First Page Friday: Eight Days Ablaze

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Lawyer Adina barJonas loves Hanukkah. And her papa gives the best gifts. This year, it’s the VirtualClone Box, for “a fully integrated sensory experience”. Adina uses it to argue law, meet her heroes and thoroughly indulge herself with some very sexy men over the eight nights of the holiday.

But Papa and Uncle David have their own agenda, and Adina finds that by enjoying her new toy she has played right into their hands.





Chapter One

2045

Adina barJonas loved Hanukkah. December was nothing but cold weather, ice storms and chilly rain, but she loved the holidays with the lights, presents and comfort food. She didn’t even mind that Christmas dominated the stores. Any holiday in any religion was just an excuse to see family, overeat and spend too much.

The UPS box she balanced on her hip as she opened the apartment door only emphasized the last point. She set her briefcase down—the Linzer inheritance case could wait a while—and placed the box on the teak coffee table while she decompressed from work.

She brushed aside the beaded curtain that separated her bedroom from the rest of the apartment. She’d done the place in the style of an opium den or vintage hippie pad from the middle twentieth century, full of gold-tassled red velvet furniture and floor cushions around low tables. Candles and incense burners filled the apartment with fragrant smoke when it suited her. There were no black-light posters. They didn’t fit the more upscale image she projected as a junior partner in Brinkley, Samudrala, Wallace and Nguyen.

Adina moved slowly, drawing out the anticipation. She stepped out of her heels and hung them in their place on the shoe rack before peeling off the silk stockings and rinsing them. She itched to open the box.

“Delayed gratification is the hallmark of a mature personality,” she heard her father say in her head. She continued her evening ritual, trying very hard to be mature.

Her dark designer suit and silk blouse went into the closet, replaced by soft cotton. The current Indian fashion made the yoke of the tunic sparkle with beads and little mirrors. She dug her bare toes into the thick Persian carpet her father had given her when she graduated from law school.

She scooted back into the front room and stopped herself just as she reached for the letter-opener. Now she had to make herself wait even longer for the present because she’d been too eager. Although she was in regular contact with her father and uncle, she had little enough other social life that even a present and not just a call felt like an event. She sat a minute with her hands in her lap, then went to the kitchen for her usual cup of coffee.

The same disquiet that had been growing within her for the last six months seized her as she made coffee. She did her best not to hurry as she got the beans from the freezer, ground them twice and made a single cup. She sat on the sofa and sipped her coffee, staring at the box, her fingers twitching now and then toward the letter opener. There was no name and the return address on the box was a post office box in New York. It could be from no one but her father. Papa’s gifts were always expensive, always too much. She loved it.