Chapter 6 - ch6 - education

Twenty days after Africa disappeared beneath the horizon, England emerged from the fog.

Nathan saw it first as a darker shade of grey beneath a grey sky.

He had been standing near the forward rail for almost an hour by then, one gloved hand resting lightly upon iron made slick with condensation, watching gulls appear and vanish above the water. The Thames did not announce itself beautifully. There were no mountains rising out of the mist, no brilliant line of coast beneath a hard African sun. There were warehouses. Chimneys. Barges moving like black insects through the river. Masts and funnels accumulated in the distance until it became difficult to tell where the ships ended and the city began.

Coal smoke hung over everything.

The smell reached him long before the docks did.

Soot. Salt. Fish. Tar. Wet timber. Horses. Sewage emptied somewhere farther upriver. Hot iron. Steam. Men.

Thousands of men.

Nathan stood very still.

Twenty days aboard ship had taught him that the thing he had become did not cease noticing merely because he wanted it to. A man walking behind him possessed a heartbeat. A woman beneath the awning had a cold settling in her chest. One of the stokers below had burned his left hand three days before and hidden it because he feared being put ashore without wages. There were rats in the hold. Fleas upon some of them. Mould inside a crate of oranges. A gull wheeling over the bow had eaten part of a dead fish less than an hour earlier.

He knew these things without looking.

By the end of the voyage he had become very good at pretending that he did not.

His face reflected dimly in the glass of the observation-room window beside him.

It was still the face he had chosen beneath the African sky.

Dark hair, neatly cut now after a ship's barber had remarked that he looked as though he had been dragged backwards through a thorn hedge. Brown eyes. A stronger jaw than the one his mother had known. Broader shoulders beneath a borrowed winter coat. Taller than Nathan Drake had ever been by several inches, with none of the old scars in quite the right places.

No one waiting in England would recognise him.

That should have been comforting.

Instead, as the shore drew closer, Nathan discovered that there was something uniquely cruel about knowing he could walk through his own country as a stranger.

A whistle sounded.

Men began gathering luggage.

The steamer was taken alongside at Tilbury beneath a sky so low it seemed supported by the cranes.

Nathan descended with the other passengers into a confusion of porters, customs men, families and shouting dockhands. Steam hissed beneath the ironwork. Trunks struck the boards with heavy thumps. Somewhere nearby a child squealed when a father lifted her into his arms, and Nathan's head turned before he could stop himself.

He watched them for perhaps two seconds.

Then he looked away.

His family was somewhere beyond all this.

Not here.

But close enough now that the knowledge had weight.

His mother might be sitting beside a window.

One of his brothers might be crossing a street.

Someone might still curse his name.

Someone might mourn him.

Someone might have stopped.

He had imagined England often during those twenty days. Had imagined walking along the road toward the house where he had been born. Standing outside. Looking through a window after dark. Seeing whether anything had changed.

He had never once imagined knocking.

There were things more frightening than death.

Being recognised was one of them.

"Mr. Drake?"

The voice came from his right.

Nathan turned.

Two gentlemen stood a little apart from the tide of passengers.

The elder of them was perhaps fifty, broad around the waist, with a well-fed face made immediately approachable by an extravagant pair of greying side-whiskers. He wore a dark charcoal frock coat buttoned high against the January cold, striped trousers disappearing into polished black boots and a dove-grey waistcoat beneath which ran a heavy gold watch-chain. A stiff white collar seemed to be making an active attempt upon his throat. In one hand he carried a black bowler hat; in the other, a walking stick whose silver head was shaped like a lion.

Nathan noticed that last detail immediately.

The man followed his eyes down to it.

"Oh."

He regarded the silver lion.

Then Nathan.

Then the lion again.

"Good Lord."

The second gentleman laughed.

It was not a restrained little diplomatic laugh either. He actually turned his head and coughed into his glove while the older man stared accusingly at his own walking stick.

"I assure you," the elder gentleman said, "this was not arranged."

Nathan looked at him.

Something in his expression must have betrayed him, because the gentleman's embarrassment broke into a broad smile.

"Well, that is an excellent beginning. Arthur Penrose."

He offered his hand.

"Uganda Railway Committee. Assistant secretary, technically, though I've discovered that titles become inversely impressive in proportion to the amount of paper one is expected to move."

Nathan accepted the handshake.

The warmth of the man's palm registered instantly.

Blood moved beneath it.

Nathan ignored that.

"Nathan Drake."

"Delighted."

Penrose shook his hand enthusiastically rather than ceremonially, then turned toward his companion.

"And this unfortunate creature is Mr. Lionel Harbury."

Harbury appeared somewhat younger, perhaps thirty-five, tall and narrow through the shoulders, dressed in a black morning coat beneath a heavy wool overcoat the colour of wet slate. He wore a silk top hat and pince-nez glasses attached to his waistcoat by a fine cord. Where Penrose gave the impression that he had spent the previous hour talking pleasantly with anyone willing to listen, Harbury looked as though he had spent it making certain every ticket, carriage and appointment existed precisely where it ought.

Nevertheless, when he offered his hand his smile was genuine.

"Mr. Drake. Welcome home."

The words struck harder than Nathan expected.

He shook Harbury's hand.

"Thank you."

Penrose seemed to notice something in his face but, mercifully, mistook it for exhaustion.

"Yes. Well. Twenty days at sea after what you've apparently been doing would leave anyone looking half-haunted. We were expecting someone rather more—"

He stopped.

Harbury glanced at him.

"More what?"

Penrose looked Nathan up and down.

Nathan raised one eyebrow.

"Damaged?"

"I was going to say older."

"That is substantially worse."

Harbury's mouth twitched.

Penrose laughed, and Nathan surprised himself by doing the same.

Only softly.

It felt strange.

The sound seemed to belong to somebody he remembered.

Penrose clapped him once upon the upper arm.

"Well, Patterson's account speaks very highly of you. Embarrassingly highly, in fact. I had to read portions of it twice because I thought the fellow had developed a talent for adventure fiction."

At Patterson's name, something inside Nathan eased.

He could still see the man at Kilindini.

Could still hear him saying that perhaps they would meet again in the mother country.

That would be nice.

Nathan had said it because there had been nothing else he could safely say.

Now England stood beneath his feet.

And Patterson's words had arrived before him.

Penrose continued as they began walking away from the quay.

"He describes you as having assisted materially in the destruction of both animals, preserved the lives of several railway employees, and—this particular sentence has caused considerable discussion—saved Colonel Patterson himself when the outcome might otherwise have been fatal."

"He would have managed."

Harbury looked sideways at Nathan.

"Patterson appears to disagree."

"He is inclined toward exaggeration."

"Colonel Patterson?"

"Yes."

Penrose gave Harbury a solemn look.

"Make a note of that. We shall send it to his wife."

Harbury nodded gravely.

"I expect she already knows."

Nathan almost smiled again.

They passed beneath the iron skeleton of one of the dock sheds, boots ringing differently where timber gave way to stone. Porters moved around them carrying leather cases and wooden trunks. Horses stamped in the cold beside wagons while their breath drifted white from their nostrils. A locomotive farther along the dock released a rolling cloud of steam, briefly swallowing half the platform before the wind tore it apart.

England was louder than Nathan remembered.

Or perhaps Nathan was listening too closely now.

Everywhere there were voices.

Everywhere there was movement.

Everywhere there was life enclosed in skin.

Penrose spoke as they walked.

"We thought it would be rather poor form to allow you to disembark after all that and discover your reward consisted of navigating the docks alone. There is a carriage reserved on the next train. Fenchurch Street first, then we shall take you across to the offices. Nothing unpleasant, I promise."

Nathan looked at him.

"Offices."

"Yes, I'm afraid civilisation insists upon paperwork before gratitude becomes official."

"Arthur."

"I am preparing him."

"You are frightening him."

"I have seen lions."

Nathan's mouth moved slightly.

"I think I can survive forms."

"Excellent man."

Penrose tapped his walking stick once against the stones.

"There will be a statement required regarding the events at Tsavo. Patterson has provided his own account, of course, and several other reports have arrived from the works, so there is no question of anyone dragging you through an interrogation. Quite the contrary. The Railway considers itself indebted to you."

Nathan's eyes shifted toward him.

Penrose's tone changed slightly.

Still friendly.

More deliberate now.

"There has also been discussion of financial recompense."

Nathan said nothing.

"And recognition," Harbury added.

Penrose nodded.

"That matter is not entirely within our hands. Recommendations have to climb ladders. Government departments enjoy ladders enormously. But Patterson has been unusually forceful on the subject."

"He said something about that."

"Did he?"

"At the port."

Penrose smiled.

"Then for once I am not ruining a surprise."

Nathan looked ahead.

Financial recompense.

Recognition.

A piece of paper bearing the name Nathan Drake.

Perhaps a photograph.

A record.

The old instinct that had once kept a hunted man alive stirred inside him.

Careful.

His face revealed nothing.

His companions, seeing only a quiet young man returned from an ordeal, allowed him the silence.

They were nearing the railway entrance when Nathan noticed the newspapers.

The stand itself was small, crowded between the ticket office and a tobacconist, its wooden shelves protected from the damp by a striped canvas awning. Papers had been arranged face outward beneath little brass clips, their front pages competing for the attention of travellers moving through the station. The Times sat beside the Daily Mail, the Morning Post, the Standard and several cheaper sheets whose headlines had been printed large enough to be read by men too hurried to stop.

Nathan might have walked past them.

Then he saw the word.

TSAVO.

His feet slowed.

Harbury took another two steps before noticing.

Penrose stopped beside him.

Across the front of one of the papers, beneath a headline concerning Parliament and another regarding trouble somewhere on the Continent, ran a column surrounded by thick black rules.

TERROR AT TSAVO ENDED

Beneath it:

THE MAN-EATING LIONS DESTROYED

And beneath that, in smaller type:

REMARKABLE ACCOUNT FROM THE UGANDA RAILWAY — COLONEL PATTERSON CREDITS BRITISH TRAVELLER WITH ASSISTANCE

Nathan stared.

For a moment the station ceased to exist.

He saw firelight instead.

Thorns.

Darkness beyond the camp.

A shape moving where nothing should have been moving.

Patterson's rifle lifting.

The impact of weight.

Blood.

The lion looking at him.

Not frightened.

Not confused.

Knowing.

He remembered the animal's smell.

Remembered the sudden terrible clarity with which its living body had unfolded inside his senses.

Bone. Muscle. Blood. Nerve.

Possibility.

Nathan blinked.

Steam rolled through the station.

England returned.

Penrose had followed his gaze.

"Ah."

Nathan stepped toward the stand.

The proprietor glanced up from beneath a flat cap.

"Penny, sir."

Nathan reached into his coat.

Penrose was faster.

"Nonsense."

He dropped the coin onto the counter and took the paper.

"You shouldn't have to purchase your own legend."

"Arthur," Harbury murmured.

"What?"

"That was dreadful."

"I thought it rather good."

"You would."

Penrose handed Nathan the newspaper.

Nathan unfolded it.

There it was.

Africa translated into ink.

The article had none of the smell of the place. None of the heat. None of the flies that had settled upon dried blood. None of the men sitting awake at night because sleep meant trusting canvas walls. It spoke instead of railway works interrupted by two extraordinary lions, of terrified labourers, of repeated attempts to destroy the animals, and finally of Patterson's success.

Then came Nathan.

Not much.

Three paragraphs.

But enough.

A certain Mr. N. Drake, described as an English traveller recently arrived under unusual circumstances, had joined Patterson during the final efforts to hunt the animals. Patterson was reported to have attributed considerable courage to him and to have stated that Drake's intervention had prevented further loss of life.

Nathan read the paragraphs twice.

His name looked strange in print.

Not because it was misspelled.

Because it belonged there.

Ink gave things weight.

Records gave them permanence.

Somewhere inside the machinery of the British Empire, a clerk had received a telegram. Someone else had copied it. Someone had set metal type. A printing press had struck paper hundreds or thousands of times, and now strangers Nathan had never met were reading about him over breakfast.

Nathan Drake had returned to England before Nathan had.

A man brushed past him, glanced at the paper and then at Nathan without recognition.

Nathan watched him disappear into the crowd.

Of course.

The face was wrong.

The thought brought neither relief nor fear.

Only a peculiar emptiness.

Penrose stood beside him.

"You appear disappointed."

"No."

"Newspapers rarely resemble the event."

Nathan looked back down at Tsavo rendered cleanly into columns.

"No," he said. "They don't."

Harbury glanced toward the station clock.

"We should move. The train will not share Mr. Patterson's patience."

They started walking again.

Nathan folded the newspaper beneath his arm.

Around him Tilbury continued without caring that anything had changed.

Newsboys called headlines.

Porters shouted.

A woman kissed her husband beside a carriage.

A soldier argued with a customs officer over a trunk.

Steam poured across the rails.

Somewhere, bells rang.

Penrose was speaking about London now. About lunch. About a hotel room already arranged at the Railway's expense. About an appointment during the afternoon which, he assured Nathan, would involve tea of deeply questionable quality but people of respectable intentions.

Nathan listened.

He answered when appropriate.

He even laughed once when Harbury observed that Penrose considered any tea not served from his wife's kitchen to be evidence of national decline.

And all the while he walked toward the train carrying him inland.

Toward London.

Toward roads he had known.

Toward buildings he remembered.

Toward people who might still remember the face that Nathan Drake no longer possessed.

At the platform Penrose opened the door of a first-class compartment and stood aside.

"After you, Mr. Drake."

Nathan stopped with one foot upon the step.

Beyond the glass, his reflection waited.

Dark hair.

Brown eyes.

A stranger's face.

Behind that face were mountains.

A cavern.

Ward praying in the dark.

Harcourt.

Hargreaves.

Men who had screamed.

Men who had become quiet.

A red sea which had existed before anyone had ever thought to call this island England.

And somewhere beneath all of that, almost impossibly small now, was a boy who remembered his mother.

Nathan climbed aboard.

Penrose followed, talking cheerfully about the arrangements awaiting them in London. Harbury placed his case carefully into the luggage rack. Outside, a guard moved along the platform closing doors.

Nathan sat beside the window.

The newspaper remained upon his knee.

TERROR AT TSAVO ENDED.

He touched the printed name beneath it with the tip of one gloved finger.

N. Drake.

His old name.

His new face.

Neither entirely belonged to him anymore.

The whistle sounded.

The carriage jerked.

Tilbury began sliding past the window.

Nathan watched the docks recede and the grey English countryside slowly open beyond them.

Twenty days earlier, standing on the deck at Kilindini, he had told himself he was not going home.

He had been right.

Home required somebody to return to it.

Whatever Nathan was now, whatever name he eventually chose, whatever life he managed to build in the space left behind by the man who had gone beneath that mountain, there could be no walking through an old doorway and pretending that absence had been a misunderstanding.

He would see them.

Eventually.

He knew that now.

From across a road perhaps.

From beneath a hat in a crowd.

Through a window after dark.

He would learn who had married, who had grown older, who had forgiven him and who had not.

He would make certain they were alive.

And then he would leave before any of them could look closely enough to recognise something that was no longer present in his face.

Penrose said something.

Nathan turned.

"Sorry?"

The older man smiled.

"I asked whether you have anyone waiting for you in London."

For the first time since stepping onto English soil, Nathan did not know what expression to wear.

He looked through the window.

Fields moved beneath the winter sky.

"No."

Penrose's face softened, though he had no idea what answer he had truly been given.

"Well."

He settled back into the upholstered seat and crossed one leg over the other.

"You do now, at least until we've finished making a tremendous administrative nuisance of ourselves on your behalf."

Harbury adjusted his pince-nez.

"Speak for yourself."

"I always do."

Nathan looked at them.

Two ordinary men.

Warm blood beneath ordinary skin.

Kindness offered without suspicion.

Neither knew what sat across from them.

Neither knew what had crossed the sea.

And, for the moment, Nathan decided that was all right.

He leaned back as the train carried him toward London.

Outside, England disappeared and returned between curtains of steam.

For the first time since Africa, Nathan Drake existed on paper again.

The difficulty would be deciding how long to let him live.

..The compartment settled into the steady rhythm of the rails once Tilbury had fallen behind them.

Nathan had expected the train to feel familiar.

Instead, almost everything about it seemed smaller than he remembered.

Not literally. The compartment was comfortable enough, upholstered seats facing one another beneath brass luggage racks, dark polished timber surrounding the windows, little curtains gathered neatly at either side of the glass. Penrose had arranged for all three of them to travel first class, and from the ease with which Harbury had accepted this Nathan gathered that nobody expected him to object. There was heat in the carriage, though not enough to entirely drive away the January chill clinging to the windows, and every few moments the wheels struck some imperfection in the track and sent a muted shudder through the floor.

It was not the carriage that seemed small.

It was the distance between things.

Between one man and another.

Between a heartbeat and his hearing.

Between an expression and the thought that caused it.

Twenty days on the ship had not taught Nathan how to stop noticing. They had only taught him how to remain still while he did.

Penrose sat diagonally opposite him with one ankle resting over his knee, the silver lion-headed walking stick tucked between the seat and the wall where Nathan did not have to look at it. Harbury had removed his hat and was carefully folding the morning paper into quarters, apparently incapable of allowing even newsprint to become disorderly.

For the first twenty minutes they spoke of harmless things.

The voyage.

The cold.

Whether Nathan had eaten breakfast.

Penrose complained about railway coffee with such dedication that Nathan suspected it might be one of the great personal grievances of his life. Harbury corrected him twice regarding which company was responsible for the refreshments at Tilbury and was told that the identity of the criminal did not improve the crime.

Nathan found himself relaxing despite himself.

Not much.

Perhaps a fraction.

The countryside moved past the windows in pale winter colours. Bare hedgerows. Damp fields. Cottages clustered around church spires. Smoke rose from chimneys and flattened beneath the low clouds.

England.

It still did not feel real.

Penrose had been talking about the railway works when his voice gradually lost some of its professional brightness.

"There is one matter, Mr. Drake, which we ought to cover before we reach London."

Nathan looked at him.

Penrose lifted a hand immediately.

"Nothing alarming."

"That usually means something alarming."

Harbury lowered his newspaper.

Penrose pointed at Nathan.

"You see? Twenty minutes and he has already learned how government men speak."

"We are not government men."

"Close enough to be distrusted."

Harbury sighed.

Nathan smiled slightly.

Penrose's expression remained pleasant, but there was more care behind it now.

"The Railway will need some details from you for its records. Nothing terribly intrusive. Your age, occupation, previous address if you had one. There may also be questions from the people arranging your recompense. Patterson's report tells us quite a lot about what happened in Africa and almost nothing about what happened before it."

Nathan had known this was coming.

He had known it since Patterson first offered passage.

Longer, perhaps.

The first thing civilisation demanded of a man was a history.

Nathan already possessed one.

That was the problem.

There were records somewhere bearing his real birth. A mother who had survived his arrival into the world. A father whose face he remembered. Brothers. A house. His arrest. Men who would know his old face if shown it.

That Nathan Drake could not return to England.

So another one would have to.

Nathan lowered his eyes briefly toward his gloves.

He had constructed the story aboard ship.

Simple stories were safer.

Too much detail could be checked.

Too little invited questions.

A dead family solved several problems at once.

"I don't know how useful my history will be."

Penrose's manner softened.

"Useful isn't quite the word."

Nathan looked out through the glass.

"My mother died when I was born."

The lie came easily.

That disturbed him more than he allowed to show.

Penrose's expression changed at once.

Harbury stopped folding the newspaper.

Nathan continued before either could speak.

"My father raised me. Him and my brother."

He let the wheels fill the silence for a moment.

"Neither of them lasted very long either."

Penrose's brows drew together.

Nathan stared at the passing fields.

"They came down with a cold when I was twelve."

"A cold?"

Harbury said it gently rather than suspiciously.

Nathan nodded.

"A bad one."

That was plausible enough.

People still died from influenza, pneumonia, fever, infections that began with something no more frightening than a cough.

"My brother first. My father not long after."

He did not embellish.

That was important.

A liar who gave too much detail was usually trying to convince himself.

Nathan let his voice flatten slightly, as though this part of his life had been repeated often enough that grief had worn smooth around the edges.

"After that there wasn't anyone."

Penrose's leg slowly uncrossed.

"Good God."

Nathan shrugged.

He had seen men do that when they did not want pity.

So he did it now.

"I managed."

Harbury's voice was quieter.

"At twelve?"

"There were always things that needed doing."

"Such as?"

Nathan looked toward him.

"Carrying things. Cleaning. Stables sometimes. Markets. Helping unload carts. Anything someone would give me a penny for."

"And when there was no work?"

Nathan let a small silence answer first.

"Then I begged."

Penrose looked down at his hands.

Nathan continued.

"Sometimes stole food."

Neither man reacted with condemnation.

That was useful.

"Not often," Nathan added. "Not if I could avoid it."

Penrose waved the distinction away.

"If a twelve-year-old boy is stealing bread because no one has fed him, I should hope Heaven possesses enough common sense to know where the sin actually lies."

Harbury glanced at him.

"That is unusually theological for you."

"I become deeply spiritual whenever someone else's hypocrisy requires condemning."

Nathan studied Penrose for a moment.

The older man's annoyance was genuine.

Not outrage performed for Nathan's benefit.

Genuine anger at an injustice more than a decade old and belonging to someone he had met less than an hour earlier.

Nathan did not know what to do with that.

Harbury asked, "You said you worked your way through things?"

Nathan nodded.

"Here and there."

"No fixed trade?"

"No."

"What about schooling?"

"Some."

That answer came too quickly.

Nathan corrected for it.

"Enough to read. Write. Numbers."

Penrose gave him a look.

"A little more than enough, I should think."

Nathan said nothing.

Patterson had likely mentioned his intelligence.

That could become inconvenient.

Penrose seemed amused rather than suspicious.

"Patterson described you calculating distances in the dark, predicting where the animals might turn and generally behaving in ways that caused him to wonder why you were not already employed by someone with more sense than money."

Nathan allowed a faint smile.

"I learned things when I could."

"From whom?"

"Anyone willing to teach me."

True enough, in a sense.

Harcourt's memories lived inside him.

Ward's.

Hargreaves'.

Men who had attended universities.

Men who had been soldiers.

Men who had spoken languages Nathan had never studied and now remembered as naturally as his own.

He lowered his gaze before either official could look too closely into his eyes.

Harbury leaned back.

"So you reached twenty-five living that way?"

"Mostly."

"And then the ship?"

Nathan nodded.

Another portion of the lie that had been prepared carefully.

"I found work around the docks. Loading mostly. One ship needed hands."

"Which ship?"

There it was.

Nathan had anticipated that too.

He frowned as though trying to remember rather than answering immediately.

"Couldn't tell you the proper name anymore."

Harbury regarded him for a moment.

Nathan continued.

"I didn't sign on as crew. I wasn't supposed to be aboard for the voyage."

Penrose raised an eyebrow.

"Ah."

Nathan gave him the smallest trace of embarrassment.

"I thought I might find work somewhere else."

"You stowed away."

"Yes."

Penrose looked toward Harbury.

"Well, that answers one administrative question before anyone has the chance to ask it badly."

Harbury ignored him.

"What happened?"

Nathan let himself breathe in slowly.

This part Patterson already knew.

The story had to remain consistent.

"They found me after we'd been at sea some time."

"And?"

"They weren't pleased."

Penrose's face darkened.

Nathan glanced at the window.

"There was an argument. Someone hit me. I hit him back."

That sounded enough like the man Patterson had met to be believable.

Harbury's mouth twitched despite the subject.

Nathan continued.

"The captain—or whoever was giving the orders—decided I'd become a problem."

Penrose stared at him.

"What exactly do you mean by that?"

Nathan met his eyes.

"They threw me over."

The noise of the train suddenly seemed much louder.

Harbury stopped moving altogether.

Penrose's face became completely still.

"Overboard?"

Nathan nodded.

"At sea?"

"Yes."

Penrose blinked.

"They threw you into the bloody sea?"

Harbury turned his head toward him.

"Arthur."

"No, I believe profanity has earned its place."

Nathan almost laughed.

Almost.

"It was near enough to Africa."

"That is not an improvement."

"I washed up."

Penrose stared at him as though Nathan had just described falling from the moon.

"You washed up."

"Yes."

"And survived."

"Yes."

Harbury studied Nathan now, his expression not suspicious but struggling to reconcile the young man sitting calmly across from him with the story being told.

"How long were you alone?"

"I don't know exactly."

That, at least, was technically true.

Time beneath the mountain had lost meaning.

"Days. Then longer inland."

"You simply walked?"

Nathan looked down.

"I had no money. No papers. I didn't know where I was."

Penrose muttered something under his breath.

Nathan continued carefully.

"I found water. Ate what I could. Sometimes villages helped. Sometimes they didn't want me near them."

A memory flickered.

Daro watching from the edge of a village.

Men entering the forest with rifles.

A scream cut suddenly short.

Nathan pushed it away.

His face remained unchanged.

"Eventually I heard about the railway works."

"And you made for Tsavo."

"Yes."

Penrose stared at the countryside for several seconds.

His friendliness had not disappeared.

If anything, it had become more pronounced, though quieter now.

"Then after everything you've just described," he said, "you reached Tsavo and decided the appropriate thing to do was help Patterson hunt man-eating lions."

Nathan shrugged.

"They were killing people."

Penrose looked at Harbury.

Harbury looked back at him.

Some silent agreement seemed to pass between them.

Nathan disliked that immediately.

Not because he sensed danger.

Because he didn't.

Penrose leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.

"Mr. Drake."

Nathan looked at him.

"I owe you an apology."

"For what?"

"For spending the last hour congratulating you without understanding what exactly we'd brought you home to."

Nathan's expression tightened slightly.

Penrose continued before he could respond.

"You have no family?"

Nathan shook his head.

"No one?"

"No."

"No home?"

"No."

Harbury quietly set the newspaper beside him.

Penrose rubbed one hand over his moustache.

"And before Africa you had no proper occupation, no savings worth mentioning and nowhere particular to return to."

Nathan regarded him cautiously.

"That's about the shape of it."

Penrose leaned back.

"Well."

His voice became decisive.

"Then we shall have to improve upon the shape."

Nathan blinked.

Penrose seemed surprised by the reaction.

"I beg your pardon?"

Nathan stared at him.

"What do you mean?"

"What I said."

Penrose gestured vaguely at Nathan, at the train, perhaps at England itself.

"Things will be better now."

The words landed strangely.

Nathan's first instinct was distrust.

People did not say such things without wanting something.

Ward had known that.

Nathan himself had known it long before the mountain.

Kindness generally came with an invoice.

But Penrose merely continued.

"You've done the Railway an extraordinary service. Patterson is alive in part because of you. Men are returning to work because those animals are dead. You are not going to be dumped at Fenchurch Street with a handshake and expected to resume begging."

Harbury nodded.

"There will be money."

Nathan looked toward him.

"Enough to establish yourself comfortably, assuming the committee approves the figure we've discussed."

Penrose snorted.

"They'll approve it."

"They have not yet."

"They will."

"Arthur."

"They will if I have to haunt the office of every man who objects until he develops a nervous condition."

Nathan's mouth moved before he could suppress it.

Penrose saw.

"Good. At least someone appreciates sound administrative technique."

Harbury ignored him.

"There may also be employment available, Mr. Drake."

Nathan's gaze shifted back to him.

"Employment?"

"If you want it."

Harbury was careful with the words.

That mattered.

"Not charity."

Nathan said nothing.

"You are clearly literate," Harbury continued. "Patterson believes you are unusually capable. You have practical experience. You seem to possess more mathematical ability than you are admitting to. The Railway employs surveyors, clerks, logistics men, inspectors, engineers' assistants. There are examinations and apprenticeships depending on the position."

"I've never been to university."

"Most clerks haven't."

Penrose added, "And frankly, if you can survive being thrown into Africa, walking half across it and helping kill the lions of Tsavo, I feel confident we can teach you to survive an accounts ledger."

Nathan looked between them.

There was no mockery in either face.

No condescension.

Harbury spoke quietly.

"You would have choices."

That word did something to him.

Choices.

Nathan turned toward the window.

The countryside blurred past.

He had once believed freedom meant removing the chain around his wrist.

Then Ward had removed it in the dark beneath the mountain and Nathan had discovered that freedom could arrive five minutes before death.

Now he possessed more freedom than any human being alive.

He could become another man simply by willing his face to change.

He could walk through London tonight as an old gentleman, a dockworker, a soldier, a boy.

He could flee to France.

America.

India.

Africa again.

He might live for centuries.

Perhaps longer.

And yet the simple offer of a job unsettled him.

Somewhere to go in the morning.

Money honestly earned.

A room whose door belonged to him.

A name on paper that did not end with wanted.

Penrose misread the silence.

"You needn't decide today."

Nathan looked back.

The older man's expression had softened.

"You have been fighting for quite a long time by the sound of things."

Nathan almost said you have no idea.

Instead he said nothing.

Penrose went on.

"Let someone else take care of the next few days."

Nathan's eyes narrowed slightly.

Not in anger.

In confusion.

"Why?"

Penrose frowned.

"Why what?"

"Why bother?"

The question escaped more plainly than Nathan intended.

Neither man laughed.

Harbury answered first.

"Because you saved lives."

Nathan looked at him.

"And because Patterson asked us to look after you properly."

Penrose paused.

Then added, more quietly,

"And because someone ought to have done it when you were twelve."

Nathan's gaze dropped.

For one terrible instant an image surfaced that did not belong to the invented childhood.

His real mother.

Alive.

Standing in a kitchen.

Hands flour-dusted.

Turning when she heard the door.

The memory was his.

Then another overlapped it.

Ward's mother sewing near a fire.

Then Harcourt's father leaning over a book.

Hargreaves laughing beside his brother.

Lives folded over lives until Nathan could no longer immediately tell where one ended.

His fingers tightened inside his gloves.

He forced them loose.

Penrose was still speaking, unaware of the storm passing silently behind the stranger's brown eyes.

"You needn't treat every kindness as a trap, lad."

Nathan looked up.

Penrose immediately seemed to realise how paternal the words had sounded.

"I apologise."

"No."

Nathan's voice came out quieter than intended.

Penrose waited.

Nathan stared through the glass again.

A farmhouse passed.

Smoke from its chimney.

Laundry stiff in the cold.

A woman stood in the yard holding the hand of a little boy.

They disappeared behind the carriage almost instantly.

"No," Nathan repeated. "It's all right."

Silence remained between them for a while.

Not uncomfortable.

Just present.

Then Harbury reached into the leather case beside his leg and removed a small notebook.

"Since Arthur has apparently adopted you, we should establish something important before London."

Nathan glanced at him.

Harbury opened the notebook.

"What would you like for luncheon?"

Penrose turned indignantly.

"That is what you chose to follow all that with?"

"He has likely been eating shipboard food for twenty days."

"A fair point."

Harbury looked at Nathan.

"Beef? Mutton? Something simpler?"

Nathan stared at both men.

Then, unexpectedly, laughed.

A proper laugh this time.

Short.

Quiet.

But real.

Penrose smiled.

Harbury merely waited with his pencil poised above the page as though feeding Nathan Drake were now the most important matter facing the British Empire.

Nathan shook his head.

"Beef."

Harbury wrote it down.

"Excellent."

Penrose looked enormously satisfied.

"There. Better already."

Nathan leaned back into the seat.

Outside the window, London drew closer.

He still did not believe Penrose.

Not entirely.

Things did not simply become better because somebody said they would.

The world did not work that way.

He knew that more intimately than either man could imagine.

But as the train carried him inland, with a newspaper bearing his name folded beside Harbury and two strangers discussing which hotel in London possessed the least offensive beds, Nathan permitted himself one small and dangerous thought.

Perhaps they could..

By the time Penrose, Harbury and Nathan were shown upstairs, the cold of the docks had been replaced by that particular London warmth produced by coal fires, too many bodies and windows which appeared not to have been opened since autumn. Nathan removed his gloves as they entered the meeting room, more because everyone else did than because his hands required warming, and took the chair offered to him at the end of a long walnut table. Patterson's report was already there. Nathan recognised the handwriting before he was close enough to read it, several pages laid beside official correspondence and telegrams from East Africa. There was something unnerving about seeing Tsavo contained like that. Weeks of fear, blood, sleepless nights and two animals that had made hundreds of men afraid of darkness had become paper tied with string. The four gentlemen waiting for them rose when he entered, and the oldest came around the table to shake his hand with both of his own.

"Mr. Drake. Henry Alderton. I'm very glad to meet you." His manner was warm without becoming theatrical, and Nathan immediately liked him more for not staring. Alderton was a lean man somewhere around sixty, silver-haired and neatly moustached, dressed in black with a dark green waistcoat almost entirely concealed beneath his coat. "Colonel Patterson has managed to make you considerably famous in this office during the past fortnight."

Nathan glanced at the report. "That sounds unfortunate."

It took Alderton a moment to realise he was joking. Then his mouth broke into a smile. "Yes, well, if you wished to remain inconspicuous, saving the life of the man responsible for one of Her Majesty's more expensive railway projects was perhaps not the proper method."

"That's what I told him," Penrose said as he took his seat. "He refuses to show remorse."

Harbury pulled out the chair beside him. "You told him nothing of the sort."

"I considered telling him. Administratively, that is much the same thing."

Nathan sat between them and allowed the amusement to pass around the table. He was beginning to understand Penrose. The man's humour did not disappear when matters became serious; it appeared precisely because matters became serious, as though he had long ago decided bureaucracy already contained enough misery without his adding to it.

The conversation that followed was easier than Nathan had expected. Nobody asked him to tell his entire story again. They had Patterson's account, the reports from railway employees and what Penrose and Harbury had learned during the journey from Tilbury. Alderton asked him about the final hunt, and another gentleman named Wetherby—round-faced, thinning badly above the temples, with spectacles he continually pushed farther up his nose—wanted clarification about the circumstances in which Patterson had been saved. Nathan gave them the truth in reduced form. Patterson had been in danger. Nathan had been close enough to intervene. He had done so.

Wetherby looked down at Patterson's version. "Colonel Patterson's description is rather stronger than that."

Nathan's eyes moved toward the page. "He was there. He's entitled to his version."

"He states that the lion was almost on him."

"It was."

"And that you went toward it."

Nathan hesitated. "There wasn't much advantage in running away from it at that point."

Penrose made an appreciative sound under his breath. Wetherby looked over his spectacles. "Most men, Mr. Drake, when confronted by a lion at close quarters, might disagree."

"Most men probably have better instincts."

That finally made Alderton laugh. The atmosphere softened after that, and the questions gradually moved away from Tsavo. Nobody probed Nathan's invented childhood beyond what had already been recorded. That suited him perfectly. His mother had died giving birth to him. His father and brother had succumbed to illness when he was twelve. He had survived afterward through whatever labour was available, sometimes begging, occasionally stealing food, eventually finding his way among dockworkers before stowing away aboard the ship that had carried him toward Africa. It was a miserable history, but misery itself was not unusual enough to inspire an investigation. There were thousands of boys in Britain who disappeared into streets, docks and factories without leaving enough paper behind to prove where they had been. Nathan had deliberately made himself one of them.

It was Wetherby who eventually gathered the papers concerning Tsavo into a neat pile and drew another folder toward himself. "There remains the reason we've asked you here today, Mr. Drake. Colonel Patterson's recommendation was explicit. The Railway agrees that your assistance went substantially beyond anything that could reasonably have been expected of a private citizen. We cannot give you back the weeks you lost in Africa, naturally, and I imagine there is no sensible financial value one can place upon preventing a man from being eaten by a lion."

"I'm pleased to hear it," Patterson's absence somehow seemed to say through Penrose's expression.

Wetherby ignored him. "Nevertheless, recompense is appropriate."

He named the amount.

Nathan looked at him.

He had known money would be offered. Patterson had practically promised as much before Nathan boarded the steamer, and Penrose and Harbury had both mentioned it on the train, but hearing the actual sum caused him to look back down at the folder and calculate without meaning to. Rent. Food. Clothing. A modest home eventually. Years of ordinary living if he was careful. For the young man whose life he had described, it should have been an almost incomprehensible fortune.

Alderton watched him. "You needn't answer immediately."

Nathan lifted his eyes. "I understand what you're offering."

Wetherby nodded. "Good."

"And I'm grateful."

Penrose's brows rose slightly. He knew Nathan well enough by now to hear the unfinished sentence. "But?"

Nathan looked at him, then back toward the men responsible for deciding what Patterson's gratitude had become in pounds and shillings. He had thought about this for most of the night. Money mattered. He was not foolish enough to believe otherwise. Even if he could survive without it in ways these men could never imagine, Nathan Drake could not live in society without paying rent, purchasing clothing, buying meals and producing the appearance of a human life. But money was something he could acquire later. What he needed now was access to something a purse alone could not necessarily purchase.

"Does it have to be given to me as money?"

For a moment Wetherby appeared to think he had misunderstood. "I beg your pardon?"

"The reward. Does it have to be cash?"

Wetherby glanced at Alderton, then back at Nathan. "Not necessarily, although I confess I don't quite understand the question."

Nathan folded his hands together on the table. "I was thinking there might be something more useful you could do with it."

Penrose leaned forward. Harbury had gone very still beside him.

Alderton asked, "What do you want?"

Nathan almost answered immediately. Instead he looked at Patterson's report again, because the request suddenly sounded larger now that he had to say it in a room full of men who had been educated since childhood.

"I want to go to university."

Nobody laughed.

That mattered to him more than he wanted it to.

Wetherby's spectacles slipped a fraction down his nose. Penrose simply stared at Nathan, while Harbury's expression changed from surprise to something quieter. Alderton was the first to speak. "University."

"Yes."

"Have you attended a secondary school?"

"No."

"We gathered as much."

"I know."

"Have you sat any recognised examinations?"

"No."

"Latin?"

"Some."

Alderton's brows lifted. "Where did you learn Latin?"

Nathan had prepared several lies for that question during the voyage, yet when it arrived he found that a partial truth was safer. "Books. People I've worked for. A priest for a while. I picked things up where I could."

"How much?"

"I don't know."

That answer produced the first trace of confusion.

Nathan continued before they could decide what to make of it. "That's the problem. I know things. I don't know whether I know them properly."

Penrose finally spoke. "And instead of taking enough money to establish yourself comfortably, you'd prefer us to send you to university?"

Nathan shook his head. "You can't."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You can't send me."

Penrose glanced at Harbury, then back. "I'm afraid you've lost me."

"A university isn't going to accept me because the Uganda Railway tells them to."

Alderton's gaze sharpened.

Nathan leaned slightly forward. "And I don't want them to."

That silenced the room again.

"If I'm not good enough," Nathan said, "then giving somebody money or writing a grand letter shouldn't make me good enough. I don't want a place bought for me."

Wetherby closed the folder. "Then what precisely are you asking us to provide?"

Nathan had the answer this time. "A chance."

"A chance at what?"

"To be tested."

Wetherby stared.

Nathan continued, becoming more certain as he spoke. "You know people I don't. You can write a letter someone will actually read. Introduce me to a university man and tell him what you've told me—that I've had no proper schooling and want to know whether I'm capable of going farther. Let him decide. If he says I'm not ready, fine. Have him tell me what I need to learn and I'll learn it."

Alderton asked, "And if he tells you that university simply isn't realistic?"

Nathan gave a small shrug. "Then I'll know."

"You would accept that?"

"I'd ask him why."

Penrose smiled.

Nathan caught it. "What?"

"Nothing."

"That isn't nothing."

Penrose shook his head. "You have spent less than a day in England and you've already decided that if a professor rejects you, your first act will be to demand supporting evidence. I think university may suit you rather well."

Harbury looked toward Alderton. "He isn't asking for admission. He's asking for access to someone qualified to determine whether admission is possible."

"Precisely," Nathan said.

"And expenses?" Wetherby asked.

Nathan nodded. "If I can do it, use the money for that. Tuition. Examinations. Books. A tutor if I need one. Somewhere to sleep while I'm studying. I don't know how much any of that costs."

"Quite a bit less than being eaten by lions, I should hope," Penrose murmured.

Alderton ignored him but could not entirely hide his smile. "You understand that even an introduction doesn't guarantee anything."

"I wouldn't want it to."

There was a brief silence before Alderton asked the question Nathan had expected eventually. "What subject?"

Nathan's expression did not change.

"I haven't decided."

That brought Penrose's head around. "You want to attend university badly enough to exchange a considerable portion of your reward for it, but you don't know what you wish to study?"

"I know I want to learn."

"That is not generally how university prospectuses organise themselves."

Nathan gave him a look. "Then maybe I should first find out whether any of them would have me before worrying about which door I use."

Harbury laughed quietly. "There is some logic in that."

Nathan was grateful when Alderton did not press. The older man merely sat back, studying him for several seconds before turning toward Penrose. "You suggested University College on the journey here."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because we're in London, because I believe I can arrange an introduction there, and because sending the poor fellow to Oxford tomorrow would be an excellent method of teaching him despair before breakfast."

Wetherby sighed. "Must everything become an attack upon Oxford?"

"Certainly not. Cambridge deserves occasional attention."

Nathan looked between them. "University College?"

Penrose nodded. "University College London. I cannot promise what they'll say."

"That's all right."

"I may be able to get someone to see you."

"Someone who'll test me?"

Penrose's smile softened a little. "Yes, Drake. Someone who'll test you."

Nathan sat back.

That was enough.

The meeting continued for nearly another hour because nothing involving respectable institutions could apparently occur without generating several pages of paper. Alderton refused Nathan's attempt to divert every penny of the reward toward education, telling him that the Railway had meant to recompense him personally and would not allow a twenty-five-year-old man with no home of his own to emerge from the arrangement with nothing except textbooks. Nathan objected twice. Alderton ignored him twice. In the end a portion of the reward would remain Nathan's regardless of what happened, while another portion could be used to meet educational expenses if the proposed assessment justified continuing.

As they left, Penrose waited until the door closed behind them before turning on Nathan.

"University."

Nathan continued walking down the corridor. "Apparently."

"You never mentioned university."

"You never asked."

"I asked what you intended to do with your life."

"No. You asked whether I wanted beef for luncheon."

Harbury, walking on Nathan's other side, said, "He has you there."

Penrose looked betrayed. "Before luncheon."

"You mostly complained about coffee."

"It was extremely bad coffee."

Nathan smiled despite himself.

Several days passed before Penrose's promised letter produced anything. Nathan spent them in the rooms the Railway had arranged, reading newspapers, purchasing clothing under protest and walking portions of London that he remembered without permitting himself to walk too near the places that mattered. Then, on a cold morning beneath a colourless sky, Penrose arrived carrying a folded letter and looking far too pleased with himself.

"You have your professor."

Nathan looked up from the book in his hands.

"Already?"

"Do try to sound impressed."

"I am impressed."

"You have a peculiar way of showing it."

Harbury entered behind him, removing his gloves. "Professor John Arthur Platt. University College. Greek."

Nathan frowned slightly. "Greek?"

Penrose dropped into the chair opposite. "You said you wanted someone capable of determining whether you possess a university education hiding somewhere beneath all that Africa."

"I said someone capable of determining whether I could get one."

"Yes, well, Professor Platt has agreed to begin discovering the difference."

Nathan looked at the letter.

"Why him?"

"Because he answered."

Harbury closed the door. "Arthur."

"What? That is one of the strongest academic qualifications available in London."

Nathan took the letter and read it carefully. There was nothing miraculous in it. No promise. No admission. Professor Platt had agreed to meet Mr. Nathan Drake and assess the extent of his education after receiving a letter describing his unusual background and the Railway's willingness to sponsor further preparation should it prove worthwhile.

Nathan read it twice.

"When?"

Penrose grinned.

"Tomorrow."

University College did not look like a place where Nathan belonged.

That was the first thing he thought when he entered.

Young men passed through the corridors carrying books and papers, talking about lectures and examinations with the bored familiarity of people who had never considered that education might be something denied to them. Nathan found himself looking at their faces and wondering how much of their lives had been arranged years before they were old enough to appreciate the arrangement. School followed by examinations. Examinations followed by university. A path worn smooth before they ever put a foot upon it.

His path had involved chains, prison, Africa and a sea of living red matter beneath a mountain.

Nathan suspected there were admissions forms without a suitable box for that.

Penrose and Harbury accompanied him to Platt's room, although Platt dismissed them within ten minutes.

The professor had read the Railway's letter before they arrived. Nathan realised almost immediately that he was uninterested in hearing the story repeated for dramatic effect. Platt was in his late thirties, with a high forehead and the settled manner of a man who had spent enough time around students to be resistant to intimidation, flattery and youthful excuses. Several books lay open on his desk, and more occupied shelves behind him.

"So you are Mr. Drake."

Nathan nodded. "Yes."

"And these gentlemen wish me to determine whether you ought to receive preparation for university entrance."

Penrose opened his mouth.

Platt looked at him.

Penrose closed it.

Nathan's mouth twitched.

Platt saw that. "Something amusing?"

"No."

"You are a poor liar."

"That isn't what Mr. Patterson says."

Penrose made a choking noise that might have been laughter.

Platt regarded Nathan for a moment, then glanced toward Penrose and Harbury. "You may leave him."

Penrose straightened. "For how long?"

"I don't know."

"Approximately?"

Platt looked toward Nathan. "That rather depends upon him."

Nathan saw Penrose glance at the papers on the desk.

"I'll return at luncheon."

"No."

Penrose blinked.

Platt had already begun sorting the papers. "Return this afternoon."

"What time?"

"When you are tired of waiting."

Harbury took Penrose firmly by the sleeve. "Come along, Arthur."

"I dislike academics."

Platt did not look up. "A feeling we frequently encourage."

The door closed behind them.

Nathan was alone with him.

Platt gestured toward the chair.

"Sit."

Nathan did.

For several seconds Platt studied him.

"The letter says you have had no regular schooling since childhood."

"I've had almost no regular schooling at all."

"But you read."

"Yes."

"Write?"

"Yes."

"Arithmetic?"

"Yes."

"Latin?"

"Some."

"Greek?"

Nathan hesitated. "Less."

Platt's brows lifted slightly. "Less than some?"

Nathan realised how that sounded. "A little."

"French?"

"Some."

"You have a remarkable quantity of some."

Nathan almost smiled.

Platt leaned back. "Where did you learn it?"

"Different places."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the one I have."

Platt waited.

Nathan sighed. "Books, mostly. People. If someone knew something and didn't mind explaining it, I listened."

"Since you were twelve?"

"Whenever I had the chance."

Platt nodded once. He did not appear convinced or unconvinced. He simply reached for the first paper.

"Then we shall discover what 'some' means."

The first hour hurt Nathan's pride.

That surprised him.

Platt began with English prose rather than Latin or Greek. Nathan was given a passage and told to explain it in his own words. Then another and told to identify where its argument failed. Nathan answered both. Platt asked why he had chosen particular phrases, corrected a grammatical habit Nathan had never known possessed a name, then gave him a page upon which to write an argument of his own.

"On what?"

Platt shrugged. "Anything you can defend."

Nathan looked down at the blank paper.

"That's the question?"

"That is the question."

"You're testing whether I can argue."

"I am testing whether you can think in sentences."

Nathan looked up.

Platt's expression remained entirely serious.

Nathan began writing.

When he finished, Platt read the pages in silence.

"Well?"

"I haven't finished reading."

Nathan waited another thirty seconds.

"Well?"

Platt looked over the paper. "Do you always require immediate judgement?"

"When the man judging me stops speaking, yes."

"That will become exhausting at university."

"So I've been told."

"By whom?"

"Mostly people who become exhausted."

Something moved at the corner of Platt's mouth. He placed the essay aside.

Then came arithmetic.

Nathan finished quickly.

Algebra followed.

That too went well.

Geometry slowed him more, not because he could not see the solutions but because he had to remember which pieces of knowledge belonged naturally to him and which had arrived inside him after the mountain. Harcourt had known geometry. Hargreaves had known more. Another man among the expedition had attended enough formal schooling to remember proofs Nathan himself had never learned.

The knowledge was simply there.

That was the terrible thing about it.

It did not arrive as voices whispering answers. There was no ghost standing over Nathan's shoulder.

He remembered learning it.

He remembered classrooms he had never entered.

Nathan deliberately made an error.

Platt marked it.

Another problem came.

Nathan knew the answer before finishing the question.

He wrote a longer method than necessary.

Platt read it.

"Why?"

Nathan looked up. "Why what?"

"Why did you do this?"

Platt touched the middle of the solution.

"Because it works."

"That wasn't my question."

Nathan said nothing.

"You reached the conclusion here."

Platt tapped an earlier line.

"Then spent another seven lines reaching it again."

Nathan felt something inside him tighten.

"I wanted to be certain."

"No."

Platt looked at him directly.

"You wanted me to believe it took you longer."

The room became very quiet.

Nathan held his gaze.

Platt turned the paper around and placed it back in front of him.

"Do not do that."

Nathan said nothing.

"If you don't know something, say you don't know it. If you know it, answer it. I cannot determine whether you are suitable for university if you spend the day attempting to imitate the man you imagine I expect to meet."

That came far closer to Nathan's real problem than Platt could possibly understand.

Nathan looked down at the paper.

"What happens if I know too much?"

Platt frowned.

Nathan immediately regretted the wording.

He corrected it. "For someone who says he hasn't been to school."

Platt watched him for several seconds.

"Then I shall think you have educated yourself rather better than the letter suggested."

"And if you don't believe me?"

"About your upbringing?"

"Yes."

"That is not what I have been asked to judge."

Nathan looked up.

Platt leaned back. "Mr. Drake, I am not a policeman. If the Uganda Railway has somehow delivered an international criminal into my room, I trust somebody else will eventually discover it."

Nathan very nearly laughed.

Platt continued. "Today I want to know whether you can learn. Stop trying to help me arrive at the answer you think sounds believable."

Nathan stared at him.

Then slowly nodded.

"All right."

"Good."

Platt placed another problem before him.

Nathan looked at it.

This time he wrote the answer the way it came.

The examination changed after that.

Not suddenly. There was no dramatic revelation, no moment in which Platt pushed back his chair and declared Nathan a prodigy. There were simply fewer pauses. Nathan completed questions more quickly. When he knew something, he answered it. When he did not, he admitted it. The result became stranger rather than cleaner.

His education had holes in it.

Real holes.

Platt discovered them with ruthless efficiency.

A date Nathan should have known escaped him. His formal English grammar was embarrassingly inconsistent. He knew Latin words he could not explain having encountered and then stumbled over a construction a properly schooled boy might have met years earlier. His Greek was worse. Platt put a passage before him, watched Nathan struggle through perhaps half of it, and finally asked, "Who taught you this?"

Nathan rubbed his forehead. "Several people."

"Several people taught you half of Greek?"

"They taught me bits."

"There is that unit again."

Nathan looked at him. "Would you prefer ounces?"

Platt actually laughed then, only once, before pointing back at the page. "Translate the next sentence."

Nathan tried.

It was wrong.

Platt corrected him and explained the construction.

Nathan frowned at it.

"Why does that change the verb?"

Platt explained.

Nathan looked again.

"Then this earlier sentence—"

"Yes."

"Would follow the same rule."

"Yes."

Nathan went back three lines and corrected an error Platt had not yet mentioned.

Platt became quiet.

Nathan looked up.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"That isn't nothing."

"I am beginning to understand why your railway friend finds you difficult."

Nathan almost smiled.

Platt took another passage from a book and slid it across.

"Try that."

"I don't know half these words."

"I know."

"Then how am I supposed to translate it?"

"Work out what you can."

Nathan looked down.

The passage occupied him for nearly twenty minutes. He misunderstood two sentences entirely. He guessed at several words from context and was wrong about one of them. Yet when he reached the end he had reconstructed enough of the structure to produce something that resembled the meaning.

Platt read it.

Then he explained the parts Nathan had missed.

Nathan listened once.

Another passage came.

This time he did better.

Then another.

By the fourth, Platt was no longer watching the page.

He was watching Nathan.

Around midday somebody brought food.

Nathan had forgotten about luncheon entirely.

He ate because Platt ate and because not eating would raise questions, though most of his attention remained upon a mathematical paper a colleague had apparently supplied. The first question was familiar. The second less so. The third introduced a principle Nathan genuinely did not know.

He stared at it for several minutes.

Finally he said, "I can't do this."

Platt looked up from his bread. "Good."

Nathan frowned. "Good?"

"You have spent half the day becoming increasingly irritating. This is refreshing."

"I thought the purpose was to show I could do the work."

"The purpose is to establish where the work must begin."

Nathan looked back at the problem.

"Then explain it."

Platt raised an eyebrow.

"You are remarkably comfortable giving orders in other men's offices."

"Please explain it."

"Marginally better."

Platt did.

Nathan listened.

The principle itself was not complicated once he understood what was being described. Something in his mind rearranged around it. The unfamiliar symbols ceased to be obstacles and became relationships.

He solved the question.

Then he looked at the next one.

It used the same principle differently.

Nathan solved that too.

Platt stopped eating.

Nathan barely noticed.

The third problem altered one of the assumptions.

Nathan began the same way, reached a contradiction, stared at his own work and crossed it out.

"No," he murmured.

Platt said nothing.

Nathan started again.

Several minutes later he pushed the paper across.

Platt read it.

"Who taught you mathematics?"

Nathan groaned softly.

Platt looked amused. "It remains a reasonable question."

"I told you."

"Books and miscellaneous strangers."

"Essentially."

Platt examined the solution again. "What book?"

"I don't remember all of them."

"That is becoming convenient."

Nathan's eyes lifted sharply.

Platt's tone contained no accusation, merely curiosity.

Nathan forced himself to relax.

"I worked around people who had books. Sometimes they let me borrow them. Sometimes I read while I was supposed to be doing something else."

"And retained all of it?"

"No."

Platt looked at the page.

Nathan added, "Apparently enough."

The professor gave him another problem.

Nathan began.

The day continued that way until Nathan lost track of the hour.

History returned. Geography. More mathematics. Latin again. Platt gave him short passages to analyse and occasionally disappeared for several minutes, returning with papers from elsewhere in the College. Nathan did not ask whose they were. Some defeated him completely.

Strangely, those became his favourites.

Each failure exposed something that could be filled.

He began keeping a separate page beside him, writing down unfamiliar terms and subjects he needed to revisit.

Platt noticed.

"What is that?"

Nathan covered the page reflexively.

"Things I don't know."

"I can see that."

"I want to remember them."

"Why?"

Nathan looked genuinely confused by the question. "So I can learn them."

Platt stared at him.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You've been saying that all day."

"And you continue asking what."

Nathan looked down at the page again.

Penrose and Harbury returned sometime after four and found Nathan still working.

Penrose entered without knocking, saw the papers covering almost every available portion of Platt's desk and stopped.

"Good Lord."

Nathan did not look up. "You're late."

"I was told not to return before afternoon."

"It is afternoon."

"It has been afternoon for some hours."

Platt took the paper Nathan had just completed.

"That will do."

Nathan looked up. "There's another question."

"It will still exist tomorrow."

Nathan stared at him.

Penrose began smiling.

"Don't."

"I haven't said anything."

"You're about to."

Harbury removed his hat. "How did he do, Professor?"

Nathan turned toward Platt as well.

For the first time that day he was genuinely nervous.

Platt did not answer immediately. He gathered several papers together and straightened them against the desk while Nathan watched the movement with increasing irritation.

Penrose apparently felt the same.

"Well?"

Platt glanced toward him. "Are you always like this?"

"Only when kept waiting."

Nathan said, "Yes."

Harbury quietly turned away to hide a smile.

Platt finally sat back.

"He is not properly educated."

Nathan's stomach dropped.

Penrose's smile vanished.

Platt continued before either could speak.

"That is not the same as saying he is incapable of being educated."

Nathan waited.

"There are gaps. Considerable ones in places. His instruction has plainly had no order whatsoever. He knows things without knowing what normally precedes them, and occasionally lacks something elementary while possessing something substantially beyond it."

Penrose glanced toward Nathan. "Is that bad?"

"It is inconvenient."

Nathan asked, "Can it be fixed?"

Platt looked at him. "Of course it can be fixed."

Something inside Nathan loosened.

Platt picked up one of the papers. "What interests me more is that when he does not understand something, he learns very quickly once it is explained."

Harbury asked, "Quickly enough?"

"For university?"

"Yes."

Platt regarded Nathan for a moment.

"More than quickly enough."

Nobody spoke.

Nathan felt his fingers curl slightly against his knee.

Penrose was the first to react. "So you think he could enter."

"I think, with structured preparation, he could meet the academic requirements necessary to pursue higher study. That is what I was asked."

Nathan looked at him. "How much preparation?"

"I don't know."

"A year?"

"Perhaps less."

"Six months?"

Platt sighed. "You have been declared capable, Mr. Drake, not invincible."

Nathan ignored that. "How long?"

"Your Latin needs regular instruction. Your mathematics requires organisation more than remediation. Your writing needs discipline. There will be formal requirements regardless of how clever you prove to be. We would have to determine the appropriate route."

Nathan nodded, already arranging it mentally.

Platt watched him.

"Do you ever stop?"

Nathan looked up. "Stop what?"

"Moving on to the next problem before anyone has finished discussing the previous one."

Nathan thought about that.

"No."

"I suspected as much."

Penrose laughed quietly.

Nathan turned on him. "You have been remarkably happy today."

"I brought a dock labourer into University College this morning and returned to find a professor complaining that he learns too quickly. Permit me a little satisfaction."

"I didn't say too quickly," Platt said.

Penrose waved that away. "Close enough."

"It is not remotely close enough."

Harbury sat beside Nathan. "The important question is whether the arrangement Sir Henry offered remains worthwhile. If Professor Platt believes preparation is justified, then the Railway can cover it."

Nathan looked at him. "Books?"

"Yes."

"Tutors?"

"Yes."

"Examination fees?"

"If required."

"Lodging?"

Harbury nodded. "You will not be expected to sleep beneath a bridge in order to demonstrate academic commitment."

Nathan opened his mouth.

Penrose pointed at him. "Do not argue about the money again."

"I wasn't."

"You were preparing to."

"How could you possibly know that?"

"I have spent an entire day with you."

"Two days."

"It has felt considerably longer."

Platt looked between them with faint amusement before turning back to Nathan. "There is one question which still has not been answered."

Nathan waited.

"What do you intend to study?"

Penrose went quiet.

Harbury turned toward him.

For the first time, Nathan realised all three men were waiting for an answer none of them knew.

He had deliberately kept it that way.

The officials at the Railway had not needed to know. Penrose and Harbury had assumed nothing beyond Nathan wanting an education. Platt had spent the entire day examining whether Nathan possessed the foundations to undertake serious study without ever asking what direction he intended to take afterward.

Now there was no reason left to avoid it.

Nathan looked toward the window.

His reflection hovered dimly upon the glass.

Dark hair. Brown eyes. Broad shoulders beneath a respectable coat Penrose had bullied him into purchasing. Twenty-five years old.

A perfectly healthy young Englishman.

The heart beneath his ribs beat steadily.

Nathan knew he could stop it whenever he wished.

He looked back at Platt.

"Physiology."

There was a small pause.

Penrose's brows rose.

Nathan continued.

"Anatomy."

Platt's expression sharpened with interest.

"Zoology."

Harbury looked at Nathan now.

"And bacteriology."

Penrose blinked. "All of them?"

Nathan nodded.

"You weren't considering something modest, then."

"I've had a modest education so far."

"That is one way of describing it."

Platt ignored them. "Why those subjects?"

Nathan had known the question would come.

Knowing did not make answering easier.

He rested his hands together and considered how much truth could safely be placed inside a lie.

"I saw things in Africa I didn't understand."

Platt waited for more.

Nathan gave it.

"I spent weeks among animals I knew almost nothing about. I watched people become sick. I saw wounds that killed one man and left another alive. At Tsavo everyone knew what a lion was, but knowing its name didn't tell us everything about how it hunted or why those two behaved differently."

Penrose nodded slowly.

Nathan looked down at his own hand.

"I want to know how bodies work."

That was true.

"Why?"

Nathan looked back toward Platt.

"Because I don't like ignorance."

Platt almost smiled. "That is a dangerous motive for entering a university. You may discover how much of it exists."

"Then I'll be busy."

This time Platt did smile.

Nathan continued before he could be asked more.

"Physiology tells me what a living body does. Anatomy tells me what it's made from. Zoology lets me understand how different animals solve the same problems differently."

He paused.

"Bacteriology…"

That word was harder.

Platt waited.

Nathan could remember the mountain as clearly as he could remember the room.

Ward disappearing beneath red.

Harcourt's memories becoming his own.

His skin flowing over bones that had not existed moments earlier.

A wolf attacking him and then becoming something he could wear.

Cells.

Disease.

Contagion.

Life using other life as material.

Nathan chose his next words carefully.

"People die from things they can't even see."

Harbury's expression sobered.

Nathan went on. "A man can look perfectly healthy and something inside him is already killing him. If there are organisms small enough to enter us without being seen and alter what happens inside the body, I want to understand them."

Platt considered him.

"You have read about the germ theory of disease?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"Not enough."

"That answer I believe."

Nathan smiled faintly.

Penrose leaned back in his chair. "So while I was imagining mathematics, perhaps engineering, you were planning to dissect things."

"I wasn't planning anything until today."

"You've clearly thought about it."

"Yes."

"Since Africa?"

Nathan nodded.

That, too, was true.

Harbury asked quietly, "Was there much disease among the people you encountered?"

Nathan's mind produced memories that did not belong wholly to him. Villages. Fevers. Parasites. Men coughing. Children dying of illnesses medicine had no power to stop. Some came from Nathan's own journey. Others came from men whose memories he carried.

"Yes," he said.

Harbury accepted the answer.

He did not infer anything further.

Neither did Penrose.

Why would they?

To them Nathan was simply a young man who had spent weeks nearly dying in East Africa and had returned fascinated by why some living things survived while others did not.

Only Nathan knew he was not trying to understand what had happened to the people around him.

He was trying to understand what had happened to himself.

Platt folded his hands on the desk. "You appreciate that you have named several disciplines, each capable of occupying an entire career."

"Yes."

"You cannot simply announce yourself tomorrow in every department and request mastery."

"I assumed there would be slightly more paperwork."

Penrose groaned. "He's learning."

Platt ignored him. "You need foundations first."

Nathan nodded.

"Chemistry will become relevant."

"Then chemistry too."

"Do not collect subjects while I am speaking."

Nathan shut his mouth.

"You will need biology in a more systematic form than whatever you have acquired independently. Depending upon the precise route you take, there will be additional requirements. Your interests may change once you actually encounter the subjects."

"They might."

"You don't sound convinced."

"I won't know until I encounter them."

Platt studied him for a moment, then nodded. "A reasonable answer."

Nathan leaned forward slightly. "Do you know people who teach them?"

"Of course."

"Could I meet them?"

"Eventually."

Nathan's disappointment must have shown because Platt raised a hand.

"Mr. Drake, twelve hours ago you did not know whether you were capable of university study at all."

"Nine."

Platt stared.

Nathan corrected himself. "Approximately."

Penrose covered his face with one hand.

Platt's eyes narrowed. "Tomorrow."

Nathan stopped.

"What?"

"Come back tomorrow."

"To meet them?"

"No."

Nathan's expression fell again.

"To begin correcting the holes in your education."

Nathan stared at him.

Platt continued, "If you are serious about this, then we begin with what you require rather than what happens to interest you most. You do not get to leap over foundations merely because you find them dull."

"I didn't say they were dull."

"You were about to."

"I wasn't."

Penrose murmured, "He was."

Nathan turned. "Whose side are you on?"

"The University's, apparently."

Harbury stood and pulled on his gloves. "What time tomorrow?"

Platt looked directly at Nathan.

"Nine."

"I'll be here."

"Nine means nine, not nine-ten."

"I know how clocks work."

"That remains to be demonstrated."

Nathan almost laughed.

They gathered their things.

Penrose spoke briefly with Platt about letters and fees while Harbury waited near the door. Nathan stood beside the desk, looking down at the pages he had filled throughout the day. Errors remained visible in red and black marks. Words he did not know. Problems he had failed. Things requiring improvement.

For perhaps the first time in his life, evidence of ignorance did not humiliate him.

It excited him.

Every red mark represented something that could be learned.

Platt noticed him looking.

"Keep that page."

Nathan glanced up.

"The list you made."

Nathan picked it up.

"You'll need a longer one."

"I was hoping it might get shorter."

Platt gave him a look that almost resembled pity.

"My dear Mr. Drake, if your education is successful, it will become considerably longer."

Nathan folded the paper carefully and put it into his coat.

"Good."

Something in the answer made Platt pause.

Then he nodded.

"Tomorrow."

Nathan followed Penrose and Harbury from the room.

Their footsteps carried them through corridors where students still moved between rooms, books tucked beneath their arms, conversations floating around Nathan in fragments. He listened differently now.

He might belong here.

Not yet.

That mattered.

Nobody had handed him anything he had not earned.

Patterson had bought him the introduction. The Railway would buy books, rooms and time.

Nathan would have to do everything else.

At the doors Penrose stopped and looked at him.

"Happy?"

Nathan frowned. "What?"

"With today."

Nathan looked back along the corridor.

"I don't know."

Penrose's expression softened. "You are allowed to be."

"I know."

Harbury opened the door and cold London air moved inside.

Nathan stepped out.

The city had darkened. Gas lamps shone through thin mist. Carriages rattled past. Somewhere down the street a newsboy shouted something about Parliament. London moved around him, enormous and uncaring.

Nathan stood beneath the stone front of the College and looked at his gloved hand.

Physiology.

He wanted to know why the heart inside him could stop without killing him.

Anatomy.

He wanted to know how bone could dissolve and reform at a thought, why his organs existed when he seemed not to require them, whether anything inside his body remained where a physician expected to find it when nobody was looking.

Zoology.

He wanted to understand why consuming a wolf had given him not merely its flesh but the capacity to reproduce its entire form.

Bacteriology.

That was the deepest question.

Something had existed beneath that mountain for longer than human memory. It had taken living things into itself, retained them, changed them, recombined them. Then it had taken Nathan Drake.

Or Nathan had taken it.

He still did not know which sentence was true.

Maybe both were wrong.

"Drake?"

Nathan looked up.

Penrose was beside the waiting cab.

"You intend to stand there until morning?"

Nathan glanced once more at University College.

"No."

He joined them.

Penrose climbed in after him, still talking. "I should warn Sir Henry that instead of funding one degree, we appear to have accidentally acquired a man who intends to study the entire animal kingdom."

Nathan settled beside the window.

"Not the entire thing."

Harbury sat opposite. "That is reassuring."

Nathan looked out through the glass as the cab began moving.

"I haven't decided about plants yet."

Harbury laughed.

Penrose stared at him for two full seconds.

Then, despite himself, Nathan began to laugh too.

It was a small thing. Three men in a cab, joking about university subjects while London passed outside.

Ordinary.

Nathan had almost forgotten what ordinary felt like.

He rested his head against the seat and listened to Penrose complain that he would personally refuse to fund botany unless Nathan promised never to bring anything growing into his office.

Neither man noticed Nathan press two fingers against the pulse beneath his glove.

It beat normally.

Nathan let it stop.

One beat missed.

Then another.

Penrose continued speaking.

Harbury answered him.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Nathan felt no dizziness. No suffocation. No pain. His thoughts remained perfectly clear.

He allowed the pulse to resume.

Tomorrow he would begin learning what a human body was supposed to require in order to remain alive.

After that, perhaps he would finally be able to determine why his required none of it.