Eve and Adam (19 page)

Don’t be a fool, I tell myself. Of course she would. Just about anyone would.

Where did Solo go?

He could be anywhere, I realize. He doesn’t need to wait for some library or printing company to open. There are computers all around me. They’re piled seventy stories high. Solo, being Solo, may have already found an office left unlocked, or charmed his way past a security guard. The odds are that the deadly data is already propagating across the Web.

This isn’t his decision. It’s our decision.

“Yeah, well, screw you, Solo,” I say bitterly. “You can drop dead and die!”

I’m aware of the redundancy in that statement.

I head dejectedly back to the pier warehouse. I pause at a doughnut shop. I go in, telling myself I’ll just grab a cup of coffee. I come out with a dozen doughnuts, some of them still so fresh they’re hot. I devour two on my way home.

It isn’t far back to the pier. The door’s unlocked, just as I’d left it. Some part of me hopes Aislin’s returned. I want to hear her tease me for resorting to comfort pastry.

Some other part of me is hoping Solo’s returned, so I can scream at him and then, quite possibly, kiss him for several days.

More doughnut.

As soon as I’m inside, I know I’m not alone.

The rising sun beams through the high windows. It lights the tops of the statues glaring down at me with animal ferocity.

The sun also lights one side of his face.

He sees me.

He doesn’t move.

“Evening?” he asks.

“Adam,” I say.

– 34 –

SOLO

On the twenty-seventh floor of the Bank of America building I find a big law firm. They aren’t open for business, but they work the lawyers hard at places like this. A rushing, harried young woman is on her way in. She fumbles with the key, gets it finally, and throws open the door before hurrying inside.

The door swings shut, but not fast enough. I stick the toe of my sneaker in, just barely, to keep it open. I wait three minutes to make sure the lawyer has gotten to her own office. Then I slip inside.

The lights are dim, the reception desk empty, the floors carpeted. I try to guess which way the lawyer has gone, decide it was to the left. I go right. Some individual offices are locked, others are wide open.

Their computers look pretty up-to-date, but I’m able to find one with a USB port. I enter the office and close the door behind me. There’s a nice view down California Street.

The computer’s password protected. I try the basics: 1,2,3,4. QWERTY. YTREWQ, which is querty backward. PASSWORD. A few others. Whoever uses this computer isn’t quite that dumb. They are, however, dumb enough to write it down in the corner of the desk blotter.

I check the clock, stick in the flash drive. It’s slow to load. Very slow, since there are a lot of hi-res images.

From here it will be simple. All I have to do is attach the file to a dozen e-mails: CNN, the
New York Times
, various members of Congress from both parties, contacts I know in the hacker collective Anonymous, the FBI.

I type the addresses in. Each will know the others have received the same documents, so there will be no chance of a cover-up.

All I have to do is push “send.”

All. I have to do.

Is push “send.”

What follows won’t happen overnight. The world doesn’t move that fast. But in days or weeks the FBI will descend on Terra Spiker.

Congress will schedule hearings.

Documents and files will be seized. In the end, likely, handcuffs will grind shut around the wrists of Terra and Tattooed Tommy and probably lots of others.

I sit, unmoving, staring at the screen.

A crime’s been committed. Many crimes. Some may be more than criminal; they may be evil.

But I can’t lie to myself and pretend that’s my only motive. I’m angry at Terra Spiker for the life she’s given me. For treating me like one of her low-level employees after my parents died. For keeping me, if not quite a prisoner, then close to it in the walled-off world of Spiker Biopharm.

For doing to me what she did to Eve.

“Do this,” I tell myself.

Chaos and madness. Unleash it. What’s that phrase?

Cry havoc?

I actually pause to Google it.

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” I read.

Then I read that “cry havoc” was a phrase from Shakespeare’s day, a signal to soldiers to burn and pillage and rape.

So, a bad choice of things to think about.

Shakespeare used the phrase in two other plays. He must have liked it. One is something about a stained field. Bloodstains, of course. The third is from a play I’ve never heard of.

“Do not cry havoc, where you should but hunt with modest warrant,” I read aloud.

I gaze at the words on the screen.

Seriously, Solo? You’re hesitating? You’ve lived for this moment.

Let slip the dogs of war!

Or …

Hunt with modest warrant.

Just theoretically, I ask myself, what would that mean, to hunt with modest warrant? What’s the step that isn’t quite dogs of war?

I’m agitated. I feel bouncy and twitchy all of a sudden. Frustrated, in more than one way.

Really, Solo? A Google search stops you?

A Google search and a kiss. That’s the truth of it. That’s what has me jumpy and indecisive and looking for an excuse to just not go all dogs of war.

I’m a warrior. I
am
a dog of war. I’ve spent years … and now the will drains out of me because of a kiss and a Shakespeare quote?

Well, not
just
the kiss. The rope descent, that was … Yep, breathing a little harder at the memory, and whatever that brings to mind (I know exactly what it brings to mind). Whatever that memory means to me, if I drop my finger on that “send” key, a memory is all it will ever be.

The problem is that I can feel her legs wrapped around me, and I can taste her lips, and I can imagine, and imagination is a damned tease, imagination will torture you, but knowing that doesn’t stop it. My imagination is off and running, running through places sweet and sweaty. And it’s not just that, not just the sweaty parts or even the sweet parts, it’s the feeling that my life is a laser beam that just encountered a mirror, that it’s being bent, a sudden turn, a wild veer, a turn, all of that stuff, all that feeling that whatever the hell I thought my life was, maybe it’s not. Maybe the whole story of Solo was just a way to get to this point, only the point is not the poisoned e-mail that rests half an inch below the index finger of my right hand, the point is something I never saw coming and surprise! the Solo story is not all what I thought it was.

Justice and revenge. Or Eve.

My hand flies back. As if I’d suddenly discovered the keyboard was a cherry-red stovetop.

I gasp.

I stare at my hand. My hand made the decision. My hand thinks I’m an idiot. My hand thinks only a damned fool would choose revenge over love.

I think my hand may be right.

One way or the other, the decision isn’t mine to make alone. I need Eve.

– 35 –

“Evening,” he says again.

I nod. Too vigorously. Because my voice is sure to fail.

He’s here.

But he can’t be here.

He’s real.

But he can’t be real.

He’s taller, somehow, in reality. His eyes are alive now, amazingly alive. He’s curious, concerned. He knows me—that much I can tell. He knows who I am.

He’s the most beautiful male I’ve ever seen. Ever. Anywhere. George Clooney and Johnny Depp and Justin Timberlake and all of them, all of them, would be cast as Adam’s less attractive best friend.

I wonder, can he speak anything more than my name?

Although even that’s great. I liked hearing him say my name. I’d like him to do it again.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he says.

“Unh?” I respond brilliantly.

“Your mother sent me to find you.”

It’s obviously true, and the honesty of it surprises me. “Are you supposed to tell me that?”

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t shrug or smile or duck his head. I realize he has no affectations. He’s acquired no little tics or habits.

The strangeness of seeing him leaves me speechless. He’s a creature from a dream. He’s something I doodled on a sketch pad, brought to life, fully formed.

I want to touch him. To ensure that he’s real and not some weird trick of my tired mind.

I also just want to touch him. Because … just because.

And I believe I can touch him. I believe he will allow me. I believe this because he is, in some impossible way, mine. Does he know that?

“Do you know who I am?” I ask. I’m not just asking if he knows my name. I’m asking if he knows who I am, what I am. I’m asking if he knows my importance.

It’s the kind of thing I’ve heard coming from my mother on more than one occasion: Do you know
who
I am? With italics on the “who” and a rising, incredulous tone on the “am.”

I don’t say it that way. But I mean it that way.

It’s insane to even think like this, but despite the magnificence of this boy, he is in some sense mine. And I want him to know it.

You are mine, Adam.

Where the hell does that kind of thinking even come from?

“You are the one who designed me,” Adam says. “I am your perfect match. Your soul mate.”

“You know about all that?”

The first hesitation. He isn’t being coy. He’s considering. “I don’t think I know all of anything, Evening.”

I want to tell him to stop using my name because every time he does it sends a shiver through me. I don’t want a shiver. I don’t want him to make me weak in the knees.

I stay silent and he continues. “I have been given some information. It’s a crude technique, I understand, so all I know is parts of things. I’m still being formed mentally. I have knowledge but no experience.”

“That won’t make you so different from most guys,” I say. It’s a smart-ass remark. A joke. Does he have a sense of humor? I gave him one. At least, I included the codes that would tend to allow him to develop a sense of humor, but does he have the experience to know a joke when he hears one?

“You made me different from most guys,” he says.

That might be a semi-witty comeback. I’m prepared to accept it as such because I don’t think I could ever have a relationship with a guy who has no sense of humor.

Relationship?

Back up there, girl.

Back right up against that … Okay, no. I’m now arguing with myself. Chiding myself. I’m in charge here, right? I shouldn’t even be thinking about him as anything other than a very interesting experiment. He’s my A-plus science project.

Some rational part of my brain points out that this—this person, this creation, whatever Adam is—is a walking crime. Real or unreal, living or fabricated, it doesn’t matter. Adam shouldn’t be here. Someone breathed life into him and sent him out into the world, and that was wrong.

But try as I might, I can’t stand here two feet away from him and not react. I don’t think there’s a person of any gender, or no gender, for that matter, who could stand here and not react to him.

He is a work of art.

If I do say so myself.

“Okay,” I say, mostly just to have something to say, because otherwise I’m just looking him up and down and up and down and it’s impolite to stare. “What did my mother tell you to do once you found me?”

“She wants me to ask you to come back.”

“That’s it? No excuses or explanations? Just ‘come back’? She didn’t say anything else?”

“She said some things which I don’t believe she wanted me to say to you. They were more in the nature of observations.”

Poor guy, he seems to think I’d leave that alone. “Observations?”

“Statements.”

I tilt my head quizzically. He starts to do the same, then stops himself. I inhibited his willingness to be influenced. I gave him that individualistic streak.

“Do you remember any of those statements? Her statements?”

“Yes. They were among the first things I ever heard.”

“Please tell me.”

“Okay.” He frowns slightly with the effort of recall. “She’s a headstrong little bitch, okay, well, so am I, she got that from me. She doesn’t think she owes me anything, she doesn’t think I gave her anything, it was always about her father. Well, too bad, honey, because he’s dead and I’m all that’s left. And now she’s off with Solo, that snake in the grass, I should have known better. I did, didn’t I? I knew I had to keep them separated and then like an idiot I let them meet. I will destroy that little monster, I swear, after all I’ve done for him, taking him in when his backstabbing, criminal parents … and who does Evening think cost her her father?”

I hold up my hand. “What?”

“Do you want me to repeat it? I probably missed a few words. I don’t have a photographic memory. But you know that already.”

“What did she say next?”

“That was it. She seemed agitated—”

“She’s more or less always agitated,” I interrupt.

“But then she stopped herself and said, ‘You don’t need to know any of that. And don’t tell Evening any of it.’”