Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  “I have to do something.”

  I pulled at my slacks where they continued to stick.

  “Yes, as do I.”

  He looked at me.

  “Why are you here?”

  It was only when he asked the question that I realized how little I understood the answer. Why was I there? Surely I should have been gone long before. The travel drive in my possession, the dead in their places, all other concerns swept away as I discharged my contract with Lady Chizu.

  I spoke without thought, letting my words inform me.

  “I am here to complete something. Something I have been working on for many years. My whole life.”

  Omaha twisted suddenly and almost slipped from his arm onto the floor. He caught her, the movement disrupting Rose’s recitation long enough for a moan to slip from her lips.

  Park closed his eyes.

  “I can’t take care of both of them.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “I need help.”

  I didn’t move.

  He came off the bed, walked to me, and put the baby in my arms.

  I had realized long before that a gun is a kind of philosopher’s stone. Only rather than transmuting all that it touches into gold, a gun transmutes the entire atmosphere around it. Hardening edges, sharpening the air, a glitter of clarity. Fear. Even an unloaded gun can turn the air in any room to pure fear. In the moment Park handed me his daughter, I discovered something else that could transmute everything in its vicinity. Creating an element that was also part fear but equally made of astonishment.

  Omaha settled into my arms, stopped crying, closed her eyes, and slept.

  WE TOLD EACH other our stories. The last few days of our paths looping and twisting over one another.

  He would not give me the travel drive, but he did let me look at its contents.

  I followed his directions, and found and opened the secret file. He explained to me the coordinate sequences. I thought about our dying city, seeded with secret Dreamer. I knew, of course, the great value of this information, but I did not see how it could relate to Lady Chizu. Certainly she might deal in Dreamer, but the idea of her buying and selling by the bottle was absurd. She was more likely to provide security and shipping for container loads of the drug being sent to Asia, or to finance a lab reverse engineering the drug.

  I asked him what else was on the drive.

  He looked at me with little expression.

  “What else could matter?”

  He tended his wife. I cradled his daughter in one arm and looked further.

  There was Hydo Chang’s photography, quite accomplished, I thought. Records relating to the buying and selling of Chasm Tide artifacts and gold. Bank account numbers and codes. Pornography. And a second partition.

  The drive was divided in half. I opened the second partition, expecting to find it was a simple backup of the first, and found, instead, a wilderness preserve. A fragment of Chasm Tide, isolated on the drive, populated by three characters.

  In a glen, bordered by trees beyond which the evening blue sky became blank slate, three adventurers sat around a waning fire. A woman warrior, half her face disfigured by horrible burns, broadsword across her back, armored in opalescent black shells harvested from acid beetles. A young and slight ferrous mage, armed with an iron staff and gauntlets, his skin stained in mottled rust. And an aged nether troll, spindle-limbed, two fingers missing from his right hand, the other eight tipped with yellowed and cracked ivory nails, barefoot, wearing wine-stained white tuxedo trousers and a swallowtail coat over his wrinkled bare chest.

  Deeper in the partition were the logs and files, the digital souls of the characters. Also a bill of sale.

  I opened my mouth.

  “Ah.”

  Park looked from the bed.

  “What?”

  I touched the screen.

  “I have found what I was looking for.”

  He turned back to Rose.

  “What now?”

  Rose had been whispering all the while. Now her tone changed; she spoke with authority and excitement.

  “Tab, tab, control-space, triple shift-jay-up arrow, space, space, space, backspace, down arrow, ex.”

  She buried her face in the mattress and screamed, rolled over sweating and grinning, reached up, grabbed Park, pulled him down, and kissed him.

  “I did it! Fucking did it! No one thought it could be done. But I did it. Alone. I conquered the Clockwork Labyrinth.”

  Park smiled, pushed damp hair from her forehead, and kissed her.

  “So I heard. That’s great. I wish I could have seen it.”

  She scooted up in bed.

  “It was so cool, Park. I just realized that I had to stop trying to run through that last gap before it closed. If I just waited, it swung back around. I used the Rod of Torquine, jammed it in there, slipped through, and I was in the center.”

  He put a hand on the side of her face.

  “What was there?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was just quiet. It was just so perfectly fucking quiet.”

  Then she was gone again, repeating her adventure, starting with the first up arrow.

  Park looked at the wall beyond which we had killed the three invaders.

  “How much longer are we safe here?”

  There was no calculation I could conjure to answer that question.

  “We are not safe now. Every second we spend here increases our risk. But I cannot say for certain when the risk will outweigh the benefit of having a single position to defend rather than committing to travel.”

  He thought.

  “Will they come back before dark?”

  “Would your neighbors question the appearance of black-clad men with assault rifles storming your house in broad daylight?”

  “Now? Today? I don’t know.”

  I shrugged.

  “Then there is a risk that they will come in daylight.”

  He took his wife’s hand.

  “I have to do something.”

  He looked at his daughter.

  “And I have to know she’s safe.”

  With great discomfort I stood and brought the baby to him.

  “We are, none of us, ever safe.”

  He put his free hand on her head and looked up at me.

  “I just need to know she’s somewhere safe. Just until I come for her. Just until I do what I have to. Do you know a place?”

  I felt the weight of the gun holstered on my ankle, the knife strapped against my crotch, the lines burned into my legs. And I thought about somewhere safe for a baby girl.

  “Yes, of course. I know a place. Until you come for her.”

  Omaha grunted. We both wrinkled our noses.

  Park squeezed Rose’s hand and stood up.

  “Come on, I’ll show you how to change a diaper.”

  He did. A simplicity that I watched carefully, certain I could never master it.

  And, knowing what course of action he was committed to, and the resolve that he required, I showed him something as well. A crime. A coldblooded act. Irrefutable guilt. Armor in his cause.

  27

  7/13/10

  WE’RE ALONE AGAIN. Rose. I’ve done things. Things I believe are right. Things I have to do.

  I think you would agree with me. That there wasn’t any choice.

  You said I couldn’t take care of her. And I can’t. I can’t take care of her.

  She can’t be safe. Not as long as the world is this way.

  Jasper says it’s just changing. As if that is a small thing. Which I suppose it is.

  Everything is always changing. Look at how you changed me. How we changed each other. How Omaha changed us both.

  But it’s still my world. The world where my father and mother met.

  Where she called him Peaches. Where I ran away from them to try to find a different way of understanding. Where I met you. This is the world where you wouldn�
�t let me go. Not that I tried to run. This is the world where my mother died and my father killed himself because he couldn’t live in it without her. This is the world where you got pregnant.

  Or is it? Or is that the world that was? Is this already the new world? The world where you got sick. And where Omaha was born. If it is, then it is her world. And she’ll need to know how to live in it.

  But only if it has time to breathe.

  Afronzo Senior said they were “tapping the brakes.” Trying to slow things down, give the new world a chance to be born.

  My daughter’s world. A world that should not have the crimes of the old world polluting its birth.

  I have to do something. You understand, Rose. I know you understand.

  You said it when we met. I will die one day wandering into traffic. But I’m not wandering. I’m walking straight across all five lanes.

  I have to do something. Someone has to do something. Otherwise, why?

  I love you.

  Good night.

  28

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT LADY CHIZU’S OFFICE, MY HANDS WERE not in my pockets, but they were full.

  In one hand I carried the gift I had promised, a flower, a random lily, plucked from a withered bush in Rose’s garden, fragrant. In the other I carried Omaha Garden Haas. Sleeping still. As she had been since I took her from the car seat Park had showed me how to install in my Cadillac.

  Lady Chizu received the flower with all her long-accumulated graciousness. The child she received into her presence with a slight pursing of thin lips.

  “This is unexpected.”

  I said nothing.

  Chizu indicated the breakfast laid out on her low desk, set for two, noodle soup with spicy egg and salt cod.

  “Is she old enough for milk?”

  I tipped my head at one of the well-mannered, fabulously cheekboned young men who had escorted me in. A countermeasure in light of my hands not being pocketed. One carried the diaper bag I’d had draped over my shoulder when I came off the elevator.

  “I have powdered formula. If someone would be so kind.”

  She nodded.

  I looked at the man.

  “Three scoops, six ounces filtered water. Room temperature, please.”

  Both bowed and left.

  Chizu took a slight step back. I walked past her toward the table.

  She observed my stride.

  “Your wounds.”

  There was a small blue vase standing empty on the table. I slipped the stem of the lily into its mouth.

  “Yes.”

  I placed the now-empty hand into my pocket.

  She approached, small gliding steps.

  “I am curious.”

  “Yes?”

  She lowered herself to her cushion.

  “When I invited you to breakfast, did it occur to you to think how you would eat with your hands in your pockets?”

  I smiled.

  “No, it did not.”

  She pointed at the second cushion.

  “I would not have made the invitation if I had not intended for you to be comfortable.”

  I took the hand from my pocket and used it as I lowered myself, edging onto my bottom rather than sitting on my legs in her manner. Omaha burrowed more deeply into my armpit.

  Chizu picked up a set of plain bamboo chopsticks.

  “Were your legs injured in execution of my concerns?”

  I was looking at the wall behind her. The typewriters were gone. In their places, filling only a handful of the cubbyholes, were a variety of objects: a lone thumb drive that seemed to have been crafted into the proximal phalanx of an actual thumb, its beaded thong draped over a framed screen grab image of a warty hag sitting astride a dragon. An iPhone running an animation of a bearded dwarf in plate armor, his long red hair wreathed in white roses. A framed and numbered piece of collage by Shadrach that I may or may not have seen at his show. And a hard drive, carefully disassembled, all the components laid out with schematic precision around a small card of linen stock on which someone had executed a beautiful copperplate script that spelled out a name with no vowels.

  I looked from the displays to the lady.

  “Yes. There were many unexpected turns of events.”

  “That is apparent.”

  One of the cheekboned men returned, placed a filled baby bottle on the table next to me, placed the diaper bag, now properly screened, at my side, bowed, and left.

  Chizu’s chopsticks were poised over her bowl.

  “How is this best accomplished so that we might all eat?”

  I considered the technical difficulties involved in eating hot soup one-handed while feeding a baby.

  “It would be easiest, I think, if the ladies eat first. And then I may ask for your help.”

  She nodded, dipped her chopsticks into her bowl.

  “It has been years since I held a baby. My little brothers. But I expect that one never forgets.”

  I didn’t know if she was right or wrong in that. Before Park had handed me Omaha, I had never held a baby.

  Chizu pinched a knot of noodles between her chopsticks.

  “And perhaps you will tell me, while I eat, some of the turns of events you encountered.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She bent her head and politely slurped her noodles. I picked up the bottle, shook it in the manner Park had instructed, tickled Omaha’s lower lip with the nipple, and held it for her as she began to eat while still asleep.

  What Park had called a dream feeding.

  By the time the bottle was empty, and Lady Chizu’s bowl as well, I had finished most of my story, and I handed the baby across the table. She woke when she felt new hands on her, and I expected she would cry, but she did not. Chizu played a game, first showing the baby her five-fingered hand and then hiding it and showing her the four-fingered hand. A game that made Omaha giggle.

  “And my hard drive?”

  I slurped my soup. It was slightly cold but still excellent.

  “Lady Chizu, mistress of one thousand storks, I do not have it.”

  She flashed the four-fingered hand at the baby girl.

  “It was destroyed before you could take possession?”

  I used the tips of my chopsticks to pluck a sliver of egg white from the broth.

  “No. I held it in my hand. And I returned it to the man who stole it.”

  She lifted Omaha from her lap and held her at eye level to herself.

  “But you are here.”

  I could see the tension in her neck, the effort she was making to disguise it.

  “I am.”

  She lowered her forehead, and Omaha reached out and ruffled her hair with both hands.

  “To offer me what explanation?”

  I put down my chopsticks and pointed at the diaper bag, and she nodded. From inside the bag I took Rose’s MacBook. I woke it from sleep, opened the new partition I had created while at Park’s home, placed it on the table, and turned it to face her.

  She looked at the glen, the three adventurers huddled from the night’s cold around the dying fire.

  “Ah.”

  She said it with slight surprise and possibly a similar amount of delight. Though it could have been mild discomfort caused by Omaha yanking on her hair.

  I laid a finger on the top of the screen.

  “I do not have the drive, but I do have your property. I transferred the data from the travel drive, including the bill of sale and documents of provenance, and erased the partition where they had been previously stored. They are complete in every way that they were on that drive. And, to the best of my knowledge, as unique as the bill of sale states.”

  She turned Omaha, facing her toward the screen.

  “Teessa Delane. Founder Pale. And the Vitiated Man. Together they plumbed the Chasm to a depth of thirteen leagues. None have gone deeper. Their creators, all sleepless, have since died.”

  She looked at me.

  “The transference of these f
rom one device to another impacts not only their value but their nature. I initially bid on these three in situ, as housed on the platforms from which the creators most usually played them. My broker failed to act quickly enough and could only ensure that the originals had been erased and his copies the only ones made. But he refused to renegotiate the price I had already paid. And further insulted me by insisting on a premium for the additional inconvenience he had suffered making the copies.”

  I was still.

  “He is dead now.”

  She began her game of hands with the baby again.

  “Yes, as you said. But killed in the course of his dealings with the Afronzo boy. Not for his offenses against me.”

  I held an open hand over the laptop.

  “This belonged to Rose Garden Haas, the mother of the baby in your lap. Sleepless herself, and a player. I transferred your property in her home, as she was in the first grips of the suffering.”

  Omaha held tight to the thumb of the four-fingered hand as Chizu pulled lightly against her.

  I continued.

  “Does this addition to the provenance of your properties impact their nature and value in a manner that pleases you?”

  She offered Omaha her five-fingered hand as well. The baby took each by a thumb and swung them together in a silent clap.

  “It is a worthy addition, yes. I am pleased. Not that the woman should suffer, but it adds to the beauty of the item. Yes.”

  Omaha swung the giant hands.

  I turned the laptop toward myself, clicked back to the original partition, opened another application, and showed Chizu.

  “And this is Cipher Blue. Elemental mage. She walked the length of the Clockwork Labyrinth alone and found its silent center. Created by Rose Haas, as surely as she created the child.”

  Lady Chizu’s empire was built on engines of destruction and the men and women who wielded them. She had armed militias and insurgencies, rebels and strongmen. She had fielded mercenary armies of her own, seized governments, and held them ransom. Her guns had killed thousands.

  She leaned forward, her hands encircling the baby’s torso, forgetting her discipline, letting the sickness inside twist her neck, and gazed at the young woman on the screen, sleeping in a perfectly silent catacomb.