RYLIN’S SNEAKERS POUNDED a vicious rhythm on the pavement of the outdoor track.
She usually loved running out here on the deck, past the basketball courts and swimming pools and jungle gyms. But today it felt painfully monotonous, or maybe just painful. No matter how far she ran, the horizon never seemed to change, as if any illusion of progress was just that: an illusion.
Still Rylin kept going, because even useless movement was better than stillness right now. At least if she kept moving, the air would hiss past her sweat-dampened skin, calm the heat pounding through her. She ran faster and faster, until her hamstrings were burning and she could feel a blister forming on her left ankle. Ahead of her was an artificial pond, where a group of small children were racing miniature hovercrafts, a flotilla of toys with colored flags waving in the breeze.
This was the point where Rylin usually turned back. But today she pressed onward. She wanted to run until she sweat out all the anger still clinging to her from last night, if that was even possible.
She couldn’t believe what Cord had done. How dare he get involved in her relationship with Hiral? It was so typical of him, of all the highliers, to think that he could bend and twist the world to his will. How gross, that he had used money to try to knock down the obstacles between them.
She remembered the Skyspear, the way their bodies had been intertwined in the dawn glow, and fought back a sudden sense of shame. Knowing what she knew now, the memory no longer seemed magical. If anything, it made Rylin feel rather cheap.
She couldn’t keep doing this. No more thinking about Cord or Hiral. Rylin was more than the sum of the boys she’d loved. She refused to let them define her.
Her contacts lit up with an incoming ping.
Rylin tripped from the shock of it, but managed to catch her balance before she fell. She slowed to a walk and turned around, toward the pond. Flecks of golden sunlight danced over its surface.
She hesitated another instant before giving in and accepting the ping.
“Hiral. I thought we agreed not to talk,” she said acerbically, lowering herself onto one of the benches.
“Chrissa reached out. She told me I was supposed to ping you?”
Rylin winced. She’d been banging around the apartment all morning, letting out loud angry sighs, until Chrissa bullied her into sharing what was going on. “It sounds like you need to talk to Hiral,” she had said. To which Rylin responded by grabbing her sneakers and escaping for a run.
“That sounds like Chrissa,” she muttered under her breath.
“I see. Younger sister, meddling again,” Hiral replied. Rylin heard a note of concern beneath the false lightness of his tone.
Rylin wanted so badly to be angry with him—royally pissed, in fact. But she found that she didn’t really have it in her.
“How is it?” she asked, because no matter what had happened between them, she still wanted to know that Hiral was okay.
“Awesome, actually.” She heard the excitement in his voice. “I’ve finished training and started work in the algae-harvesting pens. The only drawback is that I’m eating way more green-protein than I ever wanted to see. I feel like even my sweat is turning green.”
“Gross,” Rylin snorted at the unexpected image.
Hiral fell momentarily silent. “What was it that Chrissa wanted me to talk to you about?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Okay,” Hiral said, as if he didn’t quite believe her. “For what it’s worth, though, I’m sorry. For everything I put you through. I know you’re still upset with me for leaving town without giving you much warning. But I also know that it was the best thing for us.”
“I’m getting really sick of everyone telling me what’s best for me, without any actual input from me,” Rylin couldn’t help replying.
“Trouble in paradise for you and Anderton?”
This was really weird, talking about Cord with Hiral. “How did you know?”
“Because I know you, Ry. I saw it in the mall that afternoon, when we were working on your ridiculous project; I wanted to ignore it, but it was there. The way your whole face lit up when you made eye contact with him. I know that look.” Hiral’s voice was very faint in her eartennas, and it suddenly struck Rylin how utterly distant he was, on the other side of the world. “I know because once upon a time, you looked at me that way.”
Rylin lifted a hand to her eyes, disconcerted. The sunlight was getting brighter.
Hiral didn’t say anything, just let the moments of silence tick away, though god knows how much those minutes were costing him.
“Cord told me that he helped you leave town,” Rylin said at last.
“You know about that?” Hiral asked, and she recognized the guilty note creeping into his voice. “I’m sorry. Please don’t judge me too harshly, okay? I didn’t have a lot of options.”
It took a moment for Rylin to process his words. “Judge you too harshly?”
“For going behind your back, asking your ex-boyfriend to help me flee the country. That’s what you’re upset about, right?”
“Wait—you’re the one who approached Cord?”
“Yeah, obviously. What did you think, that Cord bribed me to leave or something?” When Rylin didn’t answer, Hiral sucked in a breath. “Rylin, you have to stop assuming the worst of people.”
“I don’t—”
“It’s from all your years of living alone, from being the adult and taking care of Chrissa. Trust me, I get it,” Hiral said gently. “But you can’t keep living like that. Always holding people at arm’s length, hiding behind the lens of your camera. Sometimes it’s okay to let people in.”
Rylin felt a flush of defensiveness—but she also knew that there was an element of truth to his words.
“Look,” Hiral went on, “the whole thing was my idea. I went to Cord, asking if he could get me a job and a plane ticket away. He kept saying that he didn’t want to get involved, but I talked him into it.”
“Why? Surely there were other places you could have gone for help,” Rylin began, but Hiral cut her off.
“Not really, Ry. Getting a job, let alone a job on another continent, is pretty hard to do when you have a record. I needed someone with money and connections. Turns out Cord is the only fancy rich person I knew.” He said it surprisingly without bitterness. “Also,” he added, “I knew that he cared about you so damned much that he would even help me.”
The children’s hovercrafts were darting eagerly across the water, like dragonflies dancing over the surface, barely even leaving a ripple.
“But . . .” She trailed off, helpless. It was still wrong, wasn’t it, that Cord would help Hiral get out of the country, then immediately go after Rylin? And not even tell her that he had played a part in getting rid of her ex?
She heard a rustling on the other end of the line, and a series of muffled voices as Hiral talked to someone else, probably explaining that he was on a ping with an old friend. Rylin wondered if he was talking to a girl. She tried to imagine him stretched out on a deck on that floating city, soaking up the sun’s rays.
And then, because she wasn’t quite ready to lose Hiral’s voice in her ears, she asked him to tell her more about Undina. She could practically hear him smile on the other end of the line.
“The first thing you notice when you get here is the sky. It feels so much closer than in New York, which is strange, since of course we’re way higher up in the Tower. . . .”
Hiral went on for a while, telling her about his routine, out there on the world’s largest floating city. How he was on night shift, because all the new hires started on night shift until they were promoted. How he worked by touch alone, hauling in nets of algae and scraping off the soft plant growth, all in the pitch darkness so the algae wouldn’t be sensitized by light.
Rylin sat there listening, watching the flow of people past her, the calm waters on the surface of the pond.
“Ry,” Hiral said, and she realized she’d been silent for a while. “Are you still upset with me?”
“I’m not upset with you,” she assured him. Hiral was so obviously happy in his new life; she would have to be a pretty terrible friend not to feel happy for him. He belonged where he was, and Rylin belonged here, in New York.
She just wasn’t sure who she belonged with. Part of her still loved Cord—but she wasn’t ready to forgive him for everything he had done, and said.
“I have to go. Bye, Rylin,” Hiral said softly.
She started to say see you later, then realized she wasn’t sure when, if ever, she would see Hiral again. “Take care of yourself, okay?” she told him instead.
Rylin sat there for a long time, staring thoughtfully at the water, the lines of her face strong and unreadable.