A GIRL STOOD in the Budapest airport, wearing jeans and a shapeless sweatshirt, a tattered red bag slung over one shoulder. She was trying to decide where to go next—luxuriating in the pleasant anticipation of it, wherever it would be.
Like all public spaces, the airport was a world of abbreviated anonymous encounters, of strangers thrust together in temporary forced intimacy. The girl kept her head down, avoiding eye contact, trying to escape notice; and to her continued surprise, it worked. No one paid any attention to her.
Her stomach surprised her with a growl of hunger. Okay, a snack first, she thought, and then a destination.
Every choice had become a sort of game with her. She would tilt her head a little to the side, her brows drawn together, to internally debate whether she wanted limeade or beet juice. One might have safely assumed that the girl didn’t know her own preferences, and perhaps she didn’t. Maybe she wasn’t sure whether her preferences were actually hers, or whether they had been handed to her, like everything else in her life thus far.
She paused near one of the flexiglass windows, to look out at the planes landing and taking off. She loved watching the various steps of its choreography: the sloshing water tanks that fueled the jets, the individual transport pods that moved like strings of beads, picking up each individual person and driving them toward the drop-off point.
She reached absentmindedly up to her jet-black hair, recently and crudely cropped in a boyish cut. Her head felt curiously light without the heavy tresses that normally spilled over her shoulders. It was a wonderful sensation.
The girl tilted her head against the glass and let her eyes flutter shut. They still burned from the lightning-fast retina-replacement surgery she’d had in an unmarked but surprisingly clean “doctor’s office” down in the Sprawl. What a strange, reckless few days it had been.
“I need to disappear,” she’d said to Watt when she pinged him that night. “You can do that, can’t you?”
“You’re running away?” Watt paused as if collecting his thoughts. “Is this about the article? Because I can find out who submitted that picture, and then—”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Leda,” she chided gently. “I’m not looking for revenge, Watt. I’m looking to escape.”
To her surprise, Watt resisted her. Part of her was oddly grateful for it, as if he knew that he had to speak out, because he was the only person she planned on sharing this with. The only person fighting for her. “I know this whole situation seems impossible right now,” he’d said, “but you can’t just walk away from your life because of it.”
“What if I told you that I’ve wanted to walk away from my life for a while?”
She had collapsed back onto her bed and stared up at her ceiling, one hand resting on her forehead, the other over her heart, the way she did in yoga. Trying to center herself on something, anything. How long had this sensation been building—the feeling that she was trapped, her true self suffocating under the weight of everyone else’s expectations, her parents’ and Max’s and the entire world’s?
She struggled to explain. “You wouldn’t understand, but it’s like I have all these voices in my head, telling me who they think I should be. And now there are even more voices, a whole clamoring city of them, and I just want to walk away from it all.”
“I know more than you think about voices in your head,” Watt had told her, with an unreadable laugh. “Okay. Let’s start talking logistics.”
Looking back, she still couldn’t believe they had pulled it off.
She could never have done it without Watt, whose hacking abilities had surpassed even her wildest expectations. He’d managed to steal an out-of-use military drone equipped with Teflon cloaking panels. The drone picked her up right there on the roof, after she set fire to the apartment using the high-grade spark-sticks Watt had obtained. She didn’t ask where he found them.
She barely fit into the drone, even sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, but it didn’t matter. She’d flown the twenty minutes to Boston inside it, practically invisible, nothing but a shimmer in the air.
She winced a little, remembering the destruction she’d wrought on her childhood home. But she hadn’t had a choice. She and Watt had discussed it from all angles, and they couldn’t think of a way for her to get out through the Tower, not without being caught by the retinal scanners. Her only option was to leave from the roof. Which meant that she needed the fire, to explain the absence of a body.
Because if her parents hadn’t thought her dead—if they realized that she had just run away—they would have thrown their inexhaustible resources into finding her. And she didn’t want to live the rest of her life looking over her shoulder in fear.
The hardest part had been not telling Leda. But she knew that if she let Leda in on her plans, Leda would have fought her every step of the way. She’d made Watt promise to tell Leda as soon as he felt it was all clear. Still, it pained her to think that she had caused her friend even an hour of false grief.
She was glad she’d done it. It freed the rest of them from suspicion, it freed Leda from her guilt, and most of all, it set her free. She hadn’t realized how much her identity was trapping her until she crawled out from beneath it.
She turned back toward the departures holo, where tiny destination icons all glowed tantalizingly before her eyes, like items on a menu. Saint Petersburg, Nairobi, Beirut. Where was Atlas in all these countless places? She wished yet again that she could have warned him about her plan, but not even Watt had been able to find him. Wherever her parents had taken him, they’d done a damn good job making him vanish.
Already she kept seeing him everywhere. In every café, in every train, at every street corner. Someone’s walk or voice or hair color would look like his, and she would do a double take, just to make sure. It was like being surrounded by infinite echoes of him. She wondered if he felt the same about her.
The girl lifted her head. Her eyes might be new, but the stubborn defiance flashing in them was the same as ever.
He could be anywhere, really. There was so much world out there, filled with so many unexpected corners: small towns and sprawling cities and towers that traced the sky; oceans and lakes and mountains; and all those billions of people. And she had no clue where he was, in all that vast imminent everything. It might take weeks to find him, or years, or an entire lifetime.
But looking would be half the fun, wouldn’t it? If it was going to take a lifetime, she thought wryly, she might as well get started.
Avery Fuller was dead, and the girl who’d been living her life for eighteen years couldn’t wait to learn who she really was, underneath it all.
She turned her profile toward the airline counters and walked boldly into her future.