Chapter 240 The Resurrection Man's Return Home
POV: Jack | St. Thomas ruins, Southwark
I arrive at the St. Thomas site at two fifteen in the morning and the building has the quality that buildings have when they have recently come down, which is the quality of a structure that was a structure and is now a configuration, the specific rearrangement of materials that were organized and are no longer organized, and the dust is still settling in the way that dust settles from a collapse, which is slowly and completely, covering everything in the specific uniform grey of a building that has become its own aftermath.
The east side is clear. The morgue passage exit is clear. The people who came out of this building came out through the east and they are gone, which I know because I was watching from the position I have been maintaining since midnight, which is the position of the person who documents rather than participates, which is the position Silas held and which I have inherited along with everything else.
I have my notebook and I have my recording device and I have the specific professional quality that four years of Silas's training produced, which is the ability to enter a space where something large has happened and to see it as information rather than as the thing it is, to separate the event from the record of the event and to prioritize the record because the record is what remains.
Tonight the separation is harder than usual.
I walk the perimeter first, which is standard, establishing the scope of what I am documenting before I enter it, and the perimeter tells me the collapse was primarily internal, the outer walls of the ground level mostly standing, the sublevel contents compressed, the ancient asylum level at the bottom absorbing the most significant structural load in the way basements absorb the collapse of things above them. It tells me the scale of what was happening in this building tonight across four simultaneous operational levels, and I count the evidence of it in the specific way I count everything, which is accurately.
Twenty-three dead. I reach this number through the combination of what I can see in the rubble's margins and what I know from the contact reports that have been coming in through the network since one thirty, which is the time the last fighter cleared the east passage and the collapse completed. Hermetic Order mages, three in the collapse and two in the upper facility engagement. Callum's coalition members, seven, which is a number that lands differently from the numbers that represent the other side, which is the specific difference between counting and feeling what you count. Parliamentary guards, four, in the upper facility engagement before Alteroni stabilized the situation. Hybrid prisoners from the deepest level who did not survive the conditions of the facility independent of tonight, six, whose deaths predate this evening and whose bodies are in the collapsed lower level, documented in Fell's own logs which I will recover when the rubble is accessible.
And Tom.
Tom the Cracksman, born in Whitechapel in 1974, fae-touched at age seven, thief of thirty years, member of Callum Brennan's coalition from its first year, dead at age fifty-one inside a building he chose to hold standing with his own body's remaining resources while the people he worked with carried a child to safety through the east passage.
I stand at the east wall and I look at the rubble and I feel the specific quality of a loss that is personal rather than professional, and I allow myself to feel it for the time that it requires, which is a decision Silas would not have made and which I am making because I am not Silas and the conscience he said I was developing has developed sufficiently that it insists on this.
Then I go to work.
The recovery of Tom's body takes two hours, which is the time it takes when you are working carefully and alone and when the rubble is recent enough to be unstable at certain points and when you are not willing to risk the collapse of additional material onto the person you are trying to reach. I find him at the first sublevel junction, which is the position from which the ward system for a full building would be most effectively maintained, which means he was exactly where he needed to be and which means the position was a choice rather than a circumstance.
His expression has the quality of the outline description, the last smile, the specific quality of someone who finished something, and I sit with him in the rubble for a moment before I do the work of moving him, because the work of moving him is the work I know and the moment before it is the one I am giving to something else.
"You earned it, thief," I say.
I carry him out through the east passage. I do not put him in a transport case. He goes in my arms, which is not my standard protocol and which is the correct protocol for tonight.
I will give him a proper burial, which is the first time I have done that, which is the first time the body I am moving has been someone whose burial matters to me personally, and I will find a place that is appropriate for a fae-touched Whitechapel thief who died holding a building up, which is a specific kind of place that I have not needed to find before but which I will find.
My records for tonight read, in the final entry before I close the notebook:
Twenty-three dead, both sides combined. Fifteen hybrid children rescued, total across all facility operations. Hermetic Order: ended. Tom the Cracksman: dead. Hero.
The word hero is not a word that appears in Silas's records. It is a word I have introduced into the record myself, which is a departure from the methodology, and which is the correct departure.