HEY GUYS MY ANSWER CHAPTER WILL BE COMING UP AFTER THE NEXT CHAPTER BEFORE I CONTINUE THE STORY, SO GIVE AS MANY QUESTIONS AS YOU WANT AND ILL ANSWER THEM ALL THERE NEFORE POSTING THE NEXT CHAPTER.
ONTO THE CHAPTER FRIENDS
....
Chicago announced itself long before the train finally came to rest, not with a sign or any clean geographical boundary announcing that the countryside had ended and the city begun, but through a gradual thickening of human occupation that kept Nathan beside the window for nearly the entire final hour of the journey.
He had been awake since before the first substantial outskirts appeared, washed and dressed while much of the carriage remained quiet, and by the time Joseph returned from washing and dressing for the morning Nathan had already watched isolated farmhouses gather themselves into streets, streets press closer together, and telegraph wires multiply beside the railway until the landscape seemed increasingly bound together by poles, tracks and smoke. One set of rails became several, several divided again, and before long the railway yards had become complicated enough that Nathan stopped attempting to count the sidings and simply watched them unfold. Freight cars waited in long motionless chains beside warehouses blackened by years of soot, their company names dulled beneath grime, while switching engines moved among them with short impatient bursts of steam. Lumber yards and coal depots followed, then factories whose chimneys were already feeding smoke into the pale morning sky, joining the greater brown-grey haze hanging above the approaching city. Men in work clothes crossed sidings carrying lunch tins beneath their arms, disappearing behind freight wagons before emerging farther along, while beyond the industrial buildings the upper floors of tenements and narrow houses appeared wherever Chicago had found enough room to put them.
Joseph remained in the civilian clothes he had worn since changing aboard the train, his armour packed securely among the rest of his equipment rather than accompanying him openly into Chicago. The dark three-piece suit was well cut and conservative, accompanied by a white shirt, subdued tie and polished shoes, but there was no tailoring clever enough to disguise the breadth of his shoulders or the particular economy with which he moved. Without the armour he looked younger than most people expected T to be, and Nathan had noticed several passengers glancing at him twice since breakfast, apparently trying to reconcile the relatively young face with the physique and manner of a man who carried himself like someone considerably older. Joseph seemed either unaware of it or unwilling to acknowledge it, and sat opposite Nathan fastening one cuff before smoothing it beneath his jacket sleeve.
"You've been staring for twenty minutes," Joseph observed, leaning back once the cuff sat properly and watching Nathan follow an elevated structure through the window until another warehouse slid between them and blocked it from sight. His tone carried no real criticism, merely the patient familiarity of a man who had watched Nathan become interested in machinery, architecture, animals, people, drainage systems, ventilation ducts and almost anything else capable of provoking the question why.
"I've been looking," Nathan corrected without immediately turning, resting one elbow near the window as another cluster of factories passed beyond the glass, then glancing back at Joseph with faint amusement already visible around his eyes. "There is a distinction, and I would have expected a man of your observational gifts to appreciate it."
"Not to anyone watching you," Joseph replied, adjusting the fall of his jacket before turning his own attention toward the window, where several children were moving through an alley between buildings that looked as though no child had ever been intended to play there.
"You realise that argument applies equally well to you," Nathan said, watching Joseph rather than the city now. "You spend half your life looking at people as though you're deciding whether they're carrying a concealed weapon."
"I don't stare," Joseph answered, giving Nathan the level look that had made considerably more intimidating men abandon conversations.
"You absolutely stare."
"I observe," Joseph corrected, and the complete seriousness with which he said it made Nathan's eyebrows rise.
"Ah. Of course. My mistake," Nathan replied, inclining his head as though Joseph had settled an important academic dispute before turning back toward the glass and leaving him to decide whether the concession was sincere.
The deeper the Limited carried them into Chicago, the more the city accumulated around the railway. Streets appeared beneath and beside the tracks, already crowded despite the hour, and Nathan caught brief views down them whenever the buildings opened enough to provide a line of sight. Horse-drawn wagons moved beside motor cars, delivery carts stood backed against loading entrances, pedestrians gathered at corners and streetcars crossed intersections before the train carried the view away. Laundry hung between some of the poorer buildings even beneath the smoke, while children appeared in alleys where Nathan would have expected only freight and refuse. A man in shirtsleeves stood outside a workshop drinking from a tin cup while speaking to another man through the open doorway, and several streets farther on a woman leaned from an upstairs window to shake something over the sill before disappearing inside again.
It was the ordinariness of those glimpses that interested Nathan more than the skyline beginning to rise ahead of them. Maps reduced cities to streets and districts, and reports reduced them further until Chicago became railway junctions, hospital beds, population figures, factories, troop movements and columns of disease statistics. He had spent much of the journey reading exactly those abstractions, drawing lines between hospitals and railway stations, marking reported admissions, comparing telegrams and wondering whether symptoms described in one place genuinely resembled those recorded in another. From a moving train, however, the abstractions kept becoming people again. Someone was late for work and had broken into a run, someone else was arguing with a delivery driver while pointing at a crate, a child pursued another child along a pavement for reasons important only to the two of them, and a policeman stood in the middle of an intersection attempting to impose order upon vehicles that seemed philosophically opposed to the concept.
"That is what reports are terrible at showing," Nathan murmured after watching the policeman narrowly avoid a wagon whose driver appeared to regard the raised hand as a suggestion rather than an instruction, and Joseph followed his gaze toward the crowded street they were already leaving behind.
"People?" Joseph asked, shifting slightly so he could see past Nathan toward the pavement below, where a woman had stopped to pull a small boy out of the path of two hurried men carrying a long wooden box between them.
"The fact that there are any," Nathan replied, and the humour left his voice without turning the observation solemn. He watched the woman straighten the child's cap before taking his hand and continuing down the street. "Write Chicago at the top of a report and beneath it put two hundred hospital admissions, and by the tenth page the city becomes arithmetic. Two hundred admissions, seventeen severe, five deaths, three districts, four hospitals. Useful numbers, all of them, but you have to come here occasionally to remember that every one is attached to somebody who was meant to be doing something else that day."
Joseph looked at him for a moment before returning his attention to the city. "You remembered that in France."
"I try to remember it everywhere," Nathan said. "It becomes easier to forget the farther away you are."
Joseph's expression changed by only a fraction, but Nathan knew him well enough to understand the agreement contained in it, and neither man felt the need to continue merely because silence had appeared between them. The city filled it readily enough.
The rhythm beneath the carriage began changing not long afterward. The hard, regular percussion of speed stretched farther apart as the brakes took hold, and the carriage gave a series of subtle forward movements against its couplings while passengers who had spent the previous hour preparing to arrive suddenly discovered urgent final tasks. Newspapers were folded and stuffed into cases, hats appeared from racks, coats were shaken out and put on, and people began retrieving luggage despite the conductor's repeated request that everyone remain seated until the train had stopped. Nathan closed the Chicago file he had reopened over breakfast and returned it to the leather document case, checking automatically that the clasp had caught before Joseph stood and reached for their luggage.
"I can carry that," Nathan reminded him as Joseph took down the heavier case first and placed it beside the seat, then reached for the second without appearing remotely burdened by either. Nathan had made the same observation often enough during the journey that it had become less an offer of practical assistance than a ritual defence of his independence.
"I remember," Joseph replied, checking the fastening on the larger case before setting it upright.
"And yet every time I say it, you continue behaving as though I've said nothing," Nathan observed as he gathered his coat and slid one arm into it, watching Joseph take possession of the second case as well.
"I've learned from watching you," Joseph answered, lifting both cases before Nathan could make another attempt at claiming one.
Nathan stopped halfway through buttoning his coat and stared at him, recognition gradually overcoming offence. "That was annoyingly good," he conceded, finishing the last button and reaching instead for the document case.
"I've had practice," Joseph replied, the smallest movement at one corner of his mouth disappearing before Nathan could accuse him of enjoying himself.
The train passed beneath increasing shadows as buildings crowded closer to the tracks, entering the final approach toward LaSalle Street Station amid a confusion of rails, platforms, signal structures and smoke. Nathan caught only fragments through the window now: railway workers walking beside the tracks, porters waiting farther ahead, the dark underside of station roofing and, beyond it, taller buildings rising through the morning haze. Steam swept past the glass as another locomotive moved somewhere alongside them, briefly obscuring everything in white before Chicago returned in broken glimpses, and then one final sequence of jolts travelled through the couplings before the Limited came completely to rest.
For several seconds the carriage felt unnaturally still, the absence of motion noticeable after the long journey, but around them the Chicago-bound passengers rose nearly as one and the quiet order of railway travel immediately dissolved into elbows, coats, luggage and apologies as everyone attempted to occupy the aisle simultaneously.
"Well, let's see whether the city is as cooperative on foot," Nathan said as he adjusted his coat and picked up the document case, only to find Joseph already holding both travelling cases again. Nathan looked at the luggage and then at Joseph, who returned the look with such complete calm that any further protest seemed likely to become embarrassing. "I'm choosing to preserve what remains of my dignity," Nathan informed him as he stepped into the aisle ahead.
"Good choice," Joseph replied, following close enough to prevent another passenger from becoming trapped between him and the cases.
LaSalle Street received them with noise the moment Nathan stepped down from the carriage. His shoes struck concrete damp in places from steam and tracked-in grime, and he moved aside immediately as a porter came the opposite way steering a luggage cart through the newly arrived passengers. Above them the station roof trapped the sounds of locomotives until every whistle seemed louder than it ought to have been, while steam drifted between the supports in broad white sheets that repeatedly swallowed sections of the crowd and released them again. Porters called for luggage, conductors answered questions from travellers who had apparently waited until arrival to wonder where they were, and a newsboy worked his way along the platform with papers pressed against his chest, shouting headlines Nathan could distinguish only in fragments. Farther along, a family had reunited with enough enthusiasm to create an obstruction everyone else simply divided around, a woman holding both hands against a man's face while two children attempted to embrace him at the same time.
Joseph descended behind Nathan and shifted the cases to one hand long enough to settle his hat properly, while Nathan stopped for a moment to look back along the train. The polished Limited appeared less elegant here than it had beneath the controlled light of the dining car, its exterior marked now by the evidence of distance and surrounded by smoke, luggage carts, passengers and railway workers. Nathan found that he preferred it that way. It looked less like an exhibit and more like machinery that had actually done something, a great complicated system of steel, steam, men and schedules that had carried hundreds of private lives across the country and now stood breathing heat into the station while everyone abandoned it without ceremony.
"Professor," Joseph said beside him, the single word carrying the mild warning Nathan had learned to recognise without needing any further explanation.
"I'm moving," Nathan replied, although he continued looking at the train for another moment before turning.
"You stopped," Joseph observed as they joined the crowd moving toward the station interior.
"For perhaps four seconds."
"Six."
Nathan turned his head. "You counted?"
"No."
"Then you cannot possibly—" Nathan began, only to interrupt himself when a porter steering a loaded cart nearly caught his shoulder because he had turned sideways in the middle of the flow of passengers. Joseph said nothing after Nathan stepped quickly out of the way; he merely looked at him until Nathan sighed and faced forward again. "Fine. Your point has been made through hostile demonstration."
LaSalle Street was less monumental than Grand Central had been, but Nathan found that he preferred the difference almost immediately. Grand Central had invited people to look upward, to pause beneath its enormous spaces and admire the fact that human beings had built something grand enough to make travel itself feel ceremonial. Chicago seemed determined to keep them moving. The station possessed the purposeful disorder of a place through which enormous numbers of people passed because they had somewhere else to be, and Nathan let the crowd carry them toward the exit while his eyes wandered over ticket windows, signs, railway offices, porters and the constant movement of luggage.
Then the doors opened ahead of them, and Chicago struck properly.
The noise arrived first: streetcar bells, automobile horns, horses striking pavement, wagon wheels, voices and the deeper industrial murmur that seemed to exist beneath everything else. Buildings rose around them in walls of brick, stone and windows, some ornate enough to carry the confidence of an earlier generation while others possessed the blunt vertical ambition of structures built because the land beneath them had become too valuable to waste. Smoke softened the distance and gave the sunlight a pale dirty cast, while advertisements covered walls wherever architecture had left a large enough surface unclaimed.
Nathan stopped beneath the station frontage, and this time Joseph allowed him.
The pavement beyond them was alive with people moving in several directions at once. Office clerks in dark coats passed labourers wearing caps and work jackets, women navigated the crowd with handbags held close, and shop boys hurried between pedestrians carrying parcels. A Western Union messenger appeared between two motor cars, vanished behind a wagon and emerged on the opposite pavement without once seeming concerned that several tons of machinery had nearly disputed his route. Soldiers appeared too, though not in the concentrations Nathan had grown accustomed to around ports and camps, their uniforms simply another part of the crowd rather than the defining feature of it.
Horse-drawn vehicles had not surrendered the streets merely because motor cars existed. Both competed for the same space with a confidence suggesting each regarded the other as temporary, while streetcars occupied their tracks with greater authority than either, bells clanging whenever a pedestrian, wagon or motorist wandered too near.
Nathan's smile developed slowly as he watched it.
"No," Joseph said beside him, adjusting his grip on the luggage while following Nathan's attention toward a passing streetcar.
Nathan turned. "I haven't asked anything."
"You're going to," Joseph replied.
"I was admiring the city."
"You were looking at the streetcar tracks."
"Those things are not mutually exclusive," Nathan said, glancing once more toward the rails embedded in the road.
"Hotel," Joseph reminded him, moving the cases slightly as though their combined weight constituted a practical argument.
Nathan took one final look along the street before conceding with a small nod. "Hotel."
Flagging a motor car proved easier than Nathan had expected, largely because several drivers had positioned themselves near the station precisely for arriving passengers. One vehicle drew forward when Nathan raised a hand, its dark body carrying a thin layer of city dust, and the driver leaned across to open the passenger door before climbing down when he saw the luggage. He was a broad-faced man somewhere in his forties, his dark cap pulled low and his coat bearing the permanent creases of someone who spent most of his working life seated.
"Need a hand with those?" the driver asked, moving around the vehicle before properly taking in Joseph and the two cases hanging from his hands. His eyes travelled briefly from the luggage to Joseph's shoulders, and he stopped with one hand halfway toward the larger case. "Or maybe you don't."
"I've got them," Joseph replied, and the faint movement at the corner of his mouth suggested he appreciated the revision.
"I can see that," the driver answered, stepping aside and opening the rear door instead.
Nathan suppressed a smile as he approached. "We're looking for a hotel," he said, giving the name and address copied from the arrangements sent ahead.
"Know it," the man replied, closing the door after Nathan ducked into the cabin and shifted across the rear seat. As Joseph secured the luggage and climbed in beside him, the driver glanced through the mirror and seemed to reconsider the amount of space available in the back. "Big fellow."
Joseph looked forward without answering.
"We've been told," Nathan supplied, settling nearer the window while Joseph gave him a sidelong glance.
The driver laughed, started the engine and eased them away from the station.
The motor car vibrated differently from the vehicles Nathan knew in Britain, though whether that belonged to the machine itself or Chicago's roads he had not yet decided. The cabin smelled faintly of leather, petrol, old tobacco and cold air entering through a window that did not quite seal, while every uneven section of road travelled through the suspension and into the seat beneath them. Nathan placed his document case between his feet and turned almost immediately toward the side window, where Chicago transformed again.
The railway had shown him roofs, industrial yards and broad geometry; street level placed him inside the human machinery. They passed storefronts with awnings extending over the pavement, restaurants preparing for the day's trade, tobacconists, tailors, druggists and narrow shops whose windows competed for attention with painted advertisements several storeys above them. Men unloaded barrels from a wagon while its horses waited with the resigned patience of animals accustomed to cities, and a butcher stood in his doorway speaking to a policeman as though the two had been continuing the same argument every morning for years. A boy carrying newspapers darted between pedestrians with the fearless speed of someone convinced adults would always move aside.
A streetcar clanged beside the motor car, and Nathan turned to watch passengers standing close behind its windows, some already reading newspapers while others stared outward with the empty expression of people performing a journey too familiar to deserve attention. At the next intersection another car crossed ahead of them, forcing their driver to brake while a policeman in the centre of the road raised one gloved hand toward approaching traffic and waved a wagon through with the other.
"Busy," Joseph remarked, watching the wagon lumber across their path as a motorist behind it leaned on his horn to absolutely no effect.
"This?" the driver called back, catching Joseph's remark through the open partition and glancing at them in the mirror. "This isn't bad."
Nathan's eyebrows rose immediately. "What qualifies as bad?"
"You'll know it when you see it," the driver replied, laughing as he guided the motor car around a delivery wagon whose driver had stopped partly in the road and appeared completely indifferent to everyone inconvenienced by the decision. "Get caught downtown when everybody decides to go home at the same time and you'll start thinking walking was God's last sensible invention."
Nathan looked through the window at the mixture of automobiles, wagons, pedestrians and streetcars competing for the same few yards of street. "How long have you been driving here?"
"Driving? Four years," the man answered, checking the road before pulling around a slower vehicle. "Chicago? Whole life."
That interested Nathan considerably more than the traffic. He settled one arm along the edge of the seat and leaned forward slightly. "Then perhaps you can answer something better than a guidebook can. What's life actually like here?"
The driver gave a short laugh, the reaction of a man who had expected directions and received a question far larger than the distance remaining to their hotel. "In Chicago?"
"In Chicago," Nathan confirmed.
The driver considered it while turning them onto a broader street. "Fast," he decided after several seconds. "Mostly fast."
"That's the first thing?" Nathan asked.
"You asked what it's like, not what the mayor says it's like," the driver replied. "Everybody's going somewhere, everybody's building something, and everybody thinks the fellow in front of him is moving too slow."
"That seems accurate," Joseph said, looking through the window as a man carrying two parcels pushed past another pedestrian and nearly lost both.
"You've been here ten minutes," the driver answered.
"It was a productive ten minutes," Joseph replied, and the driver's laugh filled the front of the cabin.
"English?" he asked, looking at Joseph through the mirror.
"Yes," Joseph said.
"Both of you?"
"Both," Nathan confirmed.
"Figured. Don't get too many Englishmen asking what Chicago's like before they ask where to get a drink."
"Give us time," Nathan replied, and when Joseph turned his head toward him Nathan deliberately ignored the look.
"Depends where you are anyway," the driver continued, warming to the subject now that he understood Nathan genuinely wanted an answer. "That's Chicago. You can drive twenty minutes and think you've gone to another country. Poles, Irish, Germans, Italians, Swedes, Bohemians, Jews, Negro families coming up from the South; everybody's got a part of town where somebody knows somebody from home, and then everybody goes downtown and gets in everybody else's way."
Nathan watched a group of workers pass on the pavement, catching fragments of a language he did not recognise before the motor car carried them beyond it. "And people get along?"
The driver made a thoughtful noise, drumming two fingers against the steering wheel. "Sometimes," he answered after considering the question, and when Joseph glanced toward the mirror the man smiled slightly. "You asked."
"I prefer the answer to the advertisement," Nathan said.
"Then sometimes," the driver repeated. "Sometimes they work beside each other all day and argue at night. Sometimes they marry each other's daughters and everybody gets over it eventually. Sometimes they don't. City gets bigger faster than people get used to each other."
Nathan liked the phrasing enough that he repeated it quietly while looking out at another block. "Bigger faster than people get used to each other."
"That's about right," the driver said.
Nathan watched office windows rising storey after storey, each containing desks, papers and people whose individual lives became almost impossible to distinguish from below. "What do people do when they're not working?"
"Complain about work," the driver replied immediately, and Joseph's mouth twitched while Nathan leaned back laughing.
"Naturally."
"Baseball when there's baseball, taverns, music, pictures, church if that's your thing, dance halls, parks when the weather's decent, lake if you've got time," the driver continued. "People visit family, sit on stoops, argue with neighbours. Same things people do anywhere, I suppose, except Chicago likes doing everything louder."
"That I believe," Joseph observed as a streetcar bell rang repeatedly beside them, loud enough to punctuate the sentence.
"See?" the driver said, pointing through the windscreen without taking his other hand from the wheel. "City agrees with you."
Once the driver understood that Nathan was genuinely interested rather than filling an awkward journey with polite questions, his answers acquired the complaints and contradictions that made them useful. Rent had risen, food cost more than it used to, war work meant good money for some people and exhaustion for others, factories needed men, railroads needed men, the stockyards always seemed to need men, and nearly everybody knew someone who had gone into uniform or was waiting to learn whether he would. Some neighbourhoods changed almost month by month as new families arrived, while other streets seemed capable of remaining exactly the same despite the city growing around them.
"You work every day?" Nathan asked after the driver mentioned the hours he kept.
"Most," the man answered.
"How long?"
The driver looked at him suspiciously through the glass. "You a government inspector?"
"Physician," Nathan replied with a smile.
"That's worse," the driver said, and Joseph made a quiet sound beside Nathan that might have been agreement.
"You are supposed to be on my side," Nathan reminded him, turning toward Joseph with an expression of mild betrayal.
"I am," Joseph replied, though his tone did nothing to support the claim.
The driver laughed and tapped one hand against the wheel. "Depends on the day. Long enough my wife complains, not long enough the bills stop coming."
"Children?" Nathan asked, his expression warming when the man nodded.
"Three. Fourteen, eleven and seven; boy, girl, boy. Oldest thinks he's twenty-five, youngest thinks he's indestructible, and my daughter thinks she's the only intelligent person in the house."
"Which one is correct?" Joseph asked, leaning forward slightly, and the driver considered the question with exaggerated seriousness.
"My daughter," he decided, prompting Nathan to laugh openly.
"Don't tell my wife I said it," the driver added, glancing back through the mirror.
"I don't know your wife," Nathan assured him.
"Then we're safe."
They stopped behind a streetcar taking passengers at an intersection, and Nathan used the pause to look more carefully at the pavement. A woman emerged from a grocer carrying a paper-wrapped parcel against her chest, while two boys had begun some private contest involving a lamppost and were being watched by a younger girl who seemed unimpressed by both competitors. Near the corner a man with one trouser leg pinned beneath the knee moved steadily through the crowd on crutches, and people opened space for him without staring.
Nathan's amusement softened as his eyes followed the man.
Reminders of the war were everywhere once one knew how to see them, and not only in uniforms. They appeared in absences, injuries, flags hanging in windows, collection posters, newspaper headlines and jobs now being performed by people who might not have held them four years earlier. Britain had taught Nathan that war did not remain politely at the front. It entered kitchens through shortages, factories through contracts, hospitals through amputees, houses through telegrams and railway stations through goodbyes. Chicago was thousands of miles from the guns, but distance had not made it separate from them.
"You said you're a physician?" the driver asked as traffic began moving again, bringing Nathan's attention forward.
"Among other things," Nathan replied, and Joseph turned his head toward him before the driver could.
"Among other things?" the driver repeated.
"Research," Nathan clarified with a faint smile.
"That sounds expensive."
"It generally is."
"You're in the right country, then. Everything's expensive."
Joseph looked through the window so the driver would not see him smile, while Nathan settled farther back into the seat. "We're here to look at some hospital reports."
The driver's hands shifted slightly on the wheel. "Sickness?"
"Possibly," Nathan replied, careful not to give the word more weight than the evidence justified. "Respiratory cases. Fever, pneumonia, illnesses that may be entirely ordinary but have appeared often enough to justify looking at them."
"Been hearing about people sick," the driver said after a moment, though his tone suggested nothing about it had yet seemed extraordinary. "Nothing I'd call strange. This time of year somebody's always coughing."
"Anyone you know?" Nathan asked, his attention sharpening without allowing the question to sound urgent.
"My wife's sister had something a few weeks ago," the driver replied after thinking. "Fever, cough, felt like she'd been hit by a wagon for three days. Better now."
"Did a physician see her?"
"No. Couldn't get her to one if you paid her. Says doctors charge you money to tell you you're sick."
"There are days I find that criticism difficult to refute," Nathan admitted, allowing the driver to laugh before asking whether anyone else had been ill.
"Fellow drives over by the Palmer House was off a few days. Don't know what he had, and there's always a couple men missing work somewhere," the driver replied, then glanced at Nathan through the mirror with slightly greater interest. "Why, you expecting something?"
"No, and that's exactly what I'm trying not to do," Nathan said, shaking his head before concern could settle in the man's expression. "If I arrive expecting a particular disease, every fever begins looking like evidence. I'd rather see the patients first and let them tell me what I'm looking at."
The driver considered that, then nodded once. "Makes sense."
Joseph did not say anything, but Nathan caught the small approving movement of his head before turning back toward the window.
Chicago continued around them. A motor truck coughed black exhaust into the street as it pulled away from the kerb, earning an insult from the driver of a horse-drawn wagon behind it that Nathan could not hear but understood perfectly well from the man's expression.
"Does the smoke ever clear?" Nathan asked, looking upward between the buildings.
"Wind gets strong enough," the driver replied.
"So no."
"Pretty much."
"You can taste it," Joseph observed.
"You get used to that," the driver said.
"That is not medically reassuring," Nathan replied.
"Didn't say it was healthy. Said you get used to it."
Nathan considered the distinction before nodding. "Fair."
The wealth of the city changed noticeably as they travelled. Ornate façades and well-dressed pedestrians gave way within a few streets to narrower storefronts and buildings crowded more closely together, then opened again into a district where motor cars waited outside offices and hotel entrances beneath uniformed doormen. Nathan watched the transitions with enough interest that the driver eventually noticed his repeated movement between the windows.
"You like cities?" the man asked.
"I like systems," Nathan replied, and Joseph slowly turned his head toward him.
"Don't," Nathan warned before Joseph could say anything.
The driver glanced into the mirror. "Systems?"
"Cities are systems," Nathan explained, resting one hand over the document case between his feet. "Water, sewage, food, railways, roads, electricity, telephones, hospitals, people; millions of individual decisions somehow producing something that functions often enough for everyone to pretend it was planned."
The driver barked a laugh. "You haven't been here long enough."
"I said often enough."
"Give him a day and he'll start asking how the sewers work," Joseph said, looking out the window as though the prediction required no further defence.
Nathan adopted an offended expression. "I was going to wait until tomorrow."
The driver laughed hard enough that he wiped one eye with the back of his glove at the next stop. "You two brothers?"
"No," Joseph answered with such immediate certainty that Nathan turned toward him.
"You sounded alarmed."
"I'm employed," Joseph replied, straightening one cuff.
"Ah. Much worse."
The driver grinned at them through the mirror. "How long you been working for him?"
"Long enough," Joseph answered after considering the safest possible response.
Nathan sighed. "Everyone has become very comfortable insulting me since we arrived in America."
"You make it easy," Joseph replied, and when Nathan reminded him that it was a terrible thing to say to the man paying him, Joseph merely observed that Nathan was still paying him, which left the driver laughing again.
By then the formality that had existed when they first entered the motor car had largely disappeared. The driver eventually introduced himself as Frank Donnelly, and Nathan gave both their names in return without mentioning the Institute, after which the conversation wandered through Chicago weather, the lake, which streets became intolerable in rain and why no sane visitor should attempt to understand local politics from the first person willing to explain them. Nathan asked what the lake looked like in winter and received a description involving wind vicious enough to cut through three coats, while Joseph asked where a man could find a decent meal after midnight and received three answers, one of which Frank immediately withdrew after remembering an incident involving his brother-in-law.
"What happened to your brother-in-law?" Nathan asked, leaning forward with immediate interest when Frank refused to elaborate.
"Nothing worth repeating," Frank replied, shaking his head firmly.
"That makes me considerably more interested."
"Exactly why I'm not repeating it."
"Smart man," Joseph said approvingly, and Nathan looked between the two of them with exaggerated suspicion.
"This conspiracy is becoming international," Nathan complained, which kept Frank smiling until he finally slowed the motor car before their hotel.
Nathan had been so occupied with the conversation that he initially failed to notice they had arrived. The building rose several storeys above the street, respectable without being ostentatious, its entrance sheltered by an awning beneath which a uniformed doorman was helping an older couple into another motor car. Large windows looked into the lobby, where electric light reflected warmly from polished surfaces despite the morning brightness outside.
"Here you are, gentlemen," Frank said as he drew up at the kerb and set the brake.
"Already?" Nathan asked, looking from the hotel to the driver as though Frank had personally shortened the journey.
"Been driving nearly half an hour."
Nathan checked his watch and discovered that he was right. "Well, that's disappointing."
Frank turned partly in his seat. "Hotel not good enough?"
"The conversation ended," Nathan explained, and the driver's expression softened into a grin.
"You'll survive."
"Everyone keeps telling me that."
"Usually for a reason," Joseph said as he opened the door and stepped onto the pavement.
Nathan followed, immediately receiving the full noise of Chicago again as the enclosed cabin released him into bells, engines, wheels and voices. He buttoned his coat against the cooler air while Joseph retrieved the luggage, and when Nathan paid the fare he added enough that Frank looked down at the money and then back up at him.
"You don't have to do that," Frank said, holding out part of the amount.
"I asked you considerably more questions than the fare ordinarily includes," Nathan replied, closing the man's fingers back around it.
"Thought doctors were supposed to ask questions."
"Yes, but usually people are allowed to complain about it afterward."
Frank laughed and tucked the money away. "Well, Professor—" he began, only for Nathan to pause because he had never given the title. Frank caught the reaction immediately and grinned. "Your friend called you Professor twice."
Nathan turned slowly toward Joseph, who had become extraordinarily interested in checking the luggage. "Traitor," Nathan murmured, receiving no apology whatsoever.
"Enjoy Chicago," Frank said as he reached for the gear lever, then hesitated. "And if you're looking into that sickness, I hope you find nothing worth worrying about."
Nathan's amusement softened. "So do I," he answered, and the sincerity of it made Frank nod once before easing the motor car away from the kerb.
Nathan watched until a streetcar passed between them and erased the vehicle from sight. "Interesting man," he said as Joseph lifted both cases.
"You interrogated him for half an hour," Joseph replied, beginning toward the hotel doors.
"I conversed with him."
"You asked about his work, wife, children, neighbourhood, traffic, restaurants, weather, pollution and sick relatives."
"And he appeared to enjoy himself," Nathan pointed out, picking up his document case and following.
"He did."
"Then it was conversation."
"That's a generous definition," Joseph replied as they entered the lobby.
The noise of the street fell behind them and became a muted presence through the glass. Thick rugs softened footsteps over polished flooring, brass fixtures shone beneath electric lights and several leather chairs had been arranged near tall windows for guests who wanted to watch Chicago without being required to participate in it. A clerk stood behind the reception desk speaking to a travelling salesman whose sample cases occupied enough floor space to constitute a minor territorial claim, while a bellboy emerged from an adjoining corridor and immediately approached Joseph.
"Can I take those for you, sir?" the young man asked, reaching instinctively toward the larger case before properly registering Joseph and slowing his hand. "Or one of them."
Joseph looked at the case, then at the bellboy. "I've got them."
"Please do," Nathan interrupted, gesturing toward the smaller case before Joseph could deprive the young man of his occupation. "He needs to learn that allowing other people to carry things is one of civilisation's achievements."
Joseph considered him, then surrendered the smaller case.
"Remarkable progress," Nathan said approvingly.
"Don't start," Joseph replied, and the bellboy smiled uncertainly as he led them toward the desk.
Nathan gave the clerk his name, and the man's expression shifted almost imperceptibly as he checked the register. "Drake," he repeated, running one finger down the page until he found the reservation. "Yes, sir. Two rooms, close together as requested."
"That should be us," Nathan said, resting one hand against the counter while Joseph stood beside him.
"We have them prepared," the clerk replied, turning the register toward Nathan. "How long will you gentlemen be staying?"
Nathan and Joseph looked at one another.
"As long as required," Joseph answered, and Nathan slowly turned his head toward him while the clerk glanced between them.
"Several days, most likely," Nathan translated with a sigh, picking up the pen. "Perhaps less, perhaps a little more. Our plans depend upon work."
"Of course, sir," the clerk replied, waiting while Nathan signed.
The pen scratched across the paper while the lobby continued around them, luggage moving across the floor and a telephone ringing somewhere behind the desk. Joseph signed after Nathan, and the clerk collected the keys before handing them to the bellboy. "Fourth floor. If you require meals sent up, telephone the desk. Dining room is through there, breakfast from seven, and we can arrange a motor car whenever you need one."
"That last part will be useful," Nathan said, and Joseph heard the subtle shift in his voice immediately. The curiosity of arrival had not vanished, but the physician and Institute director were already reasserting themselves beneath it.
The bellboy led them toward the lift, though Nathan slowed after several steps beside one of the tall lobby windows. Chicago moved beyond the glass exactly as it had from the motor car: streetcars clanging through intersections, automobiles nosing between wagons, men and women passing beneath the hotel awning without any knowledge of the two strangers who had crossed an ocean partly because of reports most of the city had probably never seen.
"Different from London," Nathan said quietly as Joseph stopped beside him.
"Very," Joseph replied.
"I like it."
"You've been here half an hour."
"Long enough," Nathan answered with a faint smile, and Joseph's eyes narrowed as he recognised his own phrase being returned to him.
Nathan's smile widened as he turned toward the waiting lift. "Come along. We'll put the luggage upstairs, find out which hospital received the newest cases, and then I can begin discovering whether the reports deserve all the paper we've spent on them."
Their accommodations occupied the same corridor on the fourth floor, separated by little more than a stretch of patterned carpet and two brass room numbers, an arrangement Nathan suspected had been made deliberately after whoever handled the reservation had been told that Joseph travelled as his security. The bellboy unlocked Nathan's room first and pushed the door inward, revealing an accommodation considerably larger than Nathan had expected to occupy for what might prove no more than a few nights.
"Very nice," Nathan murmured as he crossed the threshold, removing his hat and letting his eyes travel around the room while the bellboy carried the smaller case inside. A broad bed occupied one wall beneath a carved wooden headboard, its linen turned with hotel precision beneath a heavy coverlet, while a writing desk stood near the window with stationery, blotting paper and a small electric lamp arranged as though every guest arrived carrying urgent correspondence. A wardrobe and washstand occupied the opposite side, an upholstered chair sat beside a smaller table, and through a half-open interior door Nathan could see the tiled edge of the bathroom. "Considerably more space than I require, which usually means I'll cover most of it in paper before tomorrow."
The bellboy smiled politely, uncertain whether Nathan was joking, while Joseph entered behind him carrying the heavier case as though it contained little more than a spare shirt. "Mrs Hargreaves said you were supposed to sleep," Joseph reminded him as he placed the case beside the wardrobe, then deliberately looked from the writing desk to the bed. "That one is for writing and that one is for sleeping. Try not to confuse them."
"You've become remarkably authoritative since yesterday," Nathan replied, setting his hat upon the small table.
"I've always been authoritative," Joseph said.
"You were quieter about it."
"I had the helmet."
Nathan considered the explanation with unexpected seriousness before inclining his head. "Fair."
The bellboy received a tip that brightened his expression considerably and departed with Joseph to unlock the room opposite, leaving Nathan alone for the first time since the train. The sudden privacy felt strange after days of ship corridors, railway carriages, dining rooms and shared conversations. Somewhere beyond the wall a tap ran briefly before being shut off, footsteps crossed the corridor and another door closed, while four floors below came the softened sounds of Chicago penetrating glass and brick.
Nathan crossed to the window and looked down, finding the intersection transformed by height into a moving arrangement of hats, vehicles and horses. Pedestrians collected at corners until an opening appeared, then crossed in groups while automobiles edged impatiently forward. A streetcar stopped almost directly below the hotel, discharged a dozen passengers and swallowed nearly as many before continuing. Somewhere beyond the roofs lay the lake, invisible from this angle, while farther south and west the city extended into districts Nathan presently knew only through maps, addresses and reports. Chicago had ceased being a destination and become the thing immediately outside his window, close enough now that Nathan could distinguish individual people rather than dots upon a map.
He allowed himself perhaps half a minute before turning toward his luggage.
Unpacking was accomplished with considerably less reverence than Mrs Hargreaves would have approved. Shirts entered drawers, spare trousers and jackets went into the wardrobe, shaving equipment and toiletries migrated toward the washstand, while the things Nathan actually cared about arranging properly—the medical instruments, notebooks, document folders and several sealed containers—occupied the writing desk. Papers claimed more space than clothing within minutes, exactly as he had predicted to the bellboy, although Nathan resisted the temptation to reopen the Chicago files. He had crossed an ocean to see patients rather than spend another afternoon reading descriptions of them.
After washing his hands and face, he changed his shirt because the one worn through the latter part of the railway journey smelled faintly of coal smoke and dining-car tobacco, then stood before the mirror fastening his collar. The man reflected there appeared appropriately tired after the journey, with fine lines around his eyes, subtle grey among his hair and the small changes in texture Nathan had allowed to accumulate across his face and hands over the years. Nothing about him would have suggested to Mrs Hargreaves or anyone else that those changes were anything except age taking its ordinary course. Nathan knew each of them for what they were, but there was no vanity in the knowledge as he adjusted the collar and moved on; the face belonged to Professor Nathan Drake as convincingly as any other part of him, and people who had known him for years saw precisely the gradual passage of time they expected to see.
He took his hat from the table, collected the leather medical case containing his credentials, notebooks and instruments, and opened the door just as Joseph emerged from the room opposite.
Joseph had unpacked with considerably greater efficiency. His suit remained immaculate enough that Nathan suspected he had changed the shirt beneath it, while his hat rested in one hand and his jacket sat properly across shoulders that continued making civilian tailoring look like a temporary compromise. There was no visible weapon, although Nathan knew better than to interpret absence of evidence as evidence that Joseph Taylor had voluntarily wandered into an unfamiliar American city unarmed.
"That was quick," Nathan said as he pulled his door closed, tested the handle and slipped the key into his pocket.
"I unpacked," Joseph replied, locking his own door.
"So did I."
"You put papers on every available surface," Joseph said, and Nathan looked toward his closed door as though Joseph had somehow seen through it.
"Not every available surface."
"The bed?"
"Still perfectly clear," Nathan answered as they started toward the lift.
"For now," Joseph said, putting on his hat.
Nathan pressed the call button, then looked Joseph over once, taking in the civilian suit, polished shoes and the slightly greater care than usual with which the tie had been arranged. Joseph noticed the inspection and became suspicious before Nathan said anything.
"You're not coming into the hospital with me after all," Nathan said, and when Joseph's eyebrows rose he continued before the question could form. "At least not beyond delivering me to the door. I have doctors, nurses, records and more patients than I can reasonably examine in one afternoon. You have somewhere else to be."
Joseph's expression remained carefully blank. "Do I?"
"You asked a woman on the train—"
"I didn't ask her."
"Quite right," Nathan corrected, enjoying himself more with each second. "She asked you, which is substantially better. Helen told you where she teaches, named a particular bar near Lake View and suggested that if your employer released you for an hour you might find it worth visiting. Your employer, in an unprecedented display of compassion, is releasing you for considerably longer than an hour."
Joseph stared at him while machinery stirred behind the wall. "You remembered the name of the bar."
Nathan looked offended by the implication that he might not have. "Bell and Crown."
"You were reading."
"I can read and listen simultaneously."
"You weren't part of the conversation."
"You brought her to my compartment," Nathan reminded him, and when Joseph's expression tightened Nathan's smile softened enough to remove the worst of the teasing. "Go and see her, Joseph."
Joseph looked toward the lift indicator rather than Nathan. "We came here to work."
"I came to this particular hospital to work," Nathan corrected, resting one hand on the medical case. "You came because you are travelling with me, because you insist upon keeping me alive and because I would prefer not to cross half a continent alone. None of those things require you to spend every hour standing six feet from my shoulder."
Joseph gave him a sideways look. "You usually manage to create that requirement."
"Today I shall attempt extraordinary restraint."
The lift arrived, its attendant opening the gate before Joseph could answer, and the two men stepped inside. Nathan waited until the gate had closed and the car begun descending before he continued, his voice quieter now and without the grin that had accompanied the earlier teasing. "She gave you the name because she wanted you to use it. You enjoyed speaking with her. I have an entire hospital full of people to occupy me, and if something genuinely goes wrong I am perfectly capable of surviving long enough to send for you."
Joseph leaned one shoulder lightly against the wall. "You're assuming she'll be there."
"I'm assuming you're curious enough to find out," Nathan replied. "If she isn't, you will have lost an afternoon walking through Chicago and drinking something in a bar. I have subjected you to worse."
Joseph considered that and finally exhaled through his nose. "You are going to be unbearable about this."
"Only if it goes well."
"And if it doesn't?"
Nathan's amusement faded into something warmer. "Then I won't mention it unless you do."
That answer caught Joseph sufficiently off guard that he looked at him properly, but Nathan merely adjusted his grip on the case.
"Before nightfall," Joseph said after a moment, settling the matter on his own terms. "I'll be back before nightfall."
"Good," Nathan replied as the lift slowed. "Because if you remain out until dawn, Mrs Hargreaves will somehow discover it from New York and blame me."
Joseph's mouth twitched. "She'd be right."
The attendant looked resolutely forward while Nathan muttered something about a complete collapse of professional loyalty.
By the time they entered the lobby Nathan had resumed the outward ease of an ordinary visiting physician. Morning traffic continued passing beyond the tall windows, and the hotel had grown busier since their arrival. Several travellers clustered around luggage while a businessman dictated something into a telephone near the desk, and a woman with two children was trying to convince the younger that crawling beneath a lobby table was neither entertaining nor acceptable. Nathan approached the desk long enough to leave his key and ask about the hospital, tipping his hat toward the woman seated there when she looked up from her ledger.
"Good morning," Nathan said, resting one hand lightly against the counter as he gave the hospital name. "Would you happen to know whether a driver outside is likely to know it, or should I give him the street?"
"Oh, he'll know it, sir," she replied, returning his smile before glancing briefly toward Joseph. "Most of them will. If there isn't a car waiting, the doorman can find you one."
"Perfect. Thank you."
"You're welcome, Doctor," she said, and Nathan paused just enough for her smile to broaden. "It's on your registration."
"Ah," Nathan replied, tipping his hat again as he stepped away. "For a moment I was worried I had become obvious."
"You carry a medical case," Joseph pointed out as he fell into step beside him.
Nathan glanced down at it. "That may contribute. I preferred the mystery."
They emerged beneath the awning into a Chicago morning that had grown louder during the short time they had spent upstairs. Streetcars moved in both directions and the pavements had filled with office workers, shoppers, messengers and labourers, while a delivery wagon stood near the corner as two men unloaded wooden crates from the back and its horse waited patiently amid bells and motor exhaust. Somewhere across the street a newsboy was shouting loudly enough that Nathan caught fragments about France, Washington and baseball before the doorman raised one hand toward an approaching motor car and gave a sharp whistle.
Nathan waited until the vehicle had stopped before reaching for the rear door, while Joseph inspected the cabin with the habitual attention that had long ago ceased to surprise him. "You know, at some point during this journey I would like to enter a motor car without you looking at it as though somebody might have hidden an artillery piece beneath the seat," Nathan said as Joseph opened the door fully.
"At some point during this journey you might stop giving people reasons to want you dead," Joseph replied, checking the driver and front compartment before allowing Nathan to enter.
Nathan considered that while climbing inside. "That seems less likely."
"I know," Joseph said, joining him.
Nathan gave the hospital address to the driver, and the motor car pulled away from the hotel and rejoined Chicago traffic. The journey was shorter than the earlier ride from LaSalle Street but considerably more useful now that Nathan had a specific destination against which to orient himself. He watched street signs whenever they passed intersections, mentally joining them to the maps studied aboard the train, while Joseph spent more time looking at people than buildings. Men queued outside factory entrances, women carrying baskets moved between shops, and a physician's brass plate flashed briefly beside the door of a narrow building before vanishing behind them.
Their driver was less talkative than Frank, a thin man with a narrow moustache who answered Nathan's occasional questions politely but showed no inclination to volunteer his life story. Nathan respected that enough not to extract one from him. Instead he sat mostly in silence and began seeing Chicago differently now that the hospital drew closer. Pharmacies appeared where he had previously seen only shops, physicians' offices emerged from rows of anonymous doors, and crowded lodging houses suggested routes by which illness might move unnoticed. Streetcars and railway lines ceased being merely interesting machinery and became arteries through which people carried whatever they possessed inside them.
Joseph noticed the change in his attention. "You're doing it again," he said, looking from Nathan to the street.
Nathan glanced toward him. "Looking?"
"Turning the city into a diagram."
Nathan considered denying it, then watched a streetcar discharge passengers onto a crowded corner. "Only temporarily."
The hospital appeared several minutes later, substantial without possessing the monumental character of some London institutions. Its main entrance stood above broad steps worn slightly at the centre from years of shoes, several windows had been opened despite the coolness, and people moved through the doors with the uneven urgency peculiar to hospitals: some quickly because something was wrong, others slowly because they had been waiting long enough for urgency to exhaust itself.
The motor car stopped beside the kerb, and Nathan paid the driver before stepping down with his medical case. Joseph shifted as though preparing to follow, but Nathan turned and kept one hand against the open door.
"I expect you back before nightfall," Nathan said, leaning slightly toward the cabin. His expression was composed, though Joseph knew him well enough to hear the instruction beneath the humour. "And before you accuse me of hypocrisy, yes, I know I have just encouraged you to go. I am merely specifying that this generosity has limits."
"I said I'd be back before nightfall," Joseph replied, settling into the seat again.
"Good. Then I won't have to explain to Mrs Hargreaves that I lost you in Chicago within three hours of arrival."
Joseph looked at him. "You wouldn't explain anything. You'd write four lines and hope she didn't notice."
Nathan winced. "She told you about the letters."
"She told everyone."
"Of course she did."
Joseph's expression relaxed slightly, and he glanced past Nathan toward the hospital doors. "And I expect you to still be here when I return, rather than halfway across Chicago following a patient nobody else thought important."
"I have considerably more discipline than that," Nathan replied, drawing himself up with enough dignity that Joseph simply looked at him. Nathan maintained the expression for several seconds before conceding. "Fine. If I move, I will leave word at the hotel."
"And eat," Joseph added, resting one arm along the seat.
"I had breakfast."
"That wasn't the instruction."
"Mrs Hargreaves is hundreds of miles away and somehow I am still being supervised," Nathan complained, though the movement at the corner of his mouth betrayed him.
"She's efficient."
"Before nightfall, Joseph," Nathan repeated, stepping back from the door.
"Before nightfall," Joseph confirmed, then looked toward the driver before returning his attention to Nathan. "And Professor, since you're apparently giving me the afternoon off to follow a woman across Chicago, try not to discover a new disease and forget that food exists while I'm gone."
Nathan stared at him for a moment. "I make no promises concerning the first half, and I resent the implication contained in the second."
"I know."
Nathan started to close the door, then stopped and looked back at him, the teasing briefly absent. "Enjoy yourself, Joseph."
Joseph's expression softened almost imperceptibly. "I'll try."
Nathan nodded once and closed the door.
The motor car remained beside the kerb while Joseph leaned forward and gave the driver a new destination. Nathan could not hear every word through the glass and street noise, but he caught Lake View and then Bell and Crown, which was enough to produce a small, satisfied smile. Joseph noticed it through the window and gave him a look that promised future retaliation before the driver pulled away.
Nathan watched the motor car merge into traffic until a streetcar passed between them and hid it from sight. Somewhere in that direction was a schoolteacher with brown eyes, a sharp sense of humour and enough confidence to invite a nearly silent English veteran to find her in Chicago. Whether she would actually be at the Bell and Crown when Joseph arrived was no concern of Nathan's, he told himself, which was such an obvious lie that he dismissed it before finishing the thought, adjusted his hat and turned toward the hospital.
The smell met him almost immediately upon entering, familiar enough that for an instant Chicago might have been London, France or any of a dozen other places in which Nathan had crossed a threshold and found sickness waiting on the other side. Hospitals differed in architecture, wealth and practice, but they possessed certain common qualities that Nathan had learned to recognise before seeing a single patient. Soap and disinfectant sat nearest the surface, sharp enough to suggest determined cleaning, while beneath them lingered boiled linen, damp wool from visitors' coats, medicines, food from some distant kitchen and the less definable human smell produced when too many frightened or unwell people spent too long beneath the same roof. The entrance hall carried a low mixture of voices, footsteps and intermittent coughing, while nurses crossed between corridors at the efficient pace of people who had learned that running everywhere frightened patients without making the work any easier.
Nathan removed his hat and approached the reception desk, where a woman looked up from a ledger as he opened his leather case far enough to remove a folded packet of credentials.
"Good morning. Professor Nathan Drake," he introduced himself, placing the papers carefully upon the desk rather than thrusting them toward her. "I've come from Britain regarding the recent respiratory admissions. Your administration should have received a telegram concerning my visit."
"Professor Drake," the woman repeated, and recognition reached her expression before she had finished opening the documents. She stood slightly straighter as she examined them, then looked back toward him. "Yes, sir. We were telegraphed before your arrival, yesterday afternoon, I believe. They said you might come today, although we weren't given an exact hour."
"That would be because I didn't possess one," Nathan replied with a small smile, resting his hat against his side. "The railway insisted upon controlling that portion of the experiment."
The woman smiled despite herself, checked the final page and returned the credentials. "One moment, please. I'll have someone from medical meet you."
"Thank you," Nathan said, moving aside rather than occupying the desk while she sent word.
Waiting gave him time to observe, though he resisted the temptation to turn every cough into evidence. A man sat hunched on a bench with one arm wrapped around his abdomen while a woman beside him held his hat and spoke quietly into his ear. Near the opposite wall an older woman coughed into a handkerchief and immediately apologised to nobody in particular, as though illness itself constituted poor manners. A young nurse carried a tray through a set of swinging doors, and somewhere farther inside a child began crying before a woman's voice soothed him. None of it told Nathan anything yet, and he reminded himself that this was important. He had not crossed an ocean to confirm an answer already chosen. France had given him observations, Kansas had given him questions, and Chicago had given him reports suggestive enough to justify the journey, but resemblance was not identity merely because he wanted the pieces to fit.
Several minutes later a physician appeared through the swinging doors accompanied by a senior nurse whose expression suggested she had already been working longer than Nathan had been awake. The physician was perhaps in his early forties, his spectacles sitting slightly crooked across his nose and his sleeves hidden beneath a white coat that had acquired several small creases during the morning.
"Professor Drake?" he asked, offering his hand as he approached. "Doctor Whitaker. We received the telegram from New York and another from your people in Britain. I confess we weren't entirely certain you'd actually arrive this quickly."
"Neither was I until the train stopped," Nathan replied, shaking his hand.
"Long journey?"
"Long enough to develop strong opinions about railway coffee," Nathan said, and the nurse beside Whitaker gave him a brief assessing glance.
"Then you've had the good kind," she remarked, her expression remaining perfectly serious.
Nathan looked at her for half a second before amusement reached his face.
"Sister Donnelly has been awake since before dawn," Whitaker explained with the resignation of a man who had long since abandoned any effort to moderate her.
"Which is why I no longer waste time pretending it's good," Donnelly replied, turning toward the corridor before looking back at Nathan. "You wanted the new respiratory admissions?"
"Please," Nathan answered, immediately liking her.
Whitaker led them through the swinging doors, and Nathan fell into step beside him while Donnelly walked on the other side. The hospital beyond the entrance was busier than the lobby suggested. Nurses moved between wards carrying basins, linens and charts, an orderly pushed an empty wheeled chair past them, and somewhere behind a closed door a man objected loudly to something before another voice instructed him to lie down.
"We've had a number of cases," Whitaker explained as they walked. "Nothing I'd ordinarily call extraordinary in isolation: fever, cough, weakness, several pneumonias. What drew attention was the clustering and the speed in a few of the younger patients."
"How many admitted since yesterday morning?" Nathan asked, matching his pace while his eyes moved over doors, ward signs and every nurse who passed.
"Seventeen with broadly respiratory complaints. Nine I'd consider potentially related, while four I'm reasonably confident are ordinary pneumonia or complications of existing illness."
"You separated those judgments before receiving word I was coming?" Nathan asked.
"Yes."
"Good," Nathan replied, and Whitaker seemed mildly surprised by the approval.
"I assumed you'd want all of them."
"I do, but I also want to know what you thought before a visiting Englishman arrived and contaminated everybody's judgment," Nathan explained as they turned into another corridor.
Donnelly looked toward him with greater interest, while Whitaker smiled. "You've had trouble with that before?"
"I run a research institute," Nathan replied. "I've had trouble with everything before."
They passed a ward in which several beds were occupied by men old enough that Nathan doubted they represented the group he most wanted to examine first. One coughed heavily beneath blankets while a nurse adjusted the window above him, and Nathan slowed just enough to observe the man's colour and the effort of his breathing before continuing.
"Any deaths among the newest admissions?" Nathan asked, keeping his voice low enough not to carry through the open ward.
"Not among the newest group," Whitaker replied.
"Severe cases?"
"Two."
"Children?"
Whitaker hesitated before answering, and Nathan noticed it. "Three younger admissions. One boy this morning, another yesterday afternoon and one girl overnight. The boy's early."
"How early?"
"His mother says he complained of being cold after breakfast, fever by midmorning and a cough beginning around noon," Whitaker explained. "She brought him in quickly because his younger brother died of pneumonia two winters ago and she wasn't willing to wait."
Nathan's attention sharpened. "That is exactly the sort of patient I crossed the Atlantic to see."
"The boy?" Whitaker asked, his eyebrows rising slightly.
"The timing," Nathan clarified as they reached the newer admissions ward.
His first impression upon entering was not catastrophe, and Nathan was relieved by that. Beds stood in orderly rows with enough space between them for nurses to work, some occupied by patients who looked merely miserable while others possessed the unmistakable stillness of people too ill to waste energy moving. Windows admitted daylight diluted by Chicago smoke, and the air carried disinfectant, perspiration and the warm stale quality produced by fever. Somewhere near the far end a man coughed repeatedly into a cloth while a nurse held a cup of water ready for him, and another patient slept with one hand hanging loosely over the edge of the mattress.
Nathan stopped just inside long enough to listen, not merely to the volume of coughing but to its character and to the breathing between episodes. Years spent around wards, laboratories and disease had taught him that coughs differed as much as voices did, and the sounds of an inflamed throat, a congested chest and a man struggling to draw enough air were not interchangeable merely because a report might place all three beneath the same heading.
"Before we begin, what exactly are you hoping to find?" Whitaker asked quietly beside him, following Nathan's attention across the beds.
"The truth would be convenient," Nathan replied, and Donnelly's mouth moved faintly.
"Anything more specific?" Whitaker asked, too tired to be diverted by the answer.
Nathan turned toward him. "I have reports from France describing respiratory illness with several features I don't like, material from Kansas that may or may not belong to the same picture, and reports from Chicago detailed enough to make comparison worthwhile. I am not here to declare that you have the same illness simply because several words repeat themselves on paper. I want to discover whether the resemblance survives contact with actual patients."
"And if it does?"
"Then I ask harder questions," Nathan replied, and Whitaker considered the answer before nodding toward the ward.
Nathan removed his coat and folded it over the back of an empty chair, then rolled his sleeves only far enough to keep his cuffs away from patients. He washed his hands thoroughly at the nearest basin, dried them and began where Whitaker suggested, introducing himself to each patient before asking a single medical question.
The first was a woman in her thirties whose fever had begun the previous day. Nathan sat beside her rather than standing over the bed and asked about the onset, headache, muscle pain, coughing and everyone with whom she had recently shared a home or workplace, then listened to her chest while Whitaker observed. He did not hurry, but neither did he allow the questions to become theatrical. When she said she had felt tired for two days before the fever, Nathan asked what tired meant to her rather than deciding the word represented a particular stage of illness. Had she wanted to sleep, or had her limbs felt heavy? Had she completed her ordinary work? Had she eaten normally? When she described chills, he asked whether she had actually shaken or merely felt cold, and when she mentioned a colleague being ill he asked what she personally knew rather than what she had heard from someone else.
The second patient was a young man employed in a warehouse, and Nathan spent several minutes establishing whether the man's cough had preceded his fever or followed it. The third worked near the rail yards and insisted at first that he had been perfectly well until the previous evening, only for Nathan's slower questioning to reveal that he had gone home early the day before because his back and legs hurt badly enough to make lifting difficult. Nathan did not correct him. To the patient, the illness had begun when the fever made itself undeniable; that distinction mattered as much as the symptom itself.
Whitaker eventually noticed that Nathan wrote far less than expected. A few times the American physician glanced toward the notebook as though wondering whether the visiting professor intended to record anything at all, but Nathan continued listening until the shape of the cases began settling into memory. He had learned long ago that writing every observation immediately could create the illusion that every observation deserved equal importance. He preferred to understand the person first and decide afterward what belonged on paper.
Then Whitaker brought him to the child.
The boy looked eight or nine, though the oversized hospital gown and fever made age difficult to judge. His brown hair had plainly been combed at some point that morning but had since surrendered completely, several strands stuck damply to his forehead while the rest stood at angles suggesting he had spent much of the day turning against the pillow. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes carried the exhausted suspicion children often reserved for unfamiliar adults approaching beds with instruments.
His mother sat beside him with one hand wrapped around his.
Nathan's manner changed as he approached, not dramatically enough for Whitaker to identify a performance but noticeably enough that some of the professional distance left him. He placed his medical case on the floor, lowered himself so the boy would not have to look upward at another adult looming over the bed and rested one forearm loosely against his knee.
"Hello," Nathan said, offering the child a small smile without attempting to touch him yet. "I've been told you've had a rather miserable day."
"I'm sick," the boy replied, looking first at Nathan and then toward his mother as though expecting her to confirm that the stranger ought to have worked this out independently.
"So I gathered," Nathan answered, glancing toward the blankets with exaggerated professional consideration. "Although I should warn you that I'm a doctor, which means I occasionally require several years of education to notice things you've already worked out."
The boy stared at him while his mother smiled tiredly, and after a moment the suspicion around the child's eyes loosened slightly. "You're not from here," he said, his voice roughened by fever.
"No, I'm English," Nathan replied, leaning a little closer as though confiding something important. "Which means I've travelled an absurd distance to be told by you that you're sick."
"That's dumb," the boy said, and behind Nathan Whitaker produced a sound suspiciously like a laugh before disguising it as a cough.
"I am beginning to suspect the same thing," Nathan admitted solemnly, allowing the boy's weak smile to remain for a moment before his own expression softened. "What's your name?"
"Peter," the child answered.
"Peter," Nathan repeated. "I'm Nathan. Everybody here insists upon calling me Professor or Doctor, but that seems unnecessarily complicated between the two of us."
Peter looked toward his mother again, and she squeezed his hand. "It's all right," she assured him, her thumb moving across his knuckles in a repetitive gesture Nathan suspected she had been making for hours.
Nathan noticed the fear in her face more clearly than anything else around the bed. "Mrs—?" he prompted gently, turning enough to include her without abandoning Peter's eye level.
"Halpern," she supplied.
"Mrs Halpern, Doctor Whitaker tells me you brought Peter in very quickly," Nathan said, and the woman nodded before tightening her fingers around her son's hand.
"My younger boy died two years ago," she replied, the sentence coming out with the bluntness of something repeated internally too many times to require embellishment. "Pneumonia. He was five. When Peter started coughing and got hot so fast, I wasn't waiting."
Nathan's face lost the last of its humour. There were questions he could have asked immediately, but none mattered enough to make them his first response. "I'm sorry," he said instead, and the quiet simplicity of it seemed to suit Mrs Halpern better than anything longer would have.
She nodded once, and Nathan let the subject rest.
Turning back toward Peter, he held one hand where the boy could see it before moving closer. "May I check your forehead?" he asked, waiting until Peter nodded before laying the back of his fingers gently against the heated skin.
The fever was obvious even to ordinary touch. Nathan brushed several damp strands of hair away from Peter's forehead, then deliberately mussed the rest enough to make the boy frown.
"Hey," Peter protested, lifting one hand weakly toward his hair.
"Sorry," Nathan replied without sounding remotely sorry, keeping his fingers lightly against the child's forehead. "Professional requirement."
"No it isn't."
"You're very suspicious for a sick man."
"I'm eight," Peter informed him with wounded dignity.
"Then you're doing exceptionally well," Nathan said, and Mrs Halpern smiled again.
Nathan kept his hand there for only another moment, and it was enough.
Nothing visible changed. No colour moved beneath Nathan's skin, no tendril crossed the space between them, no pulse of foreign tissue disturbed Peter's forehead and no sensation sharp enough to make the child flinch. To Whitaker, Donnelly and Mrs Halpern, the English physician was doing nothing more remarkable than checking a fever and moving damp hair away from a boy's face. Beneath that ordinary contact, however, Red-Light reached with a delicacy Nathan could not have imagined in the earliest years after the Red Sea, and Peter's biology opened to his perception as living process: heat, inflammation, cellular distress, chemical signals moving between tissues and, threaded through them, the earliest stages of viral occupation.
Nathan did not need a name for what he found. The thing replicating inside Peter did not know itself by one, and whatever physicians might eventually decide to call the illness had no relevance to its behaviour inside the child. What mattered was structure, replication and consequence, and there among tissues not yet badly damaged Nathan found the biological pattern he had crossed an ocean to seek.
His outward expression remained unchanged while inside his attention narrowed completely.
He sampled almost nothing, taking such a minute quantity through the contact that no ordinary instrument available in the hospital could have meaningfully detected the loss. The material passed into him and was immediately isolated within Red-Light, held apart from his own active biology while his distributed awareness began examining it. It was alive only in the peculiar sense a virus could be said to be alive, dependent upon the machinery of another organism and yet brutally effective at turning that machinery toward its own continuation.
Nathan could have ended Peter's infection.
The knowledge arrived with uncomfortable simplicity. He could have moved through the boy's body and destroyed every viable trace he could reach, corrected the resulting damage and left Peter sitting upright with a fever collapsing so rapidly that Whitaker would have spent the rest of his career trying to explain it. Nathan did not. Such a recovery would save one child while creating questions he could not answer without exposing something far larger than the disease he had come to investigate, and an unnaturally perfect intervention would teach him almost nothing about how an ordinary human body survived the illness.
That did not mean he was willing to do nothing.
Nathan made the smallest intervention he believed he could conceal. The infection remained present and Peter's immune system remained responsible for overcoming it, but the rapid expansion Nathan could feel beginning across vulnerable tissue encountered resistance it had not possessed seconds earlier. He did not sterilise the boy's body or replace the child's immunity with Red-Light; he merely denied the virus some of the opportunities it would otherwise have exploited and quietly strengthened several of Peter's own responses enough to purchase what illness so often stole first: time for the child's body to recognise what was happening, time before replication outran defence, and a little more margin between fever and disaster.
Then Nathan withdrew completely, leaving nothing behind that any physician in the room could distinguish from Peter's own biology doing slightly better than it otherwise might have done. To everyone else, Professor Nathan Drake had touched a child's forehead and pushed untidy hair away from his eyes.
"Definitely warm," Nathan said as he removed his hand and reached for an ordinary thermometer, his tone giving no indication that the previous few seconds had yielded more information than hours beneath a microscope might have provided. "Unfortunately, Peter, Doctor Whitaker appears to have been telling the truth."
Peter groaned and sank farther into the pillow while Nathan prepared the thermometer.
"Terrible habit among physicians," Nathan added, glancing toward Whitaker.
"We try," Whitaker replied, folding his arms while Peter regarded both doctors as though their profession had disappointed him personally.
Nathan took the temperature in the ordinary way, listened to Peter's chest and breathing, examined his throat and asked questions slowly enough that the child never felt trapped beneath them. "When you felt cold this morning, was that before breakfast or after?" he asked while returning the blanket over Peter's chest, then waited through the boy's effort to remember rather than looking immediately toward his mother for the easier answer. When Peter decided it had been after breakfast, Nathan asked whether his head had hurt at the time, whether his legs hurt now, whether he had coughed the previous evening and whether anyone at school had been absent recently. Each answer produced another question, but Nathan kept them conversational, occasionally letting Peter complain about the unfairness of school before steering him back toward the information he needed.
Mrs Halpern supplied details her son could not remember, including the fact that two children from his class had been away during the week, though she did not know why. Nathan wrote that down without assigning it significance.
When he finished, he pulled the blanket properly into place and looked at Peter's hair. After a moment's consideration he reached out and deliberately disordered it again.
"You did that on purpose," Peter accused, staring at him.
"There is no evidence," Nathan replied as he stood and collected his case.
"My hair is evidence."
Nathan looked toward Whitaker with grave concern. "He's going to be difficult."
"Runs in the family," Mrs Halpern said before she could stop herself, and the first genuine laugh Nathan had heard from her escaped into the ward.
"Ma," Peter protested, looking betrayed enough that his mother covered her mouth.
Nathan smiled, then allowed his attention to settle on Mrs Halpern. The laughter had not removed the fear beneath her eyes, and he knew better than to offer promises simply because he privately believed he had improved Peter's chances. There were too many things he did not yet understand about the organism he had sampled, and too many ways a human body could still betray expectation.
"I'll come back and see him," Nathan told her, lowering his voice enough that the promise belonged to her rather than the entire ward. "I can't tell you exactly what course this will take, and I won't insult you by pretending otherwise, but you brought him in early and he's being watched closely. Those things matter."
"Thank you, Doctor," Mrs Halpern replied, squeezing Peter's hand as she looked from Nathan toward her son.
Nathan inclined his head and stepped away, and only after several beds stood between himself and the child did his fingers tighten slightly around the handle of his medical case.
He now possessed what France and the reports had not been able to give him: a living sample taken while the infection was still establishing itself, isolated within his own biology and available for examination without the deterioration or uncertainty accompanying transported material. It did not prove that every illness in Chicago belonged to the same process, nor did it tell him that Kansas and France were automatically pieces of a single outbreak, but it gave him a biological reference against which those questions could finally be tested. Whatever uncertainty remained around geography or origin, the thing inside Peter deserved every hour Nathan intended to spend on it.
None of that appeared on his face.
Whitaker caught up beside him while Sister Donnelly remained behind to check Peter's chart. "What do you think?" the physician asked, looking toward the child and then back at Nathan.
Nathan glanced over his shoulder. Peter was complaining to his mother that his hair had looked better before the English doctor arrived, while Mrs Halpern attempted to smooth it down without much success.
"I think he's early enough that I want his temperature, pulse and respiratory rate recorded carefully through the afternoon," Nathan replied as he turned back to Whitaker, his voice entirely clinical now. "If his colour changes, his breathing worsens or he becomes markedly less responsive, I want to know immediately rather than at the next scheduled round."
Whitaker nodded. "And the illness?"
Nathan's eyes moved across the ward, taking in beds, faces, relatives sitting beside them and nurses passing between them. The people came first; the pattern could wait another hour.
"I think I need to see everyone you've admitted," Nathan answered. "Then I need your records, whatever samples you've preserved and, if possible, the physicians who saw the earliest cases before they arrived on this ward. I also want to know which patients were seen and sent home, because hospital admission is a selection process, not a complete picture of illness in the city."
Whitaker studied him more carefully. "You found something."
Nathan met his eyes without defensiveness. "I found a reason to continue."
It was entirely true, simply not all of the truth, and Whitaker appeared to recognise that distinction without knowing its scale. Before he could pursue it Nathan moved farther into the ward, but he had nearly reached the next bed when he noticed several patients watching him. The unfamiliar English physician had spent enough time asking questions that curiosity had spread ahead of him, and an elderly man near the aisle looked as though he had been waiting several minutes for an opportunity to ask why Nathan was there.
Nathan understood the expression. He had seen it in hospitals before, especially in wards where physicians lowered their voices near doors and relatives stopped speaking when nurses approached. Uncertainty was often worse than an answer because imagination possessed fewer limits than disease.
"My name is Nathan Drake," he said, keeping his voice conversational rather than turning the moment into an announcement, though enough nearby patients could hear that attention gradually shifted toward him. He rested one hand against the end of an empty bed while the other held his case at his side. "I'm a physician and researcher from England, and I've come because some of the illnesses being reported here resemble cases I've been studying elsewhere. I want to understand whether that resemblance actually means anything before anyone decides that it does."
A woman two beds away watched him carefully, while the elderly man who had first caught Nathan's attention shifted higher against his pillows.
"I'm not going to tell you that I already know what's happening, because I don't," Nathan continued, and the plainness of the admission seemed to surprise several people more than reassurance would have. "I don't know whether I can help every person in this room, and anyone who promises that before examining you is either considerably cleverer than I am or considerably less honest. What I can do is listen, compare what is happening to each of you and try to determine whether we're looking at one thing, several things or something entirely ordinary that happens to look frightening when written down in a report."
Whitaker glanced sideways at him but said nothing.
"But I am here to help," Nathan continued, allowing his eyes to move between individual faces rather than addressing the ward as an abstraction. "If there is something common between these cases, I intend to find it. If there isn't, I intend to find that out too. I'll ask irritating questions, I'll probably ask some of them more than once, and if Doctor Whitaker is particularly unfortunate I'll spend half the afternoon disagreeing with him about his records."
"I was afraid of that," Whitaker replied with a theatrical sigh, and several tired smiles appeared around the nearest beds.
Nathan allowed his own smile to remain for a moment before his expression softened. "I cannot promise you answers today, and I cannot promise that understanding something means I can immediately cure it. What I can promise is that I'll study what is happening here properly, and if the answers exist within reach, I will do my best to find them."
The ward did not respond as a crowd because it was not one. One patient nodded while another simply watched him, a woman near the window closed her eyes again as though the explanation had been enough for the moment, and somebody farther down coughed heavily into a cloth as Sister Donnelly moved toward him almost before the sound had finished. Behind Nathan, Peter's voice carried faintly through the ward as he continued insisting to his mother that his hair had been perfectly respectable before the English doctor interfered with it, and Nathan's smile returned for only a moment before he moved to the next bed, introduced himself to the person lying there, washed his hands again and resumed the work he had crossed an ocean to do.
Beyond the hospital walls Chicago continued without waiting for him. Streetcars carried workers between neighbourhoods, freight moved through the yards, children sat at school desks and shopkeepers opened their doors to the afternoon, while somewhere farther north a motor car carried Joseph toward Lake View and the Bell and Crown, toward a young schoolteacher who had given him a name and a place in the hope that the quiet Englishman might decide to use them.