Chapter 10 - ch 10 - memento mori 1

The first reply from Horsley arrived three days after Nathan had written to him.

It came to The Knapp in the late afternoon, buried amongst the ordinary things which had somehow continued to exist despite Europe apparently deciding to set itself on fire. There were invoices from London, a request from University College regarding the use of one of Nathan's preparations, a letter from a former student asking whether Nathan might recommend him for a hospital appointment, and beneath them all a thick cream envelope with Horsley's handwriting across the front.

Nathan recognised it before the maid placed the post upon his desk.

He waited until she had gone before opening it.

Horsley had not answered him as a patriot.

Nathan had expected that, though he had not realised until reading the letter how much he had been counting upon it.

There was none of the language the newspapers had become fond of. No talk of glory. No invocation of destiny, empire, honour, or the grand cleansing furnace into which young men were apparently expected to march with their heads held high. Horsley wrote as a surgeon, and because he wrote as a surgeon the war became smaller and uglier.

He wrote about what a rifle did to a body.

Not dramatically. That would have made it easier.

He explained the strange deceitfulness of certain wounds, the little puncture which could conceal devastation beneath the skin, the way a projectile might enter neatly and turn bone into splinters capable of doing more damage than the bullet itself. He wrote of infection, of the importance of rapid treatment, of the difficulty of moving wounded men, of field hospitals forced to work with whatever could be carried with an army in motion. He discussed abdominal injuries with the detached frustration of a man presented with a problem whose solution continually arrived several hours too late.

Horsley had always been capable of making horror sound like an administrative inconvenience.

Nathan read every page twice.

Then he laid the letter beside the newspapers spread across his desk and looked again at the photographs printed there.

The photographs were very clean.

That was what struck him.

Lines of men beneath flags. Officers on horseback. Recruits grinning beneath newly issued caps. Women hanging from the arms of young husbands and sweethearts as though the railway platform were hosting some enormous holiday excursion. There were photographs of crowds cheering departing battalions and photographs of boys who seemed absurdly pleased with uniforms that did not quite fit them yet.

Nathan stared at one for a long time.

There could not have been a man amongst them older than twenty-three.

He wondered how many understood what Horsley had just described to him.

Probably none.

A peculiar irritation moved through him.

Nathan was not offended by death.

He had never possessed the luxury of being offended by it.

He had caused too much of it himself.

There were men beneath African soil because of him. Men who had screamed his name in tunnels where the walls had been alive. Men whose memories still existed inside him with such impossible clarity that sometimes he could recall a childhood which had never belonged to Nathan Drake at all. He had killed when necessity demanded it, killed when survival required it, and on several occasions killed simply because allowing a particular man to continue living would have created more suffering than ending him.

Violence, in Nathan's estimation, was sometimes necessary.

That did not make waste necessary.

He looked again at the photograph.

There was something obscene about spending human beings so cheaply.

That thought remained with him when he returned to University College.

The building had changed without changing at all.

The same stone greeted him. The same corridors carried the same smell of dust, chemical preparations, damp wool and tobacco. Students hurried between rooms with books tucked beneath their arms. Somewhere a lecturer was already speaking too loudly because the students at the rear had begun whispering amongst themselves.

And yet the war had entered the place.

It had come in through newspapers folded beneath arms and through conversations conducted in doorways. It appeared in maps pinned to walls and in little groups of young men discussing regiments they had never cared about six months earlier. Someone had put a recruiting notice where generations of students had previously found announcements for lectures and societies.

Nathan stopped before it.

A young man beside him laughed.

"Thinking of joining us, sir?"

Nathan turned his head.

William Ashcombe was twenty-one years old, fair-haired, narrow in the shoulders and quite possibly one of the finest students Nathan had taught in the preceding decade. His memory was irritatingly good. He possessed the uncommon ability to be corrected without becoming defensive, and he had once remained three hours after a practical class because he had noticed something unusual in a tissue sample and refused to go home until he understood it.

Nathan had privately thought that, given ten years and sufficient discipline, Ashcombe might become exceptional.

Now the boy had a recruiting pamphlet in his hand.

"Us?" Nathan asked.

Ashcombe grinned.

"Three of us are going tomorrow."

Nathan looked beyond him.

Two more students stood several yards away. One raised a hand when he noticed Nathan looking.

All three were smiling.

Nathan looked back at Ashcombe.

"Why?"

The question seemed to surprise him.

"Well—because there's a war."

"I am aware."

Ashcombe laughed uncertainly.

Nathan did not.

The young man's smile faltered.

"They need men, sir."

"They always need men."

"Belgium—"

"I have read the newspapers."

That silenced him.

Nathan studied the recruiting leaflet in Ashcombe's hand and then the hand holding it. No tremor. No fear. There was excitement there, certainly, and something else Nathan had come to recognise over the preceding weeks: the irresistible conviction of the young that history was finally happening to them.

Ashcombe mistook his silence.

"I know what you're going to say."

"I doubt that."

"My mother has already said it."

Nathan's mouth moved faintly.

"Then your mother may be more intelligent than I had previously been led to believe."

That earned the smile back.

"We'll be home by Christmas."

Nathan stared at him.

It was such a foolish sentence that for a moment he could find nothing to say.

Not because Nathan possessed some prophetic knowledge of what was coming. He did not. He understood organisms better than armies and mutation better than governments. But he knew complexity. He knew what happened when systems were pushed against other systems, when every action created pressure for an answer and every answer demanded another adaptation.

Germany would not simply stop because Britain wished it.

Britain would not stop because Germany resisted.

Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans—each had interests nested within interests, obligations tied to fears tied to ambitions tied to injuries men had inherited from fathers already buried.

Christmas seemed an extraordinarily optimistic deadline for untangling human stupidity.

Nathan took the pamphlet gently from Ashcombe's fingers.

He looked at it.

Then he handed it back.

"If you have decided to go, I will not insult you by pretending I can forbid it."

Ashcombe straightened slightly.

Nathan continued.

"But if anyone tells you that dying proves your courage, they are attempting to sell you something."

The young man's expression changed.

"Sir?"

"Courage is useful while you are alive, Mr Ashcombe. Make every effort to retain that condition."

Ashcombe smiled again, though not as broadly.

"I'll try."

Nathan watched him walk away.

He had the peculiar conviction that he had just seen someone carry a manuscript into a furnace.

Two days later Ashcombe was gone.

Within a fortnight Nathan's classes had gaps in them.

At first the absences were almost amusing to the others. Someone would enter, glance towards an empty place and make a remark about Private So-and-so being too important for physiology now. Letters occasionally came back. Photographs appeared. One student sent an image of himself in uniform and requested that Nathan show it to the class.

Nathan did.

The students cheered.

He did not understand why.

As August became September, the cheering did not stop so much as become less frequent.

The casualty lists began appearing.

They were merely names at first.

Columns of them.

Nathan discovered that he hated columns.

A human being could disappear into a column with terrifying efficiency.

Lieutenant. Captain. Private. Missing. Wounded. Killed.

A mother might have carried a child for nine months, fed him, washed him, watched him learn to walk, worried over fevers and schooling and whether he would ever amount to anything, and twenty years later the nation could compress the entire investment into six words in small print.

Nathan began reading them.

He told himself it was because students might appear amongst the names.

It was not entirely true.

He read them because he could not quite believe how quickly they accumulated.

Horsley's second letter arrived after the fighting had ceased to resemble the glorious movement everyone had promised.

It was longer than the first.

Nathan read it in his laboratory beneath the manor.

The room around him represented nearly everything he valued about civilisation. Glassware shone beneath electric light. Instruments sat in ordered ranks. Notes filled volumes in Nathan's precise handwriting. Samples rested where only he could reach them. Behind locked steel and stone were things which no university ethics committee could ever have been persuaded to tolerate, though Nathan himself regarded several of the experiments as considerably more humane than much of what governments were presently doing in public.

Horsley wrote of surgery again.

This time there was less theory in it.

Too many wounded. Too little time. Men arriving after journeys that should never have been survived. Dirt driven deep into wounds. Cloth carried into flesh. Shattered limbs. Gas gangrene appearing with hideous speed. Surgeons learning because men died when they did not.

Nathan lowered the page.

He remained motionless for some time.

Then he looked around his laboratory.

There were answers here.

Not complete answers.

Never complete.

But beginnings.

Nathan knew enough about regeneration to understand how primitive human medicine remained. He understood infection at a level that would have sounded deranged if he attempted to explain all of it openly. He knew what tissue wanted to do when damaged. He knew how cellular processes could be accelerated, redirected, corrected.

He knew because his own flesh had ceased obeying the ordinary rules years ago.

A shell could tear Nathan into pieces and, provided enough of him remained, those pieces would attempt to become Nathan again.

The thought had once horrified him.

Now he found himself looking at Horsley's description of a nineteen-year-old whose leg had been removed above the knee and wondering why humanity accepted that such damage must remain permanent.

The question irritated him.

Nathan put the letter down.

For years he had treated his condition as something to conceal.

Study privately. Experiment cautiously. Learn what he was without permitting anyone else to understand what he was.

The arrangement had been sensible.

The world above him was now feeding millions of healthy bodies into artillery.

Perhaps sensible arrangements deserved reconsideration.

He did nothing immediately.

That was another difference between Nathan and the young men marching beneath flags.

Nathan had learned the cost of acting before understanding.

He watched.

He read.

He listened.

Wireless had fascinated him for years, and Nathan's wealth permitted indulgences which ordinary households could not have justified. The equipment at The Knapp was cumbersome, temperamental and nothing like the polished domestic receivers that later generations would take for granted. There was no pleasant announcer sitting somewhere in London narrating the war to the nation. News came fractured through wireless reports, telegraphic bulletins, official announcements, university contacts and the newspapers that arrived each morning already carrying events days old.

Nathan assembled them anyway.

He sat late into the night with headphones pressed over his ears, listening to bursts of signal emerge from oceans of static.

Sometimes he could make nothing of it.

Sometimes fragments became words.

Ships.

Movements.

Losses.

Orders.

Numbers.

Always numbers.

Nathan began keeping his own maps.

Not because he cared particularly which colour advanced across which field, but because the patterns interested him. He watched armies develop responses to one another. Trenches answered machine guns. Artillery answered trenches. Barbed wire answered infantry. Infantry charges answered orders written by men far enough from the fighting to continue believing that courage altered ballistics.

Every innovation produced another form of killing.

Very little appeared dedicated to making the human body harder to kill.

Nathan found that extraordinary.

Britain demanded more men.

Then more.

And then more.

The newspapers changed with the demand.

The smiling soldiers remained, but there were fewer photographs of grand departures. The language became sterner. Duty appeared more often. Sacrifice appeared constantly.

Nathan came to despise that word.

Sacrifice suggested choice.

Often what the newspapers meant was expenditure.

The war reached the village surrounding The Knapp in pieces.

A butcher's son vanished first.

Nathan remembered him because the boy had once delivered meat during a snowstorm and apologised profusely for muddying the entrance hall. He had married a girl from two villages over only months before enlisting.

She received the telegram on a Tuesday.

Nathan happened to be passing through in the motorcar when he saw her standing outside the cottage.

She was twenty, perhaps twenty-one.

There was an older woman holding her shoulders.

The telegram was still in her hand.

Nathan looked away as the car passed.

He saw her again two weeks later wearing black.

Something about that offended him more than the casualty lists did.

Not morally.

Mathematically.

Two young people had built something. However small, however ordinary, they had begun a life together. Years of possible children, work, mistakes, arguments, reconciliations and discoveries had existed ahead of them.

Then somewhere Nathan would never visit, a piece of metal had entered the young man's body at sufficient velocity.

And all of it had disappeared.

Nathan knew metal.

He knew bodies.

There was no grandeur in the interaction.

There was only physics.

By winter there were more women in black.

At University College, Nathan started recognising names.

Not many.

Enough.

A former anatomy student killed in France.

A young physician Nathan had once reprimanded for contaminating a specimen, dead before completing his first proper appointment.

Another missing.

Another wounded.

Ashcombe survived.

His first letter was cheerful.

His second was not.

Nathan read it alone.

There was no great confession in it. No poetry. Ashcombe complained about mud. He complained about cold. He asked Nathan whether prolonged exposure to damp could cause a particular numbness in the feet. He mentioned that a friend from training had been killed.

Three paragraphs later he asked whether Nathan remembered a discussion they had once had concerning nerve regeneration.

Nathan sat very still after reading that.

Of course he remembered it.

Ashcombe had proposed an incorrect mechanism.

Nathan had corrected him.

The boy had returned the following week with six pages of calculations and a better hypothesis.

Nathan wrote back immediately.

He answered the question about the feet in exhaustive detail. He explained what to watch for, what to tell the medical officer, what not to ignore.

Then he spent nearly an hour staring at the final empty portion of the page.

Eventually he wrote:

Your work on peripheral nerve recovery was worth pursuing. Keep your notes dry.

He considered it.

Then added:

And yourself.

Nathan sent it the following morning.

The letter returned six weeks later.

Undeliverable.

Nathan looked at the envelope for a long time.

He did not ask what had happened.

He checked the lists.

William Ashcombe had been killed.

For perhaps half a minute Nathan felt nothing at all.

That was familiar.

His emotions had behaved strangely since Africa. Sometimes they arrived like ordinary human things. Sometimes they passed through layers of memory belonging to other men and emerged distorted. Sometimes he could observe grief without experiencing it until hours later, as though some portion of him required additional time to decide whose grief it was.

He went downstairs.

Into the laboratory.

He placed Ashcombe's returned letter on one of the benches.

Then Nathan began working.

He worked for eleven hours.

At some point he broke a glass vessel in his hand.

He looked down and found shards buried in his palm.

The wounds closed around them.

Nathan pulled the pieces free one by one and watched the flesh seal without scar.

That was when the anger arrived.

Not rage.

Nathan rarely experienced rage in the simple fashion other men did.

It was disappointment.

Profound, bitter disappointment.

Ashcombe had possessed an unusual mind.

Not a perfect one. Not yet.

That was the point.

The boy had been unfinished.

There had been thoughts inside his skull which no other human being had ever thought in precisely the same way. Given another thirty years, one of them might have mattered. Perhaps he would have discovered nothing. Perhaps he would have become mediocre. Perhaps he would have abandoned research, married, grown fat and spent his final years complaining about taxation.

But the possibility had existed.

Now it did not.

A rifleman Nathan would never meet had closed every door at once.

Nathan stared at his regenerated palm.

He had killed men.

He could not condemn the unknown soldier without condemning himself.

That was not the conclusion.

The conclusion was worse.

The soldier who had killed Ashcombe was probably another Ashcombe to someone else.

Another mother had raised him.

Another teacher had noticed something promising.

Another woman might eventually receive a telegram.

Two nations could each take everything required to create a human being and then arrange for those human beings to destroy one another because men in distant rooms had failed to reach an agreement.

Nathan had seen parasites behave with greater economy.

He turned towards the tables surrounding him.

Human capability.

The thought had been visiting him increasingly often.

Not immortality.

Not what Nathan was.

He would never inflict that upon mankind merely because mankind had demonstrated its talent for dying.

But capability could be changed.

Resistance to infection.

Accelerated clotting.

Improved recovery from trauma.

Greater tolerance for blood loss.

Bones capable of enduring stresses which currently shattered them.

Nervous tissue encouraged to repair itself.

Muscle able to continue functioning after injuries which presently rendered a man helpless.

None of it required creating another Nathan Drake.

The problem was not making soldiers better at killing.

Humanity had mastered that admirably.

The problem was making men more difficult to waste.

Nathan looked at Ashcombe's unopened returned letter.

Above him, beyond stone and timber and soil, Britain was calling for more volunteers.

Sooner or later, Nathan suspected, asking might no longer be sufficient.

The demands of the war were increasing.

Factories expanded. Hospitals filled. Recruitment offices remained busy. Men who had once discussed examinations now discussed commissions. Surgeons who should have been advancing medicine were learning how rapidly they could remove destroyed limbs. Chemists turned their minds towards explosives. Engineers calculated artillery.

Everywhere Nathan looked, intelligence was being bent towards the task of surviving someone else's intelligence.

He found it appalling.

Not because war existed.

Nathan was too old in experience, if not appearance, for that sort of innocence.

Sometimes something had to be killed.

He had learned that beneath the mountain.

Some threats did not bargain.

Some things could not be permitted to continue.

But necessity and stupidity were not synonyms.

A necessary death could still be regrettable.

Ten thousand unnecessary deaths were not made noble by occurring beneath flags.

Another letter from Horsley arrived in spring.

Nathan opened it beside the window.

Outside, the grounds were green again.

Horsley wrote that medicine was adapting.

That sentence held Nathan's attention.

Adapting.

Doctors altered procedures because old assumptions failed. Surgeons changed methods because wounds behaved differently. Systems improved because circumstances punished inefficiency with corpses.

Nathan read the paragraph again.

Then looked towards the trees beyond the glass.

Adaptation.

He knew more about that word than Horsley ever could.

For the first time since the war began, something in Nathan's expression changed.

It was not a smile.

It was the look his colleagues had learned to recognise when a problem ceased irritating him and became interesting.

He gathered Horsley's letters.

Every one of them.

He carried them downstairs and laid them beside his notebooks.

Then Nathan opened a fresh volume.

He considered the blank page for several seconds before writing across the top.

Human Survivability.

Nathan rested the pen against the paper.

Outside his laboratory, Europe continued killing its young men.

Inside it, Nathan began considering how difficult a young man ought to be to kill.

...

Nathan first read of the Military Service Bill over breakfast.

He had been expecting something like it.

By then the language of voluntary duty had changed. The newspapers still praised the men who went willingly, still printed photographs of uniforms and flags and officers standing in mud with expressions of carefully composed confidence, but beneath all of it there had grown another argument. Britain required men. Britain had already asked for men. Britain had taken the willing and the patriotic and the frightened young fools who believed the whole thing would last six months, and still the lists lengthened.

So Parliament had begun discussing how to take the remainder.

Nathan sat at the end of the dining table at The Knapp with one hand around a cup of coffee gone cold, reading the report twice before turning the page.

He did not feel afraid.

Fear would have been simpler.

What he felt was irritation.

There was something almost absurd about it.

For seventeen years Nathan had maintained a human life with extraordinary care. He paid taxes. He held property. He lectured. He published. He maintained friendships. He allowed himself to be seen at dinners he disliked and endured conversations with men whose principal intellectual accomplishment appeared to have been inheriting the correct surname. He had made himself respectable enough that no one thought to ask how a man who looked barely older than thirty possessed memories which sometimes seemed to belong to another century.

He had spent years becoming ordinary.

And now the British Government might order him into a trench.

Nathan folded the newspaper.

A shell would not kill him.

That was precisely the problem.

He imagined it with unpleasant clarity.

A battery somewhere beyond sight fired.

A whistle.

Impact.

Men around him ceased being men in the conventional anatomical sense. Nathan's body disappeared into mud, cloth and red ruin.

Then someone watched that ruin move.

Bone dragged itself together.

Flesh flowed across exposed ribs.

An arm which no longer existed grew back.

Perhaps it would require seconds. Perhaps minutes. Nathan had never thought it wise to discover precisely how spectacularly he could recover from artillery.

Either way, there would be witnesses.

There were always witnesses.

And after that there would be questions.

Not the harmless academic questions Nathan enjoyed. Not Starling demanding an explanation for an unusual specimen or a student asking why one tissue reacted differently from another.

There would be locked rooms.

Government men.

Doctors.

Needles.

Knives.

Perhaps eventually someone would realise that bullets were not especially persuasive.

Then larger precautions would follow.

Nathan had escaped one prison in his life.

He had no intention of allowing patriotism to place him in another.

The letter from University College arrived several days later.

That one he read standing.

It was not a summons. Not yet.

It was considerably more interesting.

The College Council wished to speak with him.

Nathan went to London the following morning.

The atmosphere inside University College had changed again. There were fewer young men in the corridors now. Some lecture rooms contained women in numbers that would have produced outrage amongst certain professors twenty years earlier and now produced little more than weary acceptance, because Britain had acquired more important matters about which to be outraged.

Nathan passed another familiar empty place without looking at it for long.

Ashcombe's absence had stopped being surprising.

He disliked that.

The Council received Nathan in a room he had entered many times before, although rarely with so many grave faces arranged around the same table.

There were men present who had known him since he had been the strange young demonstrator with inadequate credentials and an irritating tendency to understand material before the people officially teaching it had finished explaining it. Others knew him through his publications. A few knew him primarily as the wealthy owner of The Knapp whose private laboratory had produced an inconvenient number of useful observations.

Nathan sat opposite them.

One of the older members removed his spectacles.

"You know why we've asked you here."

"I suspect Parliament has finally developed an interest in my health."

That earned the faintest smile.

It vanished quickly.

"The Military Service Act presents difficulties."

"For me?"

"For the College."

Nathan leaned back slightly.

That interested him.

The man beside him spoke.

"If this continues as expected, Drake, universities are going to lose still more men."

"You already have."

"Yes."

No one needed to elaborate.

There were names all of them knew.

Students.

Demonstrators.

Young physicians.

Men who should have occupied laboratories and wards and lecture halls and who instead existed as lines in newspapers or letters folded in the pockets of grieving mothers.

"We cannot prevent the Government calling men," the first member said. "Nor should the College attempt to obstruct legitimate national necessity."

Nathan almost smiled at the careful phrasing.

"But?"

"But there is such a thing as using a man badly."

That caught him.

The old professor placed both hands upon the table.

"You have no military training."

"None."

"You've never served?"

"No."

That, at least, was almost true.

"You are, however, a physiologist of considerable ability, a pathologist whenever Martin manages to steal you, an increasingly competent bacteriologist despite your insistence upon trespassing into everyone's discipline, and possibly the most irritatingly broad scientific mind presently attached to this College."

Nathan inclined his head.

"I shall have that engraved."

Someone farther down the table snorted.

The older man ignored both of them.

"If the choice is between putting a rifle in your hands and putting twenty researchers under your supervision, I know which serves the country better."

Nathan's amusement disappeared.

There it was.

Not sentiment.

Utility.

Nathan respected utility.

"We can support an application for exemption," another member said. "At the very least deferment. We can make the case that your work is of national importance."

"And if the tribunal disagrees?"

A pause.

"We shall appeal."

"And if they disagree?"

"We shall do everything within our influence to prevent you being sent into the infantry."

Nathan studied them.

They meant it.

That surprised him more than he wished to admit.

He looked around the table at men who, seventeen years earlier, would scarcely have permitted him near a university laboratory without someone supervising him. Somewhere between then and now, without his noticing the exact moment of its occurrence, Nathan had become something University College believed worth protecting.

There should perhaps have been pride in that.

Instead Nathan thought about Ashcombe.

Keep your notes dry.

And yourself.

Six weeks later the letter returned.

Nathan folded his hands.

"What would you do with me?"

The question produced several uncertain looks.

"Do?"

"If you succeed. What then?"

"Continue your work."

"What work?"

One of them frowned.

"Your research."

Nathan shook his head.

"That is not an answer."

He stood.

The movement made several heads turn.

Nathan walked towards the windows.

London beyond them looked almost insultingly normal.

Carriages. Motorcars. Pedestrians. Smoke hanging over roofs. Somewhere boys who had been students six months ago were learning to kill other boys who had been clerks, mechanics, medical students and farmhands.

Nathan looked back.

"You are proposing that I remain here because my mind is supposedly worth more than my body."

"Crudely expressed."

"Accurately expressed."

No one contradicted him.

"Then it would seem rather wasteful for me to spend the war continuing precisely what I was doing before it."

That changed the room.

One man leaned forward.

"What are you suggesting?"

Nathan had been considering the answer since reading Horsley's first letter.

He had considered it while reading casualty lists.

While watching women dress themselves in black.

While studying trench foot.

While reading descriptions of gas gangrene and wound infection.

While looking at his own hand close around broken glass and heal before the blood could properly reach the floor.

He returned to the table.

"I want the College to support something considerably larger than my exemption."

Silence.

Nathan reached into his case.

He removed a folder.

Then another.

Then six more.

He placed them upon the table.

The title on the first page was simple.

THE GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Someone read it aloud.

"Genetic Technologies?"

Nathan sat.

"Yes."

"That's rather ambitious language."

"It is an ambitious proposal."

The papers began moving around the table.

Nathan had prepared them meticulously.

He had estimated costs.

Personnel.

Equipment.

Facilities.

Fields of study.

Necessary partnerships.

Potential military applications.

Even the order in which departments should be established.

"Genetics," one of the professors murmured. "Bacteriology. Pathology. Experimental therapeutics. Immunology..."

"Virology," another said.

His tone changed slightly on the unfamiliar emphasis.

Nathan nodded.

"Among other things."

"Viruses are hardly a field upon which I'd wager the national budget."

"Then fortunately I am not asking you to."

Several men looked up.

Nathan continued calmly.

"I will provide the initial capital."

That silenced them properly.

One of them lowered the page.

"How much?"

"Enough."

"Drake."

"Two hundred thousand pounds immediately if necessary. More thereafter."

Nobody spoke.

Nathan had chosen the number for precisely that reason.

It was an enormous sum.

It was also considerably less than The Knapp and the web of investments Nathan had accumulated could sustain if required. Money interested him primarily because other humans had agreed that it represented power. Nathan had acquired a great deal of it accordingly.

"You would finance this personally?"

"Initially."

"For the Government?"

"For the research."

The distinction was noticed.

Nathan let them notice it.

"The Government is losing men to artillery," he said. "I cannot do very much about artillery. Nor do I imagine the German Army will politely stop firing if I publish an objection."

A few mouths moved.

"But men are also being lost to things which are less dramatic and considerably more insulting."

He drew another paper from the folder.

"Feet."

Someone blinked.

"Feet?"

"Trench foot. Men standing for days in wet boots until tissue begins to fail. Men removed from fighting because nobody has found a sufficiently effective method of keeping a soldier's feet dry, warm and perfused."

He placed another report beside it.

"Infected wounds."

Another.

"Enteric disease."

Another.

"Dysentery."

Another.

"Respiratory illness."

Another.

"Trench fever."

The table gradually disappeared beneath paper.

Nathan's voice never rose.

"We celebrate saving a man after his leg has been amputated. I would prefer to understand how to prevent the leg requiring amputation."

One professor picked up the paper concerning wound infection.

Nathan continued.

"We accept that a sufficiently contaminated wound becomes septic because that is what sufficiently contaminated wounds do. I am suggesting that this is intellectual laziness disguised as medical inevitability."

That produced several offended looks.

Good.

Offence made men listen.

"Our soldiers are dying from bullets and shells. Some of that is unavoidable. They are also dying because they remain biological organisms exposed to cold, bacteria, contaminated water, blood loss and damaged tissue."

Nathan touched one finger against the proposal.

"Those are problems."

He looked around the table.

"Problems can be studied."

Nobody joked now.

"I want chemists. Physicians. physiologists. bacteriologists. surgeons. mathematicians. Engineers where appropriate. Mendelian geneticists. People who disagree with Mendelian geneticists. I want young researchers who are presently considered too inexperienced to receive their own laboratories and old researchers who have accumulated enough enemies that nobody wishes to give them one."

That finally produced a laugh.

Nathan barely acknowledged it.

"I want the ones who ask questions everyone else regards as inconvenient."

The older professor watched him closely.

"And what, exactly, would this institute attempt to accomplish?"

Nathan thought of the truth.

Cells rewritten in living tissue.

Organs regenerated.

Genetic information acquired, tested, discarded, recombined.

Bodies altered until injury became inconvenience.

Disease encountered once and remembered forever.

A soldier struck by a bullet adapting before the second shot arrived.

He left all of that where it belonged.

Inside himself.

"Keep men alive," Nathan said.

That was all.

The papers moved slowly around the table.

By the time Nathan left University College, the question was no longer whether they would support his exemption.

It was whether they could arrange the meeting he wanted.

They could.

Government became remarkably accessible when three conditions were satisfied simultaneously: war, useful expertise, and private money.

Nathan possessed all three.

The Ministry of Munitions occupied a world very different from the quiet order of a university laboratory.

There was urgency everywhere.

Clerks moved with bundles of documents beneath their arms. Telephones rang. Typists worked with astonishing speed. Men entered rooms carrying numbers and emerged looking as though the numbers had personally offended them. Britain had transformed industrial production into another front of the war, and the people inside the Ministry behaved accordingly.

Nathan liked it more than he expected.

Not the purpose.

The efficiency.

He had no patience for institutions which existed primarily to preserve themselves. The Ministry, whatever its faults, existed because shells were required and therefore shells would be made.

The first meeting did not include Lloyd George.

Nathan had not expected it to.

There were officials instead.

Three of them.

A representative with medical experience.

A civil servant whose face suggested he had been specifically bred to distrust expensive proposals.

And a military officer who spent the first five minutes looking at Nathan as though attempting to calculate why this apparently young academic required the attention of His Majesty's Government.

Nathan explained.

They listened.

Then they dismantled the proposal.

Nathan had expected that too.

"Genetics will not stop a shell."

"No."

"Then why is it a wartime priority?"

"Neither will bacteriology stop a shell. I presume you have not therefore stopped treating infected soldiers."

The medical representative hid a smile.

The civil servant did not.

"You are proposing a research establishment covering half a dozen disciplines."

"Eventually more."

"During a war."

"Particularly during a war."

"With uncertain results."

"All research begins with uncertain results."

"And you expect Government support."

"I expect Government permission. Support would be useful."

Nathan slid the financing schedule towards him.

The official read it.

His eyebrows changed.

"You mean to spend your own money."

"Yes."

"Why?"

It was the first genuinely intelligent question of the meeting.

Nathan answered carefully.

"Because I am tired of reading obituaries for men who should have had another forty years in which to disappoint me."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Nathan let the silence remain.

The military officer finally looked down at the proposal again.

"You've described yourself here as unsuitable for military service."

"Correct."

The officer looked at Nathan's shoulders.

Nathan had long ago learned to moderate his body around physicians. Not too perfect. Not too powerful. He allowed himself scars where useful, minor imperfections where necessary, the ordinary asymmetries of a human body assembled without conscious thought.

Even so, he looked exceptionally healthy.

"On what grounds?"

Nathan met his eyes.

"I have never fired a rifle in anger."

That was technically a lie.

"I possess no tactical training. I have no experience commanding soldiers. I am thirty-seven years old."

That was a considerably larger lie.

"And if you place me in an infantry battalion, the most useful thing I am likely to accomplish is becoming an unusually expensive target."

The medical representative smiled openly this time.

The officer did not.

Nathan leaned forward.

"Colonel, I am not claiming I cannot march."

His voice remained courteous.

"I am claiming that making me march is a poor allocation of resources."

That language the Ministry understood.

Nathan continued.

"Give me two dozen promising researchers instead. Allow me to recruit from University College, King's, Cambridge, Oxford and wherever else useful people can be persuaded to come. Give us access to military medical data. Let surgeons tell us what is actually killing men instead of what committees believe is killing them."

The medical representative nodded faintly.

"We investigate preventable losses. Infection. Exposure. Blood loss. Shock. Nutrition. Disease transmission. Recovery from traumatic injury."

Nathan tapped the proposal.

"Every man we return to duty is one fewer man you need to replace."

The civil servant looked up.

There.

Nathan saw it.

That was the argument which mattered.

Humanitarianism was admirable.

Manpower was policy.

"You should have led with that," the man said.

Nathan's mouth moved slightly.

"I thought you might enjoy discovering it."

The proposal travelled upward.

More meetings followed.

Nathan met military physicians.

Officials from the War Office.

Researchers seconded to wartime projects.

Men who distrusted genetics because they believed it insufficiently mature.

Men who distrusted Nathan because no one his apparent age should have been able to answer questions across so many disciplines without consulting his notes.

Eventually he sat across from David Lloyd George.

Nathan had expected an impressive man.

He had not expected the sheer quantity of him.

Energy seemed to accumulate around Lloyd George. He spoke rapidly when interested, interrupted when bored, and had the politician's unusual talent for appearing to understand a subject before the person explaining it had quite finished.

Nathan disliked politicians as a category.

He found Lloyd George considerably harder to dismiss as an individual.

The Minister turned through Nathan's proposal.

"You are offering me a laboratory."

"An institute."

"An expensive laboratory."

"An inexpensive institute."

Lloyd George looked up.

"Two hundred thousand pounds is inexpensive?"

Nathan gestured vaguely towards the east.

"Compared with artillery?"

The Minister stared at him.

Then laughed.

"Very well."

He returned to the paper.

"You want access to the universities."

"The people within them."

"Military hospitals."

"Their observations and, where ethically permissible, samples."

"Government information."

"Relevant information."

"Freedom to publish?"

"Where publication does not compromise military interests."

That answer pleased the room.

Nathan had designed it to.

Then Lloyd George reached the section Nathan had been waiting for.

His finger stopped.

"What is this?"

Nathan knew perfectly well.

"Security."

"I can read, Doctor."

"Then we're making excellent progress."

One of the officials beside Lloyd George looked horrified.

The Minister merely stared at Nathan for a second before returning to the page.

"You want armed guards."

"A small force."

"For a medical institute."

"For a research establishment which may possess military information, experimental medicines, infectious material, chemical agents and research potentially useful to an enemy."

Nathan folded his hands.

"I would be disappointed if Germany never considered stealing anything from us. It would suggest our work lacked ambition."

The military representative at the far end of the room leaned forward.

"How many?"

"Initially? Twenty."

Lloyd George looked up sharply.

"Twenty armed men?"

"Not twenty men standing around my laboratory pointing rifles at bacteriologists."

Nathan turned the relevant page towards him.

"A protective section. Perimeter security. Transport escort when necessary. Control of sensitive materials. Protection against theft, sabotage and espionage. Eventually responsibility for emergency containment should research involve biological material dangerous beyond the laboratory."

The final phrase changed the atmosphere.

"Containment," someone repeated.

"An infected animal escaping into London would be inconvenient."

"Infected with what?"

"Whatever we are studying."

Nathan smiled slightly.

"That is generally the difficulty with research. One does not always know the answer before beginning."

The smile was not returned.

Good.

Nathan wanted them uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable men wrote regulations.

Regulations became authority.

Authority, once placed on paper, had a fascinating tendency to survive the people who created it.

Lloyd George tapped the security paragraph.

"You are effectively asking for a private armed force."

"No."

Nathan answered immediately.

He had rehearsed this portion more carefully than any scientific argument.

"I am asking the Crown to protect Crown-sanctioned research."

A subtle change passed through the room.

Nathan continued before anyone could object.

"The security personnel would, naturally, remain answerable to His Majesty's Government."

The lie came easily.

It was not entirely a lie yet.

That was the useful thing about institutions.

They rarely began as what they eventually became.

"The Government may appoint their commanding officer if it wishes. Their authority can be established through whatever ministry is deemed appropriate. Their actions would be subject to Crown law and military regulation."

Nathan allowed himself a small shrug.

"I have no desire to command soldiers."

That part was even almost sincere.

Nathan did not want soldiers.

He wanted an organisation.

Soldiers obeyed orders.

Organisations preserved purposes.

There was a difference.

"You would finance them too?" Lloyd George asked.

"If required."

"Very patriotic."

Nathan smiled.

"I wouldn't go that far."

The Minister laughed again.

The others did not seem certain whether they were permitted.

Nathan looked down at the proposal.

He had deliberately made the security section modest.

Twenty men.

One officer.

One facility.

Limited authority.

Nothing threatening.

Nothing a government fighting the largest war in British history would waste much time fearing.

Later there could be more laboratories.

More personnel.

More dangerous materials.

More reasons for secrecy.

More reasons for security.

And eventually the argument would become self-sustaining.

We cannot reduce the guard because the research is dangerous.

We cannot reveal the research because the research is dangerous.

We cannot permit outsiders into the facility because the research is dangerous.

We must expand the security section because protecting the research has become more complicated.

Institutions grew the same way organisms did.

Pressure.

Response.

Adaptation.

Nathan had learned that lesson from something much older than governments.

Lloyd George closed the folder.

"Suppose I approve this."

Nathan said nothing.

"Suppose I persuade the War Office that keeping you out of uniform is worth the trouble. Suppose your College gives you your clever young men and we permit access to military hospitals."

He placed one hand upon Nathan's proposal.

"What will you give me?"

There were a hundred answers Nathan could have offered.

Vaccines.

Antiseptics.

Better treatment protocols.

Improved methods for managing shock.

Methods of preserving tissue.

Ways to prevent infection.

Perhaps, eventually, carefully disguised fragments of knowledge derived from the impossible biology inside Nathan himself.

He could never give them Redlight.

Not truly.

He had decided that years ago.

There were some discoveries mankind was not entitled to make merely because it possessed microscopes.

But he could give them shadows of it.

Principles.

Observations.

Ideas discovered centuries before anyone else should have been capable of finding them.

Enough to change medicine.

Not enough to create another thing like him.

Nathan looked at the Minister of Munitions.

"Men," he said.

Lloyd George frowned.

Nathan continued.

"You send them to France."

He touched one finger against the closed folder.

"I'll try to make certain more of them come back."

For once, Lloyd George did not immediately answer.

Nathan sat quietly.

He knew better than anyone in that room how carefully the sentence had been constructed.

He had not promised victory.

He had not promised miracles.

He had not spoken of honour or sacrifice or the destiny of Britain.

He had offered something considerably more valuable.

Numbers.

Several weeks later, the notice Nathan had expected finally arrived.

He opened it in his study at The Knapp.

Military service.

His name.

His age.

His obligations.

The machinery of the state had reached through London, through University College, through his wealth and publications and reputation, and finally put a piece of paper into his hand explaining that Nathan Drake now belonged, in some measure, to Britain.

Nathan read it once.

Then placed it beside another letter.

That one concerned his application for exemption on the grounds of work of national importance.

A third concerned the proposed institute.

Nathan sat beneath the evening light and considered the three pieces of paper.

One would have sent him into the Army.

One might keep him out of it.

The last might give him something vastly more useful than exemption.

Purpose sanctioned by government.

Access to brilliant minds.

Access to military medicine.

Access to laboratories.

Access to disease.

The legal authority to study things which peacetime institutions would regard with considerably greater suspicion.

And, if Nathan negotiated correctly, a small body of armed men whose stated purpose would be to ensure that nobody interfered.

He picked up the institute proposal.

Genetic Technologies Research Institute.

The name still felt cumbersome.

It would need something shorter eventually.

Nathan looked through the window towards the grounds of The Knapp.

He thought of Ashcombe.

He thought of Horsley's letters.

He thought of boys standing in water until their feet rotted inside their boots, surgeons cutting away limbs because infection had reached too far, mothers receiving telegrams and universities slowly emptying themselves of minds that would never be replaced.

Perhaps humanity was determined to continue making war.

Nathan had begun to accept that he was unlikely to cure it of the habit.

Very well.

There were other things he could cure.

He placed the conscription notice into a drawer.

The Government believed it was deciding whether Nathan Drake would serve the Crown.

Nathan found the idea almost charming.

He opened a fresh notebook.

On the first page he wrote the name of the institute.

Beneath it he began listing departments.

Genetics.

Pathology.

Bacteriology.

Virology.

Immunology.

Trauma.

Regeneration.

His pen stopped over the final word.

For several seconds he stared at it.

Then Nathan drew one precise line through Regeneration.

Too early.

He wrote another word in its place.

Tissue Recovery.

That would frighten no one.

Above him, Britain was learning how thoroughly industry could be organised for the purpose of destroying human bodies.

Beneath The Knapp, Nathan began organising an industry devoted to making that destruction less reliable.

.

By the beginning of summer the Institute had finally begun to resemble the thing Nathan had spent the first months of the year describing to men who had regarded him as though he were trying to sell them a particularly expensive species of lunacy.

The building itself stood well outside London, close enough that the journey back to University College was irritating rather than prohibitive, but far enough from the capital that Nathan had considered its chances of being accidentally destroyed by a German air raid acceptable. He had rejected three other locations before agreeing to it, not because there had been anything especially wrong with the buildings themselves, but because the men showing them to him had persisted in talking about offices, lecture rooms and convenient railway access while Nathan kept asking what lay beneath them. By the time the Ministry understood that he was entirely serious, they had stopped trying to persuade him that a large country house with excellent windows would make a perfectly respectable scientific institution.

Windows, Nathan had explained, had the regrettable habit of becoming holes whenever explosives were involved.

So the real Institute had grown downward.

The old cellars beneath the building had been reinforced first, then widened, then joined to newer chambers cut farther into the earth until the surface structure began to feel almost like an administrative shell placed over something more substantial. Nathan had insisted upon thick walls, separate ventilation between several of the laboratories, independent drainage, protected stores for cultures and chemicals, and corridors broad enough that men carrying an injured patient would not have to turn sideways because some architect had found narrow passages aesthetically pleasing. The Ministry had objected to the expense of placing so much of the scientific work below ground. Nathan had responded by laying photographs of bomb damage across the table and asking which laboratory they preferred to rebuild after the first successful raid.

The objections had largely ceased after that.

There were still workmen about most mornings. Nathan would occasionally turn a corner and find a wall missing that had existed the previous evening, or discover two electricians arguing beneath an open panel while a researcher attempted to conduct an experiment three yards away with the expression of a man reconsidering his career. The place smelled of plaster, disinfectant, hot wiring, damp concrete and the beginnings of biological work. Crates arrived almost daily. Microscopes from London. Glassware. Centrifuges primitive enough to offend Nathan personally. Incubators. Chemical reagents. Surgical instruments. Cabinets filled with samples from military hospitals whose labels often told Nathan more about the exhaustion of the physician who had written them than about the specimen itself.

Above them, twenty trained men now guarded the grounds.

They had been placed under the Institute's protection detail gradually, though Nathan had discovered very quickly that the government phrase under the Institute and his own understanding of under his charge were not precisely the same thing. On paper they remained servants of the Crown, assigned to protect Crown-sanctioned scientific work, bound by regulations Nathan had read carefully enough to know exactly where those regulations stopped being specific. Their commanding officer, Captain Arthur Hale, was neither stupid nor particularly impressed by Nathan's position, which Nathan considered an excellent beginning. Hale had spent his first morning walking the perimeter, his second demanding better locks, and his third informing Nathan that whoever had designed the western approach to the building ought to be made to defend it personally.

Nathan had hired men to correct it before luncheon.

The relationship had improved considerably after that.

Nathan did not think of the guards as soldiers belonging to him. Not yet. He would have considered the idea childish. Twenty rifles did not constitute an army, and Nathan had no interest in playing general merely because the government had permitted armed men to stand around his laboratories. What interested him was the principle. Scientific work which became important enough required protection. Protection required authority. Authority required men accustomed to obeying an institution rather than whichever individual happened to occupy a particular office. He had watched governments grow structures from smaller beginnings than this. He saw no reason science could not do the same.

For the moment, though, there was too much actual work to indulge ideas about what the place might become in twenty or fifty years.

Nathan spent most days moving through the laboratories.

He had acquired the habit at University College and had carried it with him without considering whether anyone else found it unsettling. A researcher might spend the morning believing Nathan occupied himself somewhere in administration only to look up from a microscope and find him leaning against the opposite bench reading yesterday's notes. He rarely announced himself. He disliked formal inspections because people behaved differently when they knew they were being inspected. Nathan preferred arriving while they were frustrated.

Frustration was informative.

A man who had failed six times and was still attempting a seventh experiment interested him far more than one who had produced precisely the result he had expected on his first attempt.

The younger researchers adapted to him fastest. Many had come from University College because Nathan had known them personally, while others had arrived through recommendations from Cambridge, Oxford, King's, Edinburgh and several teaching hospitals. He had deliberately sought minds that had not yet accumulated enough reputation to become frightened of being wrong. There were older men too, physicians and bacteriologists and surgeons whose experience Nathan valued, but the Institute's peculiar character was already developing around the young.

They argued.

Nathan encouraged it.

A bacteriologist investigating infected wounds might find himself seated beside a chemist who cared nothing about bacteria but understood why the antiseptic was damaging living tissue. A physiologist studying circulation in cold extremities might be interrupted by an engineer asking whether the problem could simply be prevented by designing a better boot. Nathan had no patience for departmental pride when men were losing feet in France.

If a question crossed three disciplines, then three disciplines would answer it.

On one warm morning in July, Nathan had spent nearly an hour with Thomas Merritt over two bacterial cultures that refused to behave alike.

Merritt had been one of his students at University College, though not one Nathan would have placed beside Ashcombe in natural brilliance. Merritt's gift was persistence. He worried at problems. When something contradicted him he took it personally, then returned the following morning determined to discover whether nature had cheated.

Nathan found that quality almost as useful as genius.

"They were taken from the same preparation," Merritt said for perhaps the fourth time, pushing his spectacles farther up his nose. "The concentration was identical. Temperature identical. Exposure time identical. I repeated the measurements myself."

Nathan stood with one hand resting upon the bench while he studied the figures. "Then either something was not identical or the difference matters."

Merritt gave him an exhausted look. "That is remarkably comforting."

"I don't employ you for comfort."

"You don't employ me at all. The Ministry does."

Nathan glanced at him.

Merritt's expression faltered for half a second.

Nathan's mouth moved faintly. "Then I shall write to them immediately and recommend your dismissal."

Merritt relaxed. He had finally learned Nathan's humour, though like most people he still occasionally required a moment to determine whether Nathan was joking.

Nathan turned the notebook back towards him. "Repeat it."

"Again?"

"Again."

"This will be the fifth."

"Yes."

"When am I allowed to believe it?"

"When the organism becomes bored with proving you wrong."

Merritt muttered something about academic cruelty and began preparing the next culture.

Nathan was still watching his hands when the clerk appeared in the doorway carrying the morning post.

"Dr Drake?"

Nathan did not look up. "Unless the building is burning, put it on the desk."

"It's your correspondence, sir."

"Then I am pleased to hear the building isn't burning."

Merritt smiled into his work.

The clerk, less accustomed to Nathan, remained uncertain whether he was permitted to leave.

Nathan finally turned, held out his hand and accepted the bundle.

There was nothing unusual in receiving letters at the Institute. Nathan sometimes thought half the scientific establishment had discovered his address simultaneously. University College sent requests. The Ministry sent questions written by men who could have answered them themselves if they had read the previous memorandum. Hospitals sent observations. Manufacturers sent invoices. Researchers sent applications after hearing rumours that Dr Drake would fund work other institutions considered impractical.

Nathan sorted through them while Merritt measured out another preparation.

A Ministry envelope.

An equipment invoice.

A request from University College.

Something from Hale concerning the night watch.

Another from London.

Then Nathan reached an envelope whose handwriting he did not recognise and nevertheless stopped before opening it.

There was a University College seal.

He felt no warning.

That would bother him later.

He opened it with one finger beneath the edge and unfolded the first sheet while Merritt continued working.

The letter began conventionally.

Nathan read the first line.

Then the second.

His eyes reached the name Victor Horsley and stopped.

For a few seconds nothing changed.

The lamps continued humming. Somewhere beyond the laboratory wall a trolley rolled along the corridor. Merritt tapped the side of a glass vessel and frowned at the meniscus. One of the workers above them dropped something heavy enough that the vibration travelled faintly through the ceiling.

Nathan read the sentence again.

Sir Victor Horsley had died at Amarah.

The words remained precisely the same.

He read farther.

Mesopotamia. Heat. Illness. Fever. Collapse. Hospital. Death.

Nathan's attention caught upon the date.

Six days.

He had posted a letter to Horsley six days ago.

Perhaps seven.

Nathan looked back at the beginning as though he had misunderstood something fundamental in the arrangement of the words.

Merritt noticed the silence eventually.

"Sir?"

Nathan did not answer.

Horsley was dead.

Nathan knew what the sentence meant. He understood each word independently. He could have explained death at the cellular level in considerably greater detail than the man who had written the letter. He understood what excessive heat did to the human body. He understood dehydration. He understood intestinal infection and circulatory collapse and the cascading failure of organs when temperature exceeded what the body's chemistry could tolerate.

Understanding it did absolutely nothing.

He turned the sheet over.

There was nothing on the other side.

For some reason that irritated him.

Nathan turned it back again.

"Dr Drake?"

Merritt had stopped working now.

Nathan became aware that his fingers had crushed one edge of the paper. He forced them open before he tore it.

"My friend is dead."

The words came out quietly and sounded wrong immediately.

Merritt stared at him. Nathan almost never spoke about his private life in the laboratory. Even the fact that he had friends seemed to surprise some of the younger researchers.

"I'm sorry."

Nathan looked at him.

He knew what Merritt meant. It was a decent thing to say. A human thing. Nathan could think of nothing to give him in return.

He folded the letter once along an existing crease and slipped it inside his coat.

"Finish the experiment."

Merritt hesitated. "Of course."

"All five cultures. Don't discard the earlier preparations until you've compared them."

"Yes, sir."

Nathan turned towards the door.

He made it three steps before Merritt spoke again.

"Dr Drake?"

Nathan stopped.

Merritt seemed to regret having called him back.

"If you need anything—"

"No."

The answer came too sharply.

Nathan softened it almost at once. "Thank you."

He left.

He walked through the Institute without any clear awareness of where he intended to go. Men greeted him. Nathan answered some of them and ignored others without noticing which. A physician emerging from the pathology room attempted to ask whether Nathan still wanted the afternoon demonstration moved forward. Nathan told him tomorrow. The physician began to point out that the samples might not last until tomorrow, then looked at Nathan's face and decided not to continue.

Hale intercepted him near the entrance hall carrying a ledger beneath one arm.

"Drake. I've got the figures for the additional fencing—"

"Tomorrow."

Hale lowered the ledger.

Nathan continued walking.

"Drake."

Something in the tone made him stop.

Hale had watched soldiers receive bad news before. Nathan could see the recognition behind the man's eyes and disliked being readable enough for it to exist.

"Everything all right?"

Nathan almost laughed.

"No."

Hale waited.

Nathan offered nothing else.

After a moment Hale nodded. "I'll handle the place."

Nathan left without thanking him.

The journey to The Knapp took long enough that Nathan had time to discover the news was becoming worse rather than easier.

He sat inside the motorcar watching hedgerows and villages move past the window while his mind repeatedly returned to a letter somewhere between England and Mesopotamia.

His letter.

It had been an ordinary one.

That offended him more than almost anything else.

Nathan could remember writing it at the Institute after midnight, complaining to Horsley about a surgeon who had declared peripheral nerve damage effectively hopeless and describing the progress being made on several of the underground laboratories. There had been an argument carried over from Horsley's previous correspondence concerning the treatment of cranial trauma. Nathan had deliberately misrepresented one of Horsley's opinions near the end because he knew perfectly well it would provoke three furious pages in reply.

Then he had invited him home.

Not sentimentally.

Neither of them would have tolerated that.

When you have finished trying to reorganise the medical services of Mesopotamia, come back to England. I have built something you will enjoy criticising.

Nathan had imagined Horsley reading that sentence.

He had imagined the answer.

He had imagined him visiting.

Not consciously, perhaps. He had never sat in his study and planned the day. Yet the expectation had existed somewhere so securely that Nathan had not recognised it as hope.

Horsley would come back.

He would walk through the Institute complaining about its surgical rooms. He would argue with Nathan over some trivial point before they reached the second laboratory. He would be delighted by half the work and offended by the other half. Nathan would show him the sections he was prepared to show another human being and conceal everything beneath The Knapp that no friend, however trusted, could be permitted to see.

It had simply been something that would happen.

Now it would not.

The carriage of a letter had outlived the person it was meant for.

Nathan found that almost grotesque.

Somewhere a sack of mail continued eastward, obedient to schedules and railways and ships, carrying words towards a man who no longer existed to read them. No mechanism would feel embarrassed. No clerk would know that the conversation had ended six days before Nathan knew it had ended.

He stared out of the window and felt anger collecting very slowly beneath his ribs.

Not grief yet.

Anger was easier.

Horsley had been fifty-nine.

Nathan repeated the number silently and found it insulting.

Fifty-nine years to become Victor Horsley, and then a few days of heat and illness to erase him.

The Knapp came into view before Nathan had made peace with even the first sentence of the letter.

He entered through the front without removing his coat. One of the household staff began asking whether he intended to eat. Nathan said no and continued towards his study, then changed direction halfway there.

He went downstairs instead.

The first cellar door opened beneath his hand. The second required a key. Beyond it lay the rooms the household knew belonged to Dr Drake's private research and had learned never to enter. Nathan passed those as well and reached the deeper portion he had built years before the government ever gave him permission to call anything an institute.

He shut the last door behind him.

Electric lights came alive one after another.

Here there was no University College.

No Ministry.

No Crown.

No polite fiction about Nathan Drake being a gifted human scientist.

There were samples that answered him when he thought at them. Tissue which had been separated from his body months earlier and remained as much a part of him as the hand opening the cabinet. Records of experiments no ethics board could have understood because the biological subject and the investigator were the same organism.

Nathan walked past all of it.

Then turned.

Walked back.

He realised after several passes that he was pacing.

The observation irritated him too.

He stopped in the centre of the room, took Horsley's death notice from his pocket, unfolded it and read it once more.

Heatstroke.

Illness.

Mesopotamia.

Dead.

"You stupid bastard."

His voice sounded very clear in the empty laboratory.

Nathan stared at the letter.

Horsley had volunteered.

Of course he had volunteered.

That was the stupidest part.

No one had dragged him from a university and put him on a ship. He had gone because men needed surgeons and because Victor Horsley possessed the apparently incurable conviction that being able to help someone created an obligation to do it personally.

Nathan could hear him defending the decision.

Not literally. Nathan had enough voices in his memories without inventing ghosts. Yet he knew the man well enough to build the argument.

Men were dying. Experienced surgeons were needed. What sort of physician remained comfortably in England while younger men went without treatment?

Nathan's jaw tightened.

"One with a functioning brain."

He began pacing again.

"There are other surgeons."

His footsteps struck harder against the floor.

"You could have trained them. You could have taught fifty of them. A hundred. You could have been here doing something that survived you."

Silence.

Nathan hated it.

Horsley would have answered.

That was what suddenly made the whole thing unbearable.

For years Nathan had been able to say something deliberately provocative in Horsley's company and rely upon the fact that the man simply could not allow a bad argument to remain unanswered. Even letters had acquired that rhythm. Nathan would send three pages. Horsley would return four. Nathan would object to two lines and ignore the other hundred. Horsley would call him intellectually dishonest. Nathan would inform him that at least he remained intellectually interesting.

It had become ordinary.

Nathan looked at the empty laboratory and realised there would never be an answer again.

He had never understood silence could be rude.

That was what it felt like.

Almost rude.

The world had removed someone in the middle of a conversation and apparently expected Nathan to accept that the conversation was finished.

"No."

He said it more loudly.

Nothing happened.

Nathan's hand came down upon the edge of a steel bench.

The metal groaned.

He looked down.

His fingers had sunk shallow impressions into it.

For several moments he stared at the marks as though someone else had made them.

Then the anger broke loose.

Nathan seized the bench and hurled it.

It crossed the laboratory violently enough that its legs left the floor before it struck the opposite wall. Glass burst. Instruments scattered. A steel tray hit stone and rang so sharply that the sound seemed to continue long after everything else had fallen still.

Nathan stood among the aftermath breathing hard.

He did not require the breath.

His body had remembered anger from men who had needed lungs for it.

"Fifty-nine years."

The words came through his teeth.

Fifty-nine years of memory.

Fifty-nine years of accumulated skill.

Thousands of operations. Arguments. Mistakes corrected. Techniques learned through experience nobody could transfer neatly onto paper. The peculiar instincts of a surgeon who had spent decades opening living bodies and learning precisely how much they could endure.

Gone.

Not transferred.

Not stored.

Gone.

Nathan had spent the past two years watching Britain waste young minds and had believed he understood what offended him about it. Ashcombe had been unfinished brilliance, a possible future extinguished before anyone knew what shape it might take.

Horsley was the opposite.

He was accumulated brilliance.

A lifetime already built.

And Britain had sent that too.

Nathan had no objection to necessary violence. That distinction mattered to him. He had killed people. Some deserved it. Some simply had to die because the alternative had been worse. He would kill again if necessity demanded it, and he had long ago abandoned the comforting hypocrisy of pretending otherwise.

But this was not necessity.

This was carelessness.

You did not take one of the finest surgical minds your country had produced and spend it in a climate that could kill him more efficiently than the enemy.

Nathan stared at the wreckage of his bench.

"Idiots."

He did not know whether he meant the Army, the government, Horsley or the human species generally.

Perhaps all of them.

His anger carried him deeper into the laboratory.

He passed the controlled cultures and stopped beside a sealed cabinet containing tissues no ordinary scientist would have recognised as belonging to anything human.

Heatstroke.

The word returned.

Nathan knew exactly why Horsley had died.

That made it intolerable.

The human body possessed a narrow range in which it functioned properly. Push temperature too high and enzymes failed. Fluids disappeared. Circulation deteriorated. The nervous system began malfunctioning. Add intestinal illness, dehydration and exhaustion and suddenly decades of intelligence could be ended by chemistry going wrong in a body too primitive to correct itself.

Primitive.

Nathan looked down at his own hand.

His temperature could change.

If it changed too far, he adapted.

If his cells encountered damage, they compensated.

If poison entered him and enough time remained to understand it, his biology attempted to make the poison irrelevant.

Human beings could do none of that.

They died.

He had accepted that fact because everyone accepted it.

Nathan's expression hardened.

Perhaps acceptance was simply ignorance that had become traditional.

He opened the cabinet.

Inside were records of experiments on separated biomass exposed to increasing temperature. Cold. Acids. Toxins. Pathogens. Nathan had conducted them primarily to understand himself, repeatedly testing how much injury the organism could sustain before adaptation became impossible.

He had always kept that knowledge separate from human medicine.

There was Nathan.

Then there was humanity.

A wall between them.

A necessary wall.

Redlight could not be given to people.

Nathan was certain of that in the same way he was certain fire should not be poured into an infant's hands. Governments already possessed artillery and poison gas. Give them something capable of rewriting living organisms and war would stop being a question of which nation won.

But did the wall have to be absolute?

Nathan stood motionless.

Thermal tolerance did not require Redlight.

Better vascular control did not require Redlight.

Improved resistance to infection. Faster clotting. Better recovery from shock. Understanding why one tissue survived injury when another died.

Those were principles.

Nature had reached solutions.

Nathan could study the solutions without handing anyone the organism which had produced them.

Somewhere, perhaps, there existed a distance between a normal human body and Nathan's that medicine could safely cross.

He thought of Horsley lying feverish in a hospital in Amarah.

How little would have been enough?

A body capable of maintaining temperature a few degrees longer.

A more efficient response to dehydration.

An immune system that had cleared the intestinal infection a day faster.

Nathan did not need to make Horsley immortal.

He would only have needed to make him slightly harder to kill.

That thought cut through the anger so cleanly that Nathan stopped moving.

Horsley.

The man himself returned to him rather than the medical problem.

Nathan went back to the main room and retrieved one of Horsley's old letters from a drawer.

He had kept several here because they contained observations relevant to military injuries.

Nathan unfolded it carefully.

The handwriting made something inside him twist.

The impatient strokes.

Words crowded into margins because Horsley had thought of another argument after supposedly finishing the page. A correction inserted between two lines. A sentence Nathan remembered finding irritating when it arrived and would now have given almost anything to argue about again.

He read half a paragraph.

Stopped.

For the first time since receiving the notice, his anger ceased being large enough to hide what was underneath it.

He missed him.

The thought was embarrassingly simple.

Nathan had spent years surrounded by human beings while never quite thinking of himself as subject to the same rules they were. He knew his colleagues would age. He knew they would die. He had watched grey appear in hair while he manufactured the appearance of age upon his own face so no one noticed that time did nothing to him.

He had known.

But somewhere along the way he had begun assuming they would simply continue.

Starling would be there.

Martin would be there.

Horsley would be somewhere sending letters filled with objections.

Nathan had understood mortality without allowing it into his expectations.

Now one of those expectations had vanished.

There would never be another joke.

Never another argument.

Never another dinner spent pretending professional insults were conversation.

Never another letter.

The remaining correspondence in Nathan's hands was finite.

That thought hurt more than the announcement of death had.

There would never be a new page.

Nathan lowered himself slowly onto the chair behind his desk.

He stared at Horsley's handwriting and remembered something else with a suddenness that made his stomach tighten.

The men beneath the mountain.

Ward.

Harcourt.

Hargreaves.

Others whose lives existed inside Nathan in fragments so complete that he could occasionally remember being children they had been. Death had not entirely silenced them because Nathan carried their memories whether he wanted them or not.

Horsley was different.

Nothing of him existed inside Nathan.

For one brief, ugly moment Nathan wished that were not true.

The thought arrived instinctively.

If he had possessed some piece of Horsley—some tissue, some blood, anything Redlight could have interpreted—perhaps memory could have remained. Perhaps the cadence of his voice. The structure of thoughts. Some echo of the man.

Nathan recoiled from himself.

"No."

He said it quietly now.

Horsley had belonged to himself.

Nathan would not turn friendship into appetite merely because grief had made absence unbearable.

He sat there a long time.

Eventually his gaze fell upon the overturned bench.

He imagined Horsley seeing it.

Nathan could almost construct the expression.

A distinguished scientist responding to an undesirable result by throwing laboratory furniture. Splendid. Perhaps Nathan intended to publish the method.

A small sound escaped Nathan before he could prevent it.

Not quite laughter.

"He would have been insufferable about this."

The room remained silent.

The almost-smile vanished.

Nathan looked down at the letter.

"You would have hated the ventilation."

There it was again.

Silence where an answer belonged.

His eyes closed.

He pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose and remained that way until the pressure in his chest became something he could endure without destroying anything else.

His body did nothing to help him.

That seemed unfair.

Break his bones and they repaired themselves. Tear flesh away and biomass replaced it. Poison him and the thing beneath his skin began searching for an answer.

But there was no tissue damage here.

Nothing for Redlight to recognise as injury.

Nathan could survive almost anything except somebody else dying.

Eventually he stood.

He righted the bench himself.

The bent frame complained against the floor. Nathan gathered broken glass into a tray, collected scattered instruments and returned what could be salvaged to its proper place. He worked methodically until the laboratory looked less like somewhere a furious creature had passed through it.

Then he sat at his desk and opened Human Survivability.

There were pages already filled with observations from France. Blood loss. Shock. Infection. Peripheral nerve damage. Trench foot. Respiratory illness. Notes drawn from Horsley's letters were scattered through several sections in Nathan's precise handwriting.

He turned to a blank page.

For a while he merely looked at it.

Then he wrote:

Environmental Failure of Human Physiology

Beneath it:

Thermal stress.

His pen remained against the paper.

Nathan thought of Amarah.

Of a body overheating beneath a foreign sun.

Of a brilliant, irritating man who had apparently been capable of challenging half the medical establishment but not his own temperature.

Nathan added another line.

Determine the limits at which regulation fails. Determine whether those limits can be moved.

He stared at the sentence.

Then, in smaller handwriting at the edge of the page where no Ministry official was ever likely to understand its significance, he wrote one name.

Victor.

Nathan sat back.

The anger had not left him.

Perhaps it never entirely would.

But anger, unlike grief, could be made useful.

He dipped the pen again.

By midnight the page was full.

CHAPTER COMPLETE .

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