Page 24 of The Dazzling Heights
“Look around. These are all seniors.” Leda gestured sharply to the other girls in the class. “This isthemost popular elective at school, with a ninety-person waiting list. The only reason I’m even here is because they reserve a few spots for juniors, and my application essay was best.” She clenched the edge of her desk as if she wished she could break it. “What’s your explanation?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Rylin admitted. “I was just assigned this class. It appeared on my schedule the other day, so here I am.” She shoved her tablet toward Leda as if to offer proof.Accelerated Studies in Holography; instructor, Xiayne Radimajdi.
“Watt,” Leda muttered under her breath, saying it as if it were a curse word.
“What?” Rylin couldn’t have heard correctly. Wasn’t that the boy from the roof, who’d come with them to the police that night?
Leda sighed. “Never mind. Just don’t screw this up for me, okay? I’m hoping to get a recommendation out of it.”
“To Yale?” Rylin said drily, glancing at the silencer.
“Shane went there,” Leda snapped. At Rylin’s confused look, she sighed. “Xiayne Radimajdi. He teaches this class! His name isright thereon your tablet.” She rapped sharply at the evidence, and cut her eyes to Rylin in evident disbelief.
“Oh.” Rylin hadn’t realized that Leda was saying the name Xiayne. She’d been wondering how to pronounce it. “Who is he?”
“The triple-Oscar-winning director!” Leda exclaimed. Rylin just stared at her blankly. “You haven’t seenMetropolis? OrEmpty Skies? That’s why this class only meets on Fridays—because he works the rest of the week!”
Rylin shrugged. “The last holo I saw was a cartoon. But those things you just mentioned sound depressing anyway.”
“Oh mygod. This class iswastedon you.” Leda tossed the silencer back into her bag, turning away from Rylin just as the door swung inward. The whole room seemed to edge forward, collectively holding its breath. And then Rylin understood why the class was composed mostly of girls.
Into the room walked the most incredibly attractive guy Rylin had ever seen.
He was tall, and not much older than they were—in his early twenties, maybe—with deep olive skin and shaggy dark curls. Unlike her other professors, who all wore neckties and blazers, he dressed with shocking disregard for the dress code, in a thin white T-shirt, a jacket with zippers all over it, and skinny jeans. Rylin glanced around and noticed that she and Leda were the only ones not swooning.
“Sorry I’m late. I just got off the ’loop from London,” he announced. “As you all probably know, I just started filming a new project there.”
“The royalty one?” a girl in the front row exclaimed.
Xiayne turned. The girl shifted, but then Xiayne gave a devilish smile, and she visibly relaxed. “I’m not supposed to share this, but yes, it’s about the final queen of England. A little more romantic than my usual material.” The announcement elicited a few gasps andooohs.
“Now, Livya, since you were so eager to volunteer, can you tell me what we discussed in the last class about Sir Jared Sun?”
Livya sat up straighter. “Sir Jared patented the refractive technology that allowed holographs to obtain motion perfectly aligned with the observer, creating the illusion of presence.”
The door to the classroom slid open again, and a familiar form appeared there. Rylin instinctively sank lower in her seat, wishing she could sink all the way into the floor—farther, even; into the mechanical jumble of the interstitial level and the floor below, all the way down to the ground itself, littered with trash and god knows what else, it didn’t matter—she just wanted to disappear.
“Mr. Anderton,” Xiayne said, sounding amused and unsurprised. “You’re late. Again.”
“I got held up,” Cord offered by way of explanation, and Rylin couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t exactly said he was sorry.
Xiayne glanced around the room as if searching for some explanation for why he was missing a desk. He seemed to register Rylin’s presence with some astonishment. He hadn’t singled her out yet, hadn’t made her do one of those awful self-introductions that some of the other professors insisted on. What if he did so now, and in front of Cord?
But to Rylin’s shock, the professorwinkedat her, in a way that could only be described as conspiratorial.
“Well, Mr. Anderton, it seems you need somewhere to sit.” Xiayne pushed a button and a desk rose up out of the floor, directly in front of Rylin.
Cord didn’t glance Rylin’s way as he took his seat. Only the tension in his shoulders betrayed any reaction to her presence. Rylin sank miserably lower.
“As we discussed last week,” Xiayne continued, undeterred, “settings are the easiest aspect of the world to re-create in holographic form, because, of course, they are stable. A far more difficult task is the portrayal of something living. Why is that?” He snapped his fingers, and a cat leapt from behind his desk onto the top of it.
Rylin barely refrained from gasping aloud. She’d seen plenty of holograms before: on their screen at home, and of course the adverts that popped up whenever she went shopping. But those were loud and flashy and low-resolution. This cat felt different. It was rendered in exquisite detail, and moved so realistically in a thousand small ways—the lazy flick of its tail, the way its chest lifted lightly with its breath, the challenging blink of its eyes.
The cat jumped onto the desk of the girl in the front row who’d spoken earlier. She let out an involuntary squeal of shock. “Movement,” Xiayne went on, ignoring the scattered laughter. “The movements of anything living must be rendered with perfect relation to any viewer, no matter where he or she is located with respect to the holo. Which is why Sir Jared is called the father of modern holography.”
Xiayne went on for a while about light and distance, about the calculations needed to make something seem larger to the viewers who were closer to it, but smaller to those farther away. Rylin tried to listen, but it was hard to focus with Cord’s dark head right in front of her. She willed herself not to stare. A couple of times she saw Leda looking at her out of the corner of her eye, and she knew the other girl was missing none of it.
When the bell finally rang to signal the end of class, Xiayne quickly changed tack. “Don’t forget that your next project is in pairs, and is due in just two weeks. So you all need to find a partner if you haven’t already.”
