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
Well, not
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
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.
