The Towering Sky

He looked up and noticed her, and his entire face broke out into a grin. “Look, guys! We have an audience,” he announced, flashing Rylin a geeky thumbs-up.

She laughed and shook her head, tucking a strand of dark hair behind one ear. After she and Hiral broke up the first time, Rylin had never guessed that they would get back together. Which was incontestable proof that you couldn’t predict where life might take you.

Rylin had started dating Hiral Karadjan when they were both in eighth grade. He lived near her on the 32nd floor and went to her school. Rylin remembered being instantly drawn to him: He had an effervescent sort of energy, so palpable she imagined she could see it. She came to realize that it was joy—a hazy afterglow of laughter, like the light that still streaks across the sky after a shooting star has disappeared.

Hiral laughed a lot back then. And he made Rylin laugh—the sort of deep, helpless laughter that you can only spark when you truly know someone. Rylin had loved that about Hiral: the way he seemed to understand her in a way that no one else ever could.

Until Cord.

Last fall Rylin had started working her mom’s old job, as maid for the Andertons on the 969th floor. In spite of her best intentions, she’d fallen headfirst for Cord Anderton. She tried to break up with Hiral, except by that point he was in jail, having been arrested for drug dealing. Things got messier and messier, until eventually Rylin ended up betraying Cord’s trust—and ruining things between them for good.

Then, unexpectedly, Rylin won a scholarship to Cord’s upper-floor private school, and she started to wonder if they might have another shot. She’d even gone to a party all the way in Dubai, hoping to win him back: only to stand there like a fool as he kissed Avery Fuller, the richest, most flawlessly beautiful girl on earth.

Rylin told herself that it was better this way. Cord belonged with someone like Avery, someone he’d known since childhood; someone who could join him on his life of lavish ski trips and black-tie parties and whatever else they did up there in the stratosphere.

Several weeks later, Hiral had knocked on Rylin’s front door. And for some reason—maybe because she felt so alone, or because she’d learned one too many times that people don’t always get the second chances they deserve—she opened it.

“Rylin. Hi.” Hiral had sounded shocked that she’d actually answered. Rylin felt the same way. “Can we talk?” he added, shifting his weight. He was wearing dark jeans and a crewneck sweater that Rylin didn’t recognize. And there was something else different about him, more than just the clothes. He looked softer, younger; the shadows erased from the hollows beneath his eyes.

“Okay,” she decided, and opened the door wider.

Hiral walked in tentatively, as if expecting some wild thing to jump out and attack him at any moment, which might have happened if Chrissa were home. As it was, Rylin followed him with slow steps to the kitchen table. The silence between them was so thick that she seemed to be wading through it.

She saw Hiral’s eyes dart to the missing table leg—he’d been the one to break it, in a burst of anger, when he learned that Rylin had hooked up with Cord—and his expression darkened.

“I owe you an apology,” he began clumsily. Rylin wanted to speak up, but some instinct bade her stay silent, let him say his piece. “The things I did and said to you, when I was in jail—”

Hiral broke off and looked down, tracing an irregular pattern carved into the surface of the table. It was a series of half-moon indentations, like bite marks, from where Chrissa used to bang her spoon as a baby. If this were a holo, Rylin thought bizarrely, the markings would be important. They would mean something. But this was real life, where so many things had no meaning at all.

“I’m sorry, Rylin. I was a complete asshole to you. The only thing I can say is that jail scared me shitless,” Hiral said baldly. “The other guys in there . . .”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. Rylin remembered visiting Hiral in jail: an adult jail, not juvie, because Hiral was over eighteen. It had felt unbearably soulless, permeated by a cold sense of despair.

“I know,” she said softly. “But that doesn’t excuse the things you said, and did.”

Hiral looked pained at the memory. “That was the drugs talking,” he said quickly. “I know it’s not an excuse, but, Rylin—I was so terrified that I kept on using, anything that I could get my hands on in jail. I’m not proud of it, and I wish I could take it back. I’m sorry.”

Rylin bit her lip. She knew plenty about doing things you wished you could undo.

“I’m not sure if you heard, but the trial went well. I got my old job back.” Hiral worked as a liftie, one of the technicians who repaired the Tower’s massive elevator shafts from the inside, suspended by thin cables, miles above the earth. It was dangerous work.

“I’m glad,” Rylin told him. She felt guilty that she hadn’t even shown up at his trial—she should have been there, if only for moral support, for the sake of their former friendship.

“Anyway, I just wanted to come say that I’m sorry. I’ve changed, Ry. I’m not that guy anymore, who was so awful to you. I’m sorry that I was ever that guy at all.” Hiral kept his eyes steady on hers, and Rylin could see the regret burning there. She felt oddly proud of him for apologizing. It couldn’t have been easy.