Eve and Adam (16 page)

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 terraces 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 building. 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.

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.