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He points to a sort of car corral where a dozen or so electric cars are parked. Each one has the Spiker logo on the side.
Solo checks the clock on his phone. He looks up and within a few seconds a guard comes walking by. We hear the footsteps. Coming, then going, fading altogether.
“Yep,” Solo says. He pushes me out into the garage. The cars aren’t locked. The “keys” rest on the dashboard.
Solo pushes the passenger seat back as far as it will go and I hoist myself in. He folds my chair and pops it into the trunk. The car starts without a sound.
“Do you know how to drive?” I ask.
“Do you have six dollars in cash?” Solo asks, ignoring my question.
“I don’t exactly have my purse with me.”
“Check the glove compartment. See if there’s a roll of quarters.”
I dig under some maps and find two rolls.
“Good. We have to use cash at the bridge.”
I point to the automatic toll-road transponder mounted on the windshield.
“Yeah,” he says. “Pull that down and put it in the glove compartment. We don’t want to be tracked. I don’t want to have to try to hack the toll system.”
“But you have no problem hacking into Spiker?” I ask.
An annoyed look, maybe even an angry one, clouds Solo’s eyes.
“Seat belt,” he says tersely.
I click my belt and we’re off across the garage with an almost silent whir of electric motors. The tires on the painted concrete floor make more noise.
“Lower the sun visor and put your head down,” he orders. “Cameras.”
There’s an automated checkout. Solo pulls a plastic ID card from his pocket. I can see the picture is not of him. The name on the ID is Wanda Chang.
“Funny, you don’t look Chinese,” I say.
He swipes the card past the reader. The gate goes up.
And for the first time in forever, I am outside.
“They’ll never know?” I ask, looking anxiously back at the receding outer gate of the campus.
He shrugs. “I can’t guarantee that. They know I escape from time to time.”
“Escape?” Even though I’ve been feeling the same way, it seems overly dramatic.
“What else is it when the monkey gets out of his cage?”
“You’re not a monkey,” I point out. “You’re strange, but you’re human.”
“Mostly,” he says with a slim smile.
“But you can leave, right?”
“Yeah. But where would I go, exactly? I don’t have wheels”—he takes a sharp right—“not unless I get them this way. And Spiker’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
It’s twenty minutes to the Golden Gate Bridge, which, as usual, is shrouded in fog. I call Aislin to tell her I’m on my way, but she doesn’t answer.
