“Among other things,” she replied, lifting her eyes to his.
“What other things?”
“The city,” she began, then hesitated. How could she possibly explain the way she felt about New York? She loved it, in that strange way you can love something that never loves you back, because it has left its imprint on your soul. Calliope belonged in New York, or maybe she belonged to New York. She’d been so uncertain when she came here—like clay that couldn’t hold its shape—and now she had form, had texture; she could feel the fingerprints of New York all over her the way she felt Brice’s touch on her skin.
There was so much here, so much color and taste and light and motion. So much pain and so much hope. The city was ugly and beautiful at once, and it was always changing, always reintroducing itself to you; you couldn’t look away even for a moment, or you might miss the New York of today, which would be different from tomorrow’s New York and next week’s New York.
Brice flipped her palm over to hold her hand in his. “What’s your plan?”
Calliope took another sip of her coffee, wishing she had a spoon so she could stir it around, whisk it with more force than was necessary. She felt brimming with new purpose.
It dawned on her that today was Monday. “School, I guess?” The idea of going to a multivariable calculus lecture right now felt a bit ludicrous. “I need to figure out some things. Figure out myself,” she said slowly.
“What is there to figure out?”
“My personality!” she blurted out. “I don’t know who I am anymore. Maybe I never did.” She’d spent the past seven years slipping seamlessly from one role to another, being clever or stupid, rich or poor, adventurous or afraid, whatever the occasion demanded of her. She had been everyone but herself, lived every life except her own.
But this time, she could be whoever and whatever she wanted to be.
“I know you,” Brice said stolidly. “It doesn’t matter what story you’re telling or what accent you’re using. I know who you are and I want to keep on knowing you, Calliope, Gemma, whatever your name is.”
Calliope hesitated.
She had never—well, almost never—told anyone her real name. That was the central tenet of the rules they lived by. Never tell anyone your real name, because it makes you vulnerable. As long as you protected yourself with fake names and fake accents, no one could hurt you.
But no one could ever know you that way either.
“Beth,” she whispered, feeling a seismic shift within the world. “My real name is Beth.”
Her contacts lit up with a new flicker, from a sender registered as Anna Marina de Santos. Here’s to this time.
Tears gathered at the corners of Calliope’s eyes, and she let out a strangled laugh. It was Elise, of course, already operating under her new name.
“Here’s to this time,” Calliope whispered, and nodded to send the reply. “I love you.” She imagined her words translating into text, darting all the way up to a satellite and across the world, to flash across her mom’s brand-new retinas. If only she could reach through the intervening miles and hug her just as easily.
Love you too.
“Beth,” Brice repeated, and held out his hand as if introducing himself. His eyes were dancing. “It’s nice to meet you. Please allow me to be the first to welcome you to New York.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” Beth said and grinned.
RYLIN
RYLIN SAT AT her kitchen table, her tablet arrayed before her in composition mode, trying unsuccessfully to focus on her NYU essay. But her mind felt far too scattered to stay pinned on any one topic.
She hadn’t seen Cord in class today. After all the commotion over Avery Fuller, he was hardly the only person to have missed school. In spite of everything, Rylin found herself hoping that he wasn’t taking the news too hard. He’d known Avery practically his entire life. And of course, this wasn’t the first time that Cord had lost someone he cared about.
Rylin hadn’t known Avery especially well, yet they had been pulled together by a set of exceptional circumstances: Eris’s death, the Mariel investigation . . . and the fact that they both cared about Cord.
Sometimes Rylin had wanted to hate Avery, just a little. She was always so perfectly put together, her smile just so, while Rylin ran around with sloppy ponytails in a perpetual state of uncertainty. And Avery and Cord had been friends for so long. It was intimidating, the way they had all those shared memories, a lexicon of jokes that ran between them, something private Rylin could never hope to crack.
She had wanted to hate Avery, and yet she couldn’t, because even amid all of that Avery was invariably nice. She could have been the world’s greatest mean girl, Rylin thought, but she never chose to be.
Then again, it was probably pretty easy to be a nice person when you had everything in the world you could possibly want. Or at least, almost everything.
Rylin was still shocked by what Avery had been hiding. To think that beneath her pristine porcelain veneer, she had been in love with Atlas, the one person the world would never let her have. Ultimately Avery had died for it. What had she been thinking, Rylin kept wondering, to just give up like that—to burn her family’s apartment while she was still inside it?
She sighed and looked again at the essay prompt. What matters most to you, and why?
Suddenly Rylin knew her answer. Stories, she keyed into the answer box.
Stories are the only real magic that exists. A story can breach the impossible distance between individuals, take us out of our own life and into someone else’s, if only for a moment. Our hunger for story is what makes us human.
Maybe it was her conversation with Hiral, or the fact that she still felt betrayed by what Cord had done. Maybe it was the strangeness of Avery Fuller, the princess of New York, doing something so irrevocably self-destructive. But even though she knew it was an unsophisticated and potentially embarrassing opinion—that no one serious ever admitted to this, especially not for university programs—Rylin kept typing.
In particular, we long for stories that make us happy.
Stories make sense in a way that the real world fails to. Because stories are the cleaned-up version of real life, a distilled version of human behavior that is more comic and more tragic and more perfect than real life. In a well-made holo, there are no lost narrative threads or stray shots. If the camera zooms in on a detail, that means you should pay attention to it, because that detail has some crucial meaning that will become apparent. Real life isn’t like that.
In real life the clues don’t add up to anything. Roads lead to dead ends. Lovers don’t make epic romantic gestures. People say ugly things, and leave without a good-bye, and suffer in senseless ways. Story threads are dropped with no resolution.
Sometimes what we need is a story—a well-made, uplifting story—to help the world make sense again.
Rylin’s eyes stung, her fingers flying over the surface of her tablet. She remembered something Cord had said about there not being endings in life and realized that he was right. The only endings were the ones that people made for themselves.
There aren’t any happy endings in real life, because there aren’t any endings in life, only moments of change, she wrote, repeating his words. There’s always another adventure, another challenge, another opportunity to find happiness or chase it away.
I want to study holography because my dream is to create stories. I hope that my holos someday inspire people to leave the world better than they found it. To believe in true love. To be brave enough to fight for happiness.
Rylin held her thumb over her tablet to submit the essay and smiled through her unexpected tears.
Her story was only beginning, and she had every intention of writing it herself.
Later that night, when she heard a knock on the front door, Rylin gave a dramatic sigh. “Seriously, Chrissa?” she snapped, going to open the door. “You need to bring your ID ring to volleyball; it’s starting to really—”
“H
ey,” Cord said softly.
Rylin was too stunned to do anything except blink at him. Her pulse was suddenly running haywire, plucking a vibrant, erratic rhythm against the surface of her skin. Cord Anderton was at her apartment, down on the 32nd floor.
“Before you slam the door in my face, please hear me out,” he said quickly. “I thought a lot about what you said the other night. And you were right. I shouldn’t have helped Hiral move away. I never meant to manipulate you or hurt you or tell you what to do. Actually,” Cord added, with a tentative smile, “I would really appreciate it if you would tell me what to do, because I can make a real mess of things sometimes.”
“I did tell you what to do. You just didn’t listen,” Rylin pointed out.
Cord shifted uncomfortably. “I really am sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. We seem to have a real knack for hurting each other.”
“That’s because the better you know someone, the easier it is to hurt them,” Cord replied. “See? I actually learned something in psychology class.”
Rylin wasn’t so sure. Did she really know Cord? Sometimes it felt as if she did, as if he’d lowered his guard to reveal his real self, beneath the money and sarcasm. But then when she was alone again, Rylin always doubted that it had happened.
Cord’s expression grew more serious. “I felt terrible the other night, when you said that you thought I was ashamed of you.” He moved quickly over the word, as if he couldn’t even bear to say it. “I just sometimes get carried away and want to do things, buy you dresses or whatever, because I can—”
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should,” Rylin cut in.
Cord let out a breath. “Right. I get it.”
Rylin knew it had taken a lot of bravery for Cord to swallow his pride and say he was sorry. “Thanks for coming down here to apologize.”
“I’m not just here to ask for your forgiveness. I’m here to ask you for one more shot, because I know that what we have is worth fighting for.”
Rylin knew this was the moment where she was supposed to run forward into his arms, but some instinct of self-preservation held her back. Cord had hurt her one too many times. “I don’t know.”
Cord took a step closer and ran his hand down her arm. She shivered.
“You’re telling me you don’t feel the same way?”
“Cord,” she said helplessly, “we still live almost a thousand floors apart. If you stretched that horizontally, it would literally cross state lines.”
“Long-distance dating,” he joked, and Rylin cracked a smile at that. “I’m game to try, if you are. Or we could start as pen pals first, if you don’t want to move too fast.”
“I just worry that we’re doomed to failure. We’ve been down this road before; there are so many reasons that we don’t make sense.”
Cord leaned against the doorway, crossing his arms over his chest. “Doomed is a pretty strong word. What are all these reasons, if you don’t mind my asking? And don’t say that I never come downTower, because I’m here now.”
Rylin’s anger and resentment were crumbling away, falling in useless hollow pieces down into her chest, to settle there, forgotten. She felt her throat clog in a strange hybrid of laughter and tears.
“I have one very big reason that we will work. Which is that I love you.” He smiled, his eyes on her, as if he was willing her to smile too. “I love you, and I have this foolish hope that maybe, possibly, despite all my countless dumb mistakes, you might love me too.” He lifted an eyebrow, and suddenly he looked just as cocky and full of himself as he did last year, when Rylin fell for him the first time.
She couldn’t hold back the words anymore.
“I do love you. Against my better judgment, might I add.”
“Let’s hope your better judgment never wins out.” Cord laughed and reached into his back pocket. “I brought a peace offering, by the way.”
It was a miniature packet of Gummy Buddies.
“Remember that night? The first time I kissed you?”
As if Rylin would ever forget. “You mean when I slapped you and called you a rich, entitled asshole?”
“Yes, exactly,” Cord said evenly. “The night it all began.”
“Maybe one.” Rylin reached for a bright cherry-red Gummy Buddy and bit into it. The miniscule, digestible RFID chip embedded in the gummy registered the impact, causing the candy to begin twitching and screaming. Still laughing a little, Rylin quickly swallowed the other half.
“Those are just as weird as the first time.”
“That’s because you insist on torturing them,” Cord countered, unable to suppress a grin. “Not that I’m complaining. Better them than me.”
“Really? Because I think it’s your turn.” Rylin smiled and tipped her face up to kiss him.
Maybe happy endings were real, as long as you understood that they weren’t endings, but steps on the road. Value changes, Cord had called them.
If Rylin had learned anything by now, it was that in real life, you never quite knew what was coming. You had to take the bad with the good. You had to take a chance, hold your breath, and trust people.
After all, the fun of real-life stories is that they’re still being written.
WATT
WATT STOOD AT the edge of Tennebeth Park in Lower Manhattan, gazing out at the Statue of Liberty in the distance, her torch lifted determinedly into the flurry of gray skies. The snow hadn’t stopped. It caught in the folds of Watt’s jacket, dusted the tops of his boots.
He lifted a hand to just above his right ear, where a crinkly Medipatch was the only evidence of the surgery he’d just had. His head throbbed with a confused pain that was physical and emotional at once.
“You again?” the doctor had asked when Watt opened the door to his unmarked clinic. The self-styled Dr. Smith, official medical consultant of the black market—the person who had installed Nadia in Watt’s brain several years ago.
And now the doctor had uninstalled her.
Watt glanced down at the palm of his glove. The entire city lay behind him, vibrant and busy, but Watt’s focus had zeroed to a tiny fixed point: the disc he was holding.
There was something oddly intrusive about seeing Nadia this way, her qubits laid bare before him, almost as if he were seeing a girl without her clothes on. To think that this tiny quantum core, this warm pulsing piece of metal, contained the vastness that was Nadia.
It felt weird, not having her voice in his head. She had been there for so long that Watt had forgotten what it was like without her.
He was going to miss her. He would miss her sarcastic sense of humor, their constant chess matches. He would miss feeling as if he always had an ally—as if there were someone in his corner, no matter what.
But maybe he didn’t need to stop feeling that way, Watt thought, as a figure detached itself from the shadows to step toward him.
“Leda? How did you know where I was?”
“You told me,” she said, her nose wrinkled in adorable confusion, and Watt realized what must have happened.
Nadia must have messaged Leda for him, intuiting his emotions the way she always did. She had known that he would need a friend right now.
Or maybe, he amended, Nadia had known that Leda needed him.
The ambient light reflected off the snow to illuminate Leda’s face, which was bright with grief. Her features were drawn, her eyes glassy and brilliant with tears. Huddled into her puffy green jacket, her hands stuffed into her pockets, she looked frail; yet there was a new quiet strength to her movements.
“Are you okay?” he asked, though it was patently obvious that she wasn’t.
Leda threw her arms around him in response. Watt closed his eyes and hugged her back, hard.
As they stepped away, they both couldn’t help glancing up at the top of the Tower: too high to see properly from this close, but it didn’t really matter. They knew what it looked like up there.
“I still can’t believe w
hat Avery did for me. For all of us.” Leda’s voice fractured over the words.
Watt shuddered a little. Avery must have felt incredibly trapped up there on the thousandth floor, to want to give it all up and let the rest of them go free.
But then, Watt had seen the turmoil over Avery and Atlas, the hateful things people had spewed at them both. It never ceased to amaze him, the way humans could hurt each other. No other animal was capable of that kind of vicious, useless cruelty. You’d think that people would have learned to do better by now, as a species.
Watt understood why Avery had wanted to get away from that. It was the kind of thing that would have chased her the rest of her life. She would never have escaped it.
He knew that he should feel guilty for the role he had played in helping her—he and Nadia both, really—except that he had a feeling Avery would have found a way to do exactly what she wanted, with or without his help.
He glanced down again to where Nadia was clutched tight in his palm like a talisman. Leda followed the movement, and her eyes widened.
“Is that Nadia?” she whispered.
Watt nodded. “I had her removed,” he managed to say. Just barely.
“Why?”
“Because she killed Mariel.”
Watt heard the sharp intake of breath, saw the final weight of uncertainty slide from Leda’s shoulders as she realized, once and for all, that Mariel’s death wasn’t her fault.
“I’m not a killer?” she said quietly, and Watt shook his head. The real killer was him, even if he hadn’t known or meant it.
He turned back toward the water, which was a smooth, mirrored gray, reflecting the hammered surface of the clouds overhead. Good-bye, Nadia. And this time, for the first time in years, she didn’t answer his silent thought, because she was no longer in his head to hear it. The only person who could hear his thoughts was Watt himself.
He hurled his arm back and threw Nadia out over the water in a single clean motion, as hard as he possibly could.
There was a moment of profound, acute silence when Watt wished he could undo what he’d just done, but it was too late—Nadia sailed in a flying arc over the water, gleaming in the pearly morning light, and hit the surface with a definitive, echoing plop.
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