The Towering Sky

CALLIOPE



THE NEXT MORNING, Calliope followed her mom onto the Rail Iberia platform in a daze. She felt oddly like a child, being led blindly by the hand, but for some reason she couldn’t summon the ability to do anything for herself right now.

They had spent the last two nights at the Nuage. “How perfect that we’re ending our time in New York the same way it began,” Elise had pointed out, though Calliope didn’t answer. She knew the real reason they had stayed an extra night, instead of taking yesterday’s Hyperloop train.

Elise had been holding out hope that Nadav would change his mind, and come running after them in some grand romantic gesture. But as the hours ticked by and they didn’t hear from him, it became apparent to both of them that he wasn’t coming.

Calliope lifted her eyes to the mirrored wall of the bitbanc on the corner and was startled at the version of herself she saw reflected there. Because she knew this girl. This was Leaving Calliope, the girl who skipped eagerly from one place to another, standing next to her mom in a sleek coat and boots, an assortment of luggage wheeling along in her wake.

She and Elise were clutching their usual hazelnut lattes, their bags jostling with their favorite snail-cream moisturizers and the massage pillows that helped them fall asleep on train rides. Each detail was part of the ritual, familiar from all the other times they’d left town at the end of a con; yet it felt all wrong. This time they weren’t skipping away, bowled over with laughter, flush with the cheap thrill of success.

They were subdued. A miasma of regret hung over them; and Calliope imagined that their steps resounded louder than usual, like in an echo chamber, because each step took them farther and farther away from New York. From the only people who actually cared about them.

Not even the bustle of Grand Central could cheer her up. Calliope kept her eyes on the floor, willing herself into invisibility. It wasn’t all that hard, really—after all, it was the other side of the coin from being stared at, and Calliope was an expert at that. The only difference was that this time she had to repel attention instead of attract it. She retreated into herself, imagining an invisible force field that she wore like a cloak.

She wondered how long it would take everyone to forget her.

The kids at school would go first, she thought. After all, what did they know about her, or she about them? They would whisper about her for a while—Whatever happened to that British girl, the one with the weird name? She hoped there would at least be some gossipy rumors. That she’d run away to Hawaii to work on a coffee plantation, or that she was eloping with an older man and her parents didn’t approve—hell, she’d even take rumors about drugs and rehab, as long as she wasn’t forgotten.

But Calliope wasn’t a fool; she knew they would remember her for a week at most.

It would take longer for Nadav and Livya and Brice. Don’t think about Brice, she scolded herself. There was no use dwelling on it; it would only hurt her more. She hated to imagine herself quietly vanishing from his memory, like a holo fading out of focus.

These past few weeks, she had let herself hope that they might have some kind of future. She cared about Brice, with his irreverent humor and sense of adventure, his bouts of surprising sincerity. He knew Calliope better than anyone in the world, except for her mom. Which just went to show that no one in her life had really known her at all.

She had shown Brice her real self, underneath all the false layers and lies that she wore so well.

And now that she wouldn’t see him again, Calliope felt alone in a way she hadn’t felt since before New York: as if she would never connect with another person again, for the rest of her life.

“I wasn’t planning on stopping over in Lisbon, unless you want to,” Elise said, breaking the silence. Her eyes were still red-rimmed from crying, and she pulled a scarf closer around her neck, but at least her voice was steady.

Calliope knew her next line. She was supposed to suggest Biarritz or Marrakech, make a joke about how her tan was fading, and couldn’t they go someplace warm? Instead she shrugged and pulled the force field closer around herself.

Elise smiled bravely and tried again. “Beginning or end?” she asked, nodding toward a young couple holding hands. They looked very East Coast preppy, with their crisp sweaters and matching monogrammed luggage.

Calliope knew what her mom was doing, feeding her cues, reminding her of the dialogue they used to fling back and forth at each other. Beginning or End was a game they would play, guessing whether people were at the beginning or end of their respective journeys—whether they were starting out on a vacation or returning home. Calliope and Elise used to love it because it made them feel superior; because of course they were always at the start of a journey, every single time.

Calliope didn’t feel very superior right now, though. “I don’t know,” she said vaguely, and her mom fell silent.

A train pulled up to the platform, its sleek chrome curves stamped with the purple Rail Iberia logo. Calliope stepped back as the new arrivals flooded out. Some were flushed with excitement, others dull-eyed with weariness; but all of them here, in New York, about to start whatever adventure this city might hold for them.

The moment the last passenger had de-boarded, the train’s doors closed, and the seats began to swivel a perfect 180-degree arc to face the other way. A flurry of lemon-yellow cleaning bots instantly scoured the train car from top to bottom, changing out the seat covers and sterilizing everything with ultraviolet light. Calliope remembered the first time she’d seen a train self-cleaning, when she was eleven and she and her mom ran away from London. The pulses of neon purple through the windows had looked to her like a fairy rave.