“No, I know what you mean,” Watt agreed. “Hard to believe we’re inside right now, isn’t it?”
Avery smiled. “What about you, are you training for something?”
“Oh, just my next Wizards game,” Watt said lightly. “And—”
“Want to race?”
“What?”
But Avery was already tearing headlong down the path. After a split second of hesitation Watt took off after her, suddenly grateful for all the soccer games. Avery was fast. He wondered if they’d somehow found an extra high-twitch muscle gene in her parents’ DNA.
Finally she slowed to a stop at the path that led to the elevator, where a small water fountain was disguised as a tree stump. “Thanks for that.” She smiled broadly, splashing water on her face. A few droplets trickled down the curve of her neck and onto the front of her shirt. “I haven’t done that in a while.”
“Me neither,” Watt said truthfully.
Her eyes dilated; she was looking something up on her contacts, probably an incoming flicker. Now or never, Nadia urged him.
“Hey, Avery?” he began, and immediately cursed himself for making the sentence pitch up like a question. “Want to do something this weekend?”
“Oh, god. This weekend I’m throwing a huge party for my friend Eris’s birthday,” Avery replied, pulling her leg behind her into a stretch. For a moment Watt thought he was being completely blown off. But then—
“Want to come?”
Watt tried to hide his excitement. “Yeah, sure. I mean, I’d love to.”
“Great. It’s at Bubble Lounge, Saturday night.” Avery leaned back down to take one last sip from the water fountain, then turned back to head the other direction. “See you then.”
“You will,” Watt said, watching her disappear into the trees.
RYLIN
RYLIN STOOD AT the counter of her monorail snack station, unaware that several miles above her, all the highlier kids were in a flurry of activity over Eris Dodd-Radson’s eighteenth birthday party, which Avery Fuller was hosting tonight. But even if Rylin had known, those names would have meant nothing to her. All she knew was that it was too early on a Saturday morning to be awake.
Yet here she was, working a job that somehow seemed worse than it used to. If that was even possible.
Rylin had worked at Cord’s all week. She hadn’t taken any more of his Spokes after that close call and the subsequent kiss, which she really needed to stop thinking about. Still, every morning she’d called in sick to the monorail cart and headed upTower to the Andertons’. She told Chrissa and Hiral it was for the pay—which she’d levered to pay off their last few months’ rent and kept them from getting evicted. Hiral still hadn’t managed to sell the Spokes, he told her. She didn’t really care. She sort of wished she’d never taken them.
If she were being honest with herself, though, the money wasn’t the only reason she stayed. Cord was part of it too. Something had changed between them, something unspoken and confusing, and Rylin was curious about it. He came home earlier in the afternoons and always chatted with her for a few minutes on her way out, asking questions about her family, her monorail job, why she’d dropped out of school. He bought more Gummy Buddies and left them out on the counter. Once she caught him napping on the couch in the living room, a wistful smile on his face, the same smile she’d seen when she caught him watching the family holovids. Only when Brice was around did Cord seem different, as though he acted tougher for his brother’s sake. I can’t wait till he leaves again, Rylin had caught herself thinking; but of course it didn’t matter, because once Brice left, she would be gone too.
Then yesterday, Buza—her boss at the monorail cart—had called Rylin, refusing to let her take any more sick leave no matter what the mediwand said. “Either get to a hospital or get back to work,” he’d snarled, and hung up. Rylin had messaged Cord that she was done, feeling surprisingly disappointed.
Now here she was, back to smelly, depressing reality. It was for the best, though, she assured herself. Better that she leave now, while she still had her actual job, than be fired whenever Brice left town and have nowhere to go.
“Myers! Look alive!” Buza said as he walked past. Rylin clenched her jaw, saying nothing. A monorail was just pulling up to the station. She allowed herself a brief glance out the window, way over on the far wall, then squared her shoulders and settled in for the typical Saturday-morning rush.
She hated weekends, when the crowd was mostly tourists. At least the weekday commuters always knew what they wanted, ordered quickly and moved down the line and occasionally even tipped her, since they knew her and would see her again. Tourists dithered over their orders, asked a million questions, and never tipped. Sure enough, the first group to reach her from the overfull train was a family wearing matching I ? NYC sweatshirts outlined with the Tower’s silhouette. The two children fought over the single banana-nut muffin their mom agreed to buy, while she pestered Rylin, micromanaging exactly how much foam she wanted in her coffeeccino.
The next customers were all just as bad. Sometimes Rylin wondered if people forgot she was a human and not a bot. Cord had once asked why her job even existed, why they didn’t just have bots at each monorail stop like they did at upper-floor lift stations. “Because I’m cheaper than a bot,” she’d told him, which was true.