The Towering Sky

The museum’s event planner ducked out onto the terrace to inform them that the appetizer tasting was ready. As they began to file through the doors, Calliope cast a lingering look over her shoulder, at the great wide expanse of sky. Then she turned to walk with dutiful, mechanical steps back inside.

WATT

IT WAS FRIDAY evening, and Watzahn Bakradi was doing the same thing he did every Friday. He was out at a bar.

Tonight’s bar of choice was called Helipad. The midTower clientele probably thought that was some kind of hilarious hipster irony, but Watt had another theory: It was called Helipad because no one had bothered to name it anything more creative.

Though Watt had to admit that this place was pretty cool. During the day it was a real, functioning helipad—there were actual skid marks on the gray carbon-composite floor, mere hours old—until every night after the final copter departure, when it transformed into an illicit bar.

The ceiling soared above them like a cavernous steel rib cage. Behind a folding table, human bartenders mixed drinks out of coolers: No one dared bring a bot-tender up here, because a bot would report all the safety violations. Dozens of young people, dressed in midriff-baring tops or flickering instaprinted T-shirts, clustered in the center of the space. The air hummed with excitement and attraction and the low pulse of speakers. Most striking of all, though, were the helipad’s main double doors—which had been thrown open jaggedly, as if an enormous shark had taken a bite out of the Tower’s exterior wall. The cool night air whipped around the side of the building. Watt could hear it beneath the music, an odd disembodied hum.

The partygoers kept glancing that way, their gazes drawn to the velvety night sky, but no one ventured too close. There was an unspoken rule to stay on this side of the red-painted safety line, about twenty meters from the gaping edge of the hangar.

Any closer and people might think you were planning to jump.

Watt had heard that copters did sometimes, unpredictably, land here at night, for patients with medical emergencies. If that happened, the entire bar would pick up and evacuate with four minutes’ notice. The type of people who came here didn’t mind the uncertainty. That was part of the appeal: the thrill of flirting with danger.

He shifted his weight, holding a frosted beer bottle determinedly in one hand. It wasn’t his first of the evening. When he began coming out like this, right after Leda broke up with him, he would skulk around the edges of whatever bar he’d come to, trying to conceal his hurt, which only made it hurt worse. Now at least the wound was scarred over enough for him to stand at the center of the crowd. It made Watt feel marginally less lonely.

Your blood alcohol levels are higher than the legal limit, reported Nadia, the quantum computer embedded in Watt’s brain. She projected the words over his contacts like an incoming flicker, communicating the way she always did when Watt was in a public setting.

Tell me something I don’t know, Watt thought somewhat immaturely.

I just worry about you drinking alone.

I’m not drinking alone, Watt pointed out mirthlessly. All these people are here with me.

Nadia didn’t laugh at the joke.

Watt’s gaze was drawn to a pretty, long-limbed girl with olive skin. He tossed his empty beer bottle into the recycle chute and started over.

“Want to dance?” he asked once he was standing next to her. Nadia had gone utterly silent. Come on, Nadia. Please.

The girl pulled her lower lip into her teeth and glanced around. “No one else is dancing. . . .”

“Which is why we should be the first,” Watt countered, just as the music abruptly switched tracks to a grating pop song.

The girl’s reluctance visibly melted away, and she laughed. “This is actually my favorite song!” she exclaimed, taking Watt’s hand.

“Really?” Watt asked, as if he didn’t already know. It was because of him—well, because of Nadia—that the song was playing. Nadia had hacked the girl’s page on the feeds to determine her favorite music, then hijacked the bar’s speakers to play it, all in less than a second.

Thanks, Nadia.

Are you sure you want to thank me? This song is garbage, Nadia shot back, so vehemently that Watt couldn’t help cracking a smile.

Nadia was Watt’s secret weapon. Everyone could search the i-Net on their computerized contacts, of course, but even the latest contacts operated by voice-command—which meant that if you wanted to look something up, you had to say it aloud, the way you sent a flicker. Only Watt could search the i-Net in surreptitious silence, because only Watt had a computer embedded in his brain.

Whenever Watt met someone, Nadia would instantly scan the girl’s page on the feeds, then determine what he should say in order to win her over. Maybe the girl was a tattooed graphic artist, and Watt would pretend to love old 2-D sketches and small-batch whiskey. Maybe she was a foreign exchange student, and Watt would act urbane and sophisticated; or maybe she was a passionate political advocate, and Watt would claim to espouse her cause, whatever it was. The script always changed, but in each case, it was easy to follow.

These girls were all looking for someone like them. Someone who echoed their own opinions, who said what they wanted to hear, who didn’t push them or contradict them. Leda was the only girl Watt had ever met who didn’t want that, who actually preferred to be called out on her bullshit.

He forced away the thought of Leda, focusing on the bright-eyed girl before him.

“I’m Jaya,” she said, stepping closer and draping her arms around Watt’s shoulders.

“Watt.”

Nadia provided him with a few conversation starters, questions about Jaya’s interests or her family, but Watt wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. “I have to leave soon,” he heard himself say.

Wow, really jumping the gun tonight, aren’t you? Nadia remarked drily. He didn’t bother to reply.

Jaya startled a little, but Watt quickly forged ahead. “I’m fostering a rescue puppy from the shelter,” he said, “and I need to go check on him. I have one of those pet-minder bots, but I still feel weird leaving it with him. He’s so young, you know?”

Jaya’s expression had instantly softened. Her dream was to be a veterinarian. “Of course I understand. What kind of puppy?”

“We think he’s a border terrier, but we aren’t totally sure. Apparently he was found alone in Central Park.” For some reason the lie tasted rancid in Watt’s mouth.

“No way! I have a border terrier rescue too! His name is Frederick,” Jaya exclaimed. “They found him under the old Queensboro Bridge.”

“What a coincidence,” Watt said flatly.

Jaya didn’t seem to notice his lack of surprise. She looked at him through her thick fluttering lashes. “Want me to come help? I’m really good with rescues,” she offered.

It was exactly what Watt had been fishing for, yet now that Jaya had suggested it, he was shockingly uninterested. He felt as if nothing or no one would surprise him ever again.

“I think I’ll be okay,” he offered. “But thanks.”

Jaya recoiled. “Okay, then,” she said coolly, and stalked away.

Watt ran a hand wearily over his face. What was wrong with him? Derrick would never let him hear the end of it if he knew Watt was rejecting cute girls who invited themselves over. Except that he didn’t actually want any of those girls, because none of them could erase the memory of the one he’d lost. The only one he had ever really cared about.

Instead of heading for the exit, Watt found himself walking the other direction. His toes edged against the painted safety line. The stars glittered far up in the sky. To think that their light was careening wildly toward him at three hundred million meters per second. But what about darkness? How fast did the darkness rush toward you after a star died and its light went out for good?

No matter how fast light traveled, Watt thought, the darkness always seemed to have gotten there first.

Inevitably, his thoughts turned back to Leda. This time he didn’t even try to distract himself.

It was his fault. He should have watched Leda more closely, those first few weeks after Dubai. She had insisted that she needed some time alone, after everything that happened. Watt tried to respect her wishes—until he learned that she had overdosed and was going back to rehab.

When she got home several weeks later, Leda didn’t seem all that eager to see him.

“Hey, Watt,” she’d said woodenly, holding open the front door. She was wearing an oversized charcoal sweater and black plasticky shorts, her feet bare on the hardwood floor of her entryway. “I’m glad you came by. We need to talk.”

Those four words filled Watt with a shiver of foreboding. “I—I was so worried about you,” he’d stammered, taking a step forward. “They wouldn’t let me talk to you at rehab. I thought that you were . . .”

Leda abruptly talked over him. “Watt, we need to stop seeing each other. I can’t be with you, not after everything I’ve done.”

Watt’s heart thudded. “I don’t care,” he assured her. “I know what you’ve done and I don’t care, because I—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Leda cried out. “Watt, Eris and I shared a father. I killed my half sister!”

Her words reverberated in the air. Watt felt his throat close up. Everything he wanted to tell her now seemed inadequate.

“I need to start over, okay?” Her voice was shaking, and she seemed determined not to meet his eyes. “I can’t get better with you around. You’re one of my triggers—the worst of my triggers—and as long as I’m with you, I’ll keep turning back to my old behaviors. I can’t afford to do that.”

“That isn’t true. You and I make each other better,” he tried to protest.

Leda shook her head. “Please,” she begged. “I just want to move on. If you care about me at all, you’ll leave me alone, for my own good.”

The door shut behind her with a definitive click.

“Hey, step back!” someone shouted. Watt realized in a daze that he had wandered past the painted safety line, toward the gaping maw of the helipad.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and retreated a few steps. He didn’t even attempt to explain. What would he tell those people, exactly? That there was something soothing about looking out over the edge? That it was a sharp reminder of how small and insignificant he was, surrounded by this vast city? Of how little his pain mattered in the scheme of things?

Finally Watt turned and walked away from the bar, just as he had forced himself to walk away from Leda all those months ago.

RYLIN

RYLIN MYERS SAT cross-legged on the floor, old vid-storage devices scattered around her. Some of them were shaped like shiny circular discs, others boxy and square. Rylin’s delicate half-Korean features pulled into a frown as she considered each piece of hardware in turn, pausing over it as if internally debating its merits, before shaking her head and moving on. She was so engrossed in her task that she missed the footsteps that sounded in the doorway.

“I didn’t expect you to work so hard on your last day.” It was Rylin’s boss, Raquel.

“I wanted to organize this last collection for you before I go. We’re almost up to 2030,” Rylin said eagerly.

To Rylin’s surprise, Raquel came and knelt on the floor next to her. The lightning bolt inktat on her forearm—which was timed to flash every sixty seconds—appeared, darkened, then vanished again like smoke. “What do you think this one is?” Raquel mused aloud, reaching for a disc that was emblazoned with an animated snowflake and a pair of girls with braids.

“I like that one,” Rylin quickly said, reaching for the disc before Raquel could dismiss it. She sorted it into the pile marked SAVE: POSSIBLE ADAPTATION.

A smile curled at the corner of Raquel’s mouth. “I’m going to miss you, Rylin. I’m really glad you applied for this job.”

“Me too.”

Rylin had spent most of last year, her junior year, attending an upper-floor private high school on scholarship. She had assumed that when June arrived, she would do the same thing she did every summer and get a mindless job downTower to pay the bills. But just when she’d been about to swallow her pride and beg for her old job at a monorail snack station, Rylin had learned that her scholarship actually continued through the summer—as long as she got an academic internship.

She had applied to as many internships as she could find, especially ones that had to do with holography, the creation of three-dimensional holographic films. And she had found this internship: working for the Walt Disney archivist.

Rylin had been startled to learn that the job was located here, in the bowels of the main public library location, in midTower. She’d never been to this location, though Rylin and her best friend, Lux, used to spend hours at their nearest public library. They would trade their favorite e-texts back and forth, then make up plays about them and stage them for their bemused parents, complete with a loud, improvised sound track.

On her first day, Rylin had walked in to find Raquel sitting cross-legged on a swivel chair, spinning it back and forth like a distracted child, her ponytail whipping sideways to smack at her cheek. “You’re the new intern?” Raquel had asked, somewhat impatiently, and Rylin nodded.

Raquel explained that Disney had hired her to sort through all the old films from the pre-holo age and flag any that were ripe for adaptation. “Holographs fully saturated the market fifty years ago,” she told Rylin. “At that point, everyone stopped producing 2-D films, and the machinery to play them. A lot of content was adapted in those first few decades, but there are still so many that no one has ever bothered to redo.”

Rylin knew that 2-D–to–3-D conversion was an expensive and painstaking process. It was like turning a stick figure into a sculpture, taking a flat sheet of pixels and making it inhabit space. The whole thing required hundreds of hours of computer design and human creativity.

“Why isn’t this stuff on the cloud somewhere?” Rylin had wondered, gesturing at the walls of old tapes and discs.

“Some of it is: the big blockbusters and all the classics. But people lost interest trying to catalog and upload every last thing. That’s where we come in.”

To Rylin’s surprise, the more time she spent watching these old 2-D films, the more she appreciated them. The directors had so little to work with, yet accomplished so much with what they had. There was an elegance beneath the films’ celluloid flatness.

“By the way,” Raquel said now, as they kept methodically sorting the boxes, “I really enjoyed Starfall.”

Rylin glanced up in surprise. “You watched it?”

Starfall was a short holo that Rylin had written and directed this spring, in several weeks of angst-ridden shooting after her return from Dubai. It featured some dark interior shots of the Tower, juxtaposed with sweeping views from the terraces and zoomed-in shots of Lux’s eyes: because of course Lux and Chrissa, Rylin’s sister, were the only actors she’d been able to coerce into it.

“It’s a lovely film,” Raquel replied. “You made your friend feel almost . . . capricious. Is she like that in real life?”

“She is,” Rylin managed to reply, gratefulness blooming in her chest. Raquel was acting as if it wasn’t a big deal—and maybe it wasn’t, for her to have watched a five-minute film—but it meant a lot to Rylin.

After she’d said good-bye, Rylin trotted out the library’s main entrance, with its grandiose carved stone lions. She boarded the A express lift downTower, disembarking on thirty-two and walking the ten blocks to her local neighborhood recreation center. Then it was through the broad double doors, down a long hallway, and out into the direct afternoon sunlight.

Rylin lifted a hand to shade her eyes. She glanced around the deck, the narrow strip of the 32nd floor that extended out farther than the floor above. The sun felt like a searing kiss on her skin after the cool darkness of the library, even though the library was hundreds of floors above her. She quickly shrugged out of her soft green zip-up and started through the maze of basketball courts, searching for one person in particular.

Several courts later, she found him.

He didn’t notice her at first. He was too focused on the team of fifth-grade boys that he coached. They were running drills now, jogging back and forth in trailing zigzag lines as they passed the ball back and forth. Rylin stifled a smile as she leaned on the railing to watch her boyfriend, silently cataloging all the things she loved about him. The strong tanned lines of his arms as he demonstrated something to the group. The way his hair curled around his ears. The quickness of his laughter.

He looked up and noticed her, and his entire face broke out into a grin. “Look, guys! We have an audience,” he announced, flashing Rylin a geeky thumbs-up.

She laughed and shook her head, tucking a strand of dark hair behind one ear. After she and Hiral broke up the first time, Rylin had never guessed that they would get back together. Which was incontestable proof that you couldn’t predict where life might take you.

Rylin had started dating Hiral Karadjan when they were both in eighth grade. He lived near her on the 32nd floor and went to her school. Rylin remembered being instantly drawn to him: He had an effervescent sort of energy, so palpable she imagined she could see it. She came to realize that it was joy—a hazy afterglow of laughter, like the light that still streaks across the sky after a shooting star has disappeared.

Hiral laughed a lot back then. And he made Rylin laugh—the sort of deep, helpless laughter that you can only spark when you truly know someone. Rylin had loved that about Hiral: the way he seemed to understand her in a way that no one else ever could.

Until Cord.

Last fall Rylin had started working her mom’s old job, as maid for the Andertons on the 969th floor. In spite of her best intentions, she’d fallen headfirst for Cord Anderton. She tried to break up with Hiral, except by that point he was in jail, having been arrested for drug dealing. Things got messier and messier, until eventually Rylin ended up betraying Cord’s trust—and ruining things between them for good.

Then, unexpectedly, Rylin won a scholarship to Cord’s upper-floor private school, and she started to wonder if they might have another shot. She’d even gone to a party all the way in Dubai, hoping to win him back: only to stand there like a fool as he kissed Avery Fuller, the richest, most flawlessly beautiful girl on earth.

Rylin told herself that it was better this way. Cord belonged with someone like Avery, someone he’d known since childhood; someone who could join him on his life of lavish ski trips and black-tie parties and whatever else they did up there in the stratosphere.

Several weeks later, Hiral had knocked on Rylin’s front door. And for some reason—maybe because she felt so alone, or because she’d learned one too many times that people don’t always get the second chances they deserve—she opened it.

“Rylin. Hi.” Hiral had sounded shocked that she’d actually answered. Rylin felt the same way. “Can we talk?” he added, shifting his weight. He was wearing dark jeans and a crewneck sweater that Rylin didn’t recognize. And there was something else different about him, more than just the clothes. He looked softer, younger; the shadows erased from the hollows beneath his eyes.

“Okay,” she decided, and opened the door wider.

Hiral walked in tentatively, as if expecting some wild thing to jump out and attack him at any moment, which might have happened if Chrissa were home. As it was, Rylin followed him with slow steps to the kitchen table. The silence between them was so thick that she seemed to be wading through it.

She saw Hiral’s eyes dart to the missing table leg—he’d been the one to break it, in a burst of anger, when he learned that Rylin had hooked up with Cord—and his expression darkened.

“I owe you an apology,” he began clumsily. Rylin wanted to speak up, but some instinct bade her stay silent, let him say his piece. “The things I did and said to you, when I was in jail—”

Hiral broke off and looked down, tracing an irregular pattern carved into the surface of the table. It was a series of half-moon indentations, like bite marks, from where Chrissa used to bang her spoon as a baby. If this were a holo, Rylin thought bizarrely, the markings would be important. They would mean something. But this was real life, where so many things had no meaning at all.

“I’m sorry, Rylin. I was a complete asshole to you. The only thing I can say is that jail scared me shitless,” Hiral said baldly. “The other guys in there . . .”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. Rylin remembered visiting Hiral in jail: an adult jail, not juvie, because Hiral was over eighteen. It had felt unbearably soulless, permeated by a cold sense of despair.

“I know,” she said softly. “But that doesn’t excuse the things you said, and did.”

Hiral looked pained at the memory. “That was the drugs talking,” he said quickly. “I know it’s not an excuse, but, Rylin—I was so terrified that I kept on using, anything that I could get my hands on in jail. I’m not proud of it, and I wish I could take it back. I’m sorry.”

Rylin bit her lip. She knew plenty about doing things you wished you could undo.

“I’m not sure if you heard, but the trial went well. I got my old job back.” Hiral worked as a liftie, one of the technicians who repaired the Tower’s massive elevator shafts from the inside, suspended by thin cables, miles above the earth. It was dangerous work.

“I’m glad,” Rylin told him. She felt guilty that she hadn’t even shown up at his trial—she should have been there, if only for moral support, for the sake of their former friendship.

“Anyway, I just wanted to come say that I’m sorry. I’ve changed, Ry. I’m not that guy anymore, who was so awful to you. I’m sorry that I was ever that guy at all.” Hiral kept his eyes steady on hers, and Rylin could see the regret burning there. She felt oddly proud of him for apologizing. It couldn’t have been easy.

She thought, suddenly, of what Leda had said the other day in Dubai—that Rylin wasn’t the same girl who’d shown up at Berkeley, defensive and uncertain. Hiral might have changed, but she had changed too. They’d all changed. How could they not, after everything that had happened, after all they had lost?

Maybe this was what growing up felt like. It hurt more than Rylin had expected.

“I forgive you, Hiral.”

She hadn’t expected to say that, but once she did, she was glad that she had.

He looked up with an intake of breath. “Really?”

Rylin knew that she should say something else, but she felt overwhelmed by a sudden flurry of memories—of how it had been with Hiral before. The little notes Hiral used to leave for her in the silliest places, like on the peel of a banana. The anniversary when he’d served her a picnic dinner in the park, complete with flameless candles. That time she had to go on a long road trip to visit her grandparents, when Hiral had made a playlist for her that was sprinkled with little audio clips of himself telling jokes, saying again and again how much he loved her.

And when Rylin’s mom died, Hiral was the one who’d been there, steadying and certain, helping her make all the awful decisions that no daughter should ever have to make.

He stood up. “Thanks for letting me come by. I know you’re with Cord now, and I won’t bother you again. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

“I’m not,” Rylin said. “With Cord, I mean.”