Strange, maybe, but that decides it for me. I’ll get the money. Because my best friend is not going to live the rest of her life feeling like she dumped her boyfriend when he was helpless.

Maddox is going to live, if I have anything to say about it.

Then she can dump the jerk.

– 38 –

SOLO

I walk the streets of San Francisco with doom in my pocket, a heavy dread in my heart, and a longing to be back at Spiker delivering bagels.

Tommy will come looking for me. I’m sure of that. I knocked him off his stride, and by escaping I’ve probably frustrated him to the point of throwing furniture.

But he can’t find me. So for now I’m safe.

Will he guess that I have the deadly information with me? Will he guess that I’ve hesitated to disseminate it?

What’s his play? Run to Terra, no doubt. Warn her that their little creep show is over.

Why doesn’t the idea of that scene make me happy? Oh, I know why: Eve. Eve has screwed everything up. Eve has messed me up. She’s scrambled my brain. She’s totally confused me.

Which is why I have to see her. To un-confuse myself.

Probably if I tried to re-create that kiss now it would have no effect on me. No bad effect, by which I mean no good effect, as in it would probably have no effect on me at all.

This is a confusing train of thought.

Probably I won’t have a completely clear head until I test out the proposition. The one about a second kiss meaning nothing to me at all. At all.

I decide to kick a bag of trash on the sidewalk.

Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, I have to go see her, see what she’s up to, see what she thinks I should do. Get her permission. Yes, her permission, no, I don’t mean that. Because she is not the boss of me.

I remember when I walked in behind her and she was working on that sim—no not a sim, was it—but that’s later knowledge and what I’m really remembering is the way her hair was kind of swept aside and it was with great difficulty that I did not walk over and kiss the back of her neck.

At which point, she no doubt would have turned around and punched me.

Or not.

I walk faster. It’s downhill, so I can make good time. Is it possible she hasn’t realized that I left with the drive? No, no way. Dammit.

Why did I?

Because I was scared. And I am never scared.

The Embarcadero is in view. Traffic is starting to pick up. The trolleys go shrieking past. There are a pair of old gay dudes walking hand-in-hand with a tiny dog on a leash. There’s a street guy checking the trash for cans. There’s a business chick in a gray skirt suit and sneakers. I wonder if she’s the lawyer whose office I misappropriated.

I push through a mini-crowd of commuters and march purposefully toward the pier warehouse, where I will grab Eve and kiss the living hell out of her. No. First I’ll ask her whether I should or should not destroy her mother and her family business.

I stop at the edge of the pier. Something is wrong. I feel it. So I stop.

And it’s too late. Because there are two guys behind me, standing way too close.

“We have guns!”

I turn to look at them. It’s Dr. Chen and Dr. Anapura. Big Brains. Chen is in his forties. He has a chronically startled look behind glasses he thinks make him look hip. Anapura is a woman about fifteen years older than I am. She has a long braid down her back that nearly touches her … well, it’s really long.

“You guys absolutely do not have guns,” I say.

Chen points meaningfully and nervously to a bulge beneath his jacket.

Anapura pulls something from her coat pocket that looks like a can of hair spray. It’s not.

She hoses me with it, I say something brilliant like, “Hey!” and then the world goes swirly.

*   *   *

I can’t say that I expect to wake up anywhere in particular. But where I do wake up is not in the pier warehouse.

The mildew smell is gone. So is the sound of water sloshing against the pilings. There’s something in the taste of the air that’s familiar.

I’m back at Spiker.

Strong hands grab me. There’s a hood over my head. I’m being hauled up to my feet and pushed forward. They’ve taken my shoes. My bare feet are on carpeting. My hands are tied behind me. I sense that there are at least three or four people around me.

We go through a door.

“Wha—” I start to say, and only then does my befuddled mind realize there’s a piece of duct tape over my mouth.

More doors. An elevator.

We’re going down.

Out of the elevator, through a locked door—I hear them keying the combination—and then we’re on another elevator. Going down again.

Going down to where? There is nothing this far down. I know the Spiker campus like I know my own face. There is no second set of elevators. There is no sub-basement.

And yet there is.

The elevator stops and I am shoved out. I stumble. I smack into something hard and unyielding, like a wall, only not. I feel it as it slides past my cheek: a steel support column.

The hood is snatched from my head.

The light is dim, ancient fluorescent cylinders way up high, hanging from unfinished concrete. We’re in a large space, the size of a high school gym. Tanks of various shapes and sizes are everywhere. Tall cylinders, horizontal cylinders, giant steel-bolted aquariums.

There are objects, creatures, in many but not all of these tanks. Nearest to me, most visible, is something that must once have been a gorilla. It’s been shaved, or worse yet, deliberately designed to be hairless. It looks like a wrinkled, sagging, old bodybuilder with skin the color of licorice. It’s not alive, at least I hope it isn’t, because it’s jammed tightly into the vertical cylinder.