Blind Read Free

the clouds. In the distance the sky grew bright with a tangle of lightning.
    â€œPerfect,” Gaia said aloud. “Absolutely perfect.”
    The wet stone was suddenly five hundred percent more slippery under her grip. There was no pipe makingan easy road up to seventeen. No fat and simple cracks in the stones. Gaia hung on like a lizard clinging to a wall. Her fingers and arms trembled. She climbed as much with the muscles in her stomach as the muscles in her legs.
    The balcony on seventeen was enticing. Gaia even thought of going inside and making her way to the eighteenth floor with genuine stairs, like a human being, but there were sounds from the other side of the glass door. Sounds that showed there were two people inside. At least two. Gaia shook her head and looked out at the flickering lightning. At least somebody was having fun on this ugly night.
    She left the moaning and panting behind and headed up the final stretch to eighteen. Fortunately the building was more worn here, the blocks of stone curved at the edges and the gaps wide. Gaia had no problem finding enough handholds and footholds to get herself up the last ten feet to the next balcony. Once on eighteen she crouched on the balcony for a few minutes to catch her breath. She had started to open the door before she noticed that someone had put numbers on the door handles. This was 1803. She glanced to the side. The next balcony was close, not more than six feet away. A short jump.
    Brave or stupid? She looked down. This decision was simple. If she made it, it was brave. If she splattered on the sidewalk, it was stupid.
    Gaia climbed on the railing and made the jump. It was an easy jump if you could ignore the wet, slippery railing and the two hundred feet of nothing that waited for anyone who might screw up.
    Apartment 1801 was dark. Gaia pressed her ear against the cold glass of the balcony door. Nothing. Only the soft hiss of rain against the building and the distant sound of traffic down below. She grabbed the door handle and pulled. It was unlocked.
    A nearby flash of lightning momentarily lit the room, and Gaia felt, more than heard, a rumble of thunder that came right on top of the light. In that split second she saw that the apartment was small, just a modified studio, with a half wall that separated the kitchen from the rest of the living area. She caught the impression of a table and a couch, a few odds and ends of furniture. And she got the definite idea that she wasn’t the first visitor to the apartment. Disappointment washed over her. She might find some answers in this place, but if her father ever
had
been here, he was certainly long gone. She took one slow step into the darkness, felt along the wall for a switch, and flipped it on.
    The apartment looked like a shipwreck. The cushions had been torn from the couch and the cloth slashed open to reveal ragged cores of dingy white foam. Books and papers were strewn everywhere. An armchair was overturned, a coffee table broken.Pictures had been pulled from the wall. Refrigerator and cabinet doors hung open, and all their contents, from bottles of soda to bags of flour, had been spilled onto the center of the kitchen floor like the ingredients for some huge and nasty recipe.
    Gaia waded into the room, her sneakers crunching on broken glass. The place reeked. There was a sour, spoiled-meat smell—from the mess in the kitchen, she hoped—and above that the sharp, acrid odor of smoke. She navigated through the piles of broken furniture and heaps of ripped books and traced the fumes back to the wisps of smoke rising from inside a small metal trash can. It was clear that whoever had destroyed the apartment had done it very recently. She reached into the can, pulled out a stack of blackened, smoldering paper, and flipped it back and forth through the air. A few sparks flew off from the sides before the smoke stopped rising.
    â€œAll right,” she said. “Let’s see what was