The Dazzling Heights by Katharine McGee (6)

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Rylin Myers leaned forward on the checkout scanner, counting down the minutes till her shift at ArrowKid was over. She knew she was lucky to have this job—it paid more than her old one at the monorail, and the hours were better—but every moment here still felt like utter torture.

ArrowKid was a mass retailer of children’s clothing in the mid-Manhattan Mall, up on the 500th floor. Until recently, Rylin had never set foot in a store like this. Arrow was the kind of place where midTower parents came in packs: wearing brightly colored exercise pants and dragging toddlers by the arm, strollers bobbing through the air alongside them, pulled by invisible magnetic tethers.

Rylin glanced around the store, which was a dizzying kaleidoscope of sound and color. Jarring pop music played on high volume through the speakers. The entire space smelled overwhelmingly of ArrowKid’s sickly sweet self-cleaning cloth diapers. And crammed on every display were children’s clothes, from pastel-colored baby onesies to dresses in a girls’ size fourteen—all of it covered in arrows. Arrow-stitched baby jeans, arrow-printed T-shirts, even little blankets covered in tiny flashing arrows. It made Rylin’s eyes hurt just to look at it.

“Hey, Ry, can you help out the customer in fitting room twelve? I’ll man checkout for a while.” Rylin’s manager, a twentysomething named Aliah, sauntered over and flipped her close-cut dark hair. There was a bright purple arrow on her shirt, spinning slowly like the hands of a clock. Rylin had to look away to keep from feeling dizzy.

“Of course,” Rylin said, trying not to be irritated that Aliah had started calling her by the nickname she reserved for close friends. She knew her manager just wanted to duck under the counter and ping her new girlfriend when she thought the employees couldn’t see.

She knocked on the door of fitting room twelve. “Just wanted to see how things were going in there,” she said loudly. “Any sizes I can grab for you?”

The door swung open to reveal a tired-looking mom perched on a stool, her eyes glazed over as she probably checked something on her contacts. A pink-cheeked girl with a smattering of freckles stood before the mirror, turning back and forth as she studied her reflection with critical intensity. She was wearing a white dress that read BE DAZZLING and was covered in tiny crystal arrows. Her feet were encased in a pair of arrow-printed boots. They already belonged to the girl; if she’d picked them up today, Rylin would have seen a subtle holographic circle marking them as a new purchase, reminding her to ring them up. She thought of the times she and her best friend, Lux, used to shoplift on the lower floors—nothing big, just a couple of tubes of perfume and paintstick, or once a box of chocolate puffs. You couldn’t get away with that up here.

“What do you think of this?” the girl asked, turning to let Rylin inspect her.

Rylin gave a watery smile. Her eyes darted to the mom—after all, she was the one who would pay—but the older woman seemed content to stay out of her daughter’s shopping habits. “It looks great,” Rylin said weakly.

“Would you wear it?” the little girl asked, her nose wrinkling adorably.

For some reason all Rylin could think of were the clothes she and Chrissa used to wear, some of which had been given by the Andertons, the upper-floor family she’d worked for as a maid. Rylin’s favorite outfit at age six had been a swashbuckling pirate costume, complete with a feathered cap and a gold-hilted sword. She realized with a start that it had probably once belonged to Cord. Or Brice. The knowledge should have made her embarrassed, yet all she felt was a strange sense of loss. She hadn’t spoken to Cord in a month—probably wouldn’t even see him ever again.

It’s for the best, she told herself, the way she always did when she thought of Cord. But it never seemed to work.

“Clearly not,” the girl huffed, pulling the dress back up over her head. “You can go,” she added pointedly, to Rylin.

Rylin realized belatedly that she’d made an error. She tried desperately to backtrack. “I’m sorry, I just lost track of my thoughts for a moment—”

“Forget it,” the girl said in a single breath, slamming the door in Rylin’s face. Moments later she and her mom were walking out of the store, leaving a pile of discarded clothes in the fitting room behind them.

“Ry.” Aliah made a disappointed clucking noise as she walked over. “That girl was an easy sale. What happened?”

Don’t Ry me, Rylin thought with a sudden burst of anger, but she knew better than to say anything; the whole reason she had this job was because of Aliah. She’d been applying for a waitress job at the café next door when she’d seen the shooting arrow display that spelled out HELP WANTED in the holographic window, and stepped inside on a whim. Aliah hadn’t even cared that she had no experience in retail. She’d taken one look at Rylin and let out an excited squeal. “You can totally fit into our junior sizes. Your hips are, like, really narrow. And your feet are even small enough for some of the sandals!”

So here Rylin was, wearing the least offensive merchandise she could find in the store—a tank top and her own black jeans, not an arrow in sight—trying halfheartedly to sell clothes to midTower kids. No wonder she sucked at it.

“I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time,” she promised.

“I hope so. You’ve been here almost a month and yet you’ve barely hit the sales minimum for a single week. I keep making excuses for you, saying it’s a learning curve, but if things don’t change soon …”

Rylin bit back a sigh. She couldn’t afford to be fired, not again. “Got it.”

Aliah’s eyes flicked as she glanced at the time in the corner of her vision. Rylin had been surprised that most girls who worked here could afford to wear contacts, even if it was just the cheaper versions. Then again, this was an after-school job for most of them; they didn’t have younger sisters to support, or a never-ending stack of bills to pay.

“Why don’t you head home, get some rest,” Aliah suggested gently. “I’ll close up. That way you can start fresh tomorrow. ’kay?”

Rylin was too exhausted to argue. “That would be amazing,” she said simply.

“And, Ry, why don’t you take one of those”—Aliah gestured toward a display near the entrance, of printed T-shirts in a bright lemon yellow, covered in purple arrows—“to wear to work tomorrow? It might help you feel a little more … enthusiastic.”

“Those are for ten-year-olds,” Rylin couldn’t help pointing out, eyeing the shirts with trepidation.

“Good thing you’re super skinny,” Aliah replied.

Rylin held her breath as she grabbed the shirt at the top of the stack. “Thanks,” she said, flashing the biggest smile she could manage, but the older girl was already on a ping, her hand to her ear as she whispered something and laughed.

When Rylin waved her ID ring over the touch pad in the door and stepped inside, the comforting smells of batter and warm chocolate rose up to meet her. She felt an immediate stab of regret that Chrissa had beat her home yet again. Ever since Rylin had started working evenings, rather than the crack-of-dawn shift she’d had at the monorail, Chrissa had been handling more of the cooking and grocery shopping. Rylin felt guilty; those had always been her jobs. She wanted to be the one taking care of her fourteen-year-old sister, not the other way around.

“How was work?” Chrissa asked cheerfully. Her eyes drifted to Rylin’s new T-shirt and she pursed her lips, suppressing a smile.

“Don’t you dare say anything, or your birthday present this year will be nothing but a huge bag of arrow-printed underwear.”

Chrissa tilted her head as if considering it. “How many arrows per pair are we talking, exactly?”

Rylin let out a laugh, then fell silent. “Honestly, at this rate, I’ll be fired long before your birthday. Turns out I’m not the best salesperson.” She came to where Chrissa stood at the cooktop, making the banana pancakes they both loved so much. “Breakfast for dinner? What’s the occasion?” she asked, and reached into the bag of chocolate flakes to grab a handful.

Chrissa batted good-naturedly at Rylin’s hand, then tossed the rest of the chocolate flakes into the mix and let the infra-powered spoon stir the batter. She looked up at her sister with evident excitement, jerking her chin toward an envelope on the table. “You got some news.”

“What is that?” No one sent real paper envelopes anymore. The last one Rylin had gotten was a medical bill; and even that was in addition to her weekly reminder pop-ups with sound, and only because the payment was a year past due.

“Why don’t you open it and see,” Chrissa said mysteriously.

Rylin’s first thought was that the envelope was heavy, which signified something momentous, though she wasn’t sure whether to be excited or afraid. There was a familiar blue crest embossed on the back. THE BERKELEY SCHOOL, SINCE 2031, it read in gilded letters along the top. That was Cord’s school, Rylin remembered, up in the 900s somewhere. Why would they be sending anything to her?

She slid a fingernail beneath the crisp edge of the envelope and pulled out its contents, dimly aware that Chrissa had come to stand next to her, but she was too focused on reading the strange and surprising letter to say anything.

Rylin blinked up at Chrissa. “What on earth is this?” she asked slowly.

Chrissa squealed and threw her arms around Rylin in a breathless hug. “I was hoping this was a ‘yes’ envelope, but I wasn’t sure! And I didn’t want to open it without you! Rylin!” She took a step back and looked at her sister, her entire being suffused with a happy glow. “You got a scholarship to Berkeley. That’s the best private high school in New York—maybe even in the country.”

“But I didn’t apply,” Rylin pointed out, to which Chrissa laughed.

“I applied on your behalf, of course. You aren’t mad, are you?” she added, as if the thought had just now occurred to her.

“But—” A million questions rippled through Rylin’s mind. She seized on one, randomly. “How did you even find out about this scholarship?”

Rylin had known about it, of course; she’d seen it mentioned on Eris’s obituary video, which she’d watched dozens of times since that fateful night. The night her whole life turned upside down—when she went to an upTower party, way up on the thousandth floor, only to find the boy she loved with another girl. Then that girl had died in front of Rylin’s eyes, pushed off the side of the Tower by one of her drugged-out friends, who proceeded to blackmail Rylin, forcing her to keep quiet about what had really happened.

“I saw the obit video pulled up on your tablet. You watched it a lot of times,” Chrissa said, and now her voice was quiet and her eyes were searching Rylin’s. “You met Eris when you were with Cord, right? Was she a friend of yours?”

“Something like that,” Rylin said, because she didn’t know how to tell Chrissa the truth—that Eris was someone she’d scarcely known, except that Rylin had seen her die.

“I’m sorry, about what happened to her.” The timer beeped, and Chrissa scooped the pancakes into two fat stacks, handing the plates to Rylin.

“But—” Rylin still didn’t understand. “Why didn’t you apply to the scholarship for yourself?” Of the two of them, Chrissa was the one with real promise: she made straight As in her honors classes, and would probably play volleyball at the college level. She was the one who deserved a fancy upper-school scholarship. Not Rylin, who hadn’t even been in school the last few years.

“Because I don’t need it like you do,” Chrissa said intently. Rylin followed her to the table, carrying the plates of stacked pancakes. One of the legs of their table was broken clean off, causing it to wobble as she set the plates down.

“Between my grades and volleyball, I’m on track to get a college scholarship anyway. You, on the other hand, need this,” Chrissa insisted. “Don’t you see? Now you don’t have to be the girl who dropped out of school to work a dead-end job, for my sake.”

Rylin fell silent at the flicker of guilt in her sister’s explanation. She’d never really considered what Chrissa had thought, when Rylin had dropped out of school to work full-time after their mom died. She’d never imagined that Chrissa might blame herself for Rylin’s choice.

“Chrissa, you know it’s not your fault that I took the job I did.” And Rylin knew that she would do it all again in a heartbeat, to give her little sister the chance she deserved. Then she thought of another complication. “Anyway, I can’t quit work now. We need the money.”

Chrissa’s smile was contagious. “Didn’t you see what it said about a cost-of-living stipend? It’s enough to keep us going, and if we get into a tight spot, we can always figure something out.”

Rylin looked again, and saw that Chrissa was right. “But why would they pick me? I’m not even in school right now. There must have been so many applicants.” Her eyes narrowed at Chrissa as she began to think through the odds. “What did you put on my application, anyway?”

Chrissa grinned. “I found an old essay of yours about working at a summer camp, and made some tweaks to it.”

Two years before their mother died, Rylin had applied to be a junior counselor at an expensive summer camp. It was all the way in Maine—somewhere with a lake, or maybe it had been a river; the kind of place rich kids went to learn useless things like canoeing and archery and braiding friendship bracelets. For some reason, maybe because she’d seen too many holos about summer camp, Rylin had always fostered a secret desire to attend one. Of course they could never afford anything like that. But Rylin had hoped that maybe, if she worked there as a counselor, she would still have a version of the experience.

She’d gotten the job. Though it quickly became irrelevant, because her mom had gotten sick that year and nothing else mattered after that.

“I can’t believe you found that,” she said, shaking her head in amused wonder. She would never cease to be surprised by Chrissa’s resourcefulness. “Though I still don’t understand why they would pick me.”

Chrissa shrugged. “Didn’t you see the description? It’s a weird, nontraditional scholarship, for ‘creative-minded girls who would otherwise be overlooked.’”

“I’m not exactly creative-minded,” Rylin argued.

Chrissa shook her head so violently that her ponytail whipped back and forth, a dark shadow behind her head. “Of course you are. Stop selling yourself short, or you’ll never survive at that school.”

Rylin didn’t answer that. She still wasn’t sure whether or not she was going.

After a moment Chrissa sighed. “I’m not surprised you were friends with Eris. From the sound of this scholarship, she was really cool. I mean, she clearly wasn’t like the other highliers, if this is how her family chose to honor her.”

Suddenly Rylin’s mind was alit with memories of that night—of breaking up with Cord, then trying to win him back, only to find him with Eris; of seeing Eris on the roof, yelling at the other girl, Leda, then watching in horror as Eris tumbled off the side of the Tower and into the cold night air. She shivered.

“You’re going, right?” Chrissa asked, her voice hopeful.

Rylin thought of how it would feel, being at an expensive highlier school with a bunch of strangers who wouldn’t give her the time of day. Not to mention Cord. She’d promised herself she would stay away from him. And then there was school itself—how would she handle being in a classroom again, learning and studying and taking tests, surrounded by a bunch of students who were probably a lot smarter than she was?

“Mom would want you to go, you know,” Chrissa added, and just like that, Rylin’s answer was clear.

She lifted her eyes to her sister’s and smiled. “Yeah, I’ll go.” Maybe something good could finally come of that night. She owed it to herself, and to Chrissa, and her mom—hell, even to Eris—to try.