Nathan stood at the edge of the central bore with both hands resting lightly upon the reinforced railing and, despite having enough correspondence waiting upstairs to occupy the remainder of the afternoon, found that he could not quite persuade himself to move. The excavation had changed so rapidly during the previous two and a half months that even he, who had approved the original drawings, argued over the first estimates, increased the depth requirement after the engineers thought they had finally satisfied him and read enough construction reports to know almost precisely what ought to be beneath his feet, still experienced a moment of disbelief whenever he looked directly into it. What had begun as an immense cylindrical wound drilled brutally into the earth had acquired shape and purpose as it deepened, the raw walls disappearing behind descending rings of reinforcement while steel braces, temporary stairways and broad working platforms clung to the circumference in complicated tiers. Electric lamps had been placed wherever men required them, hundreds of hard white points descending through the shaft, yet the bore had become deep enough that the illumination no longer seemed capable of conquering the whole space; darkness remained between the levels, gathering in great vertical bands and swallowing men whole whenever they stepped outside the strongest pools of light before releasing them again as moving shadows farther along.
From where Nathan stood, the workers on the lowest level had almost ceased to resemble individual men. He could distinguish bodies moving between machinery, heads turning toward signals, groups taking hold of guide ropes and figures crossing the fresh foundation works, but faces had long since disappeared into distance. Men broad enough to fill doorways above ground looked scarcely larger than pieces arranged upon a board, their clothing reduced to dark and pale shapes, and every few moments one would cross beyond the lamps and become nothing more than motion where Nathan knew a person ought to be. Even his eyesight had difficulty judging where the opposite wall finally met the floor because scale behaved strangely inside the excavation; from the bottom, the upper opening must have looked like a pale circle impossibly far above, while from the top the base seemed to belong to some separate underground world where people worked inside a darkness too large to be understood at a glance.
Sound suffered the same distortion. An instruction shouted from one of the lower platforms arrived several seconds later as a thin and incomplete fragment of a human voice, almost stripped of language by the journey upward, while the drilling machinery that could shake a man's ribs when heard nearby had become something less like noise and more like pressure. Nathan felt it through the soles of his shoes and into the railing beneath his hands, a deep mechanical vibration travelling through concrete and steel as the Institute continued cutting itself downward into the earth. Somewhere well below him another tool struck metal, the sharp sound arriving softened by distance before dissolving into the larger industrial murmur of the shaft, and Nathan leaned slightly farther over the barrier while trying to follow the far wall downward through the suspended levels.
The dimensions had seemed extravagant enough when they existed only as ink across plans, and he remembered more than one engineer looking at him as though he had personally taken leave of his senses when he requested further depth after the first excavation figures were approved. One had actually removed his spectacles, rubbed both hands over his face and asked Nathan whether he intended to reach Australia before finally accepting that the professor was serious, and another had threatened resignation in a moment of theatrical despair only to return the following morning carrying revised calculations and the air of a man who had been personally wronged by geometry. Nathan had enjoyed the complaints more than he admitted, but what pleased him now was not simply the satisfaction of seeing his requirements obeyed. There was something more fundamental in watching people take an idea that was far too large for any one person to build and turn it into a physical place through repetition, knowledge, muscle and the peculiar human refusal to be intimidated permanently by scale.
A signal bell rang somewhere below while Nathan was still looking into the depths, and several seconds later the hoisting machinery overhead answered with the heavy groan of gears accepting load. His attention shifted upward and inward toward the enormous assembly hanging over the centre of the bore, where several support members had been bound into a rigid framework along with reinforcement, formwork and additional materials intended for the lowest level. Multiple steel cables ran upward from the load into pulleys large enough to require supporting structures of their own, and men positioned around the upper platform watched every line while communicating through raised hands, whistles and shouted commands that vanished almost immediately into the vastness around them.
The cables came taut one after another until every length of steel looked unnaturally straight, and for a brief uncomfortable moment the entire load seemed to hang without movement above the darkness. Tens of tonnes were suspended there, enough weight that Nathan did not need an engineer's education to understand what a broken line would mean for anyone unfortunate enough to be beneath it, and he watched with the respectful concentration of a man who knew just enough about engineering to appreciate what he did not know. He understood the principles well enough to see why the load had been distributed as it had and why different guide points were being used, but he possessed no arrogance about replacing the men responsible for making it work; a mistake around machinery like this would not be corrected with an apology or another calculation. It would erase whoever stood in the wrong place.
The first signal came from the hoist crew, followed by an answer from farther around the platform, and the assembly began descending so slowly that for several seconds Nathan could judge its movement only by comparing it with the steel supports behind it. The men operating the system treated the whole thing with a calm that bordered on indifference, not because they underestimated the danger but because they had repeated variations of the same operation often enough for discipline to replace awe. Nobody shouted unless something genuinely required shouting, nobody rushed because rushing would only transfer risk to the next man and nobody seemed interested in appearing impressive for the benefit of Nathan Drake watching from the railing. The load passed the first intermediate platform, where several workers stepped back from the edge to give it room, then continued toward the second while men above adjusted tension and the guide ropes below gradually came alive.
Nathan found himself smiling before he consciously noticed the expression. He knew almost none of the men guiding the operation, and that realisation settled strangely upon him while the framework continued disappearing into the shaft. He knew the principal engineers because their names appeared on reports, amendment sheets and invoices large enough to become memorable, and he knew several foremen because Hale had cleared them personally or because disputes over labour, materials and impossible scheduling eventually found their way upward to somebody with enough authority to approve another shipment of steel. Nathan knew which company supplied the concrete, which contractor had underestimated consumption so badly that Willit had threatened to frame the third revised order and hang it in his office, and which engineer had objected so violently to a new reinforcement requirement that Mercer had later asked whether the man required sedation.
The labourers themselves were different. Masons, riggers, drill operators, electricians, hauliers, carpenters, scaffolders and men whose occupation seemed from Nathan's distance simply to involve being strong exactly where another person needed strength came and went every day, many arriving before he reached the Institute and leaving after darkness settled over the grounds. Their names existed somewhere in Hale's cleared employment records and Willit's payroll documents, but most of those names would never attach themselves to faces Nathan remembered, even though the things built by their hands might outlast every one of them. He watched three figures far below take hold of guide ropes as the descending framework approached the base, their movements tiny from above yet coordinated well enough that one man shifted before another needed to call for him, and the efficiency of it struck Nathan as almost beautiful.
No minister would ever know the name of the worker currently raising an arm from the lowest platform. No scientific paper eventually written in the laboratories branching away from this shaft would include a line thanking whichever labourer had spent the morning ankle-deep in wet concrete ensuring reinforcement remained where an engineer had drawn it, and years from now, if the Institute survived long enough to become old, people might pass through finished underground corridors without once wondering who placed the steel behind the walls. Yet none of it could exist without them, and Nathan allowed that simple fact to settle more warmly than he expected.
He had lived long enough that admiration for humanity no longer came cheaply. Human beings could be frightened, cruel, selfish and astonishingly inventive whenever they required respectable language for something ugly; Nathan had watched governments turn desperation into policy, watched institutions make suffering administrative simply because writing it on a form rendered it easier to ignore and watched ordinary people look away from someone else's pain because seeing it properly might have demanded action. He had no interest in pretending the species possessed some natural nobility that history contradicted at every opportunity, but looking into the bore reminded him that the same creatures capable of those failures could also cooperate on a scale almost impossible for one mind to hold.
One person had drawn the first lines. Another calculated whether the lines could stand under load, while hundreds more arrived with drills, hoists, trowels, cables, hammers and skills Nathan himself did not possess, and together they had taken measurements from paper and turned them into an engineered space large enough to swallow tonnes of steel into darkness. Humanity could do extraordinary things when enough people agreed, even temporarily, that the same direction was worth pulling toward, and Nathan found himself proud of the men below despite knowing almost none of them well enough to greet by name.
Several paces behind him, T remained quietly attentive to the same spectacle. Joseph had accompanied Nathan throughout the inspection without offering commentary, and by then the black fatigues, rifle and Ledermaske had become familiar enough around the Institute that workers on the upper platform gave him room without the startled second look that had followed him during his first weeks. He understood security, weapons, patrols, men under pressure and the thousand practical disciplines France had burned into him, but he was not an engineer and possessed no urge to perform intelligence by offering opinions simply because Nathan happened to be nearby. Nathan respected that more than he respected men who spoke before deciding whether they had anything useful to add.
"Quite something, isn't it?" Nathan asked after another moment, turning partly from the railing while the descending support assembly crossed through another illuminated level below. Joseph continued watching the workers for several seconds before answering that it was "a lot of work," the words emerging low through the mask and carrying an understatement so thoroughly English that Nathan gave a quiet laugh before looking back into the shaft. "That may be the most aggressively British description available," he replied, his smile deepening when T's helmet turned fractionally toward him in the movement Nathan had learned usually concealed amusement.
"I don't know most of their names," Nathan admitted after a while, allowing the thought that had followed him for several minutes to become speech while his attention remained upon the lower platforms. "Strange, really. We're going to do things down there that depend completely on what these men are building, and I'll probably never speak properly to most of them." Joseph followed another crew crossing the foundation level and answered that they would know they had built it, and the simplicity of that response pleased Nathan enough that he turned to look at him before giving a slow nod. "Yes," he said, warmth settling naturally into his voice. "Sometimes that should be enough."
They remained at the edge until the load finally reached its intended level and the lower crews began guiding the support framework toward prepared anchoring points. Nathan watched long enough to see the rigging lose some of its tension as the assembly was transferred gradually into place, then stepped back from the railing only after he was satisfied the most dangerous portion of the operation had passed. The enormous base remained active beneath him, men guiding another concrete pour while reinforcement thicker than a man's wrist vanished beneath structures that would eventually support entire laboratory levels, and the fresh concrete reflected the electric lamps like dark water before distance and shadow swallowed detail again.
Nathan carried the image with him when he finally turned away. The machinery did not disappear from hearing immediately, because drilling followed him and Joseph into the first reinforced corridor as a vibration transmitted through the structure, while the rougher industrial air of the open bore gradually gave way to the controlled coolness of the completed sections. Each heavy doorway placed more concrete and steel between them and the excavation until the grinding diminished into a pulse beneath the floor, and their own footsteps became more noticeable in the quieter environment, Nathan's measured rhythm accompanied by the heavier return of Joseph's boots several paces behind.
The transition from the construction levels to the medical sections always affected Nathan more strongly than he expected because the two places seemed to represent opposite ends of the Institute's purpose. The bore existed for things not yet built, laboratories that remained lines in plans and questions nobody had begun asking properly; the recovery ward existed because people had already been broken, and there was nothing theoretical about what waited inside it. Nathan's pace slowed before he reached the ward without him consciously deciding to alter it, the efficient stride he used through offices and working laboratories giving way to something quieter as though his body remembered the change in atmosphere before his thoughts did.
He did not believe wounded soldiers required whispered voices or theatrical solemnity, because men who had endured artillery were unlikely to be injured by someone closing a door too loudly, but he did believe the ward deserved to be entered differently from a storeroom. Reverence was the word Nathan had eventually settled upon, though he would probably never have said it aloud to the patients because several would have insulted him until he left. Reverence, however, was different from pity, and pity had begun to irritate him profoundly whenever it arrived without usefulness.
The men in those beds had received enough pity from visitors who looked at a missing limb before remembering there was a person attached, from acquaintances who softened their voices because mutilation frightened them and from administrators who used words such as fortunate whenever a casualty remained alive without asking what survival actually looked like after discharge. Nathan had no interest in standing beside a bed and congratulating a man for possessing half the body he had entered France with, as though continued breathing automatically settled the debt. The men inside had gone where they were ordered and returned carrying consequences that politicians preferred to describe through speeches about sacrifice, and Nathan thought that deserved respect before sympathy.
The ward was quieter than usual when he entered, although not because the patients were sleeping. One soldier near the windows held a newspaper close enough to compensate for damaged sight, another attempted to arrange playing cards with the limited dexterity remaining in one hand and an orderly farther down was adjusting support beneath a shortened leg while arguing cheerfully with its owner over whether the man had deliberately moved it again. A kettle hissed beside a tea tray near the partition, the gramophone stood silent against one wall and the smell of clean linen, antiseptic and human bodies filled the warm room with the peculiar atmosphere of hospitals everywhere.
Nathan had taken only several steps before realising that half the patients were pretending very badly not to listen to an argument developing near the centre of the ward. Mercer stood beside one of the beds with a wooden prosthetic leg held horizontally in both hands, while opposite him a nurse had folded her arms and adopted the expression of someone who had already explained herself several times and discovered that scientific qualifications did not make Mercer more receptive to answers he disliked.
"It is the issue pattern available to us," the nurse said, keeping her voice low enough to preserve the fiction that they were not entertaining half the room while several newspapers remained suspiciously still. She reminded Mercer that the man had been fitted according to the supplied measurements and that the socket itself was correct, and Mercer held the wooden limb as though its existence should have settled the argument by itself before replying that it weighed too much and that correct measurements had not, to his knowledge, altered gravity.
"You cannot reject every prosthetic because you personally dislike how heavy it feels in your hands," the nurse answered while the patient between them stared determinedly at the ceiling, clearly having decided that neutrality offered his best chance of avoiding recruitment into either side. Mercer shifted the artificial leg and told her that he could dislike anything he pleased, then added that what bothered him was the habit of calling something satisfactory merely because it could be attached to a man without immediately falling off.
Nathan stopped several yards away with Joseph halting behind him, and Mercer saw them almost instantly. Relief crossed his face with enough speed that the nurse followed his gaze and appeared considerably less enthusiastic to discover another senior scientist arriving in the middle of the dispute. "Good, you can settle this," Mercer said as he turned toward Nathan with the confidence of a barrister who believed the judge had finally entered the correct courtroom, while Nathan looked from him to the nurse and finally the wooden leg before remarking that he had not yet heard the prosecution.
"You do not need to," Mercer replied, already walking toward him with the prosthetic, and then apparently decided that explanation would take longer than demonstration because the wooden leg left his hands with almost no warning. Nathan caught it against his chest from reflex, both arms closing around an unexpectedly substantial weight while the nurse shut her eyes briefly in what looked suspiciously like a private prayer for patience, and several soldiers abandoned all pretence of not watching.
Nathan lowered the artificial limb and turned it carefully in his hands. It was not crudely made, and whoever had constructed it had plainly tried to provide something more sophisticated than the simple pegs many poorer amputees still used. The socket had been shaped carefully, leather strapping was arranged with thought and the overall form attempted to imitate a natural limb closely enough that someone had spent time making the object look like a replacement rather than merely a support.
It was also remarkably heavy.
Nathan shifted one hand beneath the socket and lifted the lower portion slightly to feel the balance, at which Mercer immediately pointed toward him and said, "Exactly," with enough vindication that Nathan looked up and reminded him he had not spoken. Mercer replied that Nathan's wrist had moved; Nathan explained that he had been determining the weight, only for Mercer to answer that this was merely a more elaborate way of admitting he had discovered it was ridiculous. "You are exceptionally talented at hearing your own argument inside other people's movements," Nathan said, amusement entering his eyes while Mercer ignored the accusation and tapped one knuckle against the wooden frame.
"Reports from several hospitals suggest men are abandoning these once supervised rehabilitation ends," Mercer explained, the irritation gradually resolving into the useful thought that had produced it. Some men, he said, preferred a crude peg because the simpler construction did not make the entire leg feel as though somebody had strapped a piece of furniture to the stump, and before Nathan could answer the patient in the bed turned his head and dryly suggested that Mercer could perhaps ask the men wearing the things.
Several nearby soldiers laughed, and Nathan immediately looked toward the speaker. The man appeared to be somewhere around thirty, though war and months in hospital had made the usual markers of age unreliable, and his left leg ended above the knee beneath the blanket while the intact right foot rested beyond the covers. Nathan asked whether he genuinely preferred the peg, and the soldier looked at him for a moment before saying that he would prefer his leg, which earned another wave of laughter before his expression sobered enough for him to add that, between the heavy artificial limb and a peg, the peg at least did not pretend it was doing him a favour.
Mercer spread his hands in triumph and supplied another "There," but Nathan's humour was already fading as he looked down at the prosthetic again. "How long can you actually wear it?" he asked, keeping his attention on the patient rather than the men around him, and the soldier admitted that an hour was enough for the stump to begin aching properly. He could tolerate it longer while sitting, he added, but sitting rather defeated the purpose, and the previous day he had taken it down the corridor only to feel as though his hip was being dragged away with it.
"The fit should improve as he adjusts," the nurse said, her tone less defensive now that the man himself was describing the problem, and Mercer agreed that perhaps the fit would improve before adding, with considerably less hostility than before, that the weight certainly would not. Nathan shifted the prosthetic again and imagined the forces travelling through it during each step, because a healthy leg was heavy inside a body that had grown from infancy around carrying the weight, with muscle, bone, tendon, balance and sensation working together. A prosthetic transferred mass through scarred tissue, straps and structures never intended to bear the same leverage, and every movement of the lower portion magnified force through the socket against a body already injured.
"What do you recommend?" Nathan asked as he looked toward Mercer, and the transformation in the other scientist was immediate. Irritation disappeared behind concentration, because Nathan had learned during their comparatively short time working together that Mercer's complaints usually concealed a solution waiting impatiently for permission to exist.
"I've been reading engineering reports and some of the material work coming out of aircraft manufacture," Mercer said as he pulled folded pages from beneath one arm and named duraluminium, immediately catching Nathan's interest. Aluminium alloys strengthened with copper and other additions were hardly unknown by 1917, and aviation had already provided engineers with powerful incentive to obtain useful strength without carrying unnecessary weight, but prosthetics had not yet benefited from the same urgency.
"It is dramatically lighter than this," Mercer continued, knocking his knuckles against the wooden leg while explaining that properly worked material should remain strong enough for structural components, absorb less contamination than timber and prove much easier to clean around areas exposed continuously to sweat, dirt and whatever else soldiers insisted upon walking through. The nurse asked whether he intended metal to sit directly against the stump, and Mercer's irritation returned just enough for him to explain that he had not abandoned reason; the socket would still require lining, whether leather, padded material or whatever combination testing showed to be tolerable and replaceable, while the alloy would form the load-bearing structure rather than the surface pressing directly against scar tissue.
Nathan continued turning the wooden limb while Mercer lowered his voice slightly, though every patient close enough to hear had become conspicuously interested. "The problem is that I do not know enough about working the alloy," Mercer admitted, and the frankness made Nathan look at him more seriously. Mercer understood sterilisation and possessed enough materials knowledge to know what properties he wanted, but he did not know how thin a duraluminium member could be made before fatigue became dangerous, how the joint should be designed to tolerate repeated loading or which manufacturing methods could reproduce the same structure reliably enough for medical use.
"So you want engineers," Nathan said, and Mercer immediately added metallurgists, mechanical specialists and perhaps someone already involved with aircraft production, because he would rather bring in people who had learned the material's weaknesses through practical work than waste months rediscovering the same lessons badly. He took the prosthetic briefly and worked the heavy knee mechanism through its limited range, explaining that the wood required enough mass around the fittings to prevent splitting, whereas a properly designed metal structure might allow them to shift weight upward, reduce the mass below the knee and design the joint around what the wearer needed instead of what timber tolerated.
Nathan looked again toward the patient whose leg had started the argument and found the man no longer pretending indifference. Nobody else was pretending either. A double amputee across the ward had lowered his newspaper completely, another soldier missing an arm watched Mercer's demonstration with the fascinated concentration of someone wondering whether similar thinking might eventually reach his own circumstances, while the veteran who had once named T the Angel of Death had turned in his bed just enough to hear everything while maintaining the fiction that he was interested in the opposite wall.
"I want permission to approach several people outside the Institute," Mercer said after noticing the attention around him, and some of the sharpness left his voice as the men themselves became part of the question. He wanted the consultants brought in under his division and his responsibility, with Hale screening them before they saw anything beyond what their work required; they needed no information concerning the more sensitive levels, only an understanding that the Institute had wounded men and equipment that was not good enough.
Nathan allowed his gaze to travel through the ward before answering, and for several seconds the conversation ceased to be about alloys. The men around him had been measured, fitted, operated upon and rehabilitated by systems genuinely attempting to return whatever function contemporary medicine could manage, yet good intentions did not make a heavy limb lighter and did not stop scar tissue from hurting merely because a doctor had judged the object medically acceptable.
Nathan remembered Joseph Brown without needing to turn around. He remembered one surviving arm, no legs and eyes so damaged that the bed beside him had once been little more than blurred form and movement, while Joseph Taylor now stood several paces behind him in black fatigues, restored and silent beneath a mask nobody in the ward understood. The contrast gave Nathan's answer more weight than Mercer could have known.
"If it will make their lives even slightly easier, then do whatever you believe will help them," Nathan said, keeping his voice clear enough that the soldiers no longer had any need to pretend the conversation was private. Mercer's expression shifted almost immediately toward satisfaction, but Nathan continued before he could answer, authorising engineers, metallurgists, machinists and aircraft specialists wherever those were the people who understood the material best, provided Hale cleared them, Willit handled the contracts and every consultant remained inside the sections relevant to the work.
"But the men wearing these are part of the design process before you settle upon anything," Nathan added as he glanced toward the wooden leg, causing Mercer to pause and several patients to look directly at him. An engineer could tell them what could be built, Nathan explained, while Mercer could tell the engineer what could be sterilised, fitted safely and maintained, but only the man expected to strap the thing onto his body every morning could tell either of them whether the damned object was actually worth wearing.
Approval moved through the beds in a low murmur, and the nurse who had spent much of the previous argument opposing Mercer gave Nathan the first openly satisfied expression she had shown. "That would prevent a great many arguments," she said while directing the remark toward Mercer, who immediately looked offended and insisted that he was not opposed to feedback. The patient whose prosthetic had begun the entire dispute snorted and reminded him that he had just thrown the man's leg at his employer, causing Mercer to look down at the wooden limb as though only now realising how difficult that fact was to defend.
"That is difficult to defend," Nathan said with a widening smile, while Mercer replied that throwing it had made the point efficiently enough that several patients began laughing again. The laughter loosened something in the ward that had been tight when Nathan entered, and for several moments nobody was a casualty, an experimental treatment case or a line on a medical chart; they were wounded soldiers enjoying the absurdity of watching an irritated scientist fling somebody's artificial leg across a hospital room because he was personally offended by its weight.
Mercer allowed the laughter to settle before returning naturally to planning, saying he would begin with three outside consultants, probably one metallurgist, one structural engineer and somebody experienced in precision mechanical joints, perhaps adding a second engineer if he found someone involved in aircraft work who understood the alloy from manufacturing rather than theory. Nathan told him to take what he required but reminded him that every additional person meant another clearance Hale had to approve and another possible route by which sensitive information might escape.
"I am aware," Mercer replied as he glanced instinctively toward T, while Joseph's black lenses offered no reaction. Nathan looked at the prosthetic one last time before extending it toward him and simply saying, "Hold this," and T accepted the wooden limb without hesitation.
The resulting image silenced two nearby soldiers for perhaps a second because the Institute's enormous masked security figure now stood with a rifle slung across his chest and somebody's artificial leg held carefully in both hands. The veteran who had named him the Angel of Death stared across the ward before grinning and telling T that it looked good on him, drawing laughter from the surrounding beds while Joseph's helmet turned slowly toward the speaker.
"Bit short, though," the veteran added once he knew he had the masked man's attention, and Joseph looked down at the prosthetic as though genuinely considering the criticism. Nathan saw the movement, Mercer saw it as well and even the nurse raised one hand toward her mouth before Joseph finally lifted the wooden leg and pointed its foot directly toward the veteran.
"All right, all right, keep it," the man said as he raised both hands in surrender, and the ward laughed more loudly than before while Nathan shook his head and started toward the door. Before leaving, however, he turned back toward Mercer and waited until the scientist looked at him properly.
"Do what you think will work," Nathan said, his amusement settling into something more sincere. "I trust you."
The words affected Mercer more visibly than Nathan had expected. His habitual irritation faded and for a moment there was no answer being prepared, only the quiet weight of having been given responsibility for something that mattered. Mercer looked around at the patients, then toward the artificial limb currently being held by the most intimidating man in the Institute and finally back to Nathan before giving a single serious nod. "I will," he replied, and Nathan believed him enough that nothing more needed to be said.
He left the ward with Joseph several paces behind, still carrying the prosthetic because Nathan had never actually instructed him to put it anywhere and because T had discovered that literal obedience could be turned into humour without violating a single order. Their steps travelled down the corridor for perhaps fifteen yards before Nathan realised the rhythm behind him contained something unfamiliar: his own softer steps, Joseph's heavier footfalls and every second stride or so a wooden knock as the artificial leg bumped lightly against T's equipment.
Nathan slowed and Joseph stopped with him. When Nathan turned, T stood in the middle of the reinforced corridor with the rifle across his chest and the prosthetic held vertically beneath one arm as though carrying it had become part of his official duties, and Nathan stared at him for several seconds before saying that he could put it down now. Joseph merely tilted his helmet.
"You knew that," Nathan said as his eyes narrowed, and one slow nod confirmed the accusation with enough shamelessness that Nathan laughed despite himself. The sound carried along the corridor and made two clerks farther away look up, only to discover Professor Drake laughing at the Institute's silent masked spectre while the latter held an artificial leg as though nothing about the scene required explanation.
"Give it back to Mercer before he decides it belongs in your equipment allowance," Nathan told him, and Joseph turned without comment toward the ward. Nathan watched him go with the smile still present, and through the doorway came the renewed sound of patients speaking as Mercer began questioning the original wearer about where the prosthetic hurt, how long he could tolerate it and what compromises in appearance he would accept if the result weighed less.
Within days, Nathan knew, letters would leave the Institute for engineering works and specialists he had never met. Material samples would arrive, calculations would be made and discarded, machinists would complain about dimensions, engineers would argue with Mercer over fatigue limits, patients would reject elegant designs that rubbed the wrong place and Mercer would become personally offended every time somebody proposed a component heavier than he considered necessary. Somewhere inside all that irritation a better artificial limb might emerge.
Nathan continued along the corridor while the vibration from the bore remained faint underfoot, and the connection between the two places became difficult to ignore. Hundreds of feet below, men were setting tonnes of concrete and steel into the earth so scientists they would never know could work inside rooms that did not yet exist, while only several passages away Mercer had become angry because one wounded soldier's artificial leg was heavier than it needed to be.
The difference in scale was enormous, but the instinct beneath both efforts was the same. Nathan had stood above the bore admiring what human beings could accomplish when enough of them chose to carry a burden no single person could manage, and Mercer was now applying that principle to something small enough to fit beneath a hospital blanket. Human progress did not have to announce itself through grand discoveries or buildings deep enough to require hoists; sometimes it began when someone looked at another person's burden and decided there was no good reason it should remain that heavy.
The thought stayed with Nathan for most of the afternoon, following him through reports, conversations with Willit and another inspection of the construction schedule, but by evening another man was carrying a burden that no engineer could lighten.
Joseph Taylor left the Institute after his duties ended, changed out of the black fatigues and locked away the Ledermaske, helmet and rifle with the same disciplined care he gave them every evening. Nathan's rules concerning his private time had remained exactly as promised: when Joseph was not on duty and no genuine emergency required him, his hours belonged to him, and there was no requirement to report where he intended to go merely because Nathan had given him a second life. Hale had nothing waiting before morning, so Joseph told nobody that he intended to travel to Luton.
By the time he reached the town, evening had settled under heavy cloud and the air smelled of damp brick, smoke and rain not yet fallen. Weak yellow lamps had begun pushing back against the dark along streets whose familiarity reached Joseph in alternating waves, some corners appearing almost unchanged while others forced him to stop himself from staring at things memory insisted should have been different.
Luton was not the place he had preserved inside his head during France and the hospitals, and he realised that before he had walked very far. Brick terraces still crowded along wet roads and chimney smoke gathered under the low sky as it had before the war, while shopfronts remained where he remembered them, but signs had changed, paint had faded and people he half expected to see simply did not exist in the places memory had assigned them.
War had marked the town without transforming it entirely. Women carrying baskets moved past buildings where groups of young men once stood after work, children raced along pavements beneath coats obviously inherited from older siblings and every few streets Joseph noticed a uniform, an empty sleeve or the careful gait of someone who had returned from France carrying injuries concealed beneath ordinary clothing. Factories still worked, public houses remained noisy and life continued with a casual persistence that offended Joseph for perhaps half a minute before he recognised the unfairness of expecting otherwise.
Some childish portion of him had apparently imagined that Luton would notice his return, that a town from which Joseph Brown had vanished might somehow hesitate when he came home, but nobody cared because nobody knew. People passed without recognising him, and those who looked twice did so because the stranger walking toward them was unusually tall rather than because anything in his restored face reminded them of the soldier who had lived there years earlier.
Joseph had dressed to reduce the risk as much as was reasonable. The dark coat fitted the reconstructed body Nathan had given him, falling cleanly across shoulders broader than those Joseph Brown had carried to war, while a high collar and low hat kept enough of his face in shadow that anyone passing beneath a streetlamp had little reason to study him. He was not exactly hiding, because hiding suggested he expected pursuit, but he made himself deliberately uninteresting and chose routes that allowed him to move with purpose rather than hesitate like a stranger.
He avoided the public house where men from before the war might recognise his voice, crossed to the opposite pavement after spotting an elderly butcher whose name he still remembered and once waited beneath an awning while two women left a shop farther ahead because one looked familiar enough that he did not want to discover whether the feeling was mutual. Each avoidance made the absurdity sharper.
Joseph Brown had come home, but the town was not allowed to know.
That understanding followed him into the narrower streets around the neighbourhood he had actually come to see, where front windows stood close enough to the pavement that household life could be glimpsed through curtains when families had not yet drawn them. Joseph's pace slowed naturally because the route no longer required conscious thought. He turned beside the grocer, passed the small lane where he and Emily had once sheltered from summer rain because neither had wanted to admit that going home would have been sensible and crossed the junction where she had nearly backed into the path of a delivery cart while insulting him too enthusiastically to look behind herself.
He remembered catching her around the waist and pulling her clear, then remembered Emily laughing even harder because the driver shouted something obscene at both of them. The memories returned with an accuracy that felt almost cruel now that his mind was free of pain, medication and the haze that had surrounded so much of the hospital months, and by the time the house appeared farther down the street Joseph could already feel his heart working harder.
He stopped before reaching it.
Nothing remarkable distinguished Emily's house from the others around it. Dark brick, narrow frontage, curtains across the downstairs window and a small iron gate separating the pavement from a short path that barely deserved the name, yet merely seeing the building from a distance made Joseph feel like someone standing outside property that no longer belonged to him.
He had stood at that gate before France, and Emily had once kissed him there so quickly that he barely understood what had happened before her father appeared behind the curtain. She denied the entire event immediately, which had led Joseph to spend several days reminding her of it whenever possible, and somewhere in the months before enlistment he had decided that when he came back he would ask her properly what they were doing.
Not marriage, because neither of them had been brave enough to pretend they were already that serious, but something more definite than two people continuing indefinitely to behave as though what existed between them was casual. The bottle of champagne at the back of Joseph Taylor's wardrobe belonged to that imaginary homecoming, purchased before France for a future Joseph Brown had assumed would wait politely for him.
Joseph crossed to the opposite side of the road and stopped where he could see the front room through a narrow gap in the curtains without standing close enough for anyone inside to identify him easily. The house was perhaps thirty yards away, no more than a few seconds' walk for the body he possessed now, and Joseph put both hands into his coat pockets while staring across the wet road.
He could cross.
The simplicity of the thought hurt more than its content.
He had legs now.
For months Joseph Brown had imagined walking again with the desperate abstraction of a starving man imagining food, yet until this moment he had not understood how strange it would feel to possess two strong legs while being unable to cross thirty ordinary yards. The obstacle separating him from Emily was no longer a ruined body, a hospital bed or a chair someone else had to push. It was choice.
He could step into the road, pass through the little gate and knock.
Emily might answer.
Joseph imagined her face before he could stop himself, not the rain-streaked grief he had seen at the funeral but the expression she used before the war whenever he arrived unexpectedly: surprise for the first instant, then that smile she tried unsuccessfully to hide whenever she wanted him to believe she had been occupied with something more important than waiting for him.
His hand moved inside the pocket.
He nearly stepped forward.
Then the curtain shifted.
Joseph froze where he stood as Emily entered the front room carrying folded washing, and the simple sight of her moving around her own home affected him more violently than watching her stand beside the false coffin had done. At the funeral she had belonged to grief, wrapped in black and rain beneath the attention of everyone gathered around Joseph Brown's death; here she belonged only to herself.
She wore a plain dress with the sleeves turned slightly above the wrists, and her hair had been pinned back less carefully than it had been for the burial. That ordinary imperfection made her seem more real than she had beneath umbrellas and mourning clothes, and Joseph watched as she placed the washing upon a chair and remained standing with both hands resting over it.
Emily stared down.
She looked tired, though not physically unwell. Joseph recognised something more intimate in the way she stood, the exhaustion of a person discovering that a day contained too many empty minutes and inventing tasks before memory found room to fill them.
She picked up one garment and folded it even though it was already folded, then set it down and did the same thing to another. Joseph understood immediately because he had spent enough time in hospital doing exactly the same sort of thing with letters, medical papers and whatever else his remaining hand could rearrange; silence became dangerous when the hands stopped moving, because once the body became still there was nothing left to distract the mind from what it had lost.
Emily moved toward a little table, adjusted something that did not need adjusting and returned to the washing. Joseph's throat tightened when her hands finally stopped and her head lowered, because he recognised the moment before anything visible happened and stepped from the pavement without deciding consciously to do so.
One boot touched the road.
If she began crying, he would cross.
The promise formed so immediately and irrationally that, for several seconds, Nathan's secrecy ceased to matter. Joseph did not care about forged documents, six extra inches of height or the impossible explanation required when a man declared dead after losing three limbs appeared whole on a doorstep. If Emily sat alone inside that room and broke because Joseph Brown had died, then Joseph Taylor was going to knock, and whatever consequences followed could be dealt with afterward.
Her shoulders moved.
Joseph took another half-step.
Then another person entered the room behind her.
Joseph stopped in the road.
A young man crossed into view, apparently close to Joseph's age, though distance made exact judgement impossible. He wore shirtsleeves beneath a waistcoat with the informal ease of someone who had been inside long enough to remove his coat, and there was nothing immediately threatening about him.
Joseph disliked him at once.
The emotion arrived so sharply that some detached part of Joseph almost laughed at the stupidity of it, because the stranger had done nothing beyond enter a room. Then the man approached Emily from behind and Joseph's jaw tightened as one hand settled gently upon her shoulder, followed by the other.
Emily did not flinch.
That mattered.
She knew the touch.
The young man rubbed her shoulders slowly, not possessively and not with the self-conscious performance of someone demonstrating affection. Nobody inside knew Joseph was watching. The man simply seemed to recognise that Emily had gone still and understood enough about her to know she needed comfort before she asked.
Emily turned slightly toward him.
Jealousy opened inside Joseph with an ugliness that embarrassed him almost as soon as he recognised it. His fingers curled in the pockets of his coat while his mind produced a rush of questions more viciously than any rational thought could stop them.
Who was he? A neighbour, a friend from before the war, someone who began visiting while Emily waited for letters Joseph no longer sent? Had he attended the funeral? Had Joseph seen him among the mourners without understanding who he was, and how many times had the man crossed that little front gate Joseph himself had once imagined using every day?
For one ugly heartbeat Joseph imagined doing it now. He saw himself crossing the street, walking through the gate and knocking hard enough that the young man came to answer. He imagined Emily seeing Joseph Brown alive behind a face restored from everything France had done and wanted, selfishly and completely, to watch the entire safe arrangement inside that room explode around his return.
He wanted the room to belong to him because once he had imagined that it might.
Then the young man bent and kissed Emily gently upon the forehead.
There was nothing passionate about it, and that made it hurt differently. Passion could have been dismissed as intrusion, something sudden Joseph could hate without complication, but this was intimate because it was familiar. It was the kind of affection that belonged to knowing where someone kept the tea, what annoyed them, when they wanted to be spoken to and how long a silence should be left alone before companionship mattered more.
Emily closed her eyes briefly beneath the kiss.
The man kept one hand on her shoulder.
Joseph remained in the road with jealousy tightening around his ribs until another thought arrived more painfully than any of the others.
Where were you?
The question was not directed through the window.
Emily had written to him. She had asked to visit. Once she learned how badly he had been injured she told him it did not matter and offered to come to the hospital if he would only allow it, but Joseph had refused because he had been terrified of watching her face change when she saw what remained of him. He wanted to preserve the version of himself she remembered.
Instead he had left her alone with memories.
Someone else had apparently been willing to sit beside her while she carried them.
Joseph breathed slowly through his nose and became aware of his hands. The reconstructed body Nathan had given him carried anger differently from the body he remembered; his heart could hammer without immediate exhaustion and his muscles possessed enough strength that a thoughtless clench could become damaged property, so he consciously relaxed his fingers before tearing something inside the pockets.
The man in the house had done nothing to him.
Emily had done nothing to him.
Whatever right Joseph Brown had imagined he possessed over a future with her had never existed beyond hope. Joseph had stopped answering her. Joseph had allowed her to believe he died. The reasons might have been human and understandable, but understandable reasons did not become ownership simply because they hurt.
He lifted his chin and let the jealousy remain without pretending it had disappeared. It hurt because he loved her, and that was all; love did not become permission merely because the person carrying it suffered.
Emily turned far enough that Joseph could see more of her face and said something to the young man. Joseph could hear neither voice through glass and distance, but the response caused the corner of her mouth to move, not a full smile and barely even the beginning of one.
Joseph stared.
That tiny movement wounded him and comforted him in exactly the same instant.
She could still smile.
The funeral had not buried that part of her.
A tear formed before Joseph could stop it, and he almost laughed at himself because after surviving mutilation, blindness, surgery and his own burial, apparently the thing capable of breaking through every defence was a warm front room viewed from the wrong side of a street. He let the tear travel down his cheek rather than wiping it away and continued watching Emily for another moment while his imagination finally gave him everything reality could not.
He saw himself crossing the road, Emily opening the door and shock somehow turning into recognition despite the impossible changes. He imagined the champagne bottle finally leaving the wardrobe, a chair at the kitchen table, Emily complaining that his new height made every piece of furniture look ridiculous and mornings when he could wake without putting on the face of T.
Children entered the fantasy before Joseph could prevent them. A garden followed, then a fence repaired badly because he had never possessed much patience for carpentry, and suddenly an entire ordinary life unfolded inside the little house with such clarity that it hurt more than France had in some ways. Joseph Brown had never understood how much courage it required to want ordinary things because he had always assumed there would be time later.
For several seconds Joseph lived that life.
Then he let it go.
Not forever, perhaps, because he could not lie convincingly enough to himself while the desire remained so strong, but tonight he released it.
The young man was still beside Emily, and Joseph looked at him again with resentment remaining because he was human enough for resentment, yet something else had begun taking shape beneath it. Gratitude was too generous for what Joseph felt, but acceptance came close. Somebody had been present when Joseph was not, and at this moment that mattered more than which man Emily might eventually choose to love.
"All right," Joseph murmured beneath the ordinary noise of the street, speaking softly enough that nobody could have known whether the words were meant for Emily, the young man or Joseph Brown himself, and then he turned away.
The first few steps hurt despite there being nothing wrong with his legs. The pain existed in choosing a direction when every part of him wanted to turn back, and Joseph kept both hands in his coat pockets while maintaining a measured stride beneath streetlamps beginning to shine more brightly against the darkening clouds. A woman carrying groceries thanked him when he made room for her, two boys ran across the road behind him arguing about something important only to themselves and a nearby door opened long enough for the smell of supper to escape into the evening.
Joseph did not look back.
That required more discipline than almost anything Hale had taught him.
Behind him stood the house in which Joseph Brown had imagined one version of his future, and Emily remained inside with another man's hands resting gently upon her shoulders. Joseph could have crossed if he wanted. He had legs, a restored face she might eventually recognise and a life that should not have been possible.
What he did not possess was the right to tear open her grief simply because he suddenly wanted the future Joseph Brown had once been too frightened to reach for.
The tear reached his jaw and disappeared into the collar of his coat while Joseph continued walking like nothing unusual had occurred. Anyone watching the towering stranger pass beneath the evening lamps would have assumed he was simply another man heading somewhere before the rain began, and none of them could have known that only a few streets behind him Joseph Taylor had just walked away from an entire life Joseph Brown once imagined living inside someone else's home.
The consequences of Mercer's prosthetic project arrived at the Institute the following week in a form considerably less quiet than Joseph's return from Luton.
The man from the nearby aeronautical works entered the grounds already angry enough that every security checkpoint Hale placed between the gates and Nathan's administrative rooms appeared merely to add another layer to the grievance he intended to deliver. He was not military in the strict sense, though much of the work around the neighbouring airfield served the Royal Flying Corps, and he carried himself with the indignant certainty of someone accustomed to arguing that whatever his department required automatically qualified as part of the national war effort.
One of the engineers Mercer had approached regarding the proposed duraluminium prosthetics had apparently worked under or alongside him, and the fact that the man agreed to spend a portion of his time consulting at the Institute had been interpreted less as cooperation than theft. By the time Hale's guards showed the visitor through the final administrative passage his hat had been removed, replaced and removed again several times, and irritation seemed to radiate from the stiff line of his coat even before he spoke.
Nathan was sitting at a desk beside the open administrative corridor when the man arrived, reading construction reports while Willit worked farther down the room and two clerks moved between filing cabinets. T stood near the doorway with the habitual stillness that allowed Joseph to disappear almost into the architecture until somebody remembered the architecture was armed, and beyond them the Institute continued producing the layered sound Nathan had come to associate with rapid growth: telephones ringing, typewriters striking, laboratory doors opening and closing, carts moving equipment through secured passages and distant machinery vibrating through floors from construction below.
The visitor began politely enough, though the politeness lasted only as long as the opening sentence. "I understand your Dr Mercer has taken Whitcombe," he said from several feet before Nathan's desk, holding his hat in one hand while displeasure sharpened each word. He added that Mercer apparently intended to approach another metallurgical specialist before the week ended and suggested somebody might have possessed the courtesy to discuss the matter before deciding the aeronautical works could simply spare trained men whenever the Institute acquired a new interest.
Nathan finished the paragraph he had been reading before looking up, and the calm response apparently convinced the visitor he had not yet said anything unreasonable. "Mercer requested consultations," Nathan replied as he placed the report flat upon the desk, making clear that no one had been conscripted into the Institute.
"That is hardly the point," the man answered while stepping closer, irritation beginning to overcome formality. Nathan offered these fellows superior facilities, money and the promise of some grand experimental programme, he said, so naturally they came running, but those men already performed work that mattered. Engineers were short, metallurgists were short, skilled draughtsmen and machinists were short, and every competent pair of hands diverted into what he called some unfounded little branch inside Nathan's Institute was a pair no longer available for useful work.
Nathan's fingers stopped against the paper.
Joseph noticed immediately.
Nobody else did yet.
The visitor remained too occupied by the momentum of his grievance to recognise the change and mistook Nathan's failure to interrupt for permission to push harder. "We are trying to keep machines in the air," he continued, his voice growing loud enough that a clerk passing the corridor slowed without quite stopping. Those machines were being taken into combat by young men who depended upon them, production schedules already failed to keep pace with need and designs required improvement yesterday rather than months from now, so if Mercer wanted someone to construct clever joints or experiment with aluminium he could surely find people who were not already occupied with essential aeronautical work.
Nathan watched him without blinking.
The visitor gave a small humourless laugh and finally stepped across the boundary he had not even recognised. "And all this for artificial limbs," he said, shaking his head as though the waste should have been obvious to any sensible person. "With respect, the fellows in your ward already have prosthetics. If they find them cumbersome, well, they would scarcely need to use them if they had been better at keeping themselves in one piece in the first place."
The room changed so completely that Joseph felt it before Nathan moved. Nothing supernatural happened and the Red-Light remained silent within Nathan, but the stillness entering him was absolute enough that T's helmet turned at once. Nathan's fingers ceased moving on the report, the detached patience he normally carried around irritating men vanished and for a moment he looked less angry than confused, as though his mind had refused to accept that another human being had genuinely arranged those words in that order.
Willit glanced up from his work.
One clerk stopped with a cabinet drawer halfway closed.
The visitor noticed none of them and continued because he believed himself to be winning. "You cannot keep drawing essential technical men away whenever someone here invents some sentimental side project," he said. Those soldiers possessed wooden replacements already and were, after all, alive, and considering what was happening in France he thought they might reasonably count themselves—
Nathan rose.
He did it slowly.
Joseph found the restraint considerably more frightening than if Nathan had thrown the desk aside.
The chair scraped backward beneath him while both hands settled flat against the desktop, and Nathan came upright with his face controlled only in the sense that a furnace door could technically be described as containing the fire behind it. The visitor finally stopped talking.
"Better at their jobs?" Nathan asked, his voice quiet enough that the man actually leaned closer to hear, while the colour of Nathan's expression did not change. When the visitor began, "Professor, I did not mean—," Nathan interrupted by asking precisely what he had just suggested those men should have been better at, each word more deliberate than the last.
The visitor shifted his weight and tried to explain that he was making a broader point, but whatever restraint had kept Nathan seated finally failed. "WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE HAD THEM DO?" he bellowed, and the question struck the administrative wing like a detonation.
Joseph had heard artillery from close enough that the pressure punched air from a man's lungs, and for a fraction of a second Nathan's voice returned him bodily to France. Glassware rattled inside laboratory cabinets near the corridor, a cup trembled hard enough against its saucer beside Willit to produce a sharp porcelain chatter and conversations died almost simultaneously in every room close enough to hear. A scientist who had been emerging through one doorway froze with the door still half open, two orderlies farther down the corridor turned together and even one of Hale's guards at the next junction glanced toward the administrative room before apparently deciding that running toward the source of the disturbance might be less sensible than waiting to see whether anyone requested help.
Nathan came around the desk before the visitor recovered. "What should they have done better?" he demanded, his voice still carrying through the adjoining rooms while the man took an unconscious step backward. Nathan asked whether they should have ducked faster, predicted the shell before it left the German gun or perhaps grown another bloody leg before the first one hit the mud, and when the visitor tried to interrupt with "Professor Drake—," Nathan cut him off with a single "No" delivered quietly enough that everyone could hear how much effort it took to lower his voice.
"You came into my Institute and stood within the same walls as men who left pieces of themselves in France because their country put them there," Nathan continued, one hand cutting sharply toward the corridor that eventually led to the recovery ward, "and you have the extraordinary arrogance to suggest that helping them afterward is an inconvenience caused by some failure of theirs."
The visitor's face reddened as embarrassment began competing with indignation, and he insisted that this was not what he had said. "It is exactly what you said," Nathan replied while stepping closer, and Joseph shifted fractionally from the doorway without consciously deciding whether the movement was preparation to intervene or simply the instinctive response of a soldier recognising that a room had become dangerous.
Joseph had seen Nathan cold before. He had watched the professor make decisions that would have terrified ordinary men, watched him threaten people without raising his voice and seen enough of Nathan's capacity for controlled violence to understand that cruelty was not required for danger.
This was something else entirely.
Nathan was not wielding anger as a tool.
He was simply furious.
"You said those men would not need prosthetics had they been better at their jobs," Nathan continued, every word cutting cleanly through the silence beyond the doorway. "Their job was to stand in mud while artillery tried to tear them apart. Their job was to climb out of trenches into machine-gun fire because somebody with a map decided the ground ahead was worth the bodies it would cost. Their job was to carry wounded men when every reasonable instinct should have told them to run in the opposite direction, and to hold positions long after common sense had already informed them there was nothing left worth holding."
The visitor opened his mouth again, but Nathan lifted one hand sharply enough that he stopped. "One engineer," Nathan said, the volume beginning to rise again despite his effort to control it. "One metallurgist. One specialist from each discipline Mercer believes might improve the ability of a man without a leg to walk through his own home without feeling as though somebody has strapped a railway sleeper to his hip, and you speak as though I have emptied every aerodrome in England."
"We are short of qualified people," the visitor replied, recovering enough pride to defend his position despite being acutely aware now of the audience outside. He told Nathan that the shortage remained true whether the professor approved of his phrasing or not, and Nathan answered so quickly that the words nearly struck over the end of his sentence.
"And if those men were truly indispensable, they would not have come," Nathan said, his expression becoming merciless as the visitor stiffened. Mercer had not abducted anyone from a drafting table, Nathan reminded him; he had asked. The engineers had heard what Mercer wanted to accomplish and decided for themselves that helping mutilated soldiers walk with less pain deserved some portion of their expertise, and if one man spending an afternoon at the Institute was enough to cripple the aeronautical programme then perhaps the visitor's anger belonged with whoever had constructed an operation so fragile that a single absence became a disaster.
Willit lowered his face toward his papers at that point, and Joseph strongly suspected the movement concealed an expression that would have been unsafe to show.
Nathan was nowhere near finished.
"What is tragic," he continued, and the anger in his voice changed into something heavier than fury alone, "is not that one engineer spends several hours designing a knee joint instead of an aircraft fitting. What is tragic is that you can apparently look at men who gave arms, legs, faces and years of their lives to this country and regard the effort required to make what remains slightly easier as waste."
The visitor glanced toward the open corridor, perhaps only then understanding how many people had heard the insult, and Nathan followed the look before lowering his voice until everyone nearby was forced to listen rather than merely hear. "Some of those men are twenty years old," he said. "Twenty. If fortune is kind, they may have another forty or fifty years to live with whatever France has left them, and you would have them drag heavy pieces of wood through those decades because the engineer capable of making one lighter might otherwise improve an aeroplane by some fractional degree."
"You are putting words in my mouth," the visitor said, his own anger returning now that humiliation had replaced confidence, but Nathan's answer came almost calmly.
"No," he replied. "I am removing the respectable words you tried to wrap around them."
The accusation landed harder than the shouting had.
The visitor said nothing for several seconds, and Nathan turned slightly back toward the desk without sitting. "Do you know what Mercer found?" he asked. Men were abandoning supposedly superior artificial limbs because simple wooden pegs were easier to carry, he explained, and the absurdity of that should have offended anyone claiming to care about engineering. They had designed objects intended to replace what soldiers lost and made them so cumbersome that some men preferred a shaped piece of timber because at least timber did not pretend the burden was assistance.
"If duraluminium makes one prosthetic light enough for a man to walk another hundred yards before pain forces him to stop, then the work is justified," Nathan continued, his voice settling into controlled intensity. "If a better joint allows one soldier to climb his own staircase without another person lifting him, it is justified. If Mercer spends three months and discovers nothing more dramatic than a lining that rubs less brutally against scar tissue, then I will still consider those three months useful."
The room had become quiet enough again for the machinery beneath the Institute to be felt through the floor, and Nathan allowed the vibration to sit beneath his next words as he finally acknowledged the part of the visitor's concern that was not contemptible. "You build aircraft," he said. "Important aircraft. Men need them, and I have not suggested otherwise. But do not come here and tell me that the people who return from using those aircraft, rifles, guns and every other tool of this war cease being worthy of technical effort the moment they can no longer be sent back to the line."
The visitor stared at Nathan while the professor's breathing remained controlled but more visible beneath his waistcoat. "What exactly would you have me tell the men at the works?" he asked eventually, his voice considerably quieter than when the conversation began. "That trained staff are leaving because Drake has decided prosthetic legs outrank aircraft?"
"No," Nathan replied as he held his gaze. "Tell them the truth. Tell them one of their engineers volunteered part of his expertise because he believes wounded soldiers deserve better equipment, then tell them he will return when the agreed consultation is complete unless he decides for himself that his future belongs somewhere else."
The man's face tightened.
"You do not own him either," Nathan added, and whatever argument remained ended there.
Not the disagreement, because Nathan doubted either man had transformed the other's entire understanding of wartime labour in several minutes, but the possibility that enough shouting would force Mercer's consultant back to the airfield by Nathan's order was finished. The visitor glanced toward Joseph almost unconsciously, and T had barely moved throughout the confrontation, yet the black lenses seemed considerably more oppressive now that the man remembered they had been watching him.
Joseph did not threaten him.
He did not need to.
Standing silently behind the professor who had just made laboratory glassware shake was sufficient.
"I think this conversation has ceased being productive," the visitor said stiffly as he took his hat properly in hand, and Nathan regarded him for another moment before the anger seemed to drain from his posture with almost unsettling speed.
He returned behind the desk and sat. "On that, we agree," Nathan replied, leaving the visitor standing for a moment as though he expected something else, perhaps an apology or some softer ending that would allow him to leave with dignity intact.
None came.
Nathan drew one measured breath, rested both forearms upon the desk and interlaced his fingers beneath his chin with such familiar composure that, if not for the colour still high across his face and the silence remaining in the corridor, someone arriving late might have assumed nothing unusual had happened. "You may go," he said, and the complete absence of anger somehow reddened the visitor more deeply than the shouting had.
The man turned and left.
People in the corridor discovered urgent reasons to become elsewhere before he passed them. The scientist frozen halfway through his doorway withdrew with a smoothness that would have impressed Hale, while an orderly near the next junction began pushing an empty trolley with remarkable concentration and two clerks found papers requiring immediate inspection inside another room.
The office remained quiet after the visitor disappeared, and Nathan did not return to the construction report waiting beneath his hands. He sat with his fingers interlaced and his eyes fixed somewhere below the papers rather than upon them, while Joseph remained near the doorway and Willit stayed at the opposite table without attempting to test whether the storm had truly passed.
The anger had gone.
What remained looked almost less comfortable.
Nathan was thinking, and that was rarely an idle process.
The Institute's ordinary sounds began returning cautiously around them after another minute. Somewhere beyond the corridor a telephone rang, construction vibration travelled faintly upward from the underground levels and farther away a laboratory assistant finally risked placing down a piece of glassware that had apparently been held motionless since Nathan shouted.
Joseph understood why the visitor's words had reached Nathan so violently because the recovery ward was not an abstraction to either of them. Joseph remembered blankets lying flat where legs should have been and the humiliation of other people deciding whether equipment was good enough when they would never be required to strap it to their own bodies. He remembered how quickly wounded men became administrative inconveniences once the battlefield stopped having use for them, and he knew Nathan remembered enough of those same beds to understand the cruelty even if he had never occupied one himself.
Willit eventually broke the silence with the cautious neutrality of a man checking whether the weather had moved on. "I believe everyone in the western corridor now understands your position on prosthetics," he said while keeping his attention pointedly on his own papers, and Nathan answered with a quiet "Yes" without looking up.
"Possibly the eastern corridor as well," Willit added after a moment, and Nathan briefly closed his eyes while Joseph's shoulders shifted beneath the black fatigues. Nathan noticed the movement, opened his eyes and looked directly toward T before asking whether he found the situation amusing.
Joseph gave the smallest possible nod.
Nathan stared at him for several seconds until some final portion of the tension cracked and he exhaled through his nose. "I shouted," he said with the faint bewilderment of a man who had only just realised how badly he had lost his temper, and Willit raised an eyebrow before replying that the foundations had probably heard him.
Joseph's shoulders moved again.
Nathan rubbed one thumb slowly over the opposite knuckle and allowed his gaze to drift toward the corridor that eventually led to the recovery ward. He could still picture the prosthetic Mercer had thrown at him, still hear the patient saying a peg did not pretend it was helping and still remember the way every wounded man in the room stopped pretending not to listen once Nathan told Mercer to bring in whoever he needed.
One engineer, one metallurgist and perhaps another specialist represented almost nothing when measured against the industrial machinery of a war consuming entire generations, but if their combined work allowed one man to walk across his home with less pain, those same people might become everything to him.
The anger no longer mattered.
The thought beneath it did.
Only days earlier Nathan had stood above the central bore feeling proud of men he did not know because they were building something together that none of them could have created alone. He had watched Mercer become angry over the unnecessary weight of a wooden leg, watched Joseph carry a private life outside the Institute that nobody inside its guarded corridors could see and now listened to another man dismiss compassion as a diversion from useful work.
Perhaps that was why his temper had broken.
The Institute had been conceived initially as a place for research, secrecy and control, large enough to contain work Nathan believed humanity would someday need to understand. Yet the longer the place existed and the more people filled its rooms, the less comfortable he became with measuring value only through discoveries dramatic enough to interest ministers.
The men in the recovery ward did not need immortality.
They did not need impossible transformations, secret organisms or discoveries capable of changing the world.
Some simply wanted to climb stairs without another person lifting them, hold a cup without assistance, walk farther than a corridor without their stump aching and return to a home without becoming an object everybody else needed to manage.
Humanity did great things when enough people came together, and above the bore that thought had seemed almost inspirational. Sitting behind his desk now, Nathan found himself considering the inverse question with considerably less comfort: how many smaller cruelties persisted simply because nobody considered them important enough to gather the right people around them?
A better artificial leg required an injured soldier, a physician, a metallurgist, an engineer and someone stubborn enough to insist that "acceptable" was not the same thing as good. None of them possessed enough knowledge alone to solve every problem, yet together they might alter the remaining decades of a man's life.
Perhaps the Institute needed to become better at that.
Nathan remained seated while Willit cautiously returned to his work and Joseph resumed his silent position by the doorway, the anger cooling into something more deliberate as ordinary movement spread again through the corridors.
The confrontation was over and the visitor gone, but Nathan Drake continued thinking about the men the world called fortunate simply because they had survived, and long after the last echo of his own voice had disappeared from the Institute, he found himself wondering how much more could be accomplished if survival stopped being treated as the end of anyone's responsibility.