Eve and Adam

– 33 –

I’m frantic. I still have my phone, but I don’t have Solo’s number. I ask my phone where I can find a computer for rent. I follow the directions and head toward it at a trot.

This is happening too fast. I can’t let Solo do it.

Can I?

The copy center is closed. It doesn’t open for another two hours. I look around, desperate. I’m in the financial district now, a midget at the feet of giants. The Transamerica Pyramid is in one direction, the Bank of America building in the other. I head toward the B of A, hesitate, stop, wish I had psychic powers, look carefully in every direction. Nothing. No one but a street person, an older woman, who pushes a shopping cart toward me while muttering, “I told her it was okay, I told her it was okay.”

Schizophrenia, a genetic condition. The kind of terrifying disease that might be cured with the right knowledge, if you knew just where to find the particular genetic codes and could snip, snip, paste, paste.

Would the mentally ill street person want to be cured if she knew that it meant a basement full of freaks and monsters?

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.