Morning came to Chicago without making any effort to beautify the city first. The smoke remained where the previous night had left it, suspended above rooftops and factory chimneys in a broad grey-brown ceiling that caught the first light only along its upper edges, while beneath it the city had already begun the practical business of another day. Delivery wagons rattled over uneven streets with milk, bread, meat and produce; streetcars rang impatiently at crossings where dray horses seemed determined to occupy the rails; shopkeepers raised blinds and swept yesterday's dirt from one patch of pavement onto another; and behind restaurant doors men were already lighting stoves while women in aprons scrubbed counters that would be dirty again before noon. Chicago seemed constitutionally incapable of waking slowly, and even at an hour when much of the residential North Side still belonged to milkmen, bakers, servants, policemen finishing their watches and working men beginning theirs, there was already a sense that anyone lingering too long would discover the city had gone on without them.
Joseph had been awake long before it, though he had returned to the hotel the previous evening comfortably before the hour he had promised Nathan. He had not returned quite early enough, however, to escape the professor's notice. Nathan had been seated at the writing desk in his room when Joseph appeared, sleeves rolled, waistcoat unbuttoned and three separate hospital files spread beneath the electric lamp, yet somehow he had still found enough attention to look Joseph over from shoes to collar before asking how Chicago was treating him in a tone that made the perfectly innocent question intolerable.
"It's treating me perfectly well," Joseph had replied while remaining near the door, deliberately refusing to supply anything beyond the literal answer, but Nathan's eyes had already acquired the bright amusement of a man who believed he had discovered something interesting and intended to be insufferable about it.
"Encouraging," Nathan had said, lowering his pencil onto the chart without taking his eyes from Joseph. "I was concerned the city might prove inhospitable."
"If you ask another question, you can walk to Kansas," Joseph had answered, and the threat had finally ended the interrogation only because Nathan laughed while Joseph shut the door on him.
The laughter had continued through it.
By the time Joseph came downstairs the following morning, however, Nathan was already gone. The professor's room contained an empty bed that looked as though it had received only a few hours of use, a washstand still damp around the basin and a writing desk buried beneath copied hospital records, handwritten charts, symptom lists and case numbers. A cup containing the remains of coffee had gone cold beside the papers, his medical case was missing, and in the centre of the desk, weighted beneath an ink bottle so Joseph could not possibly overlook it, waited a folded sheet of hotel stationery bearing his name.
"Joseph, I have returned to the hospital," Nathan had written in the irritatingly cheerful hand that somehow remained recognisably his even when discussing serious matters. "I expect to be there for most of the day unless someone gives me a compelling reason to be elsewhere. You are therefore, for perhaps the first time since I have known you, officially instructed to do absolutely nothing useful until this afternoon. This is an order. Try not to frighten anyone. N." Beneath the signature Nathan had evidently reconsidered the completeness of his instructions and added, "And eat breakfast."
Joseph read the note twice, not because anything about it required clarification but because the words This is an order deserved preservation as evidence of hypocrisy from a man whose relationship with orders generally depended upon whether he had issued them himself. He folded the paper neatly and slipped it into his pocket.
The black armour remained packed away in Joseph's room, every plate, fastening and piece of equipment cleaned and arranged with the same methodical care he applied to weapons whether he expected to use them or not. For a second consecutive day he dressed instead in the dark three-piece suit he had worn through Chicago, though this morning he changed the tie and discovered himself standing before the wardrobe with two white shirts laid across the bed, examining them as though one contained a hidden tactical advantage.
They were nearly identical.
Joseph knew they were nearly identical.
He selected one, changed his mind, selected the other, stared at himself in the mirror and became irritated enough by the entire proceeding that he very nearly chose the first simply out of spite. His weapons remained concealed, because being off duty had never meant being stupid, but nothing visible about him suggested the man whom Institute personnel knew simply as T.
Joseph adjusted one cuff, stared at himself doing it and muttered, "Don't start," before picking up his coat and leaving the room.
By seven he was heading north.
Helen lived in a respectable apartment building in Lake View several streets removed from the Bell and Crown, close enough to the school and streetcar lines that she could manage both without requiring a motorcar. Joseph had written the address down the previous evening after walking her home, although he had remembered it after hearing it once. He nevertheless checked it before leaving the hotel, then spent much of the journey north watching Chicago gather itself around the streetcar lines.
Morning suited the city differently than evening had. There were fewer couples and more lunch pails, men in work clothes stood shoulder to shoulder inside crowded streetcars, some reading folded newspapers while others appeared capable of sleeping upright despite the movement, and women carrying baskets waited outside grocers whose assistants were still arranging produce. Delivery boys pedalled bicycles between wagons with a confidence Joseph considered suicidal, while outside one bakery a man in a flour-dusted apron stood smoking as another carried trays inside. Newspapers shouted war news from boards and corners, uniforms appeared here and there among civilian coats, and every few blocks another flag hung from a window or storefront.
Joseph arrived several minutes earlier than the time he and Helen had agreed upon and consequently spent those several minutes on the opposite side of the street rather than presenting himself early and forcing her to hurry. The decision seemed sensible until he realised that he was now a very large man in a dark suit standing perfectly still across from a residential building at seven in the morning, watching its entrance.
He moved nearer a lamppost.
That did not improve matters.
Fortunately the street supplied enough ordinary life to occupy him. Curtains moved in several windows, a woman opened an upstairs sash and shook a cloth vigorously into the morning air before noticing somebody directly beneath her and snatching it back inside, and a milk wagon stopped near the corner with its horse standing in the patient misery of an animal that had already accepted humans would never organise their affairs sensibly. Two girls hurried along the pavement with books tucked beneath their arms, while somewhere inside Helen's building a child began crying loudly enough that Joseph could hear the muffled protest through brick and glass.
It was ordinary.
Joseph liked it.
Ordinary things had acquired a value he had never consciously assigned them before the war. A milkman being late, a child refusing breakfast, somebody arguing about rent or a woman annoyed because dust had settled on washing were not necessarily pleasant to the people experiencing them, and Joseph had no intention of romanticising another person's difficulties simply because he had seen worse. Yet there remained something almost luxurious in problems that did not involve whether a man would still possess both legs by supper.
At precisely the agreed hour Joseph crossed the street, entered the building and climbed the stairs rather than wait for the lift. The hallway smelled faintly of furniture polish, breakfast and coal heat, while somewhere behind one door crockery touched crockery and behind another a woman was telling someone named George that he would miss his car if he did not leave immediately. Joseph reached Helen's floor, found her door and had barely raised his hand to knock when it opened.
Helen stopped when she found him standing there, and Joseph lowered his hand as they regarded one another for a moment without speaking. She had dressed for walking rather than work, wearing a practical tailored coat over a lighter morning dress, with gloves and a modest hat pinned over her brown hair, and there was less formality to her than there had been aboard the train or at the Bell and Crown. Perhaps it was the hour or simply the absence of a crowded room around them, but Joseph had the peculiar sensation of seeing her more privately than he had the previous day.
"Good morning, Joseph," Helen said as she stepped into the hall and drew the door closed behind her, and there was enough warmth in the greeting that Joseph found himself wondering whether she too had thought about yesterday after they parted. Her eyes moved over him once before her smile widened. "You're early."
"Only slightly," Joseph replied, waiting while she checked the lock before offering his arm almost experimentally. "I waited downstairs."
"Why?" Helen asked as she looked at the offered arm before lifting her eyes back to him.
"I didn't want to arrive early," Joseph answered with complete seriousness, and Helen stared at him for another second before slipping her gloved hand through the crook of his elbow.
"So you arrived early in order not to arrive early?" she asked as they started toward the stairs.
"Yes," Joseph said finally. "It made more sense before you said it."
"You learn quickly," Helen replied as they began descending, and when Joseph informed her that he had been trained she immediately glanced sideways at him. "By Professor Drake?"
"No," Joseph answered, then reconsidered when she asked whether Mrs Hargreaves might deserve the credit. "Possibly."
Helen's laugh followed them down the stairwell and out into the morning.
The air was colder than it had been the previous afternoon, carrying the sharpness that sometimes belonged to spring mornings before the sun had decided what season it intended to produce. Helen felt it more than Joseph did and drew her coat closer as they turned east, while Joseph shortened his stride until their pace matched comfortably.
She had insisted upon showing him Lake Michigan in the morning because, according to her, he had not really seen it the previous evening. Joseph had objected that several million tons of water were difficult to overlook, but Helen had informed him that evening and morning were entirely different matters and that an Englishman who had spent less than two days in Chicago was not qualified to argue.
"You do realise I've seen large bodies of water before," Joseph said as they crossed behind a delivery wagon, keeping his arm steady while Helen stepped around a shallow gutter. "I crossed an ocean to get here."
"That was the Atlantic," Helen replied as though this distinction settled everything.
"It was still water."
"You're being difficult."
"I work for Nathan Drake."
"Is that going to be your explanation for everything?" Helen asked, looking up at him with a smile.
"It has been useful so far," Joseph replied.
As they approached Lincoln Park the streets gradually released them into greater openness, buildings no longer pressing so closely upon either side and the first clean light of morning appearing between trees and rooftops. The lake announced itself before it became visible, cold air moving inland from the water with a freshness the inner streets could never quite imitate, carrying dampness and wind and something almost empty with it.
Then the buildings fell away.
Joseph stopped, and Helen, who had deliberately said nothing during the last hundred yards, stopped beside him without looking at him immediately.
Lake Michigan stretched eastward beneath the sunrise.
The water he had seen the previous evening had been dark and immense, a great cool plain reflecting the final light behind the city, but morning transformed it. The sun stood low over the distant horizon, unobstructed by anything Joseph could see, and its reflection formed a trembling road across the lake, every small wave catching gold for an instant before losing it to the next. The sky immediately above the water had become pale yellow fading gradually into blue, while thin clouds farther north carried pink along their undersides. Near shore the lake remained darker, blue-grey beneath the wind, but farther out it seemed to burn.
There were few people around them compared with the previous evening. An elderly man walked with a cane several dozen yards away, stopping occasionally to face the lake, while two women passed in quiet conversation and a young man in work clothes sat alone upon a bench eating breakfast from paper. Farther down the path a policeman walked his beat without apparent hurry, and several gulls quarrelled noisily over something Joseph could not see.
The city remained behind them, and that made the difference. In the evening Chicago had owned the light, its western sky burning behind chimneys, rooftops and smoke while the lake received whatever remained; this morning the order had reversed. The sun belonged entirely to the water, and Chicago stood behind Joseph in shadow waiting for daylight to reach it.
Helen watched the lake for several seconds before turning her attention toward him.
When Joseph finally noticed, she was smiling.
"You were right," Joseph said as he looked back toward the sunrise, his hands resting loosely inside his coat pockets. "It's beautiful."
"I told you," Helen replied with unmistakable satisfaction.
"I questioned."
"You argued," Helen insisted, and Joseph conceded the technicality with a small movement of his head before looking at her.
Only briefly.
At least he intended it to be briefly.
The morning light caught the side of Helen's face and turned loose strands of her brown hair almost copper where they escaped beneath her hat, while the wind had brought a little colour into her cheeks. She had been watching the lake, but when Joseph's gaze lingered she turned toward him and caught him looking.
Neither moved.
Joseph's face remained almost perfectly composed.
His eyes betrayed him.
"I meant the water," Helen said quietly as her confident smile softened into something unexpectedly shy.
"So did I," Joseph replied without changing expression, maintaining the lie for approximately two seconds before Helen looked at him again and one corner of her mouth lifted.
"Of course," she murmured, allowing him to preserve what remained of his dignity as she moved closer and slipped her arm more securely through his.
They began walking.
For the first few minutes there seemed no need for conversation. Their pace remained slow enough that other walkers occasionally passed them, and Joseph discovered that the lake changed continually as the sun rose. What had been gold became silver-white in places, then blue where the angle shifted, while small waves moved toward the shore in orderly lines only to collapse into disorder upon reaching it.
Helen leaned slightly against Joseph's arm whenever the wind strengthened.
Joseph found himself wishing for stronger wind.
The thought was sufficiently ridiculous that he nearly smiled.
"What is Professor Drake doing today?" Helen eventually asked as they followed the lakefront path. "Or am I supposed to believe he's given both of you a holiday?"
"He doesn't understand holidays," Joseph replied so quickly that Helen laughed before he could elaborate. "He can sit still, but generally only if there's a book nearby."
"And without one?"
"Less."
"And he gave you the morning free?"
"The day, actually."
"The whole day?" Helen asked, turning toward him in genuine surprise.
"Apparently."
"Apparently?"
"He left instructions."
"What sort of instructions?"
"To do nothing useful," Joseph answered, and Helen's laughter returned immediately.
"He actually wrote that?"
"Yes."
"I like him more every time you describe him," Helen said as she squeezed Joseph's arm lightly.
"Please stop saying that."
"What is he doing at the hospital?" Helen asked after her amusement settled, and Joseph looked toward the water while deciding how much could be said without discussing anything belonging to the Institute.
"Examining the sick, comparing cases, speaking with physicians and checking when symptoms began and how they change," Joseph replied. "He had half the hospital on his desk when I looked in this morning."
"Half the hospital?"
"On paper."
"I should hope so."
"Beds would have been difficult," Joseph added, and Helen shook her head at him while smiling.
"You said he was drawing charts."
"Many charts."
"That sounds ominous."
"It means he's thinking."
"And that's ominous?" Helen asked, and Joseph looked down at her with enough seriousness that she understood the answer before he spoke.
"Frequently."
The humour left Helen gradually rather than disappearing. "Does he think there's something wrong?" she asked, and Joseph took several steps before answering.
"He thinks there's something worth understanding," Joseph said finally, his eyes returning to the horizon. "That's not the same thing."
"And he's helping them?"
"Where he can," Joseph replied. "He'll diagnose what he can, help where they'll let him and keep drawing charts until the paper runs out. Then he'll find more paper."
"You sound fond of him," Helen said with a smile as she studied Joseph's face.
Joseph looked down at her.
"I didn't say obedient," she added.
"Good."
"How long do you think you'll be in Chicago?" Helen asked, and the simple question altered the morning in a way neither of them could pretend not to notice.
The lake remained the lake, the sun continued rising and Helen's arm remained linked through his, but Joseph felt the change nonetheless.
"Another two days," Joseph answered, noticing Helen's steps slow slightly before he added, "Perhaps three. Then Kansas."
"Kansas," Helen repeated while looking ahead again. "I remember."
They walked several more yards with only the sound of their steps and the water beside them.
"Two days," Helen said eventually, her smile smaller and more private when she turned back toward him. "That's short."
"Yes."
"But enough for me," Helen said as her arm tightened through his, and colour appeared almost immediately in her cheeks as though the sentence had escaped before she could decide whether she ought to say it so plainly.
Joseph looked down at her.
Helen did not withdraw the words. Instead she kept walking with her eyes ahead and waited for whatever answer he chose to give.
Joseph had faced men with rifles who produced less uncertainty in him.
"For what?" he asked eventually, allowing just enough innocence into his voice that Helen looked up in disbelief.
"Joseph," she said reproachfully, and the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth betrayed him.
"That was cruel," Helen accused.
"I wanted to hear you say it," Joseph replied, and the words stopped her so abruptly that he stopped beside her as well.
Helen stared at him with enough astonishment that Joseph wondered whether Nathan's influence really had begun contaminating him, but after another second she laughed quietly and lowered her face while colour deepened in her cheeks. "You are considerably worse than you pretend to be."
"I spend time with Professor Drake."
"That's no excuse."
"It's the only one I have."
"Two days is enough to enjoy two days," Helen said more gently as they resumed their place beside the water. "I don't know what happens after that."
"Neither do I."
"Good."
"Good?"
"I'd be suspicious if you did," she answered, resting a little more comfortably against him.
Morning gathered around them gradually as they continued along the lake. More people appeared as the hour advanced, some walking for pleasure and others simply using the paths because they led where they needed to go. Nurses and nursemaids pushed perambulators while children leaned forward beneath blankets to inspect gulls, dogs and passing strangers. Two soldiers walked with a woman between them while all three laughed about something one of the men had said, and farther along an elderly couple occupied a bench facing the water without speaking at all.
Helen began telling Joseph about herself almost without announcing the transition. She had been born in New York and spent nearly all of her childhood there, growing up with her mother in a city she remembered as simultaneously enormous and surprisingly small. New York could contain millions of people, she explained, while a child might still believe the entire world consisted of six streets, a school, several shops, a church and whichever neighbours her mother considered respectable enough to visit.
"My mother knew everybody, or at least she behaved as though she did," Helen said as they walked, smiling at the memory. "I was convinced she had spies throughout Manhattan."
"Perhaps she did," Joseph replied.
"She was a mother. I think that amounts to the same thing."
"Exactly."
She had loved school almost immediately, though the affection had less to do with discipline than with discovering that books allowed her to go places her mother could not reasonably forbid. She read whatever teachers gave her and then whatever they did not, borrowing books from friends, libraries and occasionally shelves belonging to adults who had not technically given permission.
"You stole books?" Joseph asked, turning toward her with mock suspicion.
"Borrowed," Helen corrected.
"Without permission."
"I always returned them."
"Criminal."
"I was nine."
"Early start."
"I shall tell Professor Drake you're bullying me," Helen said as she nudged his arm with hers.
"He'll take your side without asking what happened," Joseph replied, and Helen's delighted declaration that she knew she liked Nathan earned another resigned look.
The teachers mattered more as Helen grew older. There had been one woman in particular, Miss marsh, who taught literature and history with enough enthusiasm that Helen eventually realised the woman was not merely explaining things she knew but deliberately trying to make other people want to know them too. She could not remember deciding to teach in any single moment; instead the possibility accumulated until alternatives began feeling less like alternatives and more like things other people might sensibly do.
"Your mother approved?" Joseph asked.
"Eventually," Helen answered.
"Meaning no."
"Meaning she had opinions."
"Strong ones?"
"She's my mother," Helen replied, and Joseph accepted the explanation.
Her mother had wanted her close. New York had schools enough, after all, and there seemed little reason to cross half the country simply to stand in another classroom. Helen had considered remaining there and might have done so had an opportunity farther west not presented itself at precisely the point when she had become restless enough to accept.
"Chicago was growing so quickly," Helen explained. "Families coming from everywhere, children coming into schools from homes where their parents spoke Polish or German or Swedish or Italian, children from farms, children born here, children whose families had only just arrived. There was always another classroom needing somebody."
"You came because they needed teachers," Joseph said. "What was the other part?"
"I wanted to know whether I could do it without my mother standing three streets away," Helen admitted with a smile.
"Were you frightened?"
"Terrified," Helen answered cheerfully. "I cried on the train, so don't look so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I was imagining it."
"Well, stop," Helen said, bumping his arm with hers. "I arrived with two cases, a ridiculous hat and the absolute certainty I'd made a terrible mistake. Then I found my room, got lost twice on the way to the school and spent my first week convinced every other teacher could tell I had no idea what I was doing."
"Could they?"
"Probably."
"And the children?"
"Oh, certainly," Helen replied, and Joseph's quiet laugh made her smile. "Children know weakness. It's rather like being surrounded by wolves, only the wolves ask permission to sharpen pencils."
"That sounds dangerous."
"It was."
"But you stayed," Joseph said, watching her expression become more thoughtful when he asked why.
They had reached another open view of the lake, and Helen slowed until they were walking near the edge of the path.
"Because one of them learned to read," Helen said quietly. "Not from the beginning. He could read a little when he came to me, but badly enough that he'd decided he was stupid. That's a terrible thing about children. Tell them something often enough and they'll start helping you believe it."
Joseph said nothing.
"He'd make jokes whenever I asked him to read, or cause trouble, knock something over, talk to the boy beside him, anything that meant nobody would discover he couldn't do what the others could," Helen continued. "At first I thought he was simply difficult."
"What changed?"
"I watched him when somebody else read. He followed every word. He wanted it, so we started staying afterward."
"Did he mind?"
"He hated me."
"Understandable."
Helen gave him a look. "For about three weeks. Then one afternoon he read an entire page without stopping. He looked at me as though I'd performed magic, but he'd done it. I hadn't. I'd only helped."
"And that was enough."
"If I can help one more person than I would have helped by staying home, then coming here was worth it," Helen replied with a small nod. "It doesn't have to be hundreds. It doesn't have to be important enough for newspapers. One more is still one more."
"That's admirable," Joseph said after several thoughtful steps.
"You don't have to say that."
"I know," Joseph replied, and something in the simplicity of his answer affected her more than a longer compliment might have done.
"What about you?" Helen asked eventually. "Yesterday you told me you hadn't seen your mother in a long time."
Joseph had expected the question.
He had prepared for it.
That did not make answering easier.
"I never really knew my parents," he said while looking toward the lake, building the safest version of his past from truths and omissions rather than inventing something wholesale. "I was an orphan. Grew up mostly in a boys' home."
"I'm sorry," Helen said as her expression softened and her arm tightened gently through his.
"It was a long time ago."
"Was it awful?"
"Sometimes," Joseph answered. "Sometimes it was just crowded. Too many boys, not enough quiet. You learned quickly which things belonged to you and which things only belonged to you until somebody larger decided otherwise."
"Were there many larger?" Helen asked before glancing up at him.
Joseph looked down at himself.
Helen laughed before he needed to answer.
"Not eventually," he said.
"I imagine not."
"The war came, so I joined the Army," Joseph continued, keeping his eyes ahead while the sentence concealed considerably more than it revealed.
Not because he thought her weak, but because he had begun to like the fact that she could look at him and see Joseph rather than T, an asset, a weapon or the armoured thing whispered about in Institute corridors.
"What happened after the Army?" Helen asked gently.
"I met the professor," Joseph replied.
"During the war?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"He needed people for security and field work, somebody who could handle himself," Joseph explained, using the version he had prepared because it placed truth around the lie.
"And you gave him reason to think you could. What did you do?"
Joseph looked toward her.
"That expression again," Helen said with a quiet laugh. "The one that means I've reached something you're not going to tell me."
"He tried me," Joseph answered. "Gave me work and watched how I handled it."
"And?"
"I'm still employed."
"So you impressed him."
"I think he liked me."
"Professor Drake?"
"Eventually."
"You make him sound like a difficult dog," Helen said, and Joseph's laugh escaped before he could stop it.
Helen stared at him in delight. "Was that actually funny?"
"No."
"It was."
"Don't tell him."
"I absolutely will," Helen replied.
"He recruited you personally?" she asked when her amusement settled.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"He said I was useful."
"How romantic."
"That's Nathan."
"And you stayed because?"
"He gave me somewhere to belong," Joseph answered before he had time to construct anything safer.
Helen's teasing disappeared.
Nathan had done considerably more than that. He had taken a man whom war had already claimed in almost every meaningful sense and refused to allow the matter to end there. He had healed what should not have healed, changed what could not ordinarily be changed and then, perhaps more importantly, treated Joseph afterward as something other than an experiment or debt.
Nathan could be infuriating, reckless, obsessive, arrogant and occasionally possessed of the self-preservation instincts of a curious child standing beside an unexploded shell.
But Joseph would have followed him into hell.
On several occasions, he suspected, he nearly had.
"You care about him," Helen said as her hand slipped from the crook of Joseph's arm until her fingers found his.
"Yes," Joseph replied, closing his hand around hers almost instinctively.
"And he cares about you."
"He has an unusual way of showing it."
"So do you," Helen said as she looked up at him, and Joseph could not argue with that.
They remained beside the lake until the sun had risen high enough to turn the water from gold to clear blue-grey, and by then Chicago had fully awakened behind them. Traffic had strengthened, streetcars carried men and women in both directions, the paths had filled and the intimate quiet of sunrise gradually surrendered to ordinary morning.
By late morning Helen declared that Joseph had been sufficiently educated about Lake Michigan and required coffee, an assessment Joseph accepted without argument. She took him to a restaurant she knew farther into the city, respectable without being grand, with broad windows facing the street and tables dressed in white linen that had survived enough washings to lose any unnecessary stiffness. The room carried the pleasant combined smell of coffee, toasted bread, butter and whatever was cooking beyond the swinging kitchen doors.
Coffee arrived in a polished pot accompanied by fine china cups thin enough that Joseph regarded his suspiciously before lifting it.
"What?" Helen asked, immediately catching the look.
"Nothing."
"You're staring at the cup."
"It's small."
"It's a coffee cup."
"I've had larger."
"I'm certain you have."
"It feels breakable."
"Most china is," Helen answered, and when Joseph looked at the cup again she stared at him in growing amusement. "You're worried you're going to break it."
"No."
"You are."
"I'm evaluating it," Joseph replied before taking a careful drink.
The waiter brought a plate of biscuits still warm enough that steam escaped when Helen broke one, followed by sandwiches cut neatly into manageable portions and a small dish of preserves. After the cold lake air Joseph discovered he was considerably hungrier than expected, and Helen watched him finish one sandwich before reaching for another.
"Does Mrs Hargreaves normally feed you?" Helen asked, only to realise how the sentence sounded when Joseph looked up at her. "That sounded terrible."
"Yes."
"I meant—"
"I know what you meant."
"I missed breakfast," Joseph added when she continued watching him.
"Why?" Helen asked as she lowered her cup.
"I was coming to see you," Joseph replied, then calmly resumed eating while Helen stared at him across the table.
"You can't say things like that and then behave as though you haven't," she said after several seconds.
"Why?"
"Because I don't know whether you're doing it deliberately."
"Doing what?" Joseph asked with such perfect stillness that Helen narrowed her eyes, only to catch the faint movement at one corner of his mouth.
"You are."
"Perhaps."
"Yesterday you barely knew how to speak to me."
"I've been learning."
"Far too quickly," Helen replied, shaking her head while Joseph hid whatever answer he might have given behind another drink of coffee.
They remained there considerably longer than the meal required. Coffee became a second pot, Helen told him more about her pupils and Joseph told carefully selected stories about men he had served beside, stripping away places, names and details that might lead toward things she could not know. He told her about soldiers who could sleep through artillery but woke if somebody touched their boots, about one man who received food parcels from home and became the most popular person in his unit for approximately fifteen minutes at a time, and about the peculiar ingenuity men developed when trying to improve terrible tea.
He did not tell her about bodies.
He did not tell her about the grenade.
He did not tell her what T had done.
Helen did not push.
By early afternoon the question became what to do with the remainder of Nathan's unexpected gift of freedom, and Helen already had an answer.
"There is a play, if you're willing," she said as they stepped back onto the pavement, drawing on her gloves while Joseph waited beside her.
"What sort?"
"A comedy."
"That sounds suspicious."
"You don't like theatre?" Helen asked, only for her expression to brighten when Joseph admitted he had never attended often enough to possess an opinion apart from the one time in new york. "Then that's settled. We're going."
Joseph looked at her.
"You fought Germans," Helen continued as she linked her arm through his. "Surely you can survive theatre."
That argument was difficult to dispute.
They made their way toward the Loop as afternoon advanced, sometimes walking and sometimes taking a streetcar when the distance demanded it. Chicago grew denser around them again, residential streets giving way to larger buildings, offices, shops, restaurants and the busy commercial heart Nathan had admired upon their arrival. Elevated trains rattled overhead in places, briefly overwhelming conversation, while newsboys called headlines at corners and automobiles forced their way among horses and wagons.
By the time they reached Randolph and Dearborn, the Woods Theatre was impossible to mistake. The house was almost painfully new, having opened only weeks earlier, and its façade still possessed the freshness of a building that had not yet accumulated years of Chicago soot. Posters and signs announced Friendly Enemies, with Louis Mann and Sam Bernard displayed prominently enough to suggest neither gentleman's admirers would tolerate second billing.
"The play concerns two German-American friends arguing over America, Germany and the war," Helen explained as they approached the doors with the afternoon crowd, and Joseph slowly turned from the poster toward her.
"You brought an English soldier to this?" he asked.
"Former soldier," Helen corrected with an innocent smile.
"That's worse."
"You haven't seen it yet."
"Neither have you?"
"No."
"Then how do you know it's good?"
"People say it is," Helen replied, pulling gently at his arm when he observed that people said many things. "Come along."
Joseph allowed himself to be taken inside.
The theatre surprised him. Its foyers were quieter and more dignified than the busy street outside suggested, with dark wood, rich carpeting and restrained decoration that seemed designed to make patrons lower their voices without being asked. Ushers guided people efficiently toward their seats, programs changed hands, coats were removed and the murmur of hundreds of conversations collected beneath the auditorium ceiling.
Joseph found himself studying exits.
"Stop working," Helen murmured while an usher directed them down the aisle.
"I'm not."
"You counted the doors."
"I noticed them."
"How many?" Helen asked, and when Joseph refused to answer she gave him a triumphant look. "Exactly."
Their seats were close enough to the stage to see expressions clearly without forcing either of them to crane their necks. Joseph helped Helen remove her coat, waited until she was seated and then settled beside her while the auditorium continued filling. A woman several rows ahead wore a hat substantial enough to create a private obstruction for everyone behind her, and Helen leaned toward Joseph with a conspiratorial expression.
"If that hat gets any larger, they'll need to sell it its own seat," she whispered.
"Perhaps it paid," Joseph replied, and Helen covered her mouth while he remained solemn.
"You're terrible."
"You started it."
The lights lowered before she could answer.
Conversation diminished through successive whispers until the stage possessed everyone's attention, and Joseph experienced the unfamiliar sensation of hundreds of people agreeing simultaneously to pretend that the walls before them belonged to somewhere else.
Friendly Enemies proved considerably more amusing than he had expected. The arguments between its German-American protagonists carried enough exaggeration to produce laughter without entirely concealing the tension beneath them, and the audience responded enthusiastically whenever patriotism, stubbornness or family loyalty collided in particularly ridiculous fashion. Joseph understood quickly why the play worked in Chicago. The city around them was filled with people whose families had come from somewhere else, many recently enough that old languages remained spoken around supper tables, and the war had forced questions of loyalty into places where they had once been private.
Helen laughed beside him.
Joseph watched the stage.
Mostly.
At some point during the first portion of the performance, Helen's shoulder touched his.
Neither moved away.
Later her arm settled lightly against his, and Joseph remained perfectly still while Helen apparently interpreted the absence of objection as permission. By the time the performance moved deeper into its story, she had shifted closer until their shoulders rested comfortably together, and Joseph discovered that every few minutes her laughter moved through him before he heard it.
During the interval Helen caught him looking at her.
"You're supposed to watch the stage," she whispered while patrons around them stood, stretched and began discussing what they had seen.
"I was."
"You weren't."
"Most of the time."
"Joseph," Helen murmured as colour appeared in her cheeks, lowering her eyes toward the program in her lap.
When the performance resumed, she sat slightly closer.
Joseph decided not to mention the contradiction.
The second half drew the war nearer to the centre of the story, and there were moments when laughter around Joseph faded while the subject beneath the comedy became more serious. Family, loyalty, America, Germany, sons going to fight and parents discovering that political arguments became something different when ships carried their children toward danger.
For Joseph, the theatre occasionally disappeared. A reference to a son overseas could place mud beneath his boots again, while a line about letters from Europe reminded him how carefully soldiers learned to lie to the people at home. Doing well. Food isn't bad. Weather miserable. Don't worry. Men could write those sentences while artillery shook dirt from the roof above them.
Helen noticed his silence but did not ask about it. Instead her hand found his between their seats, her fingers resting lightly against his as an offer rather than an insistence, and Joseph looked down once before closing his hand around hers.
The stage continued.
By the time the performance approached its conclusion, evening had settled beyond the theatre walls. Joseph had ceased thinking about Nathan's charts, Kansas, France or the black armour waiting inside his hotel room. For a few hours there was only a theatre in Chicago, actors beneath electric lights, an audience laughing and applauding around them, and the warm hand of a woman he had known for scarcely two days resting inside his own.
Helen shifted beside him until her head touched his shoulder, the movement tentative enough that Joseph understood she was giving him time to object. He did not, and she settled more comfortably against him with her hat resting in her lap and her brown hair brushing lightly against the shoulder of his coat.
Joseph looked down at her.
Helen's attention remained ostensibly upon the stage, though the smile at the corner of her mouth suggested she knew perfectly well what he was doing.
Several minutes passed before Helen moved a fraction closer, and when Joseph's thumb brushed once across the back of her hand her smile deepened.
No artillery sounded.
No telephone rang.
No one shouted for T.
Nobody needed saving.
Somewhere in another part of Chicago, Nathan Drake was standing over hospital records, building charts from temperatures, coughs, colours, symptoms and times, refusing to leave a question unanswered while something unseen moved through human bodies beneath his hands. Within two days that work would probably pull Joseph west toward Kansas, and beyond Kansas there would inevitably be something else.
There was always something else.
But Helen had been right that morning.
Two days were short.
Two days were also two days.
For the moment that was enough.
"Well?" Helen whispered as she looked up from his shoulder near the end of the performance. "Have you survived the theatre?"
"Barely," Joseph replied while regarding the stage with exaggerated gravity, and Helen suppressed a laugh against his shoulder. "Terrible."
"You're smiling."
"No."
"You are."
"I'm not," Joseph insisted, making the mistake of looking down at her while saying it.
The smile Helen found was small enough that another person might have missed it.
Helen did not.
"Two days," she whispered as she rested her head against him again, her fingers tightening gently around his.
"Two days," Joseph agreed while looking from the brightly lit stage to the woman resting comfortably against him, and for once he made no attempt to think any farther ahead.
Across the city, Peter Halpern was getting better.
Nathan had been careful not to say so too early.
For the better part of two days he had resisted the temptation each time Mrs Halpern searched his face for reassurance, because one improved temperature reading meant very little, a quieter cough could reverse itself before supper, and children possessed the irritating habit of appearing remarkably healthy shortly before reminding physicians why optimism ought to be rationed. By the following morning, however, the evidence had accumulated sufficiently that caution no longer required pretending not to see what was happening.
The hospital had already been awake for hours by the time Nathan settled himself at the end of Peter's narrow bed. Hospitals, he had discovered long ago, shared something with railway stations in that there was no hour at which they truly slept; night merely altered the people moving through them. Nurses handed responsibilities to nurses, orderlies carried basins and linen, breakfast appeared for patients who wanted it and patients who did not, and physicians arriving fresh encountered colleagues who had been awake long enough to resent them for looking rested.
Peter's chart rested across one of Nathan's knees, one hand holding the pages steady while the other moved a pencil down the columns of observations recorded since his admission. Temperature, pulse, respirations, appetite, sleep, coughing, colour, fluids taken and urine passed were mundane measurements individually, the ordinary arithmetic by which a sick human being was translated into something several physicians could understand without standing beside the same bed at once.
Together they told him precisely what his eyes had already told him when he entered the ward.
Peter's fever was easing.
Not dramatically and not miraculously.
That distinction mattered.
The boy remained pale, his brown hair had acquired the stubborn disorder of someone who had spent too much time against a pillow, and fatigue still sat heavily around his eyes. His cough remained, although it came less frequently and with less force than the day before, while his breathing had lost some of the shallow haste Nathan had heard during the first examination. A breakfast tray sat nearby bearing evidence of a partial victory over toast and porridge, and there had been no sudden recovery, no inexplicable transformation capable of drawing attention from every physician in the hospital.
Peter had simply begun doing what physicians desperately wanted a patient to do.
He was winning.
Everyone around the bed believed the boy's own body was responsible.
They were almost entirely correct.
Nathan had not removed the infection when he first touched Peter. Doing so would have been scientifically useless and dangerously conspicuous; an eight-year-old boy entering with fever and respiratory illness only to become perfectly well after an English physician placed a hand against his forehead would have generated questions Nathan had no intention of answering. Instead Nathan had altered almost nothing while changing just enough. The virus still existed, Peter's immune system still had to recognise it, answer it and clear it, fever still came from the boy and every ordinary test available to the hospital would show nothing except a child apparently mounting an effective natural response.
Nathan had merely made the contest less unfair.
A microscopic interference here, a denied replication there, a slight advantage granted to cells that would otherwise have been overwhelmed; nothing foreign remained behind, nothing that could be isolated later and traced to him. Peter's body had been given room to fight, and now it was using that room enthusiastically.
"Well, you're becoming considerably less interesting," Nathan murmured as he turned the page and compared the morning observations against those from the previous evening, lowering the chart slightly when Peter looked at him with immediate suspicion.
"Is that bad?" Peter asked from beneath the blanket, shifting against the pillow.
"Professionally? Devastating. Personally, I'm delighted," Nathan replied while inspecting him over the edge of the chart, and Peter's mother, seated beside the bed with a book closed upon her lap, tried unsuccessfully not to smile.
"Because I'm getting better?" Peter asked.
"Because you're making me look clever," Nathan answered, only for Peter's immediate response to wipe the satisfaction from his face.
"You didn't do anything," Peter said, and Mrs Halpern covered a laugh with one hand while Nathan stared at the boy in wounded disbelief.
"I have crossed an ocean, spent an unreasonable amount of time asking you irritating questions, listened to your chest repeatedly and endured sustained criticism concerning my treatment of your hair," Nathan informed him as he lowered the chart onto his knee. "This is the gratitude I receive."
"You messed it up," Peter replied while touching the hair in question.
"It required examination."
"No it didn't."
"Still suspicious, I see."
"I'm eight," Peter said, as though age settled the matter.
"Yes, you've used that defence before," Nathan replied, and Peter's smile gave him considerably more satisfaction than he allowed onto his own face.
Two days earlier even talking for long had tired the child. Now he possessed enough strength to argue, enough interest to follow jokes and enough annoyance to care about his hair.
Nathan reached forward and rested two fingers lightly against Peter's wrist, outwardly counting the pulse while deliberately resisting the far easier method available to him. Red-Light could have given him a living map of the boy beneath his fingertips, but there was value in forcing himself to remain a physician whenever a physician was sufficient.
"Better," Nathan said after checking his watch and releasing Peter's wrist, making another notation before looking toward Mrs Halpern. "His temperature is coming down, his breathing is easier, he's taking food again and apparently his capacity for insolence has recovered completely. Another couple of days here, assuming nothing changes, and I see no reason he shouldn't go home."
"Truly?" Mrs Halpern asked as relief loosened something visible across her face and shoulders.
"Assuming he continues as he is," Nathan replied, turning toward her rather than disguising the qualification. "I don't want to send him home merely because he's had one good morning. Let us have another day or two without the fever returning, make certain his lungs remain clear and see that he can get out of that bed without discovering the floor has developed an unexpected attraction for him. After that, home will probably do him more good than we can."
"I can walk now," Peter objected.
"You can barely tolerate sitting upright for breakfast," Nathan replied.
"I ate all of it."
"You ate half."
"Most."
Nathan looked toward Mrs Halpern.
"Half," she confirmed.
"Mother corroborates physician. Case closed," Nathan said.
"I ate the toast," Peter protested.
"One piece."
"There were two."
"Precisely."
"I ate some porridge."
"You moved some porridge," Nathan replied, and Peter sank farther into the pillow with all the injured dignity available to an eight-year-old.
Around them, however, the ward was not improving with him.
A harsh, wet cough came from three beds away, followed by the quick scrape of a chair and a nurse's low instruction for the patient to lean forward. Nathan's amusement disappeared almost imperceptibly as his attention shifted. A young man sat hunched over a basin, shoulders trembling beneath his hospital shirt while a physician supported him from one side and a nurse held cloth near his mouth. What he brought up was no longer merely thin sputum. Frothy fluid clung to the basin, faintly pink in places, and even from several beds away Nathan could hear the unpleasant bubbling beneath the man's next attempt at breath.
Another physician was already moving toward them.
Nobody ran.
Hospitals taught people not to run unless running genuinely altered the outcome.
Nathan watched long enough to know he was not required there, then lowered his eyes to the stack of charts beside him.
Peter was getting better.
Others were not.
That difference had become the centre of Nathan's work.
The hospital no longer felt to him as it had upon his arrival. On the first day every bed had been an individual question and every cough potentially important because he did not yet know which observations deserved weight. Now faces had become familiar, and patterns had begun emerging from the noise.
Not certainty.
Nathan distrusted certainty acquired this quickly.
But enough repetition existed that he had spent much of the previous night reorganising his notes rather than sleeping. Age, onset, temperature, muscular pain, headache, respiratory involvement, time between the first recognised symptom and serious deterioration, occupation, known contacts, household illness, school absence, workplace absence, colour changes, pneumonic involvement, recovery and death had all found their way into his tables.
Dr Whitaker entered the ward carrying another folder beneath one arm, his spectacles once again sitting slightly crooked upon his nose. Nathan had privately concluded that the spectacles were not badly fitted; Whitaker simply possessed a face apparently determined to reject symmetry.
"You're still here," Whitaker said as he approached Peter's bed, glancing first toward the boy and then toward the charts occupying the empty portion beside Nathan.
"I've been accused of persistence," Nathan replied as he accepted the folder Whitaker offered.
"By whom?"
"Almost everyone."
"Six more from this morning. Two admitted overnight, four examined and sent home with instructions," Whitaker explained, tapping the folder. "I had copies made because I assumed you'd become unbearable if we didn't."
"You learn quickly," Nathan said approvingly.
"I've had incentive."
The first patient was twenty-six.
The second thirty-one.
The third nineteen.
Nathan's pencil stopped.
He turned another page.
Twenty-eight.
Then thirty-five.
Then twenty-two.
He read the summaries without speaking, turning each sheet slowly before returning to the first. The ages alone proved nothing. Six cases were not epidemiology; they were six people. Yet the distribution repeated what had increasingly bothered him in the larger collection.
"You're doing that thing again," Whitaker said while watching Nathan's face.
"What thing?"
"The one where you stop making jokes."
"I make jokes," Nathan replied, finally lifting his eyes.
"Exactly."
"He does," Peter contributed from the bed.
"Thank you, Peter."
"They're not very good," Peter added, and Whitaker coughed into his fist to disguise a laugh while Nathan's expression flattened.
"You see what prolonged hospitalisation does to children?" Nathan asked as he rose from the end of the bed and gathered the charts beneath one arm. "Another reason to discharge him as soon as medically responsible."
Peter grinned.
Nathan moved with Whitaker several steps away from the bed. Sister Donnelly joined them near the central table, setting down another observation sheet before glancing toward the patient being attended across the ward.
"His breathing's worse," Donnelly said quietly as she nodded toward the young man with the basin.
"I heard," Nathan replied.
"Doctor Ellis thinks pulmonary oedema."
"So do I."
"More?" Donnelly asked when her eyes moved toward the folder in Nathan's hands.
"Six."
"Young?"
Nathan looked at her.
She already knew.
"Mostly," he said.
"You've been circling that since yesterday," Whitaker observed as he leaned one hip against the table.
"I've been refusing to say it until I had enough reason," Nathan replied while arranging several charts across the table.
"And now?"
"I think we're looking at influenza," Nathan said, keeping his voice low enough that the declaration remained among the physicians and nurses immediately around him. "But I don't think we should make the mistake of hearing that word and deciding we already understand what follows."
"A new strain?" Whitaker asked.
"Something new enough that our expectations may be more dangerous than useful," Nathan replied, drawing another page beside the first. "Ordinary seasonal influenza gives us patterns we're accustomed to seeing. Children suffer, the elderly suffer and people already weakened by other illnesses suffer. Healthy adults become ill as well, obviously, but when you're asking who is most likely to die or develop serious complications, you normally expect the extremes of age and the already vulnerable to occupy a great deal of your attention."
Nathan tapped the ages written across several pages. "These are nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-six, twenty-eight, thirty-one and thirty-five. Yesterday we had the warehouse man, the rail-yard worker and several others in much the same range. France gave me enough similar observations to make the question worth carrying across the Atlantic, and what I've seen here has not made it disappear."
"The young adults," Whitaker said as he looked across the ward.
"The people we'd normally expect to tolerate influenza comparatively well," Nathan answered. "Not exclusively. Peter is eight and he's clearly had it, while older patients have it as well. I'm not suggesting some magical boundary at eighteen and forty because disease isn't that courteous. I'm saying the distribution is wrong enough to deserve our attention."
"And some of the younger ones are the ones going bad quickly," Donnelly said.
"Precisely."
"Why?" Whitaker asked after removing his spectacles and rubbing at the bridge of his nose.
"I don't know," Nathan answered immediately. "I have possibilities, but possibilities are not answers. It may be something about the organism itself, something about the response it provokes, or it may be that we're selecting cases badly and seeing a distorted sample because young adults are arriving only when they're unusually ill. It may be several things acting together. Until we know, I'd rather not dress ignorance in a respectable coat and introduce it as knowledge."
"So what do we do?" Donnelly asked.
"Watch everything," Nathan replied.
"That's broad."
"It's meant to be," Nathan said as he leaned over the table and turned one sheet so both could see it. "If this is a form of influenza we haven't encountered before, then calling it influenza must not become permission to assume it will behave like the influenza we know. Record the things that seem trivial. Record how quickly fever rises, whether pain precedes respiratory symptoms, whether the cough begins dry and changes, when sputum appears, colour, confusion, bleeding, stomach or bowel complaints, anything neurological, anything unusual about the skin and anything patients mention repeatedly even if it doesn't fit what we expect."
"Everything," Whitaker repeated.
"Anything that repeats," Nathan corrected. "We don't need three pages documenting that Mr Collins dislikes hospital porridge unless five other patients independently declare war upon the same breakfast."
"Given the porridge, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility," Donnelly replied.
"Then we shall establish a separate column," Nathan said with perfect seriousness.
"You see? Jokes again," Whitaker observed.
"I feel safer," Nathan replied before resting one hand against the table. "Most importantly, don't dismiss something because influenza isn't supposed to do it. We haven't seen this before, which means we don't yet know what it's supposed to do. Familiar names are useful until they become blinders."
A coughing fit interrupted him.
The patient several beds away bent sharply forward, and this time the basin received more pink froth. Ellis called for assistance, and Sister Donnelly was moving before the words had fully left his mouth, crossing the ward with another nurse beside her while Whitaker followed a moment later.
Nathan remained by the table, his eyes tracking the patient.
Young.
Twenty-nine, if he remembered correctly.
A labourer.
Strong before illness.
Fever less than two days.
Now struggling to draw air through lungs increasingly incapable of exchanging it.
Nathan looked down at the chart.
That was the part he disliked most.
Not because he had never seen rapid deterioration before. He had seen bodies fail with appalling speed in Africa, Europe and laboratories where the very purpose of the experiment had been to discover how failure occurred. What disturbed him here was the contrast. Influenza was familiar enough that people treated its name as reassurance. Everyone had heard of it, most had suffered something resembling it, and fever, aching, cough and several miserable days in bed usually ended in recovery.
A familiar name could hide an unfamiliar threat.
"Professor?" Peter called from behind him, and Nathan looked around to find the boy watching him while Mrs Halpern spoke quietly with a nurse near the ward entrance.
Nathan returned to the bed.
"You've got that face again," Peter said as Nathan sat near his feet, the boy's eyes moving from him toward the physicians surrounding the other patient.
"What face?"
"The worried one."
"I don't have a worried face," Nathan replied.
"You do."
"How unfortunate."
"Is he going to die?" Peter asked as his bravado faded.
"I don't know," Nathan answered after following his gaze, refusing the easy lie. "But there are several people around him working very hard to make sure he doesn't. That's what matters right now."
Peter remained quiet for a moment before his eyes moved toward the charts Nathan had left on the table. "You said it's flu."
"I said I believe it's a kind of influenza," Nathan replied.
"Should I be worried?" Peter asked as he pulled the blanket slightly higher.
Nathan's expression softened.
"No, you shouldn't be worried," he said, leaning slightly closer and resting one forearm across his knee.
"But you said it's different."
"It is."
"And that man—"
"Is not you," Nathan replied gently. "Listen to me, Peter. Your fever is falling, your pulse is better than yesterday, you're breathing more easily, you've started eating properly despite your criminal attempt to redefine half a breakfast as most of one, and everything I'm seeing tells me your body is handling this very well."
Peter watched him carefully while Nathan placed two fingers against his wrist again.
"You've already done the difficult part," Nathan continued. "Now we're going to keep watching you for another couple of days because physicians are suspicious creatures and I don't trust a disease merely because it appears to be leaving. If everything continues the way it is now, you'll go home."
"Really?" Peter asked as hope entered cautiously.
"Really."
"When?"
"A couple of days."
"Two?"
"Perhaps."
"Three?"
"Possibly."
"Four?"
"You're negotiating badly," Nathan replied while narrowing his eyes, and Peter's faint smile returned.
Nathan squeezed the boy's wrist once before releasing it.
"You're going to be all right," he said.
The words were stronger than he would ordinarily have permitted himself, but Nathan knew more than the chart did. Beneath Peter's skin, beyond anything Whitaker, Donnelly or Mrs Halpern could see, the balance had already shifted. The infection remained, but its opportunities were narrowing. Peter's own immune response was established and effective, the tiny advantages Nathan had granted it accumulating into something that now required almost no further intervention. Unless another complication appeared, the boy would recover.
Naturally, as far as anyone else would ever know.
"Can I go to school when I get home?" Peter asked after settling back against the pillow, and Nathan stared at him long enough that the boy became confused.
"Peter, I have spent the last two days attempting to save you from illness, and your first ambition upon recovery is to return voluntarily to school?" Nathan asked with grave concern.
"My friends are there."
"Ah. That explains the lapse in judgment."
"And I like school."
"We may need another examination," Nathan replied, and Peter laughed hard enough that the laugh became a cough halfway through.
Nathan's hand moved instinctively toward his shoulder, but Peter recovered quickly, drew another breath and waved him away with the offended dignity of someone who had already been declared nearly well. Nathan watched his colour, then his breathing, and allowed himself to relax when both settled normally.
Mrs Halpern returned to the bedside, and Nathan rose to give her the chair.
"He's trying to negotiate his discharge," Nathan told her as she sat beside her son.
"Already?" Mrs Halpern asked with a smile.
"He lacks subtlety."
"I said two days," Peter protested.
"You asked two days," Nathan corrected.
"Same thing."
"It absolutely is not."
"Listen to the professor," Mrs Halpern said as she took her son's hand, and Peter sighed with the exaggerated suffering of a child who had discovered the adults had formed an alliance.
Nathan collected the charts and stepped away.
Behind him Peter immediately began telling his mother that Professor Drake had said he was going to be all right, investing Nathan's words with the absolute authority children sometimes gave adults when they desperately wanted the adult to be correct.
Nathan heard it.
His steps slowed.
Only for a moment.
Then another cough sounded from across the ward, deeper and wetter than the last, and Nathan's attention returned to the living problem surrounding him.
He moved back to the central table and opened the newest chart.
Twenty-four years old.
Healthy before onset.
Fever yesterday.
Severe respiratory distress this morning.
Nathan drew his own sheet nearer and wrote the age into the growing column before adding onset, temperature and respiratory involvement, then compared the line with those immediately above it.
Nineteen.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-six.
Twenty-eight.
Thirty-one.
Thirty-five.
Not all severe.
Not all identical.
Not enough.
But something.
"He's holding, for now," Whitaker said when he returned from the labourer's bed several minutes later, his face telling Nathan enough before the words did.
Nathan nodded and slid one of the charts toward him.
"Another one," Whitaker murmured when he saw the age.
"Yes."
For a moment the two physicians stood without speaking, listening to the ward breathe around them.
"How long before you're satisfied?" Whitaker eventually asked as he gestured toward the ages, columns and accumulated pages.
"With what?" Nathan replied.
"That it's real. Whatever you're seeing."
"Those are two different questions," Nathan said as he rested both hands against the edge of the table. "I'm satisfied there's something worth taking seriously now. I'm not satisfied I understand it."
"And when will you be?"
"Possibly never."
"Comforting," Whitaker replied with a tired half-smile.
"It should be."
"Why?"
"Because the dangerous physician is usually the one who becomes satisfied too soon," Nathan answered.
Nathan looked across the ward. A nurse was helping an older woman drink, Ellis remained beside the labourer, Peter had closed his eyes while his mother read, and two beds farther down a young woman was attempting to convince a nurse that she could stand without assistance and being informed with considerable firmness that she could demonstrate this revolutionary ability later.
Ordinary people.
That remained important.
Nathan had spent years working with organisms, mechanisms, containment systems and the terrible convenience of words such as cases, subjects and fatalities. They were necessary words because medicine could not function if every chart became a biography, but the arithmetic had to lead back here. A twenty-four-year-old entry in a column was somebody who had expected to be elsewhere today. A twenty-nine-year-old labourer struggling to breathe had probably possessed plans for the week. Peter wanted to return to school because his friends were there.
"Send word to the other hospitals," Nathan said as he looked down at the page again. "Not an alarm. A request."
"For what?" Whitaker asked as he reached for a blank sheet.
"Age, onset and severity on anything they're calling influenza, grippe, unexplained pneumonia or acute respiratory fever," Nathan replied while indicating the columns he wanted. "I want the cases they sent home as well as the admissions if they kept records."
"That's a great deal."
"Yes."
"And if they ask why?"
"Tell them an irritating Englishman is attempting to prove himself wrong," Nathan replied.
"That might actually work."
"It usually does."
"What are you trying to prove wrong?" Whitaker asked while looking again at the cluster of young ages.
"That this is selective," Nathan said. "Hospitals lie without intending to. We see the people frightened enough or sick enough to come through the door. If a hundred older people are home in bed recovering perfectly well and twenty young people come here because they're frighteningly ill, our ward makes the disease look younger than it is. I want to know what's outside the ward."
"You're mapping it."
"Trying to," Nathan replied before his pencil began moving again. "Ask whether employers have reported unusual absence as well. Rail yards, warehouses, factories, schools. Nothing elaborate. I don't need a census. I need to know whether ten men from the same workplace became ill within forty-eight hours and nobody thought it worth mentioning because only two came here."
"Across Chicago?"
"Temporarily," Nathan replied, and Whitaker recognised enough of the answer to shake his head before returning to his notes.
France sat in one portion of Nathan's mind.
Chicago in another.
Kansas waited beyond both.
He still refused to connect them simply because connection was tempting. That was how people manufactured discoveries from coincidences, and Nathan had spent too much of his life watching intelligent men fall in love with elegant answers to excuse himself from the same danger.
But he no longer believed Chicago could be dismissed as ordinary seasonal noise.
Something was here.
He had touched it.
He had taken the smallest possible portion of it into himself and held it apart from Red-Light rather than allowing the vast biological machinery inside him to consume or overwrite it. He knew it was viral. He knew enough of its behaviour to understand why Peter's cells had struggled.
What he did not yet know was the shape of the event around it.
One infected child did not explain a city.
Six young adults did not explain a continent.
France did not explain Kansas.
Kansas did not explain Chicago.
Not yet.
"Professor, have you eaten?" a nurse asked as she passed the table, slowing just enough to look at him with the particular suspicion Nathan seemed to inspire in women responsible for keeping other people alive.
Nathan looked up, and for one irrational instant the question was so familiar in structure that he expected Mrs Hargreaves to be standing in Chicago.
"I had breakfast," he replied while the nurse's expression immediately made it clear she did not believe him.
"Why does nobody believe me when I say that?" Nathan asked, turning toward Whitaker for support.
"Experience?" Whitaker replied without looking up from the papers.
Nathan stared at him.
Whitaker kept reading.
Nathan reached for the cup of coffee somebody had left near the end of the table, discovered it was cold and drank it anyway.
"That doesn't count," the nurse said as she watched him.
Nathan stared at her.
She walked away before he could answer.
Whitaker's shoulders moved once.
"Don't," Nathan warned while placing the cup down.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
"Perhaps."
Nathan looked toward Peter's bed and discovered the boy awake again, watching him with a smile.
"Not a word," Nathan told him while pointing the pencil in his direction.
Peter's smile widened.
For several minutes the ward possessed a strange equilibrium. One patient improved, another held precariously, nurses changed bedding and temperatures, physicians wrote orders, families waited, and the city beyond the windows continued with no knowledge that a handful of people inside this room were beginning to suspect an ordinary word might be concealing something less ordinary.
Nathan bent over the charts.
Knowing precisely what occupied Peter's cells did not tell him which train had brought it to Chicago, which household had passed it onward, how many mild infections never reached a hospital, whether France represented the same chain or merely a related one, or whether Kansas would confirm everything and overturn half of it simultaneously.
Biology was never only biology once people began moving.
It became railways, ships, barracks, factories, schools, families and cities.
Nathan looked toward the window and wondered briefly whether Joseph had obeyed his instruction to do absolutely nothing useful.
Almost certainly not in the manner Nathan intended.
A faint smile touched his face.
"Jokes again?" Whitaker asked when he noticed.
"No," Nathan replied.
"Thinking about something?"
"Someone."
"Your enormous friend?" Whitaker asked, and Nathan's smile became more apparent.
"He'll be offended you described him so reductively."
"He frightened the receptionist yesterday."
"He wasn't even wearing armour," Nathan replied before realising what he had said.
Whitaker stopped reading.
Nathan looked down at the chart.
"Armour?" Whitaker asked after a beat of silence.
"Occupational eccentricity," Nathan replied without looking up.
Whitaker stared at him.
Nathan turned a page.
"You cannot say something like that and then continue reading," Whitaker protested.
"I just did."
"What does he do?"
"Security."
"For whom?"
"Me," Nathan answered, and Whitaker's expression suggested the answer had produced substantially more questions than it resolved.
"Influenza," Nathan reminded him while pointing toward the papers.
Whitaker stared for another second before looking down with the resignation of a man beginning to understand why Joseph had threatened to make Nathan walk to Kansas.
The ward carried on around them.
Peter slept for part of the afternoon.
The labourer did not improve.
Two more suspected cases arrived.
Nathan examined both.
One was a woman of thirty-three who worked in a laundry and insisted she had felt entirely well until the previous evening, though careful questioning established that she had complained of aching shoulders before noon and gone home early because she could not keep warm. The other was a nineteen-year-old clerk whose mother answered half the questions until Nathan politely began directing them to the young man himself.
Neither case proved anything.
Both went onto the chart.
By late afternoon the pages on the central table had multiplied enough that Sister Donnelly threatened to move Nathan bodily if he occupied any more of the nurses' working space.
"You would need assistance," Nathan told her while shifting his papers anyway.
"I have an entire hospital," Donnelly replied, gesturing around them.
Nathan looked around.
She did.
"Fair," he conceded while gathering the final stack and moving to a smaller desk near the windows.
Chicago outside had changed with the hour. The light had warmed, smoke hung between buildings beyond the hospital grounds and traffic below moved in intermittent streams. Somewhere in that city Joseph and Helen were perhaps eating, walking or discovering whether Joseph could survive an entire day without treating leisure as an operational failure.
Nathan hoped so.
Then a patient coughed.
His attention returned immediately.
There would be time to torment Joseph later.
He bent over the next chart.
Twenty-seven.
Healthy before onset.
Sudden fever.
Severe muscular pain.
Dry cough becoming productive.
Nathan wrote carefully.
He had no intention of leaving Chicago with the question answered merely enough to satisfy curiosity. Nathan did not like unanswered questions, but he disliked poorly answered ones even more.
"Professor?" Peter called from his bed, his voice stronger than it had been the day before, and Nathan looked up immediately.
"What is it?" Nathan asked, setting his pencil against the page.
"Are you still here?" Peter asked as he watched him from beneath the blanket.
Nathan glanced theatrically toward the room around him. "Apparently."
"Don't you have a home?" Peter asked with complete sincerity, and Mrs Halpern, seated beside him again, slowly closed her eyes.
Nathan stared at the boy.
Whitaker laughed somewhere behind him.
"Peter, I have just revised my opinion concerning your recovery," Nathan replied as he slowly placed his pencil on the desk.
Peter grinned.
His mother apologised through a smile.
Nathan picked the pencil back up.
The boy was going home.
Across the ward, others were still fighting for the same privilege, and Nathan intended to make certain as many of them as possible got it. Before he could fight something properly, however, he had to understand what it was, how it moved, who it struck and which assumptions it punished.
Outside, Chicago continued into evening as though nothing had changed. Streetcars rang beneath the hospital windows, factories worked through their shifts, children went home from school, men left warehouses and rail yards, families sat down to supper and somewhere a person coughed and thought nothing of it.
Nathan drew another line across the chart, studied the figures gathering beneath his hand and then drew another.
He kept working.