The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel Read online

  “I just can’t see a future for us.”

  “Of course not,” she said as kindly as she could. “There isn’t one. You want to get married and be a husband and a father some day. I can’t help you do that.”

  “Kate,” he said, and the courage and pain in his voice were almost more than its youth could carry.

  Kate couldn’t bear to hear his voice break. “You young people,” she interrupted. “You have such long-range vision that you fall over your shoes.” She forced a laugh. “But that’s not a bad thing, darling. You need that kind of seeing to look far into the future and find where you want to be. I can tell you what it looks like once you arrive, but not how to get here.”

  “I can’t see either.”

  “You will,” she promised, and her phone rang again. “I’m due in the office,” she told Daniel and, since she was already getting up to go, Kate took the call.

  * * *

  And thank god she did. Things could have been much worse if she hadn’t.

  —Oskar

  * * *

  * * *

  Ren pulled on jeans and a cami, stuck her feet into her TOMS, and grabbed her handbag. “Crap.” She walked back through the kitchen. “Jane still has my car keys.”

  “We all have rentals,” Oskar said, heading to the bathroom.

  “I’ll drive Phil’s car.” Ren opened the drawer where she and Phil both kept their keys, and her whole body tightened. Knowing Jimmy was watching her, she tried not to look more upset than she was. Phil’s phone, keys, wallet, and notepad were all inside looking exactly like they always had. She picked up his phone. “That’s weird,” she said.

  “Oh?” Matsu asked.

  “Phil missed a call.”

  “I imagine he missed several.”

  “Right, I know,” Ren said, holding his phone. “He’s dead.”

  “What?” Oskar came back into the room walking too quickly.

  “Phil missed a call late last night,” Ren repeated.

  “And?”

  “And he’s dead.”

  “And?” Oskar stood close to where Jimmy sat, sunk into the sofa.

  “Who would be calling him?” Ren asked. “Especially that late. Everyone knows he’s dead.”

  “Play the message.” Jimmy stood up heavily.

  “Hi, Phil?” said a young man’s recorded voice from the phone’s speaker. “Remember how you said you might be able to help me if I ever needed it? I kinda need it. I’ve been arrested. I’m at the Pima County jail.”

  “That’s not Frio,” Jimmy said.

  Ren looked at the phone. “Menzie Pulu,” she read. “I have no idea who that is.”

  “Call him back,” Oskar suggested. “Maybe he’s been released.”

  “Yeah, I will from the car,” Ren said. “Let’s go.”

  They piled in, Matsu in the front beside Ren, Oskar and Jimmy in the back. Ren called Menzie Pulu and left a message saying Phil was unavailable, but she’d try to help. Matsu grazed for Irina’s hotel, Oskar and Jimmy just cuddled, best Ren could tell, but maybe the Prius did it to them. Oskar was as large in muscle and bone as Jimmy was in padding and girth. She missed Phil’s arms.

  “Irina is at the airport Hilton.” Matsu focused on typing the address into Google Maps. Ren waited.

  “Take I-10 to the Kino Parkway and follow the signs for the airport.”

  Ren waited.

  “I checked her front gate,” he said.

  “I did too,” Jimmy said from the back. “As soon as I realized Phil’s stub was gone. I didn’t see anything.”

  “It’s quite new, I think,” Matsu said. “And fairly desperate.”

  Ren’s fingers went cold on the steering wheel and she accelerated without meaning to.

  “Ren,” Matsu cautioned.

  “I know,” she said, lowering her speed, but changing lanes. “What did Irina’s message say?”

  “That she needed medical help.”

  “Did she say anything about Phil?”

  “No.”

  “Anything on his villa door?”

  Matsu shook his head, and no one said anything else until they pulled into the Hilton parking lot.

  “She’s in room 217,” Matsu said.

  They heard the moaning when they reached the door. They knocked, and Oskar would have kicked the door in had Matsu not pulled a blank plastic card from his wallet and pushed it into the reader.

  Ren stepped into the room and covered her mouth to keep from screaming. Frio was on the bed, on his back, thrashing and sweat-covered while Irina fought to hold him down. Another woman bent over them both, a hypodermic needle poised over Frio. As they entered, she looked up.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Oskar demanded.

  “No time now, Oskar. I’m working.” She jabbed the needle into Frio’s arm.

  MAY 1858

  BEFORE HENRY’S BODY DIED

  May 19,1858

  Trading Post, Kansas Territory

  Dear Miss Voight:

  I beg your pardon for not having written to you for so long. I plead a long illness, acquired December last when I foolishly exposed myself to the elements. I have made a good recovery, and there is also news.

  Of course, as you are aware, we have carried the matter, or, as you called it, the battle: there can no longer be any doubt that Kansas will be admitted to the Union as a Free State. Even the border ruffians understand this, and for the most part, the violence here is at an end. There is still activity by Lane and his Jayhawkers near the Missouri border (though whether to free slaves, ensure Lane becomes Senator, or just for plunder, I cannot say), but even that is diminishing. I have hung my Sharp’s over the fireplace, and long may it stay there. I think we can look for a significant increase in immigration over the next year. Dare I hope that you and yours will join us?

  As to what you called the war, I fear that will have a great deal to do with stopping Brown. I cannot express how much I fear damage to our cause if he carries out his plan. It could, and almost certainly will, cost us the sympathy of the entire North, and might prove to be the end of the Republican Party. I am writing today because I have finally gotten definite word of his movements: he has returned to New England. There is little I can do from here, but I know that you are well acquainted with our people there. If there is anything you can do to stop him—

  I stuffed the letter into a pocket, put down my pencil, and stood up from the bench on which I’d been writing while enjoying the spring afternoon. “May I be of service to you gentlemen?” I said.

  There must have been thirty or forty of them, and they already had a couple of prisoners as well. I recognized the leader as Charles Hamilton, which didn’t bode well.

  Hamilton didn’t seem interested in conversation. They made sure I was unarmed, then tied my hands together in front of me and put me on a horse. One of Hamilton’s men rode on either side of me, and refused to answer any of my questions. When I persisted, one of them, a scruffy-bearded man with almost no teeth, put his hand on his Bowie knife, so I stopped asking. We were on the road for several hours, stopping to take more prisoners in tow; most of whom I knew. Eventually there were eleven of us; none of us armed.

  They made us dismount, and pushed us into a ravine with the river at our back, and Hamilton coldly ordered them to aim.

  At best, I’d be in stub for months, and, even assuming I came back out as me, it might well be too late. Slavery would continue, and I could have stopped it.

  There was an argument when one of the ruffians refused to shoot, and for just a moment, I had hope. If I got out of this, I’d go after Brown again. If I had to dog his every step, I’d find out what he was planning, and I would stop it, whatever it took.

  Hamilton raged, roared, ordered, and then fired his pistol. I heard a moan, but didn’t see who was hit.

  I looked down at the hands that had failed to pull the trigger in December. “Useless,” I muttered, and the border ruffians opened fire.

  NINETE
EN

  He Had to Be Stopped

  Oskar was across the room and at Irina’s side before a word was spoken. Behind him, a confused yammer of, “How did he get here? She. He.” “What’s wrong with Phil?” “Tell us what happened from the beginning,” and “How could you do this?” broke out, but he focused on restraining Frio enough that the pretty woman with the large hypo could work. She kept her eyes on her patient, a confident look on her face. But when she met Oskar’s eyes over Frio’s twisting body, Oskar saw she wasn’t sure how much it would take to relieve the pain, knock him out, and still leave his cardiovascular system functioning.

  “I wish I had some equipment and a trained staff,” she said. “For that matter, I wish we could reach a real doctor. Irina’s trying to call Kate.”

  “Ramon?” Oskar hazarded and was rewarded with a curt nod.

  “I haven’t practiced medicine since the seventies, and even then it was mostly research.”

  Oskar remembered Ramon saying that his recent path had been medicine, to biology, to chemistry, to physics, “recapitulating the growth of modern science in reverse, at least in some ways.”

  “She answered,” Irina gasped, holding her phone into the space between Ramon and Frio. Ramon took it, and for some time spoke urgently into it, listening and nodding; no one else spoke. Eventually, Ramon switched it to speaker in order to free his hands. He finally said, “Patient is quiet, breathing well, pulse strong at around sixty.”

  “All right,” came from the phone. “That should do. Keep an eye on him, call me back if anything changes.” Kate disconnected and Ramon stood up.

  “Ramon!” Jimmy wrapped his old friend’s new body in a hug. Oskar grinned seeing Ramon’s effort to relax and accept it; to bear up under Jimmy being Jimmy. “A good-looking Second.” Jimmy beamed, looking Ramon’s new body over with overt appreciation. “I knew she was a genius, I hadn’t realized she was quite so attractive.”

  Oskar looked away. He’d been thinking much the same thing, and seen Ramon’s momentary flash of annoyance with them both before shrugging it off. Oskar knew it was something Ramon was going to have to get used to, but at least he knew with Jimmy and Oskar it wouldn’t affect how they listened to him.

  Ren was looking from Frio to Ramon. “What is happening with Phil, Ramon?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “He rejected the Second, leaving our patient with all the sensations but unable to finish the ritual.”

  “Rejected the Second?” repeated Jimmy.

  “That’s my hypothesis.”

  “Why?” said Ren.

  “I didn’t know that was possible,” said Oskar.

  Jimmy answered Oskar. “No, neither did I.”

  “Ramon,” said Ren, with a snap in her voice Oskar had never heard before, and rather liked. “Where is Phil?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Irina said, “But why would Phil—”

  “Shut up, Irina,” Oskar and Ren said together.

  “I’ll begin at the beginning.” Ramon chose his words carefully, and Oskar remembered a story Ramon had told Phil once, of having to defend his thesis, in 1730, before the Dons, all eyes on him, afraid to speak lest he pick the wrong word. “I was in a queue at the airport waiting for a taxi—”

  “Ramon,” said Ren.

  “In a moment, Ren. I was in the queue, and decided to do a quick graze while I waited, hoping to get caught up. None of you has put up pointers to whatever you seeded, so I found Irina’s node, checked the circle, and it overlapped with Phil’s, so I called Irina, but she didn’t answer. I checked her Garden, and saw she’d left a note asking for medical help, so I came directly here already certain something was very wrong.”

  Jimmy said, “Ramon, what do you mean, something was very wrong?”

  “I mean,” Ramon said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “that Phil’s stub isn’t where it should be, and yet he hasn’t been spiked. He’s—”

  “Alpha-locked?” Ren asked, her voice sufficiently emotional that Oskar wasn’t sure if she’d even be able to listen. “Celeste.”

  Ramon shook his head, appearing to fight impatience. “It is the nature of the Garden that no two of us addresses it the same way. It’s frustrating. If you all saw it the way I do, this would be so much easier to explain. It isn’t Celeste; the strength of her influence doesn’t remotely approach the levels needed to dislocate Phil any more than a candle flame could evaporate the ocean. And I’m certain it isn’t an alpha-lock. Phil’s stub is there, somewhere in the Garden.”

  “Where?” demanded Ren with a fierce, frightened urgency.

  “Exactly,” Ramon agreed. “What has happened before when a spiking ritual was interrupted?” Ramon asked Jimmy, because the others were too young, except for Irina, who was too shaken.

  “I don’t remember,” Jimmy said. “It’s been so long. Sometimes the stub moves to somewhere along the person’s timeline. Sometimes to somewhere along the timeline of the Primary. Sometimes it splinters, and pieces end up distributed along the timeline. You think that’s what happened?”

  “No, but the same effect.”

  “Then what—”

  “We have to find Phil’s stub. If it’s in pieces, we need to find all of them or he’ll most likely shade. I don’t know how to do that, but we have to. In the past, it’s been a long painful search. I don’t know if we have the time. We have to find a way to find Phil now, and hope he can tell us something useful.”

  They all looked at Ren.

  * * *

  Kate listened to Ramon’s information and she calculated dosage by weight and age without nearly enough information. Daniel picked up her briefcase and carried it for her as she talked, and Kate realized that he really wasn’t giving up. She popped the locks and Daniel slid the minivan door open while she told Ramon what to monitor in his patient. Daniel deposited her bag in back amid the action figures and craft kits, and climbed into the passenger seat next to her. Kate drove badly, trying to coach Ramon through what he needed to do to stabilize someone so ruthlessly sedated.

  By the time she pulled into her parking space in the medical complex garage, Kate was rattled too badly to do more than drop her phone onto the box of wet wipes and stare out the windshield.

  “Is he going to die?” Daniel’s voice was gentle and calm.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why didn’t they call an ambulance?”

  “I just hope no one’s called the police.” Kate shook her head as if she could knock the suffering from her ears like water.

  “Are you okay?” Daniel hadn’t unbuckled his seat belt, and the shoulder strap spanned his chest like a bandolier. His torso had the brave and untested suppleness of saplings and colts.

  “Yes.” Kate gave him her best farmwife smile—the one that never works on children, but does wonders for worried moms.

  Daniel didn’t buy it. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Irina—she’s one of the oldest members of the group—same personality for something like seven hundred years, and I don’t even know how many Seconds—er, that means bodies she’s inhabited—spiked Phil into an ex-cop in Tucson.”

  “Phil,” Daniel said. “Wasn’t he who you were going to use me for?”

  Kate nodded. “He’s the oldest of us. More than two thousand years. That’s why I didn’t.” Kate took a breath. “We need Phil to come back as Phil. We need the continuity with everything that’s happening.”

  “And you couldn’t be sure, if you put him in me, that he’d make it?”

  “He’d have good odds. He’s in love. But you’re so very young,” Kate said, feeling every one of her years. “And stronger than you know.”

  “No,” he said. “I know.”

  Kate nodded. “I’m glad.”

  “So Irina picked some other body to put Phil into?”

  “Right,” Kate said. “Frio. And he almost died.”

  “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  �
�Not the personality, Daniel. The body.”

  “That doesn’t happen sometimes?”

  “No! How could we ever spike anyone if it did? We already ask too much.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Kate knew Daniel was trying to comfort her, and she smiled. “I need to go up,” she told him. “I hate to keep patients waiting.”

  Daniel was quiet the way parents get when you give them treatment options for a sick kiddo. “How does it work?” he asked. “When you put one of you into someone else?”

  “There’s a ritual,” Kate said, more to buy herself some time for resting than anything else. “We have to be able to see the dead Incrementalist’s stub for one thing. We turn the stub into a spike—” She hesitated. It seemed cruel to describe the embers and char to a man who’d seen his skin blackened and bleeding. But Daniel wasn’t going to have to face it, so Kate told him. “It’s like a burning torch, and we introduce it into the recruit’s brain through the forehead by force.”

  “Not really,” he said, looking pale.

  “No,” Kate said, wearily. “Not really.”

  * * *

  If he were going to make sense of it, Takamatsu was going to have to wait until things became more stable. Yes, it was possible to see patterns in motion, and it was possible to see patterns when they are unclear; but the combination defeated him.

  “Here’s how I see it,” he said, description as preamble to understanding. “Phil’s stub is somewhere along the Who of his Primary, in one or several pieces, distributed or concentrated. It could be anywhere and anywhen in the last two thousand years, possibly the last forty thousand. The only good news is that recent is somewhat more likely.” Ren was frowning her alert dragon’s frown of complete concentration. “You, Ren, are the best choice to search for him, both because of your connection to him, and because of your work last year going into our prehistory.”

  Jimmy put his arms around Ren, but she shrugged him away. “Tell me what to do,” she said.

  Ramon, still bent over Frio said, “Use your connection to Phil to search for his stub.”