The train reached Kansas City with coal smoke creeping through the carriage windows and Nathan no longer prepared to believe the clock above the door. For the last hour the city had been appearing in pieces: sidings crowded with freight cars, warehouses with open loading doors, workshops whose soot-darkened backs stood almost against the tracks. A man in shirtsleeves looked up from a barrow as they passed, holding a sack against his hip while he waited for the last carriage to go by. Beyond him a locomotive released steam, drowning the wheels beneath Nathan's feet until the carriage rattled into the next stretch of yard.
Joseph had put his coat on before the first dense sidings appeared. The hotel stationery beside him disappeared into his waistcoat, carefully folded and still without a word written on it. Nathan had watched him pick it up twice during the journey, only to put it down again when he thought the other man was occupied. He kept his attention on the Kansas reports now. Joseph would write to Helen when he found something he could bear to commit to paper; having Nathan observe the struggle was unlikely to make it easier.
The reports had spread across the seat, beneath the medical case and onto the narrow space beside Nathan's leg. One page had spent several minutes under his elbow before Joseph rescued it, and his pencil was noticeably shorter than it had been in Chicago. The slowing train finally obliged him to gather everything. He put the loose notes into order, flattened a bent corner against his knee and tied the last bundle while the wheels knocked across a succession of points.
Ironwork passed overhead, and Union Station rose beyond the window between passenger cars and baggage wagons. Its stone frontage made him pause over the knot. Even after Dearborn, the building was enormous, and the work beneath its roofs had the familiar urgency of a place receiving more people than it could conveniently hold. Recruits stood beside families waiting on luggage; an officer stepped around a mail cart, then had to retreat when another crossed behind it. The station had been open only a few years, but the war had already worn its own habits into it. Nathan had read the previous year's traffic figures. Watching two porters negotiate a trolley through the waiting men, he could believe them.
The final pull against the couplings became a series of smaller jolts. Nathan stood and closed his case while Joseph reached overhead for their lighter luggage, briefly blocking the window with his shoulder. Around them, fourteen hours of shared travel began coming apart. Hats were retrieved, blankets folded and conversations interrupted by the need to find a bag which had been quite visible ten minutes earlier. Arthur was on his feet before the train stopped, one hand already raised towards the hard-sided case that had tormented him since Chicago.
"Leave it," his wife said, gathering her knitting into its bag without looking up. Arthur kept his hand raised for another second, then lowered it as she tightened the cord. When the porter appeared, he stepped aside with an air of having arranged the whole thing himself.
"One hand," Thomas's mother told him, peeling one of his palms from the window. The boy looked at the hand she had removed, plainly dissatisfied with the restriction, but left the other pressed firmly against the glass. The platform was changing too quickly to permit a proper argument, and he returned to watching it while his mother kept hold of his wrist.
Nathan lifted the medical case and reached for their smaller bag, finding that Joseph had already taken it. They joined the slow crush towards the door, coats brushing seats while the newspaper man tried to tuck two editions beneath an arm that was also required to hold his coat. A soldier helped the elderly woman stand and waited while she settled her weight against him.
Somewhere behind them, a passenger began asking about a missing glove.
Several people answered, none apparently describing the same glove.
Joseph stopped beside Thomas when the queue checked ahead of him. The boy tipped his head back until his cap nearly slipped, following the length of Joseph's coat to his face. Joseph inclined his head.
Thomas returned the gesture with such gravity that Nathan looked towards the door to hide his smile, and the line began moving again before either of them could decide whether anything else was required.
The carriage's warmth gave way to platform air that tasted of coal and hot iron. Nathan stepped down into the rattle of baggage wheels, porters calling across one another and the nearby hiss of steam. Their fellow passengers were already separating. Arthur followed his wife around a loaded trolley, and Nathan caught one last glimpse of Thomas being guided through the crowd before other travellers closed between them. He adjusted the handle in his palm and followed Joseph towards the concourse.
Union Station made him experience its size a second time inside the head house. Voices climbed into the high interior and returned muddled together, so that a woman calling for her husband seemed to be calling from several directions at once. Soldiers waited against their kit, families searched the arriving faces, and a railway clerk attempted to answer three questions while somebody behind him demanded a fourth. Nathan passed the ticket windows and slowed where the arriving passengers began dividing into separate streams. Joseph stopped just behind his shoulder.
"What?" Joseph asked, shifting the bag out of a passing woman's way. He followed Nathan's gaze across the hall and waited while a trolley rattled between them and the man Nathan had found.
"I made a promise," Nathan said, turning towards Isaiah Carter. He threaded past a woman with two children and approached from the side, where Isaiah could see him without turning his back on the luggage being brought through the station.
Isaiah stood beyond the busiest flow with his smaller valise at his feet and his hat against one thigh. The two suitcases he had carried into Dearborn were absent. He watched each arriving collection with patient attention, occasionally looking towards a railway employee before deciding against asking again. Nathan set his case beside his shoe. Isaiah turned at the sound of his name, and some of the reserve left his face.
"Professor," he said, straightening and bringing his hat closer to his chest. His glance moved briefly to Nathan's luggage before returning to him.
"Nathan," Nathan corrected, offering a small smile. "We survived one another for fourteen hours. I think we've earned it."
"Nathan, then," Isaiah agreed, the corner of his mouth lifting. He looked past him towards Joseph, and the smile remained while his eyebrows slowly rose. At Dearborn he had seen Joseph among hundreds of travellers. Here, his gaze began at the man's chest and had rather farther to travel before reaching his face.
"You neglected to mention your friend was built like a courthouse," Isaiah said, looking back at Nathan. Joseph's mouth moved, and Nathan stepped aside before the comparison could improve.
"Mr Isaiah Carter, Joseph Taylor," he said, giving the two men room to reach one another. Joseph extended his hand, moderating the grip as Isaiah took it.
"Mr Carter. A pleasure," Joseph said, inclining his head. Isaiah returned the greeting, then glanced once more at his shoulders as their hands separated. Nathan allowed him another second before looking towards the luggage.
"The bags?" he asked, searching the cases being lowered from a trolley. Isaiah's amusement faded, and he shook his head.
"Not yet," Isaiah said, turning his hat by the brim. Nathan left his medical case beside the valise and went to find a porter. This time there was no argument, which improved his opinion of Kansas City by a small but measurable amount.
The suitcases had apparently come through another part of the station. While the porter checked, Nathan kept their patch of floor clear of a departing family whose members were trying to arrange themselves around Isaiah's valise. A little girl brushed against the case, received an admonition from her father and looked back at Isaiah, who gave her enough of a smile to send her on without distress. Nathan watched the next trolley approach. The worn corner of the larger suitcase showed beneath a travelling rug, and he raised his hand before Isaiah had seen it.
"There," Nathan said as the porter retrieved the second case and brought them across. Isaiah put his hat on and bent for the larger handle, checking the fastening with his free hand before trusting it with the weight.
"I told you I could carry them," he said, testing the handle. Nathan smiled at the familiar complaint and told him he remembered. Isaiah did not lift the case immediately. "You also remembered them."
"Unfortunately, I have a very irritating memory," Nathan said, keeping his eyes on Isaiah's face. The porter had gone back into the hall, leaving them standing among people who paid no attention to either man.
Isaiah glanced down at the recovered cases, then met Nathan's gaze again.
"Thank you," he said, the humour gone from his voice. Nathan resisted the easy reply that would have made the whole thing sound trivial.
"You're welcome," he answered, and let that be enough. Joseph tipped his head when Isaiah looked towards him, receiving the same gesture in return.
"My brother's going to think I've hired an escort," Isaiah said, lifting the larger suitcase and settling the valise over it. He adjusted the balance before reaching for the second handle, and Nathan moved clear of his elbow.
"If he sees Joseph, he may assume you've invaded," Nathan said, drawing a quiet laugh from him. Isaiah's grip tightened on the cases as he prepared to leave, but he stayed a moment longer.
"I hope you find what you're looking for," he said, looking down at Nathan's medical case. Nathan thought of Daniel Walsh's lungs, then Peter Halpern standing beside his bed, and France with its rows of men struggling for the next breath. The case held figures and observations gathered from all of them; he had carried those other things without needing a handle.
"So do I," he replied, watching Isaiah free a hand long enough to offer it once more. Nathan took it, feeling the pressure the suitcase handles had already left in his fingers. "Good luck with your brother."
"Good luck with your sick soldiers," Isaiah returned, giving his hand one firm movement. He reclaimed the luggage and went into the crowd, a suitcase in each hand and the smaller valise balanced over the larger. Nathan watched until the hall hid him, then lifted his medical case.
"Come on," he said, turning towards the doors. Joseph fell into step beside him as they passed a family examining tickets in the middle of a passage, obliged to divide around them and meet again beyond the father's outstretched arm.
The building had been designed to keep arriving passengers clear of departing traffic, but wartime numbers found ways to defeat the arrangement. Nathan caught the smell of cooking from a restaurant and passed a post office, a drug store and a barbershop where a man sat with foam on his chin, apparently undisturbed by the crowds outside. Railway offices occupied portions of the building he could only guess at. The public spaces were full of people looking for relatives, waiting for porters or stopping to discuss where they ought to stop next.
Near the washroom sign, Joseph slowed.
Their equipment trunk had finally been brought to them, and he lifted it with an ease that made the porter look twice at the handle. Nathan followed his attention towards the washrooms. He knew what was in the trunk and had no need to accompany him while he retrieved it.
"I'll meet you outside," Nathan said, taking the smaller bag while Joseph turned away. He went towards the doors, but had scarcely reached the outer hall when a woman approaching them stopped so abruptly that the man behind nearly collided with her.
Black armour came through the gap she had made. Joseph carried the same travelling trunk, but the man who had sat in the carriage beside Nathan had disappeared beneath plates, straps and field equipment. His shoulders scarcely needed the extra breadth. Dark lenses concealed his eyes, and the Ledermaske covered the rest of his face with an expression Nathan had seen halt conversations in France and stop men speaking in West African darkness. There was nothing in the leather for a stranger to read. They looked for a mouth, an expression, some sign of what he intended, and had to move aside without finding one.
Two soldiers near the entrance fell silent. One straightened his shoulders as Joseph passed; a child twisted for another look until his mother put a hand between his shoulder blades and steered him towards the ticket windows. A businessman found reason to take the wider path. The Terror of Africa crossed Union Station carrying a travelling trunk, and the practical, almost embarrassed way people avoided him made Nathan watch more closely than any outcry would have.
"Subtle," Nathan said when Joseph reached him. He glanced at the trunk, then at the mask, while the woman who had stopped resumed walking with determined attention to the doors.
"You told me to bring the armour," Joseph replied, shifting the trunk so it would clear the entrance. The leather muffled his voice without concealing his patience, which Nathan had done a great deal to cultivate.
"I did," Nathan said, stepping outside and turning back towards the lenses. He smiled as Joseph joined him. "I continue to stand by the decision."
Kansas City met them with a streetcar bell and the blast of a motor horn. Two men carrying a crate retreated towards the kerb while a Ford rattled through the gap they had meant to use, its driver still sounding the horn. Women emerged behind Nathan with parcels and travelling cases. Farther along the station entrance, a soldier kissed a woman while another stood smoking and tried, with limited success, to appear interested in the traffic. Joseph stopped beside Nathan, receiving a fresh succession of glances from pedestrians.
The city was open and busy. Delivery wagons waited outside businesses, restaurant doors swung around the lunch trade, and people crowded onto streetcars without masks or any visible anxiety about standing together. The March illness at Funston had diminished within weeks. Here, sickness still belonged among the familiar troubles a household endured until it passed, and no ambulances continually threaded the traffic to suggest otherwise.
The autumn that would alter that understanding lay months ahead. Nothing in the lively confusion outside the station warned anyone of it.
Buildings crowded the streets climbing away from the railway. Signs projected above shopfronts, telephone and telegraph wires crossed overhead, and a boy with a handcart shouted at men twice his size to give him room. Clerks and labourers shared the pavements with soldiers. Newspapers changed hands on a corner, and the boy returned somebody's objection with a shout Nathan could not quite hear. Nathan would have liked another hour to walk through the city, to see it at the pace of someone who belonged there. An Army officer beside a dark touring car had already recognised him.
"Professor Drake?" the man called, approaching with his hand extended. He was perhaps forty, sun-darkened and accustomed to soldiers, but the sight of Joseph checked his pace. Nathan took his hand before the pause could become awkward, and the officer returned his attention to him. "Major Henry Caldwell. Medical Corps."
"Thank you for coming," Nathan said, releasing the firm grip and settling the bag against his wrist. Caldwell looked towards the car, his mouth shifting at one corner.
"I was under the impression I was making you come for me," he replied, stepping around the luggage to open the rear door. Nathan followed him, pleased to have been given something other than a formal greeting to answer.
"An arrangement we may both resent before the day is over," Nathan said, setting down his case. Caldwell's mouth twitched, but his eyes went back to Joseph.
"Orders said meet the British professor," the major said, looking up at the lenses. He seemed to consider the remainder of his instructions before adding, "And his security."
"T," Nathan supplied, indicating his companion. The mask turned slightly towards Caldwell, who looked back at Nathan and received nothing further. After a moment, the major nodded and held the door wider.
"How far?" Nathan asked, examining the space available in the rear. Caldwell followed the glance, and for an instant they shared the practical question of whether Joseph would fit.
"Funston?" the major asked, looking back at him. Nathan raised his eyes from the worn upholstery and gave Caldwell a small smile.
"Unless you've arranged another outbreak for me," he said, bringing the bags closer to the car. Caldwell accepted the remark as a joke and warned him it was a long drive.
Nathan paused with the medical case in his hand. "How long?"
"Depends on the roads," Caldwell replied, looking towards a wagon that had obstructed a motorcar and a streetcar at once. He waited for the driver to move before returning to Nathan. The answer would become considerably more precise once they were outside the city.
Nathan loaded the luggage himself, keeping the medical case where he could reach it. Joseph laid the equipment trunk across the rear, and the springs settled beneath its weight. Caldwell looked back at the sound, then at the man who had lifted it, but confined himself to checking that the door would close. Nathan climbed in and drew the case onto his knees. Joseph took the remaining space beside him, broad enough that Nathan doubted they would be troubled by loose luggage shifting on that side.
For the first portion of the journey, Kansas City refused to release them. Streetcars governed the traffic, their rails shining between tyres and wagon wheels, and Caldwell used the horn whenever pedestrians treated the road as another stretch of pavement. A delivery team stopped to unload in front of them. While they waited, Nathan watched a woman leave a bakery with a loaf wrapped in paper and break a piece from one end before she had gone ten yards. Two boys chased each other past a grocer's display until the proprietor came out to shout them away.
Outside a barber's, three men disputed a newspaper with enough energy to suggest the argument had been going on before the edition was printed.
A man beside a waiting streetcar coughed into his fist. The woman behind him shifted her parcel to let him aboard, and nobody moved away. Nathan watched the car carry him down the street. He could still hear the cough beneath the bell for a moment after it had gone, though it had been an ordinary sound and everyone around the man had treated it as one. He opened his case and took out the first report. The city slipped past while he flattened the page against his knee.
"How many?" Nathan asked, drawing out his pencil. Caldwell met his eyes in the mirror, then had to brake for a pedestrian crossing ahead of them.
"At present?" the major asked, waiting for the man to clear the road. Nathan told him to start there, and Caldwell let the car move before answering. "Not many."
"Major, if I wanted 'not many,' I could have remained in London and asked somebody to send me a telegram," Nathan said, tapping the report against his knee. Joseph's mask turned towards the front seat, and Caldwell tightened his hand on the wheel. Nathan held the pencil still. "How many?"
"The outbreak has passed," Caldwell said, keeping his eyes on the traffic. Nathan told him he knew, but the major continued as they crossed a rough join in the road. "Then you know the worst of it was weeks ago."
"I know that too," Nathan replied, catching a loose sheet before it slid beneath Joseph's leg. He laid it flat again and waited. Caldwell drove around a wagon whose driver had ignored the horn, let out a breath and began to answer properly.
"First morning, we had men appearing at sick call almost one after another," the major said, his voice changing as he remembered it. "Fever, headache, sore throat. By noon there were more than a hundred."
"One hundred and seven?" Nathan asked, holding the pencil above the figure already in the report. Caldwell looked into the mirror again, this time with more interest than irritation.
"You've read the reports," he said, turning back to negotiate a streetcar. Nathan kept the page steady against the vibration of the seat.
"I want to know whether the reports resemble what you saw," he replied, looking up from the written total. Caldwell considered that while the streetcar passed, then nodded.
"Yes. About that," the major said, passing his thumb along the wheel. "Five hundred and change inside the week. More afterwards. Over eleven hundred hospitalised before it burned down."
Nathan made his first mark. The camp's strength had averaged more than fifty-six thousand troops, a figure which could make eleven hundred seem deceptively small to somebody reading it at a desk. Those men had arrived within roughly three weeks, most in a shorter rush, and every one had needed a place to lie down. He left room beside the total for the daily figures and asked what they had looked like. Caldwell frowned at the road.
"Sick," he said, then caught Nathan's expression in the mirror and reconsidered.
"Fever. High in some. Headaches, throat, cough. Aches bad enough that men complained they felt beaten. They'd report in the morning after drilling the day before."
"Breathing?" Nathan asked, setting the pencil beneath the symptoms. The city was changing around them, larger blocks giving way to houses with yards, workshops and stretches of ground still waiting to be built upon.
"Most weren't like your Chicago cases, if that's what you're asking," Caldwell said, checking the mirror. Nathan's pencil stopped, and the major saw it before returning his eyes to the road.
"Some were?" Nathan asked, bracing the report as the tyres acquired a persistent vibration. Caldwell took longer to answer this time.
"Some developed pneumonia," he said, steering around a depression. When Nathan asked how many, he promised the hospital figures on arrival. Nathan accepted that and moved to the deaths, but Caldwell answered only that there had been deaths. A wagon carrying timber passed beside them, its driver staring at Joseph until a horse drifted towards the roadside and forced him to correct it.
"How many?" Nathan asked once the wagon was behind them. Caldwell looked ahead through several seconds of road noise before answering.
"Forty-some," he said, working his jaw. Nathan's papers gave figures in the high forties, different totals according to the document. He marked the disagreement rather than choosing the first number that fitted. Caldwell had seen men die; making him invent precision would add nothing useful.
"From influenza?" Nathan asked, raising the pencil again. The major glanced into the mirror with the weary look of somebody who had already argued over that column.
"Influenza, pneumonia, complications," Caldwell said, guiding the car onto firmer ground. "Depends whose column you're reading."
"Good," Nathan replied, making a note. Caldwell looked back sharply, and Nathan lifted his eyes before the man could mistake him. "That you said you don't know."
The major's grip eased a little as he faced the road. Asked what the staff had done, he described bed rest where possible, isolation while numbers allowed it, treatment of symptoms and nursing. Pneumonia cases went into hospital. As admissions increased, space had become the immediate problem, and Nathan could hear the effort of those days in the practical way Caldwell listed measures which had never been sufficient for everyone at once. He wrote them down before turning the page.
"Did you quarantine the camp?" Nathan asked, resting one finger along the new margin. Caldwell shook his head and said no. Nathan's pencil stopped again. "Troop movements continued?"
"There's a war on," the major said, giving him a sideways look. Nathan met it in the mirror and let the silence last long enough for Caldwell to face forward.
"I am aware," he replied, lowering the pencil to the paper. For a while he heard only the engine and the roughness of the road. Joseph sat beside him without shifting, the armour making the leather seat complain whenever the car jolted.
Kansas opened gradually around them. Telephone poles replaced the crowded urban wires, following fields darkened by recent working and others carrying the first green of spring. Farmhouses stood back behind fences. Horses lifted their heads at the motorcar, and chickens scattered across one yard when Caldwell sounded the horn. Nathan held the report against air coming over the side and looked back for the city. Its last buildings were already hidden behind the rise they had crossed.
Improved surfaces near the towns let Caldwell increase speed, but the road repeatedly returned to gravel and graded earth. Named routes offered painted signs and roadside markings, with long stretches where knowing the way did nothing to improve the ground. At uncertain junctions the major relied on turns he remembered. Nathan watched him choose a road which looked much like the one they had left and understood why he had refused an arrival time. A rut caught the right wheel before he could return to his notes.
The case struck his hand, and he caught it while his pencil left an unintended stroke across the page. Joseph scarcely moved. Caldwell checked the mirror, found the Ledermaske looking back and restored his attention to the road. Nathan examined the ruined mark and nearly smiled, then remembered the question he had been about to ask. He turned the page to keep the loose papers from sliding again.
"Did the men recover completely?" he asked, settling the case more securely. Caldwell said most had, many in a few days, others after longer. Nathan wrote the answer with room left for what the men themselves might tell him. He asked whether onset had been recorded by company, then about barracks and mess assignments, watching his pencil whenever Caldwell's certainty diminished.
"Where we could," the major said of barracks, changing his grip as the road climbed. "Some mess assignments. Not all."
"Kitchen staff?" Nathan asked, looking up from the list. Caldwell nodded, and Nathan continued with training groups, work details, arrivals and departures. The major drew breath to interrupt him.
"Professor—" Caldwell began, letting the word carry a warning. Nathan lifted his eyes to the mirror and waited, but nothing followed.
"Major," he returned, keeping the pencil still. Caldwell closed his mouth and guided the car over the rise. Nathan looked beyond him as the country widened, fields reaching towards distant tree lines and farm buildings made small by the land around them. After Chicago, there was enough sky to make him feel exposed.
"Men became sick in groups," Nathan said as the motorcar began descending. "Groups have structure. They sleep somewhere, eat somewhere, work somewhere, arrive from somewhere. I need that structure."
"We have it," Caldwell replied, looking back once before the road demanded him again. Nathan nodded and finished the list. The major drove several moments in silence, then returned to the investigation. "You think you'll find where it started?"
"No," Nathan said, watching a farmhouse pass behind its fence. Caldwell turned slightly, and he continued before the man could ask. "I think I may find where people first noticed it. Those are not necessarily the same place."
Telegraph poles approached beside the road and joined the diminishing line behind them. Joseph watched the fields through his dark lenses, a black shape quite out of place among the young crops and grazing horses. A farmer working at a fence stopped with his hands on the rail and stared after them.
Nathan saw him remain there until the curve hid him, then opened another page. The camp's dead were still represented by an uncertain number.
"What about the men who died?" he asked, flattening the sheet. Caldwell's jaw tightened, and he asked what Nathan wanted to know. Nathan met his eyes in the mirror. "I want their names."
"Not numbers?" the major asked, glancing at the papers spread over Nathan's knees. The car slowed where the road narrowed, and Nathan gathered the loose edge beneath his hand.
"I already have numbers," he said, touching the total with his pencil. "Names, ages, companies, occupations before enlistment. Dates they reported sick, when the cough began, when breathing became difficult, when pneumonia was diagnosed. What was done, and when they died. If tissue was preserved, I want it. Photographs too, if anyone took them. And the physicians who examined the earliest cases, before anyone tells them what I think."
"Anything else?" Caldwell asked, staring ahead. Nathan turned the pencil between his fingers, then added the request that surprised him most.
"Yes. I want the men who recovered," he said, watching Caldwell look back. He could almost hear the major rearranging the work that had seemed straightforward when he had come to meet them at the station.
"The recovered?" Caldwell repeated, easing past a rough stretch. Nathan thought of Peter Halpern standing beside a hospital bed and insisting that he did not get tired. He had remembered that voice as often as Daniel's damaged lungs.
"Especially them," Nathan said, drawing a line beneath the request. Caldwell asked why, and Nathan left the pencil against the page for a moment before answering.
"Because dying is only one outcome."
The route continued through towns and farmland towards Topeka, then Manhattan, Junction City and Fort Riley. Hours of changing surfaces still lay between them and the enormous camp beside the reservation. Nathan worked when the road allowed it and held the papers still when it did not. Caldwell drove with a growing familiarity Nathan appreciated more than he cared to interrupt. Dust gathered at the edges of the seat and whitened a crease on the major's sleeve.
"The men who recovered mostly went back to duty," Caldwell said eventually, returning to the request. Nathan looked up from the report and told him to find some. The major nodded. "I'll see what I can do."
"And Major," Nathan said, closing the report over one finger. Caldwell met his gaze in the mirror, and Nathan set the pencil down. "Don't prepare them for me."
"What do you mean?" Caldwell asked, slowing for a corner. Nathan braced the case against his legs as the tyres crunched over loose gravel.
"Don't tell them what the reports say," he replied, speaking over the road noise. "Don't tell them what their symptoms are supposed to have been. Don't put six men in a room together and let the first teach the other five how to remember it."
"You want them separately," Caldwell said, working the wheel. Nathan confirmed it, and the major asked whether that included the doctors.
"Especially the doctors," Nathan replied as the car settled onto the westward road.
Joseph turned towards him, leather creaking faintly beneath the helmet. Nathan felt the attention before he looked. "What?"
"Nothing," Joseph said, facing forward again. Caldwell glanced between them in the mirror, and Nathan studied the lenses for another moment before returning to his papers.
"You've been spending too much time with me," he said, reopening the report. Joseph secured the trunk against his boot and kept his attention on the country.
"Occupational hazard," he replied, making Caldwell's mouth twitch despite himself. Nathan let the amusement pass and lowered his eyes to the names and figures.
Ahead, the road ran between the telegraph poles towards a camp where men had fallen ill and recovered quickly enough for the Army to keep moving. He wanted to know why.
By the time they reached Camp Funston, the light had flattened across the Kansas sky. Nathan had put his papers away some miles earlier, but their figures remained arranged in his thoughts: hundreds reporting within days, more than eleven hundred hospitalised, beds filling faster than the staff could prepare them and then emptying as the majority recovered. The line rose and fell neatly on the reports. He distrusted it more each time he remembered the work required to produce either end of it.
A lower daily total could mean men getting well, men being moved or men no longer alive to be counted.
The empty ground beside the road became fenced land and military traffic. An Army truck approached in a cloud of dust, forcing Caldwell partly aside while it passed close enough for Nathan to see the soldiers sitting beneath its canvas. One elbowed his neighbour when he noticed Joseph. By the time the truck was past, every visible face had turned backwards, and Joseph watched them go without reacting. Dust settled over the touring car as Caldwell brought it back onto the road.
They crested a rise, and the camp spread before them. Long wooden barracks repeated across the reservation, interrupted by warehouses, mess buildings, roads and training grounds. Smoke rose from chimneys beneath wires strung between poles. A marching cadence reached Nathan from beyond the nearest buildings before he could distinguish the men calling it, and a detail carrying timber paused to let the car through. Each held his end while the load hung between them, waiting for Caldwell's wheels to pass before they could move again.
Laundry stirred behind a barracks. A sergeant stood in the road berating three soldiers, faltering for half a word when Joseph passed within twenty feet, then continuing with enough force to cover the lapse. Two men worked beneath the raised front of a truck. Another sat on an overturned crate cleaning mud from his boots, and somebody played a harmonica badly through an open window while several voices offered competing advice. Nathan looked towards the hospital buildings and back at the men beside the road. Weeks earlier, some of those same barracks had been sending patients into sick call almost one after another.
"What are we seeing first?" he asked, leaning forward to make himself heard.
Caldwell pointed towards the hospital and told him they would begin at the overflow building. Nathan watched a wagon cross ahead of them while the major slowed.
"Still holding respiratory cases there," Caldwell said, waiting for the wagon to clear. "Most aren't severe now."
"How many?" Nathan asked, drawing the medical case closer. Soldiers carrying folded blankets stepped aside, and Caldwell moved between two long wooden buildings before answering.
"Thirty-seven this morning. Might be fewer by now," he said, checking the passage ahead. "Men are being returned to quarters as they recover."
"Good," Nathan said, catching Caldwell's glance in the mirror. He gave him a tired look before the major could object. "Good that you're taking me somewhere useful."
A soldier with blankets against his chest stopped as they passed. He leaned towards the man beside him, and Nathan caught the single letter through the engine noise. Joseph turned his mask towards them. The soldier straightened so sharply that the blankets shifted and had to be caught beneath his chin, while his companion found something to examine on the wagon.
"You've made friends," Nathan said, looking at Joseph. The lenses regarded him without comment, and Nathan turned back towards the hospital with a faint smile. It faded when he saw the doors and smelled what came through them.
The overflow building was long and broad, its high windows admitting strips of late light beneath a roof built for goods rather than sick men. Orderlies carried linens and enamel basins through the open double doors. Disinfectant reached the car, mixed with sweat, damp wool and the stale sourness of crowded beds. Nathan was out before Caldwell finished setting the brake.
Joseph followed, lifting the trunk and allowing the rear springs to rise, while Nathan took his case towards the entrance.
He heard the ward before he entered it. A shallow cough came from somewhere close to the doors, followed by a deeper fit farther away. Between them were quiet voices, a chair scraping and enamel striking enamel.
He shortened his last few steps and stopped just inside, letting his eyes travel the length of the building. The doorway had given him very little idea of how far the rows would reach.
Ten lines of beds extended beneath the rafters. Narrow aisles separated them, with broader passages at intervals for orderlies carrying their burdens from one section to another. White sheets and grey blankets repeated towards the far wall until individual mattresses became pale bands broken by heads and shoulders. Some beds stood stripped now. An orderly worked a fresh sheet over one, pulling a corner tight with the absent ease of a movement repeated hundreds of times. Nathan looked from that empty place to the occupied bed beside it.
A soldier near the entrance had a newspaper across his knees, and the man next to him leaned far enough sideways to share it.
Farther down, another argued with an orderly that the ability to stand ought to constitute proof he could leave. His neighbour laughed at the answer. A sleeping man lay with his mouth open and hair stuck to his forehead, while a nurse listened to the chest of someone bent forward beneath a loose shirt. Air from the windows stirred the sheets hung around several beds, exposing her for a moment before the cloth settled again.
Nathan's hand tightened on the case. The noise should have reassured him after Chicago, but the empty mattresses kept making him see the men who must have occupied them. There were boys scarcely older than Clara among faces worn by years of labour, all reduced to the same blankets and little bedside cups. One man laughed at a whispered remark, then folded over a cloth when the laugh caught in his chest. Nathan waited until his shoulders stopped working before looking away. If the men now looked well enough to leave, what had they looked like when every space beneath this roof was needed?
The light behind him diminished as Joseph entered. His shadow stretched over the boards to the foot of the nearest bed, and a soldier paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. Conversation thinned along the entrance. Nathan heard somebody whisper T's name; the next man turned, then the one beyond him. The black armour belonged more readily among soldiers than among the civilians at Union Station, but some of these men had heard what it meant in France. Others knew versions improved by men who had never seen Joseph at all.
Nathan glanced at the mask and remembered the unmarked stationery tucked into the waistcoat beneath it. Joseph had spent hours wondering what to write to a schoolteacher while the men around him travelled in comfortable ignorance. Here, that same quiet man was becoming a story before he had put down their bags. Nathan set his medical case beside his leg and looked towards Caldwell, who had entered behind them. They needed the ward to become a ward again.
"T. Take our things to the rooms they've given us," he said, indicating the luggage. "Find out where they've put us. I'll meet you there when I'm finished."
"Professor," Joseph replied, inclining his head. He turned back through the doors, followed by the eyes of the soldiers nearest him. One continued watching the empty doorway after the shadow had gone.
"He's considerably less interesting when you know him," Nathan told the man, lifting his case. The soldier looked at him, then laughed when somebody farther down the row did. His cup completed its journey to his mouth. Conversation resumed around the beds, and Caldwell let out a breath through his nose.
"You do that deliberately," the major said, joining Nathan at the aisle. He moved clear of an orderly coming through with a basin and glanced back towards the doors.
"Frequently," Nathan replied, waiting until the man had passed before following Caldwell. "Your chief physician?"
The major led him towards a table covered with charts. The ward grew less talkative as they moved farther from the entrance, though the coughing became more frequent. Nathan passed men sitting upright without effort and others supported by several pillows, cups set where their hands could reach them. He watched the colour around their mouths, the sweat at their hairlines and whether they looked up when he passed. A nurse carried thermometers in a tray. Behind her, an orderly stripped an empty mattress while a patient tried to move his feet out of the way.
The physician waiting at the table was older than Nathan had expected, perhaps in his late forties, with his sleeves above his forearms and red impressions where his spectacles rested beside his nose. Two younger doctors stood with him. One was writing; the other held coffee in an enamel cup and watched the ward over its rim.
Caldwell introduced Major Charles Avery, chief medical officer for the section. Avery offered his hand, and Nathan took it beside the crowded table.
"Professor. I've read some of your work," Avery said, his grip brisk. Nathan glanced at the younger doctor's coffee and returned to Avery.
"Major. Then I apologise," he replied, releasing the hand as the younger man choked into his cup. Avery kept his expression for a second before a corner of his mouth moved.
"I was told you were difficult," he said, adjusting his spectacles. Nathan found a clear patch of table and set his case on it.
"You were told correctly," he answered, opening the clasp and taking out a notebook. He put it beside the case, where Avery could see how little he had yet written. "I want everything."
"Everything?" Avery repeated, looking from the notebook to Nathan. The younger doctor lowered his coffee, and Nathan cleared a little more room with his case.
"Admission records, sick-call logs, ward registers, temperature charts, daily totals," he said, counting them off against the edge of the notebook. "Company and barracks assignments wherever you've recorded them. Transfers, discharges, deaths.
Pneumonia separately if you've already kept it that way. If separating it means asking somebody to decide now which cases count, give me the original records. And the physicians' notes from the first forty-eight hours, before everyone agreed what they were seeing."
"Why?" Avery asked, folding his arms. Nathan looked at the fatigue around the man's eyes and kept the answer matter-of-fact.
"Because once physicians agree on a diagnosis, they become remarkably talented at discovering evidence for it," he said, putting his pencil beside the notebook. Avery glanced towards the younger men before returning to him.
"You don't think it was influenza," the major said, his voice quieter under the coughing. Nathan told him he had said nothing of the kind, and Avery tried again. "You think something else was here."
"I didn't say that either," Nathan replied, resting a hand on the open case. "More than a thousand men became sick in a concentrated military camp. I'd prefer to look at what they actually did before deciding what they must have done."
Avery studied him for another moment, then unfolded his arms. The younger man with the notebook had stopped writing. Avery told Lieutenant Harris to get the March records, and Harris looked towards the small office partitioned off at one end of the building. His eyes returned to the portion of table Nathan had cleared.
"All of them?" the lieutenant asked, closing his notebook around the pencil. Nathan answered before Avery could decide how much room they required.
"All of them," he said, taking his stethoscope from the case. Harris looked towards Avery, who sighed and waved him towards the office. Nathan had already turned to the nearest occupied bed when the major told Harris he had heard him.
The patient looked twenty-three or twenty-four. Fever had flushed his cheeks and forehead, leaving the skin around his mouth comparatively pale, and his shirt was damp where the collar lay against his neck. A thermometer rested beside an enamel cup on the little table. Nathan pulled a chair close and sat with his notebook against his knee. The soldier looked from him to Avery, uncertain whether an examination by this stranger required something he had not been told to do.
"What's your name?" Nathan asked, keeping his hands clear of the chart for a moment. The soldier drew one arm from beneath the blanket as if he might be expected to salute.
"Private Samuel Reed, sir," he said, stopping when Nathan made a small downward motion. His hand remained above the blanket while he waited.
"Samuel will do," Nathan replied, lifting the chart. Reed looked towards Avery again and asked what he meant, making Nathan glance beneath the bed. "Unless you have another Samuel Reed hidden under there."
"No, sir," Reed said after looking down before he could help it. He straightened with embarrassment adding to the colour in his face, and Nathan settled the chart against his notebook.
"Excellent. One patient at a time is much easier," Nathan said, letting him see the smile. Reed returned it, and Nathan began asking when he had first felt ill. The headache had started two days earlier, before the cough. Chills followed that night, and aches had made almost every position uncomfortable. Nathan asked about pain in his chest.
"When I cough," Reed said, pressing his hand beneath his sternum when Nathan asked him to show it. Nathan watched the movement, then passed him the thermometer.
"Under your tongue," he said, touching the back of his fingers briefly to Reed's forehead. "Don't bite it. It has done nothing to deserve that."
Reed obeyed with another small smile caught around the instrument. Nathan put two fingertips against his wrist and began counting the pulse. Avery stood beside the chair, watching the examination while a nurse crossed behind him. To anyone farther down the row, there was nothing unusual in it. Nathan sat with a patient's wrist beneath his fingers, eyes lowered towards the watch, while the Red-Light followed the contact into Samuel's body.
Heat spread through him beyond the patch of skin Nathan touched. Inflamed tissues lined the respiratory tract, damaged cells gave way to replacement, and the body's defence worked with a persistence untidier than anything drawn in a textbook. The infection Nathan had followed through Peter and Daniel was here too, using living cells until those cells could no longer perform their ordinary work. In Reed, however, it was losing ground. Places where it had multiplied freely were becoming harder to occupy, and repair had begun among the damage. Samuel shifted his fingers on the blanket, waiting for the pulse count to finish.
Nathan kept the wrist in his hand as his awareness widened. He could still feel the ordinary warmth of a young man with a wet collar and an uncomfortable thermometer, and that small contact steadied his attention while the neighbouring beds entered him.
Fever in one body; a wound healing along another's arm; scarred tissue, digestion, sweat and blood moving beneath skin.
Bacteria occupied places they belonged and exploited places the influenza had opened to them. The signals overlapped across the aisle until he had to attend deliberately to separate one man from the next.
The infection ran through many of them.
Around some beds it was faint, scattered activity thinning as the immune response cleared what remained. Elsewhere it held more densely within injured tissues. He had no satisfactory word for the impression.
Willit would ask for one, and Nathan would probably say haze, then spend half an hour explaining why the word was inadequate.
There was no colour in the room for another man to see. He felt the presence beneath the roof as plainly as he heard the cough that interrupted Avery beside him.
"Yesterday morning was higher," Avery said, tapping the temperature on Reed's chart.
Nathan returned his attention to the paper and asked how high. Avery read one hundred and three point two. Nathan finished the pulse count, gave the thermometer its remaining time and took it from beneath Reed's tongue.
"One hundred and one," he said, holding the column towards the window light. Reed began to speak, but Nathan raised a finger and checked it again. "Better."
He wrote the figure on the chart and reached for the stethoscope. Reed loosened his shirt when asked, exposing skin that cooled in the draught. Nathan listened at the front, then had him lean forward to examine his back. A sound on the right made him return there, and he kept the bell in place while Reed waited for the next instruction. Avery leaned slightly to see the chart, but Nathan gave him no conclusion yet.
"Deep breath," Nathan said, steadying the instrument against Reed's back. The first inhalation reached its end. The second broke halfway through and folded the soldier over his cloth, shoulders contracting as the cough took hold.
Nathan moved the stethoscope aside. Reed pressed the cloth over his mouth until his knuckles paled, struggling through several coughs before he could draw air without starting another. The man in the next bed looked up from his newspaper. A nurse passing behind Nathan paused, saw that Reed was being attended and continued towards her own patient. Nathan kept a hand close enough to steady him and waited until he could straighten.
"Once more. Smaller this time," he said, replacing the bell. Reed managed it, and Nathan listened without asking him to deepen the breath. His lungs were injured, but they were working. Beneath the sound, Nathan could feel the body containing the infection and beginning to repair what had been damaged. He withdrew the instrument and folded it into one hand.
"You're improving," he said, putting the chart where Avery could reach it. Reed tightened his grip on the cloth and looked up at him with the rank-conscious caution gone from his face.
"You sure?" he asked, waiting for Nathan's answer. Nathan felt the temptation to give him the reassurance he wanted and settled a hand on his shoulder instead.
"No," he said, seeing the hope leave Reed's expression. "But I'm considerably happier with you than I would have been yesterday."
"So I'm getting better?" Reed asked, studying him. Nathan patted his shoulder once and stood, moving the chair clear of the aisle.
"That is the current conspiracy," he replied, giving Reed a smile as he collected his notebook. "Keep participating."
"You're going to examine all of them?" Avery asked, following him to the next occupied bed. Nathan lifted its chart and checked the temperature before answering.
"No. Only the interesting ones," he said, catching Avery's relief before the second part reached him. The major stared, and Nathan looked up from the page. "That was a joke."
"I wasn't certain," Avery admitted, stepping aside for a nurse carrying water. Nathan watched her set the cup down before pulling the chair towards the bed.
"Neither was I," he replied, sitting beside the man waiting there. The patient looked about thirty and had a blanket around his shoulders despite the warmth farther from the windows. Nathan asked his name before anything else. Private William Harper had become ill three days earlier, with headache and fever followed by a cough the next morning. He described it carefully, occasionally looking at Avery as though the major might correct him.
Nathan waited until Harper stopped doing that before asking where he slept. Barracks Two-Fifteen, lower bunk; he recorded both and put the thermometer where Harper could hold it beneath his tongue. Then he asked how many men occupied the room.
Harper frowned towards the rafters, counted briefly and removed the instrument to answer. Avery watched him do it and said nothing.
"Thirty-eight, I think," Harper said, holding the thermometer between two fingers. Nathan accepted the estimate and guided his hand back towards his mouth.
"I admire your enthusiasm, William, but we do need the temperature," he said, making Harper smile as he replaced it. Avery turned his face aside, and Nathan began a new line beneath the barracks number.
He moved along the row without repeating the same examination mechanically. One chest required several minutes of listening; another man had lost his fever but retained a cough which kept waking him. A third remembered muscle pain before any respiratory complaint. He could place the onset to the hour because he had been unloading supplies when his legs abruptly refused the work. Nathan asked him to describe what he had been carrying and where he had set it down, allowing the task to bring back the morning without supplying symptoms for him to confirm.
Meals, bunks, work details and journeys into Junction City filled successive pages.
Nathan asked who had coughed in the room, whether the man above had been ill, whether they shared cigarettes or received visitors, and who had appeared sick in the mess hall. Some recalled names at once.
Others gave accounts which contradicted a man he had spoken to minutes earlier. He left the disagreement in his notebook. They had slept and worked through the same days without experiencing every part of them together; agreement would have been convenient, but convenience was how an early answer became difficult to question.
The Red-Light remained attentive beneath the conversations. Most of the ward was recovering, and Nathan felt his own relief in small increments: a lower temperature, a deeper breath, a man irritated enough by the food to describe its shortcomings at length.
He gave that complaint more patience than it deserved. Around them nurses crossed the aisles, blankets moved and an orderly shook a sheet before folding it. Biological traces travelled with those ordinary disturbances, adding to the overlapping impression beneath the roof. Infection remained active even in men impatient to get out of bed.
A soldier coughed three beds away. Nathan felt the dispersal before the sound had fully reached him and turned, following droplets too small for the window light to reveal. They spread into the air, slowed and settled towards sheets, clothing and floorboards.
Many would go nowhere. Some would dry or disappear beneath soap and a cleaning cloth. Others entered the space an orderly was about to cross, and Nathan watched the man walk through it with folded linen against his chest.
The orderly looked towards the nurse who needed him and drew breath as he went.
The soldier wiped his mouth and returned to speaking with his neighbour. A chair scraped at the far end of the aisle, and somebody called for water. Nathan stayed still beside the bed. He could describe the transmission in words any physician would understand, but feeling it happen while nobody interrupted an ordinary task made those words seem horribly small. There was nothing for the orderly to step around, nothing in the cough to announce which breath might matter.
"Professor?" Avery said, stopping beside him. Nathan looked back and realised the pause had become conspicuous. A sheet stirred near the far wall as air came through the windows.
"Ventilation," he replied, following its movement. Avery told him the windows were kept open whenever possible. Nathan looked up at the high openings and then along the occupied rows. "Keep them open."
"It's cold at night," Avery reminded him, glancing towards the nearest patients.
Nathan could imagine the complaints and the orderlies trying to settle them, but he could also feel the air those men shared.
"Give them another blanket," he said, stepping around a chair in the aisle. "And spread the beds farther apart where you can."
"We're nowhere near capacity now," Avery said, indicating the stripped mattresses. Nathan looked at the space between them and nodded.
"Good. Use it," he replied, stopping beside two occupied beds close enough for the men to share a newspaper. He watched one patient bend towards the other's page. "How close were these three weeks ago?"
"Closer," Avery said, looking down the row. Nathan waited beside him, and the major glanced towards the passage through which an orderly had just carried a basin.
"How much?" Nathan asked, keeping his eyes on the beds. Avery drew a breath before answering.
"Close enough that we could walk between them," he said, then saw Nathan turn towards him. He worked his jaw as though he already knew the answer had failed to provide a distance.
"That's not what I asked," Nathan said quietly, leaving the correction between them. Avery looked back at the rows his staff had been required to fill.
"Some nearly touched," he admitted, lowering his voice while a nurse passed.
Nathan placed men into the empty spaces in his mind. Cups would have crossed those gaps, blankets would have brushed neighbouring blankets, and staff would have worked their way between beds until there was scarcely room to turn. He could feel the renewed haze building from cough after cough while the men waited for someone to reach them. Avery had needed more space than he possessed; the infection had required very little.
"Show me the records," Nathan said, turning towards the table. Harris was returning from the office with a box, and an orderly followed with another. Nathan stopped beside the place he had cleared and watched the lieutenant lower his burden onto it.
Registers, loose admission sheets and charts filled the first box tightly enough to bow several pages against its sides. The second landed beside it, leaving less table than Nathan had expected to need. Harris straightened his sleeves and reminded him he had asked for all of them. Avery folded his arms when Nathan looked at him, evidently prepared to enjoy this part of the afternoon.
"You asked," the major said, watching Nathan pull the first register free. Nathan opened it far enough to see the crowded entries, then looked up with a slowly widening smile.
"Major, I believe we may get along," he replied, drawing a chair towards the table.
Avery took the other while Harris moved the charts away from Nathan's elbow. Behind them, a cough rolled under the rafters and disappeared among pages turning, beds creaking and a soldier laughing near the entrance.
March fourth stood above the first entries.
Nathan ran a finger down the names of men who had come to sick call expecting to be told when they could return to duty. Around him, fever was withdrawing, damaged tissues were repairing and viral populations were collapsing beneath the body's response. Yet the infection persisted in other throats and lungs, carried into shared air whenever a man breathed or coughed. He felt it among men who already considered themselves well enough to leave.
"Major Avery," Nathan said, tapping the first entry. He waited while Avery turned the book towards the window light. "Start at the beginning."
Outside, boots struck earth in cadence and trucks moved between barracks. Mess halls prepared the next meal, and thousands of men continued their training for a war across the ocean. Nathan bent over the register beneath the warehouse roof, listening as Avery began to describe the morning when more than a hundred soldiers had reported sick. The patients around him were getting better. Their breaths kept renewing the invisible miasma while he read.
Night had settled over Funston when Nathan left the hospital, but the camp had made little accommodation for it. Yellow light lay beneath doors and across the ground below barracks windows. Somewhere a truck engine coughed repeatedly before catching, followed by a cheer from men who had evidently become invested in the attempt. Nathan smiled as he walked past the sound. Boots crossed the packed earth, voices carried between buildings, and farther away an order received an answer from several dozen throats. Darkness had hidden the open spaces without emptying them.
Disinfectant had worked itself into his cuffs. When he raised a hand towards his face, he caught it beneath the smells of wool and paper, carrying the ward with him into the cooler air. There had been forty-three more charts after the first boxes, three physicians who remembered the opening days differently, and two nurses who remembered details none of them had written down. He had spoken separately with seven recovered men on light duty, examined eleven still in the ward and arranged for the staff to identify preserved material from those who had died. By the time he stopped, the figures in his notebook had acquired faces and voices he could no longer mistake for neat columns.
He had eaten because a nurse put a plate beside the register and informed him that she would report him to Avery if it remained there twenty minutes later. Most of the meal had disappeared before she returned, which seemed to satisfy her sufficiently to let him continue. Now, following the directions to their quarters, he could hear somebody laughing in a room he could not see. A door slammed nearby. He reached the officers' building shortly after ten, with the case heavy against his leg and several questions still waiting to be written down.
The Army had given them a small room together rather than attempting to accommodate T among the enlisted men.
Hale would probably have approved of that arrangement. Nathan opened the door against the equipment trunk and had to push harder before it scraped far enough across the boards to admit him. Joseph looked up from one of two narrow beds. His forearms rested against his thighs, and one hand worked beneath the edge of his helmet.
"You've barricaded the room," Nathan said, closing the door with his heel. A table stood between the beds, with a washstand, two chairs and a wardrobe occupying most of the remaining floor. Joseph's armour did little to improve the available space.
"It's a small room," Joseph replied, drawing the helmet forward to free something pinching beneath it. The Ledermaske lay beside him with its lenses towards the ceiling, but the helmet had apparently proved less willing to leave his head.
"You're a large man," Nathan said, setting down his case and hanging his coat over a chair. Joseph told him that was hardly his fault, still attending to the fastening. Nathan took the other chair. "Debatable."
The electric bulb overhead was dark. Two candles lit the table, one in a holder and the other fixed into the neck of an empty bottle, their small flames leaving the corners comfortably indistinct. Stationery waited between them. Nathan drew a sheet closer, and Joseph finally looked properly at him, his hand resting beneath the helmet instead of worrying it. He asked how long they would be staying.
"A week," Nathan said, uncapping the fountain pen. Joseph's fingers stopped, and he added, "Give or take."
"That's different," Joseph observed, looking at him across the table. Nathan tested the nib against the edge of the sheet before beginning the greeting.
"That's why I added it," he replied, writing Dear Mrs Hargreaves. His hand lingered beneath the words. A letter announcing only his continued survival would earn questions about meals, sleep and whether anyone had sufficient sense to interrupt him. He began with Kansas, deciding that the cold night air was something she could read without needing to worry about what he meant.
"I want a week because I don't trust what I've seen today," he said, writing while Joseph returned to the fastening. "Avery isn't concealing anything. They're giving me everything."
"What don't you trust?" Joseph asked, lowering his hand for a moment. Nathan finished the line and turned the pen between his fingers.
"The sample," he said, indicating the medical case. "Thirty-odd men left in an overflow ward weeks after the outbreak tell me what remained for me to find. They don't necessarily tell me what was there in March."
Air slipped beneath the door and bent the nearer flame. Nathan cupped a hand around it until it straightened, then returned to his letter. Most of the men who could describe March were already outside the hospital.
The dead could give him only what somebody had kept. He would spend the next week finding both, observing the remaining patients and helping where he could, instead of assuming the ward had supplied a complete answer on his first afternoon.
"They have microscopes here," he continued, drawing another line beneath the greeting. "Better equipment than I expected. Not Institute standard, but enough for staining, sections and ordinary microscopy. I want their slides before I prepare mine, and whatever cultures they've maintained."
Joseph removed the helmet at last. His hair lay flattened beneath it and damp at the temples; he rubbed a hand through it before setting the helmet beside the mask. With his face uncovered, the day's discomfort became easier to see. He looked towards Nathan's case and asked about the dead.
"That's the more important part," Nathan said, slowing the pen. He finished the sentence in the letter before looking across. "I want tissue from as many of the deceased as they can still provide."
"How many?" Joseph asked, his hand still in his hair. Nathan turned the sheet to keep his cuff out of the wet ink and answered that he wanted as many as possible. Joseph lowered his hand. "That's not a number."
"No. It shouldn't be yet," Nathan replied, watching him accept it and begin releasing the outer armour. "Lung principally. Several regions if possible: damaged tissue, comparatively preserved tissue and the boundaries. Trachea and bronchi where they have them. Other organs if the records give us reason. Different stages, different dates. Six men who died the same morning won't give me everything I need."
One fastening released, then another.
Joseph drew an arm clear, and the freed piece settled against the bed with enough weight to make the boards complain.
Nathan moved the candle farther from his stationery and explained the transport.
Preserved organs would travel in formalin.
Larger specimens already fixed must be retained as they were, with nobody trimming away portions because they supposed he wanted only the most damaged part. He wanted enough material to return to when the first question proved to have been the wrong one.
"And slides?" Joseph asked, lowering the armour to the floor. Nathan nodded and blotted the page before continuing.
"Prepared here where useful, more at the Institute," he said, lifting the blotter. "Paraffin blocks as well as slides. Fixed tissue, properly dehydrated, embedded in wax and sectioned thinly enough for microscopy. Keep the blocks, and we can prepare more sections later."
"Specific," Joseph said as Nathan described the labels he intended to require. He began freeing the other side, glancing up when Nathan put the pen down.
"I do not want several dead men's lungs arriving in London with labels saying 'bad influenza,'" Nathan said, holding his gaze. "It has happened."
"To you?" Joseph asked, setting the next piece beside the first. Nathan looked back at the letter and admitted it had not. Joseph attended to another strap. "Yet."
"I dislike you occasionally," Nathan said, regarding him across the candle. Joseph continued loosening the leather and told him he did not. Nathan watched him for another second, then returned to the sheet. "No."
The next lines came more easily. Funston was large enough to qualify as a town despite the Army's insistence on calling it a camp, and its medical staff had been more accommodating than some of those in Chicago. He described the outbreak as largely spent and wrote that most of the men he had examined were recovering. Daniel's lungs stayed out of the letter. Mrs Hargreaves would read it in a room in New York, perhaps before bed, and Nathan wanted her to be able to put it down afterwards.
"The men are getting better," he said, reading the sentence again. Joseph looked up from the boot he was removing.
"Most of them," he replied, pulling it free and setting it beside the bed. Nathan nodded.
That word had appeared beside a great many totals today, leaving enough room for all the names in the other register. He picked up the pen, but Joseph kept watching him. "What are you thinking?"
"That Funston and Chicago don't feel the same," Nathan said, completing three words before stopping. Joseph leaned back against the wall and asked whether he meant a different disease.
"No. That's the problem," Nathan replied, looking across at him. "Peter, Daniel and the men today belong close enough together that I wouldn't defend calling them separate diseases. But the populations aren't identical. I knew that in Chicago. What I don't know is whether Kansas gives me something earlier."
The second flame shrank towards its wick, then recovered, stretching Joseph's shadow up the wall. Nathan watched it steady before returning to the comparison. One man's tissue could tell him about that man; he needed enough specimens, from enough dates, to discover whether the differences continued beyond individual bodies. He had felt the ward recovering. That did not entitle him to turn its remaining patients into evidence for everything he had hoped to find.
"If the material preserves enough of what was here in March, I can compare it with what I took from Peter and Daniel," he said, turning the sheet beneath his hand. "Groups against groups. Dates against dates."
"And France," Joseph added, resting his shoulders against the boards. Nathan lowered his eyes to the letter and confirmed it. Men passed beneath their window, their conversation swelling and fading along the building. He waited until they had gone before writing how long he intended to stay.
Mrs Hargreaves, I expect we shall remain here approximately one week, though I have learned better than to promise exact dates when both railways and biology are involved. I intend to be back in New York within ten days if the work proceeds without complication. Please interpret that as an intention rather than an invitation to accuse me of lying should I arrive on the eleventh.
"What?" Joseph asked when Nathan smiled at the last sentence. He paused with his hand around the second boot, watching Nathan attempt to remove the expression.
Nathan said it was nothing, but Joseph looked towards the letter. "You're writing about me."
"I wasn't," Nathan replied, settling his hand beside the sheet. Joseph pulled at the boot and told him he must be writing something he thought was funny. Nathan resumed the next line. "The two are not synonymous."
He asked whether she had enjoyed New York after their departure and found anywhere worth visiting twice. Had she allowed herself even one afternoon without worrying about him? He suspected the answer, but wrote the question anyway.
Then he reached Horsley and put down that he hoped the rat had behaved himself. Reading it back, Nathan crossed out the words firmly enough for Joseph to look up.
"Problem?" Joseph asked, still holding the boot. Nathan gave him Horsley's name, and Joseph stopped altogether. "What did he do?"
"Nothing," Nathan said, pointing the nib towards the spoiled line. "But asking whether he's behaved implies I believe the outcome possible."
"Fair," Joseph replied, pulling the boot free and putting it beside the other. Nathan began again, remembering Horsley sitting with extraordinary dignity beside a bowl he had emptied less than twenty minutes earlier. The recollection made his next request rather less authoritative than he had intended.
I hope Horsley has not made too much trouble for you. I realise this is an optimistic request. Please make certain he is eating properly, and do not let him convince you he has not been fed simply because he sits beside an empty dish and looks neglected.
He has discovered that this works on you. It also works on me, so I am in no position to criticise.
"Say it," Nathan told Joseph, catching the movement at the corner of his mouth as he finished the sentence. Joseph became unusually occupied with arranging the boots, then sat back and said he had said nothing. Nathan pointed the pen at him. "You were about to."
"I was thinking," Joseph replied, looking from the letter to Nathan. They remained still for a moment, and Joseph's face betrayed just enough satisfaction to settle the matter.
"That was deliberate," Nathan said, lowering the pen when Joseph agreed. He shook his head and returned to the page. "Chicago has damaged you."
"I had a pleasant time," Joseph said, looking towards the candle. Nathan abandoned the reply he had been preparing. He could see the man on the platform again, watching Helen Harcourt run beside the train, but Joseph had chosen to say only this much.
"I'm glad," Nathan answered, letting it stand without a joke. Joseph kept his eyes on the flame, and Nathan finished the letter while the silence remained easy between them.
He told Mrs Hargreaves that he was well, that Joseph was well, and that American railway food had not yet succeeded in murdering either of them. He wished her a pleasant remainder of her stay, urged her to enjoy New York rather than hurry back to Britain because he was elsewhere, and repeated that he expected to see her within ten days. At the bottom he wrote Take care of yourself, then signed his name. She would know he was working and where to find him. There were things he had left out, as there always were, but she would have enough ordinary details to picture his evening.
Nathan read the pages once, folded them and copied the temporary address from his notebook. He checked the number twice before sealing the envelope. Joseph had removed most of the armour now and looked more like the man who had sat beside a railway window that morning.
Nathan did not mention the stationery in his waistcoat. A knock came before he could put the notebook away.
"Come in," he called, laying the envelope beside the candle. A boy of perhaps sixteen appeared with a leather dispatch pouch across his body and several letters in one hand. His uniform was slightly too large through the shoulders.
"Professor Drake?" he asked, stopping in the gap. Nathan stood and picked up the envelope while Joseph watched from the bed.
"Unfortunately," Nathan replied, making the boy hesitate. Joseph covered his mouth with a hand, and Nathan held out the letter before the messenger could decide what to do with the answer. "Can this go with the outgoing post? New York."
"Yes, sir," the boy said, checking the address. Nathan kept hold of the envelope for one extra second and told him not to lose it. The messenger's fingers tightened at the other end. "No, sir."
"Thank you," Nathan said, releasing it. The boy placed it carefully between two other letters, then looked past Nathan towards the armour and the Ledermaske. Joseph noticed. The messenger straightened when he realised it, wished them good night and withdrew with more urgency than he had entered. Nathan closed the door and listened to his footsteps accelerate down the corridor.
"I don't see what's amusing," Nathan said when Joseph began laughing quietly. He returned to the table while Joseph lowered his hand and told him he had frightened the boy.
"I did nothing," Nathan replied, gathering the unused sheets. Joseph looked towards the mask and said the messenger had seen it. Nathan followed his glance. "That's your fault."
Joseph conceded the point, and Nathan tidied the table. His hand came to rest on the medical case, habit already arranging another hour of work: the earliest admissions against barracks assignments, the morning distribution by company, the question Avery's register had raised. His fingers reached the clasp before he noticed Joseph watching. He removed his hand and pushed the case beneath the table with his foot.
"Not a word," he warned, seeing Joseph assume the same innocent expression. Joseph said he had said nothing, and Nathan recognised the reply waiting beyond his own accusation. He unbuttoned his collar instead. "Definitely damaged. Sleep."
"That's an order?" Joseph asked, leaning forward to gather the last of the armour. Nathan went to the washstand and poured water into the basin.
"Advice," he said, testing it with his fingers. Joseph questioned advice from him, and Nathan bent towards the cold water with a tired smile. "I recognise the hypocrisy."
Joseph arranged his equipment beside the trunk where he could reach it, placing the mask on top. Its dark lenses caught both candle flames. Nathan washed his face and hands, removing some of the hospital's warmth without doing much for the heaviness behind his eyes. The small mirror gave him the face of a man who had spent a day breathing ward air and arguing with records. He dried his hands while Joseph settled onto a bed that was slightly too short for him.
"One week," Joseph said, drawing his legs onto the mattress. Nathan looked at him in the mirror and added that it was approximate. Joseph lay back. "And New York within ten days."
"That's what I told Mrs Hargreaves," Nathan replied, hanging the towel over the basin. Joseph's eyes were closing, but he informed Nathan that they had better be there, then that she would be angry. Nathan crossed towards the table. "Deeply."
"Terrifying woman," Joseph murmured, his mouth moving faintly against the pillow. Nathan smiled and wished him good night, receiving his own name in the quiet reply before he bent over the first candle.
His breath extinguished it, leaving smoke visible as it twisted through the remaining light. For a moment the other flame held the room alone: Joseph stretched across the short bed, armour beside the trunk, the mask directed sightlessly towards the ceiling and the case beneath the table. The envelope had gone. Nathan blew out the second candle and watched the last red point shrink while darkness filled the space between them.
The camp remained beyond the window.
Boots passed beneath it, a truck changed gear with an effort Nathan heard through the wall, and a man laughed in another building before somebody answered him. Nathan lay down and closed his eyes. Samuel Reed's pulse returned beneath his fingers in memory, and the overlapping pressure of the ward remained clear enough to keep him awake. He had drawn back the finer awareness used in the examinations, but the day's sensations needed no further reach to follow him here. Infection had withdrawn in one man while finding room to persist in another.
"Hmm. Let's get to work," he murmured, quietly enough that Joseph did not stir. With his eyes closed, he began setting the observations beside those from Chicago, saving the questions he would bring back to the ward in the morning. Somewhere among the barracks a soldier coughed. Another voice told him to go back to sleep, and the camp's night continued around them.