The Towering Sky

And so it begins again, Avery thought, her stomach twisting at the unwanted attention. Max trotted alongside her. He’d started talking loudly about his research, probably in an attempt to distract her.

She’d only made it a few meters before a young man in an official-looking vest came forward. “Miss Fuller!” he said officiously. “Please come with me. You’re a press case and can skip the line.”

“No, thank you. I don’t want special treatment,” Avery assured him.

“Don’t be silly. We always do this for the candidates’ families,” the polling attendant insisted, reaching for Avery’s elbow to steer her through the crowd. The people in line cast her dark looks.

Avery tried to keep the smile on her face, but it was dimmer now, mechanical beneath the spotlight of attention.

The polling attendant led her through the main doors of the community center, which was decked out in swaths of New York decorations. Across the room, a few simulated windows depicted the chill of a gray autumn day.

“I’ll wait for you right here,” Max told her. “Good luck.” He paused at a wall of election stickers—the kind that fastened themselves to fabric on a time release, much better than the old pins people used to stab their clothes with. Most of the stickers said I VOTED! “Can I take one of these even if I didn’t vote?” Avery heard Max asking, and almost laughed. Of course Max wanted to feel included.

At the wall of retinal scanners, she lifted her gaze and focused on not blinking. There was a momentary instant of darkness as the low-energy beam licked over her eye, gathering all the rich data from her pupil, exponentially more data than what was encoded on a fingerprint. AVERY ELIZABETH FULLER appeared on the screen before her, along with her New York State ID number and birthdate. She had turned eighteen over the summer, and this was her first time voting.

A cone of invisibility descended on Avery from above. Not real invisibility, of course, just simple light refraction technology, the kind used mainly in recreational toys or in schools on test days. Genuine invisibility was available to only the military. Avery knew that her body was still in full view of everyone outside the cone, though watery and hazy, as if seen through a rippling surface of water.

A holo materialized before her, projected by one of the computers along the ceiling. NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL MAYORAL ELECTION it said in block letters. Beneath were the names of the candidates: PIERSON FULLER, DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN PARTY, and DICKERSON DANIELS, FEDERALIST PARTY, along with a string of minority-party candidates Avery had barely heard of. Beneath each person’s name appeared his or her headshot. There was her dad, smiling and waving in his little square of high-res instaphoto; and next to him Dickerson Daniels, wearing his signature red bow tie. Avery reached up to touch her index finger to the circle marked with her dad’s name.

But her hand didn’t seem to be working properly, because for some reason, it had hovered over Dickerson Daniels’s name instead.

She didn’t want her dad to be mayor.

She didn’t want four years of this media circus, this endless public scrutiny. She didn’t want to keep being summoned to appear in preapproved dresses, to smile and nod on command like a marionette. She wanted to be herself again.

If Daniels won, wouldn’t people eventually lose interest in her? Her life would go back to the way things had always been. People would stop staring at her in public places, except for the occasional fashion blogger trying to chronicle her outfits. Most of all, her parents would go back to normal. They would stop obsessing over every last detail of their family’s appearances, and go back to stressing about other things, like making even more ridiculous amounts of money.

A cold sweat had broken out on Avery’s brow. Several minutes must have ticked by. Had she been in here too long? Would people notice? The faces of her father and Daniels kept smiling cheerfully and waving at her from their squares of holo. Her hand wavered, and she began to lean in, toward Daniels.

But at the last moment, Avery’s rigid lifelong training kicked in, and she pushed the holo-button marked with her dad’s name—jerkily, as if she hadn’t fully committed to the decision and part of her was still resisting it.

The box glowed a bright green, confirming her vote, and then the screen repixelated into the election for treasurer.

Avery bent over to catch her breath, her hands on her knees. She felt as if she’d just fought a battle within herself, and had the oddest sense that she’d lost.

Finally she pulled herself together and cycled through the other items: everything from city council to town clerk to library trustee. The holographic ballot rolled itself up with a flourish, and the invisibility cone dissolved into thin air. Avery reached up to smooth her hair as she stepped away, producing a vague, distracted smile for the various hovercams aimed in her direction. There was a whole swarm of them now, clearly sent by her parents, whose PR team was probably already blasting the pics to the feeds.

As she walked toward the line of press contacts waiting for an interview, the cold metallic eyes of the cameras and the organic eyes of humans followed her every move.

“Fifteen minutes left!” one of the campaign aides cried out as the hum of excitement reached a fever pitch.

It was later that night, and Avery was home on the thousandth floor, where her father had set up a makeshift campaign headquarters in what he and her mom called the great room. It was the room they usually used for parties, almost the size of a ballroom, and empty of furniture. Right now the room was packed, seething with volunteers and publicity assistants and their parents’ friends. A stage had been set up along one side, with enormous touch screens above it, depicting the citywide votes in glowing bars of red and blue. The data was being fed into the system in real time, as the last few citizens made their way to the polling stations.