Blind

by Francine Pascal

  BLIND

  FRANCINE PASCAL

  SIMON PULSE

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  A footstep on the stairs. Another.

  She raised the gun. Two-hand stance. One foot pushed slightly back. Well balanced. Just as her father had taught her.

  Another step.

  Gaia aimed the gun at the level of the doorknob. Waist-level for Natasha. That was another of her father’s instructions. Always keep a gun aimed at the center of the body. Don’t go for anything fancy like a head shot; just make sure you connect with the target. If Natasha rushed her, Gaia could drop the gun and fight. If Natasha was carrying a weapon, Gaia could shoot.

  She was ready.

  Don’t miss any books in this thrilling series:

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Simon Pulse edition May 2002

  Text copyright © 2002 by Francine Pascal

  Cover copyright © 2002 by 17th Street Productions, an Alloy, Inc. company.

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  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2001097510

  To the best fans: Emily, Kathryn, Lucy, Maddy, Meg

  ISBN 978-0-7434-4399-9

  eISBN-13: 978-0-743-45282-3

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  broken glass

  Instead of life with Gaia, it had turned out to be the start of life After Gaia. Ed A.G.

  Spider Gaia

  GAIA UNFOLDED THE NOTE AND squinted at the words for the twentieth time. She had to take a few steps down the sidewalk and hold the note up under a streetlamp before she could see well enough to read.

  TOM MOORE, APT. 1801, ABERDEEN BLDG.

  Pretty sketchy note. Whoever had slipped the piece of paper under Natasha’s front door was a long way from Tolstoy.

  Since finding the paper that night when she’d come home, Gaia had folded and unfolded the sheet so many times that the little piece of paper was already starting to wear thin along the creases. Another couple of hours and she’d have nothing left but some ragged confetti.

  Gaia raised the note and squinted at the sloping handwriting in the poor light, trying to see if there was some secret she might decipher from the six short words. Had her father written the note? Maybe. She couldn’t tell. The letters were scribbled, which could mean whoever had written the note had been in a hurry. That could mean someone was after the note writer, and that could mean it had been written by her father. Sure. And it could have been written by Santa Claus. Maybe with a little help from his pal, the Easter bunny.

  Gaia scowled at the letters until the message started to blur. Was this an invitation? Was her father asking her to meet him at this location? It was just as likely—probably more likely—that her uncle had written the note and that the thing was nothing but an invitation to get herself neatly dissected under a microscope. That was, assuming her uncle really was the killer Loki. Gaia didn’t know that. Not for sure. She took one last look at the note, then jammed the paper into the pocket of her jeans. She wasn’t sure of a damn thing these days.

  If mysterious people were going to drive her crazy with cryptic notes, Gaia wished they could at least leave a decent address. It had taken two hours online before Gaia was able to locate the Aberdeen Building. By the time she’d climbed up out of the subway on the west side of Central Park and hunted through the maze of apartment buildings and brownstones, it had been close to five in the morning. Even with an address, it had taken another twenty minutes to identify the Aberdeen as a skinny, twenty-story affair that looked out of place among a crowd of newer and much shorter duplexes.

  Gaia stopped on the corner and watched the building as cabs rolled slowly by on the narrow street. Despite its height, the Aberdeen had a weary, worn-down look about it. The building was faced with some kind of gray stone, which had grown smeared and dark from years of air pollution. There were carvings at the corners. Big gray faces. They might have been faces of presidents, or famous explorers, or rich old farts who had put up the cash for the building. Whoever they were supposed to be, they all had a serious case of acid rain acne and were too eroded for Gaia to make out much more than hollow eyes and grim expressions.

  She counted narrow balconies along the flat front of the building until she found the eighteenth floor. Most of the rooms were dark, but some were light. Gaia wondered who would be awake at this crazy pre-dawn hour. Maybe her father. Or a killer. Or both.

  Either way, Gaia hoped for some answers.

  She hustled through the traffic and up onto the sidewalk in front of the Aberdeen. When she reached for the worn brass handle on the front door, it unexpectedly flew open, and a man in a dark red uniform stepped out. “Yes?” he said through a muffled yawn. Clearly, Gaia was interrupting his nap. “Can I help you?”

  Gaia studied the man for a second. There was some kind of unwritten rule: The shoddier the building, the more elaborate the doorman. This guy looked like he was ready to lead French forces at the Ardennes. Or maybe the British in the Boer War. He looked almost old enough to have been at both battles. His red wool uniform was several sizes too big for his buzzard shoulders, and the long, sweeping coat brushed the tops of his boots. Gold braid spilled off the brim of a ridiculous felt hat. There was even something that looked like medals jangling against the man’s pocket. Gaia wondered what kind of medals a doorman might get. The Silver Star in taxi hailing? The Purple Heart for bad Christmas tips?

  The doorman stepped completely out of the old apartment building and let the door swing closed behind him. “You want something here?” he asked, folding his thin, uniformed ar
ms across his thin, uniformed chest.

  Gaia shrugged. “Just visiting.”

  “And who is it you were visiting at this hour?”

  “My father. He has to catch an early flight and I’m here to see him off.”

  Sounds plausible.

  “Your father, is it? And what would his name be?” The doorman had an accent that sounded like Dublin by way of a decade in Brooklyn.

  Gaia started to say something, stopped, and tried to think. What name would her father have used?

  “What’s wrong there, miss? Don’t you know your own father’s name?”

  “Moore. His name’s Tom Moore.”

  The doorman’s colorless lips puckered. “I’ve not heard of him.”

  “What about Oliver?”

  “Mr. Oliver?”

  “No, Oliver Moore.”

  The man shook his head, sending the gold braid on his cap into a dance. “Never heard that name, either.” He squinted at Gaia with pale gray eyes. “You sure you’ve come to the right building, miss?”

  Gaia gritted her teeth and stared through the glass door behind the man. She could see a long, marble-floored hallway leading back to a pair of elevators and the old metal button between them that would take her up to her father. “This is the right building,” she said. “My father lives here, and I want to see him.” She started to move around the doorman, but the old man stepped back against the door and shook his head again.

  “You can’t come in. Not unless someone inside says it’s okay.”

  “My father—”

  “I don’t know your father,” said the doorman. “You give me a name I know and I’ll ring a bell, see if someone wants you on the inside; otherwise you need to get out of my door.”

  The muscles in Gaia’s jaw tightened into a painful knot. The pleasant idea of kicking the man’s bony ass down the street came and lingered for a few moments in her mind. Reluctantly she shoved it away. She had no doubt that she could take this guy out with both hands behind her back and blindfolded. But the doorman was just an old guy doing his job. A sour old guy, yeah, but that didn’t mean he deserved to get his ugly wrinkled face turned inside out.

  Gaia turned away from the door without another word and marched back along the sidewalk. She heard the old man give a grunt behind her. He sounded awfully satisfied with himself. Maybe he would get another medal. The Medal of Doorman Honor for keeping ignorant kids out of the building.

  As soon as she was around the corner, Gaia stopped. She tipped back her head and looked up the long side of the building. She could see the first few floors well enough, but the top was nearly lost in dingy gray fog and darkness. Eighteen floors was… what? Two hundred feet? Something like that.

  It was one of those moments when fear would have been handy. It would have been nice to know if the decision she was about to make was very brave or just really, really stupid. But there was nothing. Not even one of those gut-grabbing jolts she’d been having ever since her uncle had tried to cure her of fearlessness.

  Gaia crouched down, her fingers touching the cold surface of the sidewalk. Then she jumped up, reaching for the gray face at the corner of the building. Her left hand closed on the damp, worn stone and she pulled herself up. It wasn’t until she was looking into the hollow eyes of the oversized face that she realized she was holding on to the carved nose.

  Gaia laughed, which cost her a foot of climbing. She worked her fingers into a gap between two of the building’s sandstone blocks and scrambled against the stone with the toes of her sneakers. A few seconds later she was standing on the face and reaching up for the lowest of the balconies. From the second floor to the fourth she clung to a rusty drainpipe. It made Gaia think of how she used to climb up the drainpipe into her bedroom at George and Ella’s brownstone by Washington Square Park That was, what? Three months ago? Less? It seemed like forever.

  The drainpipe headed off at the wrong angle above the fourth floor, but Gaia found a crack barely big enough for a finger jam and a narrow band of marble that ran along the building between floors. The marble strip made for a treacherous ledge, barely more than a fingernail wide, but Gaia was able to jump from there and catch the bottom of the fifth-floor balcony. She pulled herself up and rested for a moment. Through the window she could hear someone’s radio alarm blaring the weather report. They were expecting rain.

  Perfect timing. Coming inside from the rain, plopping down on a couch, and listening to a little morning show seemed like a rather attractive idea at the moment. Gaia grinned as she thought of what the people inside would think. Surprise. Your fearless neighborhood Spider Gaia is here.

  A series of raised stones made travel easy from five up to the tenth floor. Another narrow marble band got her to eleven, where it was so dark, Gaia had to do more feeling for holds than looking. The tips of her fingers began to get sore from rubbing against the rough stone.

  She remembered a climbing trip with her father when she was ten. Clean mountain winds somewhere up in Vermont. Warm pink granite gleaming under spring sunshine. She glanced down. Not exactly Vermont. The dark street was more than a hundred feet below her. There was one insomniac out walking his dog, but he didn’t look up. People in New York never looked up. They were too afraid of being mistaken for tourists.

  On her way from eleven to fourteen—Gaia figured that an old building like this wouldn’t call any floor thirteen—she reached a new set of faces. The faces looked especially weird up here, with all the light coming from the street lamps. The eyes were deep and dark, the mouths open. The face right in front of her looked mad and kind of hungry. So this is what it feels like to step on someone. Gaia shook her head and mentally corrected herself—it was just something else to climb on. She jumped up and grabbed for the granite face.

  The nose snapped off in her hand.

  For a long second Gaia could only stare at the broken bit of granite in her hand. Grab the reins, Gaia, it’s an inanimate object. She scrambled wildly, fingers scraping against the rough sandstone, her feet seeking anything that might stop her fall. She tumbled down, falling back from the building as she plummeted past the twelfth balcony. Head down, she saw the sidewalk coming up toward her face. Fast.

  Gaia felt something like a dull icicle stab into her heart. Oh, sure, now Oliver’s magical mystery brew decides to kick in. Her stomach made a mad run for her throat.

  A wild kick and she managed to jam a foot through the railing on the eleventh-floor balcony. The sudden twist and jerk on her leg was so hard that she was sure she had broken it. A moment later she forgot all about the pain in her leg as her body smashed against the side of the building with such force that all the air burst from her lungs.

  Oh, yeah, she thought. That was graceful.

  She dangled there by one aching leg for long seconds. Her heart was beating hard enough that she swore she could hear it. Her breath was coming in needle-sharp gasps.

  Why was it I wanted to feel fear? The feeling she got from the serum never showed up when she needed it. It only put in an appearance right at the moment when Gaia needed to be thinking clearly.

  It took at least a minute for Gaia to recover, bend like a jackknife, and make her way back up to the balcony. Her leg hurt. Her hip hurt. Her arms and back and head hurt. The fake fear feeling slipped away slowly. Ready, no doubt, to make a return visit when it was needed least. Gaia made a mental note: In retrospect, the decision to climb the building seemed more on the stupid side of the line. She’d have to remember that for the future. Then she reached her increasingly sore fingers up and started climbing again.

  On this second pass she avoided the cracked face on her way to fourteen. More worn stones gave her an easy ride to fifteen. Another pipe made the trip to sixteen easy.

  Halfway to seventeen the rain came.

  Not bothering to drizzle, the weather went straight from dry to downpour. Gaia glanced up and saw the pale reflection of the city’s lights against the bottom of the clouds. In the distance the sky gr
ew bright with a tangle of lightning.

  “Perfect,” Gaia said aloud. “Absolutely perfect.”

  The wet stone was suddenly five hundred percent more slippery under her grip. There was no pipe making an easy road up to seventeen. No fat and simple cracks in the stones. Gaia hung on like a lizard clinging to a wall. Her fingers and arms trembled. She climbed as much with the muscles in her stomach as the muscles in her legs.

  The balcony on seventeen was enticing. Gaia even thought of going inside and making her way to the eighteenth floor with genuine stairs, like a human being, but there were sounds from the other side of the glass door. Sounds that showed there were two people inside. At least two. Gaia shook her head and looked out at the flickering lightning. At least somebody was having fun on this ugly night.

  She left the moaning and panting behind and headed up the final stretch to eighteen. Fortunately the building was more worn here, the blocks of stone curved at the edges and the gaps wide. Gaia had no problem finding enough handholds and footholds to get herself up the last ten feet to the next balcony. Once on eighteen she crouched on the balcony for a few minutes to catch her breath. She had started to open the door before she noticed that someone had put numbers on the door handles. This was 1803. She glanced to the side. The next balcony was close, not more than six feet away. A short jump.

  Brave or stupid? She looked down. This decision was simple. If she made it, it was brave. If she splattered on the sidewalk, it was stupid.

  Gaia climbed on the railing and made the jump. It was an easy jump if you could ignore the wet, slippery railing and the two hundred feet of nothing that waited for anyone who might screw up.

  Apartment 1801 was dark. Gaia pressed her ear against the cold glass of the balcony door. Nothing. Only the soft hiss of rain against the building and the distant sound of traffic down below. She grabbed the door handle and pulled. It was unlocked.

  A nearby flash of lightning momentarily lit the room, and Gaia felt, more than heard, a rumble of thunder that came right on top of the light. In that split second she saw that the apartment was small, just a modified studio, with a half wall that separated the kitchen from the rest of the living area. She caught the impression of a table and a couch, a few odds and ends of furniture. And she got the definite idea that she wasn’t the first visitor to the apartment. Disappointment washed over her. She might find some answers in this place, but if her father ever had been here, he was certainly long gone. She took one slow step into the darkness, felt along the wall for a switch, and flipped it on.