“You mean from you! You said it yesterday, this isn’t my fault!”
“Yes, but—”
“You go ahead,” Eris said, turning away. Her entire body felt strangely numb. She found that she didn’t care what her mom did, one way or the other. “I’ll wait here for Dad.”
“I don’t know what your dad wants right now,” Caroline said softly. “I know he loves you, but it’s up to him to figure out how all this is going to work. And just in case, we should be prepared for the worst.”
The worst? Wasn’t this already the worst?
“It’s you and me now, Eris,” Caroline finished, with the ghost of a smile.
Eris wanted to argue but lacked the heart for it. “Where are we going?”
“I found us a new apartment downTower.”
“DownTower? We aren’t just going to the Nuage?”
“We can’t afford the Nuage,” Eris’s mom said quietly.
Suddenly Eris understood. Her mom, the former model, and her much older dad. The revelation that Eris’s mom had been with someone else. “You aren’t taking anything from Dad, are you? You want to prove that you didn’t marry him for the money.”
Her mom nodded. “It’s the right thing to do. I owe your father that much, at least. Don’t worry,” she said quickly, “I’m trying to keep this as normal as possible for you. I have some money saved, and your tuition is covered through the year, so you won’t have to change schools. I promise, it’ll all be okay.”
Eris felt a little sick at that statement. The idea that she might have to go to a downTower school wouldn’t even have occurred to her.
Her mom stood there a moment, as if she wanted to give Eris a hug, but Eris made no move toward her. After a moment, Caroline faltered and started for the door.
“Just one suitcase for now,” she said. “We’ll figure out the rest later.”
As the door shut behind her mom, Eris collapsed onto her pillows and turned the cartoons back on, wishing she could escape into them indefinitely.
* * *
An hour later Eris sat in a hover across from her mom, bags and boxes stacked around them in the tiny space. Her skin crawled with dread as the numbers etched into the vertical corridor’s titanium walls grew ever smaller. She kept expecting their hover to slow down and turn onto one of these floors, but it showed no signs of stopping.
“Mom,” she said sharply, “just how low, exactly, are we going?”
“It was the best I could do, given the short notice.”
“That’s not an answer,” Eris persisted.
The numbers dipped below three hundred. Her mom sighed. “I was poor once, too, you know.”
The dim light from the walls caught on Caroline’s bracelet, the one piece of jewelry she’d brought with her, as far as Eris could tell. It looked fake, probably because it predated Eris’s dad. There are millions of dollars worth of jewels in that safe, she thought in mounting frustration. Yet her mom had apparently picked today to abide by a strict moral code.
Eris looked out the window, crossing and uncrossing her legs, feeling suddenly itchy in her Denna jeans, as if her skin no longer fit. She got on her tablet and looked over her messages again—she didn’t want to do it on her contacts, in case her mom heard the verbal command and got upset with her for checking them constantly.
Still nothing. Like every other time she’d looked at them today.
Finally Eris felt the familiar weight of the hover decelerating, rotating just slightly as its electromagnetic propulsion slowed. She glanced up at the numbers marking the floor they had turned onto, and thought she might throw up. They were going to live on the 103rd floor?
The streets down here were so narrow that the hover was barely able to turn the corners. They weren’t even streets at all, really, certainly not the expansive streets of the upper floors that were designed to convince you that you might be outside, with real live trees and air that pumped through the floor in soft, breezy patterns. This was more of a hallway, with flickering fluorescent lights overhead and depressing, institutional white walls. Several heads turned and watched as they skimmed past. Eris got the sense that no one down here took hovers all that often.
They pulled to a stop in front of a dingy door marked 2704. Eris gulped. They were so far down, the floor here so big, that the numbers of each apartment didn’t even begin with the floor number. God, the 103rd floor must be almost as big as the Tower’s base. Up on 985, there had only been ten apartments total. Eris had known all her neighbors individually.
Bags on each shoulder swinging wildly, Caroline opened the door to the hover and began fishing in her purse for some kind of ID chip. No bioscanners down here, that was for sure.
Eris waited until the last possible instant, when the hover started beeping and informing her angrily that it would charge for the delay, before she peeled herself from the seat and walked slowly inside.
It was worse than she’d imagined. The ceilings were low, the lighting was bad, and there was nothing even resembling a window. Feeling dizzy, Eris held her wrist up to her nose and inhaled her jasmine perfume, but it wasn’t enough to cover the lingering odors of rot and trash that permeated this place. There were several boxes stacked in the middle of what was apparently her mom’s bedroom, containing the few things Caroline had managed to send ahead. A tiny bathroom was tucked off the main bedroom, as well as a narrow kitchen, not that Eris or her mom knew the first thing about cooking.