Chapter 505 | A Man Who Weighs 131 Pounds

Chapter 505: 505 | A Man Who Weighs 131 Pounds

Arthur brought himself down behind the administration building instead of the quad, because the quad had brick pavers and the head groundskeeper kept a list.

The landing still put a hairline through the service walkway. He looked at it, decided he would pay for it out of pocket like the other four, and stood there in the shade of the loading bay with his cape hanging wet against his calves. Chemical plant water. It smelled like a swimming pool that had gone wrong.

Eleven minutes left on the clock in his chest. He could feel it the way you feel a tooth.

He got the service door open with his shoulder and stepped into the corridor where the HVAC lived, and then he let the form go.

It always felt like taking off a coat that had been holding him upright. Seven foot two folded down and in, shoulders collapsing toward a frame that had not carried real weight in nine years, and the golden light went out of his hair the way a filament dies. He got one hand on the wall. The left side of his torso woke up, the whole caved-in ruin of it, and told him at length exactly how the morning had gone.

Blood came up. He caught it in the handkerchief. Then a second mouthful, which was new for this hour of the day.

There was a maintenance locker at the end of the corridor with a broken hasp that he had been using for four years. He got the tracksuit out of it and put it on over the ruin, and by the time he had the hoodie zipped he looked like exactly what he was, which was a man in his late forties who weighed a hundred and thirty-one pounds and should have been in a hospital bed in a city that could not afford to know that.

He pushed the interior door open and Caelum Ashby was standing in the hallway with two cups of tea.

"Arthur Vance," Ashby said.

Arthur stopped.

Ashby was in linen again. Pale grey blazer, open collar, no tie, a pocket square in a green that Arthur was certain meant something to somebody. Six foot three of him filling up the corridor without doing anything to fill it, silver hair pushed back off his face, one cup in each of those enormous hands. He held them the way other men held a phone.

"You came in low over the eucalyptus," Ashby said. "Off the angle of the quad camera. You have done that every time for nine years, and every time I have wanted to tell you that I watch the eucalyptus."

"Caelum."

"Walk with me."

"I’ve got somewhere to be."

"You had somewhere to be at nine thirty." Ashby turned and started walking, which meant Arthur was walking, because the alternative was standing in a service corridor arguing with a man who did not argue. "You have somewhere to be at eleven forty-one, and the somewhere is my office, and the reason is this tea, which is cooling."

The stairwell was cold. Arthur took it slow and hated that he took it slow. Ashby did not adjust his pace, which Arthur appreciated more than he could have said out loud, and did not offer him an arm, which he appreciated even more.

The office had not changed. Books stacked in a system that was not alphabetical and was definitely not random. A wooden training staff leaned in the corner with a crack running up the lower third that had not been there when Arthur first sat in this room. Windows open. Somebody’s kid running the perimeter track four floors down.

"Sit," Ashby said.

Arthur sat.

Ashby set one cup on the desk in front of him and took the other around to the window and stood there with his back half turned, looking down at the campus like a man checking on livestock.

"Drink that."

"I’m all right."

"I did not ask after your condition, and I am not going to, because you would lie and then I would have to decide what to do about it." Ashby drank from his own cup. "That is the blend. I have never given it to anyone. Three of my staff have tried to work out what is in it by smell alone and one of them submitted a written proposal. Consider the exception a diagnostic."

Arthur picked it up. It was hot enough to hurt his fingers, and the steam came off it with something in it that he could not name, something between smoke and stone fruit, and when he drank it went down through the wreck of his chest and did not make him cough.

That was the first thing in six hours that had not made him cough.

He looked at the cup.

"What’s in this."

"You have two hours and nine minutes of tardiness to account for," Ashby said. "Start there."

"There was a sedan in the air at Meridian and Fourth."

"Yes."

"Family of three inside it. Little girl in the back."

"Yes."

"Apartment fire on Coleridge, fourth floor, stairwell gone."

"Four occupants," Ashby said. "Two floors involved. You went through the exterior wall and you told the crowd nobody was going to die today, which the local affiliate has already run twice, and which is the sort of sentence a man says when he has decided the sentence out loud before he has checked the building."

"Everyone came out."

"They did." Ashby turned around. "And then the Maxwell plant."

Arthur set the cup down.

"Three trapped," he said. "Eastern wing. Suppression was dead and the integrity was gone. If I’d routed here first I would have been forty minutes out and the eastern wing would have been on the ground."

"That is true."

"So."

"So you have given me a list of four places you were needed," Ashby said, "and you have not once mentioned the fifth."

There it was. Arthur felt his shoulders come up and knew Ashby watched them come up.

"They’re kids," he said. "They’ll have another Wednesday."

"Forty of them," Ashby said, "were told nine days ago that the number one Hero in the United States would be standing on the floor of the Crucible this morning. Sixteen of them have not slept properly since. One of them has been rehearsing a question about beam angle for a week and will die of it privately when he does not get to ask. A young woman in Class 1-A has been building her entire understanding of what a person can be around a flood in her neighborhood when she was seven years old, and she was going to see you today, and you are here."

"I’ll go now."

"You will not."

Arthur got a breath in. "Caelum."

"Do you know what my staff spent this morning doing." Ashby crossed to the desk and set his cup down on the blotter, and he did not sit, which put all six foot three of him at exactly the height where Arthur had to look up. "Imara Steele has looked at the access road eleven times. Cole Dravid told me at eight fifty that you would not come, and he said it in the voice he uses when he has already written it down. I told him he was wrong. I was wrong. I dislike that."