Then she kissed me.
Not on the cheek, not like a sister. Full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamy kiss that seemed to go on forever. I was so overcome with emotion —
No, that’s bull. I knew exactly what I was doing. I kissed her back.
Then I stopped and pulled away, nearly shoved her away. “Van,” I gasped.
“Oops,” she said.
“Van,” I said again.
“Sorry,” she said. “I —”
Something occurred to me just then, something I guess I should have seen a long, long time before.
“You
She nodded miserably. “For years,” she said.
Oh, God. Darryl, all these years, so in love with her, and the whole time she was looking at me, secretly wanting me. And then I ended up with Ange. Ange said that she’d always fought with Van. And I was running around, getting into so much trouble.
“Van,” I said. “Van, I’m so sorry.”
“Forget it,” she said, looking away. “I know it can’t be. I just wanted to do that once, just in case I never —” She bit down on the words.
“Van, I need you to do something for me. Something important. I need you to meet with the journalist from the Bay Guardian, Barbara Stratford, the one who wrote the article. I need you to give her something.” I explained about Masha’s phone, told her about the video that Masha had sent me.
“What good will this do, Marcus? What’s the point?”
“Van, you were right, at least partly. We can’t fix the world by putting other people at risk. I need to solve the problem by telling what I know. I should have done that from the start. Should have walked straight out of their custody and to Darryl’s father’s house and told him what I knew. Now, though, I have evidence. This stuff — it could change the world. This is my last hope. The only hope for getting Darryl out, for getting a life that I don’t spend underground, hiding from the cops. And you’re the only person I can trust to do this.”
“Why me?”
“You’re kidding, right? Look at how well you handled getting here. You’re a pro. You’re the best at this of any of us. You’re the only one I can trust. That’s why you.”
“Why not your friend Angie?” She said the name without any inflection at all, like it was a block of cement.
I looked down. “I thought you knew. They arrested her. She’s in Gitmo — on Treasure Island. She’s been there for days now.” I had been trying not to think about this, not to think about what might be happening to her. Now I couldn’t stop myself and I started to sob. I felt a pain in my stomach, like I’d been kicked, and I pushed my hands into my middle to hold myself in. I folded there, and the next thing I knew, I was on my side in the rubble under the freeway, holding myself and crying.
Van knelt down by my side. “Give me the phone,” she said, her voice an angry hiss. I fished it out of my pocket and passed it to her.
Embarrassed, I stopped crying and sat up. I knew that snot was running down my face. Van was giving me a look of pure revulsion. “You need to keep it from going to sleep,” I said. “I have a charger here.” I rummaged in my pack. I hadn’t slept all the way through the night since I acquired it. I set the phone’s alarm to go off every 90 minutes and wake me up so that I could keep it from going to sleep. “Don’t fold it shut, either.”
“And the video?”
“That’s harder,” I said. “I emailed a copy to myself, but I can’t get onto the Xnet anymore.” In a pinch, I could have gone back to Nate and Liam and used their Xbox again, but I didn’t want to risk it. “Look, I’m going to give you my login and password for the Pirate Party’s mail-server. You’ll have to use Tor to access it — Homeland Security is bound to be scanning for people logging into p-party mail.”
“Your login and password,” she said, looking a little surprised.
“I trust you, Van. I know I can trust you.”
She shook her head. “You
“I don’t think it matters anymore. Either you succeed or I — or it’s the end of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I’ll get a new identity, but I don’t think so. I think they’ll catch me. I guess I’ve known all along that they’d catch me, some day.”
She looked at me, furious now. “What a waste. What was it all for, anyway?”
Of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt me more. It was like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, futile. Darryl and Ange, gone. I might never see my family again. And still, Homeland Security had my city and my country caught in a massive, irrational shrieking freak-out where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism.
Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. She left me there.
Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back “home” — to the tent under a freeway overpass in the Mission that he’d staked out for the night. He had a pup tent, military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCO LOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING BOARD.
The pizza was a Dominos, cold and clabbered, but delicious for all that. “You like pineapple on your pizza?”
Zeb smiled condescendingly at me. “Freegans can’t be choosy,” he said.
