Arthur Vance woke on a slab of cold marble.

The first thing he became aware of was the smell: camphor, wet linen, and something metallic beneath it all, like the memory of blood. The second was the cold, seeping through the thin shroud that covered him, creeping up from the marble beneath his back.

He kept his eyes closed.

It was a trick he had learned in the long gray hours before this moment -- or rather, before the moment that his new mind considered the beginning of anything. When he had opened his eyes for the first time in the dark, something had surged through him like a current through broken wire, connecting circuits that had been silent for longer than he could comprehend. Knowledge flooded into him: anatomy, chemistry, the precise temperature at which rigor mortis sets in, the composition of the camphor, the pH of the fluid dripping from a leaky pipe somewhere in the ceiling.

He did not know where this knowledge came from. He only knew that it was there, vast and luminous and utterly alien, like a library that had been burned and then somehow rewrit itself in his mind.

Arthur opened his eyes.

The room was small and windowless, lit by a single gas jet hissing behind frosted glass. White walls, a metal cabinet, a drain in the floor. A mortuary. That word came to him the way a man remembers his own name: without effort, without doubt.

He was in a mortuary. He was on a slab. And according to the ledger on the desk by the door, he had been dead for six hours.

Arthur did not move immediately. He listened. The hiss of the gas jet. The distant rumble of a carriage on cobblestones. The creak of settling wood. And beneath it all, the knowledge sat in his mind like a second heartbeat -- calm, precise, utterly certain of itself.

"Right then," Arthur whispered. His voice was rough, unused, but clear. Clearer than a voice should be for a man who, by all appearances, was a gentleman's illegitimate son of twenty-three years, constitutionally delicate and mentally confirmed by two physicians as "not unfit for gentle recreation but unfit for intellectual exertion."

He sat up.

The shroud fell away. Arthur looked down at his body: pale, thin, marked by the heavy blows he had received three days ago in the Saint Jude's Temple during the Queen's annual memorial service. A public humiliation that had cost him his life, or so his family believed. A public humiliation caused by a drug -- something called Three-Laugh Powder -- that had been slipped into his wine.

Someone had tried to destroy him. And in doing so, had accidentally resurrected something far worse.

The door opened. A tall man in a black waistcoat turned at the sound and froze, his face draining of color. He dropped the bundle of clean linens he was carrying and backed toward the door, his mouth working silently.

"Mr. Hemlock," Arthur said calmly. "If you will close the door, I should be grateful. And then, if you would be so kind as to fetch my clothes from the Vane estate -- they should be in the third drawer of the writing desk in the west wing -- I would prefer to be dressed before morning."

Mr. Hemlock made a sound that was half-gasp, half-swoon. He pressed himself against the wall, eyes wide as saucers, and whispered something that sounded like "miracle" or "demon" or perhaps both.

Arthur did not blame him. He was looking at his own hands -- pale, thin, marked by a tremor that had been present since childhood, the tremor that had confirmed his status as mentally deficient in the eyes of society. But they were his hands. And in them, he felt something he had never felt before: potential.

The Archive inside him stirred, approvingly. It had no voice, exactly. It communicated the way gravity communicates: by the simple certainty of its presence. Arthur understood, with a certainty that was both terrifying and exhilarating, that he was not what he appeared to be. His mind, medically deemed broken, was the most powerful instrument of information processing on the face of the earth.

He had spent -- he did not know how long -- listening. Listening to a signal that came from nowhere and everywhere, carrying the accumulated knowledge of a civilization that had existed a million years before his own. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, sociology, philosophy. A million years of accumulated understanding, compressed into a quantum signal that had struck the earth some centuries ago and been buried beneath the soil of what would one day become London.

Until his brain, in its brokenness, had become the only receiver capable of catching it.

The dead do not receive signals. Neither did the living, not in the way Arthur received them. His neurological disorder -- the Rare Yin Constitution as the old texts called it, though he knew it by its medical name -- had created a unique pattern of neural activity that matched the frequency of the Archive perfectly.

He was not dead. He was not alive, not in the way others understood it. He was something in between, something new, something the world was not prepared for.

Arthur Vance pulled on his trousers and stood. His body was weak, malnourished, damaged by days of neglect and brutal treatment. But it was a body. And within it, a million years of knowledge waited to be used.

He walked to the door. Mr. Hemlock flinched as he approached.

"Please," Arthur said quietly. "I would not wish to alarm the household further. Tell Earl Vane that his ward is alive, that he requires immediate medical attention and appropriate clothing, and that under no circumstances is the fact of my survival to be mentioned to anyone."

Mr. Hemlock nodded frantically and scurried away.

Arthur Vance stepped out of the mortuary and into the fog of a London that would not know what had happened to him for many months to come. He pulled his coat tightly around his shoulders and walked into the darkness, his mind already turning over the first problem he needed to solve: how to survive in a city that had written him off as dead, with knowledge that no living soul knew he possessed.

He was not a hero. He was not a genius. He was a broken man with a broken mind and a million years of someone else's memories, walking through a city of gaslight and shadow.

And he was only just beginning.