Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (32 page)

Alice laid her hand on the table and slid the
Codex Atlanticus
toward her, opening its pages to show the young girl. “This is pretty much all we did the past ten years,” she said. “Just building things.”

Hazel hung her face over the book. “You drew these?” she asked softly.

Alice nodded.

“They’re amazing.”

“If only you had seen them in person. Especially ... ” Alice flipped to the first pages of Zeke, “him.”

Hazel studied the machine for a moment, then tapped her finger on the page. “That’s Zeke?”

“Yup,” Alice said. “Oh, there is something else I wanted to show you.” And with that, Alice disappeared into the hallway, leaving Hazel alone with me. The girl looked around the room for another few moments before addressing me again.

“You’re dying?” she whispered.

I looked at her, clearly taken aback by the forwardness of her question. “That seems to be the consensus, yes.”

Hazel scrunched her face, pondering my answer before she’d followed up with another question: “Are you scared?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” I said, “but not for me, and not scared so much as worried.”

“About Alice?”

“And the baby,” I nodded. “But she has you now, and Mohammad, and Gabriel. She’ll be sad when I’m gone, but I know she’ll be okay.” I could tell that Hazel didn’t know how to respond. She looked away. “What about you?” I asked. “You’re the one living on a strange spaceship. How are
you
doing?”

“Alice tells me to take it one day at a time,” she said. “So that’s what I do.”

“I’d say that’s good advice.”

“Were you there?” she asked, still looking away.

“Was I where?”

“You said I’m looking well; that means you’ve seen me before. Were you there?”

She must have been referring to that gruesome day we rescued her from Cherrybrook. I was surprised she was ready to talk about it. I wasn’t even ready to talk about it.

“Yeah,” I said, humoring the thought of assembling a half-assed apology on behalf of the wickedness of the world, but quickly deciding against it. “That was a shitty place,” is what I’d decided to say instead, and ended up hating myself for it anyway. Why is it that some of us just seem destined to spend our lives with our feet in our mouths?

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Shitty.”

I shuffled for a way to change the subject, remembering something that Saint John had recently told me. “So they call you Kitty, huh?” I asked. “Is there a reason why?”

Hazel hesitated for a moment, growing uncomfortable. “One day,” she began, “I was beaten so bad that everyone thought I was dead.”

It was about then that I realized I’d made a terrible error, but was left to listen to her horrific story nonetheless:

“They threw me into the street,” she continued. “I wasn’t moving, so they tossed me out like garbage.” She took a deep breath and turned to look at me; when she did, I averted my eyes back to the table. “But I woke up on the sidewalk later that night. I could have tried to run away, but I didn’t. I walked right back in. They called me Kitty after that, because they said I had nine lives.”

I nodded. “Jesus Christ.” How do you respond to a story like that?

“I still remember their faces,” Hazel went on, “like they were looking at a ghost.”

Alice entered the room, and not a moment too soon. She had taken her alarm clock from her room and brought it out to us.

“Miles could tell you that this alarm clock appeared to be destroyed beyond repair when I found it. I sat right where you are sitting now, just staring at it for hours and hours.”

“I even told her to give it up,” I added.

“But I didn’t. I kept on. And now I keep it as a reminder to never give up.” Alice placed the alarm clock on the table and slid it over to Hazel. “And now I want you to have it,” she added. “It’s brought me luck over the years, and now it will do the same for you.”

“Thanks.” Hazel lifted the device from the table and examined its bent and cracked features. “Thanks so much.”

Alice squeezed her shoulder. “Now, why don’t you head on back; I’ll be up there shortly.”

Hazel nodded and then looked to me. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

“Likewise.”

She drifted back through the wall.

Alice turned to me. “So what do you think?”

“Seems like she’s doing really well, considering.”

“She’s doing great. Notice how I left her with you for a little while?”

“Yeah, that was awkward.”

“I thought it would be, but it’s good for her.”

I nodded. “So what was all that rubbish about your alarm clock?”

“What rubbish?”

“You don’t believe in luck, but you still spoon-fed that whole speech to her.”

“She needs to have something concrete, something she can hold and touch that will tell her nothing is impossible. Right now she needs strength.”

“And nothing says strength like an alarm clock.”

Alice smiled at me, sighing softly. “Why must you be difficult?”

“No reason,” I shrugged. “I actually thought it was kinda sweet.”

The following day Alice returned alone from the Vahana, this time with a small device she placed on top of the workbench. She pressed the rounded object’s center as a hologram of a child in utero came to inhabit the space just above it. I watched the child rotate slowly with its tiny arms and legs tucked inward.

“It’s a girl,” Alice announced as I stepped closer to the projection.

“She’s beautiful,” I observed. “She’s going to need a name, you know.”

Alice nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

“And?”

She looked down at the tattoo on her arm. “How about Hope?”

“Hope.” I smiled. “I think it’s perfect.”

Soon Hazel gave birth to a baby boy, a baby boy whose flesh was only slightly less crimson than Alice’s. The pigmentation of the child’s skin seemed to startle the young mother as she held the infant warily upon its birth, or so I’ve heard, for I was not present at the time.

It was not a natural birth by any means. It was about as unnatural as one could possibly get.

A very pregnant Hazel had been placed atop an operating table. With Alice by her side, holding her hand, the mechanical appendages lowered themselves upon her, administering the necessary anesthetics before they opened her up to retrieve the child.

The process, from what I was told, was extremely fast.

“He’s like me,” Alice whispered to Hazel, recognizing the girl’s mild shock over her son’s physical appearance. “He’s an heir to the Earth.” Alice continued to stroke Hazel’s hair. “You have given birth to a prince.”

And, in what seemed like only the blink of an eye, Alice found herself on a similar table, ready to deliver Hope to the world. I could tell she was nervous, and rightfully so, as I tried to steady her trembling hands with the warmth of my own. She closed her eyes and held her breath as the appendages lowered from their arch in the ceiling.

“Breathe,” I told her. “Alice, look at me.”

She turned her head and fixed me in her green eyes.

“Breathe. Everything is going to be fine.” I reached into my pocket to pull out a small ring. It had been the thick, inner-race of a bearing I’d found in the shop. I took her left hand, spreading her fingers wide, and slid the rustic band onto its rightful place. She smiled at me, her lower lip shaking slightly, as I revealed a similar disc I donned earlier.

I leaned over to kiss her, both hands pressed to her face. I felt her tears trail into my palms.

“I will always be with you,” I told her. “I love you, Alice.”

The wailing heard next stole my attention. I looked to find that our baby had already come. One of the appendages had snipped away the umbilical cord, as the others remained busy, each engaged in their own separate task.

I reached out to take Hope in my arms, marveling at the sight of her tiny body. She flexed and wriggled, screaming through a toothless mouth. Her skin was reddish as wispy streams of jet-black hair formed into thin swirls atop her head.

She looked undoubtedly like her mother.

One of the appendages had slithered past my arm, sticking a nipple-like device into Hope’s mouth. The baby’s squirming instantly ceased. Her eyes closed as her jaw moved vigorously, instinctively manipulating the device to gain a thick, milky sustenance from it. Her body relaxed as I slipped my finger within her tiny palm. She squeezed it hard, strong, a simple gesture that made her father incredibly proud.

But a feeling of dreadful unease had soon swept over me.

Gabriel was staring at us through a window on the far wall. It was the first time I’d seen the Traveler since his argument with Alice nearly nine months before. I stared back at him, my daughter still warm and real in my arms, knowing just what her presence meant for me.

I’d been on borrowed time for too long.

And that time would be coming to an end.

To my dismay, the Traveler had smiled slightly, nodding in my direction, before disappearing through an adjacent corridor. I knew exactly what that gesture meant:

Time’s up, Miles.

My condolences to your new family.

You have served me well.

The vivid memory of our child being born was followed by a haze of passing weeks as my eyes remained closed for what must have been a majority of that time. I can speak for no other dying man, but I found random memories flooding me at all hours of the day and night.

One of the most vivid ones I recalled was back from my teen years—a high-school crush I’d had. I remembered her dark hair and green eyes, along with the effortless way in which she could set a flurry of butterflies to beat upon the walls of my belly ... I suppose
stupid
is the best way to describe that feeling, like reasoning no longer mattered when she was around.

The physical similarities between her and Alice struck me quite suddenly, and I wondered briefly over it being a simple coincidence. But nothing was simple any longer, and something told me it wasn’t. Gabriel was thorough in his workings, and I knew it was well within his power to dip into my psyche and pluck a figure from it he thought he could use. But back to the memory: despite knowing full well of her boyfriend, I found myself in a tie and dress shoes when I’d handed her a red rose one Valentine’s Day—such is the stupidity of which I speak. She had been gracious nonetheless, and had accepted the rose, only to broaden the boundaries of my teenage brainlessness.

Shortly after that exchange, she invited me along when her family had plans to go to the beach one weekend; and I’d agreed without a second thought. Then, exhausted from the outing that day, she had fallen asleep in the back of the car as I’d sat beside her. She slipped the seat belt from her shoulder to lean and place her head in my lap. And there, free to admire her beauty, I had bent to kiss her. But that memory suddenly shifted, mirrored by another, as the two experiences, however uniform, held a great emotional contrast between them.

The second, taking place about twelve years later, was far more powerful than the first. I was on that same road, driving back from a day at that same beach, with yet another girl sleeping beside me, her little head pressed to the side of her car seat. I kept a sweatshirt stuffed beneath her chin—an effort to keep her head from falling forward, which had been my designated fatherly duty at the moment. And there, just as countless fathers, in awe of their daughters, had done before, I’d leaned to kiss the top of her beautiful, sleeping head.

It was memories like these that I searched for, ones that made me happy, ones that granted me a much-needed element of peace. As I write this, perhaps the last human obituary ever to be written, it is all for the little girl just recently born, so that she might know her father, so that she might know the man beneath that ragged tombstone.

As the sickness crept deeper, I would glimpse Alice here and there, coming to stand over me as she ran a hand through my hair. She would whisper stories to me, or read from books that she knew were sentimental, ones she knew I’d want to hear just one last time.

That’s what I can remember. That, and the sound of her singing Hope to sleep one dark and silent night, along with the musical tones of the giraffe Alice hung above her.

What had happened next, I can hardly describe; and whether it was a dream or something more, I may never know:

I opened my eyes to find my wife there at my bedside. She smiled at me, tears just forming in her eyes.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said, reaching out to touch my face. Her hand felt warm, solid; I wanted to reach up to hold it, but hadn’t the strength for that.

I could see my daughter by the crib, her gorgeous blonde hair tumbling well past her shoulders, as she stood on her tippy-toes to catch a glimpse of Hope. “It’s a baby,” she whispered excitedly to her mother.

My wife turned to her, laughing ever so softly. “It’s your sister, Sweetie,” she said.

“Sister?” my daughter lifted herself again, shifting her head from side to side.

Alice went on singing, unaware of our guests. She began the second verse of an age-old lullaby, a song she’d been repeating so long that the melody had become a permanent fixture in the surroundings, weaving in and out of various facets of my recollection.

My wife turned back to me, leaning over to place her lips beside my ear. “We’ve missed you,” she said. “Listen, there is a shroud, just beyond this place. Deep and heavy. When it falls over you ... don’t fight it.”

I felt a stream of moisture sliding past my cheek as my wife moved to wipe it away.

“We are on the other side of that shroud, Miles, where we have always been. We’ll be waiting for you.” She beckoned my daughter with an outstretched hand. “Come, Honey,” she said, and my little girl rushed quickly to my side.

“Are you coming, Daddy?” she asked, but her mother shook her head.

“Not yet, Sweetie. Give him hugs. He has to rest.”

I felt her little arms wrapping themselves around my neck, along with the fabric of her pink nightgown. “See you soon,” she said, then pressed her lips to my cheek.