Thieves Are Kept

Imogen Hatch hasn't truly slept in twelve years. Her father died of the same affliction, found upright in his chair, weighing eighty-one pounds, his throat packed with grey silt no coroner could explain. A brochure for a sleep clinic in Portland carries the face of a woman who signed his funeral book and hasn't aged a day. Inside Northlight, three hundred insomniacs are being counted down toward something patient and tall, and Imogen is thinner than any of them.