Plus One (32 page)

“Not now, Sol,” he said. He wasn’t commanding, he was counseling.

“Yes, now!” I insisted.

“It won’t help,” D’Arcy said, shaking his head. “And Fleur is out there.” He took my hand, grounding me.

I forced air out of my lungs, and my shoulders down. Kizzie began painting clown eyelashes above and below my eyes. I focused on her face and saw wet tracks of tears on her cheeks. She was making me up like a Noma, like the woman who had stolen her child. She was placing her hope in me, and I was balking.

I closed my eyes, quashing the confusion in my chest. Fleur was my niece. She belonged with Ciel and Kizzie. I was the right person for this job; I was the one with guts and nothing to lose.

“When I bring Fleur back, I want two years of answers,” I said, my throat hot and full.

Hearing that I was back on track, Ciel switched gears, the way I was learning terrorists do, in the interest of efficiency. “I’ll put you on a dinghy and you can row to the Fifty-ninth Street Harbor. The lake is calm this morning. D’Arcy’s car is there. He can drop you at Fifty-ninth and University and then get the minister’s baby. Richard will keep us hovering just offshore until you’re back. William will look for your return with binoculars all day.”

Kizzie finished her work and stood back to look at it.

“Do you have a tracer on my cell or on D’Arcy’s?” I asked.

“No,” Ciel said. “Of course not.”

“Put one on mine.” I handed him my phone and stood up. D’Arcy stood with me.

*   *   *

When everything was agreed, Ciel took me out onto the upper deck alone. The air was cool but calm, and the lake smelled heavy with fish. It was still dark, but there were lights running along the exterior wall, casting our shadows so that they crisscrossed each other.

“Listen,” Ciel said in a low voice, “when you talk to Gigi it’s as simple as this: I haven’t successfully developed remote programming yet. Tell her that when I do, I promise I’ll talk to Fuzz and Zen. But so far it doesn’t work. I have major hurdles to get over before it’s functional.”

I held his eyes for a long time. They were bluer than mine, so clear they were almost see-through. And fourteen years of a childhood spent looking into them had served me well.

“I’ll tell her that. But in exchange for getting Fleur I want a favor from you.”

“If I can. Anything.”

I looked at the door to the bridge, hollow and flimsy. I took a few steps toward the stern of the boat; he joined me.

“I want you to remotely program D’Arcy’s phone back to his real profile later today. Zen said he stored the old information somewhere in a blinded buffer—you’ll find it. Make it kick in the second William sees that I’ve returned with Fleur.”

“Sol, I just told you—”

I shook my head.
Don’t even bother
.

He pursed his lips and bit his cheek. And then he smiled, but there was a melancholy corner to it. “Will do.” He pulled me into a hug. “I love you, Sol.”

Sunday
6:40 a.m.

William and Ciel planned to lower the dinghy at sunrise. D’Arcy and I stood at the railing, facing east. I had never seen the sun rise over the lake, but neither had he: the precise moment of legal curfew happened when the upper edge of the disk of the sun broke the horizon, and unless you lived in an apartment near the lake there wasn’t enough transit time for most people to witness it. Ditto sunset.

Ciel appeared next to me, on my left. “Do you know what a green flash is?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a flash of emerald light that appears at sunset and sunrise, the instant the upper rim of the sun breaks the horizon. It’s not that easy to see one; the conditions have to be just right—the sky has to be clear, of course, and it helps when the air is a little colder than the water, the way it is this morning, because the temperature inversion creates a mirage that magnifies the refraction between red and green light.”

We were already in twilight, with the reflected light from the sun in the atmosphere beginning to bring the world to life. Seagulls called overhead, embarking on their scavenging missions to the city’s beaches.

“The trouble is, the flash occurs directly above the sun and it only lasts for a second or two, which—on a sunrise—is how long it takes your eye to fix on the location, so you’re almost always too late. It’s a lot easier to see it on a sunset for that reason, from the Michigan side of the lake.” He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen. “I wrote a program to predict where the sun rises on the horizon using the state’s global positioning software.” He held it out for me, and I passed it to D’Arcy. “Line up the horizon with the dashes, and then watch the point of the vertical arrow as the curfew clock counts down—that’s where the sun will break.”

The clock was at SR-00:02:11 and tenths of seconds that were counting down faster than I could see them. Two minutes before sunrise. Two minutes until Smudges had to be in their homes, off the streets.

D’Arcy handed it back to him. “Nice. But maybe I’ll try it on my hundredth sunrise with Sol, not my first.”

Ciel nodded, his glance revealing something—either that he was still struggling to accept the idea of D’Arcy and me, or that he knew there wouldn’t be a hundred sunrises for us. He moved to help William get the dinghy ready.

“I
would
like to see a green flash with you someday,” D’Arcy said in a moment. “Sunrise or sunset.”

I looked out at the lake, the water finally acquiring the glistening blue hue that made it seem like liquid and not just a massive shadow that rimmed Chicago. It was unbearable that this was the only sunrise I would ever see with D’Arcy. I hated that every first was also our last. I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy the moment, for the crushing sorrow it produced, a weight heavy enough to force me to my knees if I let it. I gripped the railing, willing myself to stay standing. His left hand slid on top of my right, and then lightly trailed along my knuckles, coaxing me to relax them.

“You’re being kind of quiet for Sol,” he murmured. “What happened to the girl who says exactly what she’s thinking?”

I turned to face him. There was finally enough light to see the green splotch in his left iris. I fixed on it. “You want to know what I’m thinking?”

He nodded, staring back, unwavering.

“What I’m thinking, exactly,” I said rather than asked. He nodded again. I swallowed to try to smother the dull heat that burned where my heart was. “This is what I’m thinking…” My voice trailed flimsily, and I had to stop to take a breath.

Oh, why the hell not?
It was superstitious idiocy to hold it back, as if not saying it would fool the universe into letting me have him.

“I love you,” I said, and it came out defiantly. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. There are times when the amount I love you hurts so much, I have to sit down. And at this particular moment, it’s debilitating.”

D’Arcy let out a sort of surprised exhale. The right side of his face began to glow, and he must have seen the same thing on the left side of my face, because we both turned to look at the lake. The watery orange disk of the sun had shown its edge above the horizon, and it was reflected in the rippled water, with streams the colors of flame lying like ribbons low in the sky and pink-tinged clouds fading into a pale robin’s-egg blue of the upper atmosphere. I felt his arm slip around my waist and pull me against his side. Tears welled in my eyes, and everything became an impressionist painting, swimming in color. We tipped our heads until they were touching.

“Thank god I asked.” His voice was rumbly, exposed. “It would have been a shame if that had gone unsaid.”

*   *   *

William lowered the dinghy—an inflated raft big enough for two—and D’Arcy got in first. As I prepared to board it, a vessel the size of a lifeboat moved swiftly toward us. It had no identifying features at all, no Coast Guard stripes.

“What is that, Ciel?” I asked nervously.

“My boss’s boat. Just ignore it, climb down.” As I ducked under the railing and put my leg over the side, he said to D’Arcy and me, “Make sure to act Noma.”

“Identify your departing passengers, Ciel.” A man’s voice exploded in my ears through a loudspeaker. I glanced to see a rifle pointed in my direction. My foot slid off the rope ladder, and I flailed, burning my hands on the plastic twine to save myself from falling. D’Arcy scrambled below me to catch me, slipping himself, toppling with the squeak of skin against rubber. I gripped the ladder with the crook of my right arm and raised my left middle finger high in the direction of the boat.

“We can speak for ourselves, asshole,” I shouted.

“Sol…” Ciel hissed. Obviously he didn’t have Noma instincts.

“Identify yourselves,” the bullhorn said again.

“Sunny Puso and Skin Russell, and you and your metal cock are…?” I shouted again, climbing onto the raft, where D’Arcy’s hands caught my thighs and then my waist. I tumbled in and we both instinctively crouched low, looking over the edge.

“Please state your destination.”

“WE’RE GETTING THE FUCK OFF CIEL’S YACHT.”

Pause. “Please state your destination.”

The boat was close now, close enough that I could see three figures on board: two men and a woman—the two men were wearing neat suits. I lost the air in my lungs for a second, at the precise moment that D’Arcy said, “What the hell.” And then I saw what he saw: the third figure was Jacqueline Paulsen.

I froze for a second, stunned, and she disappeared from the deck into the cabin. I yelled, but my voice had a quaver to it, “What, are you fucking Hour Guards in training?” I sat up, and D’Arcy followed my lead. I forced air into my lungs to yell with more conviction, “We’re going ashore to hook me up with some C-4, so that I can come back when Ciel least expects it and blow his lying ginger ass out of the water.”

I glanced up at Ciel, my chest burning with real anger. His eyes were riveted on me, with the whites showing in a stark rim around the blue.

“Hold while we check your papers in our database,” the voice announced.

“Go ahead and put the oars in their locks,” I muttered to D’Arcy.

“C-4?” he asked, as he clicked the second oar in place.

“Putty explosives.”

“I figured, but…”

My heart was still pounding from the confusion of seeing Minister Paulsen. I refused to look up at Ciel again. “My family had an eclectic library, what can I say.”

After D’Arcy started rowing, the bullhorn said, “Your papers check out. You may proceed.”

“Thank you, Zen,” I whispered, my shoulders rolling and my back curving in a premature collapse that Gigi would have scorned.

D’Arcy rowed toward the Fifty-seventh Street Beach. Soon we pulled in at the southern tip, where the beach ended and the riprap was piled high—giant boulders of limestone with an overgrowth of volunteer trees and bushes that created a mini urban wilderness. We climbed out of the dinghy and lashed it to the scrub. We picked our way over the riprap to the bicycle path and ran south for a half a block to the viaduct at Fifty-ninth Street—a beige-tiled, graffiti-tagged tunnel under Lake Shore Drive—and back to his car in the harbor lot.

*   *   *

Minutes later, D’Arcy stopped the car in front of Harper Library, put the gearshift in park, and turned to me without cutting the ignition.

I said too sharply, “You’re coming with me.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Please.” How could he leave me to hunt down a gangster Noma and wrest a baby from her arms? The anticipation of loss settled on me—as familiar as an old sweater, with the worn-soft feel of Ciel’s betrayal.

“You saw what I saw on that other boat.” He pushed the scraggly ends of my mullet behind my neck. “I can’t follow Ciel’s order. I’ve got to take Fitz back to his family before your brother gets his hands on him. It’s not right for Ciel to barter using someone else’s life—not even when he’s negotiating for something that would benefit me quite as much as your reassignment. You of all people agree with that, don’t you?”

You of all people.
I knew what that meant. I, who grew up without parents. I, who had a gaping hole in my life where they should have been. I, who miserably wrote “death = abandonment” on my desk.

“How will you get the baby back to Paulsen? She’s out there on the lake!”

“I’m going to try that whole ‘leave him on her doorstep, ring the bell and run’ method.” His smile was thin. “And if she has Suits guarding her house, I’ll leave him somewhere safe nearby and send an anonymous text. That boy is so wanted, someone will come within seconds.”

“And then where … where will you go?”

“We’ll text each other to meet up.” He studied me, reading my expression. It took about one second for him to figure me out. “Are you worried that I’ll leave you?”

I didn’t answer. Instead I said, “I’m going to screw this up without you.” I hadn’t relied on just myself in days. I had become soft and D’Arcy-dependent.

“You’re going to kick ass, the way you always do.”

“I can’t not see you again.” I hated how needy I sounded.

“Me neither.”

He leaned in to kiss me. “This is a down payment. I’ll put you at risk if I mess up your makeup.” It was a peck, slim and friendly.

I knew there had to be a last kiss between us. But as I opened the car door, I wished for that one not to be it.

Sunday
8:00 a.m.

Harper Memorial Library was a Gothic-inspired building with leaded-glass windows, a limestone façade, and crenellations at the top like a small castle. As theme-park as that description sounded, it had a stolid scholarliness and aged patina that gave it genuine gravitas. I thought disjointedly that I might have enjoyed going to college in another life—to read Homer in the original Greek, or something equally useless to society; whatever the opposite of pill packing was.

I received an uncensored text from Ciel as I was pulling open the heavy door.

Target is NW of you 20 m

Twenty meters was damn close. After a second set of doors I was in the main entryway with a cluster of four students, three men and a woman. They whispered something hastily and split up, the two young men flying in separate directions and the couple scurrying down the west hallway. I had forgotten that I wasn’t ethereal anymore, I was ravenous. Another message: