Free Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy by Noah Fregger

help but laugh. “You said it, Zeke. Well put.”

8
R ADICAL W HIMSY
     
    I didn’t sleep well that night. Partially due to the robot, who’d been walking restlessly around the cavern for hours, but mostly because of the recent argument between me and Alice. I tossed about, staring up at the ceiling and mumbling random thoughts that entered my mind.
    Reflection can be an ugly place. I found myself recapping an entire lifetime of trials and tribulations—past failures that continued to haunt me, digging themselves deeper into the cracks of my psyche. They hid in places I couldn’t reach.
    If I were to write each of them down I’d have something as thick as the Bible, but ten times more daunting. Perhaps I was subconsciously answering Alice’s last question. Maybe I was convincing myself just how unworthy I really was to be left on this Earth. I watched as the memories poured through me like a dusty film reel, and it was there that I’d been subjected to my own brand of spiritual battery.
    I felt a bit like a psychopath undergoing some new and experimental kind of treatment, all harnessed and shackled with eyelids pried open. Eventually I was able to drift off into some alternate form of sleep—a very dark and dreamless state—only to rise again at some point that night.
    I’d been awoken by nothing in particular, the lids of my eyes had opened as I’d found myself strangely alert there in the dark. My limbs felt impossibly heavy beneath the rest I’d not fully obtained, as if they’d been injected with a steady stream of mercury. I slid a slick knuckle over each eye and pressed down hard, wiping the remaining residue from the crevices.
    My body was still very tired but something in my brain would not allow it any further relaxation at the moment. There was something I needed to do, some task that had called out to me from some unknown stage of sleep.
    I left my room and entered the hallway, there I turned left and let my fingers slide along the rough subterranean wall until they passed over the dip that signified the opening of Alice’s quarters. I quietly pushed the curtain aside and entered—uninvited.
    The first thing I saw was a digital clock she’d always kept beside her bed. It was one of her earliest restoration projects. She’d discovered it in the junkyard years ago. Once just a useless collection of garbage, the clock had been smashed to bits, but Alice had insisted on gathering each and every single piece to mull over down in the shop.
    I’d observed her thoughtfully as she twisted her shiny black hair between those slender fingers, running the mechanical puzzle through her head again and again. She was much younger then, and I had not yet completely learned of her unique gifts in the areas of engineering. I’d even told her to forget about it—told her she was just wasting her time.
    But, of course, she had soon found a way to mend it, to refresh the digital elements within, and revive the light of which it had once been so capable. I guess that was another gift she’d been given—seeing the potential in things that others would surely overlook, and finding the light where there had only been darkness. Against all odds that thing sat there now, pouring its little neon blue numbers into the room, as it wearily advised me of the time. It was only four thirty in the morning.
    Alice was facing me, her covers pulled up, as I came to kneel beside her. Not entirely sure what I was doing there, I resorted to staring at her as she slept. Dinah was curled up in a tiny ball by her feet, purring steadily into the night and keeping that little patch of sheets perfectly warm.
    I placed my hand on Alice’s pillow and felt the thin fabric, still damp from the tears she’d invested in it earlier. With a handful of blankets clutched in her fingers, it looked as though she’d cried her way to the edges of sleep.
    I wanted so badly to touch her—to crawl in bed beside her. Instead I ran a hand just an inch