Blind (2 page)

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 grew 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.

The apartment looked like a shipwreck. The cushions had been torn from the couch and the cloth slashed open to reveal ragged cores of dingy white foam. Books and papers were strewn everywhere. An armchair was overturned, a coffee table broken.
Pictures had been pulled from the wall. Refrigerator and cabinet doors hung open, and all their contents, from bottles of soda to bags of flour, had been spilled onto the center of the kitchen floor like the ingredients for some huge and nasty recipe.

Gaia waded into the room, her sneakers crunching on broken glass. The place reeked. There was a sour, spoiled-meat smell—from the mess in the kitchen, she hoped—and above that the sharp, acrid odor of smoke. She navigated through the piles of broken furniture and heaps of ripped books and traced the fumes back to the wisps of smoke rising from inside a small metal trash can. It was clear that whoever had destroyed the apartment had done it very recently. She reached into the can, pulled out a stack of blackened, smoldering paper, and flipped it back and forth through the air. A few sparks flew off from the sides before the smoke stopped rising.

“All right,” she said. “Let's see what was worth making such a stink.”

The first few sheets where hopeless. The paper flaked away into dust as soon as she touched it. At the back of the pack a single page had survived. The paper was charred black at the top, and there were a few holes on the page, but the rest was only a toasty brown. In these lighter areas Gaia could make out… something. She held the scorched page close to her
face and frowned. The first part was a mess. Some kind of code. The rest didn't even look like writing. There were no letters that she recognized. Instead, what was left of the page was completely covered in three repeating symbols. A green delta. A red cross. A blue circle. A brown square. The symbols sprawled right up to the right edge of the paper. In the burned areas she could make out glossy spots where more symbols had been.

Gaia stared intently. Some new kind of code? She was good with codes, always had been, but this was unusual. Four symbols, over and over, and what looked like random combinations. How could she translate this?

She lowered the page and gave the metal trash can a sharp kick. The can turned over, spilling gray ash onto the floor. Smoke started to rise from the bland, tan carpeting, but Gaia stomped it out before it could become a real fire. She stirred the black mess with the toe of her shoe and saw something else that had escaped total consumption by the flames. She reached in and pulled out a Polaroid photo. Like the paper, most of the photograph was blackened. The plastic covering over the picture had bubbled and turned brown. In the shadows that remained, Gaia could barely make out the silhouettes of three people, but she couldn't see any of their faces clearly enough to say who they were. Gaia and her parents? Tom and
some friends? There was nothing but dark, somewhat eerie shadows.

“Wonderful.” Gaia sighed and looked around the room. A half-burned page full of nonsense and a half-burned photo of three ghosts. Not exactly the kind of answers she had been hoping for.

Gaia, this is your old friend Disappointment.

Disappointment, you certainly remember Gaia. You've met her so many times.

It took half an hour for Gaia to sift through the mess on the floor and check around the room for something the messy visitors might have missed. If there were secrets hiding in this place, they were evidently staying secret. Finally Gaia found a plastic bag that was half full of crushed soda cans.

My father,
she thought.
Sure, he's a spy, a liar, and probably a killer, but he recycles.
She dumped the cans on the floor, put the burned photo and page of symbols into the bag, and stuffed the little package into her coat.

She gave a moment's thought to climbing back down the way she had come up, then shook her head. There was plain stupid and
really
stupid, then there was gargantuan stupid. Gaia gave a last look at the wrecked apartment, flipped off the lights, and went out into the hall to ring for an elevator. She stopped at the door on the way out, turned, and gave the doorman a quick, fierce hug.

“The party was great,” she said. “Thanks for the invite.”

Gaia didn't bother to look back and see the expression on the old man's face. She just hunched her shoulders against the rain and kept walking.

THUNDERSTORMS AND CRUTCHES DID not mix. The rubber tips on the ends of the steel-and-wood contraptions weren't exactly nonslip under the best of conditions. In the rain they were about as useful as racing slicks on a snail.

“Are you sure you want to walk around in this weather? he asked.

Tatiana looked at him and flashed a bright smile. “You said we could look around the park today. I've walked around Moscow in worse weather.

“Besides,” she began, but Ed could see her struggle as she tried to translate her thoughts into English. In only a few weeks her speech had already become more fluid, more casual, but she still had trouble digging out the perfect word. “I have you to take care of me.”

“Oh, yeah. Sir Limp-a-Lot.” Ed knew he wasn't the
world's most likely protector, even if it did feel good to have a pretty girl say that she was counting on him. And Tatiana was extremely pretty. Ed held up one crutch and waved it through the rain. “Bad guys beware.”

Tatiana put her hand on Ed's shoulder and let it rest there for the space of several heartbeats. “I can't think of anyone else I would rather have looking out for me.”

Ed stared at her hand. Buzzers went off in his head. Warning. Warning. Physical contact. What was Tatiana doing? This wasn't supposed to be an official date. Friends only. Strictly casual.

“Uh, Tatiana…”

She took her hand away and gave him a soft smile. “Are you ready?”

Ed looked into her wide eyes. There was an expression on her face that he couldn't quite read. “That depends. Ready for what?”

“For a walk around the park, of course.”

“One cold, dark walk coming up.” Ed could still feel the spot where she had rested her hand on his arm. It probably didn't mean anything. Tatiana was from Russia. People in Russia probably did a lot more touching. It was just a friendly thing.

He looked up at the drizzle falling down around the nearest streetlight. “We're going to get wet.”

“It's only water,” said Tatiana. “I don't think I will drip.”

“You won't what?”

“Drip. Like an ice-cream cone when it gets hot.”

“Melt.” Ed couldn't help but grin. “You won't melt. You're way too…” He was going to finish with “sweet,” but then he realized how pathetic and cornball that sounded. Like something from a really awful black-and-white movie on the Family Channel. Like something from a guy who was desperate to be in love. Only this wasn't the right girl.

He cleared an irritating lump from his throat. “You sure you won't be cold?”

“Cold? Here?” It was Tatiana's turn to smile. “It's practically summer here compared to back home.” She held out a blue umbrella and pressed a button on the shaft, and the canopy opened into a wide dome. “Besides, I have this to keep the rain away.”

“Okay,” said Ed. “We'll just make a quick lap now and then come back when the weather's better, okay? It'll be more entertaining then.”

She nodded, her blue eyes bright. “Yes, that sounds perfect.”

Ed started up the sidewalk with Tatiana close at his side. The wet sidewalk limited how fast he could move, but Tatiana didn't seem to mind. She paced along beside him, holding the blue umbrella above them both.