The Towering Sky

“I didn’t expect you to work so hard on your last day.” It was Rylin’s boss, Raquel.

“I wanted to organize this last collection for you before I go. We’re almost up to 2030,” Rylin said eagerly.

To Rylin’s surprise, Raquel came and knelt on the floor next to her. The lightning bolt inktat on her forearm—which was timed to flash every sixty seconds—appeared, darkened, then vanished again like smoke. “What do you think this one is?” Raquel mused aloud, reaching for a disc that was emblazoned with an animated snowflake and a pair of girls with braids.

“I like that one,” Rylin quickly said, reaching for the disc before Raquel could dismiss it. She sorted it into the pile marked SAVE: POSSIBLE ADAPTATION.

A smile curled at the corner of Raquel’s mouth. “I’m going to miss you, Rylin. I’m really glad you applied for this job.”

“Me too.”

Rylin had spent most of last year, her junior year, attending an upper-floor private high school on scholarship. She had assumed that when June arrived, she would do the same thing she did every summer and get a mindless job downTower to pay the bills. But just when she’d been about to swallow her pride and beg for her old job at a monorail snack station, Rylin had learned that her scholarship actually continued through the summer—as long as she got an academic internship.

She had applied to as many internships as she could find, especially ones that had to do with holography, the creation of three-dimensional holographic films. And she had found this internship: working for the Walt Disney archivist.

Rylin had been startled to learn that the job was located here, in the bowels of the main public library location, in midTower. She’d never been to this location, though Rylin and her best friend, Lux, used to spend hours at their nearest public library. They would trade their favorite e-texts back and forth, then make up plays about them and stage them for their bemused parents, complete with a loud, improvised sound track.

On her first day, Rylin had walked in to find Raquel sitting cross-legged on a swivel chair, spinning it back and forth like a distracted child, her ponytail whipping sideways to smack at her cheek. “You’re the new intern?” Raquel had asked, somewhat impatiently, and Rylin nodded.

Raquel explained that Disney had hired her to sort through all the old films from the pre-holo age and flag any that were ripe for adaptation. “Holographs fully saturated the market fifty years ago,” she told Rylin. “At that point, everyone stopped producing 2-D films, and the machinery to play them. A lot of content was adapted in those first few decades, but there are still so many that no one has ever bothered to redo.”

Rylin knew that 2-D–to–3-D conversion was an expensive and painstaking process. It was like turning a stick figure into a sculpture, taking a flat sheet of pixels and making it inhabit space. The whole thing required hundreds of hours of computer design and human creativity.

“Why isn’t this stuff on the cloud somewhere?” Rylin had wondered, gesturing at the walls of old tapes and discs.

“Some of it is: the big blockbusters and all the classics. But people lost interest trying to catalog and upload every last thing. That’s where we come in.”

To Rylin’s surprise, the more time she spent watching these old 2-D films, the more she appreciated them. The directors had so little to work with, yet accomplished so much with what they had. There was an elegance beneath the films’ celluloid flatness.

“By the way,” Raquel said now, as they kept methodically sorting the boxes, “I really enjoyed Starfall.”

Rylin glanced up in surprise. “You watched it?”

Starfall was a short holo that Rylin had written and directed this spring, in several weeks of angst-ridden shooting after her return from Dubai. It featured some dark interior shots of the Tower, juxtaposed with sweeping views from the terraces and zoomed-in shots of Lux’s eyes: because of course Lux and Chrissa, Rylin’s sister, were the only actors she’d been able to coerce into it.

“It’s a lovely film,” Raquel replied. “You made your friend feel almost . . . capricious. Is she like that in real life?”

“She is,” Rylin managed to reply, gratefulness blooming in her chest. Raquel was acting as if it wasn’t a big deal—and maybe it wasn’t, for her to have watched a five-minute film—but it meant a lot to Rylin.

After she’d said good-bye, Rylin trotted out the library’s main entrance, with its grandiose carved stone lions. She boarded the A express lift downTower, disembarking on thirty-two and walking the ten blocks to her local neighborhood recreation center. Then it was through the broad double doors, down a long hallway, and out into the direct afternoon sunlight.

Rylin lifted a hand to shade her eyes. She glanced around the deck, the narrow strip of the 32nd floor that extended out farther than the floor above. The sun felt like a searing kiss on her skin after the cool darkness of the library, even though the library was hundreds of floors above her. She quickly shrugged out of her soft green zip-up and started through the maze of basketball courts, searching for one person in particular.

Several courts later, she found him.

He didn’t notice her at first. He was too focused on the team of fifth-grade boys that he coached. They were running drills now, jogging back and forth in trailing zigzag lines as they passed the ball back and forth. Rylin stifled a smile as she leaned on the railing to watch her boyfriend, silently cataloging all the things she loved about him. The strong tanned lines of his arms as he demonstrated something to the group. The way his hair curled around his ears. The quickness of his laughter.

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.

She thought, suddenly, of what Leda had said the other day in Dubai—that Rylin wasn’t the same girl who’d shown up at Berkeley, defensive and uncertain. Hiral might have changed, but she had changed too. They’d all changed. How could they not, after everything that had happened, after all they had lost?

Maybe this was what growing up felt like. It hurt more than Rylin had expected.

“I forgive you, Hiral.”