The Towering Sky

Avery ducked her head down and shoved through the center of them, past the security checkpoint, the place these people couldn’t follow. When she stepped into her family’s private elevator, she was gasping as if she’d run a marathon. Her cheeks were wet and sticky with soda and sadness.

She needed to see Atlas, no matter the consequences. She needed the warm, comforting feel of his skin on hers, to remind herself that they had each other, that they loved each other. That together they could face anything.

But when she knocked on the door to his room, no one answered. Avery tentatively pushed it open, and what she saw made her breath catch in her chest.

Every trace of Atlas was gone.

She walked past the bed, crisp and folded with hospital corners, and opened the door to the closet, already knowing what she would find. It was empty.

She tried the massive chest, violently yanking the handle of each drawer in succession, but they were empty too. There were no instaphotos tacked to Atlas’s favorite spot on the wall, no collection of knickknacks on the shelves, nothing at all to prove that he had ever lived here. It was as cold and impersonal as a hotel room; as if the memory of him had been forcibly vacuumed out of the apartment.

“Avery? What happened to you?”

Her mom stood in the doorway, a stricken expression on her face.

“What have you done?” Avery demanded. “Did you send Atlas away? Is he in Dubai?”

Her father stepped forward to join her mom, his arms crossed implacably over his chest. “No, he’s not in Dubai,” he said curtly.

“Avery, this is for your own good, I promise,” her mom insisted.

Avery ignored them, speaking a few commands to ping Atlas—but all she got was a flat monotone beep. Command not valid, her contacts informed her.

Atlas had been cut off the grid.

“Where is he?” she cried out.

“I’m sorry, Avery. This is hard for us too,” her father said, watching her with careful eyes. “I know it feels cruel now, but you’ll thank me someday, when you understand why we had to do it.”

Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She had crumpled against the doorway and started quietly sobbing again.

Avery pushed blindly past her parents, down the hallway to her room. She wanted to cry, except she felt oddly past the point of tears. Perhaps she’d used them all up earlier, and now there were none left in the aching cavity inside her.

She paused at the sight of a white compostable box waiting in the output slot of her room comp, the place where her daily vitamins or frosted glasses of water were dispensed. It was a food delivery, flagged for her. Except she hadn’t ordered anything.

Avery walked over with slow, terrified steps, and opened the box.

It was a dozen bright pink cupcakes, accompanied by a generic Happy Birthday slip. On the note, where the custom birthday message went, it said: Always know that my heart is out there, somewhere in the world, beating in time with yours.

“Oh, Atlas,” she whispered, and it turned out she did have more tears after all, because she was crying again, soft silent tears streaking down her face. Her dad had blocked their communication, but somehow—maybe in the last moments before they took away his tablet—Atlas had thought of this instead. The only way he could contact her, one last time.

She reached for a cupcake and took a single bite, though it tasted like salt in her mouth.

Where was he now? Was he okay; was he hurt? What was he thinking about?

Avery abandoned the cupcake and stumbled into her bathroom, turning all the lights on their highest wattage, setting the shower to scalding hot. Her movements were quick but clumsy, her hands shaking. She stripped off her clothes, tossing them into an angry pile on the floor, and looked up at her reflection through blurry, tear-filled eyes.

There it was in all its naked glory: the body her parents had purchased for her. Avery made a few motions, as if she were a puppet being pulled by invisible strings. She twisted a wrist, lifted a shoulder, turned her head back and forth. Whenever she moved, the pale girl in the mirror moved also, staring back at her with hollow eyes. It all felt oddly distant from her. Who was that girl in the mirror, really, and what connection did she have to Avery Fuller?

She studied her own body with an almost scientific detachment, examining its long, lean curves, the hair tumbling over the shoulders, the perfect hip-to-waist and lip-to-eye and chin-to-mouth ratios. This was what you got when you spent millions of nanodollars to custom-design your daughter from the combined pool of your DNA.

It wasn’t worth it, she thought. It had never been worth it.

If only she could take it all back, could rewind her own life to last year, or earlier even—so far back that she could brutally erase all the mistakes she had made. So far back that she could be someone else, could be a normal person, not this cherry-picked human weighed down with a million expectations and strictures. All those awful words that the people had said on the elevator today seemed to fall on Avery at once, in an acid rain of hate.

She stepped into the shower and scrubbed her skin until it was red and raw, crying herself empty. She cried until her anguish had dulled, until all that was left was a vacant dead feeling. It felt as if part of her soul had been clipped away.

As the hot water prickled over her, Avery realized that she could do one more good deed. She might be past saving, but there was someone who wasn’t—not yet.

She closed her eyes, and began to formulate one last plan.