The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel Read online

  * * *

  Ren left Daniel sleeping and went outside. The patio decking was still warm with the day’s sun, but the air had cooled off and the sky felt high and far away. Ren stood at the pool’s edge watching Phil swim like the surfer Matsu’s Second had been. She had known when Phil let Susi into the house that Phil would be in the pool and ready to talk.

  He stood up in the water when he saw her.

  “Since when do you swim naked?” she asked. “That’s not a very Phil thing to do.”

  “I know, but look at this body!”

  “Yeah,” she told him. “I have been.”

  His grin lacked both mustache and dimple, but Ren liked it.

  “Think I’ll have to do exercise things to keep it this way?”

  “Probably,” she said, dragging a chair over to the pool edge. “Maybe we should just try to enjoy it while it lasts.”

  Phil snorted and rolled into swimming.

  Ren watched the athletic new body, beautiful and shimmering, and she wrapped her love for Phil, deep and permanent, around it, snug as the water. “You know,” she said as he returned from his second lap, “when Chuck was dying, I would have done anything to keep you as him.”

  “Not anything, Ren.”

  “I don’t know.” Ren let the heel of one of her funeral pumps slide off her foot so the shoe dangled from her toes. “I can be philosophical about suffering until I’m actually in pain, then I just want it to stop. It’s why torture doesn’t work.”

  Phil quirked a damp eyebrow. “Torture?”

  “Celeste confessed to things she’d never do to make the flogging stop.” Ren shivered in the warm night, and Phil swam to the pool’s edge to be nearer to her.

  “Did you ever wonder why she tried to meddle you into shooting Brown?” she asked.

  “To keep him from inciting revolt among the slaves?”

  Ren stood, and stepped out of her shoes.

  “To stop him from setting abolition back fifty years?”

  Ren dipped one foot into the water.

  “To save the lives of innocents who always die in revolutions?”

  Ren looked at him steadily from the pool’s edge.

  Phil considered the hundreds of years he and Celeste had been on opposite sides and argued and loved each other across them.

  “Celeste lacked many things,” he said, “but conviction was never one of them. It was because she knew how wrong we can get things that she always advocated for inaction. She thought we were too fallible to get involved, that our highest good was to do no harm.”

  “I know,” Ren said.

  “Brown was the only time she ever pushed for my involvement, much less for violence.”

  “I don’t think she actually wanted it.” Ren pushed her fingers through her spiky hair. “It was a test.”

  “And I failed.”

  “No, she wasn’t testing you. She was probing to figure out where her limits were. She found she could meddle you into trying, but couldn’t convince you to pull the trigger. She had lost the power to change your mind. And by 1856, she knew it.”

  “And I’m just now figuring it out.” Phil let out a low whistle.

  Ren cannonballed into the pool.

  She came up with her hair matted flat and her funeral dress stuck to her skin. Matsu laughed Phil’s laugh. “Okay,” he said. “So we’ve both changed.”

  “I didn’t want to.” Ren stood, her back to Phil, and he unzipped her sodden dress. “You died,” she said, “and there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless, paralyzed.” She turned back to face him.

  “Grief can do that to you.” Phil didn’t meet her eyes. “So can self-doubt and recrimination,” he admitted.

  “You have,” Ren said, “been carrying that on your shoulders for years without knowing it, haven’t you?”

  Phil nodded.

  Ren threw a ball of her dress and panties onto the deck and twisted into swimming. Phil watched her for a lap before he joined her.

  “Celeste’s power lay in her noninvolvement,” Ren said. “It was like her not-doing and not-talking—her absence and secrets—created a void we all acted around. But what if now we start turning counter-wise?”

  “She’d hate that.”

  Ren grinned. “Celeste used the Garden’s ability to collect and sift information to control and centralize it. What if we use it to do the opposite—to set it free and distribute it?”

  “Like you did with Sam?”

  “And you did with Frio.”

  “And Brown did with the slaves,” Phil said.

  “We’ll ask the nemones to work with us. We’ll be their memory and they’ll help us change minds and disobey.”

  “We’ve tried that before.”

  “No, last time we told them who we were. This time, it’s an invitation.” Ren shook water from her hair. “You’ll help?”

  “You’ve been doing okay without me.”

  “No.” Ren stood up, and the air chilled her wet skin. “I was just doing. What I did was okay. I wasn’t. I was alone. It was just me, next to this big empty nothing the shape and size of where you should be. Then Oskar came, then Matsu and Kate. Then Jimmy, Irina, and Jane. Then Sam, Santi, Frio, Menzie, and Ramon. And it kept circling out until I felt all the Incrementalists here with me. And even further to include anyone who wants to be. It felt big. Spread out. Like I’d stood up and said, ‘I am Spartacus,’ and then everyone else was standing with me. And they were all me too.”

  Phil nodded. “Everyone who stood up was Spartacus. But right now, it’s just you and me.” Phil’s hands, under the water, found Ren’s wrists, then her waist. “We two.” Their bodies, naked and half-submerged, came together at the waterline. Ren’s arms opened and Phil’s took her in.

  “If we got married”—Phil’s mouth was warm on Ren’s wet cheek—“we’d be a single unit.”

  Ren watched Phil smooth his wet hair against his scalp and wind it with the same quick twist she’d seen him tie back wigs and braids. “We could do that,” she said. “Wind the whole crazy spiral back to one.”

  “That’s where it starts,” said Phil.

  * * *

  No. One isn’t where it starts. Not with “I”; with “We.” Every one of us is born a nemone. We opt in to memory. Do you remember the Rev. Richard Cordley quote Phil insisted I include, the one about angels coming down and common men and women rising to sublime heights of heroism? It’s not as rare as angels. It can’t be. The enemy is everywhere. In 2014 we stood up and said our names out loud. Stand with us. Take our name.

  It will take courage like Irina’s and Dan’s, and sacrifices like Jane’s and Kate’s. It will take wanting to be good like Frio and Phil, and real goodness like Jimmy’s and Sam’s. It will take a willingness to be changed like Ren or Matsu, and conviction like Celeste’s or yours and mine.

  Get involved. Make things better.

  I’ve taken a big step here, and maybe it’s just jumping up and down plus waving. Maybe it covers all the distance from a gunshot to an invitation. And if you accept it, from Look to Be. Yours are the hands on those machines. Think for a minute about what that means.

  —Oskar

  * * *

  ALSO BY STEVEN BRUST AND SKYLER WHITE

  The Incrementalists

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  STEVEN BRUST is the author of Dragon, Issola, the New York Times bestsellers Dzur and Tiassa, and many other fantasy novels. He lives in Minneapolis. You can sign up for email updates here.

  SKYLER WHITE is the author of and Falling, Fly and In Dreams Begin. She lives in Texas. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  One: What’s Your Involvement?

  Two: Powerfully Reasoned and Passionate

  Three: What Brings You to Town?

  Four: Complete If Not Assembled

  Five: Gallivanting through the Deep

  Six: Everything Might Blow Away

  Seven: A Small Form of Rebellion

  Eight: Something to Work With

  Nine: A State of Insurrection

  Ten: A Loyal Band That Wasn’t Giving Anything Away

  Eleven: How We Fight Is As Important

  Twelve: Not So Much Inclined to Listen

  Thirteen: Nothing Anyone Said Would Stop Either Faction

  Fourteen: Look into His Character, Celeste.

  Fifteen: All the Bodies Packed Together

  Sixteen: Well-Meant But Inadequate Refreshment

  Seventeen: A Mischief That Will Hurt Our Cause

  Eighteen: A Man Who Is Determined to Do Good

  Nineteen: He Had to Be Stopped

  Twenty: Closer, Closer

  Twenty-One: Halfway Out of His Head. Sometimes More than Halfway

  Twenty-Two: We Live Too Long

  Twenty-Three: Turned and Headed Back

  Twenty-Four: No Sun to Reflect Off the Barrel

  Twenty-Five: Alter the Entire Political Landscape

  Twenty-Six: Bigger Thoughts, Bigger Plans

  Twenty-Seven: To Kill a Good Man

  Twenty-Eight: Bad Coffee to Decent Whiskey

  Also by Steven Brust and Skyler White

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  THE SKILL OF OUR HANDS

  Copyright © 2017 by Steven Brust and Skyler White

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photographs by Trevillion Images and Getty Images

  Cover design by FORT

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8288-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-8973-6 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466889736

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  First Edition: January 2017