Sleepless (44 page)

His finger had crept nearer the trigger.

"What's gone wrong? With the world? Why aren't people trying to fix it?"

My gun was still lowered, but my finger was curled on the trigger.

"I believe it is because they don't believe there is anything to fix. They have been raised to fatalism and slaughter. A feeling of powerlessness pervades the average person's interactions with the world at large. They want it comfortable and familiar. But they've stopped thinking about tomorrow in any tangible sense. They don't believe in it any longer. Because they don't want to think about it. How hard it will be. For the ones left."

He was still looking at his gun.

"I wouldn't have a chance, would I?"

I couldn't be certain what he meant, so I answered the question at hand.

"No. If you try to raise your weapon, I will shoot and kill you. And the long conversation we should have, the mysteries we should unravel, will be lost. Much to my regret."

He eased the hammer forward on the small pistol, thumbed the safety up, and dropped the gun next to the man he'd killed.

I still held my own pistol.

"I need the travel drive, Officer."

He turned away.

"You can't have it."

He took a step, presenting the back of his head to me.

"It's evidence in a crime."

I raised my gun.

"I need it."

He shook his head.

"No. I have to check on my family now."

He moved, beginning to pass out of my aim, down the hallway.

"We can talk after I see them."

Down the hallway, walking to his family, away from the dead, and I did not kill him.

Instead, I whispered a poem to myself, very brief and made up on the spot.

"Parker Haas, crying Omaha, and his sleepless Rose."

There are other things in this life than killing. I felt a chance to be near them. If only briefly.

Chapter 26.

OMAHA CRIED. AND ROSE WAS INCREASINGLY UNWELL.

The vibrancy she'd shown in the hours she and I had spent talking before Park came home had faded. She was no longer buoyed by the past but wallowing again in the present. I watched from the bedroom door as Park told her the truth about what had happened moments before. In her condition virtually any lie would have sufficed and perhaps been more merciful. Circumstances that made the honesty shine with greater brightness.

I left them then, for several minutes, long enough to drag the bodies out the back door, across the lawn, and into the converted garage. Animated skeletons danced on three monitors. I watched them for a moment, then returned to my task. I found a bundled tarp and took it into the house, draping it over the largest of the blood puddles in the living room. Not much else could be done. An armful of towels from the bathroom scattered over the floor soaked through from underneath. By the time I went back to the bedroom my burns were seeping similarly into the legs of my slacks.

Park was holding his crying daughter, tucked into the crook of his left arm, while placing a damp cloth on the back of Rose's neck. Rose was facedown on the bed, muscles jumping in her jaw, the backs of her legs, her upper lip. She made a claw of her right hand and dragged it down the sheets in long strokes, her chewed nails rasping quietly on the weave.

She whispered.

"Up arrow, up arrow, shift, space, space, space, right arrow, tab, tab, up arrow, space."

Park looked at me.

"They're keystrokes."

I nodded.

"Yes. The Clockwork Labyrinth. She told me she'd memorized the sequence that got her through."

Her chant continued. A whispered incantation, the epic of her achievement.

I pointed at the floor.

"May I sit?"

Park didn't answer. I remained standing.

He was still now, crying baby in his arms, fading wife wide-eyed on the bed.

"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.

Chapter 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.