I hold up my hand. “What?”

“Do you want me to repeat it? I probably missed a few words. I don’t have a photographic memory. But you know that already.”

“What did she say next?”

“That was it. She seemed agitated—”

“She’s more or less always agitated,” I interrupt.

“But then she stopped herself and said, ‘You don’t need to know any of that. And don’t tell Evening any of it.’”

“Then why did you tell me?”

He smiles. He hasn’t done that before. I gave him really good teeth. Perfect teeth. But I didn’t design that smile, not exactly. That smile, that’s some alchemy, some kind of magic interaction of, I don’t know, but oh yes. Shiver. And warmth. And a general all-over-body feeling like I really want to cut the distance between us and it’s suddenly very difficult to focus on my outrage.

I have to shake my head, hard, and replay his last statement to find my place again. “Why did you tell me if my mother said not to?”

“I’m not a machine, Evening. I’m a man. And you made me to be free. You did that, right?”

“Yes. Yes.” I made him to be free? No responsibility there. Yes, I made him to be free. I wonder what else I made him to be.

That day in the lab with Aislin comes back to me in high-definition imagery. Aislin ogling, me pretending to be so much more puritanical than I really am, because that’s part of my relationship with Aislin.

I see him now in memory. I see the eyeballs floating, disconnected. They look much better in his head. I see the chest I designed, the stomach I created. I picture all the choices I made.

It’s disturbing.

He’s here and real and beautiful and I made him beautiful. And this is why Solo would destroy my mother? Is this boy, this man, is his existence really some kind of a crime?

In what mad, unholy universe could this work of art—my work of art—be a crime?

My phone chimes. I hear it, but I don’t really care much. Then I realize its chimed before. Several times.

“Excuse me,” I say. For some reason, I feel I have to be formal with Adam. I don’t know what the rules are. I’ve never stood around chatting with my own amazingly attractive creation before.

I fumble for my phone, my fingers not finding it in my purse. I don’t want to—almost can’t—take my eyes off him. I apologize again for shifting my line of sight. How dare I not gaze upon you in wonder? How dare I look down at the rat’s nest that is my purse?

I find the phone. It’s a message.

Maddox shot. SF General Hospital. Please come.

To my shame, I hesitate. I think, damn him and damn her, I’m talking to Adam, here!

But somehow, from some depth of my soul, the better side of me asserts itself and tells me I have to go.

I’ll ask him to come with me.

No. No, wait, who created whom, here? I didn’t create this person just to turn into the same diffident, critical, shy girl I usually am. I’m in charge in this relationship.

Right? I ask myself. Right?

“Adam,” I say. “Come with me.”

– 36 –

She is not quite what I expected. Visually, yes. Visually I know that Evening is the very epitome of young, female beauty. I know this as surely as I know anything. I have been given this truth.

But she does not quite sound as I expected her to.

She does not act precisely as I expected her to act.

I’d learned that she was headstrong, difficult, naive, very smart, very talented, with all the potential in the world.

That phrase is in my head: all the potential in the world.

That girl has all the potential in the world. She could be anything. She can do anything she wants. Anything! But she is frittering her life away hanging out with that drug addict slut loser friend of hers.

Having now spoken with Evening, I agree that she is intelligent. I don’t know if she has all the potential in the world.

A thought occurs to me. “This person we are going to rescue. Is it your drug addict slut loser friend?”

We have been running down the pier toward the Embarcadero. Evening stops.

“What?” Her eyes narrow. “Where did you get that idea?” Before I can answer she interrupts with a slashing hand gesture. “Never mind. I can guess.”

We run some more. We reach a trolley just as it pulls to a stop. We leap aboard, then wait impatiently for several minutes while the driver gets out and inspects his vehicle.

“Don’t believe what my mother told you,” Evening says.

I feel a rush of terror. “Evening, all I really know is what your mother told me. If I were actually to stop believing everything she told me…”

We are sitting beside each other. Her thigh and shoulder are pressed against mine. She turns to me and I turn to her and this brings our faces very close together.

“I—” she says, and then her voice makes a croaking sound. Her eyelids lower, as if she’s sleepy. Slowly, slowly she’s moving closer.

Suddenly, her eyes widen. I see something like alarm in her gaze as she pulls away.

“I have to sit somewhere else,” she says in a rush.

“Why?”

“I just do, that’s all.”

She has not moved. “Where?”

“What?” Her eyes are at half-mast again. “Oh. Yes. This seat in front here.”

She gets up, but just then, the trolley lurches. To keep her from falling over into the aisle I put my right arm around her abdomen and then she slips down a little so that my arm slips up and then stops because it can’t go any farther.