Retching, he leaned forward. Edison fastened his teeth on Joe’s pant leg and pulled. He tottered, terrified he might fall into the light. He caught his balance and let the dog pull him backward, step by step, into the familiar darkness.
His stomach roiled. The first time he’d tried this had been after breakfast, and he’d thrown up on the tracks. He knew better now, and came here only on an empty stomach.
Edison nudged his nose under Joe’s hand and tilted his head back. He urged Joe to pet him, to relax. Joe ran his hand along the dog’s warm back. His legs still shook, but he didn’t feel as if he were about to die anymore. He petted the dog, controlled his breathing, and slowly calmed down. He wasn’t going to die, but he wasn’t going to go outside either. Not today.
He’d turned his back on the light as he fled, but he faced it again now. The entrance was an empty mouth that mocked him. The light and wind and trees might be forever out of his reach. But he had gone nearly a yard farther than yesterday. Not enough, but progress.
A train came through, again on a different track, and he covered the dog’s ears. The simple act of protecting Edison brought him all the way back to himself. After the train passed, he pulled a dog treat out of his pocket and gave it to Edison. “You earned this, buddy.”
The dog swallowed it in a single gulp.
Joe headed toward the tunnels that led to Grand Central Terminal. Today, his brain had betrayed him — something he’d grown to expect. Once, he’d prized his brain. It understood things that other brains didn’t. His brain had led him out of a difficult childhood into early entrance to Massachusetts Institute of Technology — on a full scholarship — while other boys his age were freshmen in high school. His brain had let him coast through his classes, earn his degrees, found his own company, and retire a multimillionaire before most people bought their first house. It had been a good brain, but now it wouldn’t even let him sit in the sunlight.
But he had to cut his brain some slack — it wasn’t at fault. Someone had poisoned it, and he had blood tests to prove that poison had caused his crippling agoraphobia. Since he’d found that out, he’d spent a great deal of time and money trying to discover who had poisoned him and why. He’d investigated everyone who had access to his food and drink on his last days outside, but all his inquiries had led nowhere.
A large key ring at his belt jangled when he stumbled over a train tie. The keys came with the house — they provided access to all the doors in the tunnel system. With these keys, he, and he alone, could open each door in his subterranean world and see what lay behind it. Too bad his brain wasn’t so straightforward.
Edison bumped Joe’s knee with his nose, as if to remind him he was OK. That his life still had good things. That he was safe.
If only it were that easy.
Chapter 2
Vivian Torres hung on to the rock wall with every bit of strength in her chalk-dusted fingertips. She’d been mixing and matching holds all the way up, always trying to find something more difficult, and now she’d climbed herself into a spot she wouldn’t be able to get out of without falling off the wall. Her fingertips were screaming, but she wasn’t going to give up.
She ought to be safe. Her teenage sister, Lucy, stood below, belaying her. Lucy didn’t like to climb, but had taken and passed a belaying class because Vivian paid her twenty dollars for each visit to Brooklyn Boulders — an indoor climbing gym where she’d had to sign more waivers to touch the walls than she had to enter the military.
Easy money, but Lucy wasn’t earning it. Instead, she fiddled with her phone one-handed. If Vivian fell off the wall, Lucy would let her hit the mat like Humpty Dumpty. So, dropping wasn’t an option.
Vivian had to get out of this on her own. She hadn’t survived two tours in Afghanistan to kill herself falling off a fake climbing wall in New York City. No dignity there.
She blew a strand of black hair off her face and reached for a yellow handhold. She had to let one foot leave the wall, and her shoulders told her they were tired of her shenanigans. Her left hand slipped off the handhold, and the momentum knocked her off the one good foothold she’d been using. Pain shot down her right arm as it took her full weight.
Dangling by one arm, she had a good view of Lucy. The rope was slack in her brown hands, and Lucy studied the graffiti-covered front windows as if trying to read them from the inside.
“Yo!” Vivian shouted.
Lucy didn’t even flinch. White wires trailed out of her ears and down to the phone in her hand. She was wearing earbuds! Vivian had forbidden her to listen to music while belaying her. Back in the service, she had trusted her fellow soldiers with her life. Civilian life wasn’t like that.
She looked down at the wall below her, but she was just over a curve, and she couldn’t see far enough to find a safe place to put her legs or her arm. She blocked out the panic in her stomach and the pain in her hand. That was just her body. She could rise above that. She had scars on her back and a medal in her closet that would testify to it.
If she couldn’t use her eyes, she’d have to use her memory. She closed her eyes and visualized the wall below, replaying each potential handhold and foothold in her memory.
A red foothold scrolled by. She stopped the picture and studied it. If she swung toward it, her foot might reach. If she misjudged the hold’s position, she’d fall. But she’d fall in a couple seconds anyway, when her right hand lost its last bit of desperate strength.
She swung toward a foothold she couldn’t see, caught it with her toe, and pulled herself onto the wall. Her left hand found a new grip. She let go with her right hand and clenched and unclenched it, sending blood to her angry muscles. She hauled in a few deep breaths.
That wasn’t a mistake she could make on a real wall. That’d kill her. Next weekend she was going out to The Gunks with Dirk and a couple of friends, and she’d better get her head in the game by then. Outdoor walls were unforgiving.
But careful climbing wasn’t what the indoor wall was about. On the indoor wall, she didn’t allow herself to plan in advance. She went from one handhold to the hardest one she could see, training herself to react to the unexpected, getting stuck on purpose. Something that was a lot easier when she thought she had Lucy to back her up.
She reached for another handhold and pushed herself up with her legs. She wasn’t going to climb down before she reached the roof. Below her, Lucy started tapping her foot to the music.
Damn little sister. Vivian was taking back those twenty dollars as soon as her feet were on the ground.
Lucy looked up. “Your phone just beeped! It says you have a funeral to go to.”
Vivian touched the roof. “You’re damn lucky that it isn’t mine.”
Chapter 3
Ash gazed out the window of his eighty-fifth floor office. The surrounding skyscrapers faded into pollution-browned clouds. From his perch high in the Empire State Building, he was constantly reminded how humans had sullied even the clouds. Mankind was fast turning this beautiful blue and green ball into a waste dump. A few more generations and the planet would collapse. He could cope with the idea of losing a few billion people here or there, but the mass extinction of the innocent plants and animals troubled him deeply.
He cracked a window, and warm air flowed into the room. Another reason he loved the building — the windows actually opened. He’d spent so much time sealed off from nature at their last location that he’d vowed never to move into another building that didn’t have windows that could open into the world.