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 –
“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.
Eve tries it. It works. She pushes the door inward and Aislin and I step in after her, batting aside cobwebs.
Eve finds a switch. A single lightbulb high overhead barely touches the shadows. We’re in a big, open space, but not an empty space. Huge shapes rear up over us like creatures frozen in time.
The lightbulb pops and goes out. We all jump.
Eve takes out her phone and uses the light from it to locate a long table. It’s a workbench, really, just some plywood nailed together. She rummages in a drawer and pulls out a package, ripping it open with her teeth. I hear a muted crack.
It’s a glow stick. Blue light. A second glows green.
The light isn’t much better, but my eyes adjust and I see that shapes scattered through the room are abstract statues of some kind. There are forms from nature—trees, I think, flowers, even clouds—but most of the sculptures resemble animals. Next to me, rendered in smooth, white stone, is the suggestion of a ten-foot-tall bear. Near Eve I can make out a tiger in mid-leap—or maybe it’s a lion. No, it definitely feels like a tiger to me.
There must be seven or eight of these strange animal shapes. None of them look precisely like anything, but they all manage to tell you what they might be, could be.
“I haven’t been here in a long time. Not since he died,” Eve says. She sits on the floor, browsing through a stack of canvases leaning against a wall like tumbled dominoes.
I’m about to ask who she means, but it’s obvious Aislin knows. She puts her hand on Eve’s arm and says, “I wish I’d known your dad.”
“Your dad was a sculptor?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Eve says, and even that single word comes out shaky with emotion. “He did some painting and drawing, too. But mostly he sculpted.”
I find the package of glow sticks. I snap one—it’s blue, too—and use it to explore the room. There is something moving about this place. Something sacred, somehow.
“Won’t your mother know you’ll come here?” I call back to Eve from behind something that must be a hawk or an eagle. It’s hanging from the rafters by chains, and it doesn’t look happy about being chained.
“My mom doesn’t remember he was ever alive,” Eve says.
