The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel

by Steven Brust

  “Frio!” She tried to get him to focus on her. “What’s happening? Can you see anything?”

  But Frio only rocked himself and groaned. Irina wanted to put her arms around his heaving shoulders, but he needed her to make the pain stop.

  “Phil?” she shouted.

  Frio convulsed and clawed at his forehead.

  Irina grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands away. “Stop it!”

  He flicked her off him with a cocked elbow.

  Irina scrambled back. “Listen to me, you little bitch!” She got right in his face. “I can help you, but you have to stop ripping your fucking face!”

  Frio folded in half, forearms on his thighs, rocking himself in agony.

  Irina took a step back, panting. She was cold with fear and sweating, and had no idea what was going on. The stub of a dead Incrementalist stays in the Garden, a symbol of their stored memories, the location of their personality and heuristics, until another Incrementalist forms it into a burning brand and introduces it to an open, living mind.

  That’s what she’d done.

  You have to stay stretched between the inner Garden and the outside world for the spiking ritual, and it hurts, but not like Frio was hurting. It was hard, like trying to do big math in your head, or see detail in something too far away, the concentration an almost muscular strain; but Frio was making gagging, gurgling animal sounds. Irina closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. She had to think things through.

  To work the ritual, you hold yourself between reality and your metaphor. You introduce the one—and yes, rather forcefully—into the other. The invaded mind overwhelms, goes into shock and passes out. Always.

  “Lie down!” Irina told Frio, but she had to tell him twice before he heard her. “Go to sleep.”

  His body contorted, but didn’t lie down, so she tipped him gently onto his side. His groaning went up an octave and broke. Irina wanted to cover her ears to keep out his terrible gasping sobs, but she lifted his legs onto the mattress. His feet grabbled against the bed, circling and flailing like he was trying to crawl away from the pain. Irina understood that. She wanted to run too. Her mind was already way ahead of her, fleeing over explanations, hurling back suggestions. She should call 911. She should graze. She should try to comfort Frio. She should knock him out with a bat.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she told him. “It’s just pain. There’s nothing actually wrong with you.”

  But when there’s pain, that’s all there is.

  “Fuck!” she whispered. “Cock-biting, venomous whore to a faggot!”

  Frio puked and started choking. Somewhere, as far away across the room as childhood, Irina’s cell phone rang.

  “Help!” Irina shouted at it. “Fucking help me!”

  Frio wouldn’t turn his head, and the gurgling noises were just getting wetter. Irina tried to twist his neck around and felt her gorge rise with the stink and the slippery chunks under her fingers trying to clean out his mouth. Irina had fought with too many dying people. She hated it. Life was ugly, but it was ugliest at its edges.

  If she left Frio to answer her phone, he’d choke on his vomit and die. If she didn’t call for help, they’d exhaust each other until she couldn’t do anything for him anymore, and he’d die all the same only having suffered more.

  Once he was dead, Phil would be back with his blunt metal nose in the weird-smelling dirt of her window box, and everyone would be livid because they didn’t know Frio was actually a part of something bigger. Then they’d go back to fighting about Sam, who Ren didn’t like, and whoever it was Kate had found.

  Frio was panting. He could no longer make even muffled screams, and Irina’s fear was turning into anger, building it up in thin, protective layers. What the fuck was happening to him? And what was up with the dirt in her window box anyway? And why the hell was Frio in so much pain?

  He stopped breathing, and Irina’s terror came washing back. She was not nearly worn out enough to let him die. She shook him hard. He gave a sob and inhaled.

  Irina’s Garden was a fucking whorehouse, and nobody knew it. Everyone thought it was an actual garden, but that was just the courtyard out back. Irina listened to the surf, and felt the banister’s smooth wood. It took everything she had just to climb the stairs. The echoes of Frio’s agony down the too-narrow hall drowned out the sounds of fucking behind the doors. Up the main stairs, always up the sweeping main stairs, down the kitchen curling ones, and out the back door through the flowers to her garden wall. Irina hadn’t brought a quill to write with, but the charred wood of Phil’s stub was still in her hand.

  As their first symbols were millennia ago, as the Garden was first made, Irina scratched carbon over stone. “Help,” she scrawled. “I need medical help. The Hilton hotel on Aviation. Room 217. Please.”

  DECEMBER, 1857

  PASSION AND HEARTBREAK

  Brown had the same deep-set eyes as Frederick. And as I looked, I saw Fred Brown’s eyes in his father’s face—kindly and mad. I remembered Fred so well, lying there, at peace from his madness, maybe, but that didn’t make it any better. And here was his father, off to destroy the hopes of Abolition, to keep slavery alive for generations, out of the arrogant conviction that he knew what was best. What gave him the right to make that judgment?

  The same thing, perhaps, that gave it to me.

  I had him dead. I had him cold.

  I watched him walk by.

  He had almost reached the cabin when his wife came out, followed by two or three sons. I uncocked the Sharp’s, put my mittens back on, turned and headed back for Lawrence. I let the fire burn out behind me.

  EIGHTEEN

  A Man Who Is Determined to Do Good

  After a nice breakfast of eggs and chorizo at his hotel, Jimmy arrived at Ren and Phil’s to find Ren getting caught up on work e-mail and Oskar soaking in the sun at the little glass patio table and scowling at his laptop as if it knew all the details of Phil’s death but was refusing to give them up. Which might, Jimmy reflected, even be true in some sense. Matsu sat in a lounge chair, eyes closed as he and Oskar each pretended the other didn’t exist.

  “Any luck, Oskar?” Jimmy asked

  Oskar shook his head. “I need to talk to Irina. I know she’s involved somehow. But I don’t have anything concrete to confront her with. I want something. I want a piece.” He sighed. “I’m going to graze again.”

  As Jimmy was getting settled, Matsu pulled off his clothes, and dived naked into the pool. He was no Oskar, but there was nothing wrong with the view, either. Jimmy watched him swimming laps, easy, hardly splashing, then closed his eyes, and drifted off.

  When he opened them again, Matt was out of the pool, dressed, and sitting at the patio table. Ren was there, next to Oskar, wearing Phil’s ratty old bathrobe, neither of them speaking, an empty coffeepot on the table between them.

  Hours must have passed.

  “Something is wrong,” Jimmy said, and instantly had everyone’s attention.

  “What?” Oskar sat up straight on full alert.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A feeling?” said Matsu.

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Do you want to graze?” said Oskar.

  Jimmy shook his head. “I was just grazing. I went into the Garden while I was napping, and woke up knowing something was wrong. We need to figure out what it is, but I’m too hungry to graze any more right now. Matt, think you might want to?”

  Matsu stared at him like Jimmy had just grown tentacles. He noticed Ren and Oskar were looking at him in much the same way. “What is it?” he said.

  “You never call Matsu Matt,” Oskar said.

  “I know. Only Phil does that.”

  “You just did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  They all nodded.

  Jimmy’s heart gave a sudden thud. He closed his eyes and entered the Garden again, knowing exactly where to look. It took only seconds.

  “Oh, holy shit,” he said
. “Phil’s stub is gone.”

  “Irina,” they all said together. And, “Frio.”

  * * *

  Ren was on her feet before Jimmy’s words had fully sunk in. Phil’s stub was gone from the Garden—he was back from the dead! The ritual was exhausting, so he was probably asleep, wherever he was, and he’d have a fierce headache when he woke up, but Ren knew he’d want to wake up next to her. “We have to find them,” she told Jimmy. “Would you call Irina? I’m going to put on clothes.”

  “No, wait.” Jimmy shifted his bulk in the sagging plastic chaise. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Hell yes, something’s wrong.” Oskar’s voice was an angry growl. “Irina knew we weren’t agreed on her fucking SWAT cop. Kate had a recruit she was working with. I was clear about my opposition.”

  “Kate posted late last night that she had released her recruit.” Matsu stayed in his chair, legs extended and crossed at the ankles, but nobody would have mistaken his posture for lounging anymore. “And the clarity of your opposition,” he continued over Oskar, “was probably why Irina acted preemptively.”

  “I never should have let her out of my sight.”

  “Jimmy.” Ren tried to keep from shouting. “Would you please call Irina? I want to see Phil.”

  Jimmy shook his head again. He had one hand raised, listening, and his palm shone paler than the rich brown of his face. “No.”

  “Matsu,” Ren began, but the stillness of Jimmy’s lifted hand stopped her. “Jimmy?” Ren was starting to feel afraid. She made herself speak slowly and clearly. “What’s wrong? Be specific.”

  “Not yet,” he said, not moving. He was hardly breathing. He brought his raised hand to his forehead and rubbed.

  “Jimmy?” His stillness terrified Ren. Unless he was grazing, Jimmy was always in motion. “Jimmy,” she whispered, “when you called Matsu Matt, did you feel like yourself? Or was it like Phil talking out of your mouth?”

  “Irina’s not answering.” Oskar dropped his phone onto the table in disgust. “I knew she was up to something.”

  “Hush,” Matsu said, and Oskar didn’t bristle, so Ren knew he was frightened too. “Jimmy?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “No, Ren. It didn’t feel like that.”

  “Irina is always fucking shoving her way into places she isn’t needed.” Oskar wheeled into pacing.

  “She spiked Phil into Frio,” Ren said. “I really want to be there when he wakes up.” Jimmy still wasn’t moving, and Oskar couldn’t hold still. Ren looked to Matsu. “Can you graze for her address while I drive? She has a condo south of town.”

  “She won’t be there,” Oskar said. “For this, she’d get a hotel.”

  “We—” Matsu began, but Jimmy talked over him.

  His voice came, husky and distant, from the round hollow of his chest. “They will come to us,” he said. “We should stay here. Certainly Phil will come home. Come to Ren.”

  “He better not bring Irina with him,” Oskar said.

  Matsu ignored them both, answering Ren. “We need more information. Something may, in truth, be wrong.” He glanced at Jimmy and lowered his voice. “We have had almost as many nonstandard as standard transitions from stub-to-Second since yours, Ren.”

  “What are you saying?” Ren hugged Phil’s thin bathrobe tighter around her, trying not to shiver.

  “He’s saying Irina shoved Phil into that fucking cop like she shoves her way into everything,” Oskar said. “And I swear on my expectation of uprising that if she damaged him doing it, I’ll stub her myself.”

  Matsu waited for Oskar to finish, then continued speaking to Ren. “The most logical explanation for Jimmy’s sense of foreboding and his”—Matsu hesitated fractionally—“verbal slip is that something went wrong with the spike.”

  “I will kill her,” Oskar said.

  “We have to go,” Ren said. “Oskar, call Irina again, and if you get her, for god’s sake be nice.”

  “I won’t even—”

  “Oskar!” Ren shouted. “Find out where Irina is!”

  Oskar picked up his phone and jabbed at it.

  Ren crouched at Jimmy’s elbow trying to see into his eyes. “Jimmy,” she said gently, “I need you to stand up. We’re going to get in my car and drive toward town.”

  Jimmy looked haunted.

  “Matsu, can you help me, please?” Ren asked.

  Oskar pitched his phone back onto the table. “I—” he began.

  “Oskar,” Ren interrupted, still speaking to Jimmy. “Oskar is going to graze for the hotel Irina checked into while we drive. Jimmy, can you graze for Phil? See if you can find him in the Garden. If something went wrong during the ritual, maybe there’s a new stub, or maybe he can talk to us through you like Celeste did with me, you seem to have a connection to him.”

  Jimmy’s dark eyes met Ren’s and closed. “Jimmy!” she shouted. “Jimmy! Let’s get you in the car first, okay? Matsu?”

  Matsu stood, but he didn’t come to help Ren hoist Jimmy to his feet. “We have incomplete information. Ren, you are understandably upset, Oskar is irate, and Jimmy is … distraught. I’m not sure loading us all into a car and racing downtown is our wisest option.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” Ren said. “I’m going. I could use the help, but you and Oskar can come or stay. I’m going.”

  Matsu turned to Oskar, who stopped his pacing.

  “Do you have a better plan?” Oskar demanded.

  “I would like to consider more options and—”

  “So no,” Oskar said. “You don’t have a plan. And Jimmy doesn’t have a clue. If Ren has both, I say we fall in line.” He stalked over to Jimmy and began gentling the big man to his feet.

  “I’m driving,” Ren said.

  “I just said that.” Oskar scowled, his arm still around Jimmy’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” Matsu agreed.

  “I meant the car.”

  Matsu nodded. Oskar hefted Jimmy and bent his blond head to Jimmy’s dark one, whispering, tender and urgent.

  “Matt’s right,” Jimmy said.

  “Phil?” Ren was almost across the deck to him, but Oskar shook his head.

  “Something went wrong with the spike, Jimmy?” Matsu clarified.

  “Yes.” Jimmy shook himself and cleared his throat. His voice was regaining its richness, if not its customary warmth. “I couldn’t find another stub for him, but there’s a knife in a hay bale smack in the center of my courtyard that I didn’t put there.”

  “Did you graze it?” Oskar straightened.

  Jimmy closed a meaty hand over Oskar’s aristocratic one where it still rested on his shoulder. “I tried, but it’s not really there. I put my hand right through it.”

  “Interesting,” said Matsu.

  “Not the word I’d choose,” Jimmy said, leaning into Oskar.

  “An Arkansas toothpick?” asked Oskar.

  “Yes. How did you—”

  “Not now.”

  “I’m going to put on clothes,” Ren said. “Matsu, would you try calling Irina again?”

  “I should do the same,” Matsu said.

  “I’ll call her.” Oskar raised an open palm for his phone. Matsu tossed it to him, and he followed Ren into the house.

  “Do you think this is a bad idea?” Ren asked Oskar as they went down the hall to the bedroom.

  “No, I’m just not sure it’s the best one.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  * * *

  Kate found Daniel waiting behind what looked to be a licked-clean breakfast platter. She ordered coffee and assessed the scabbing on the young man’s scalp and forearms. A fine stubble of brown already hazed his head; soon it would be long enough to hide the worst of his scars. He smiled at her as she blew on her coffee, but it was a pensive smile—lopsided and too old for his face.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  “What is it you needed, dear?”

  Daniel squeezed his eyes closed like Kate had hurt him and took a sl
ow breath. When he opened his eyes again, it was all Kate could do not to look away from the intensity of his gaze. “I want—” he said, but then he had to stop and master himself again.

  “I know, darling,” Kate told him. “I know you do.”

  “You kissed me.” It was almost an accusation, fierce and sad. “Kate, I could fall in love with you.”

  “Oh my dear,” she said. “I’m already quite thoroughly in love with you.”

  “Is that why?”

  “Why I won’t spike Phil into you? No, of course not.”

  Kate’s phone rang in her purse, and Daniel hesitated. “It’ll go to voice mail,” she told him. “Daniel—”

  “Kate, let me finish?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want to be a threat to your family.”

  Kate reached for her coffee to swallow her initial, unkind, “Oh sweetie, my family is so much stronger than that.” His concern for her really was darling. “Daniel,” she said, “I know you’re full of passion and heartbreak, and you’re right to respect the damage that the wild emotions driving you can do. And yes, if you yoke two such youthful engines together, you’re as likely to tear each other apart as double your speed. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m where I want to be.”

  “I want to be there with you,” he said, although she could barely hear him. “I want to talk with you, learn from you, but that isn’t all I want.”

  “I know,” she said. “Some of it’s sexual, but most of it’s not.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like having my opinions on things,” Kate went on, trying to keep her voice light. “You know I can help you find a direction, and maybe some focus. It’s not a mother’s role, but it’s not a girlfriend’s either. More of a mentor’s. But it’s a role that makes you subordinate to me, makes you feel your youth and my age, my experience and your lack of it. I have experience, you have passion. It’s not bad to mix them.”