The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

  “You were friends of Mari’s?” José asked, drawing out the question to show that he didn’t believe them.

  Leda decided it was safer not to lie. “We were friends of Eris’s, actually,” she cut in.

  “I see. You’re a highlier,” José said laconically, as if that explained everything. His eyes traveled up and down Leda’s outfit, glittering with amusement, before turning to Watt. “You are, but not your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Leda said impatiently, ignoring the strange pang she felt at that statement. “We’re here because we wanted to know more about Mariel. She came to these parties a lot, didn’t she?”

  José’s expression darkened. “If you think that I don’t regret that night every minute of every damn day—I should never have let her walk home alone when she was so obviously messed up. . . .” He faltered and looked away.

  Oh, Leda realized. Maybe Mariel was last seen at one of these parties before she died. “It’s not your fault. She had a lot going on, before it . . . happened,” she ventured, wondering if the statement was too bold.

  “Of course she had a lot going on. She’d just lost her girlfriend!” José burst out, then sighed, deflating. “She really loved Eris, you know.”

  “I know,” Leda said softly, and even though it was woefully inadequate: “I’m so sorry.”

  “I can’t stop blaming myself,” José went on, more to himself than the two of them. “I keep thinking about her, wondering what she would be doing right now if I had insisted on walking her home that night. I’m almost tempted to go steal her diary, just to read her last few entries. Hear her voice again.”

  Leda’s gaze whipped up. “Diary?”

  “Those last few months, Mari had started carrying around a paper notebook. She never left home without it,” José said, and shrugged. “She said she loved how old-fashioned it felt.”

  Leda exchanged a loaded glance with Watt. Did Mariel actually care about things being low-tech—or had she been trying to hide from Watt and his quantum computer, which she’d known about ever since the night in Dubai? If so, it worked. Watt and Nadia might be able to hack anything that ran on electricity, but neither of them had known about this notebook.

  “You never saw what Mariel was writing in there?” Watt asked, and Leda could have kicked him for his lack of tact.

  José looked offended. “I would never violate her privacy like that. Why are you so curious about it?” His eyes narrowed. “What did you say your names were?”

  There was a beat of hot, shifting silence. “We were just leaving,” Leda said quickly, and turned away. Watt followed close on her heels.

  As they walked back to the monorail station, the air tore bitterly through her thin jacket. Leda realized that she was trembling. Watt slipped his arm around her, and this time, she didn’t protest.

  RYLIN

  “CAN YOU PICK up more of the caramel-flavored caff packs while you’re out?” Chrissa asked, interrupting the languid silence of their apartment. She was lying facedown on her rumpled bedcovers, her chin tucked on her crossed arms, her eyes half closed as she supposedly studied for a history test on her brand-new contacts. Though Rylin suspected she might actually be cruising the i-Net. Or napping.

  “No way. I refuse to support your caffeine addiction.” Rylin crouched before their shared closet, searching through the litter of debris on the floor for her buckled motorcycle boots.

  Chrissa pushed herself up onto her elbows to shoot her older sister a glare. “My caffeine addiction? You’re the one who keeps sneaking those packets to school!”

  “Only because the cafeteria refuses to serve anything except organic, vitamin-infused, ‘meditative’ water products,” Rylin confessed, and grinned. “Fine. I’ll grab another box.”

  “Why are you and Hiral going to the mall today, anyway? It’s such a zoo on Sundays.” Chrissa wrinkled her nose a little at Hiral’s name. She didn’t like that Rylin had gotten back together with him, even though Hiral had done his best to try to win Chrissa over—brought her banana ice cream, fixed her earbuds when they broke, listened to her incessant talk about the girl on her volleyball team she was crushing on. And still Chrissa didn’t approve of him.

  Rylin tried not to let her frustration show. “Why can’t you accept that I’m with Hiral, and stop acting weird about it?”

  “Weird? What am I doing that’s weird? You’re the weird one,” Chrissa said evasively, to which Rylin rolled her eyes. She tried to remind herself that Chrissa was young and immature; but it hurt, the way she kept broadcasting her disapproval.

  “I know you don’t like Hiral,” Rylin said quietly. “You still blame him for what he did last year, back when he was dealing. Which isn’t exactly fair, since I’m the one it impacted, and I forgave him a long time ago.”

  “That’s not true,” Chrissa argued, “and it’s unfair of you to accuse me like that. I would never hold Hiral’s past against him.”

  “Then why—”

  “I just thought you outgrew him, is all,” Chrissa said baldly. She flicked off her contacts, to level her bright-green eyes at Rylin. “But since he clearly makes you happy, I’ll shut up about it.”

  Rylin didn’t know how to answer that. She focused on pulling her boots on over her socks, which were printed with tiny watermelons. “Anyway, I’m not going to the mall with Hiral, I’m going for class,” she said tersely.

  “For class?”

  “For psych class,” Rylin admitted, knowing exactly what was coming.

  “Oh,” Chrissa said meaningfully. “With Cord.”

  Rylin had already told Chrissa that Cord was her lab partner. She’d tried her best to sound unconcerned, as if the whole thing were no big deal, but Chrissa knew their history and probably saw right through her.

  “We have to run a field study examining social mores in a crowded location,” Rylin tried to explain. “The mall seemed like the easiest place.”

  “Social mores? What does that even mean?”

  “Behavioral norms. The things people do automatically, subconsciously, because that’s how everyone else does it.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Chrissa refrained from commenting on the fact that Rylin was going to the mall—on a weekend—with her ex-boyfriend.

  Rylin felt plenty guilty without Chrissa’s help. She couldn’t stop wondering if it was wrong of her to have hidden this from Hiral.

  She had meant to tell Hiral that Cord was her lab partner; she really had. Last night, when Hiral came with her to Lux’s birthday party, she had planned on telling him. But she kept putting it off. By the time they were walking home, holding hands, eating doughnuts from their favorite late-night food cart, she’d decided against it. Between her schoolwork and his work schedule—he was on the late shift again, which ran into the early hours of the morning—she barely saw Hiral these days. Why ruin a perfectly good night by bringing up her ex-boyfriend?

  Besides, she and Cord were actually starting to get along during psych class, to relax back into something that resembled friendship, at least within school bounds. It wasn’t romantic, Rylin kept telling herself.

  And the more time that went by without her mentioning it to Hiral, the less it seemed like a big deal.

  After all, she was keeping a much bigger secret from Hiral: all the drama over the Mariel investigation. Mariel had known that Rylin stole drugs. If that secret somehow came to light through the police investigation, it wouldn’t take long for the cops to realize that Hiral had been involved too. He was the one who’d sold the drugs for her.

  Hiral had worked so hard to put all of that behind him, and Rylin had no desire for it to resurface now. She knew it wasn’t easy—god, even last night she’d seen their old friend V approach Hiral at Lux’s party, throwing an arm easily around Hiral’s shoulders as he whispered something. Probably offering him a hit of his latest drug. But Hiral just shook his head, ignoring him.

  When she arrived at the main entrance of the mid-Manhattan Mall, a teem
ing monstrosity that spanned the entire 500th floor, Rylin was startled to find Cord already waiting for her. He was standing near the doors, his arms crossed, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, mesh athletic shorts, and rubber flip-flops.

  “What on earth are you dressed as, a basketball team’s waterboy?”

  Cord gave a bright, unselfconscious laugh. “Is it too much? I raided Brice’s closet. I didn’t want to look absurd.”

  “Then you’ve failed miserably.” He would have looked perfectly fine in his usual T-shirt and dark jeans, Rylin thought, confused. It took a moment before she realized why he’d wanted to dress up—or rather, dress exaggeratedly down. “Is this your first time going this far downTower?”

  “Absolutely not. I’ve been to Central Park lots of times.”

  Rylin blinked to hide her consternation, though she should have guessed. Even when they were together, Cord had never come down to her apartment. Their entire relationship had begun, thrived, and ended within the confines of his 969th-floor apartment.

  “I’m happy to buy something else, if you’re embarrassed to be with me,” Cord offered. “You look nice, though.”

  Rylin laughed. “That’s just because this is the first time in months that you’re seeing me in something that isn’t a school uniform,” she pointed out.

  Cord gave a puzzled frown, as if he hadn’t quite thought of that, and didn’t especially like the realization.

  They swept through the main double doors into a department store, and Rylin was immediately assaulted by the sensory overload within. There was just so much of everything—stacks of black cyra tops, row upon row of upcycled denim, not to mention the soaring walls lined with women’s shoes. There were stilettos and slingbacks and boots, some color-shifting to match your outfit, others self-repairing so they never showed a scuff mark. Most were lined with the new piezoelectric carbon soles, which converted the mechanical energy of walking back to electricity and fed it directly into the Tower’s main grid.

  Chrissa had been right: The mall was overcrowded today. The breathless conversations of the other shoppers washed over Rylin as if she’d been in an echo chamber. Adverts instantly popped up on her contacts—Jeans just 35ND for one day only! or Don’t forget to vote in the municipal election this week! She quickly disabled the contacts, slightly relieved by the newfound clarity of her vision. She’d had them for a year now, since she started at Berkeley, but she still wasn’t used to how crowded they got in public places.

  “I think I should buy you this.” Cord held up a soft green tank top that said CAN’T I JUST WATCH THE SCHOOL VIDS FROM MY BED?

  “I don’t think it matches the school uniform,” Rylin jested, though she hadn’t missed the fact that Cord offered to buy it for her, rather than suggesting she buy it for herself. And did he even understand what the shirt meant? He’d probably never watched a school vid in his life. Up at Berkeley, the courses were taught exclusively by live professors.

  They headed through the department store’s far doors and into the mall proper, toward the massive bank of elevator pods at the center of its cathedral-like interior. The elevator pods looked like nothing so much as a strand of delicate opaque pearls, constantly detaching and reattaching as they moved throughout the mall along their fiber-cable necklaces. They would float up, sporadically stopping and starting as new people got on or off, and then finally drift back to earth.

  Elevator pod technology was nothing new. It had been invented before hovercrafts sometime in the last century and wasn’t useful on any kind of large scale, certainly not for the Tower itself. But in self-contained spaces like malls or airports, it was still the cheapest and most effective way to move people short distances.

  “Ready?” Cord asked, starting toward the nearest station.

  Because of the way the tech worked, pulling them along on that nanofiber, the pods themselves only opened from one end. And for some reason that Rylin had never paused to question, everyone always entered the pod and then turned around to face the entrance, waiting expectantly for the sliding panels to open again.

  For their experiment, Cord and Rylin were going to board a crowded car and then face the back instead of the front, to see how people reacted. It had been Rylin’s idea, actually. She liked to think that it was brilliant in its simplicity.

  The moment they stepped onto the station, the smartmatter beneath their feet registered their weight and summoned a pod. Cord tapped at the screen to mark their destination as the highest level of the mall, a full thirty floors above them. Then they both stepped inside.

  Rylin started to turn unthinkingly toward the curved flexiglass door. As the pod clicked shut and jerked into the air, the surface of the mall fell away before them, making the shoppers look like a swarm of ants.

  “Forgetting something?” Cord asked behind her, amused.

  Rylin quickly shuffled to face the back, resisting the urge to turn back and look at the view. “You know,” she said, “when Lux and I were little, we used to ride this up and down for hours.”

  It had been like a free carnival ride, the novelty of which never wore off. Rylin used to secretly imagine that she was the president, riding in her private hovercraft up to the White House—until she learned that the White House wasn’t even a tower, but a flat, squat building. It still didn’t make sense to her. What good was it to be the leader of America if you didn’t have a decent view?

  “That’s funny,” Cord said, though Rylin heard the note of disbelief in his voice. Of course he hadn’t spent his childhood riding elevator pods; he’d probably been playing a full suite of holo-games on his expensive immersion console. “Who’s Lux?” he added.

  Rylin blinked. “My best friend.” It was easy to forget how little Cord really knew her. But then, he only ever saw her at school or on other upper floors.

  Before Cord could respond, their pod lurched sideways to pick up someone else. Rylin and Cord stayed where they were, facing the featureless back wall, as a pair of older women stepped inside.

  There was a palpable moment of silence. The women had turned to face the curved flexiglass doors at the front, but Rylin felt their necks twisting, their gazes boring into her. The pod resumed its motion.

  “Tanya, I’ve been meaning to show you this,” one of the women said to the other, pulling out her tablet. She held it in such a way that it was angled toward the back wall, forcing herself and her friend to look in that direction. Rylin saw their feet edge slightly backward. She felt strangely triumphant.

  Slowly, by degrees, the women turned to face the same way as the two teenagers. It happened in minuscule increments, the curve in their spines so subtle that it would have been undetectable to someone who wasn’t looking. But by the time the elevator pod pulled to another stop, near the top of the mall, the women were also facing backward.

  The doors opened again and a boy, around twelve or so, stepped on board alone. He didn’t even hesitate, just kept on facing the back as if that was what he did every time.

  Rylin lifted her eyes to meet Cord’s. He gave an exaggerated wink, forcing her to stifle a giggle.

  Finally they reached the top floor, where a colonnaded walkway circled the center of the mall. Rylin hurried toward a display of activewear bracelets. She was laughing now, a full-bodied laugh that began deep in her belly, revealing the twin dimples on her flushed cheeks.

  “Did you see that? Those women totally caved to our social pressure!”

  “And the effect clearly magnifies with more people. That boy didn’t hesitate at all,” Cord agreed. The fluorescent lighting caught the warmth in his light blue eyes.

  “Just think of how much faster they would’ve turned if you weren’t dressed so ridiculously,” Rylin couldn’t resist adding.

  “Absolutely,” Cord agreed, with mock solemnity. “We both know that you were the success factor in this experiment.”

  “Does that make you the complicating factor?”

  “More like the comic relief.”

&nb
sp; They stepped back into the elevator pod, once again facing the back. Rylin held her breath as they pulled to a stop about halfway down. She and Cord exchanged a complicit glance, both of them still smiling.

  “Rylin?”

  She turned around to see Hiral standing there, holding a bright-red shopping bag. His eyes darted from her to Cord and back again.

  Rylin realized with a start how it must look to him, that she was out with Cord, in secret. She felt a twisting pain in her chest. “Hiral! We, um, we’re running an experiment for psych class,” she stammered. “We’re violating social norms and then recording people’s reactions. We stand backward on the elevator pod! It’s absurd, really, what people do—”

  “I don’t know if we’ve met before,” Cord interrupted, holding out his hand. “I’m Cord Anderton.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cord. I’m Rylin’s boyfriend, Hiral,” Hiral countered. Rylin noticed with dismay that he wasn’t looking in her direction. “That’s really interesting, what you’re doing for school.”

  The air seemed to condense around them, filled with palpitations of awkwardness. Shit. The only two boys she’d ever been with—the only ones she’d ever really cared about—and here they both were, standing together in a tiny pod suspended in midair. Rylin was hyperaware of every gesture, even of the sound of her own breathing, which seemed loud and rattling in the bubble of space.

  “Why don’t you join us, Hiral?” Rylin heard Cord offer. She glanced over at him in alarm, wishing he hadn’t said that, but apparently he wanted to watch the world crash and burn.

  Hiral didn’t answer at first. He didn’t need to. Rylin could read the emotions darting over his face: his confusion and wounded pride, but also his reluctant desire to understand what the hell was going on.

  She realized that Cord had the right idea. If Hiral stayed, he would see that Rylin hadn’t been doing anything wrong—that this was just for class, and didn’t mean anything.