Chapter 199 A Gloomy Visitor
POV: Fell | Final facility, Clerkenwell
The Grandmaster arrives in the evening and he looks like what he is, which is a man who has spent forty years leading an institution that no longer exists, wearing a coat that belonged to the institution rather than to him, carrying the specific quality of someone whose identity was entirely architectural and who is now standing in the absence of the architecture.
His name is Harrow and he has been the Hermetic Order's Grandmaster for nineteen years and he found me here through the one remaining channel we have in common, which is a contact network so reduced at this point that it is essentially two people and a dead mailbox. He was not followed. He would not have come if there were a risk of being followed. This is one of the competencies that survived the Order's collapse, the ability to move without being seen, and it is the competency that matters least now.
"It's over," he says. He says it standing in the middle of the facility's main room, which is not a large room, which is a basement beneath an abandoned hospital with reinforced walls and independent power and the specific smell of preservation compound that I have been working in for forty years and which I do not notice anymore the way you stop noticing the smell of your own house. "Four facilities destroyed. The program exposed internationally. Parliament has turned against us. The wolves have the children." He looks at me with the expression of someone who needs the person they are speaking to to understand something that they are refusing to understand. "We are hunted. There is no funding. There is no support. There is no future for the Order."
I look at him.
Behind me, the preservation chamber hums at the steady pitch that means the temperature is correct and the environment is stable and the subject inside it is developing normally, which she has been doing for the entire time I have been running, the entire time the facilities burned and Parliament turned and the wolves organized their coalition, developing with the specific patient persistence of a living thing that does not know or care about the conditions outside its chamber.
"The program is not over," I say.
"The Order is over," Harrow says. "Without the Order there is no program."
"Without the Order there is no institutional program," I say. "The research is here. The viable subject is here. Three months and the research produces the first result it was always intended to produce." I hear the specific quality of my own voice and I understand that I have been in this facility for long enough that my voice has taken on the quality of the facility, which is the quality of someone who has reduced their world to a single purpose. "The work does not require the Order. It requires me and three months and the equipment I have."
Harrow looks at the chamber.
"You're alone," he says. "No funding. No security. No future. They know where you are, or they will. You cannot defend this facility alone and you cannot finish the program while defending it alone and you cannot produce the result when wolves and vampires come through that door." He says it not cruelly but with the precision of someone who has made the calculation and is presenting it. "This is the end, Cornelius."
"Then I work alone," I say.
Harrow stands in the middle of the room for a moment longer and then he leaves, because there is nothing else for him to do here, and the door closes and the facility returns to its ordinary sounds, which are the hum of equipment and the occasional drip of water from the ceiling junction and the steady precise pitch of the preservation chamber.
I sit down at my workstation. I pull up the development logs. Everything is on track. Everything has been on track for the entire war that has been happening above and around this basement. The subject has developed without disruption, without setback, without the interference that disrupted every facility that was not mine, because this one was mine alone, because I did not let anyone else run it, because I understood what the others did not understand, which is that the work requires singular attention and singular commitment and the willingness to be the last person standing if that is what it takes.
I look at the chamber.
"You're my life's work," I say to it, to her, to the three months that stand between this moment and the result. "You're perfect. And I will die before I let them take you."
The chamber hums.