I wipe the blood from his face. Forehead. Eyes. Mouth.
I go back to rinse the blood out and as the cold water runs, my brain is racing, then stalling, then racing again, like a very bad driver with a very fast car.
I bring the now-pink towel back and begin to wipe the blood from his neck and chest.
I expect more blood to flow—they say head wounds bleed a lot—but it’s barely a trickle.
I wipe down to the waistband of his boxers.
I look up at him and I’m a little startled. I’m disturbed in about six different ways. I haven’t seen this much blood since it was coming out of me on Powell Street.
I haven’t ever been knocked down, pushed aside before.
I’ve never touched a boy’s body before.
I’ve never knelt in front of a boy before, a boy wearing nothing but boxers and rope.
Rope? “You’re still tied up!”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
I jump to my feet, flustered and scared and overwhelmed. My fingers pick weakly at the knots.
“There’s a Swiss Army knife in my dresser drawer.”
I find it beneath rolled socks. Carefully, carefully, because I don’t trust my trembling hands, I cut him loose.
He stands, turns, faces me, and says, “You looked at the files.”
But I don’t want to talk about it. Because all of that is so horrible and so complicated, and right now he is just so close.
“You—” Solo begins.
He stops talking, too.
We are inches away from each other. If I lean forward, my nose will touch the hollow of his neck.
Somehow we are closer now.
He breathes out and I breathe in.
Closer. My breasts touch the top of his abdomen. A shudder goes through him.
Through me, too.
His fingers tremble as they touch my cheek. I swallow hard. There’s blood on his fingers, and now there’s some on the back of my neck because his hand is under my hair and we are no longer inches away, we’ve gone metric, we are millimeters away and he breathes and I breathe and we both make shaky sounds like we might both be dying but not yet.
Nothing has ever moved as slowly as his mouth coming down toward mine.
It’s a million years.
His lips touch mine.
So, some part of my brain thinks happily: That’s a kiss.
Oh yes, that is definitely a kiss.
Some years and decades and eons later we pull apart. And he says, “Now: We have to run.”
– 27 –
We race to my room and arrive panting, the two of us babbling to Aislin about beat-downs and crazy people and cover-ups.
“We have to get out of here!” I conclude.
Aislin cocks her head. “You have blood on your mouth.”
“What?” I can feel the furious blush. “I must have cut my lip.”
“Yeah. It’s not your blood, honey,” she says. She turns to Solo. “So, I guess I missed my chance with you?”
“Um…”
“Where are we running to?” Aislin asks. Not upset, mind you, just curious. As though fleeing from my own mother and her crazed minions is a perfectly normal, everyday occurrence.
“Just out of here,” Solo says. He touches the cut on his scalp and grimaces. “Do you still have the flash drive?”
I dig in my purse and produce the little device with the Apple logo.
The three of us look at it, sitting in my palm.
So small, so dangerous, so terrible.
“Good.” Solo nods tersely. “Hang on to it.”
I rush to pull on jeans, turning away to put on a bra and T-shirt. Only then do I realize that I’m facing a mirror.
“He didn’t look,” Aislin says. In a mystified voice she adds: “He really didn’t.”
“I have excellent peripheral vision,” Solo says, winking a blood-caked eye at Aislin.
“What about Adam?” I say. The thought has come out of nowhere.
“What do you mean, what about Adam?” Aislin asks. “We’re fleeing for our very lives and you’re worried about some software?”
“It’s just—” I begin. But that’s all I have.
Solo says, “Tommy didn’t get his PhD and this job by being an idiot. We surprised him. We threw him off his game. But he’ll be back. We have minutes—if that.”
“My mother won’t hurt me,” I say, sounding pretty doubtful even to myself.
“But what about Solo?” Aislin says. “He’s not her son.” A strange look crosses her face. “You’re not, are you?”
“No, thank God,” he says with an ugly snarl. Belatedly, he realizes how that will sound to me. “I mean—”
I wave him off. “Let’s get out of here,” I say, but for some reason, I stop long enough to grab my sketchbook. I rip out my unfinished life drawing, fold it up, and stash it in the pocket of my jeans.
The three of us race out into the hallway. It’s all very action movie, but feels ridiculous. Seriously, I’m fleeing from my mother? Seriously?
My mother, who made me a lab rat. My mother, who runs a chamber of horrors.
Those images. So many of them. How am I supposed to reconcile them with my mother?
The problem is, it’s all too easy. It’s not like she has ever been some warm, nurturing, hugging, head-patting type. She’s an amoral bitch. That’s the reality.
I’m running down curving, carpeted hallways, trying to dredge up something nice to think about my mother.
It suddenly occurs to me—and yes, it’s a ludicrous setting and circumstance—that I’ve been a bit neglected as a daughter.
We make our way toward the garage, just like we had in our earlier “escape.” But the risks are higher this time. The sense of fun is gone.
We climb into the elevator. It moves, comes to a stop.
The door doesn’t open.
Solo nods, unsurprised. “He’s after us.” He pulls out his phone. “This will work once. Only once. He’ll counter immediately.”
He punches numbers into the keypad.
“We’re between four and five. He’s going to have the garage covered, and if he corners us down there, it’s way too easy for him to finish us off.”
The elevator lurches. “We’re going back up,” Aislin says.
“Yes,” Solo says tersely. “Soon as the door opens we run.”
“Where?” I ask.
“Just stay with me.”
The elevator comes to a stop and we explode out the door. Solo yells, “This way, this way!”
We dash fifty feet down a long hallway. Solo stops at an office, panting, and stabs some numbers into a keyboard. The door opens. It’s dark inside.
“Office belongs to a dude who’s been on medical leave for months,” Solo explains.
Aislin reaches for the light switch.
“No.” Solo shakes his head. “No lights.”
There isn’t much to see in the office except the view out over the San Francisco Bay. Clouds hang thick on the Golden Gate. The stars are sparse, the moon visible only as a silvery glow without distinct location.
Solo pulls open a file drawer. “Either of you ever do any mountain climbing?” He has a big coil of rope in his hands.
“I have,” Aislin says.
I blink at her, sure it’s a joke. But she’s taken a length of webbing and some metal rings from Solo. She weaves the webbing through her crotch, pulls out one loop of the webbing, and clips on the ring.
“What?” she says, in response to our shared amazement. “It’s not all parties. My dad’s taken me top-roping at Tahoe a few times.”
We move out onto the balcony. The Spiker building glitters beneath us, spreading off to our right, a massive ornament of light perched above black water and invisible rocks. Solo ties the rope to the balcony railing and tosses the coil over the side.
He’s chosen his location perfectly. It’s one of the view spots in the complex where there’s a clear drop without ter
races in the way.
The coiled rope falls into darkness. Has it reached the ground? No way to know. I can only hope Solo has planned well.
“Okay, Aislin, you go first,” Solo says. He helps her climb over the railing. “The figure eight may get twisted, so be careful.”
To my amazement, Aislin understands what he’s talking about.
She checks the rope and the carabiner like a pro and winks at me. I lean over to watch her fall, holding my breath. I’m not a big fan of heights.
She’s sort of bouncing down the side of the building, feet hitting balcony rails and plate glass, pushing off, dropping another few feet.
She disappears from sight.
“Is she okay?” I ask.
Solo points to the knot. “The rope is slack. She’s down, she’s unhooked, and she’s fine. Your turn.”
“I don’t know how to do that,” I say. Now that I’m faced with actually climbing over the railing, leaning back with nothing but a rope, I’m having serious doubts about this plan.
“Listen, you just need to—”
“I’m not a wimp,” I interrupt. “I could kick your ass in a 10K, no sweat.”
“I have no doubt of that.”
“But I don’t, you know, like high places. Falling from them, anyway.”
“I’ll carry you down,” Solo says.
“Not happening.”
“We are short on time, Eve. Tommy is on the hunt. Like I said, he’s not stupid. And if it hasn’t happened already, your mother will have security all over this. We have seconds.” He scrunches down a little so he can look me in the eye. “Don’t worry. I won’t drop you.”
“I could beat you in a 5K, too,” I add.
“Climb over the rail.”
I do it, fast, before I lose my nerve. The wind is cold and strong. I’m extremely aware that if my feet slip I’ll have a few seconds to scream before I hit the bottom.
I may be genetically modified, but I doubt my physical repair ability extends to recovering from death.
Solo swings easily over the railing. He loops the rope through his harness. He leans back, confident.
“Climb on,” he says.
“How?”
“Your arms around my neck, your legs wrapped around my waist. Try not to choke me.”
His body is at an angle to the building. He has one hand free. The other holds the trailing rope. Keeping all available hands on the railing, I turn to face him.
He pulls himself in closer, presses his body against mine.
Putting my arms around his neck is the easy part. The harder part is wrapping my legs around him. It feels ridiculous, and he has to lean slowly back to take my weight.
My calves are pressed hard against him. I don’t know what to do with my head. So I just look at him, and he looks past me at the rope. “Eve?” he says. “You okay?”
“Why do you insist on calling me Eve?” I ask, because I don’t really want to address the question of how okay I may or may not be.
“Dunno. Just feels right,” Solo says, and then we start to fall.
We float downward. When we slow and gently bounce, it drives me against him. We drop again and bounce. Fall, slow, impact. Fall, slow, impact.
“See?” Solo says, pausing halfway down. “It’s not hard.”
It takes me a few beats to realize he’s talking about the rappelling.
I snork a sudden, very stupid laugh.
He gets it, grins, looks away, and we bounce off again, falling, and now the truth is I am in no hurry to get to the bottom.
A final drop, and we land.
Aislin is waiting. It’s dark, so I can’t see her face very well, but her mocking, fake-disgruntled voice is clear enough.
“That’s so unfair. No one even told me coming down that way was an option.”
– 28 –
We are in weeds and rocks beneath stunted trees. The ground is so steep no one has ever made much of an effort to landscape it. It’s almost vertical from the foundation of the building down to the water.
“There’s a staircase, if we can get there before it occurs to anyone to cut us off,” Solo says. He points. “This way. Watch the branches—they might snap back as I push through.”
It’s not far, a hundred feet maybe, but it’s a struggle to avoid losing our footing.
The stairs turn out to be wooden, a little ramshackle. They must have been here before the Spiker complex was built. It’s dark, but there’s some moonlight bouncing off the water, so while I can’t see the steps, I can see the handrail.
Solo is in the lead, then Aislin, and I’m at the back. We try not to make noise, but the stairs creak and our breathing seems incredibly loud in the stillness.
“What do we do at the bottom?” I hiss.
“There’s a boat,” Solo calls back in a loud whisper.
It’s ridiculous, but I was almost hoping we’d have to swim somewhere. I’m an excellent swimmer. I could easily make the team, but I don’t want to be in cold water every morning before school. I’d like to show off my competence at something, after not exactly impressing during the rappelling event.
Then: “Someone’s coming!” I say, loudly enough, maybe, for Solo and Aislin to hear.
Powerful flashlights stab cylinders of light into the darkness. There are three beams, then a fourth, and one is on me, lighting up my arm and the side of my face, blinding my right eye.
“There they are!” a man’s voice cries.
They’re at the top of the steps. They are not trying to be quiet. They are thundering down after us, their lights bobbing wildly.
The water is close. I see a wooden pier. I see two boats, both small, open motorboats. One has a wooden hull and the other is an inflatable Zodiac-style boat.
Two boats are worse than one. One boat is an escape. Two boats are a chase.
Solo leaps into the wooden boat.
“Cast off!” he yells to Aislin and me.
Aislin says, “What?” But I dive toward the stern rope. It’s looped over a cleat. Aislin sees, understands, and starts to tug at the bow rope.
I hear the sound of a starter.
“Get them, get them, get them!” someone shouts.
A man, no two, hit the pier, two big, football-player-size guys charging at us.
Solo’s hand flashes out and I am yanked bodily through the air, swung aboard. I hit my knees on the bench and trip. My hands plunge into the few inches of cold water in the bottom of the boat.
Aislin jumps and lands hard, but her impact pushes the boat a few inches from the pier.
The engine catches. There’s a hoarse roar and the smell of diesel fuel.
The first of our pursuers leaps.
The boat is two feet away from the pier and gathering speed. The man misses, smacking his face against the side of the boat as he falls.
The other three men skid to a stop.
Solo grabs an orange life jacket and tosses it toward the churning water where the man has gone under. “Hey! Get your man or he’s going to drown!” he yells.
The engine roars and we zoom away into the night.
“They’ll lose a couple of minutes getting him out of the water, but they’ll be after us soon,” Solo says.
“Which boat is faster?” I ask.
“Excellent question,” he allows. “I don’t know.”
Once again the fog—a regular feature of the bay—scuds across the moon. The milky light dies. We could run into a brick wall out here and not see it coming.
“What now?” Aislin asks, panting.
Solo’s at the wheel. It’s too low for him so he has to sort of squat. It’s not a noble or attractive stance. His hair flutters in the breeze, except where some of it is matted with blood.
We are a sad, motley-looking crew. Aislin still sports a black eye and Solo… well, now that I look, his battered face is already looking better. But the boy needs a shower.
I glance over my shoulder at the towering mass of the Spiker buildi
ng. Some offices are lit, some are dark. It’s by far the brightest thing in view, and I’m strangely drawn back to it. It’s dark everywhere else. Back there is dry and safe and well-stocked with food. Out here? Out here we don’t even know what direction to steer.
“We can pull into Angel Island,” Solo says loudly, trying to be heard over the noise of the motor. “There’s no one there but some campers and a small caretaker staff. But we don’t have sleeping bags or tents. Otherwise, we keep going to the city.”
There are numerous cities in the Bay Area. But “the” city can only mean San Francisco. My hometown. I look for it, but it’s completely hidden behind a wall of fog. Not a light showing.
I see flashlights all the way back on the pier.
“I have an idea,” I say. “Do we have a flashlight?”
“Look in that locker,” Solo says.
I rummage through fishing tackle, water bottles, and life vests until I find a flashlight. I test it within the concealment of the locker. It works. And it’s a good, waterproof light.
I grab one of the life vests and wind a strap around the light. I make it as secure as I can.
Then I switch on the light and place the life vest over the side. It bobs away in our wake, then is caught by the current as the tide rushes out toward the Golden Gate.
“Smart,” Solo comments.
“They’ll see the light, figure it’s us,” I say. Then I add, “People will always go toward the light, won’t they?”
No one answers. We all know it’s not true: Sometimes people head straight for darkness.
“I don’t like camping,” I say. “Head for the city.”
– 29 –
SOLO
“So,” Aislin says after we’ve tied off the boat at Fisherman’s Wharf. “Now what?”
“My plan never really went any further than this,” I admit.
The wharf’s asleep, but in a few hours the boats will start to come in. Then the early bird tourists will show up, looking for a latte and a croissant.
For now, it’s a fog-wreathed ghost town of seafood restaurants and closed knickknack shops. The tour boats and ferries rock and creak at the piers. The stainless steel tables, which will soon be piled with crabs and fish on beds of crushed ice, are covered with canvas tarps.
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