Page 68 of The Towering Sky
“Our parents never saw me for me either, you know,” Atlas went on after a moment. “Through the years, they’ve looked at me and seen a lot of things—a PR stunt, a way to keep you happy, maybe even an asset to the business—but notme, the way that I really am. Trust me when I say that I know how it feels towant to live up to the version of you that Mom and Dad built in their heads. I might even want it more than you,” he added, and the angles of his face changed, became sharper, “because this wasn’t always my life.”
Avery was startled into silence. Atlas so rarely talked about how it had been for him, before he was adopted.
“When Mom and Dad brought me home, I thought I was the luckiest kid in the entire world. I kept worrying that they might wake up one day and decide that they didn’t want me after all, and return me like a pair of shoes.”
“They would never do that.” Avery ached at the thought of Atlas, young and uncertain, afraid of such a thing.
“I know. But unlike you, I remember a timebeforeI had their love. Which is why I hate disappointing them. They expect so much, but they have also given me everything.” He sighed. “That was part of the reason I stayed away so long last year—just to see how it felt, being myself without being a Fuller.”
“And how was it?” Avery couldn’t quite imagine who she would be if she weren’t Avery Fuller. If she could just walk through the world unremarked upon, like any other unremarkable person.
“It felt like a haze had lifted. Like everything was much clearer,” Atlas told her and smiled. “Aves, promise me that you won’t worry about Mom and Dad. That you’ll do whatever is right for you. I mean, for you and Max,” he added awkwardly; and the moment between them was abruptly broken.
“Sorry, I should get going.” Atlas reached up to run a hand through his hair, making it stick up at funny angles. “I’m not any help with this. Besides, you know that it doesn’t matter what you wear. You could show up to that party in a plastifoam box and you would still look perfect.”
Before she could find some way to answer, he was gone.The ripples of his presence seemed to lap through the room like waves, crashing over her.
Why did Avery have to struggle to make herself understood to everyone else in her life, yet Atlas always seemed together on an instinctive and elemental level? Why couldn’t she make the rest of the world see her the way that Atlas did?
She collapsed onto her four-poster bed and stared blankly up at the ceiling, which was decorated with a hologram of her favorite Italian mural. Its pixels constantly shifted, so slowly as to be imperceptible, brushstroke by brushstroke; as if an invisible artist was suspended up there, always repainting it into a new arrangement.
She wished she were still angry with Atlas. Because whatever this was, it felt immeasurably worse.
RYLIN
RYLIN LEANED BACKin the swivel chair and stretched out her legs, frowning up at the holo she was slowly stitching together. She had been here in the school’s edit bay all afternoon. Right now, it was the only place she could try to make sense of all the unresolved questions in her life.
She still felt blindsided by Hiral’s abrupt departure. And she missed him. As a boyfriend, yes, but also as a person in her life. It saddened her that after everything they had been through—the death of Rylin’s mom, Hiral’s dropping out of school, his arrest and subsequent release—that it had ended likethis, with a brief and unceremonious good-bye at the monorail.
She couldn’t help thinking that Chrissa had been right all along. Rylin had been so certain that she and Hiral could have a fresh start. But their secrets and lies had caught up with them once again.
This weekend, while she sorted through the bruisedconfusion of her thoughts, Rylin had found herself reaching for her silver holo-cam. Before she quite knew what she was doing, she’d started filming.
She filmed Chrissa, and Hiral’s family. She scanned instaphotos from the early days of their relationship—a painstaking process, adapting those into holographic 3-D images; she’d been forced to borrow Raquel’s transmuter at the library. She surreptitiously filmed young couples at the mall and old couples on the Ifty. She wandered out onto the 32nd-floor deck and filmed the sunset, the vibrant orange clouds lined with deep dusky purple, like a quiet sigh.
As she sorted through all her raw material in the comforting darkness of the edit bay, Rylin began to see this impromptu film project for what it was. Somehow she was crafting a memoir of, or maybe a tribute to, her time with Hiral. This holo was her way of mourning their relationship, all the good as well as the bad.
She kept remembering things, small incidents she hadn’t thought of in years. Like the first time she’d tried to bake a cake for Chrissa and burned herself on the stove, and Hiral cradled her hand to his chest with a cool-pack while feeding her raw batter with a spoon. That time they were stuck on the monorail together, during the Tower’s one and only blackout, and they held tightly to each other’s hands until the lights flashed back on.
It felt somehow easier to make sense of their relationship like this—as vignettes, as a series of disconnected and highly visual moments—than to confront it in its entirety. Maybe when she finished she would send it to Hiral. He would understand what it meant.
She was still filtering through the footage when the door to the edit bay slid open.
Rylin squinted into the brightness. Somehow she wasn’t all that surprised to see Cord—as if she’d felt his presence even before he walked in, like a slight shift in temperature.
He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. It made him look rumpled and sloppy and so unabashedly sexy that Rylin caught her breath.
“What are you doing on campus so late?” She wasn’t used to seeing Cord here in the edit bay.
“Actually, Myers, I was looking for you. I tried pinging you a few times, but it kept going straight to message, which meant that you were either still inside the tech-net or off-planet. I figured this was more likely.”
Rylin didn’t answer. Her heart had given a funny sideways lurch, anticipation searing up and down her body. She had tried so hard not to think about Cord after this breakup with Hiral. She needed time to process everything that had happened, to focus on herself. It had been a while since Rylin was single. Maybe she could use the time alone. She certainly didn’t want to bethatgirl, the type who Ping-Ponged instantly from one boy to another.
Cord took a step closer and clasped his hands behind his back, adopting the formal sort of pose in which people studied art. His gaze lifted to the holo that flickered before them. “Is Lux starring in this one too? What is it?” he asked.
Just a memorial to my newly ended relationship.Rylin stood up slowly—to see it from his angle. “A new project. It’s about... endings,” she explained as the hologram zoomed in on a couple’s clasped hands.
“Endings?”
