The lake remained with them for longer than Joseph expected.
Even after the shoreline itself had begun disappearing behind the first ranks of buildings, there were places where the streets opened eastward and gave them another glimpse of blue between brick façades, a narrow strip of Lake Michigan shining beneath the late-morning sun as though it had followed them inland to make certain Joseph did not escape without reconsidering his opinion of it. Helen noticed the first time he looked back and smiled but said nothing. She had moved closer to him as the pavement became busier, her left arm threaded through his while her bare right hand remained in his, and Joseph found that holding hands made negotiating Chicago pedestrians rather less efficient than usual. He was accustomed to moving through crowds by choosing a path several people ahead and taking it before anybody else realised it existed; Helen had no such military objection to being delayed by a woman stopping suddenly outside a shop window or by three men occupying the whole pavement while arguing over a newspaper. Twice Joseph started towards an opening only to feel Helen's arm tighten around his and remember that he was no longer moving alone.
The city they returned to was not quite the city they had left an hour earlier. The morning had matured while they were beside the water. Shop awnings had been put out, doors stood open, and the streets were crowded enough now that the different kinds of traffic no longer seemed willing to tolerate one another. A streetcar came clanging through an intersection with the confidence of something running on rails and therefore certain everybody else ought to move; a delivery wagon turned across its path while the driver twisted around to shout at somebody behind him, earning an angry bell and several remarks from pedestrians who had opinions on the competence of both men. Motorcars squeezed wherever the horses left room, horns sounding in short irritated bursts, while cyclists appeared to Joseph to regard the gaps between all of them as invitations. Overhead, wires crossed the street in dark lines against the clear sky. Below them, the pavement carried clerks, labourers, women with shopping baskets, children being hurried somewhere by mothers who had plainly begun the journey with more patience than they now possessed, and soldiers whose uniforms had become common enough in the city that people no longer turned automatically to look.
Helen knew how to move through all of it without seeming to think about it. She drew Joseph across one street half a moment before the flow of wagons closed again, waited at another where he would have crossed, and took a narrower side of the pavement when a shopkeeper began carrying boxes through his doorway. Joseph allowed himself to be guided because it amused her and because, after several days in Chicago, he had learned that an American city had its own small rhythms which were easier to follow than challenge.
"You see?" Helen said as they reached the opposite pavement ahead of a wagon that Joseph had privately believed they could have beaten by several seconds. She gave his hand a satisfied squeeze before steering him around two women examining vegetables outside a grocer's. "Useful."
"I haven't denied that you're useful," Joseph replied, looking back once at the wagon as it passed behind them. Its driver sat hunched beneath a cap with a cigarette in one corner of his mouth, entirely unaware that he had just been made evidence in a disagreement.
"You've implied it repeatedly," Helen said, and she had to move nearer Joseph when a boy carrying a stack of newspapers came hurrying between them and the shopfront. The boy called the morning's headlines without breaking stride, his voice already hoarse from doing it for several blocks, and Helen waited until he was past before continuing. "I have shown you restaurants, the theatre, the lake, how not to be killed crossing a street—"
"I had that last one reasonably well mastered."
"Not in Chicago."
Joseph glanced down at her. "Are the streets substantially more dangerous here?"
"To Englishmen who distrust lakes, yes."
He smiled and let her pull him around the corner.
There was something comforting in allowing the conversation to remain ordinary. The station was still some distance away; the train farther away still. So long as they were walking through Lake View with the sun warm on their coats and Helen occasionally stopping to point out something she believed Joseph had failed to appreciate properly, it was possible to pretend that they were continuing the morning rather than ending it.
Joseph knew better.
He had always possessed a good sense of direction, and Chicago's long streets made self-deception difficult. Every turn took them farther from the lake. Every block put more buildings between them and the water. The cleaner breeze that had followed them from the shore weakened until the city reclaimed the air entirely, coal smoke settling beneath the warmer smell of bread, coffee, horses, dust and motor exhaust. Even the sunlight changed. Beside the lake it had fallen across them unobstructed; here it came and went as they passed beneath awnings and between buildings, warming Joseph's open black coat for half a block before leaving them in cool shadow again.
Helen must have felt the same gradual change because her conversation became less continuous as they walked. Not silent, exactly. She still pointed out a shop whose proprietor, according to her, charged too much for everything except coffee, and she still made Joseph look at a building he had passed twice without noticing because the stonework above the windows was worth seeing. But spaces began appearing between those remarks, and when they did, Helen held his hand a little more firmly.
Neither mentioned why.
They passed a café where the door stood open to the street and the smell of frying food reminded Joseph, with renewed force, that he had not eaten. Helen felt his pace alter by perhaps half a step and immediately followed his eyes towards the doorway.
"No," she said, and instead of allowing the word to stand alone she tugged him onward before he could decide whether the café deserved investigation. "You don't have time to sit down now, and if I let you buy something you'll attempt to eat it while walking and call that breakfast."
Joseph looked back regretfully at the open door. "I wasn't planning anything."
"You slowed down."
"There was food."
"Exactly."
"I haven't eaten."
"I know," Helen said, giving him the look of somebody who had already exhausted her sympathy on the subject. They stepped aside to allow a man carrying two wooden crates to emerge from a doorway, and she waited until he had gone before drawing Joseph back into the flow of pedestrians. "Whose fault is that?"
Joseph considered blaming Nathan.
Helen saw it happen.
"Don't say Professor Drake."
"I didn't."
"You were about to."
"You can't possibly know that."
"I've known you for several days now."
"An extensive study."
"Long enough to know that when you become quiet before answering, you're inventing something."
Joseph glanced down at her. "That's a worrying amount of confidence."
Helen smiled, though the smile faded slightly when she looked ahead again. "You'll eat at the station."
"I promised."
"You did."
"I generally keep promises."
"I know."
That last answer was quieter.
Joseph felt her fingers move between his and closed his hand around them.
They crossed another street.
The lake did not appear again.
A little farther inland they passed two young American soldiers coming the opposite way. Joseph noticed them before Helen did, not because there was anything particularly remarkable about either man but because uniforms still caught his attention automatically. Both looked young. One might have been twenty; the other perhaps a year or two older. Their uniforms were clean enough that Joseph doubted either had been overseas, and one carried a small parcel under his arm while the other was speaking around a cigarette he had not yet lit.
The taller of the two looked at Joseph.
Then at Helen.
Then at their joined hands.
His companion followed the glance.
Whatever passed between the soldiers was small enough that another man might have ignored it: the slightest lift of an eyebrow, a turn at one corner of the mouth, the first man murmuring something too low for Helen to hear.
Joseph heard enough.
His head turned.
Helen felt the change in him before she understood its cause. His stride had not altered, nor had his grip tightened enough to hurt, but something in the ease of him disappeared. She followed his gaze and saw the soldiers just as they drew level.
"Don't," she said quietly, keeping hold of his hand and pulling his arm closer against her side rather than allowing him to slow. The soldiers passed them without incident, one glancing back once before his companion said something that made him laugh.
Joseph looked over his shoulder.
Helen tugged his hand.
He faced forward again.
"I wasn't going to do anything," he said, and the fact that he had turned almost completely around while saying it weakened the defence considerably.
"I didn't say you were," Helen replied, guiding him around a woman standing in the middle of the pavement while searching through her handbag. She waited until they were clear before looking up at him. "I said don't."
"That's generally what people say when they think someone is about to do something."
"I've seen your face when you aren't about to do something."
Joseph raised an eyebrow.
Helen nodded towards him. "That wasn't it."
He looked back once more, though the soldiers had already disappeared into the crowd.
Helen bumped her shoulder against his arm. "They're boys."
"I know."
"And you're twice the size of either of them."
"That wasn't my concern."
"What did he say?"
Joseph was quiet for a moment. The remark had not been worth repeating. It had been the ordinary kind of vulgar observation young men made when they saw a woman they found attractive with a man they assumed would not hear them. Joseph had heard worse before breakfast in the Army.
"Nothing worth your hearing," he said eventually, and he accompanied the answer by lifting her hand slightly as they stepped over a broken section of pavement, his attention returning to her rather than the men behind them.
Helen studied his face for another second and accepted that. "Then it isn't worth yours either."
Joseph looked down at her.
She raised her eyebrows.
He sighed. "You're becoming very authoritative."
"I teach children."
"I'm not a child."
"No, you're much larger. The principle appears similar."
Joseph gave her a long look.
Helen smiled and continued walking.
He allowed the matter to die.
It surprised him, slightly, that he could.
There had been a time when a stranger's careless words might have remained with him for an hour, not because they hurt but because his mind was trained to measure threat, intent and consequence. Now the soldiers disappeared behind them and were simply gone. Helen's hand remained in his. The sun was warm whenever they crossed an open patch of pavement. Somewhere ahead a streetcar bell rang twice, and a man outside a tobacconist was attempting to sweep dust away from his doorway only to have the wind return it every time he reached the curb.
The morning had better things in it.
They walked several more blocks before Helen began looking towards the road for a motorcar.
Joseph noticed the change immediately. Until then she had looked at buildings, shop windows, pedestrians, occasionally him. Now her attention lingered on passing vehicles.
"We're getting one from here?" he asked, and as he spoke he glanced towards the next intersection, mentally measuring the remaining journey against the time he knew was passing.
Helen nodded. "Unless you'd like to walk all the way to Dearborn," she said, loosening her arm from his so she could step nearer the curb while still holding his hand. "In which case Professor Drake will probably send someone looking for you."
"He has someone."
Helen turned back.
Joseph lifted their joined hands slightly.
For a moment she looked puzzled.
Then she laughed.
"That was terrible."
"It was accurate."
"It was terrible and accurate."
Joseph watched her raise her free hand towards an approaching motorcar for hire. "You've become very critical."
"I have high standards."
"So I've discovered."
The first vehicle was already occupied and passed them without slowing. Helen stepped back from the curb as a wagon came through behind it, the horse's hooves striking the road in a steady rhythm while its driver sat hunched over the reins. Dust lifted briefly in its wake. Joseph moved Helen farther back with a hand at her waist before the rear wheel came close to the gutter.
She looked down at his hand.
Joseph removed it.
"You know," Helen said, turning towards him while they waited for another vehicle, "I really have managed to survive this city without you."
"I've heard."
"For four years."
"So you keep saying."
"Without being crushed by a single wagon."
"Remarkable."
Helen elbowed him lightly in the ribs.
Joseph barely moved.
She frowned at the disappointing result and did it again with slightly more determination.
He looked down at her.
"Did that help?"
"A little."
"I felt nothing."
"You're insufferable."
"Apparently."
A second motorcar appeared farther along the street. Helen lifted her arm again, and this time the driver saw her, slowing with a cough of the engine before drawing towards the curb. The vehicle was dark, practical and already dusty along the lower bodywork, its paint carrying the small scratches of something used for work rather than display. The driver leaned across to push the passenger door open.
Joseph reached it before Helen did.
He opened the door fully and stood aside.
Helen paused.
"What?" he asked, one hand still on the door while pedestrians flowed around them.
"Nothing," she said, and the little smile that followed made him suspicious. "Very gallant."
"I opened a door."
"I know."
"You've seen me do that before."
"I know."
Joseph waited.
Helen climbed in without explaining further.
He shook his head and followed.
The rear compartment was narrow enough that Joseph immediately became aware it had not been designed with him in mind. He had to angle one knee slightly towards the door, and when Helen settled beside him their shoulders touched even though there was technically room between them. The leather seat was warm where the sun had reached it through the window, carrying the faint smells of dust, old tobacco and whatever polish had been used on the interior.
The driver glanced back.
"Where to?"
"Dearborn Station. Polk and Dearborn," Joseph said, leaning forward enough to make himself heard over the engine. As he settled back, the words seemed to alter the inside of the motorcar more effectively than any announcement could have done.
Helen looked out of the window.
The driver engaged the motor, and the vehicle pulled away from the curb.
For the first several blocks they said little.
Chicago moved past them instead.
The motorcar joined a street already crowded with wagons and other vehicles, forcing the driver into a pattern of acceleration and sudden restraint that made Helen brace one hand against the seat the first time he stopped sharply behind a streetcar. Joseph's arm moved instinctively across her before the halt had finished, not quite touching her but there if she pitched forward.
Helen looked at it.
Joseph lowered it.
"You really can't help yourself."
"He stopped quickly."
"I noticed."
"You nearly went forward."
"I did not."
"You moved."
"Everyone moved."
Joseph glanced towards the driver. "His fault, then."
The driver either did not hear or wisely pretended not to.
Helen smiled and settled back against the seat.
The city outside the window changed by degrees as they travelled south. Joseph watched streets he had only partly learned slide behind them: shopfronts with painted signs, boarding houses, cafés with chairs visible through broad windows, laundries, druggists, grocers, offices above street-level businesses. American flags hung from windows and façades often enough that the red, white and blue became part of the architecture. War posters appeared on walls and hoardings between advertisements. Men in uniform moved among civilians. Women queued outside one shop while a delivery wagon blocked half the road and forced their driver into an irritated exchange with a man coming the opposite way.
Helen occasionally named something.
Joseph listened.
Sometimes he asked a question. Sometimes the thing was already behind them before she finished explaining it.
The journey had the peculiar quality of retracing a city Joseph had only just begun to know. He recognised intersections without remembering their names. A building would appear familiar because he and Helen had passed it the previous day, then vanish behind them before he could place the memory. Somewhere among those streets was the Bell and Crown. Somewhere farther away was her school. Somewhere north was the apartment building outside which they had stood the night before.
He had known none of them a week earlier.
Soon he would know none of what happened in them after he left.
Helen had been resting both hands in her lap.
After several minutes, one moved across the seat between them.
She did not look at him when she did it.
Her fingers touched the side of his hand.
Joseph looked down.
Helen continued watching the city through the window.
He turned his palm upward.
Her hand slipped into his.
There was no comment from either of them.
Joseph closed his fingers around hers and rested their joined hands between them on the seat. Helen's shoulder remained against his, more deliberately now, and after another block she leaned enough that the side of her upper arm rested along his.
The motorcar jolted over a rough patch in the road.
Their hands tightened together automatically.
Outside, Chicago continued passing.
Helen pointed out a building they had discussed before, then forgot what she had been about to say halfway through the explanation when a group of soldiers crossed in front of the motorcar. Joseph watched them until they reached the opposite pavement, their uniforms disappearing among civilians.
"You always look," she said, and her voice was quiet enough that the driver could not have heard over the engine.
Joseph turned slightly towards her. "At soldiers?"
"Every time."
He considered denying it, then remembered who he was speaking to. "Habit."
Helen watched the last of the men disappear behind them. "Do you miss it?"
Joseph looked out of his own window.
That was not a simple question.
"Parts," he said after a while, his thumb moving slowly over the side of her hand while he thought. "People more than places."
Helen waited.
Joseph offered nothing more.
She nodded once and returned her attention to the window.
The motorcar carried them onward.
That was all.
Joseph looked at her profile for a moment and tightened his hand around hers.
She squeezed back.
The streets grew busier as they approached the centre of the city. Traffic thickened, pedestrians crowded corners waiting for opportunities to cross, and larger buildings began to shut out the sun for longer stretches. Their driver leaned on the horn at a wagon that seemed entirely unmoved by the criticism. Somewhere nearby a train whistle sounded, distant enough that Joseph could not tell from which direction it came.
Helen heard it too.
Her fingers tightened.
Neither mentioned it.
Another whistle came several minutes later.
Then they began seeing travellers.
Not enough at first for Joseph to be certain there was a pattern: a man carrying a valise, a woman with two children and a porter following with luggage, another man hurrying along the pavement with a suitcase in one hand and his hat held down with the other. Then there were more. Baggage carts appeared. Signs associated with railway offices and hotels became more frequent. Smoke lay differently over this part of the city, mixed with the heavier industrial smell Joseph associated with engines and stations.
The journey was becoming a railway journey before the station itself appeared.
Helen stopped pointing things out.
Joseph felt her shoulder settle more firmly against his.
He looked down at their hands.
She had threaded her fingers fully through his.
Joseph turned his hand and held hers more securely.
They passed another intersection.
Helen looked ahead through the front window.
Joseph felt her become still.
Dearborn Station had come into view.
Its brick mass rose at the head of Dearborn Street, the great tower above the surrounding buildings making it difficult to mistake for anything else. Even at a distance the terminal had a gravity of its own. Traffic seemed to feed towards it. Motorcars drew up and pulled away. Wagons carried luggage. Travellers converged from pavements with cases in hand while others emerged in the opposite direction. Steam drifted beyond the buildings nearer the train shed, appearing and disappearing between structures, and somewhere behind the station façade came the muted sounds of whistles and engines.
Helen's fingers tightened around Joseph's.
He did not look at the station immediately.
He looked at her.
She had gone quiet, her eyes fixed ahead. The sunlight entering through the window moved across her face as the motorcar passed between shadow and open street, and Joseph watched the expression she had maintained all morning finally lose some of its ease.
At the lake, the train had been later.
Walking inland, it had been somewhere across the city.
Inside the motorcar, it had been their destination.
Now there was the station.
Brick, glass, smoke, people.
Real.
Joseph rubbed his thumb once over Helen's knuckles.
She looked down at their hands, then at him.
Neither attempted a joke.
The motorcar slowed with the traffic near the terminal, giving them more time than either wanted to watch it grow larger through the window. A porter pushed a laden cart across the road ahead, forcing their driver to stop. A family stood on the pavement nearby surrounded by luggage, the mother trying to keep two children close while their father argued with a driver over a trunk. A soldier kissed an older woman on the cheek before lifting his bag and disappearing towards the entrance. Another woman stood alone beneath the station frontage, reading a letter while people divided around her.
Joseph noticed all of it.
Helen probably did too.
The driver finally found space near the curb and brought the motorcar to a stop.
Joseph paid him before Helen could reach for anything, ignoring the look she gave him as he opened the door and stepped out. The street struck him at once after the enclosed compartment: engines, voices, wheels over pavement, a whistle somewhere beyond the station and the smell of smoke hanging beneath the warmer late-morning air.
He turned and offered Helen his hand.
She took it.
Joseph helped her down.
For a moment she stood close to him on the pavement while he closed the door behind her. The motorcar remained only long enough for the driver to make certain they were clear before pulling back into the traffic and disappearing among the vehicles approaching the station.
Joseph looked towards Dearborn.
Habit took over.
His right hand moved towards his waistcoat pocket.
Helen caught his wrist.
"Don't," she said, and she did not release him after speaking. Her fingers remained wrapped around his wrist above the edge of his glove-less hand, holding it several inches short of the watch chain while she looked up at him. The station tower rose behind her, impossible now to pretend away, but there was still a little distance between where they stood and its doors. "We have time."
Joseph looked at her hand around his wrist.
Then at the station.
Then back at Helen.
He let his hand fall away from the watch.
"All right," he said, turning his wrist within her grasp until he could take her hand instead. He threaded his fingers through hers, and some of the tension left her shoulders when he made no second attempt to check the time.
They began walking towards Dearborn Station.
Slowly.
People passed them in both directions. Porters manoeuvred baggage through the crowd. A boy called newspapers near the curb. Somewhere beneath the great station roof an engine released steam with a distant rushing hiss, and the smell of coal drifted towards the street.
Helen remained beside Joseph, her hand in his.
Joseph did not look at his watch again.
By the time Joseph and Helen entered Dearborn Station, Nathan had already been there long enough for the place to lose the first impression of its great brick mass and become instead a collection of smaller things continually demanding his attention.
He had arrived early, although Nathan would have disputed the word if anyone had accused him of it. He had arrived with sufficient time for something to go wrong without that something becoming his problem, which seemed to him an entirely different principle. A railway journey already depended upon too many people and machines behaving themselves at once. There was no reason to add his own punctuality to the list. The motorcar from the hotel might have broken down, traffic might have thickened around the river, a porter might have misplaced a case, a ticket clerk might have discovered some difficulty that had somehow escaped everybody until the morning of departure. None of those things had happened, and so Nathan had been rewarded for his caution by standing beneath the great clock with his hat on, his medical case beside his leg and enough time remaining to watch Dearborn conduct the ordinary business of sending several hundred people away from Chicago.
The station did not remain still long enough to be observed as a whole. Every few moments something altered the space immediately around him. A porter passed with a baggage cart and people separated before it, closing together again after its iron-rimmed wheels had rattled across the floor. A woman with two children stopped almost directly beneath the clock and began searching through a handbag while the younger child leaned against her skirts and the elder wandered far enough away that she had to interrupt herself twice to call him back. Soldiers appeared everywhere without ever forming a group of their own: one smoking beside his father near the ticket windows, another allowing a young woman to brush lint from his uniform while he watched her rather than what she was doing, another crouched beside a little girl who had brought him something small enough to disappear completely inside his hand. Whenever the doors towards the train shed opened, the station acquired another breath of coal smoke and steam, and beneath the conversation Nathan could hear the deeper workings of the terminal—the clank of couplings, a whistle carried beneath the roof, the distant movement of an engine and, every so often, the hollow closing of a carriage door.
Nathan had been watching the little girl press whatever she held into the soldier's palm when a porter reached for the medical case at his feet.
"Not that one," Nathan said, and he caught the handle before the man's fingers could close around it, drawing it back until the leather touched his trouser leg. The porter had already gathered one of Nathan's smaller cases and stood for a moment with his free hand suspended between them, looking from the case to Nathan as though deciding whether there was something fragile inside worth explaining. Nathan saved him the trouble, turning the medical case so that the handle faced inward before nodding towards the remaining luggage. "This stays with me. The others may go through, including that trunk, although you'll want another pair of hands for it."
The porter looked where Nathan indicated and seemed unconvinced. The trunk was deliberately unremarkable, dull enough in colour and ordinary enough in construction that nobody passing it would have reason to remember it, and the porter approached with the confidence of a man who had moved several hundred such objects and expected this one to differ only in ownership. He bent, took the handle at one end and pulled.
Nothing happened.
Nathan's mouth moved slightly.
The porter adjusted his grip, planted one foot farther back and tried again, this time managing to lift the end several inches before lowering it with considerably greater respect than he had shown it the first time. "Christ," he muttered, breathing through his nose as he straightened, and only then remembered the owner was standing behind him. He looked at Nathan, wiped one palm against his trousers and nodded towards the trunk. "What've you got in there, Professor?"
"Several regrettable decisions," Nathan told him, but he did not leave the joke hanging between them. A second porter had slowed while passing with an empty cart, smiling at his colleague's difficulty, and Nathan caught the man's eye before he could continue. "You may as well come and discover how funny it is from the other end."
The second porter laughed and turned back, surrendering the empty cart beside them before taking one handle while his colleague took the other. Nathan stepped away to give them room, keeping his medical case with him while they counted under their breath and lifted together. Even between two men the trunk came up reluctantly. One of them swore when the weight shifted towards him, the other told him to mind his fingers, and Nathan watched Joseph's armour, weapons and field equipment disappear onto the cart beneath the disguise of thoroughly inconvenient luggage. He had learned years ago that the surest way to make a container interesting was to decorate it with locks and warnings. This trunk had neither. It looked like something belonging to a travelling salesman who packed too many books, and that was precisely what Nathan wanted it to look like.
"Keep it upright," he said once the porters had wedged it between two of his other cases, and while the older man tested the arrangement by pushing against one corner, Nathan stepped nearer and checked that the straps had not caught beneath the wheel. "There is nothing inside that should object to railway travel, but I'd rather not discover what happens when several hundred pounds of luggage develops momentum."
The older porter assured him it would remain upright while leaning his weight into the cart, and his companion gave Nathan a look suggesting that whatever was inside ought to be charged a separate fare. Nathan watched them join the procession moving towards the baggage entrance, the heavy trunk visible for several seconds above the smaller cases before another cart crossed in front of it and it disappeared towards the train.
He was still looking after it when the family beneath the clock moved past him. The elder boy had finally been recovered by his mother and was now carrying a parcel against his chest with the solemn concentration of someone entrusted with something vastly more important than it probably was, while his younger sister dragged a wooden toy behind her by a string. She stumbled when the toy caught between two seams in the floor, recovered before her mother noticed and hurried on after them.
Nathan thought of Peter Halpern.
The connection was immediate enough that for a moment he was no longer watching the girl. He saw Peter instead, pale after three days of fever, struggling into his coat because allowing his mother to help would apparently have undone the entire achievement of surviving influenza. Nathan remembered the boy's knees becoming uncertain when he stepped down, his small body stiffening with indignation the moment Nathan caught him, and then the embrace at the hospital entrance that Nathan had not expected and had been even less prepared to receive.
Peter was home now.
That mattered more than anything Nathan had learned from him.
The medical case pressed against Nathan's fingers as he changed hands, and with the pressure came the reminder that the most important material from Chicago was not inside it. His notes were there, along with instruments and copies of records he wanted immediately available. LeCount would send the remaining observations when they were complete, together with microscopy, cultures and anything else the hospital produced after Nathan's departure. Daniel Walsh and Peter Halpern travelled somewhere considerably safer. Nathan held both within the Red-Light Sea in separate controlled compartments, isolated from one another and, as far as he could make them, isolated from the adaptive machinery of himself. He had gone through them again during the night and once more after waking, not because another examination had been necessary but because the difference between them remained irritatingly small and therefore impossible to trust.
The doors to the train shed opened again and a wash of steam drifted through behind several arriving passengers. Nathan caught the dampness of it against his face and Daniel returned with such physical immediacy that he could almost smell the examination room again: disinfectant, cold masonry, metal, opened tissue and the wet heaviness of lungs that had ceased being capable of doing what lungs were meant to do.
He looked away from the doors.
The comparison had not become clearer because he had repeated it. Portions of Daniel's infection had attached somewhat more readily to the controlled human respiratory cells Nathan exposed them to, and some continued reproducing under ordinary cellular resistance that checked Peter's material more effectively. Other portions behaved almost identically. There had been no clean division, no convenient moment when one infection announced itself as fundamentally different from the other. Nathan distrusted clean divisions in biology anyway. What bothered him was the direction hidden inside the untidiness, the possibility that the population which had killed Daniel contained more variants suited to human respiratory tissue than the population Peter had survived.
A baggage cart came too close to his foot and Nathan stepped back against the pillar without looking at the porter pushing it. By the time the wheels had passed, his mind had already supplied the objections. Different patients. Different ages. Different tissues. Different stages of illness. Peter had been sampled while alive and improving; Daniel after catastrophic pulmonary disease had already killed him. Peter had also received help from Nathan that Daniel never had, though Nathan had been careful not to allow that help to contaminate what he later studied. Two patients could suggest almost anything if a man wanted badly enough to find it.
Nathan did not.
Kansas was valuable because he did not know.
Camp Funston lay earlier along whatever path the disease had taken, and if useful records remained there—if preserved material survived, if physicians remembered the order of cases rather than merely the number, if somebody had written down what the men looked like before memory reorganised itself around what came afterward—Nathan could compare an earlier concentration with Chicago and with the reports he already possessed from France. He had no intention of drawing a line through three places simply because three points made the temptation available. If Kansas contradicted him, then Kansas contradicted him. He had spent too many years teaching students to attack their own assumptions to become sentimental about his.
Somewhere to his left a suitcase struck the floor hard enough to make two people turn.
Nathan turned with them.
The man who had dropped it was already bending to recover it. He was Black, perhaps in his late thirties, wearing a brown wool suit that had been kept carefully enough for the worn shine at the elbows and cuffs to look like age rather than neglect. A smaller leather valise sat beside one shoe, his hat rested on top of it, and a second suitcase had been placed upright against his leg while he attempted to repair whatever arrangement had just failed. The strap around the larger case had slipped from its proper position. When he lifted the handle, the case twisted sideways; when he caught it, the other began to fall.
He managed both.
What Nathan noticed was the porter standing only a few yards away.
The porter had seen the difficulty. His head had turned at the impact like everyone else's, and for a second his eyes met Nathan's before moving deliberately elsewhere. He busied himself adjusting the cases already on his cart although none appeared to require adjustment.
The traveller had noticed too.
There was no surprise in his face. That was what held Nathan's attention. Irritation, certainly, and a tightening at the mouth while he set the larger case upright again, but not surprise. He seemed less like a man discovering he would receive no assistance than one who had anticipated the possibility and was annoyed with himself for having hoped otherwise.
Nathan picked up his medical case and crossed the floor.
The larger suitcase began to slide again just as he reached him. Nathan caught the upper corner before it could go down, holding it only long enough for the traveller to regain the handle. The man's head came up sharply at the unexpected hand on his property, and Nathan released it at once.
"I had it," the man said, and the words were not hostile so much as guarded, his hand remaining firmly around the handle while he took in Nathan's coat, hat, medical case and English accent all within the same brief assessment. He straightened the suitcase himself and moved the smaller valise closer with his shoe, making it clear without theatrics that assistance had not become permission to take over.
"I could see that," Nathan replied, and rather than reaching for anything again he stepped aside, leaving the luggage entirely within the man's control. The porter was still pretending to rearrange his cart. Nathan turned towards him and waited until the man finally looked over. "Would you take these through, please?"
The porter glanced first at Nathan and then at the traveller, and the reluctance that followed was small enough that another man might have pretended not to see it. He nodded vaguely towards the platforms instead. "There's somebody handles those farther down, sir. His bags have to go with his car."
Nathan followed the direction of the gesture. Passengers were already being sorted towards different portions of the train, and what the porter meant became obvious enough once Nathan looked for it. He had travelled widely enough in America to know the ugliness did not begin or end with one station, nor did it require the same law in every state to make itself felt. There were places farther along American railways where separation was written explicitly into statute and places where companies, employees and passengers supplied enough custom of their own. Isaiah's assigned accommodation was plainly not going to be Nathan's.
When Nathan turned back, the porter had mistaken his silence for acceptance.
"There's another fellow takes the baggage down there," the porter continued, already beginning to move his cart as though the explanation had completed his responsibility. The traveller beside Nathan bent towards the larger suitcase at the same moment, apparently deciding that waiting for a man who might or might not appear was less useful than carrying it himself.
Nathan's hand settled on the suitcase handle before either of them got farther.
The traveller stopped and looked at him.
Nathan did not pull the case away. He simply prevented it from being lifted while his attention remained on the porter.
"Where is he?" Nathan asked, and the porter, who had managed several moments of confidence while discussing a rule rather than a person, glanced towards the platforms as though the missing employee might materialise if given enough encouragement. Nobody did. Behind him another porter took a woman's case from her hand without interrupting his conversation with a colleague, swung it onto a cart and continued on. Nathan watched that happen before returning his eyes to the man in front of him. "I don't see him."
"He'll be along."
The traveller beside Nathan gave a quiet breath through his nose and reached again for his case. "Leave it. I've carried them this far," he said, and there was something in the ease with which he said it that Nathan disliked more than anger would have bothered him. The man was not asking to be rescued from his luggage. He was ending an argument whose outcome he had probably predicted before Nathan entered it.
Nathan released the suitcase, but only so that he could straighten and face the porter properly.
The change in him was not dramatic.
That made the porter notice it more.
Nathan's expression had been easy since entering the station, amused by the heavy trunk, patient with questions, willing to let railway employees conduct their business so long as his belongings reached Kansas with him. That ease disappeared. He did not step towards the porter or raise his voice above the surrounding station noise. He simply stopped looking like a man with time to waste.
"Take the bags," Nathan said, and while a whistle sounded beneath the train shed and briefly filled the space between them, he remained where he was, one hand resting lightly on the top of his medical case. When the noise faded the porter was still standing there. Nathan's eyes moved to the empty portion of the cart and then returned to his face. "You have room. He has a ticket. His luggage is going aboard the same railway as everyone else's. Whatever arrangement your company has made for where he sits does not prevent you from moving two suitcases twenty yards."
The porter reddened, more from being challenged in public than from shame, and glanced towards the traveller as though he might somehow resolve the matter by refusing Nathan's help himself. "I'm only telling you how it's done, sir," he said, lowering his voice now that two nearby passengers had begun listening. His fingers tightened around the cart handle. "I don't make the rules."
Nathan's eyes rested on him for another moment. He had heard that sentence in too many forms and too many countries to find anything interesting in it. He did not tell the porter so. The man did not need a lecture and the traveller beside Nathan certainly did not need Nathan explaining discrimination to him in the middle of a railway station. Instead Nathan shifted his medical case to his other hand and nodded once towards the luggage.
"I'm not asking you to make them," he said, and the quietness remained in his voice even as something colder settled beneath it. "I'm asking you to carry the bags."
The porter looked at him.
Nathan waited.
A family moved around them. Somebody called for a child farther towards the ticket windows. The station clock advanced without caring about any of them, and the porter finally looked away first. He bent, took the larger suitcase and put it onto the cart. The second followed. He asked the traveller which train he was taking, listened to the answer and checked the tag before pushing the cart towards the baggage entrance.
Nathan watched him go far enough to be certain the cases went with him.
Only then did he turn back.
The traveller had put his hat on while they waited and now held the smaller valise in one hand. Up close Nathan could see the first grey beginning near his temples and an old ink stain running along the side of one finger. The man was watching him with an expression Nathan could not immediately read, not hostile anymore but certainly not grateful in the uncomplicated manner another writer might have preferred the moment to end.
"You didn't have to do that," he said, and his gaze followed the baggage cart for another second before returning to Nathan. He adjusted the cuff of his coat where lifting the case had pulled it crooked, then looked past Nathan towards the flow of white passengers whose luggage had been disappearing into porters' hands without discussion. "Would've got them there."
"I know," Nathan answered, and he did not add that this was precisely the point. The man knew that already. Nathan picked up his own medical case, settling the weight comfortably in his hand while the two of them stood briefly outside the main stream of passengers. "I watched you nearly do his job for him."
That earned him the beginning of a smile.
It disappeared almost immediately, but Nathan had seen it.
The man looked towards the platforms again. "Happens."
There was nothing Nathan could say to that which would improve it. He could have offered sympathy, but sympathy from a stranger who could cross the same station without encountering the problem would have been cheap. He could have condemned the railway, but the man standing beside him had presumably condemned it often enough in private without needing an English professor to discover the injustice for him.
Nathan followed his gaze towards the train.
"I hate those arrangements," he said eventually, and the words came without performance because he had no audience he cared to impress. A group of soldiers moved past on their way towards another gate, one of them carrying his mother's parcel beneath an arm while she continued giving instructions he was pretending not to hear. Nathan waited until they had gone before looking back at the man beside him. "The cars. The rules. The expectation that you should be accustomed to either."
The traveller's mouth tightened again, although differently this time.
"I am accustomed to it."
Nathan nodded.
"I know."
He did not tell him he should not have to be. The sentence was already there between them.
For several seconds they simply stood in the station together while another engine moved somewhere beneath the roof, its slow mechanical rhythm coming through the floor before its whistle reached them. The traveller shifted his valise to the other hand and glanced at Nathan's medical case, then at the luggage labels on the remaining small case beside the pillar.
"Drake," he said, reading the name before looking back at him. "Professor Nathan Drake?"
Nathan offered his hand. "Unfortunately."
That caught the man off guard. He looked at the offered hand, then at Nathan's face, and whatever he found there persuaded him to take it.
"Isaiah Carter," he said, and his grip was firm enough that Nathan suspected he had spent at least part of his life doing work considerably harder than anything suggested by the neat suit. When they released hands, Isaiah rubbed his thumb absently over the old ink stain on his finger before nodding towards Nathan's medical case. "Professor of medicine?"
"Physiology originally. Pathology when I became sufficiently irritating about it," Nathan replied, and as Isaiah's eyes returned to the case he realised what assumption the leather and brass fittings encouraged. "I'm not going to ask you to remove your shirt and cough, if that's what concerns you."
Isaiah stared at him for a beat before a laugh escaped him, quieter than Nathan's but genuine enough that a woman passing nearby glanced towards them.
"That's good," Isaiah said, and his shoulders had lost some of the stiffness they had carried when Nathan first approached. He shifted the valise against his leg and looked towards the platforms again when another boarding call travelled across the station. "Because I'm feeling healthier by the minute."
Nathan smiled, but the movement around them had changed while they spoke. More passengers were drifting towards the gates now, conversations being finished rather than begun, newspapers folded and put away, coats buttoned, children gathered closer. Their train was not yet at the point where anyone needed to hurry, though Dearborn had begun acquiring that particular restlessness of a station approaching departure.
"How far are you going?" Nathan asked, and the question arose from the fact that they would soon have to move rather than from any desire to interrogate him. He bent to retrieve the smaller case he had left beside the pillar, then stopped when a porter returning with an empty cart recognised it as his and took it before Nathan could reach the handle.
"Kansas City," Isaiah said, moving aside with Nathan so the porter could pass between them and the ticket windows. His eyes followed his case for a moment, perhaps checking whether this one would encounter the same difficulty as the others, before he looked back. "My brother's there. Been trying to get me out for months."
Nathan glanced at him. "And he finally succeeded?"
"Got tired of his letters."
The answer came dryly enough that Nathan suspected the opposite.
"What does he do?"
"Railroad."
Nathan looked towards the baggage entrance where Isaiah's suitcases had disappeared.
Isaiah followed the look.
For half a second neither spoke.
Then Isaiah laughed again, shaking his head. "Yeah. I know."
Nathan's smile broadened. "I wasn't going to say anything."
"You didn't have to."
They began moving towards the gate with the rest of the passengers, not quite walking together by agreement but heading in the same direction at the same pace. Nathan had to slow once when an elderly woman stopped abruptly ahead of them to check her ticket, and Isaiah moved around her other side before waiting rather than continuing on. When Nathan caught up, Isaiah glanced towards his medical case again.
"What takes a pathologist to Kansas City?"
"Not Kansas City itself," Nathan told him, adjusting his grip as they passed beneath the great clock's shadow. "Camp Funston eventually. Influenza."
Isaiah's expression changed at the word. Not fear exactly, but recognition. Everybody had begun hearing something.
"Bad?"
Nathan thought of Daniel.
He thought of Peter.
He thought of a twenty-nine-year-old labourer coughing pink froth into a basin while nurses worked around him.
"I don't know yet," he said, and the answer remained with them as they walked several more paces, partly swallowed by the station noise. Nathan noticed Isaiah look at him again, perhaps expecting a professor to have offered something more impressive. Nathan had no intention of doing so merely to satisfy the expectation. "That's why I'm going."
Isaiah accepted that without asking for reassurance Nathan could not honestly give.
They reached the point where their paths would separate towards their assigned accommodation. Isaiah slowed first. Nathan could see the baggage arrangements farther down and, beyond them, the difference in the car to which Isaiah had been directed. He felt the same irritation return, but there was nothing useful in making Isaiah stand beside him while Nathan indulged it.
"When we reach Kansas City," Nathan said, turning towards him before the flow of passengers could divide them, "wait on the platform before you go after your cases."
Isaiah's eyebrows rose immediately, and Nathan saw exactly what he had done wrong before the man needed to explain it.
"I can carry my own bags, Professor."
"I know you can," Nathan answered, and he remained with the objection rather than trying to laugh it away. Isaiah had carried them into Dearborn and would have carried them onto the train if Nathan had never appeared. Nathan had no desire to transform a refusal of indignity into an assumption of incapacity. He shifted the medical case against his leg and glanced towards the porters loading luggage farther down. "I'm not offering because you can't. I'm offering because they're being paid to carry mine."
Isaiah looked towards the same men.
Nathan let him consider it.
"If they're standing there when we arrive," Nathan continued after a moment, "they can put yours beside mine. If they object, I'll deal with the objection. You can spend that time finding your brother instead."
Isaiah rubbed his thumb once over the handle of the valise.
"And if they won't?"
Nathan looked at him.
Isaiah's mouth began to move before Nathan said anything.
Apparently he had learned enough already.
"Right," Isaiah murmured, and the smile returned. "You'll ask nicely."
"At first."
Isaiah laughed, but Nathan did not turn the moment into another joke. A conductor farther down had begun checking tickets, and the passengers between them and the train were closing the available space. Nathan offered his hand again.
"Wait for me when we arrive."
Isaiah took it.
"All right, Nathan."
Nathan noticed the change from Professor and smiled.
"I'll find you."
Isaiah nodded once, released his hand and joined the passengers moving towards his assigned car. He did not look back. Nathan remained where he was long enough to see him reach the railway employee checking tickets, exchange a few words and continue down the platform with the small valise still in his hand.
Only then did Nathan turn back towards the station clock.
Joseph was not beneath it.
Nathan stopped.
He had not forgotten Joseph while speaking to Isaiah, but time had advanced more than he expected. He reached for his watch, checked it against the great clock and discovered that both remained in irritating agreement.
Joseph was still not late.
Nathan closed the watch.
A porter pushed past with an empty cart and Nathan moved automatically out of his way, ending up closer to the station entrance. From there he could see arriving motorcars beyond the doors whenever people opened them, sunlight flashing briefly against brass and glass before bodies closed the view again. A woman stood near the entrance saying goodbye to a soldier who could not have been more than nineteen, both of them smiling too deliberately for either to be convincing. Near the ticket windows, the mother with the wooden-toy girl had finally gathered her children and was now attempting to prevent the elder boy from opening the parcel he had been entrusted to carry.
Nathan looked at the clock again.
Joseph was not a man who merely arrived on time. Joseph arrived early enough to learn where the exits were, which platform they required, how long it would take to reach it and whether anybody nearby looked as though they had an unusual interest in Nathan. Even in civilian clothes he carried habits built in places where failing to understand the room could kill someone.
For him to use this much of the available time meant either something had gone wrong or—
Nathan's eyes moved towards the station entrance.
Helen.
The thought arrived so simply that he almost laughed at himself.
Of course.
Joseph had not forgotten the train. He had merely discovered something he considered worth spending the remaining minutes on.
Nathan slipped the watch back into his waistcoat, and when he looked towards the doors again he did so with considerably more interest.
He saw Joseph before he saw Helen.
That was almost inevitable. Joseph rose above enough of the crowd that concealment required either distance or architecture, and neither helped Dearborn for long. Nathan first caught the familiar black coat moving between a family with several cases and two men in business suits, then the breadth of Joseph's shoulders when he turned sideways to let an elderly couple pass.
Something about the movement was wrong.
Not wrong enough to alarm Nathan.
Simply unfamiliar.
Joseph was walking slowly.
Nathan's eyes dropped from his face and found the reason beside him.
Helen had one arm through Joseph's while her other hand rested over his. The morning wind had worked several strands of brown hair loose beneath her hat, and she was talking as they crossed the station floor, looking up at Joseph rather than towards the clock they were approaching. Joseph had bent his head towards her so that she did not have to raise her voice over the station, his expression hidden from Nathan for a moment by the angle.
Then Helen said something else.
Joseph smiled.
Nathan went very still.
It was not that he had never seen Joseph smile. He had. Usually after something dry, occasionally at Nathan's expense, sometimes in those rare private moments when neither man needed to be what the Institute expected of them. This was different less in expression than in circumstance. Joseph was not standing in Nathan's office or sitting across from him after an operation. There was no armour beneath the black coat, no mask concealing his face, no dark lenses over his eyes and no visible weapon pulling the attention of everyone nearby. His armour and equipment were already buried inside the miserable trunk two porters had cursed onto the train.
Nobody in Dearborn knew T was walking through the station.
They saw a very large man in a good black coat with a young woman holding his arm.
Nathan watched Helen say something and tug lightly at Joseph when he unconsciously began taking too long a stride. Joseph shortened it immediately. A baggage cart came through the crowd from their right, and without breaking whatever Helen was telling him he moved her to the inside of his path, one hand settling briefly against the middle of her back until the cart had passed. Helen continued speaking as though she had already become accustomed to the gesture.
That affected Nathan more than the joined hands.
Joseph had spent years noticing danger before other people knew there was anything to notice. Nathan had watched the habit become so deeply rooted that even safe rooms were inspected when Joseph entered them. Yet Helen had managed, at least for several seconds at a time, to make him forget to look anywhere else.
Nathan found himself watching without the joke he had been preparing.
There were portions of Joseph's life Nathan knew only because Red-Light had once been necessary to save what remained of it. Other portions Joseph had told him voluntarily, usually without embellishment and rarely without being asked. Nathan knew enough to understand that ordinary things had not often arrived without something attached to them: duty, violence, survival, usefulness, another man's orders.
Helen appeared to want nothing from him except that he remain beside her for a little longer.
Nathan lowered his eyes briefly to the medical case in his hand.
When he looked up again, Helen had seen him.
Her face brightened with recognition and she touched Joseph's forearm with the hand not already threaded through his. Nathan could not hear what she said, but Joseph followed her gaze towards the clock.
Their eyes met.
Joseph immediately knew Nathan had been watching.
Nathan's affection survived for perhaps another second before mischief reasserted itself.
He reached into his waistcoat.
Joseph's eyes narrowed from halfway across the station.
Nathan removed his watch with exaggerated care, opened it beneath the great clock and studied the face as though the discrepancy between two perfectly synchronised timepieces represented a scientific problem worthy of immediate investigation. He checked one, then the other, and when he looked back towards Joseph he found Helen following the performance.
She laughed.
Joseph said something to her.
Nathan could not hear it, but he had several excellent guesses.
By the time they reached him Nathan had returned the watch to his pocket and arranged his expression into something approaching innocence. Helen did not give him time to deploy it.
"He isn't late," she said before Nathan had managed so much as a good morning, and she came the remaining few steps still holding Joseph's arm, apparently prepared to defend the matter before charges had formally been brought. A porter pushing an empty cart forced all three of them nearer the pillar, and Helen waited for the wheels to rattle past before looking deliberately up at the enormous station clock and then back at Nathan. "I made certain of it."
Nathan's attention moved from her to Joseph. The lake wind had disturbed Joseph's hair beneath his hat, and Nathan noticed that he had not bothered correcting it before arriving at the station, which by itself said more about the morning than Joseph was likely to volunteer. Joseph removed the hat now, more from courtesy to Helen than because Nathan required it, and shifted closer when another group of passengers moved behind her.
"I know," Joseph said, and his eyes remained on Nathan while he settled the hat beneath his arm. Helen's hand had slipped from his elbow to his hand during the movement, and Joseph closed his fingers around hers without looking down, apparently unaware that Nathan had noticed that too. "He knows as well."
Nathan shifted his medical case against the pillar and gave himself the freedom of both hands. "I haven't accused anyone of anything," he replied, and instead of looking at the clock again he brushed a speck of coal dust from his sleeve, allowing the gesture to acquire all the innocence his face had failed to provide. Helen's smile told him she was not fooled. "I was checking the time."
"You took your watch out while standing under a clock," Joseph said, and after speaking he glanced upward at the enormous face above Nathan as though inviting Helen to consider the absurdity for herself. When he looked down again there was the faintest trace of colour high on his face, whether from the walk, the warmth of the station or being caught arriving hand in hand with her Nathan could not yet determine. "You were making a point."
"I own a watch. Occasionally I use it."
Helen laughed again, and Joseph turned towards her with an expression that was not quite betrayal but came close enough to make Nathan like her even more.
"Don't encourage him," Joseph told her, though the warning lost some of its authority when she moved nearer rather than obeying it. A family squeezed between them and the ticket windows, one child dragging a small case that kept striking his heel, and Joseph automatically moved Helen farther from the traffic before turning his attention back to Nathan. "He enjoys being irritating."
"I heard that," Nathan said, but he was watching Joseph's hand settle briefly at Helen's back while the family passed. It remained there half a second after it was necessary, then returned to hers. Nathan had seen Joseph move people out of danger hundreds of times; he had never before seen him look faintly reluctant to stop touching one afterward. "Though considering you said it from three feet away, I assume I was intended to."
"You were."
Nathan's smile broadened, and for once he resisted the temptation to answer immediately. The three of them stood slightly apart from the main current beneath the clock while Dearborn continued around them. Steam clouded part of the doorway to the train shed before thinning. A newspaper boy called headlines near the entrance. Somewhere beyond the gates an engine gave a short whistle, and Joseph's eyes moved towards the sound on instinct before returning almost immediately to Helen.
Nathan caught that too.
His amusement softened again.
"Well," he said eventually, and Helen looked towards him while Joseph's expression suggested he had already decided whatever came next would be objectionable. Nathan rested both hands lightly on the handle of his medical case and looked between them, not hurrying the moment now that it had arrived. "It appears Chicago has treated at least one member of this expedition rather well."
Joseph gave him the warning look Nathan had expected.
Helen did not.
"It has," she said, and rather than becoming embarrassed by Nathan's observation she looked up at Joseph as she answered. Her thumb moved absently across the back of his hand, the gesture small enough that Nathan doubted she knew she was doing it. Joseph did. Nathan saw his eyes drop briefly towards their hands before returning to her face, and the warning he had been directing at Nathan disappeared entirely for that moment.
Nathan felt suddenly less inclined to tease him.
Not completely less inclined.
That would have required an unreasonable degree of restraint.
"We investigated influenza," Joseph reminded him when he looked back, perhaps recognising the direction Nathan's thoughts had taken and trying to restore the conversation to safer ground. He put his hat back on and adjusted the brim, but Helen remained beside him and the attempt at professional dignity was somewhat undermined by the fact that he was still holding her hand.
Nathan looked towards the train shed when another whistle sounded, and Daniel Walsh came back to him for the briefest instant: the damaged lungs, the fluid, the unanswered difference between one infection and another, Kansas waiting beyond the tracks. The work had not become less serious because Joseph had found something pleasant in Chicago. If anything, seeing ordinary people filling the station made the reason for that work harder to ignore. Every person moving beneath the clock belonged somewhere beyond it. Every soldier had a family, every child a mother calling him back, every traveller some destination at which somebody might be waiting.
Nathan turned back to Joseph.
"Yes," he said, and the gravity that had touched him did not prevent the corner of his mouth from lifting when he looked from Joseph to Helen. "But nobody enjoys influenza."
Helen's laugh was quieter this time because she had caught something of the shift in him even if she could not have known its cause. Joseph's mouth moved despite his attempt to keep it straight, and while he looked towards the platform again Nathan bent to pick up his medical case, giving him the courtesy of pretending not to notice.
The station clock continued above them.
They still had time.