with all the wisdom of the Old World, and his practised engineer’s hands had restored it to shining beauty.
It warmed every cubic foot of air under the high roof without a hint of struggle.
James was forever in awe of Lincoln, and the few other professionals who had survived the End. They displayed true mastery—fonts of endless trivia and titbits of knowledge that books could never convey, that could only come from experience or be communicated between master and apprentice; things that were in true danger of becoming lost forever, if they had not already.
He had done his best to absorb the minutiae of his trade, but the majority passed over his head. He was a thinker at heart, not a doer. And Lincoln, though he had been among the founding members of the mission, was not taken to divulging his secrets; instead, his nuggets of invaluable skill seeped from him in dribs and drabs, often unexpectedly, and he grumbled like a man bothered by irksome children when pressed for a repeat performance.
Nevertheless, everything around them stood testament to his abilities; he had designed and supervised the renovation of every line and beam of the homestead. It had been a quaint old farmhouse when they had found it; now, it was a monument to their mission. Without him, and the continuous pillar of maternal strength Agatha had provided each day, they would have been lost.
“Small favours,” Alexander sometimes said. “The world may lie in ruin, but it’ll be saved by small favours.”
The others were out in the fields and wouldn’t be back until evening, and so they enjoyed a companionable lull, filling their stomachs and resting stiffened legs. Hector helped Norman fill out a page of arithmetic sums, patiently crossing out mistakes—a little too often for James to feel encouraged of any progress. Norman’s face was creased into a fierce frown of misery and confusion.
Finally, Lincoln smacked his lips and pushed his bowl away, steepling his fingers and leaning across the table. “So, Alex, put our minds at ease,” he said.
Alex swallowed and smiled. “Like I said, Malverston’s on board.”
Agatha, sat beside Lincoln, failed to suppress a coy smile. “Sometimes I can’t help but think he imagine us some kind o’ foolish.” She sighed in Lincoln’s direction.
He hummed assent, and their eyes met. “Fools, indeed.”
Agatha turned her gaze upon Alex, then James. “Wha’ did you two have to promise tha’ bag o’ slime to win ‘im over?”
Alex sat quietly, folding his hands before him, chewing slowly and swallowing with an audible glug. “We’re going to teach them,” he said.
“Teach them what?”
“Our ways, what we’ve learned about how to start over. We’re going to start a school. Here.”
Everyone jerked as though an electrical current had been passed through the table. James gaped and turned in his seat, staring into Alex’s deadpan expression. “What?”
“How could you agree to this without consulting us?” Lincoln hissed.
“Alex, this is …” Agatha looked down at her hands.
Norman watched them all with wary eyes, his pencil poised above unfinished sums. Hector laid a steadying hand on his shoulder, but said nothing, his face taut as he exchanged a troubled glance with Helen.
Alex bore all this as though he were alone in the room. He smiled easily. “We should expect our first students by morning. Honestly, I can’t wait to receive them. Hector, is the classroom ready?”
“It’s ready.” Hector’s brow was so low it almost concealed his eyes from view. His hand had tightened on Norman’s shoulder enough to make the boy wince.
Hector had taken up the role as general caretaker around camp, carefully maintaining the large building they had built specifically for learning—a wide open, high-roofed concrete shell crammed with the wealth of the Old World they had salvaged. They called it the Temple. Alex had mentored James under that roof for many years.
Hector had been trying to get Alex to do the same for Norman for almost a long. His efforts had been in vain.
Instead, Norman had been consigned to learning through the others in an opportunistic fashion, poaching titbits from each of them as they went about their daily lives. He enjoyed reading, but James had taken the liberty of perusing his reading list from time to time, and could only feel sorry for the boy; he made admirable efforts to read widely, but there was no coordination, no direction. The boy was a blind man feeling his way through an endless ocean of words and scripture, with nobody from the Old World to guide him.