The Architect's Final Blueprint

I.

The warehouse on the banks of the Thames did not want to be a building. That was the first thing I understood, though I did not know it at the time. It stood squat and soot-stained, its brickwork blackened by a century of London fog, its windows like cataract-clouded eyes. Any sensible man would have demolished it. But I was not a sensible man. I was twenty-eight years old, the last of the Wentworth line, and I possessed a vision that the world had not yet earned the right to judge.

"It will breathe, Abigail," I told my sister on our first walk through the ruins. The floorboards groaned beneath our feet like the ribs of some great beast. Dust motes swam in the pale light that filtered through the broken roof. "Not metaphorically. Literally. The structure will sustain itself through an exchange of energy with its inhabitant. It will be the first building that is alive."

Abigail looked at me with that particular mixture of