperfection in the Victorian glass, and the overactive imagination of a public desperate for the divine."

"The dead have no data," Holmes snapped. "And without data, one cannot speculate."