Eve and Adam

– 42 –

The rest of the trip is, shall we say, awkward.

I, the creator, sit by myself while my creation talks shyly with Aislin, and Aislin talks shyly with him.

I, the smart one, am feeling pretty stupid.

I’m thinking about my mother—soon to be in a federal prison. I’m thinking about the vengeful guy who dictated that fate. I’m thinking that Adam is superior to Solo in every possible way.

And I’m wishing Solo was with me.

The bus lets us out a mile from the Spiker campus. We trudge along together for a while down the steep, curving two-lane road, dodging aside to avoid being run over by the occasional BMW.

Aislin and Adam walk together. It just seems natural for me to get out in front a little.

A Porsche comes tearing around a blind corner and nearly hits Adam.

I see the driver’s face. His mouth is a big O. His eyes are wide.

The brakes screech. The car stops a couple hundred yards away. The backup lights glow and the car swerves back toward us.

It stops. The window rolls down. There’s a bland, vaguely familiar, middle-aged man behind the wheel. Complete mismatch between the driver and the car.

“It’s him!” the man cries.

He’s looking at Adam.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Sullivan. From accounting. I—” He’s confused, clutching the wheel like Wile E. Coyote holding on to his latest rocket sled. “You better look out,” he says at last. “They’re crazy. They’re really crazy.”

“Who’s crazy?”

“All of them.” He spits the words out. “All those scientists. They’re all nuts!”

“What’s happening?” I demand. I put my hands on the door, trying to convince him not to bolt. But he rears back, scared.

“I have no part in this!” he cries. “I just moved the money around. I’m not putting people in vats or, or, whatever they’re planning to do.”

He puts the car into gear and, with a final terrified look, goes tearing off down the road.

“We need to hurry,” I say. “You two go as fast as you can. I’ll run the rest of the way.”

“I can run,” Adam says. Of course he can run. He has amazing legs, incredible stamina, maximized lungs, all the things I gave him.

“Yeah, but Aislin doesn’t so much run as trip and stagger,” I point out.

Aislin makes a face that says Yep, true.

“Adam, take care of Aislin.” I head off.

It’s the first time I’ve run since the accident. I wasn’t sure I’d ever do it again. My muscles are out of practice, but to my surprise, my breathing is smooth and easy. I wish I were in shorts, not jeans, but it still feels good. More than good.

I reach Paradise Drive and leave the cross streets and houses behind me. There’s a bend in the road, with trees on one side and open hillside on the other.

Right, left, right, left. I’m in high gear now. The familiar rhythm lulls me.

Up ahead on my right is the shattered stump of a big pine tree. The small hairs on the back of my neck rise.

The stump is weathered and gray, mangled. The damage happened long ago.

Six years ago, in fact.

I know this place. I forced myself to come here once, when I was about thirteen. I touched the sharp edges of the wood. It was still clinging to life, but I knew it was dying.

Once was enough.

Now, on foot, it’s unavoidable. My throat closes up and my easy breathing is a memory.

This is the place where my father died. This tree is the one his car hit when he went off the road. That drop is the slope his car plunged down.

I want to keep running, but my legs aren’t having it. I slow to a walk. I stop altogether.

I bend over, hugging myself, and I sob.

No time. No time.

I gulp some air and start running again, faster than before, my legs pistoning.

From the road you can’t really see the main Spiker building, just the top floor. I can’t run down the steep driveway. I have to walk in giant going-downhill steps, fighting gravity.

I near the entrance to the underground garage. My mother’s gleaming white Mercedes convertible is in her designated space. She’s never put the top down.

I glance back, wondering how far behind me Adam and Aislin are. I’m scared. I’ve rushed in here like I have a plan.

For the first time in my life, I wish I had some kind of weapon.

I survey the garage for something weapony. My mind’s racing with made-up dialogue.

Hi, Mom, Solo and I sold you out and how are you? Nice blouse. By the way, I need some more cash.

So, Mom, while you’re in prison can I stay in the house alone? Please? I’m old enough!

Mom… what the hell?

There’s a fire extinguisher near the entrance. I take it from the hook. It’s surprisingly heavy. How do they expect people to use these things? But I find the size and weight and general metal-ness of the thing kind of reassuring.

Up the elevator. I have to punch in a code to get to my mother’s office. For some reason, my addled brain actually remembers it.

Even now, scared, tired, and a thousand times more confused than I’ve ever been before in my life, even now, with some disturbing montage of Solo and Adam and Aislin and the gangbanger and the scared Mr. Sullivan from accounting, even with the eerie images from the flash drive, even with all of it swirling like a tornado inside my brain, I have energy left over to feel nervous.

Why? Because I’m going to be interrupting my mother.

My mother does not like to be interrupted.

I approach her office on tiptoe. The door to her outer office, the one inhabited by her assistants, is wide open. The computer screens are blank. The lights are low.

The portal—it’s way too impressive and huge to call a door—leading to Mom’s office is closed. I press my ear against it. I hear the murmur of voices. Not happy voices. Angry voices. Of course, that’s normal enough in Terra Spiker’s office.

My fire extinguisher bangs against a planter and instinctively I say, “Shhh!” But I doubt anyone hears. Not over the sound of yelling.

“Hey!”

I spin on my heels. A man and a woman have come up behind me. The woman is small, dark-skinned, with penetrating eyes and an extremely long braid. The man is sweating. He is large in all dimensions and has on a name tag that reads DR. MARTINEZ.

I stare at them. They stare at me. No one knows what’s going on, it seems.

“Are you here to see my mother?” I ask.

“Are you?” the woman demands.

The man asks, “Is there a fire?”

“Oh, this?” I glance down at the extinguisher in my hand. “This is—”

He leaps for me. But he’s a large guy and definitely not a quick guy.

I back up, banging into the door as he slams into the wall to my right.

“Martinez!” the woman cries. “Get her!”

“Get me?” I repeat it in shock. Seriously? Get her? It sounds so comic book.

“She’s the boss’s daughter,” Martinez protests.

“We’re probably going to kill the boss,” the woman points out in a voice that’s all reasonableness, with just a tinge of hysteria.

This isn’t news to Martinez, but he seems embarrassed by it. It’s something they don’t want to say in front of me.

Martinez lunges. I push back against the door. It gives way and I stumble back. I drop the extinguisher. It rolls a bit, then comes to a stop. I catch myself before I can fall, then pivot to see the tableau before me.

My mother’s office is as extreme as ever. The waterfall still pours. My father’s extraordinary, oversized sculptures still hang on wires from the impossibly distant ceiling.

My mother stands behind her desk. She is casually dressed in a custom suit flown in from her London designer, a twenty-thousand-dollar watch, and a diamond necklace worth more than the lifetime wages of a hundred Guatemalan families combined. As always, she radiates the scent of Bulgari. I can’t see her shoes, but I am morally certain that they are not a beat-up pair of Nikes.

“Evening,” she says, frosty as ever. “Your timing is unfortunate.”

Tommy, the scientist with the tattoos, is here. There’s also an Asian guy and a shrimpy little middle-aged nerd.

Tommy has a gun in his hand. No one else is armed, as far as I can tell. The gun holds my attention. It’s funny how a gun will do that, kind of make everything else blur into the background while the gun occupies the entire foreground.

I’m suddenly feeling a certain sympathy for Maddox. It must have been terrifying, seeing that gun leveled at you. Watching the trigger being squeezed.

I remember that Aislin and Adam aren’t that far behind me. But neither of them has a gun. They won’t help. They’ll just make things worse.

Where is Solo? Sullivan said something about vats.

I’m trembling.

Is Solo dead?

“Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” my mother says, with a condescension that would shrivel a medieval baron, “you do realize you’re not going to manage this, don’t you?”

“I’ve managed it so far, bitch,” he says. Even he seems appalled by the B-word. The temperature in the room drops ten degrees. No one breathes.

“I made a mistake trusting you,” my mother says regretfully.

“I made a mistake thinking you were a scientist,” Tommy snaps.

“There’s a difference between Gregor Mendel and Doctor Frankenstein,” my mother says.

“Oh, of course,” Tommy sneers. “Go straight to Frankenstein. Your analogy is as feeble as your commitment to science.”

“Science is learning, Dr. Holyfield,” my mother says. “What you are doing is not about learning. It’s about money and power.”

“Aren’t you going to trot out the old chestnut about ‘playing God’?” Tommy asks.

He’s handling the gun casually, waving it as he gestures. Getting his nerve up. He’s arguing because he doesn’t yet have the nerve to shoot.

No. No.

I don’t want my mother to be shot. I don’t want anyone to hurt her.

I love her.

She may even love me.

And damn, is she cool. No wonder Tommy can’t pull the trigger. My mother is untouchable. She’s as cold and perfect—and yet beautiful—as one of my father’s sculptures.

My mother listens carefully to Tommy’s question. She nods, as if considering. Slowly, deliberately, she walks around the desk. She comes into full view and I win my little bet with myself: Her shoes are Prada.

She steps up to Tommy. They’re about the same height, but somehow my mother manages to seem like she’s a foot taller. Tommy waves the gun, but he’s not ready to shoot her. And he has to visibly restrain himself from stepping backward.

“You ridiculous, inadequate little man,” she says. “You want to know about playing God? I’ve played the part. Let me tell you about it. I had a daughter. She was near death. And I had the cure. I could wave my hand… well, inject a virus carrying a DNA modification… and I knew she would live. My husband and I—” Her voice cracks, but so minutely I doubt anyone else notices. “My husband and I asked ourselves whether it was right. Whether we could ‘play God’ and save her life with a treatment we knew was untested. A treatment that couldn’t be tested, yet, because I had broken some rules finding it.”

“Great autobiogra—” Tommy starts to say.

“Shut up,” my mother says. And he shuts up.

I’m looking at the fire extinguisher. I’m looking at my father’s sculptures. There’s the towering redwood tree reaching toward the ceiling. Near it, something that is most likely a hawk, but almost unrecognizable except as a dramatic expression of speed and rapacity, hovers overhead, its beak twelve feet off the ground.

And just three feet away from that soaring beak is the gleaming steel and Plexiglas thunderbolt.

The end of the thunderbolt is pointed in a particularly vengeful-looking way at my mother’s head. Of course, if her head were to move, it would be pointed at Tommy’s head.

“So I used the treatment,” my mother continues. “And my partners”—she gives that word a cruel twist—“said okay, let us use it on our son as well. He was perfectly healthy, mind you. But they said, if you don’t, well, we’ll go public and destroy you. So I gave in. They thought they had me.” She manages a tight smile. “And I guess they did. I tolerated their blackmail. Which isn’t very God-like, is it?”

“They were doing science,” the little short guy blurts out.

“Oh, they were brilliant,” my mother allows. “Brilliant. And when they came up with a green pig I let it go, because they were on their way to great discoveries. But the more they worked, the more I began to wonder if maybe they were a little less brilliant than they thought they were.” She hesitates. “Then they created that sad abomination of a child. And I realized that’s what my God-playing had wrought.”

“Aww,” Tommy drawls. “Did the little mutant make you queasy? All your moral qualms didn’t stop you from decanting your daughter’s little science project, did they?”

“I had to do it,” my mother says. “He was a living human being, fully formed, capable of feeling.”

“Capable of luring your daughter back,” Tommy counters.

“That, too,” my mother concedes.

“Spare me. In the end, this whole thing made you rich.”

“No. It cost me a fortune, actually. No, Dr. Holyfield, I got rich off a simple patent for accelerating the production of flu vaccines. Every time a dose of flu vaccine is made, I get twenty-one cents. A billion doses a year, that adds up to real money.”

I bark out a laugh. I don’t know why.

“There’s no patent under your name,” the woman with the braid says.

“No. It’s under my husband’s name. It’s funny. I gave it to him as a birthday gift I don’t think he really appreciated it.” She sounds a little wistful. “Maybe it’s because I described it by its patent number. I don’t think he ever looked it up.”

My mother smiles, a smile meant just for me. “He was an artist, you know. They don’t think like scientists. Fortunately, we had a daughter who’s always had the ability to think like both.”

Sweet lord. I practically burst into tears.

Tommy’s face hardens. He doesn’t like the reference to me. It makes him nervous. He extends his arm. The gun is pointed straight at my mother’s chest.

“Leave her alone,” I say.

“You stupid little nobody,” Tommy says to me. “Don’t you know she killed your father?”

I shoot a wild look at my mother.

She winces.

“It’s true. More playing God,” my mother says.

“Mom!” It’s a sob torn from my throat.

“I sent him after the Plisskens,” she says. For the first time in, like, forever, she touches me. It’s her hand on my hand. I don’t pull away.

“I said something stupid to him. I said, ‘Austin, you have to stop them. No matter what.’”

Tommy is laughing to himself. He’s enjoying this part.

“Your dumbass father took it literally,” he says. “And they talk about scientists not getting human nuance.”

“I wasn’t sure what they would do,” my mother says. “I’d just expelled them from the company. I told them I was going to have them arrested. They were unbalanced. Like this tattooed buffoon here.” She flips a manicured hand at Tommy. “Mentally unbalanced. I was worried for their son. I sent your father after them. Rainy night… and you’ve seen the road. He caught up with them and there was a terrible accident. Both cars went down the incline. I was just behind them with security…. There was a horrible fire. They were all dead when I got there.”

“Listen,” I say, and again my voice betrays me by wobbling. “I helped Solo. He sent everything out. All the documentation on Adam. All the rest.”

My mother is not surprised. “I thought it might be something like that. Well, if that’s the case, Dr. Holyfield, you and your little band of mediocrities are wasting your time, aren’t you?”

“We don’t have any proof he sent anything,” Tommy says. “And as of a few minutes ago, nothing had hit the Internet.”

I’m in the difficult position of hoping for two opposite things at once. If Solo has sent the information out and Tommy realizes it, he’ll have no reason to do anything worse: The jig will be up.

On the other hand, my mother will probably be arrested along with Tommy.

And why hasn’t the information been sent? Where is Solo?

“We have to make this look like suicide,” Tommy says thoughtfully. He scans the office, snaps his fingers. “Murder-suicide! She has to kill the girl and then herself.”

“Why, exactly, would I be doing that?” my mother asks.

Tommy’s cronies all look troubled and thoughtful. But no one is exactly objecting.

“You fought,” Tommy says. “Everyone knows your daughter hates you.”

“That’s not true!” I cry.

“She’s found out the truth.” Tommy grins. “About how you used her as a lab rat for the healing gene.” He’s pleased with his solution. He narrows his eyes at my mother. “And speaking of finding out the truth, how is it you found out about our… efforts?”

She responds with a slight smile. “You’re not the only one with secret surveillance cameras, Thomas.”

Tommy looks a bit deflated. “Grab the girl.”

Dr. Gold and Martinez lunge for me.

I slip down, almost like I’m fainting. Martinez’s arms grapple with Dr. Gold’s as I slither out beneath them. I make a wild grab for the fire extinguisher. I fumble it, it’s too heavy, but it trips Martinez.

He lands hard against the desk. I’m still trying to grab my only weapon. I can’t get the handle, but I can get my hands around the middle of the thing and with a desperate effort I slam it back.

I aim at Dr. Gold’s midsection. It misses but hits his knee.

“Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Hey, that hurt! Oh, that hurts!”

“Sorry,” I say. Because I’m not really thinking clearly. Then I get a better purchase on the extinguisher and swing it wildly.

It misses, unbalancing me, and I plow forward.

“Just get her, you idiots,” Tommy yells. “Anapura, help!”

“That’s Dr. Anapura!” she snaps. She grabs for me.

I know it’s a silly cliche to suggest that all scientists are nerds or dorks. But if this was a group of, say, football players, I’d be so dead by now.

“What the hell!” It’s Aislin.

Her cry distracts everyone, and I slip past Dr. Anapura. I drop the extinguisher because it’s just slowing me down and I know what I have to do now.

I catch sight of Adam out of the corner of my eye. He’s looking to Aislin for instructions. Aislin, bless her crazy heart, reaches out with one hand, snatching Tommy’s hair and yanking it like she’s planning on stuffing a pillow.

“Dammit!” Tommy cries.

I climb the sculpted redwood. It isn’t easy. You’d think something made of steel bands interlaced like some overly ornate Eiffel Tower would be easy to climb, but no, I’m slipping and my knees are skinned and I’m only helped by the fact that Anapura and Martinez are baffled by my move. And by the fact that Dr. Gold is acting like a scared monkey, clutching his injured knee while he howls and hops in a circle of pain.

I scrabble up and Aislin yells, “Look out!”

Just in time, I realize I’m about to jam my head into one of the “branches.”

It’s high up here, really high.

But it’s nothing like the height Solo and I rappelled together.

“Get that guy!” Aislin orders Adam.

But Adam, I notice with a sort of distant awareness, is frozen.

Oh. Courage. I gave him everything else. I guess I forgot that.

Tommy has had enough of the chaos. He pushes the barrel of the gun into my mother’s chest, and I know what she’s thinking: huge dry-cleaning bill.

“Die, you cold bitch,” Tommy says.

Adam shrinks back, but Aislin yells, “Get your hands off the cold bitch, asshole.”

I reach the uppermost part of the steel redwood. I turn, my ankle twists, and I half-fall, half-leap onto the fat end of the thunderbolt.

“Mom!” I cry.

The lightning bolt swings forward. The point will hit my mother right in the back of her head.

The jagged point arcs forward. Inches from spearing the back of my mother’s head, right through her carefully coiffed hair.

At the last possible second, she simply tilts her head to the side.

The bolt shoots past her and stops.

It stops when the point enters Tommy’s forehead, just beneath the Pixies tattoo.

Great band. But not armor.

Tommy drops like a sack of rocks. The gun skitters across the floor.

Adam bends and picks it up. He considers it for a moment, then hands it to Aislin.

The rest of Tommy’s gang is about to rush her when Aislin levels the gun and says, “There’s a reason he handed me the gun. I will totally shoot you.”

I swing back and forth on the thunderbolt for a while. I don’t much like the idea of dropping while it’s still moving. I’ve had enough trouble with leg injuries lately.

My mother—who has not broken a sweat, or even so much as caused a hair to move out of its assigned place—snaps her fingers at Adam. “Get her down.”

Adam does. I slide to the ground along the length of his perfect body and come to rest with my mouth just inches from his perfect mouth.

He’s perfect.

“Solo,” I say. “We need to find Solo.”