Sam

by Francine Pascal

  “Are you done?” the woman asked, rolling her eyeballs skyward.

  “Um, yeah.” Gaia glanced out the door reluctantly. It opened outward. The glass was thick and well reinforced.

  “Please leave.”

  Gaia backed up a few feet. “Okay,” she said.

  One . . . two . . . three . . .

  Gaia slammed into the door at full strength. Just as she’d hoped, the door flew open and caught CJ hard in the face, knocking him backward. She heard his groan of surprise and pain. It gave her the moment she needed to run.

  SoHo, with its single-file sidewalks and indignant pedestrians, was not a good place for sprinting.

  “Excuse me!”

  “Yo, watch it!”

  “What’s your problem?”

  Gaia left a stream of angry New Yorkers in her wake. “Sorry!” she called out in a blanket apology. It was the best she could do at the moment.

  She heard CJ shouting behind her. Then pounding footsteps and the protests of more unhappy pedestrians.

  Gaia hung a quick left on Greene Street. She navigated the sidewalk with the deftness of a running back.

  She heard screams as CJ (presumably) crashed into a woman with a screechy voice. He was gaining on Gaia. He cared less than she did about thrashing innocent bystanders.

  Gaia hooked onto Broome Street and ran west. CJ was just a few yards behind. The street was clotted with traffic, and she needed to cross to the south side, where the sidewalk was clear. The crosswalk was too far. She heard more screams and then a man’s voice.

  “That kid’s got a gun! A gun! Everybody down!”

  “Damn it!” Gaia muttered. Her adrenaline was pumping now. Her muscles were buzzing with intensity. She was an easy target this close. Now what?

  Parked cars were nose to tail at the curb without a break. Gaia pounced on the first parked car she came upon, putting both hands above the driver’s side window and vaulting herself onto the roof. She was in full flee mode now, and she didn’t have the luxury to care about making a spectacle. Thin metal thundered and buckled under her feet. She surveyed the traffic piled up behind the light. She jumped to the roof of the next-nearest car and picked her way across the street from car to car the way she’d use stones to traverse a river. Cars honked. Cabbies shouted. A shot rang out to her left. Oh, man.

  CJ had beaten her to the other side of Broome Street. The idiot was shooting at her in front of hundreds of witnesses. God, she wanted to wring his crazy neck! It was no fair going up against someone with a gun and no sense.

  The traffic light was about to change. Any second, the stones under her feet were going to start moving downstream. She hopped her way back to the north side of the street in half the time and sprinted along Broome Street to the east now. A fast left took her zigging up Mercer. Her breath was coming fast now. The muscles in her legs were starting to ache.

  This lower stretch of Mercer was nearly deserted. If she just ran north, she could cut over a couple of blocks and get to the park. She could run her way out of this. She had her Saucony sneakers on her feet. Footsteps sounded behind her, and she accelerated her pace. She knew that if CJ paused to take aim, he’d lose her. Faster, faster, she urged her protesting leg muscles.

  “You’re dead!” he shouted after her.

  Not yet, she promised herself. She could see the lights of Houston Street. She was getting close.

  Suddenly her escape route was obscured by a large, silhouetted figure. As she got closer she realized his presence wasn’t coincidental. In the side wash of a streetlight she recognized the face. She didn’t know his name, but she’d often seen him with CJ and Marco and the other thugs in the park. A blade winked in his hand.

  Ka-ping! CJ fired a shot, which bounced off the cobblestones several feet away.

  Oh, this sucked. This really sucked. Another wave of adrenaline flowed through her limbs and sizzled in her chest. She dragged in as much air as her lungs could take.

  She juked, but he wouldn’t let her pass. CJ was hard on her heels, so she couldn’t think of stopping. CJ would succeed in shooting her in the back if she gave him any time at all. The space between CJ and his accomplice was closing fast.

  Come on. Come on. Come on.

  The guy in front of her raised the blade. Gaia didn’t stop running. She lifted her arm, drew it back, and without losing a step punched him as hard as she could in the middle of his face. “Sorry,” she murmured to him. Judging from the sting in her fist, she’d broken a tooth or two.

  A bullet seared past her right shoulder. Another past her knee. The toe of her trusty sneaker caught in a deep groove between the cobblestones and she went down hard, scraping the skin of her forearms and shins.

  Shit. Oh, shit.

  Her mind was dreamlike again. She didn’t feel any pain from her ragged, bleeding skin or from the impact to her wrist and knees. There wasn’t anything wrong with her nervous system. It was that every cell of her body was fiercely anticipating the dreaded shot. Some atavistic impulse caused her to bring her hands over her head and curl her knees up in the fetal position.

  Time slowed to an eerie, inexplicable stop. Although CJ had been within a few yards of her, the shot didn’t come. She took big gulps of air. There were no footsteps. No bullets. She heard nothing.

  Slowly, slowly, in disbelief she lifted her head from the street. She turned around cautiously. Her legs shook as she straightened them under the weight of her body.

  She peered into the dark, desolate street.

  He wasn’t there. He really wasn’t. CJ had disappeared, just when his duck had finally sat.

  It was impossible. It made no sense to Gaia. Something told her there was no reasonable explanation for this. But she also knew it would be a mistake to hang around and try to figure out why.

  SAM

  Sometimes I worry there’s something wrong with me. Sometimes I worry I don’t actually feel things like regular people do. Often I’m watching the world rather than actually living in it. It’s not just that I feel distant from the world. The thing that worries me is that a lot of times, I feel distant from myself. I watch myself like I’d watch an actor in a movie. I think, I observe, I process, but I don’t feel anything.

  Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever sat at the funeral of your great-aunt, for example, and worn a solemn expression on your face and tried to tell yourself all the ways in which it was sad, without actually feeling sad at all?

  Have you ever met somebody who said, “Oh my God, that’s so funny!” all the time, but never actually laughed? I’m worried that’s me.

  When my parents split up when I was in fifth grade, I said all of the things a sad kid says in that circumstance. I even wrung out a few tears. When they got back together ten months later, I shared in the happiness. But for me it was abstract. I could sort of talk myself into feeling something — or at least into believing I felt something — but it didn’t come naturally. The emotions certainly didn’t rush over me like a wave. I was their eager host, never their victim.

  Maybe that’s really lucky; I don’t know.

  But the flip side of experiencing pain abstractly is that you experience pleasure that way, too. Sometimes Heather and I will be eating a romantic dinner together or making out in the park, and it feels really good and everything, but I find myself wondering if I’m missing out on something.

  I think this is the reason I can’t get over Gaia Moore. I think it’s the reason why I’m intensely attracted to her and repelled by her at the same time. When I’m with her — when I even think of her — I feel things. I feel a wave brewing just out of reach, building and swelling into a breaker of dangerous proportions.

  So maybe you can see why I have mixed feelings about getting close to Gaia. I’m not sure I want to lose control. I mean, who would willingly turn himself into a victim?

  Maybe that’s what love is — I don’t know.

  HAZARDS

  Sam couldn’t help smiling.“Yeah, I’m getting lu
cky.Very lucky.”

  AN OCEAN AWAY

  GAIA IS IN DANGER.

  Tom Moore looked up from his laptop computer. He’d been thinking vaguely of Gaia all evening — there was nothing unusual in that — but this was the first time a specific thought coalesced in his mind.

  For most of his life he’d discounted notions of telepathy with a certain scorn, but his last five years in the CIA had opened him up to almost any possibility. Was Gaia truly in danger? He felt the familiar worry roiling his stomach.

  He looked out the window of the airplane. The plane was either crossing desert or ocean because the sky was almost clear of cloud cover and beneath him was blackness. There wasn’t a single light or other sign of human life. He felt terribly lonely.

  He wasn’t worried about danger in any ordinary sense. Gaia could get herself out of most situations. Tom, of all people, would know. He was the one who’d taught her. In the case of a mugger or purse snatcher going up against Gaia, Tom would frankly fear more for the criminal than her. Gaia was intensely strong, a master of martial arts and most commonly used weapons, and moreover she was free of the fear that compromised ordinary people. Or at least she was —

  Was.

  What did he know of her now?

  He knew where she lived and where she went to school. Twice a year he received a heavily encrypted notice of her safety and general progress from the agency. He looked forward to those updates with the fervor of a man grasping for a lifeline, even though they were absurdly short, stiff, and uninformative.

  That was it. He knew nothing of her friends, her habits, her pleasures, her emotional state. He had no idea how she was coping with her losses or how close the danger was.

  “Sir?” An attendant offered him dinner on a tray. The smell further distressed his stomach. The food on U.S. military planes was even worse than on commercial flights.

  “No. Thanks. Maybe later.”

  “We should be landing in Tel Aviv in approximately seventeen minutes, sir.”

  “Very well.”

  Tom looked back at his computer screen. His current briefing involved hundreds and hundreds of pages that had been downloaded via satellite during the course of the flight. One couldn’t escape even for a matter of minutes anymore.

  He couldn’t give his mind to the intricacies of desert diplomacy right now.

  There were other dangers to Gaia. More insidious ones that struck close to home. And how could he possibly protect her? Apart from his memories, that was the worst pain he faced.

  In the old days, when Gaia was still a child, he’d been purely blown away by her abilities. She was a miracle. His greatest gift. Her brilliance, her beauty, her athleticism, and most of all her God-given sense of honor astonished him every single hour he spent with her. He couldn’t imagine what he had done in this life to deserve such a child.

  But in these strange days he found himself wishing and praying that his darling, magnificent Gaia were a meek, ordinary creature, likely to catch the attention of no one. A daughter he could trust, above all, to stay out of trouble.

  A THREAT

  “MAN, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR teeth?” Tarick asked. His eyes were bugged out the way they got when he was excited about something.

  Marty put his hand over his mouth. He was embarrassed. One front tooth was gone, and the smaller one to the side of it was cracked down the middle. “The girl got in a lucky punch.”

  CJ snorted and leaned back against the fountain in Washington Square. “The girl laid him out for like five minutes,” he explained. “The girl kicked his ass.” He was relieved that Gaia had busted somebody else for once.

  Tarick turned cold eyes on him. He got up off the fountain wall and paced. “And you, my man. Not having a lot of luck, either?”

  CJ could feel his face fall. He’d been dreading this little talk with Tarick for a good reason. “She’s tough, man. She’s, like, supernatural. And now she’s got somebody watching her back. I had a bead on her down on Mercer Street. I had her, I’m telling you, and somebody wearing a parka and a ski mask bagged me from behind and ran off.”

  “Who was it?” Tarick asked. He looked doubtful.

  “Somebody. I don’t know. I told you — I couldn’t see a face,” CJ said.

  “You’re getting real creative about coming up with excuses,” Tarick said.

  CJ glared at him. It was unfair. “I am totally serious, man. Marty woulda seen ’em, too, but he was out cold.”

  Marty looked hurt, but he didn’t say anything.

  Tarick shook his head. He looked at his watch. He sighed, like he was holding back his temper.

  CJ was starting to feel really uneasy. The midday sun had disappeared, and clouds were rolling in from the west. The October air was suddenly cold against CJ’s bare head. He felt goose bumps rising all along his back, coursing up his neck and scalp.

  “CJ, my man,” Tarick started slowly. “This is not hard. You got a powerful weapon. You know where this girl lives. You gotta do what you said you were gonna do.”

  CJ nodded.

  “And you gotta do it, like I said, by midnight Saturday. We’re not fooling around here, are we?”

  CJ shook his head.

  Tarick sat back on the fountain wall just inches away. He put a hand on CJ’s bald scalp. “I need to be able to tell the boys we avenged Marco, you know what I mean?”

  CJ wished Tarick would remove his hand. It wasn’t supposed to be comforting. It was a threat.

  “Yeah,” CJ mumbled.

  “So let’s make it crystal clear here, okay?” Tarick increased the pressure of his palm against CJ’s shrinking scalp. “Saturday at midnight. If Gaia’s not dead . . .”

  Tarick paused, and CJ stared at him expectantly.

  “Then you are.”

  SEARCH

  SEARCH: THOMAS MOORE

  No Match Found

  Search: Special Agent Moore

  Arlington, Virginia

  No Match Found

  Search: Federal Agent #4466

  No Match Found

  Search: Michael Sage

  No Match Found

  Search: Robert W. Connelly

  No Match Found

  Search: Enigma

  No Match Found

  Search: My goddamned father, you stupid morons.

  No Match Found

  Search:

  Gaia threw the mouse at the monitor. She was getting frustrated. She’d hacked her way into the files of the appropriate federal agency, but the search engine refused to recognize her father’s name, his old badge number, or any of his old aliases.

  Was he with the agency anymore? Was he even still alive?

  She’d always told herself the government would notify her if he were dead. The agency was the only place that knew her whereabouts. She’d also told herself that her dad had to have been up to some pretty covert and important stuff — like single-handedly saving the planet, for instance — to have abandoned her this way.

  She told herself these things, but that didn’t make them true.

  Gaia heard a noise. Oh, no. If Ella was home, she’d have to jump out the window again. A moment spent with that woman was like chewing tinfoil. And this was not Gaia’s computer to be performing illegal operations — or actually any operations — on.

  She crept to the door of George’s office on silent feet. The house was still. She crept back to the computer. According to the time in the right corner of the screen, she had seven minutes before Ella was due home. George wouldn’t be home till after seven.

  Okay. Now what? She drummed her fingers on the mouse pad. She didn’t know the name her father used. She didn’t know where he lived. She didn’t know where he was working. He’d never, in almost five years, made any attempt to contact her. Not quite your doting father.

  She felt the old anger building. Time for a little distraction. As far as Gaia was concerned, a little distraction was worth a lot of solution.

  Okay. Plan 2. Sam. She had been
less successful with plan 2 than plan 1, if that was possible. Could you get lower than zero? Was it appropriate to bring in negative numbers for the sake of comparison?

  She aimed her fingers back at the keyboard. She called up an address-locator web site and typed in Sam’s basic information.

  Aha! All was not lost! Within seconds she had a definitive answer:

  SamMoon3@culdesac.com

  She was just one (borrowed) computer away from direct and private conversation with Sam.

  Ha!

  And she’d done it while leaving one full minute to hide before Ella got home.

  GETTING LUCKY

  SAM LAY IN HIS LUMPY, STEEL-frame twin bed, considering Heather’s note. He didn’t need to look at the note to consider it because he had stared at it so long, he’d committed it to memory.

  Heather was ready. How long had he wanted to hear those words? How long had he fantasized about this very thing?

  God, and after seeing him with Gaia, he’d expected her to be pissed or at least suspicious. But she wasn’t. She was angelic and totally trusting. And he was an undeserving bastard who was about to get unbelievably lucky. Almost too lucky to be true.

  So what was the problem?

  Forget it. There wasn’t a problem. He wasn’t going to get derailed by thinking about the problem.

  If there was a problem, that is. Which there wasn’t.

  He was really, really happy as hell, even if he didn’t realize it one hundred percent yet.

  Time to think about Saturday night. That was only two days away. Heather was coming here, to his dorm room, and they were going to . . .

  Oh, man. He was starting to feel tingly. He stared up at the stained acoustical tile on the ceiling. It wasn’t the most romantic sight. He glanced at the piles of clothes around his room. He looked at the mound of chess books, magazines, and clippings blanketing his desk. He eyed the new box of syringes he’d just bought for his diabetes treatments. He propped himself up on his elbow and studied the grayish sheet covering his mattress. Exactly when was the last time he’d washed that sheet? Had it been gray to start out with, or was it born white? The fact that he couldn’t remember the answer to either question wasn’t a good sign.