By the time he pulls the Vespa up to a ramshackle building overlooking the Canal d’Ourc, I have shoved every trace of romance out of my heart. All the fuzzy, delicious cotton candy has left my brain. I am clear of dreams and hopes and anything else that could put my mission at risk. When we pull off our helmets and he play-punches me on the shoulder and says, “Hey, look, you’re still in one piece,” I barely feel the electricity in his touch. I can’t let myself.

Chapter Seven

The building’s front entrance is boarded up, as are several of the windows. It looks like no one’s used it in decades.

“Wow, what is this place?” I ask.

We walk around the side of the building, let ourselves in through a gate, and cross a courtyard strewn with junky lawn furniture. A couple of rusty chairs are occupied by burnout guys smoking a joint and staring at us like we’re the pot police.

“Salut,” Siaka calls.

“Ta mère,” one replies. The other laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

“Idiots,” I murmur.

Siaka ignores them. “To answer your question, the building’s a squat.” He pulls the door open, letting me into a darkened hallway. A potted plant languishes in one corner, and the elevator is propped open by a two-by-four. “Artists take over vacant buildings that are scheduled to be destroyed. They inform the city of Paris that they are squatting, and the authorities almost always let them stay. It’s like a semi-formal contract—the artists pay for electricity and water until the place is torn down, then they move on to another place.”

He leads us to a stairwell, and we start the climb. Luckily there’s a skylight at the very top: all the lights are burned out. I shield my nose from the sickening smell of body odor and melted plastic.

“And, um, why is your tech person squatting here?” I ask.

“Livia? She’s basically a genius: skipped a few grades, graduated early, laughed at the idea of university. Now at sixteen she does freelance work for big corporations and makes bank.”

“She can’t afford something better than this?” I ask, feeling it in my calves as we pass the fourth floor and head towards the fifth.

“Sure, she can afford it. But she’s a hacker. This place gives her street cred.”

He pushes open a swinging door, and we emerge into a cavernous loft with widely spaced concrete columns.

The tenants have divided the area into randomly sized zones, each with different decor, like a dozen different mini-worlds packed side-by-side under a ceiling crisscrossed by broken florescent tubes. Trash lines the base of the exterior walls—soda cans, candy wrappers, huge puffballs of dust—like someone swept everything out of the middle of the room but didn’t bother to use a dustpan and pick it up.