Poison Sleep (8 page)

“To see a consultant who does some work for me. Guy named Langford. He has a lab uptown.”

“Ah,” Ted said. “I’m still not clear, exactly, on what business you do.”

“I’m not into organized crime, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Marla said. Which wasn’t exactly true—she’d inherited a few not-strictly-legal businesses from her predecessor, Sauvage, including several betting parlors and some drug trade, though limited strictly to gentler substances, like hallucinogens and pot. Those could be abused, sure, but they weren’t a debilitating cancer on a city the way crack or meth or heroin could be. But she wasn’t involved with the mafia or any of those hard-core types, which was what Ted was probably worried about. “I own a lot of real estate and some local businesses, and I’m heavily into civic pride. I deal with important people in city government and do my best to protect the best interests of Felport. There’s not really a name for the job I do.” There
was
—chief sorcerer and protector of the city—but it was a little early to get into all that with Ted. “I need somebody to help me deal with the mundane shit, drive me around, keep things organized, make calls, etc. You can crash at the office for a couple of days, then we’ll get you set up in an apartment in the building where I live. You can stay right next door to me, I just need to get some of the junk cleaned out of the rooms. It’s not fancy, but it’s better accommodations than Dutch Mulligan’s grate. Your salary won’t be huge—what I gave you today, every week or so—but your housing will be taken care of.”

“What about time off?”

Marla stared at him. He glanced away from the road at her, then back to the road, then back at her. “What?” he said.

“Haven’t you had enough time off lately, Ted? If you need a few hours here and there to deal with personal shit, yeah, we can talk about it. I’m not inflexible. But this isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It’s an
all the time
job. I sleep about four hours a day. I can teach you some techniques so you can get by on that little sleep, too. You’ll need it. If you don’t like the gig, you can go back to your life of leisure.”

“I’ll give it a try,” Ted said, though whether he was thinking of the wad of cash in his pocket or the cold months of winter that still stretched ahead, Marla wasn’t sure.

“I don’t mean to be harsh,” Marla said. “But I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings. I need you to
lighten
my load, not complicate things.”

“Is there any possibility for, ah, advancement in this position?”

You’re the personal assistant for the most powerful sorcerer in Felport. How much more advanced do you
want
to get?
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how you handle this. If you last a month, we can think about your future.”

Ted parked on the curb in front of Langford’s lab, a low, unassuming building that blended in nicely with the various doctors’ offices on the same street. Langford was a doctor, too, sort of.

Marla buzzed the door, and it clicked open. She was surprised—Langford had a bunch of insects with their senses jacked into his own consciousness that he used for surveillance, but Marla had expected the cold to keep the bugs inside. Then she noticed the glass lens set in the wall. An ordinary camera. Trust Langford to build in redundancies. She went in, followed by Ted, who carried the shoebox holding Genevieve Kelley’s effects.

The inside of the building was one large, cluttered room, all the interior walls knocked down. Metal shelves stood on all sides, and various long workbenches and lab tables were arrayed at seemingly random intervals throughout the room. The back wall was covered in stacked cages, from Chihuahua-sized to one that could have held a couple of mountain gorillas, though all but one were empty. A yellow-eyed coyote paced the length of the cage, and Marla wondered if it was a skinchanger or just an ordinary animal. Langford sat at a stool before a workbench scattered with shiny metal components, soldering something and humming to himself. He might have been sitting that way for hours. He liked to work, and as far as Marla could tell, he didn’t like doing much else. He was a weird guy, with a tendency to stare at people like he was thinking about dissecting them, but he was fast and effective, and Marla counted on him. He was probably as powerful as any of the city’s most prominent sorcerers, but as far as she knew his interests didn’t run toward city management, big business, or organized crime, so he didn’t take a hand in governing.

“That’s not Rondeau,” Langford said, not looking up. “New apprentice?”

“He’s Ted, my personal assistant,” Marla said. “Listen, I need a rush job.”

“You always need a rush job,” Langford said. “Your personal assistant knows not to
touch
anything, right? I know Rondeau had to learn that the hard way.”

Rondeau had nearly lost a finger to one of Langford’s experiments, an experience that had finally stopped him from poking around the lab’s shelves.

“Ted’s solid,” Marla said. She walked over to Langford and snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Hey, there’s a human being talking to you now. Can I get some attention?”

“I can pay attention to many things at once,” Langford said. He looked up at Marla, though, and today his eyes were silver. Langford had a vast array of colored contacts, each pair magically altered to enhance his senses in a different way. She wondered what silver did, but asking Langford would just lead to a long lecture on the subject, and she didn’t have time. “What’s today’s emergency?” he asked.

Marla glanced toward Ted, who stood holding the shoebox and staring at the coyote. “Hey, Ted, leave the box here, and go wait in the car, okay?”

He nodded and slipped out of the room.

“Here,” Langford said, rising and walking over to a silver refrigerator. He took out a small vial of clear liquid. “Put this into Ted’s food. He’s got prostate cancer, and without this, he’ll die. But this should clear it up.”

Marla blinked at him. “Say
what
?” But she took the vial.

Langford tapped the spot between his eyes. “These are diagnostic lenses. They scan for unusual masses and inconsistent densities, among other things. Cancer is easy to see with them.”

“No, I figured that part; I mean, you have a
cancer
cure? What the fuck, Langford? Why isn’t this in every drugstore in America?”

Langford shrugged. “It’s not science. Or, it’s only partly science. It reprograms the cancer tissue and convinces it to be more community-minded, gives the chaos a plan, but it’s mostly magical, so I can’t exactly get
FDA
approval.”

“Still, you could dump some in the municipal water supply, at least!”

“It’s not easy to make in quantity, Marla. Even that vial is dear, but you’re my main patron, so I’m willing to part with some of the substance to keep your assistant alive, and, I trust, earn some personal gratitude?”

Marla nodded slowly. She’d follow up about this another time. Langford had weird priorities sometimes, and curing cancer might not be high on his to-do list if he had some other, more interesting project on his table. “Do you think Ted knows he has cancer?”

“He’s probably shitting blood by now, so I suspect he’s worried, but perhaps too afraid to go to a doctor.”

Or too poor. Or he just figures shitting blood is the sort of thing that happens when you eat out of garbage cans and live in alleys.
“Right,” Marla said. “Thanks, Langford.”

“Yes, yes. What do you need? I
am
working on something.”

“A woman escaped from the Blackwing Institute this morning. Her name’s Genevieve Kelley. She’s—”

“I know who she is,” Langford said. “Dr. Husch has me in periodically to make sure the homunculi on her staff are functioning properly, and we sometimes consult on other cases, if Husch thinks there might be a physiological component. Kelley’s case has always interested me. She
escaped
? Fascinating.”

Marla snorted. “You could call it that. The thing is, I
saw
her today. I was walking in the city, when everything around me changed. I went…someplace else. But it wasn’t anywhere on this Earth.” She described the strange buildings, the groves of trees, the cobblestones, the wind, the black tower. “Genevieve was
there
. I think it was her place.”

Langford nodded, then stared at the ceiling for a moment. Marla waited. She was used to this. “She disappears, sometimes, in her sleep,” Langford said at last. “I’ve hypothesized that she has access to some sort of conditional universe, a little bit of pinched-off reality furnished by her subconscious, filled with comforts and monsters. Or possibly a place created by
stretching
reality, the way you can press your finger into a sheet and create a little cone of extra volume by straining the fabric.”

“And what happens if you poke too hard?” Marla said.

“What you would expect,” Langford said. “You poke a hole in the fabric.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“I wonder how many other people have been pulled into her world since she escaped?” Langford said.

Marla sat down on a bench. “Shit. I didn’t even
think
about that. But why should it just be me? Gods, are people just popping into her world at random?”

“It may not be totally random. There could be some sort of vector. A particular place that gives entrance to her world, or a touch—did you have any contact with her before you found yourself in her world?”

“No, I never—” Marla paused. That same hazy image, like a picture from a dream, came to her. There was a woman, laying in the snow, and Marla had draped her coat over her. But now, thinking back, the woman was
familiar,
she was—”Hell,” Marla said. “Yes. I saw her in the snow. I bet I even touched her. Why didn’t I
recognize
her?”

“You probably did. You probably just don’t
remember
that you did. Dreams are hard to remember, Marla—they go into short-term memory, and unless you make a special effort to remember them, they disappear from your mind. I’ve always suspected her power is linked to dreams. The place Genevieve took you sounds like a dream world, something beyond her control, something she experiences as reality. But it’s a dream she can pull other people into. If she’s a reweaver, as Dr. Husch believes, it may be a dream she can bring into
this
world.”

“It was a
nightmare,
Langford. At least the last part was.”

Langford nodded. “I am, actually, reassured to hear that she touched you. That could be the vector of contagion.”

“So you think if she touches people, they get sucked into her dream world?”

Langford shrugged. “It’s just a hypothesis, but it’s possible. You haven’t received widespread reports of people popping into her world, which means you may be an isolated case, and since you had direct contact with Genevieve, it seems reasonable to assume, for now, that direct contact is a prerequisite. Of course, the question then is whether it’s black plague or bird flu.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Contagion models,” Langford said. “People initially catch black plague from rat fleas, but once they’ve caught the plague, it can pass from human to human. With bird flu—at least, the unmutated strain—you can only catch the disease directly from a bird. A human with bird flu can’t pass the disease on to other humans. The question is, can you catch this dreamsickness from Genevieve alone, or can it be caught from another person who is already infected?”

“Like…me,” Marla said. “Shit.”

“Who have you touched since this happened?”

Marla thought. She’d touched Hamil’s shoulder. She’d shaken Joshua Kindler’s hand. She
hadn’t
touched Rondeau. She
had
touched Ted. She hadn’t touched Langford. “A few people.”

Langford nodded. “Observe them. If they have…experiences…you can assume you are contagious. Until then, limit your contact with new people. As for people you’ve already touched…well, it’s probably too late for them. And if she’s a reweaver, and her world starts intruding into
our
reality, any random passerby in the vicinity could be swept up into her world, too, I suppose.”

“Great. Do you think my trip to dreamland was a onetime thing, or will I get sucked back in again?”

“I have no idea,” Langford said. “I assume you’d like me to help you find our patient zero?”

Marla pushed the shoebox of Genevieve’s things toward him. “Here are a few of her belongings. Can you use them to get a fix on her?”

“Certainly,” Langford said. “I’ll call you. But it could take a couple of days, if she’s popping in and out of our reality.”

Marla scowled. “Can’t you just, like, dangle a weight over a map or something?”

“I’m not a
dowser,
Marla,” Langford said, affronted. “I’m a
scientist
. I have some techniques that might work to connect these items to their owner, using spooky action at a distance and principles of quantum entanglement—”

“Don’t care,” Marla said, holding up her hands. “Just get it done. And call me as soon as you know anything. The sooner we get Genevieve settled back in Blackwing, the happier I’ll be.”

“She’s awake now, Marla, at least sometimes. She may not be willing to go to sleep again.”

Marla smiled. “That’s what sedatives are for.”

Ted drove Marla back to the club, where Rondeau was talking to the bouncer and the bartender, getting ready for the evening ahead. His club, Juliana’s, was currently pretty popular with kids from Adler College looking to dance all night, and Marla’s operation was making good money selling them tabs of ecstasy, though she’d nixed Rondeau’s plan to charge dehydrated customers $10 each for bottled water. She sent Ted upstairs with instructions to call in an order for lemon chicken and some egg rolls, then beckoned Rondeau over to the DJ booth to talk privately. “So, this Genevieve Kelley we’re looking for, if you see her, don’t let her touch you. She’s contagious. If you touch her, there’s a good chance you’ll get pulled into a fucked-up dream world full of buildings made of bones and bald guys with daggers.”

“Sometimes I hate my job,” Rondeau said. “I assume you contracted this little malady? But didn’t manage to catch the lady in question?”