A lone homeless guy pushes a heavy-laden Safeway cart, pauses to look into a trash can, and ignores us. A police car drives by and the fog swirls around the car. The cop ignores us, too.
Eve and Aislin look at me. I shrug. “Guys, I never planned to have two girls with me.”
“Well, that’s typical,” Aislin drawls. “Men always want two girls, but do they take the time to plan? No.”
“We need to get the data safely uploaded somehow,” I say. “Once it’s all over YouTube and Imgur.com, with links at Reddit, we’ll be safe.”
“Then what happens?” Eve asks.
I clear my throat, force myself to look her in the eyes. “Then the FBI and the FDA and a bunch of other agencies find out about it and move in.”
“Move in.” It’s not a question, just a statement.
“We can go to my house,” Aislin says doubtfully.
Eve shakes her head. “First place my mother will look.”
“Where’s the last place she’ll look?” I ask.
Eve considers the question carefully. I see that she’s thought of something. The idea makes her frown. She’s not sure.
“I know a place,” she says finally. “Follow me.”
It’s a bit of a walk along the Embarcadero, the boulevard that follows the waterfront around the northeastern tip of the peninsula. On our left are the massive pier warehouses. Many have been turned into tourist destinations. Some are more rough and ready. On our right are the streetcar tracks, and beyond them, almost wholly swallowed up by the fog, lie the hills and the tall buildings of San Francisco.
I can just make out the top third of Coit Tower, a concrete art deco structure, poking out of the fog. It was built with money left by a woman named Lillie Coit, a gambling, cigar-smoking, fire department groupie who shaved her head to pass as a man back in the twenties when that kind of thing would get you in trouble—even in San Francisco. I’ve always liked her story.
I like rebels.
We turn off the Embarcadero, heading down the side of the least-rehabbed warehouse. It extends out over the water, a shambling, corrugated tin-walled bit of history. There’s a small door at the end. Its padlock is crusted with spiderwebs and rust.
Eve stops. With a tentative finger, she touches the lock.
“I might be able to find something to break the lock,” I say.
Eve doesn’t answer. She takes a deep breath, goes to the railing over the water, and kneels, fumbling until she finds a length of rotting, seaweed-tangled rope. She pulls it up.
There’s a bobbing float on the end, even slimier than the rope. The float has a screw-off top that Eve isn’t quite strong enough to manage. It’s all I can do to budge the top. It doesn’t want to open up. But at last it gives and inside there’s a key.
Eve tries it. It works. She pushes the door inward and Aislin and I step in after her, batting aside cobwebs.
Eve finds a switch. A single lightbulb high overhead barely touches the shadows. We’re in a big, open space, but not an empty space. Huge shapes rear up over us like creatures frozen in time.
The lightbulb pops and goes out. We all jump.
Eve takes out her phone and uses the light from it to locate a long table. It’s a workbench, really, just some plywood nailed together. She rummages in a drawer and pulls out a package, ripping it open with her teeth. I hear a muted crack.
It’s a glow stick. Blue light. A second glows green.
The light isn’t much better, but my eyes adjust and I see that shapes scattered through the room are abstract statues of some kind. There are forms from nature—trees, I think, flowers, even clouds—but most of the sculptures resemble animals. Next to me, rendered in smooth, white stone, is the suggestion of a ten-foot-tall bear. Near Eve I can make out a tiger in mid-leap—or maybe it’s a lion. No, it definitely feels like a tiger to me.
There must be seven or eight of these strange animal shapes. None of them look precisely like anything, but they all manage to tell you what they might be, could be.
“I haven’t been here in a long time. Not since he died,” Eve says. She sits on the floor, browsing through a stack of canvases leaning against a wall like tumbled dominoes.
I’m about to ask who she means, but it’s obvious Aislin knows. She puts her hand on Eve’s arm and says, “I wish I’d known your dad.”
“Your dad was a sculptor?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Eve says, and even that single word comes out shaky with emotion. “He did some painting and drawing, too. But mostly he sculpted.”
I find the package of glow sticks. I snap one—it’s blue, too—and use it to explore the room. There is something moving about this place. Something sacred, somehow.
“Won’t your mother know you’ll come here?” I call back to Eve from behind something that must be a hawk or an eagle. It’s hanging from the rafters by chains, and it doesn’t look happy about being chained.
“My mom doesn’t remember he was ever alive,” Eve says.
“How did he die?”
“Car accident in Tiburon. I was eleven.”
My heart pulls a lurch. “Where?”
Tiburon.
Eve’s seventeen.
I do the math.
She shrugs: It’s an unimportant detail. “Paradise Road, the back road to Tiburon. It’s a twisty, two-lane… well, you know that.”
Yes. I know.
Pieces fall into place. Pieces I never suspected.
My history with Eve goes much further and deeper than I know.
So that’s why Terra Spiker took me in: guilt.
Her husband killed my parents.
Six years ago on a foggy night, someone tried to pass my parents’ car. The driver must have seen oncoming traffic, because he suddenly swerved back and hit my parents, knocking their car over the side of the embankment.
The two cars crashed down through trees and rock, spraying dirt in every direction, the passengers smashing again and again against the dashboards and the steering wheels and roofs until they were all dead.
At least, that’s how I see it sometimes, in my nightmares.
There was no way to know if the guy trying to pass my parents was drunk. The vehicles caught fire and burned for hours before anyone noticed and called 911. They identified my parents from dental records.
Terra never said a word. No one did. Maybe I would have pieced things together, if I’d read the accident reports, done some digging.
But I didn’t want to know anything. One moment, my parents were alive. The next, they were gone.
I shut down. Shut off the world.
“That’s a dangerous road,” I say.
Then I find some other part of the room to be in.
* * *
I pace by one of the grimy windows, thinking things through. All I have to do is make everything on the flash drive public. Once that’s done, we’re home safe.
Just one problem: We’re stuck in a big warehouse full of massive statues and no Wi-Fi. There’s no Internet of any kind.
Our phones all have connections, of course, but I have no way to get the files from the flash drive to the phone. I need a computer. A somewhat old-fashioned one, in fact, so that I can plug into a USB, then upload the files.
Damn.
I’m going to need a public library or a FedEx office or something. But it’s 4:30 in the morning.
Nothing to do but sleep.
I’m weary. The adrenaline’s worn off. I still feel bruised and battered, although I’m much better off than I should be. Poor Aislin’s probably still feeling a lot worse.
“I guess we should try to sleep,” I say.
There’s a sagging couch, a cot, and a chair in one corner. A TV, too. I switch it on, but while someone is paying the electricity bill, no one has paid cable. I fiddle around a bit and get the local broadcast channels. There’s nothing on, but the cold light is comforting, somehow.
“I’ve got the chair,” Aislin says. “And I also have the couch. You t
wo will have to share the cot. Oh, and I’m a very heavy sleeper. You guys could make all kinds of noise and I wouldn’t even notice.”
“Cute,” Eve says. “I’ll take the chair. I’m the smallest.”
I stretch out on the couch. A couple of hours ago I was kissing Eve. I was sure I was madly in love with her.
I am madly in love with her.
But. But something’s changed. I’m here in the studio of the man who killed my parents. Eve’s father. Terra Spiker’s husband.
Terra, who’s done horrible things. To Eve, to me, to a whole lot of others.
There’s too much history. There are way too many complications.
What did I think was going to happen after I revealed the truth? This isn’t exactly a happily-ever-after kind of setup.
“I can’t sleep,” Eve says softly. I’m not sure if she’s talking to Aislin or to me. To anyone. “I keep seeing… the girl.”
No one asks who she means. We know.
“I wish you’d never shown me,” Eve says, and now I’m sure she’s talking to me.
I sit up on my elbows. “So you could live in blissful ignorance?” I ask. “I did you a favor, Eve.”
“A favor?”
“She’s your mother. You have a right to know. An obligation.”
“Just because I’m her daughter doesn’t make me responsible for what she’s done,” Eve says. “Are you responsible for your parents?”
I let it sit, and a moment later I hear her sharp intake of breath. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Solo. I forgot. I’m so tired, I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just, she’s my mother. You think you know someone, know what someone’s capable of, and then—”
“Yeah, life’s full of surprises,” I say. I lie back, exhale loudly.
Then I rest the crook of my elbow on my eyes and pretend to fall asleep.
– 30 –
I open my eyes.
I see something. It’s a picture. It’s a picture I know. It was already in my brain before I ever saw it. Now the sight of that picture resonates.
It’s a girl.
The picture slowly cross-fades to a different picture. Same girl. This time she’s at poolside with another girl.
This picture in turn cross-fades to the original girl, and her name pops into my head.
Evening. Her name is Evening.
I’m sitting upright in a chair.
I’m staring at a monitor.
Why? When did I move to this chair? How did I get here? Where was I before?
I reach a tentative hand to my head. There’s a tight band, and I can feel wires, dozens of them trailing out and away.
Is this normal? I have thousands of images of people. None of them have a band with wires.
Yet another picture of Evening.
I love Evening.
How do I know that? It’s obvious. It’s true. I have to love her. She made me. I have the pictures in my head, moving and still, of Evening at a console making the decisions that would soon define me.
I see myself through her eyes, unformed, partial, incomplete. I see that she chose my hair and my face. I know that she sculpted my chest. That she had the vision to create perfect, muscular legs.
I am perfect. I’m Adam.
Perfect for Evening.
Mine is the face she will find impossible to resist. Mine is the skin she will long to touch. As I will long for hers.
She designed my body. She wants me to be her mate. Of course she does.
I haven’t been told this, but I know it. I can draw my own conclusions.
In fact, I realize, I haven’t been told anything. No one has spoken to me. I just… arrived… here in this chair. Came here from nowhere and nowhen.
I am wearing clothing, so I can’t see my perfect, Evening-sculpted legs or my artfully symmetrical biceps or my hard abdomen.
“How did I come here?” I ask.
It’s the first time I have spoken. I search my memory. Can it be true? Surely I have spoken before. To someone. But my memory reveals no someone.
I’ve just been born. The realization shocks me. I’ve just been born. But my memory tells me that is not the way it happens. My memory tells me of wombs and mothers and wrinkly, squalling infants.
None of that applies to me. I am full-grown. I am not a weak, dependent baby; I am strong and tall and I love Evening.
“You have always been here,” a voice says.
A woman steps into view. She’s tall, beautiful, glittery.
“There is no always,” I say. “Nothing persists forever.”
“Nothingness persists,” she says. She is testing me.
“No. So long as anything exists, nothingness is impossible. In fact, it’s nothingness that cannot persist. Nothingness gives way to somethingness. The nothingness that preceded the Big Bang was obliterated. Nothing became something.”
The woman nods. “Good. You’ve absorbed data well. Your intelligence is obviously fully functional. You sound like a college freshman taking his first philosophy class way too seriously, but that’s good. Evening will like it.”
“I would still like to know how I came to be,” I say.
“Consider it a mystery,” Terra Spiker says. “Like the Big Bang. One second there’s nothing, and the next second there’s a universe.”
“Evening created me.”
“Yes, she did. And now you’re going to find her. You’re going to bring her here. For you, she’ll come back.”
“Where is she?”
Terra Spiker says nothing for a long time. I wonder if she hasn’t heard me. But I can see that she is thinking. Her forehead creases. Her eyes narrow.
She corresponds to images I have of thoughtfulness.
“I have an idea where she might be,” she says at last.
“What if she won’t come with me?”
“Oh, she’ll come,” Terra Spiker says. “It’s the fate of all creators: They fall in love with their creations.”
– 31 –
It’s a gray, halfhearted dawn, cold as hell, a fairly typical San Francisco morning, no matter the time of year. The fog isn’t as thick or as low as it was last night. It looks as if it might burn off later.
Solo will wake at any moment. And when he does he’s going to ask me for the flash drive, and we’re going to find a place to upload it.
The sequence of events that will follow is lurid, even in my imagination. I see my mother with her manicured hands in chrome handcuffs. I see federal agents swarming all over Spiker, demanding passwords, hauling computers off to labs that can crack them open and make them spill their secrets.
I see my mother in jail. An orange jumpsuit.
She hates the color orange.
I see her in court. She’ll have great lawyers, of course. But the damning evidence will come from her own daughter. At the very least she’ll have to sign some kind of a deal. She’ll lose her business.
The horrors will end.
But so will the work on Level One. Projects that might bring relief to millions or save tens of thousands of lives. Some kid in Africa lives or dies because of what I decide.
This is too much to think about. I need to focus on what matters. I’ve been manipulated, used, a guinea pig. I’m a mod, in Solo’s casual phrase. A genetic experiment.
To achieve this, terrible crimes were done and nightmarish horrors were created.
I close my eyes and see the monsters in their vats.
I blink them away, focusing my gaze on the stack of my dad’s paintings piled haphazardly against the wall.
They’re good, some of them, really good. Still lifes, landscapes, a few hastily sketched faces. Charcoal, mostly. Some watercolor. There’s one of me as a baby, with chubby cheeks and a single tooth.
My hand freezes on the last canvas. It’s my mother. The oil pastel my dad attempted, then abandoned.
It’s been worked and reworked. I can feel h
im struggling with the gaze, the smile.
Smiling has never been my mother’s strong suit.
Still, there’s a soft vulnerability to the eyes. A gentle sweetness to the mouth. This drawing was done by someone who loved my mother deeply. Without reservation.
I think back to the endless fights and icy silences. Is it possible, beneath all that high-octane drama, that they really loved each other? Did he see something in her that I can’t see?
I take my own sketch out of my jeans pocket. It’s smeared at the folds. I compare it to the portrait of my mother, studying the strokes and smudges, moving an imaginary pencil over my drawing.
“Whatcha doing?”
Aislin joins me. She’s still a mess, but beautiful in her tough-but-not-really way. She squeezes herself against the cold and lays her head on my shoulder.
“Let’s go outside,” I suggest in a whisper. “Don’t want to wake Solo.”
She grins. “Are you sure?”
The breeze is brisk and smells of fish. I look down at the water. There’s a sea lion gazing back up at us hopefully. No doubt it expects breakfast. I’m not sure the sea lions in the bay ever actually fish anymore. I think they just wait for bits of burger and chalupa ends.
“I got nothing,” I say. I display my empty hands. The sea lion dives smoothly and disappears.
“You should sleep,” I tell Aislin.
“Mmm. Should. I don’t really do ‘should’ all that well.”
I smile. “I’ve noticed.”
“You do ‘should.’”
“Do I?” It’s a genuine question. I’m not sure I know the answer.
“That was some scary stuff. On the computer,” Aislin says. She sounds tentative. She’s feeling me out.
“Yeah. Stuff from a horror movie.”
“What are you going to do?”
I heave a big sigh. “I don’t know yet. According to you I do the right thing. But what’s the right thing?”
She laughs. “Really? You’re asking me?”
I look at her. “You know, Aislin, I don’t always agree with what you do. But you are a good person. All the way, deep down, you’re a good person.”
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