“I see … sunshine,” he whispered back. He felt her lips against his neck, knew he smelled raw from the night and day, loved her even more because she knew too and didn’t care.
“What else?”
“My mother’s voice. It echoes.”
She pulled back, loosened his tie and started to unbutton his white dress shirt. He looked over at the Nature & Co. window and saw a dirt road that wound through a forest. Cooley was certain it went on forever. His shirt fell to the floor, getting tangled in the wheels of the chair.
Cooley stared at her, taking in every detail of Sadie’s face—the curl of the eyelashes, the perfect arc of the lips, the subtle curve of the neck—as if this would be the last time he ever made love to her. Looking at her like this was something he always did. He did it out of unabashed appreciation, and she always returned the favor. From the beginning, they never bothered switching off the lights or even closing their eyes because neither of them was interested in casting shadows on the presence of the other or cloaking any sort of bodily flaw out of teenage insecurity. When it came to sex, Cooley and Sadie preferred the experience pure and unadulterated, with everything—the wonderful and sensual as well as the damaged—bared for the other to see.
April 2, 2035, was the first time for either of them. They had been a couple for just about one month and, while they had not discussed openly the prospect of taking each other’s virginity—as opposed to the rest of their prudish, gossipy peers, most of whom had already made informal wagers as to when Sadie would inevitably succumb to Cooley’s charms—it was something they both wanted and decided that when it did happen, it would happen naturally.
April 2 was Sadie’s birthday and that year she was turning seventeen. Cooley made certain that he would align as many stars as he could in order to provide her with the most special day possible. She woke up to a bouquet of while calla lilies, real ones he’d smuggled into the tower from the outside world just hours before. He loved the way their elegant bulbs, their scent, and even the occasional wrinkles of imperfection on their petals made a mockery of the picturesque scenery broadcast on the Nature & Co. window in her room. The flowers were accompanied by a data disk for her Tabula, which contained a dozen pieces of music that Cooley had uploaded; and each song—selections from his favorite old rock bands like the Cure, Interpol, and the Strokes—was prefaced by his recorded explanations for why a certain lyric made him think of her.
But the crowning gift he had procured would have to wait until dinner. Over the years, Sadie had taken to the intravenous food diet and actually quite liked it, but she always missed the raspberry tarts from Bubble Bakery that her mother bought for her when she was a little girl growing up in New York City. Ever since she started attending Stansbury, Sadie’s brief trips home twice a year were so jam-packed with visits from extended family, along with the carefully engineered social and cultural event schedule her parents regularly laid out, that indulging in desserts—even those golden brown pastries topped with powdered sugar and filled with a warm, sweet berry filling—were the last thing for which she had time. But she always remembered those Bubble Bakery tarts. She compared any tasty liquefied treat inside the tower to them and had a habit of describing them as “better than sex,” even though she was, of course, a virgin. So in the days leading up to Sadie’s seventeenth birthday, Cooley did everything in his power to get ahold of one for her. Since hand-and-mouth food was extremely difficult to come by inside the school, he offered two weeks’ worth of meds to Harvey down in registration and reception if he would call Bubble Bakery in New York and ask them to overnight one of their famous tarts in time for April 2.
Harvey came through. He brought Cooley the parcel just before dinner hour, and inside was a beautiful, small yellow Bubble Bakery box wrapped with a beige bow. Cooley peeked inside and took a look at the prize for himself: a palm-size tart with a perfectly woven network of fresh pastry covering the glistening filling of dark red raspberry. He shaved, carefully combed his hair, straightened his tie, and discreetly brought the box into the cafeteria. Bunson was waiting for him, holding down the secluded table for two where Sadie had planned to meet him for the meal. He set the final gift of the day on the table and waited. Everything felt perfect and his heart throbbed, eager and warm, as the place started to fill up with specimens. He simply could not wait to see the look on her face and felt so lucky just to be a part of her life.
“Cooley,” came a deep, scratchy voice. Cooley glanced up and saw Mr. Charles Lawrence Banks, a huge, and unbalanced, senior specimen, one of several for whom Cooley did the favor of serving as a cash-carrying middleman to drug dealers during his trips out to San Angeles. Banks and his buddies would give Cooley the money to make the illegal purchases and the dealers kicked ten percent back to him as a service fee.
“Yeah?” Cooley replied. Some of Banks’s goons walked over.
“You look dapper. Special occasion?”
“Sadie’s birthday.” Banks set an envelope down on the table. Cooley knew there was money inside and felt a twinge of annoyance that these guys were ruining the gaiety of his special dinner. “Keep it,” he said, sliding the envelope back toward Banks. “I was in San Angeles last night. I can’t tap Harvey for favors every day. Someone’s gonna notice. Come back next week. I’ll make a run for you then.”
Banks slammed a big palm against the table. Veins popped up in his neck and temples. His eyes were bloodshot. It’s the BryleTran, Cooley thought: a snortable, powdery blend of opiates derived from crystal methamphetamine with strains of testosterone to keep the high going longer and prevent the muscles from getting strung out and weak. It was a great concept, except for the fact that it was as addictive as old-school crystal meth and the testosterone sent users into violent fits at the drop of a hat. Like the kind Cooley was witnessing at that moment.
“Bullshit,” Banks hissed. “I was gonna make you go now, but since it’s your girl’s birthday, I’ll make an exception and let you do it right after dinner.” Cooley glanced around for Bunson, but the table he’d picked for Sadie’s birthday was nestled in a corner, out of the sight of most of the cafeteria. “I’m a reasonable guy,” said Banks. “So just do it, huh?”
Cooley simmered, pissed that Banks was talking to him like this and ordering him around like an errand boy, but he reminded himself that it was Sadie’s day. He felt his forehead start to sweat from the simple exertion of restraining himself from opening his mouth. His carefully combed locks of hair began to fall, sliding down his forehead and into his face and eyes. Phys-D tactics automatically flashed through his mind. He could take these guys. But not today. Today was not about him. At this moment, his fury would stay pent up, under control, like he was just another obedient specimen.
Banks picked up the envelope of cash and leaned down, pressing it into Cooley’s chest with his index finger. “There’s enough in there for twenty-eight doses,” said Banks, the drugs from his last fix giving him a bravado he didn’t really possess. “Don’t make me regret going easy on you.” He sat himself down on the tabletop for emphasis. One of his big buttocks crushed the side of the Bubble Bakery box. Cooley looked down at Banks’s finger, which was still jammed against his sternum. Banks’s goons were all grinning. The BryleTran overrode their med cycle conditioning, nullified the beta blockers. If push came to shove, these guys weren’t gonna hold back. And maybe, Cooley thought, that suited him just fine.
He locked eyes with Banks. “I’ll go when I’m good and ready,” he said, losing the control he had been telling himself to maintain but feeling an enormous wave of relief at the sensation of cutting loose. And then it bubbled over. “And get that fuckin’ finger out of my face before I rip it off and shove it up your ass.”
Banks’s fat buttock crushed the box a little more. “Oh yeah? Well I—”
Cooley grabbed his finger and snapped it like a candy cane. Banks’s eyes bulged. Cooley leaned back in his chair and kicked him in the face, catching his jaw and knocking him
off the table. He felt a pair of hands grab him from behind and a fist slam against the side of his skull. One of Banks’s BryleTran-juiced buddies yanked him up and threw him down against the table. Cooley felt the Bubble Bakery box smash under his body before Banks himself pinned him against the wall and started pummeling him with his uninjured left hand. Cooley crumpled to the floor, curling into a fetal position to shield himself from the shower of punches and kicks, and through eyes that were already close to being swollen shut he saw a team of detail officers shove gawking specimens aside in their rush to stop the brawl from getting any more gruesome.
By the time Sadie arrived, the only remnant of the incident that was left was the crushed Bubble Bakery box with a mutilated raspberry tart inside, its burgundy innards spilling forth and staining the white marble floor below, more collateral damage along the grim path of Cooley’s life. She reached her fingertip toward the box, pulled away some of the golden crust and jam and brought it to her lips. Her heart flooded with warmth, both from the sweet taste and the knowledge that someone loved her so much.
She went to the infirmary and patiently waited the two hours it took for school medics to examine him. Bunson stopped by at one point and gave the news to Sadie to pass onto Cooley: the Class of 2035’s valedictorian peer-reviewed the witnesses and promptly told Captain Gibson that Banks was a lunatic and Cooley acted in self-defense. Banks had already been removed from the tower and sent home.
After Cooley was ready to take visitors, Sadie walked into the room where he was being kept and stared. The left side of his face was purple and bruised. Both of his eyes were blackened. The head medic told her that three of his fingers were broken and that he had a cracked rib to go along with multiple contusions. He said Cooley refused all offers of painkillers and then the medic left them alone, shaking his head in resignation as he closed the door behind him. She walked over to Cooley’s bed and touched his cheek.
“I’m so sorry,” he mumbled through split, puffy lips.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. No matter how hard I try to get things right, I always ruin them in the end. It makes me sick, but I can’t help it.”
Sadie held his hand, felt his puffy, purpled fingers and ran her palm against his smashed nails. She touched his swelled eyelids and smiled. “You’re so beautiful,” she said.
He watched as she locked the door to the room and walked back over to him, unbuttoning her white shirt as she stood there underneath the harsh fluorescent lighting. Cooley gazed at her. Her bra slid to the floor and she stepped out of her pleated gray skirt. He thought it was absurd, looking so monstrous and battered, reaching his arm out to this gloriously perfect naked girl, pulling her down on top of him, even though the pressure of her warm body made his bruises sting. The bedsheets slid to the side and he felt her hands on him, embarrassed that he roused so slowly for the first time they were going to make love, but then found himself relieved because the worst thing in the world would be for it to end too quickly. He wanted it to last forever: after it was over they would have to go back to their engineered lives in the tower. But for that series of moments, the taste and feel of Sadie’s flesh made the pain racking his body subside—her taste and smells soothed those wounds both external and, perhaps more important, the ones lodged deep inside his mind and his heart.
Afterward, as Sadie lay next to him in that infirmary bed, she looked at the wounds that covered his slim frame. He shuddered and flinched in his sleep and each time he did, she stroked his head and whispered, “shhh…” in the hopes that he would rest peacefully, if only for a minute or two.
Cooley snapped back into the reality of his bedroom, of Riley’s dead body, of Goldsmith, and glanced at his Nature & Co. window and the dirt path it displayed.
“What were you talking about with Goldsmith this morning?” she asked.
“When?” How did she know about that?
“In the atrium. After breakfast.”
“Were you spying on me?”
“No. I was late to my progression and I saw you on my way there.”
“It … it was nothing.”
“It was a little strange, is what it was. I thought you two hated each other.”
“The less you know, the better.” She rolled away from him. “Look, Sadie, it’s for your own good, okay?”
“I wouldn’t trust him, if I were you,” she said, not facing him.
“You don’t even know him.”
“Neither do you.”
Cooley pulled her over on top of him, feeling the warm softness of her body against his. Her hair fell down around his face, tickling his cheeks. He ran his fingers down the ridge of her back and felt the tension leave her muscles. He looked her in the eye. “If I had to run, would you come with me?”
“Run where?” she asked, her cheek against the skin on his shoulder.
“Just say yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Even if I was in a lot of trouble?” Fear made Cooley’s voice crack just a little bit.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “Yes.” He pressed his face against Sadie’s soft mane. It smelled like summer. His eyes welled up with tears and some spilled out, making stray hairs cling to his nose and chin. “Where would we go?” he heard her ask. He choked back a sob and focused on the winding, digitized forest path on the Nature & Co. window.
“Anywhere but here.”
* * *
Way out in the D Sector of San Angeles, Goldsmith stood on the iron fire escape outside the late Riley’s bathroom and watched the gyrotaxi that whisked him away from the tower disappear into the swarm of traffic high above. When the cabbie first picked him up, Goldsmith was almost certain they would fall off the end of a flat Earth, rather than cruise the hundred or so miles to San Angeles without incident. The school’s constant warnings about leaving campus unsupervised ran through his head the entire ride, despite the fact that those admonitions were geared toward intimidating little boys, rather than grown men on the verge of graduation: robbers and kidnappers were waiting just outside the tower’s walls; the impure city air would cause tumors in specimens’ healthy lungs; the countless tales of specimens who left the tower and were never heard from again … The silly list went on and on. And in spite of accepted wisdom, here he was.
He was familiar enough with the apartment layout from the security detail’s incident report. Cooley and Officer Jamison went through the bathroom window right there. The wooden window frame was still lined with shards of broken glass. A web of yellow plastic barriers labeled DO NOT ENTER had been stretched across the window. Riley—who Cooley said took the handgun inside the bathroom—was pronounced dead right inside there, on the floor in front of the sink. Cooley claimed the gun was nowhere to be seen upon his entry. That hallway past the bathroom door led to the hovel’s living room, where the hiding spot and the yearbook pages that Cooley mentioned were located. Goldsmith pulled off a few of the yellow banners and poked his head inside the bathroom as the heavy storm outside soaked through his blazer and shirt. It was quiet inside. His heart began to pound and the rain on his palms mixed with clammy sweat. Right now, you’re not Mr. Goldsmith, he thought. You’re brass-balled, unbalanced specimen Mr. Cooley. So cut the hemming and hawing.
He hopped through the window space, landing with a soft thud on the tile next to the black outline of Riley’s body drawn on the floor. Except for the soft syncopation of the rain against the fire escape outside, it was silent. He glanced in the corners, behind the toilet, under the sink, but did not find Riley’s gun. File it away as a missing piece of the evidence puzzle. Goldsmith eased open the bathroom door and stepped through, taking in the combination living room and kitchen. He had never been inside the apartment of a dead man before, and imagined it would be eerie, dark, the air slightly stale. But it still looked very much lived-in; the television was illuminated and muted, and dirty clothes were strewn across an old sofa.
Two more steps inside the living room and he saw the coffee
table—there was nothing on its surface, because the detail probably bagged whatever was there as evidence—and a red rug with brown stains on the floor. He kneeled down and pulled it up, tapping the wooden planks beneath. One of them sounded hollow. He lifted it up. Inside, he saw stacks of cash and, just like Cooley said, several torn-out sheets of yearbook photos with dozens of rows of black-and-white head shots of specimens.
Goldsmith grabbed them. The text in the bottom right-hand corner identified them as six pages from the 2033 edition. There: four red X’s through faces he didn’t recognize, along with two unmarked pages with circles around two more specimen faces. There was Riley on one and … Goldsmith looked closer, thinking it must have been a mistake: the other circled face belonged to none other than Miss Stella Saltzman.
Stella. She was four years older than him and the most accomplished valedictorian he’d seen during his twelve years in the tower. Being younger and a nobody for the majority of his time at Stansbury, Goldsmith always admired her from afar, but he would’ve been more than happy to kiss the hem of her top-ranked uniform had he been given the chance. After his Selmer-Dubonnet victory was announced in the school newsletter back in September, he was shocked to receive a short note in the mail from Miss Saltzman bearing her congratulations. He wasn’t sure what she was doing now—she was probably twenty-one years old and maybe even a college graduate. What the hell did she have to do with a burnout like Riley?
Goldsmith stepped back and heard an alarm ring out. Damn. He froze, quickly realizing what had happened, and then grabbed the stacks of Riley’s cash—a makeshift slush fund for the Free Cooley Movement, grand membership total of two specimens, which included Cooley himself—stuffing them along with the stray yearbook pages in his blazer’s inside pockets. He shoved the wooden plank into its place and moved back the rug. Over the alarm, he heard the sound of heavy boots pounding down the hallway toward the apartment’s front door. That was stupid, he thought. He knew security detail procedure and should’ve anticipated the trip wire laser. If they had ThermaGuns, he was finished … unless he could make it to the pedestrian traffic down on the sidewalk before they could lock onto his body’s heat patterns: it was against policy to fire into a crowd of outsiders. The footsteps got closer. He could turn himself in, talk his way out of this, and knew he could convince Gibson that he was only trying to follow up on a lead and protect the school from Pete while procuring more evidence against Cooley.
Prodigy Page 19
