The Towering Sky Page 6

  “That paint is intended for toddlers’ rooms,” he pointed out, clearly affronted by her suggestion.

  Calliope didn’t care that the paint was made for children. She loved the way it subtly shifted colors throughout the day, from a deep angry red all the way to purple and back again. “If you hate it, I can pick something else,” she’d offered as Elise met her gaze meaningfully across the table.

  Nadav shook his head. “I’m sorry, Calliope, but you can’t redecorate. We need that room as a guest room for when my mom comes to stay.”

  Why couldn’t she change her room just because Nadav’s mom would eventually be sleeping there? “When your mom is staying in my room, where will I—”

  “You’ll share Livya’s room, of course.”

  The only person who’d seemed unhappier about that than Calliope was Livya, whose lips pursed into a thin, pale line.

  Calliope had grown used to a long litany of no’s from Nadav. When she signed up for the school play: No, you should try student government instead. When she wanted to go to a party: No, you have to be home by curfew. When she wanted to get a puppy: No, puppies are a frivolous distraction—at your age, you need to be focused on your studies. As the months went by, Nadav had eventually started to say no before she’d finished voicing her question.

  She told herself that it was fine, that she didn’t really care about that stuff anyway. Except maybe for the puppy. At least that would have made her feel less lonely.

  Standing now in her bedroom, Calliope let out a petulant sigh. This room might as well have belonged to a stranger. Even after eight months, there was something decidedly temporary about it all, as if Calliope were only camping out here: boxes and suitcases stacked haphazardly in the closet like the belongings of a criminal who might have to run from the law at any moment.

  She stepped toward the closet and pushed past the rows of hangers, covered in demure silk dresses and high-waisted slacks. Even the clothes didn’t feel like hers; before they moved in, her mom had sorted through Calliope’s wardrobe with ruthless abandon, tossing out anything tight or revealing or remotely sexy. Thank god that Calliope had secretly managed to salvage a few pieces before that bonfire of the vanities.

  She stretched toward the edge of the wall, past an enormous wool coat, until her fingers brushed the bag she was looking for. Quickly she began sifting through it, pulling out an electric bracelet, a pair of gaudy clip-on earrings, her favorite red lip gloss: things she hadn’t worn in months. When she was finally ready, Calliope lifted her eyes to the only thing in the room she did like—the mirror-screen that took up an entire wall.

  She kept the room bulbs on their maximum setting and gave a self-satisfied smirk. Her beauty was as vivid, and almost as harsh, as the overbright lighting.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said to herself, and was down the hallway without a backward glance.

  Calliope felt a little shiver of adventure as she slipped out of Nadav’s apartment. Because she wasn’t just sneaking out of the house. She was sneaking out of her life, shedding her skin, sliding neatly from the role of Calliope Brown into another role. One that she was making up as she went along.

  She knew this was risky. But Calliope had hit breaking point. She couldn’t take another night in that cold, gilded apartment, with its thick carpets and ticking clocks. It was the sort of apartment where she knew exactly what was happening at any given moment, because it all ran with such monotonous efficiency. Even now, for instance, Nadav would be sitting at his modular recycled-aluminum desk to review some contract or message before going to sleep. Livya would be tucked safely into her four-poster princess bed, her room comp whispering SAT questions to her throughout the night for some osmosal learning. It was all so terrifyingly predictable.

  As she stepped onto the downTower lift, filled with clamor and conversation—all the messy chaos of real life—Calliope felt an overwhelming sense of relief. New York was still here. It hadn’t gone anywhere.

  She switched to the monorail at Grand Central, heading out of the Tower altogether, toward the lower Manhattan neighborhood known as the Sprawl. It was as unlike the sleek, ordered reality of the Tower as night from day; parts of it were still radically low-tech, with warped wooden floors and twisted railings. Church steeples rose into the sky alongside bright holograms.

  Calliope glanced back at the Tower as she stepped off the monorail. From this angle it seemed to burn more brightly than ever. Next to it, the half-moon looked alone in its isolated glory.

  She paused at the corner of Elizabeth and Prince Street, her eyes closed with deceptive nonchalance. It was almost nine on a weeknight and the streets were mostly quiet. But Calliope could feel the Sprawl’s thrum of excitement—the seething, excited pulse of things young and thrilling and illegal.

  She pushed open an unmarked brown door and stepped inside.

  A wall of sound roared up to meet her: crowds erupting in screams, the slippery beat of electronic music. Another turn down the stairs and Calliope emerged in a bar, all done up in neons and pulsing LED lights, like some kind of video-game speakeasy. The ceiling was lined in prisms of glass that reflected the garish illumination, separating it into a million glowing strands and tossing it down again. The colors were so vibrant that it almost hurt to look at them.

  Calliope didn’t bother getting a drink, though she could have; she was over eighteen. She just lingered in the corner, her eyes flicking expertly around the room. It was crowded, with a mix of nerds, tourists, and others who were simply curious. The afternoon show was meant for children, she knew; but the night performance was supposedly much edgier—and more violent.

  Someone sounded a gong. The crowd obediently shuffled through the bar to the stadium beyond, clutching their drinks to their chests. Calliope let herself be caught along in the surge, her hair falling loose around her bare shoulders. She was wearing a strapless silver dress and boots, and had even sprayed a temporary inktat patch on her tanned cheek, just for fun. It would leave a sticky film over her face for several days, but the effect was worth it.

  The stadium smelled like popcorn and grease. Calliope sank eagerly into her seat and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, to study the ComBots—Combat Robots—waiting around the room. A team of handlers huddled near each of them, clutching tablets as they engaged in last-minute system checks. Calliope caught a surreptitious movement in the corner of her eye and smiled. Probably bookies, recording under-the-table bets. ComBattles might not be illegal, but gambling on them assuredly was.

  ComBattles were an expensive and arguably illogical sport, like racing cars used to be—how wasteful to build these sleek, elaborate bots, only to let them tear one another apart. Calliope wondered what it was about humans that made them relish destruction. This was the modern version of gladiatorial fights, or bear baitings, or reality television. For whatever reason, people loved watching things explode.

  She hadn’t been to a ComBattle in years, not since the time Elise took her to one in Shinjuku. She wasn’t really sure why she’d come here tonight. Perhaps the loud anonymity of it seemed reassuring. This was as far from the Mizrahis’ world as she could get.

  Calliope let her eyes drift to the boy sitting next to her. “Did you bet on one?” she asked. For some reason the words came out in an Australian accent.

  He looked around, startled, as she might be talking to some other, better someone lurking behind him. “Oh. Um, the three-headed snake,” he said after a moment.

  “That thing? Mine will crush it,” Calliope declared, knowing that her voice would forgive the insult. Calliope’s voice—soft and purring, with that seductive accent—had always been her secret weapon. It allowed her to say anything she wanted and get away with it.

  White teeth flashed against ebony skin as the young man smiled. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a gambler.”

  “And why not? Where’s the fun, without a little risk to spice things up?”

  He nodded, conceding the point. “Which did y
ou bet on?”

  “My money is on that scaly thing,” Calliope fabricated, pointing toward a robot that was half lion, half dragon. Little whirls of fire emerged from its gullet.

  There was something whimsical about the battle bots, despite their ruthlessness. It was against international regulations to make robots that resembled people; and in America, it was also illegal for robots to resemble real animals. As a result, the ComBots became something almost otherworldly. Calliope saw a dinosaur, a fanged unicorn, and a winged tiger that sizzled with electricity.

  “Care to up the stakes?” the guy asked and held out a hand. “I’m Endred, by the way.”

  “Amada.” It was a name she’d used back in Australia. Easy to remember. “What did you have in mind, exactly?”

  “Loser buys dinner?”

  Calliope hadn’t come here to run a con. God knows she didn’t need anything off this guy; she could buy her own dinner, now that she had access to Nadav’s money. And yet . . . for her, it had always been as much about the thrill as it was about money. That eager breathless sensation of living on the edge, of knowing she was pulling off the impossible. That was what she wanted from Endred—attention, adventure, a night of being someone else, rather than the excruciatingly boring character she’d been playing these past eight months.

  “I never say yes to dinner without drinks first,” she told him, with an inscrutable smile.

  “Done.”

  The stadium went suddenly dark and erupted in wild screaming as the first two ComBots faced off.

  It was the dinosaur against her lion-dragon. Calliope reached beneath her seat for her glowstick and waved it in the air, shouting like everyone else until her throat was ragged, watching wide-eyed as the dinosaur and the hybrid creature began slashing at each other. They breathed fire; they shot small ballistics; they lunged forward and then quickly fell back. A pair of commentators narrated the action in a guttural, excited mix of English, Mandarin, and Spanish. Strobe lights flickered overhead. She felt Endred’s gaze heavy on her and couldn’t resist giving her head a proud toss.

  The dinosaur’s barbed tail slashed at the hybrid. Calliope jumped to her feet, one hand still wrapped tightly around the lime-green glowstick. “Get him!” she cried out as the lion-dragon’s jaws unhinged—grotesquely wide, wider than a real creature’s jaws ever could—and a torrent of flames erupted from it. The dinosaur stumbled, a gash in its side exposing a bright red tangle of wires. Its arms flailed, as if its computer was short circuiting, and then it tottered to one side and fell still.

  Amid the roar of the stadium, Endred looked over at her and grinned. “It seems congratulations are in order.”

  “I always know how to pick a winner,” Calliope said provocatively.

  Endred waved over a pitcher of a sticky lemon drink and handed her a glass. Down in the arena, a team of human specialists had run forward to sweep away the debris of the broken ComBot. The team managing the winning bot were high-fiving one another, readying themselves for another round.

  Calliope took a tentative sip of the lemon drink, wincing at its tanginess. “So, Endred, tell me about yourself. Where are you from?”

  Endred preened, predictably, beneath the attention. “Miami. Have you ever been?”

  Calliope shook her head, though she and Elise had run cons in Miami countless times.

  He began describing the city’s waterlogged streets; which had been flooded for half a century, ever since the sandbars surrounding Florida crumbled into the ocean. Calliope didn’t listen. As if she hadn’t taken a Jet Ski up and down those very streets. She loved Miami, loved the stubborn sexiness of the city, the way it refused to admit defeat even when it was flooded, and instead rose boldly from the waters like a modern super-Venice.

  But Calliope could tell that Endred was the type of guy who could be easily won over by talking about himself. Like most boys.

  As she peppered him with questions, slipping in the occasional lie about herself, Calliope felt herself reviving like a plant in water. She’d forgotten what a rush it was, playing this game. But now she was in her element again, and all her self-confidence came rushing back as she did what she did best: become someone else.

  “If it isn’t Calliope Brown,” an unexpected voice said behind her.

  Calliope turned around slowly, trying to mask her trepidation. It was Brice Anderton, Cord’s older brother. He wore a dark jacket and oversized sunglasses, which he lifted now, his eyes roving unabashedly over Calliope’s skintight dress. He was swarthy and tall and far too good-looking, and he knew it.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong girl,” Endred interrupted, oblivious to the tension between them. “This is Amada.”

  “Yes. You must have me confused with someone else,” Calliope heard herself say in the Australian accent.

  “My mistake.” Brice’s mouth twisted in amusement.

  Endred tried to pick up their conversation where it had left off, but Calliope’s smile was beginning to slip from her frozen features. “Excuse me,” she murmured, and ducked back up the narrow stairs to the neon-decked bar just as the lights began to dim for the next fight.

  Brice was leaning negligently against the bar, as if he’d known that she would come. “Calliope. What an unexpected pleasure,” he said in that unmistakable entitled drawl.

  She refused to back down. “The unexpected pleasure is all mine. I had no idea you were into ComBattles.”

  “I could say the same thing. This doesn’t exactly strike me as your scene.”

  This is far closer to the real me than the Little Bo Peep version of me everyone has seen all year. “I like to think of myself as a thing of mystery,” she said flippantly.

  “And I like to think of myself as a person who solves mysteries.”

  The smart thing to do would be to ignore him and head home. Brice was the only person aside from Avery with the power to blow Calliope’s cover. She’d met him once before, in Singapore, when she’d conned his friend and then skipped town. Whether or not he recognized her—which she never could quite figure out—there was always a dangerous, and slightly magnetic, edge to their interactions.

  But instead of leaving, Calliope leaned forward over the bar, kicking one boot behind the other. She held Brice’s gaze. “I haven’t seen you in a while. Since last year’s Under the Sea ball, I think.”

  “I’ve been traveling a lot. To East Asia, Europe, all over the place.”

  “Is New York too boring for you?”

  “Not anymore,” Brice said meaningfully, his eyes on her. “But really, what were you doing in there, telling people your name is Amada, using that fake accent?”

  For once, Calliope felt an urge to tell the truth. “I was bored. I guess I just wanted to be someone else for the night.”

  “Want to be someone else somewhere else?” Brice offered. “There’s a great dumpling place around the corner, and I’m starving.”

  The prospect was oddly tempting. But Calliope knew better. She’d already risked too much simply by coming out tonight; she couldn’t be seen with the infamous, notorious Brice Anderton. Not when she’d worked for so long to convince everyone on the upper floors that she was a soft-hearted philanthropist.

  “I actually need to get home,” she told him, hating how much she sounded like a teenager on curfew. Part of her hoped that he would try to convince her to stay.

  Brice just shrugged and took a step back. “All right, then,” he said easily. He disappeared downstairs, back into the roaring darkness of the ComBot arena, taking with him the only flicker of excitement that Calliope had felt in months.

  RYLIN

  THE FIRST DAY of school, Rylin stepped out of Berkeley’s main quadrangle, lifting a hand to her eyes to shade them even as her contacts switched to light-blocking mode: one of the few things they were able to do on school grounds. The UV-free solar beams prickled pleasantly on her arms.

  Ahead of her rose the science building, surrounded by a turquoise reflecting pool that w
as filled with multicolored koi and a few croaking frogs. Rylin shuddered as she passed. She’d had to dissect a frog last year in biology class, and even though she knew it wasn’t real—that it was actually a synthetic frog-like thing built specifically for high school students to avoid animal cruelty—she still didn’t like the sound of the real ones.

  She hadn’t wanted to take a science class this year at all, but since it was mandatory, Rylin had settled on the most innocuous-sounding option: Introduction to Psychology. Actually, her summer boss, Raquel, had been the one to suggest it. “All good storytellers study psychology,” she’d proclaimed, drumming her fingers idly over the film storage boxes. “Novelists, filmmakers, even actors. You have to know the rules of human behavior before you can make your characters break them.”

  That sounded reasonable to Rylin. Besides, psychology seemed so much friendlier than the other options—no test tubes or scalpels, just surveys and “social experiments,” whatever that meant.

  She started down the two-story science hallway past the robotics lab, where electrical sparks jumped from one wire to another like fiery spiders; past the meteoroculture lab, where students gathered around a massive holographic globe, studying the weather patterns that broke in soft gray waves over its surface; past the massive steel door marked SUBZERO LAB: THERMAL PROTECTION REQUIRED. The so-called “ice box,” where the Advanced Physics class conducted below-freezing experiments in subatomic particles. Rylin didn’t even want to know how much it cost to maintain that temperature.

  When she turned into room 142 at the end of the hall, Rylin was relieved to see rows of two-person lab stations, each equipped with nothing but a pair of holo-goggles. She took a seat at one of the empty tables and pulled up the notepad function on her school tablet—just in time.

  “Humans are illogical and irrational. That’s the first rule of psychology.” A glamorous Chinese woman strode into the classroom, instantly skewering them all with her stare. Her heels clicked lightly on the floor.