“INBOX,” RYLIN MUTTERED yet again as she headed warily toward the monorail stop. Her contacts obediently pulled up her messages, but as before, there was nothing new from Hiral.
It was Thursday night, when Hiral would normally have been at work. Except that he had sent a cryptic message that afternoon, asking if Rylin could come meet him here.
She couldn’t shake the sense that there had been something strange about Hiral’s mood this past week. He’d been dodging her messages, had barely even looked her in the eye when she brought his favorite muffins over one morning before school. Whatever was on his mind, he clearly didn’t want to share it with her.
Though she wasn’t exactly sharing everything with him right now, either.
She turned onto the platform and saw him there, wearing a simple gray sweatshirt and jeans, a backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder. Maybe he’d packed a picnic, planned some kind of surprise excursion to the outer boroughs, Rylin tried to tell herself. She didn’t quite believe it.
“Hey, you.” She rose up to kiss him.
“Thanks for coming,” Hiral said gruffly and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m glad you made it.”
“Of course I made it,” she replied, but Hiral didn’t return her smile.
Rylin’s eyes flicked up to the departures board, and a new dread twisted in her stomach. This monorail only went to the airport. “Hiral,” she said slowly, “what’s going on?”
“I’m leaving.” He seemed to be speaking in as few words as possible, as if each syllable caused him unthinkable pain.
“Leaving? What are you talking about?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you, except I had to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” Rylin stumbled back a step, toward a vending machine illuminated with a coffee icon. The bitter scent of coffee grounds emanated from its surface. Her sense of foreboding had stretched itself into something much greater, something Rylin knew she wouldn’t be able to fix.
“I’m leaving New York for good. I took a job on Undina, harvesting algae. My flight leaves in two hours,” Hiral said quietly.
“What the hell?” Rylin cried out, her throat raw. “You decided to leave, with no input from me? We aren’t even going to discuss this?”
Hiral frowned in confusion. “We did discuss it, and you made it clear that you didn’t want to leave.”
“That was barely a conversation!” This couldn’t be happening. Was Hiral, the boy she’d known her entire life, really turning his back on everything?
“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, but I thought this was the right thing to do.”
The monorail pulled up in a sudden and violent rush of air, lifting Rylin’s ponytail from the back of her neck. Hiral turned to watch its arrival, his eyes following its progress along the track, before turning back to her.
“So you’re giving up,” Rylin said slowly. “You didn’t even give me a chance to fight for us.”
“Rylin,” he replied, “do you even want to fight for us?”
“Of course I do!”
The doors opened and people poured out of the monorail, flooding past Rylin and Hiral toward wherever they were headed. Rylin barely registered them, even when they bumped right into her. Her eyes were locked on Hiral’s.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said heavily. “I think you know that we’re over, just like I do.”
“No! You don’t get to just decide that we’re over!” she cried out, attracting a few stares from passersby. Why was Hiral just standing here, looking at her with such defeated resignation?
Rylin was getting pretty sick of the boys in her life making decisions without bothering to consult her. They kept kissing her when she didn’t want to be kissed, or not kissing her when that was all she wanted; hitting on her and breaking up with her; forcing her to steal drugs and sell drugs and then forgive the whole thing; pulling her this way and that until she was stretched unbearably thin. When did Rylin get to make up her own mind, for once? When would she get a damned say in any of it?
Hiral didn’t get to just take their relationship into his own hands, with no thought for her. “You can’t do this. You can’t just walk away after everything we’ve been through,” she insisted, with less vehemence.
“It’s because of everything we’ve been through that I have to walk away. Because you deserve better!” Hiral exclaimed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you my plan, okay? But I was worried that you might try to convince me to stay—and if you did, I knew it would be hard for me to say no to you.” He let out a long breath. “I really need to leave.”
“Why?”
Passengers began to board the monorail car, bringing with them their suitcases or babies, their regrets or hopes. Most of them were grinning with visible excitement, as if they couldn’t wait to reach their destination, wherever it was.
Hiral hesitated. “I was in trouble. Last year before I was arrested, I ran up some debts with V and his supplier, a debt that I never really paid off.”
Even though she was wounded and stung, Rylin felt her blood prickle on Hiral’s behalf. “Never paid off? You were arrested and they weren’t! How is that fair?”
“Who said any of this was fair?” he demanded. Rylin could tell that he hated to admit this to her. “I owed those guys a lot of money. I tried to pay it off bit by bit, but it wasn’t fast enough for them. They kept pressuring me to deal again. They said if I didn’t get the money, they would frame me, send me back to jail—and this time I wouldn’t be found innocent. I would go to prison. For years, maybe.”
“Oh, Hiral,” Rylin breathed, reaching for his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted so desperately to be worthy of you, Rylin. More than anything I wanted to hold myself to the promise I made you when we got back together. I swore that I wouldn’t hurt you ever again.”
The monorail was still waiting there, hushed and expectant, its eerie lights reflecting around the curved inside of its surface. Rylin felt a stab of panic. Those doors would only stay open another minute.
“We can figure this out,” she said impulsively.
Hiral shook his head, gently detangling her hands from his. “Your place is here, Ry. With Chrissa, going to college, studying holography. Becoming the person you deserve to be.”
And Rylin knew that he was right, no matter how much it hurt.
He gave a brave smile. “Besides, I think I’m going to like Undina.”
Rylin tried to picture Hiral there, in that enormous modular floating city located off Polynesia: living in employee housing, spending his days scraping algae from massive nets, his hair sun-kissed and shaggy. Making friends with all the other young people—there were thousands of them; Undina had a bottomless demand for labor. And it was its own sovereign nation, with no citizenship requirements: the natural destination for anyone who wanted to start over.
Anyone who wanted to leave their old life without a backward glance.
She realized, with a pang of regret, that he wasn’t changing his mind. “I love you,” she whispered.
“I know that you do. And I love you too. But I also know that I’m not enough for you.”
The train’s lights began flashing; it was about to pull out of the station. Hiral shot Rylin an anguished glance. “I hope I see you again someday,” he said quickly. “But even if I don’t, I’ll always be thinking of you.”
“Hiral, I—” she stammered as he pulled her close to kiss her one last time. Then he sprinted through the closing train doors.
Rylin’s vision became blurry. She watched Hiral wave at her through the flexiglass as the monorail swooped off into the night, and he became just another silhouette in the window. Then he was gone.
It was a long time before Rylin finally made her way back home.