The Towering Sky

Then they’d slept together for the first time—right there on the beach, in the middle of a rainstorm, because they couldn’t wait another minute to get their hands on each other.

She wondered if Cord was thinking about that day too, only to remember that she shouldn’t be thinking about it. They were friends, and nothing more.

Friends who happened to have a romantic history.

“Lie detector lab,” Rylin read aloud, letting her hair sweep forward to block her face. “Students will use somatic feedback and biosensors to determine when the other is telling an untruth. The average person . . .”

Rylin trailed off there, and perhaps Cord was reading the same thing at the same time, because he didn’t ask her to continue.

The average person tells a lie at least two times per day. Being deceitful—to protect ourselves, to protect the feelings of others, or to promote our own interests—is so common that we even have a saying: “To lie is human.” Yet most people can detect falsehoods in others with less than 30 percent accuracy. In this lab, we will re-create a version of the conditions used by law enforcement in official lie-detection procedures. . . .

“I nominate you as the first victim,” Cord declared. Rylin didn’t protest. She felt a cold dread twisting in the pit of her stomach, like some scaly creature stirring to life. If she got called in for questioning about Mariel’s death, would the police do something like this? It wouldn’t matter, she told herself; she didn’t know anything about what had happened to Mariel.

But what if they discovered what Mariel had on Rylin—that she had been stealing drugs? Maybe she could deny it, Rylin thought wildly; after all, it was her word against a dead girl’s.

If nothing else, maybe this lab would give her some useful practice at lying under pressure.

She held out her wrists, letting Cord swab them with an antiseptic pad, deliberately avoiding making eye contact with him. He peeled the backs from a series of sensor patches before placing one on each of her wrists, and another at the center of her forehead. His touch on her skin was very precise and methodical.

The average person tells a lie at least two times per day. How many times had Rylin lied so far today—to Hiral, to the school, to Chrissa? And those were just the recent ones. As she began to tally up all her mistruths and half-truths, Rylin felt a little sick.

She’d lied to Hiral about Cord, and to Cord about Hiral, and to the police about what happened to Eris. She’d lied to Chrissa too, in an effort to keep her safe. And most of all Rylin had lied to herself, when she absolved herself from all of it. She’d told herself over and over that she didn’t have a choice. Didn’t she?

The biosensors kicked on, and Rylin’s vitals were suddenly depicted on the tablet before them, pink and yellow lines tracking her elevated heart rate, capillary dilation, and sweat levels. The official government machines were exponentially more accurate than this, she knew; those also tracked rapid eye movement and neural firings in the brain.

“Your heart rate is already a little elevated,” Cord pointed out, a curious note in his voice. “Let’s start with a couple of control questions. What’s your name?”

“Rylin Myers.” The lines stayed horizontal.

“Where do you live?”

She had a feeling he wanted her to say New York or the Tower, but Rylin couldn’t resist. “The thirty-second floor.”

Cord nodded, his lips curling a little at the edges. “Where are you applying to college next year?”

Rylin tried to sit up straighter, to see the questions written there on the tablet, but Cord had angled the screen away from her. Was that really one of the lab prompts?

“NYU,” she said slowly. “I’m applying other places, but NYU is my top choice. It has the strongest holography program in the country. Besides, I don’t want to leave New York, not when Chrissa still has two more years of high school.”

She didn’t mention Hiral, though he was another reason for staying in New York. He kept saying how proud he was that Rylin was applying to college, studying something she loved. Though he did clam up a little whenever she mentioned it.

But even if she did get into NYU, Rylin wasn’t sure how she would pay for it. She’d been surreptitiously applying for holography scholarships, leadership scholarships, anything she could think of. Not that she especially wanted to share this with Cord, who’d never faced a financial problem in his life. He wouldn’t understand.

“You’ll get into NYU,” Cord declared. “After the faculty see Starfall, there’s no way they won’t admit you.”

“You watched Starfall?” She hadn’t told anyone at school about her film. How did Cord even find out about it?

“Of course I did. I loved it,” he told her. Rylin felt oddly touched.

“Though I have to ask,” Cord went on, “which character was based on me? The neighbor, or the new guy at the end of the film?”

Rylin rolled her eyes, fighting a smile. Of course Cord would think that he was in the movie somehow. “Where are you applying to college?” she asked, realizing that she didn’t know.

“I’m not sure. I think I’ll just file the Common Application a bunch of places and see who takes me.” He gave an uncertain shrug. “I still have some time to figure it out.”

Rylin felt a little catch in her chest, because she recognized Cord’s confusion for what it was: the feeling of not knowing what to do, what step to take next, when you had no parents to advise you. It was the terrifying feeling of making a monumental life decision and knowing that whether you failed or succeeded, you would do so wholly on your own.