The Waking Engine (22 page)

Still reeking of beer, Osebo the Leopard carried Nixon in his arms. Worn out and still thoroughly fainted, Nixon lolled in the valley between Osebo’s bare biceps, looking for all the worlds as innocent and helpless as a child. He was coming around now, mewling like a cranky kitten as he floated out of sleep. Osebo had stolen the unboy away from the confrontation in Bonseki-sai and carried him to safety. He hadn’t interfered with the angry pink-haired woman for numerous reasons, not the least of which was her rocky relationship with his wife, but he’d been unwilling to leave a little boy, even a false one like Nixon.

So while Asher and Sesstri fought their battles and Cooper flew into madness, Osebo the Leopard took it upon himself to tend to the child, and to see if he could kindle in Nixon’s eyes the ghost of wonder he knew had once lived there. They all had that, and as a rule they all lost it one way or another; in that way, Osebo mused, they were no different than the First People. It had taken marriage to reawaken the house cat sleeping inside the full-throttle jaguar who’d stalked the jungles of the worlds, and Osebo thanked his wife for it. The beast was not weakened by the babe within— so he hoped it might go for Nixon, too.

But Nixon had none of a child’s tacit complicity—evinced as soon as he blinked himself awake and looked up to see Osebo’s dark face. He bucked like a wet cat and tried to claw his way out of Osebo’s arms.

“Fucking queers!” he roared, or would have if he hadn’t been a ten-yearold. Instead his roar sounded more a squeal. Nixon’s face grew beet red.

“Be still, boy.” Osebo’s hand wrapped around the scruff of Nixon’s neck and pulled him back down to safety. His nonhuman strength brooked no argument. Stunned, Nixon’s eyes went wide, then he burped. Nixon might assume otherwise, but Osebo was not prejudiced by the unboy’s misleading body. To Osebo, they were all kitten-babes—infants—when measured by the years they’d lived. When he met a mortal who’d lived so long he couldn’t remember his own origin, Osebo might consider that soul his chronological peer.

“Um.” Nixon’s pupils didn’t quite match yet, but the boy was recovering quickly “Why do you stink like beer?” he asked, only half- awake.

“I gave directions to your friend, earlier. He appeared very lost.”

“Cooper?” Nixon made a screwy face and knuckled sleep from his eyes. “Yeah. Cooper the lost. Why the fuck are you holding me, guy?”

“You are in no danger.” Osebo thought that might be the kind of thing he should say.

“Ha!” Nixon barked his laugh and started struggling again. “Be still, I said.” More firmly this time.

“I’ll be still when you get your oily paws off me, Black Panther!”

They weren’t far from their destination, so Osebo set the boy down on his feet. Nixon tottered for a moment before finding his legs, then rounded on Osebo with an expression he’d obviously picked up from Sesstri.

“Hippie queers!” Nixon bellowed, glaring up at Osebo.

“I find you very strange, little boy.” Osebo’s face was implacable.

“That’s because I’m not a little fucking boy, Sambo!”

Osebo shook his head with laughing eyes. “Of course you are. Just a tantrum away from the cradle, I’d say. Once elevated above the others, some of you never learn your lessons. But you have, haven’t you, Nixon?”

“How do you know my name? What, are you friends with the gray man and his harpy?”

“I am not.”

Nixon frowned. “Cruised the burly kid that got kidnapped after you gave him ‘directions,’ did ya?”

“I did not.” My, but the Third People are odd, he thought.

“So what happened back there? Where’s the pink girl? If you’ve hurt her, I’ll smash your goddamned mosshead in. I’ve done it once today already!”

Osebo walked down the lane, leaving Nixon to catch up. “Your friend is fine. The same cannot be said, however, for the Death Boy who seemed so determined to accost her. Your concern belies some tenderness, Nixon.”

Nixon eyed Osebo warily. “Good for her. But you’re not getting anywhere near my tenders, faggot, so fuck off back to whatever Congo you crawled out of.” He paused, reconsidering his options. “We’ve got unboys aplenty for you to diddle back at the Minorarium if you’re into sicko shit.” Osebo was right, Nixon had learned a few lessons. Such as when to prioritize profit over machismo. “If you’re dead set on pederasty, I can make the connections. Won’t cost you more than a few dirties. . . .”

“I am uninterested in intimacy with anyone but my wife.” He smiled where Nixon could not see. So preoccupied, so young.

“Sure, sure,” Nixon jawed, comfortable now that he was talking shop. “They all say that.”

Osebo stopped at a wooden gate across from a sleepy café. A few old men were playing dominoes at a table, but besides them and the grapevines growing over the fence posts on both sides of the lane, he and Nixon were alone. The alley looked quaint—were they in the Lindenstrasse again, or was this somewhere else? Not the Guiselaine. Purseyet was too rundown. Amelia Heights? Caparisonside?

Osebo pointed to the morning sky. The suns had reached halfway to their aphelion, moving as one. A concomitant binary day, then. Should be cloudless blue as long as it lasted, which Osebo judged would be at least until eve ning. The little intersection of magic and physics that Osebo called the Skylit Fall would be stable till then. A piece of folded space tucked between plots of lilies and lettuce, it might be an accident of spaciotemporal mechanics or the remnant of some long- gone display of the excesses of metaphysical engineering, like the ruins of a desert boulevard lined with overflowing fountains. He knew all of the ways to return to the cottage he shared with his wife in the Anvitine Run, but this was his favorite— and he thought this the best way to impress upon Nixon that he need not abandon every thread of childhood in the name of self- preservation. The unboy’s cynicism was not so far gone that it couldn’t be teased into something wry but hale.

Osebo rebuked himself—here he was, taking time out of the end of everything to teach one reborn cretin the value of wonder. It was all her fault. How she’d tamed him!

“Would you like to see something impossible, Nixon? Harmless, I assure you, but impossible nonetheless?”

“It’s sweet of you to care, big man, but I’ve survived enough ‘impossible’ to last me a hundred lives, thanks.”

Osebo cocked his head. “Not like this, I think. Not in your few lives. A simple thing, but it brings me the kind of joy I associate with the very young.”

“I told you: young I ain’t. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but life isn’t exactly what it was.”

“By my standards, you’re young.” Osebo flashed Nixon a grin. This one would not fall into the trap of so many of his ilk—he’d already relinquished the memory of the power and privilege he’d once enjoyed. Despite his rancor, Nixon had acknowledged the truth: that the past was the past, no matter how desperately one clung to it. The past, thought Osebo in Nixon’s own idiom—to practice mortal- scale empathy—was spent rocket fuel. You could no more reclaim it than you could recapture the jettisoned first stage of an orbital launch missile. Nixon may still be spitting fire, but he’d moved on to other strata. He would not go the way of his bimillennial peer, Thea Philopater.

Nixon looked up at the dark- skinned hunter. “Who the hell are you, pal?”

“Do you remember the woman who paid you yesterday, if that is not too broad a description?”

“The doll with the box of money?” Nixon cawed. “How could I forget! Red hair, wearing next to nothing, legs like cream cheese and toes worth nibbling all day long? Yeah, I got her all right.”

Osebo blinked. “I am her husband.”

Nixon hadn’t the good sense to be abashed. He whistled. “Lucky bastard.”

Osebo nodded. “Yes. But you should call me Osebo instead; ‘lucky bastard’ might not impress my wife.”

“Osebo, then.” Nixon stuck out his ten-year-old hand. Osebo shook it with all the seriousness the little man required, and Nixon nodded in approval. “It’s good to meet a family man. ’Pologize for the misunderstanding. You never quite get used to being young again, do you?”

“I don’t think one gets used to being anything other than what one was when one began,” Osebo said with a sideways smile. It was the closest one of the First People could come to answering “yes” to the question.

“Sure, whatever. Show me.” Nixon shrugged.

The gate swung open with a creak and Osebo ushered Nixon into a little courtyard—the kind of hidden shaft of green that lived behind every apartment building in every world across the cosmoses—a secret emerald gem where mothers grew irises they’d taken from their grandmothers’ flowerbeds back in the old country, the suburbs, the childhood garden. Electric lights shaped like jalapeño peppers or stars, flotsam furniture, a zinc bucket for cigarette butts. You could change bodies, you could live on a floating continent fueled by birdsong or coast between stars on some industry’s freighter, but wherever you found cities, you found these interstitial cloisters, growing windowsill tomatoes and sheltering garden parties. People rarely evinced dissimilarities in their means of finding comfort, an observation that brought a smile to Osebo’s face, remembering his recent adventure in a barrel of beer.

Nixon strolled through and looked back at Osebo with a skeptical face.

“Great. Tomatoes and Christmas lights. Thanks a ton, pal.”

Had he been human, Osebo might have rolled his eyes.

“Turn around, Nixon.”

The sky was blue and untroubled, and Nixon quietly appreciated the simple sight of blue sky through green leaves as he looked up and turned around. The buildings on each side framed the bricked patio of the courtyard, except for the far side. Strangely, there were no buildings there, just blue sky. Odd, thought Nixon, I didn’t think you could find an unobstructed view of the horizon anywhere nearby—

Oh.

The sky continued down past where the city blocks—let alone the nonexis tent horizon—ought to have been. Instead he peered over a ribbon of sky that stretched as far below him as it did above, as if they stood on the precipice of a city in the sky.

“Sky.” He mouthed the word.

“Earth.” Osebo smiled. “I like this game.”

“Huh,” grunted Nixon. “Ain’t that a thing. Where’d the ground go?”

Osebo shrugged. “The ground was never here to begin with. Just a slice of sky. There’s no reason why, not that I’m aware of, and no purposed served—just a bit of the heavens, sandwiched between city blocks and embraced by these apartment buildings.”

Nixon leaned out over the edge just a little bit, then snapped back from the ledge. The sky went down all the way, as blue as blue could be. “Huh,” he grunted again, by way of appreciation. “Can’t buy that kind of view, can you?”

“Not with money.”

He looked up at Osebo with a flash of something that might have been filial- adjacent. “Kind of like forever decided to give us a little peck on the cheek, isn’t it?”

Osebo patted Nixon on the back. “I’m happy you appreciate the view.”

Nixon shrugged off the hand. “I appreciate cash and hot meat. But this isn’t half bad. Although,” he mused, one foot in paranoia again, “it’d also be the perfect place to diddle some brat. I’m keeping my eye on you. We need to find you a shirt, pal.”

Osebo might have laughed if the boy’s mistrust hadn’t been so deeply pathological. Instead he folded his hands and nodded. “Do whatever makes you feel safe, Nixon.”

“Yeah.” Nixon nodded, chewing his lip. “Yeah . . . That doesn’t always work out so good.”

They chuckled together. “That’s a lesson a lot of men spend many lives failing to learn.”

Nixon shrugged. “Yeah, well, walk a mile, right?”

The sky looked less blue than it had a few moments ago, and Osebo reconsidered his forecast. “Nixon, what would you say to a bite of breakfast?”

The promise of food evaporated the remains of the unboy’s skepticism.

“I’d say ‘yes!’ ”

Osebo turned to the wall and put his palm flat against the bricks while he pinched one of the beads around his neck with his other hand. He twitched a mental muscle in a part of himself that no mortal could understand or possess. The air became brittle, then viscous like honey, and the Skylit Fall vanished. The troubling sky vanished. Lilies and lettuces, vanished. As vertigo overtook him, Nixon smelled bacon frying and eggs on the skillet. The expression on his face as he disappeared from the City Unspoken was a hungry smile.

The Undertow maintained near-constant contact with one another, although he didn’t know if that was how they lived or simply protocol for a raiding party. He could hear their shorthand chirrups flitting across the rooftops, a birdsong patois of real-time intelligence—blocked thoroughfares, broken roofs, which ways were safe and which were not.