Lord Taylor and the Book of the Dead
At the Great Exhibition of 1851, a collector's reckless bravado wakes a dead fragment of the old network under the Crystal Palace's glass roof — and in the ten minutes before that roof comes down on a packed room, the dog Salugi learns exactly how to pull a soul back through a living door.
A cracked crate in the Egyptian Court nearly costs Lord Taylor an unclassified papyrus the authorities want burned by three o'clock; he buys it, and to save it from confiscation stages a private reading before witnesses. As he declaims over the open Book of the Dead, the old Bridge network briefly wakes inside the glass palace — lamps flare, a compass spins, the skylight itself begins to sing and crack. Salugi, watching from the crowd, is the only one who understands what he is seeing, and the only one who hears the cold voice that answers through the field. In the crush and falling glass that follow, he saves lives, saves the papyrus, and steals away with the one thing he came for: proof that a Book of the Dead beside a living Bridge is a door a soul can be called back through. Taylor walks away believing he survived a structural accident; Salugi walks away with a method he will wait a century and a half to use.