The next night I went looking for the figure on the roof.
It was the first thing I did when I came out, before feeding, before thinking. I climbed to the same roof where I had seen it, went over the whole block from above, jumped to the three adjoining buildings and stood still for half an hour on each one, listening.
Nothing.
I went back the night after. And the night after that. I covered six blocks. What I did learn was to move across the rooftops of Alexandria better than through its streets, and I discovered that there is a whole city up there that nobody looks at: washing lines, chicken coops, people sleeping out in the cool of summer, food scraps, a man who climbed up every night to drink alone.
Of the figure, nothing. Not a sound, not a mark, not a shadow.
And on the fourth night, sitting on a parapet with my legs hanging over, I made myself admit the truth, which was humiliating and simple:
Even if I found it, I would not know what to do.
I did not know whether I could outrun it. I did not know whether I could strike it and what would happen if I did. I did not know whether I could die from a blow, or a knife, or a fall from that parapet. I did not know how long I could last without feeding. I did not know what would burn me and what would not. I knew absolutely nothing about the body I was living in, beyond two accidents and a handful of assumptions taken from a video game that had already proved to be a lie.
I was hunting something before I had even taken inventory of my own weapon.
That night I came down off the roof and did not go up again for two weeks.
I had work to do.
The first thing was the place.
The cistern was good for hiding, not for working. It was four metres down, with one way out, and if something went wrong down there I had no way of running. So I spent two nights looking harder, and found, on the same unfinished block, a half-built house with only the outer walls standing and one interior room that had a roof.
It was abandoned. I checked carefully: I walked in with no trouble, no refusal, no invisible wall, and that confirmed at a stroke something I had begun to suspect and would write down later in large letters. The room had a floor of packed earth, one smooth mortar wall, and no gap that let light in except the doorway, which I covered with a stolen tarpaulin and three stones.
I called it the workshop, in my head, and did not realise until much later what it meant that I called it that.
Then came the problem of writing.
I had no paper. Obviously I had no paper. I was in the city of papyrus, yes, but papyrus cost money and money was exactly what I did not have, and even if I had had it I was not walking into a shop yet.
I found the solution on the second night, on the floor of the works: a bronze nail, as long as my finger, bent at the point.
And that was how my first laboratory notebook came to be the mortar wall of an unfinished room in the western quarter of Alexandria, written with a nail's point, in my own language, in an alphabet that at that moment not one person on the planet could read.
I wrote the heading the first night and stood looking at it for a long while with the nail in my hand.
Subject: me.
And underneath, smaller, because it seemed to me one ought to be honest from the start:
Observer: me.
The sun.
I put it off for three nights and on the fourth I accepted that I was avoiding it and that avoiding it was the opposite of what I had come to do.
I prepared it the way you prepare something that can kill you, which is slowly.
I chose the site: a room with a single slit in the eastern wall, angled so that at sunrise one finger of light would come through and no more. I calculated where it would fall. I covered myself completely: the tunic, the cloak over my head, my hands inside the cloth. I stood a metre back, inside the shadow, with a wet rag within reach and the decision already taken that the experiment would last as long as it took me to count to three.
And I waited.
When the line of light appeared on the floor it was a white stripe a finger wide, so ordinary and so harmless that I nearly laughed.
I put my hand out. The left little finger. Only the last joint.
One.
At one there was no pain. There was a noise. A small sputtering, exactly the sound a drop of water makes in a hot pan, and it was not coming from outside: it was coming from inside the finger.
Two.
At two the pain arrived and I cannot compare it to anything. I have had far worse injuries since and none of them resemble it, because the pain of a wound is the warning of a tissue that is still alive and asking for help. That warned of nothing. It was the sensation of a part of me being withdrawn, erased from the world, and what hurt was not the damage but the erasure.
I did not reach three.
I pulled my hand into the shadow and sat against the wall gripping my own wrist with the other hand for a full minute, thinking about nothing.
When I could look at it, the tip of the little finger was black. Black and dry, shrunken, the skin cracked like the mud of a puddle drying out, and underneath there was no blood: there was compacted grey ash. I touched the edge and a little dust came away.
Two seconds. One finger of light. Two seconds.
That did not heal the way a wound heals. I watched it all the following night. There was none of the invisible thread pulling the edges together that I already knew from cuts; there was something far slower and far more expensive. The flesh rebuilt itself from underneath, millimetre by millimetre, over hours, and while it did I had a disproportionate and constant hunger, as though the repair were being charged to an account.
It took two nights to become a finger again. And it did not come back the same: the nail grew in paler, and it is still paler.
I wrote on the wall, with the nail, with my left hand because my right was shaking:
The sun is not fire. The sun erases.
And below:
Two seconds = one joint. Extrapolation: one minute = all of it.
And below that, after a long time thinking:
There is no coming back from ash. I have not tested this and I am not going to.
Then I did the useful part, which was measuring the edges.
For four nights I stayed out to the limit and came in before the limit, measuring with my skin. I found that the itch begins nearly an hour before the sun shows, while the sky is still black to any human eye. I found that the indirect light of an overcast dawn does not erase me: it burns me slowly, takes my strength, leaves me half blind and in a filthy temper, but it can be endured for a while under a roof with the skin covered. I found that the shadow of a wall is not enough if the sky is open above it: there is something in that light that does not need to touch you head-on.
And on the sixth night I discovered the most important thing of all, the one that stayed with me for two hundred years.
The fear of the sun was not mine.
I could reason about the sun. I could plan against the sun. But when the moment came, the body took decisions without consulting me, and it took them well, and it took them before I did. Whatever had been put inside me knew how to look after itself.
Which raised a question I did not like at all, and which I wrote down anyway:
Who taught it?
Fire.
After the sun, fire was almost a relief.
I lit a stolen clay lamp and ran the flame along my left forearm, counting. I held twelve seconds before pulling away, and not because of the pain — it hurt, it hurt a great deal — but because the smell of my own flesh burning turned my stomach in a way I had not expected.
Second-degree burn, an area three fingers wide. Blister, weeping, the whole business.
It healed. It took its time: two long nights, and with a distinct additional hunger. But it healed completely, without a mark, and that was the decisive difference from the sun.
Fire wounds. The sun removes. They are not the same threat and you do not defend against them the same way.
And a note underneath, because at the time it seemed to me a minor observation and turned out not to be:
The game treated them as the same. The game was wrong.
Cuts.
Here I was systematic, because here I actually knew how to be.
I used a piece of bronze sharpened against a stone. I began with the shallow and worked up, and I timed everything by counting other people's heartbeats, which was the only clock I had: there was a family asleep thirty metres away and the father had a very regular pulse of fifty-eight, so that man was my stopwatch for two weeks without knowing it.
Shallow cut on the forearm, a centimetre: closed in four or five seconds.
Deep cut, into the muscle: close to a minute, the edges joining in two stages, muscle first and then skin.
Cut to the bone, in the thigh, which I did once and do not intend to repeat: nearly twenty minutes. And when it finished, a hunger that doubled me over.
And there I found the law that governed all of it, and it was the discovery I was proudest of in weeks.
I tested it deliberately: I waited until I was low on blood, almost at the edge, and made the same shallow cut I had started with.
It did not close.
It stayed open, bleeding slowly, the way it stays open on anybody. It took an hour to close and it closed badly.
Healing is paid for.
I wrote that on the wall with the nail and underlined it twice, because it changed everything. I was not invulnerable. I was a man with an open account who could buy repairs as long as he had a balance, and when he did not, he would be an ordinary man with a knife in his leg.
Everything I do costs. That was the sentence. And I realised that the game had been telling me so the whole time, with a red bar in the corner of the screen, and that I had looked at it ten thousand times without ever once understanding what it meant.
The powers.
I tested them in the reverse of the order I would have liked, starting with the ones that frightened me least.
The claws I already knew. I measured them: they cut pine without resistance, they cut leather, they cut a thick rope in one pass. Against a block of limestone they left four white scratches and nothing else. Against a bronze bar from the works, nothing. They slid off.
Flesh, leather, wood. Not metal, not stone. Noted.
The spring was a humiliation.
I tried it in the yard, meaning to cross the eight metres to the opposite wall. What happened was that I crossed the eight metres, yes, in a blink, with a pulling sensation in the sternum, and then kept going. I had not thought about the arriving part. I hit the wall shoulder-first with enough force to bring down half a metre of render, and sat there on the ground among the rubble laughing at myself like an idiot for a good long minute.
It was the first time I had laughed since dying.
I repeated it twenty times that night. I learned that the maximum distance was around twenty paces, that I needed to see where I was going to land, and that the landing was mine: the power moved me, but it did not stop me.
The spear cost me dearly and taught me what I needed to learn.
I opened my wrist deliberately, and the blood did not fall to the floor. It stayed in the air in front of me and organised itself. That is the only word I have: it organised, as though someone were thinking it, and in a second there was a long narrow thing there, of a red so dark it was almost black, and I knew, without anyone telling me, exactly how to throw it.
It went through a plank three fingers thick and buried itself in the wall behind. And then it came apart. It did not fall, nothing was left: it came apart in the air the way steam comes apart.
And in that same instant I felt the price.
It was as though a bucket had been emptied out inside me. All at once. The hunger came back whole, from nothing to everything, in under a second, and I had to sit down on the floor and wait.
One spear. One plank. And there went half of what it had taken me three nights to gather.
The big things are paid for in big coin.
After that I tested the cheap ones and wrote them all down without drama. The barrier: a red film in front of me that took three blows from a stone I threw myself, and broke at the fourth the way thin ice breaks. The mist: it filled the whole room, and I discovered, uncomfortably, that I could see perfectly well inside it.
And the veil.
The veil I tested on a person, because there was no other way to test it, and it was the experiment that made me feel worst.
There was a watchman on the big works, a man of about thirty who made his round every two hours with a lamp. I stood in the middle of the yard, in the open, four paces from his path, and did what had to be done.
I did not become invisible in the sense of disappearing. It is hard to explain. It was more that the air around me stopped being interesting. I could still see my own body perfectly well.
He passed four paces away.
He moved the lamp. He looked straight at where I was standing. He looked through me, with the blank expression of a man checking a place he knows to be empty, and walked on, and yawned.
I could have done anything. Anything at all. And he would never have known where it came from.
I stayed in that yard, motionless, long after he had gone, and that night I wrote on the wall a line that was not a technical observation and that remains, of everything I wrote in that room, the only thing that still strikes me as intelligent:
The problem is not what I can do. The problem is that nobody is going to be able to stop me.
And the three at the bottom of the tree I did not test.
I could feel them. They were there in the same way the rest was there, and I knew how they were done, and I knew — with the same sourceless knowledge that had told me about the veil — that one of them summoned a darkness that ate a man, that another boiled the blood inside a body until it burst, and that the third was not a technique but a permission: to let go and allow it to do as it liked for a while.
After what a single spear against a plank had cost me, I was under no illusions about what any of the three would cost.
And there was another thing, more honest, that I also wrote down:
I am not testing them because I do not want to know what they feel like.
It took me a hundred and forty years to use the first one.
Strength and speed.
I measured these because I needed numbers and because they were the only honest numbers I was going to get.
I tested strength on the stone at the works. The squared blocks waiting beside the ramp weighed, by my estimate, between two and three hundred kilos each. I lifted one from the ground to chest height. It cost me something. It was not a titan's gesture: it was the effort an ordinary man puts into lifting a sack of cement, with the same face and the same clenching of the jaw.
Two hundred and fifty kilos, with effort. Five men. That was my number.
It struck me as less than I had expected, and it took me a whole night to understand that I was wrong, and that a creature which can lift five men at once and never tires is, in the year three hundred before Christ, a siege engine with a name.
Speed I tested on the central avenue, which was straight and empty at that hour.
I ran from one corner to the next counting the heartbeats of a man asleep in a doorway, which was my usual clock. I paced the distance afterwards: about a hundred and sixty metres.
Three beats.
I did it four more times to be sure I had not miscounted, and I had not miscounted.
And the strange part was not the speed. The strange part was that while I ran, the world did not move quickly. I could see everything with complete clarity, with time to spare to choose my line, and at the same time the walls fell away behind me as though somebody were pulling them.
I was not running fast. The world was going slow, and only for as long as I decided it should.
Then I tried to tire myself out.
I ran corner to corner without stopping until I lost count of the runs. I jumped to the rooftops and came down again. I lifted the same block twenty times in a row.
I did not tire. Not at all. There was no stiffness, no burn, no shortness of breath, because there was no breath to be short of.
What there was, at the end, was hunger.
There is no fatigue. There is cost. Everything a living body would pay for in tiredness, this one pays for in blood.
And that, of all the lines I wrote on that wall, is the one that saved my life most often in the centuries that followed: I do not become exhausted, I become spent. And a man who becomes spent can find himself with nothing left at the worst possible moment, with no warning at all except the one he learns to read in himself.
Blood.
I fed three times in those two weeks and all three were different, and from those three I learned more than from everything else put together.
The first was an exact repetition of the Nikanor method: a man on his own, asleep, very drunk, by the back door of a harbour tavern. Forearm, single point, pressure afterwards, strip of cloth. It went perfectly. It took me under four minutes and he did not stir.
His name was Philon and he sold rope. His stock came in from Rhodes and he was paid late. He had two sons and loved neither of them, and felt so guilty about it that he had turned the guilt into a private religion.
All of that reached me, unasked for, while I took less blood from him than a physician takes for a test.
And there I tried the first thing, which was to close myself off.
I tried it every way I could think of. Thinking about something else. Counting. Reciting the bones of the wrist. Concentrating on the mechanics, on the pressure of my fingers, on the count of swallows.
None of it did any good. The memory does not come in through attention: it comes in through the blood. It is a property of the liquid, not an act of mine. I could have been thinking about another continent and that man's resentment of his sons would have reached me all the same.
It cannot be filtered. If you drink, you receive.
And below it, because one must also write down the consequences that cannot be seen:
Every time I feed, I take someone inside me for good. Rate: at least two a week. Calculate over a hundred years.
I did that multiplication once and did not do it again for a very long time.
The second was the one that went wrong.
I chose a man sleeping on the floor of an open courtyard and I misjudged him: he was not drunk, he was exhausted. It is not the same thing. A drunk does not wake. A tired man does.
He opened his eyes when I was twenty seconds in.
It was very quick and it was very ugly. The first thing he did was look at my face, a hand's breadth from his own, and then look at my mouth set on his arm, and I saw the exact moment his brain gave up trying to make sense of what it was seeing.
I covered his mouth with my free hand.
And I stayed there, with a man underneath me, my hand over his mouth, the whole city asleep around us, and the absolute certainty that I could resolve this in two seconds and that I knew perfectly well how.
We stayed like that, looking at each other, for three or four seconds that were very long.
Then I let go of his mouth, pulled back, and did the only thing that occurred to me: I put two fingers on his forehead and held his eyes, and willed him, with everything I had, to sleep.
And he slept.
His eyes rolled inward, his face went slack, and he dropped back onto the mat as though a thread had been cut.
I left that courtyard without finishing, and spent the rest of the night sitting in the workshop with my hands on my knees, understanding two new things.
One: that I could do that.
Two: that the only reason that man was alive was that an alternative had occurred to me in time. If it had not occurred to me, I would have done the other thing. I know that with the same certainty as everything else I have written here.
I can put people to sleep by will. I do not know the limit. I do not know what they remember afterwards.
Test as soon as possible. Not on anyone who does not deserve it.
And underneath, crossed out and rewritten three times, because I could not find the way to say it:
Nobody deserves it. Rephrase.
The third test was on an animal, and it was the one that left me worst.
There were goats in a pen at the edge of the wasteland. I picked one and held it without difficulty and made the same small cut in its leg.
It tasted of old metal. Revolting is not the word: it was insufficient. Like drinking salt water when you are thirsty. I drank considerably more than I would have taken from a man and the hunger barely shifted, and within a few minutes I had to turn away and bring nearly all of it back up.
But that was not the worst of it.
The worst of it was that I received memory from that too.
Not words, obviously. Not ordered images. What reached me was a mass of sensation with no grammar to it: the smell of the other goats, which was a good thing and a central thing and an enormous thing, the texture of dry grass, an old undated panic, the shadow of a dog. And above all something I cannot describe properly, a continuous edgeless being, with no memory of yesterday and no idea of tomorrow.
I let go of that animal and leaned on the fence of the pen, dizzy, my mouth full of metal, with the sickening sense of having stolen something from a creature that could not even know it was being stolen from.
Animal blood: does not feed. Emergency at best. Do not repeat.
And finally, the test I was most excited about, the elegant solution, the one that would have changed my whole existence.
Keeping it.
If the problem was having to find a sleeping man every three or four nights, the problem ended the day I could have blood in storage. An amphora. A reserve. To eat as everyone else eats, out of a larder.
I stole a small jar with a lid. That same night, with Philon — I repeated him, because he was the only one I had already cut and whose reaction I knew — I took a little more than I needed and filled the jar halfway.
I sealed it, set it in the coolest corner of the workshop, and waited.
By four hours it was no good.
It was not that it rotted; it took considerably longer to smell bad. It was that it went out. I tasted it after four hours and it was like drinking the memory of blood: the flavour was more or less there, and there was nothing behind it. No nourishment, no memory, no warmth. Nothing. By twelve hours it was simply dirty water.
I tried four more times that week. With a lid and without. Buried in the cool earth. Mixed with wine, with honey, with salt, which was what was used to preserve everything else in that century.
The same. Always the same.
And I sat looking at the fifth failed jar, on the workshop floor, with a frustration I had never known in my whole previous life.
Because it was not a technical problem. I understood preservation. I knew about cold, I knew about heat, I knew about acids, I knew things that in that century were black magic, and not one of the five worked.
What was failing was not the chemistry.
What was failing was that the stuff, outside a body, stopped being what it was.
I wrote on the wall, with more anger than I have ever put into a sentence:
Blood cannot be kept. I do not yet know why. I am going to find out.
It took me two hundred and eighty years to cross out that yet, and when I crossed it out it was not with a jar or with salt.
It was with something else that at the time I did not even know existed.
The threshold.
This was the one that cost me most and taught me most, and I did it over six nights, house by house, like a thief who steals nothing.
I began with what I already knew: the sick man's house, the first night, the woollen curtain. I went back. The same no, exactly the same, with the same texture.
Then I tested the rest.
A harbour warehouse full of amphorae, padlocked, with nobody inside: I walked straight in.
A small temple, dedicated to something I could not identify, with an altar and food offerings: I walked in. I stood in front of the altar and waited, with a part of me very willing to burn at last, and absolutely nothing happened. I touched the altar. Nothing. I stood there a while with my hand on it, feeling ridiculous and relieved and disappointed all at once.
A house whose family had moved out, door open, interior empty: I walked in.
The same house, three nights later, once a new family had settled in and there were two mats and a fire: I could not enter.
A shed where a man slept who looked after some goats: I could not enter.
A tent — four poles and a cloth, pitched on the waste ground to the south, with a family inside: I could not enter.
That was the one that froze me.
Because a tent is not a building. There is no threshold, no door, no stone, nothing at all. There are only four people who have decided that this patch of ground is their home.
I sat down in the sand ten paces from that tent and looked at it for a long time.
The rule was not about walls. The rule was about the fact that somebody lives there. And that means the rule, whatever it is, understands human intentions. It can tell a warehouse from a home. It knows when a family has moved out. It knows that four poles and a cloth count.
And that led me, that night, to the conclusion that cost me the sleep I no longer had:
A rule that understands intentions is not a law of nature. Gravity does not know whether you are in your own house.
I wrote on the wall:
This is not biology. This is written.
And underneath, after a long time with the nail in my hand:
What is written, somebody wrote.
I did not know who. It would be centuries before I had an answer, and when I had it I would have preferred not to. But that night, on that waste ground, in front of a tent, I stopped feeling like the victim of a disease and began to feel like something worse: like the inhabitant of a system with rules, and therefore with an author, and therefore with intent.
Folklore.
I disposed of this in two nights, almost angrily, because by then I already knew what I was going to find.
Garlic: nothing. I rubbed a crushed clove on my arm and in my mouth. It smelled very strong and was unpleasant, exactly as unpleasant as it is for anybody.
Running water: I crossed the canal three times. Nothing.
Silver: I stole a small spoon and held it in my palm for half an hour. Nothing. It was merely cold.
My reflection, again, in the same trough: still there.
And yes, I counted the grains.
I had not intended to admit that and I am admitting it. I tipped a handful of millet onto the workshop floor to see whether it would compel me to count it, because somewhere I had read that this was a vampire's affliction. I stood looking at the heap for a good while. I felt no compulsion whatsoever.
Then I counted the grains anyway, because I wanted to know how many there were, and when I finished I realised I had spent twenty minutes counting millet and that the problem, obviously, was not the curse.
None of the mythology works. None of it.
And that was the night, of all the nights of those two weeks, that left me worst, and it took me a while to understand why.
Because if the mythology was wrong, and the game was wrong, then I did not have a single map. Not one. Everything I believed I knew about what had happened to me came from stories written by people who had never seen one of us.
I was alone, without a manual, in a body with rules written by an unknown author, twelve years before the Pharos would be finished.
Food.
I left this for the last night and it was not out of method.
I stole bread. A round flat loaf, still warm, from a stall that had left its basket outside. I took it back to the workshop and sat on the floor with it in my hands, and spent a long while simply smelling it.
It smelled of bread. That is the detail. It smelled perfectly of bread, and all of it reached me, the crust and the yeast and the smoke of the oven, with more clarity than I had ever had.
I took a bite.
In my mouth it was ash. Not figuratively: ash, sand, something dry and dead that had nothing whatsoever to do with the smell. I chewed anyway, with a stupid stubbornness, and swallowed.
It stayed down for less than a minute. It came back up with a violence I had not felt even on the first night, and left me on the floor, on all fours, over the puddle, shaking.
I tried wine afterwards, just in case. The same.
And there, kneeling on the floor of an unfinished room beside a bitten piece of bread, was where I finally broke properly. Not on the beach. Not on the roof with the coin. There.
Because I remembered something specific.
My mother made a stew on Sundays. It was nothing special, it was a poor household's stew, and I had spent three years complaining that she always made it the same way. The last time I ate it I did not know it was the last time, which is how all last times are eaten.
It occurred to me, kneeling there, that I was going to go two thousand three hundred years without eating anything again.
That it was not a temporary deprivation, or a diet, or a sacrifice with an end to it. That it was everything. Bread, wine, fruit, Sunday stew, the taste of cold water when you are really thirsty. All of that had ended and I had not even noticed when the last time had been.
I stayed like that for a long while.
I wrote nothing on the wall that night.
Sleep.
I tested it the following night, partly because I needed something to do and partly because I was hoping to find a way out.
I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, kept still, and tried to sleep the way one tries anything one has resigned oneself to.
Nothing happened, for a long time.
And then something did happen, and it was not sleep.
It was as though my mind found, by groping, a door that had been there all along. An invitation to let go. To stop being. It was not sleep: in sleep one is still working, one dreams, one turns over. This was another thing, deeper and far stiller, and the nearest thing to it I know of is a general anaesthetic.
I looked in. I only looked in, and I felt perfectly clearly that if I let go I would be gone, and that there was nothing inside keeping count of the time.
It might be a night. It might be a century.
I sat bolt upright and stayed there with my back against the wall, and did not try it again for two hundred years.
I wrote, with the nail, very slowly:
There is a door. I do not know how long it lasts on the other side. Do not open it until you know.
And then came the night of the reckoning.
I stood in front of the wall with the lamp on the floor and read everything I had written over two weeks, top to bottom, and near the end I realised I was about to write something and that the something was a lie.
I was going to put: reserve at forty per cent.
I had the nail against the mortar and the first stroke started.
And I stopped, because all at once it sounded like what it was.
There is no forty per cent. There is no bar. Nobody has ever told me a figure. What there is is an ache in the gums that starts dull and rises, and a change in how things sound, and hands that shake at the end of a gesture, and a moment when you stop looking at people's faces and start looking at their throats. That is what there is. It is a symptomatology. It is exactly what a physician would write in a patient's notes, and I had spent two weeks translating it into numbers that did not exist so as not to have to look at it directly.
And I understood, finally and completely, what I had spent two weeks proving to myself without wanting to see it.
The game had ten abilities. I had ten abilities and also smelled disease at two hundred metres, and heard eleven hearts through two metres of earth, and read a man's whole life in his blood, and could not enter a tent because a family was sleeping inside it.
Not one of those four things was in the game.
The game was not the world. The game was somebody's summary of a part of something real, and I had spent three days dead using the summary as though it were the territory, and the result had been a man bled out on a beach.
I lifted the nail.
I scraped away the stroke I had started until it could not be seen.
And underneath everything else, in small cramped letters, I wrote the last thing I ever wrote on that wall:
I am not a player. I am a case.
Subject: me. Observer: me. Physician: me.
Write down the symptoms. Stop counting points. There are none.
I never thought in levels again.
I put out the lamp and sat in the dark with my back against my own written wall, and for the first time since the beach I felt something close to competent.
I knew what killed me. I knew what healed me and what it cost. I knew where I could go in and where I could not. I knew how to move, how to hide, and how to feed without killing anyone.
And I had one single thing in the world that this city, with all its marble and all its library, did not have.
I knew why women die in childbirth.
It came to me all at once, unlooked for, and I sat very still in the dark with that precise sensation of an idea arriving before you are ready to receive it.
I knew about washing hands. I knew that there were living things too small to see and that they passed from person to person by contact, and I knew that in this entire city, including the most famous school of physicians in the world, not one single person knew it and not one single person was going to know it for two thousand two hundred years.
I had no money, no name, no language, no family, no papers, and nowhere to drop dead that was not a borrowed cistern.
I had two hands that knew how to operate and an entire twentieth century in my head.
I needed one thing more to find out whether that was worth anything.
I needed a patient.