Chapter 182 The Resurrection Man Again
POV: Jack | London streets and back rooms
Silas taught me to keep records the way other people keep breathing, which is to say without thinking about it, reflexively, as a condition of survival rather than a choice made fresh each morning.
I have been keeping records for four years, since I was seventeen and Silas found me lifting purses in Southwark and decided that someone with my particular talent for noticing things other people overlooked was more useful as an apprentice than as a cautionary example. He was correct. He was almost always correct, which was one of the things about him that was both admirable and difficult to live alongside.
He has been dead for eight months and I have been running the operation alone since then, which is a different thing from running it with him, not worse exactly, but different in the specific way that doing something without the person who taught you feels different from doing it with them, even if the thing itself is unchanged.
The body trade continues. Necromancers still pay. The supernatural underworld still produces casualties that their communities would prefer not to account for officially, and someone has to move those casualties from where they are to where they need to be, and I am still that someone. Silas's philosophy was neutrality, which meant we worked for anyone who could pay and kept records on everyone and used those records as insurance and leverage and occasionally as currency in negotiations that were not strictly financial.
I have maintained the philosophy. I have also, in the four months since the facility raids began, been maintaining something Silas never maintained, which is a conscience.
This is inconvenient.
Tonight I am in a street in Bermondsey, collecting a body that a contact flagged two hours ago, an Order mage found in the aftermath of the Bristol facility fire, transported to London by someone who either did not know what to do with him or did not want to be found near him. He is middle-aged and he is very dead and he is dressed in the kind of practical clothing that means fieldwork rather than ceremony, and he has been here approximately twelve hours based on the temperature and the state of the body, which are the two metrics Silas taught me first.
I go through his pockets with the clinical efficiency that four years of this work produces, not from disrespect but because pockets contain information and information is the actual currency of everything I do.
He has a phone, dead. A keyring. A wallet with cash and a false identity card, standard Order issue based on the paper quality. A folded piece of paper in the inner breast pocket, written in the cramped precise handwriting of someone transcribing from memory rather than from another document, which means they knew they should not be carrying it and wrote it down anyway because they needed it accessible.
I read it in the dim light of the street lamp and then I read it again.
Fell's current location. A Clerkenwell address, a specific building, a specific floor, with notes on access points and security rotation and the detail that the preservation equipment requires a dedicated power line that runs along the building's east wall. Notes that are written in the particular style of someone who spent time in the facility and knew its operational details from the inside.
Below the address, in the same handwriting: three remaining children. not transferred. still here.
I stand over the body of the Order mage and feel the specific weight of Silas's philosophy pressing against the specific weight of three children still inside a building I now have the location of, and I understand for the first time why Silas never allowed himself a conscience.
I take the paper. I make a decision Silas would not have made.
Then I move.