- -
- 100%
- +
Elise—she’d had a different name back then, her real name—had been the personal assistant to Mrs. Houghton, a stuffy rich woman with a pinched nose and watery eyes. She insisted on being called “Lady Houghton,” claiming that she descended from an obscure branch of the now defunct royal family. Elise managed Mrs. Houghton’s calendar, her correspondence, her closet: all the myriad details of her useless, gilded life.
Elise and Calliope’s life felt so dull in contrast. Not that they could complain: their apartment should have been adequate, with its self-filling refrigerator and cleaning bots and a subscription to all the major holo channels. They even had windows in both bedrooms, and a decent closet. Yet Calliope quickly learned to see their life as something unforgivably drab, illuminated only by the occasional touches of glamour that her mom brought home from the Houghtons’.
“Look what I have,” Elise would proclaim, her voice taut with excitement, each time she walked in the door with something new.
Calliope always hurried over, holding her breath as her mom unwrapped the package, wondering what it contained this time. An embroidered silk ball gown with sequins missing, which Mrs. Houghton had asked Elise to take back for repairs. Or a handpainted china plate that was one of a kind, and could Elise please track down the artist and have her make another? Even jewelry, on occasion: a sapphire ring or a diamond choker that needed to be professionally cleaned.
Reverently, Calliope would reach out to touch the sumptuous fur shrug, or crystal wine decanter, or her absolute favorite, the supple Senreve shoulder bag in a shocking bright pink. She would look up into mother’s eyes and see her own childlike longing reflected there, like a candle.
Always too soon for Calliope’s taste, her mom would pack away the treasure with a sigh of regret, to take it to the repair shop or cleaners or back to the store for return. Calliope knew without being told that Elise wasn’t even supposed to bring these things home at all—that she did so for Calliope’s sake, so that Calliope could get a little glimpse at just how beautiful they were.
At least Calliope got the hand-me-downs. The Houghtons had a daughter named Justine, one year older than Calliope. For years, Elise had brought Justine’s discarded clothing home to their flat, rather than taking it to the donation center as Mrs. Houghton instructed. Together Calliope and her mom would sort through the bags, exclaiming over the gossamer dresses and patterned stockings and coats with embroidered bows, tossed aside like used tissue because they were a season old.
When her mom worked late, Calliope would go to her friend Daera’s apartment down the hall. They spent hours pretending they were princesses at afternoon high tea. They would put on Justine’s old dresses and sip cups of water at Daera’s kitchen table, curling up their pinkies in that funny, fancy way, speaking in a butchered approximation of the upper-crust accent.
“It’s my fault you have such a taste for expensive things,” Elise said once, but Calliope didn’t regret any of it. She would rather see a tiny sliver of that beautiful, charmed world than not know of its existence at all.
Everything came to a head one afternoon when Calliope was eleven. She’d had the day off from school, so Elise was forced to bring her to Mrs. Houghton’s house while she worked. Calliope had firm instructions to stay in the kitchen and read quietly on her tablet—which she did, for almost a full hour. Until she heard the little beep of the house comp that meant Lady Houghton had left.
Calliope couldn’t help it—she darted straight up the stairs into the Houghtons’ bedroom. The door to Mrs. Houghton’s closet was wide open. It was just begging to be explored.
Before Calliope could think twice she’d slipped inside, running her hands longingly over the gowns and sweaters and soft leather pants. She reached for that bright fuchsia Senreve purse and slung it over one shoulder, turning from side to side as she studied her reflection in the mirror, so excited that she didn’t hear the second beep of the house comp. If only Daera were here to see this. “You will address me as ‘Your Highness,’ and bow when I approach,” she said aloud to her reflection, fighting not to giggle.
“What do you think you’re doing?” came a voice from the doorway.
It was Justine Houghton. Calliope started to explain, but Justine had already opened her mouth to let out a shrill, bloodcurdling scream. “Mom!”
Mrs. Houghton materialized an instant later, accompanied by Elise. Calliope winced under her mom’s gaze, hating the way her expression flitted between recrimination and something else, something frighteningly close to guilt.
“I—I’m sorry,” she stammered, though her fingers were still closed tight around the handle of the purse, as if she couldn’t bear to release it. “I didn’t mean any harm—it’s just that your clothes are so beautiful, and I wanted to see them up close—”
“So you could get your grubby little hands all over them?” Mrs. Houghton reached for the Senreve bag, but for some perverse reason Calliope held it even tighter to her chest.
“And, Mom, look—she’s wearing my dress! Though she doesn’t look nearly as good in it as I did,” Justine added, nastily.
Calliope glanced down and bit her lip. This was indeed one of Justine’s old dresses, a white shift with distinctive black Xs and Os along the collar. It was true that it was a little long and shapeless on her, but they couldn’t afford to tailor it. Why do you care? You gave it away, she wanted to say, resentment rising up in her, yet for some reason her throat had closed up.
Lady Houghton turned to Elise. “I thought I instructed you to donate Justine’s used clothing to the poor,” she said, her tone clipped and businesslike. “Are you, in fact, poor?”
Calliope would never forget the way her mom’s shoulders stiffened at that remark. “It won’t happen again. Say you’re sorry, dear,” she added to Calliope, gently prying the purse from her rigid hands and passing it over.
Some deep-rooted instinct of Calliope’s rose up in protest, and she shook her head, mutinous.
That was when Lady Houghton raised her hand and slapped Calliope across the face so hard that her nose bled.
Calliope expected her mom to retaliate, but Elise just dragged her daughter home without another word. Calliope was silent and resentful at the time. She knew she shouldn’t have been in the closet, but she still couldn’t believe Lady Houghton had struck her, and that her mom hadn’t done anything about it.
The next day Elise came home in a flurry of agitation. “Pack your bags. Now,” she said, refusing to explain. When they got to the train station, Elise booked them two one-way tickets to Moscow and handed Calliope an ID chip with a new name. An unfamiliar pouch jangled at Elise’s waist.
“What’s that?” Calliope asked, curiosity getting the better of her.
Elise glanced around to check that no one was watching, then opened the drawstring of the bag. It was full of expensive jewelry that Calliope recognized as Mrs. Houghton’s.
That was when Calliope realized her mom was a thief, and that they were on the run.
“We’re never coming back, are we?” she’d asked, without a shred of regret. A sense of limitless adventure was unfurling in her eleven-year-old chest.
“That woman had it coming. After everything she did to me—after what she did to you—we deserve this,” Elise said simply. She reached for her daughter’s hand to give it a squeeze. “Don’t worry. We’re heading on an adventure, just the two of us.”
And from that day on, it was indeed a glorious, nonstop adventure. The money from the Houghtons’ jewelry eventually ran out, but by then it didn’t matter, because Elise had figured out how to get more: she’d swindled a proposal from a gullible, wealthy older man. She’d realized that Mrs. Houghton had given her something even more valuable than jewelry—the voice, and mannerisms, and overall demeanor of someone entitled. Everywhere she went, people thought Elise was rich. Which meant that they gave her things without expecting her to pay, at least not right away.
The thing about rich people was that once they thought you were one of them, they became much less wary around you—and that made them easy targets.
Thus began the life Calliope and her mom had lived for the past seven years.
“What flavor would you like for your facial cleanser?” a spa attendant asked, and Calliope blinked to awareness. The other girls were sitting up, their skin glowing. A warm, scented towel was curled around Calliope’s neck.
She realized that her treatment included a custom face wash, which had been created during her treatment specifically for her.
“Dragonfruit,” she declared, because its shocking red-pink was her favorite color. The technician deftly twisted open the jar, revealing a scentless white cream, and tossed in a red flavor pod before holding it up to a metallic wand on the wall. Moments later the jar of bright red face wash spun out of a chute, with a list of all the enzymes and organic ingredients that had been uniquely combined for Calliope’s skin. A tiny cranberry sticker completed the package.
When they emerged into the gold-and-peach front room and the other girls started leaning toward the retinal scanner to pay, Calliope pulled the trick she always performed when shopping in groups. She hung back; dilating her pupils, muttering curse words under her breath.
“Is everything okay?” Avery asked, watching her.
“Actually, no. I can’t log into my account.” Calliope gave a few more pretend bitbanc commands, letting a note of agitation creep into her voice. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
She waited until the gentleman from the front desk was pointedly clearing his throat, making it awkward for everyone, before turning to Avery. She knew her cheeks were bright pink with embarrassment—she’d long ago learned to blush on command—and her eyes were gleaming with a silent entreaty. But none of the girls made any offer to help.
A boy would have paid by now; though out of self-interest, not chivalry. This was precisely why Calliope preferred lust to friendship. Fine, she thought in irritation; she would just have to do this the direct way.
“Avery?” she asked, with what she hoped was the right amount of self-consciousness. “Would you mind covering my facial, just till I figure out what’s going on with my account?”
“Oh. Sure.” Avery nodded good-naturedly and leaned forward, blinking a second time into the retinal scanner to cover the exorbitant cost of Calliope’s facial. Just as Calliope expected, she didn’t even seem to register the long list of add-ons. She probably had no idea how much her own facial had cost.
“Thank you,” Calliope began, but Avery waved away the gratitude.
“Don’t worry about it. Besides, the Nuage is one of my favorite places. I know where to find you,” Avery said lightly.
If only you knew. By the time Avery got around to collecting—if she ever even remembered to—Calliope and her mom would be long gone, living on a different continent under new names, no trace left of them in New York at all.
The many boys and girls who’d known Calliope these past few years, whose hearts she’d left carelessly strewn throughout the world, would have recognized her smirk. She felt sorry for Avery and Risha and Jess. They were headed back to their boring, routine lives, while Calliope’s existence was anything but boring.
She followed the other girls out the door, dropping the jar of cleanser into her bag—the special-edition Senreve bag in bold fuchsia, of course—with a satisfying clunk.
RYLIN
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Rylin stood before the grandiose carved entrance to the Berkeley School, immobile with shock. This couldn’t be her, Rylin Myers, wearing a collared shirt and pleated skirt, about to start at a preppy highlier private school. It felt like it was happening to another person, a bizarre series of images that someone else had dreamed.
She adjusted the strap of her tote bag over one shoulder, shifting her weight uncertainly. The world was brightening around her as the timed bulbs subtly adjusted their luminosity to indicate the lateness of the morning. Rylin had forgotten how much she loved the effect; one time she’d sat on Cord’s doorstep as the sun rose outside, just watching the slow shift of the overhead lights. Down on the 32nd floor, the lights never shifted from their single fluorescent setting, unless one of the kids on her block threw something to smash out a bulb.
Well, it was now or never. She started toward the main office, following the highlighted yellow arrows on the school-issued official tablet she’d picked up last week. Unlike her normal MacBash tablet, this one worked within the boundaries of the tech-net that surrounded the school, though it could only carry out basic approved tasks, like checking her academic e-mail account or taking notes. And the tablets all shut down during exams, to prevent cheating. There was no hacking the tech-net, Rylin knew; though plenty of kids through the years had tried.
She tried not to stare as she moved through the hallways. This place looked the way she’d always imagined college campuses, with its wide, light-filled corridors and stone colonnades. Directional holos popped up each time she turned a corner. In a courtyard down the hall, palm trees waved in a simulated breeze. A few kids passed, all wearing the same uniform.
Of course, Rylin had seen the uniform before—in the laundry, back when she worked for Cord Anderton.
She had no idea what she would say when she saw him. Maybe she wouldn’t see him, she thought with a dubious hope; maybe this was a big enough campus that she could avoid him for the next three semesters. But she had a feeling she wouldn’t be that lucky.
“Rylin Myers. I’m here to meet with an academic adviser,” she told the young man behind the desk, when she’d finally reached the main office. She still couldn’t believe that this school even had a human academic adviser. DownTower, things like college recommendations and course assignments were distributed by an algorithm. These people must feel pretty full of themselves if they thought they could do a better job than a computer.
The man typed on a tablet. “Of course. The new scholarship student.” He glanced up at her, an unreadable expression on his face. “You know that Eris Dodd-Radson was very beloved here at Berkeley. We all miss her.”
It was an odd welcome, to bring up the person whose death had made her very presence here possible. Rylin wasn’t sure how to reply, but the man didn’t seem to expect an answer. “Have a seat. The adviser will see you in a minute.”
Rylin sank onto a couch and glanced around the room, its beige walls decorated with framed teaching awards and motivational holos. She wondered suddenly what her friends were doing—her real friends, downTower. Lux, Andrés, Bronwyn, even Indigo. She knew a few people at Berkeley, but they all already hated her.
And just like that, as if she’d summoned him with her thoughts, Cord Anderton walked into the office.
She’d told herself over and over these past weeks that she didn’t miss him, that she was doing perfectly fine without him. But it nearly undid her, seeing Cord now; his oxford shirt untucked, his dark hair a little unkempt. So familiar, and so achingly off-limits.
She sat still, letting her eyes drink him in, dreading the moment when he would notice her and she’d have to glance away. It was a cruel cosmic joke, that the very first person she ran into at her new school had to be Cord.
His gaze almost slid past her, seeing just another half-Asian girl in the uniform—and then he seemed to register who she was, and did a double take. “Rylin Myers,” he said, in the old familiar drawl; the one he used for people he didn’t know well. Rylin’s heart broke a little when she heard it. It was the way Cord had spoken the first night he met her, when she was nothing but the hired help. Before she stole from him and fell in love with him and everything spun wildly out of control.
“I’m as shocked as you are, trust me,” she told him.
Cord leaned back against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. He was smiling, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I have to admit, this is one place I hadn’t expected to see you.”
“It’s my first day. I have to meet with an adviser,” Rylin explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to be here. “What about you?”
“Truancy,” Cord said carelessly. Rylin knew that he sometimes skipped school to visit his parents’ house on Long Island and drive their illegal old autocars. She thought of the day he’d taken her out there, a day that had ended on the beach in a rainstorm, and she reddened at the memory.
“Is there somewhere we can talk in private?” She hadn’t planned on having this conversation with Cord, at least not today, but there was no avoiding it. She was here, in his world—or was it her world now too? It certainly didn’t feel like it.
Cord hesitated, seeming torn between his resentment toward Rylin and his curiosity about what she was doing here—and what she had to say. Apparently curiosity won out. “Follow me,” he told her.
He led Rylin out of the office and down the hallway. It was getting more crowded as the first bell approached, students gossiping in small clusters, their gold bracelets and wrist-comps flashing as they gesticulated to make a point. Rylin saw their eyes travel curiously over her—taking in her unfamiliar features, her angular beaded earrings, her close-cut blue fingernails and the scuffed flats she’d stolen from Chrissa, because she didn’t own any footwear that qualified as “simple black shoes without a heel.” She kept her head held high, daring them to challenge her, resisting the urge to look over at Cord. A few people said hi to him, but he just nodded in greeting, and certainly never introduced Rylin.
Finally he turned through a set of double doors into a pitch-dark room. Rylin was startled by the holographic label that popped up as they crossed the door. “You have a screening room at school?” she asked, because it was weird and because she desperately wanted to break the silence.
Cord messed with a control box, and after a moment, the track lighting along the stairs flickered on. It was still very dark. Cord was little more than a shadow.
“Yeah, it’s for the film class.” Cord sounded impatient. “Okay, Myers, what’s up?”
Rylin took a deep breath. “I’ve imagined this conversation at least a hundred different times, and in absolutely zero of those scenarios was I here, at your school.”
Cord’s teeth gleamed in a hollow smile. “Oh, yeah? Where did you imagine this conversation?”
In bed, but that was wishful thinking. “It doesn’t matter,” Rylin said quickly. “The point is, I owe you an apology.”
Cord stepped back, toward the top row of seats. Rylin forced herself to look directly at him as she spoke. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you ever since that night.” She didn’t need to clarify; he would know what night she meant.
“I wanted to ping you, but I had no idea what to say. And it didn’t seem like it mattered anymore. You were up here, and I was down on thirty-two, and I figured it was just easier not to dig it all up.” And I’m a coward, she admitted to herself. I was afraid to see you again, knowing how much it would hurt.
“Anyway, now I apparently go to school with you—I mean, I’m here on scholarship—”
“The one Eris’s parents endowed,” Cord said, unnecessarily.
Rylin blinked. She hadn’t counted on the fact that so many people would talk to her about Eris. “Yes, that one. And since I’m going to keep seeing you around, I wanted to clear the air.”
“‘Clear the air,’” Cord repeated, his voice flat. “After you pretended to date me so that you could steal from me.”
“It wasn’t pretend! And I didn’t want to steal—at least, not after the first time,” Rylin protested. “Please, let me explain.”
Cord nodded but didn’t answer.
So she told him everything. She admitted the truth about her ex-boyfriend, Hiral, and about the Spokes—how she’d stolen the custom-made drugs from Cord that one time, the first week she worked for him, to keep her and Chrissa from being evicted. Rylin lifted her chin a little, trying not to falter as she explained how Hiral had blackmailed her into selling his drugs for bail money. How V threatened her, forcing her to steal from Cord again.
She told Cord everything except how his older brother, Brice, had confronted her, saying that unless she broke up with Cord—unless she acted like she’d only dated him for the money—he would send her to jail. She knew how close Cord was with his older brother and had no desire to get in the middle of that relationship. So she made it sound like Hiral did it all.
And she didn’t tell Cord how much she’d loved him. How much she still loved him.
Cord didn’t say anything until Rylin’s last words fell into the silence like stones, causing it to ripple in waves around them. By now it was well into first period; they’d both missed their meetings in the main office. Rylin didn’t care. This was more important. She wanted, desperately, to make things right with Cord. And if she was being honest with herself, she wanted so much more than that.
“Thank you for telling me all this,” he said slowly.
Rylin took an involuntary step forward. “Cord. Do you think that we could ever—”
“No.” He flinched away before she could finish the question. The movement hit her like a blow to the stomach.
“Why?” she couldn’t help asking. She felt like she’d ripped her heart open, let its contents spill like sawdust all over the floor, and now Cord was walking carelessly all over it. She somehow held back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her.
Cord let out a breath. “Rylin, after everything that’s happened, I don’t know how to trust you. Where does that leave us?”
“I’m sorry,” she ventured, knowing it wasn’t enough. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“But you did hurt me, Rylin.”
Someone cracked open the door, letting a flood of light into the room, then backed away hastily when they saw Cord. In the brief moment of illumination, Rylin caught sight of his face: distant, cold, closed-off. It terrified her. She would rather that he yell at her, seem angry or wounded, even cruel. This casual indifference was infinitely worse. He was retreating somewhere deep inside himself, where she could never reach him—where he would be lost to her forever.
“I wish I could rewind, do things differently,” she said uselessly.
“I wish that too. But that’s not how life works, is it?”
Cord took a step forward, as if he was about to leave. Rylin realized in an instant of clarity that she could not let him be the one to walk away from her, not if she were to maintain any semblance of pride. She moved quickly to the door and glanced back over her shoulder.
“I guess it isn’t. I’ll see you around, Cord,” she told him, which was, unfortunately, the truth. She would keep seeing the boy who didn’t want her, over and over again.
Later that day, Rylin moved mechanically through the lunch line, wondering how many total minutes she had left at this school. Already she wanted to start a ticking countdown in the corner of her tablet, the way some girls did for their birthdays.
Predictably, the school had launched her on a schedule of entirely base-level classes—including freshman biology, since biology was the one science she’d never taken at her old school. She was actually relieved that she’d shown up so late to her meeting with the registrar, Mrs. Lane, if only because it spared her a full half hour of that woman’s incredulous condescension. “It says here you were working at a store called Arrow?” Mrs. Lane had asked with a haughty sniff. Rylin half wished she’d bought a pair of the flashing Arrow rainboots and worn them around school, just to make some kind of point.