Katharine McGee - The Thousandth Floor

Which was how she’d ended up in rehab.

“Leda, will you come with me?” Avery’s voice broke into her thoughts. Leda blinked. “To my dad’s office, to pick something up,” Avery repeated. Her eyes were wide with meaning; Avery’s dad’s office was the excuse they’d been using for years, when one of them wanted to ditch whoever they were with.

“Doesn’t your dad have messenger bots for that?” Ming asked.

Leda ignored her. “Of course,” she said to Avery, standing up and brushing bits of grass off her jeans. “Let’s go.”

They waved good-bye and started on the path toward the nearest transport station, where the clear vertical column of the express C line shot upward. The sides were startlingly transparent; Leda could see inside to a group of elderly women whose heads were tipped together in conversation, and a toddler picking his nose.

“Atlas pinged me last night,” Avery whispered as they moved to stand on the upTower platform.

Leda stiffened. She knew that Avery had stopped telling her parents about Atlas’s calls. She said it only upset them. But there was something weird about the fact that Avery didn’t share this with anyone except Leda.

Then again, Avery had always been oddly protective of Atlas. Whenever he dated anyone, she invariably acted polite, but a little aloof—as if she didn’t quite approve, or thought that Atlas had made a mistake. Leda wondered if it had to do with Atlas being adopted, if Avery worried he was somehow more vulnerable, because of the life he’d come from, and felt an impulse to protect him as a result.

“Really?” she asked, keeping her voice steady. “Could you tell where he was?”

“I heard a lot of loud voices in the background. Probably a bar somewhere.” Avery shrugged. “You know how Atlas is.”

No, I really don’t . Maybe if she understood Atlas, Leda would be able to make sense of her own confused feelings. She gave her friend’s arm a squeeze.

“Anyway,” Avery said with forced brightness, “he’ll come home soon, when he’s ready. Right?”

She looked at Leda with a question in her eyes. For a moment, Leda was struck by how much Avery reminded her of Atlas. They weren’t related by blood, and yet they had the same white-hot intensity. When they turned the full force of their attention on you, it was as blinding as looking into the sun.

Leda shifted uncomfortably. “Of course,” she said. “He’ll come back soon.”

She prayed it wasn’t true, and at the same time, she couldn’t help hoping it was.

THE NEXT EVENING, Rylin Myers stood at the door to her apartment, struggling to wave her ID ring over the scanner while balancing a bag of groceries in one arm and a half-full energy drink in the other. Of course, she thought as she kicked shamelessly at the door, this wouldn’t be a problem if they had a retinal scanner, or those glitzy computerized lenses that the highlier kids all wore. But no one could afford anything like that where Rylin lived, here on 32.

Just as she was drawing back her leg to kick again, the door opened. “Finally,” Rylin muttered, shoving past her fourteen-year-old sister.

“If you got your ID ring fixed like I keep telling you to, this wouldn’t happen,” Chrissa quipped. “Then again, what would you say? ‘Sorry, officers, I keep using my ID ring to open beer bottles, and now it’s stopped working’?”

Rylin ignored her. Taking a long sip of her energy drink, she heaved the grocery bag onto the counter and tossed her sister a box of veggie-rice. “Can you put this stuff away? I’m running late.” The Ifty—Intra Floor Transit system—was down again, so she’d been forced to walk all twenty blocks from the lift stop to their apartment.

Chrissa looked up. “You’re going out tonight ?” She’d inherited their mom’s soft Korean features, her delicate nose and high arched brow, while Rylin looked much more like their square-jawed dad. But they’d both somehow gotten their mom’s bright green eyes, which glowed against their skin like beryls.

“Um, yeah. It’s Saturday,” Rylin answered, purposefully ignoring her sister’s meaning. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened on this day a year ago—the day their mom died and their entire world fell apart. She would never forget how Child Services came to their house that very night, while the girls were still holding each other crying, to tell them about the foster system.

Rylin had listened to them for a while, Chrissa’s head turned into her shoulder as she kept on sobbing. Her sister was smart, really smart, and good enough at volleyball to have a serious shot at a college scholarship. But Rylin knew enough about foster care to know what it would do to them. Especially to Chrissa.

She would do anything to keep this family together, no matter what it cost her.

The very next day she’d gone to the nearest family court and declared legal adulthood, so that she could start working her terrible job at the monorail stop full-time. What other choice did she have? Even now, they were barely keeping up—Rylin had just gotten yet another warning notice from their landlord; they were always at least a month behind on rent. Not to mention all their mom’s hospital bills. Rylin had been trying to pay those down for the last year, but at this interest rate the mountain of debt was actually starting to grow . Sometimes Rylin felt like she’d never be free of it.

This was their life now, and it wasn’t changing anytime soon.

“Rylin. Please?”

“I’m already late,” Rylin said, retreating into her roped-off section of their tiny bedroom; thinking about what she would wear, about the fact that she didn’t have to go into work for a whole thirty-six hours, about anything but the reproachful look in her sister’s green eyes, which looked so painfully like their mom’s.

Rylin and her boyfriend, Hiral, clattered down the steps of the Tower’s Exit 12. “There they are,” Rylin muttered, raising a hand against the glare of the sun. Their friends were gathered at the usual meeting place, a hot metal bench across the street at 127th and Morningside.

She glanced at Hiral. “Are you sure you don’t have anything with you?” she asked again. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about the fact that Hiral had started selling—at first just to their friends, then on an even bigger level—but it had been a long week, and she was still on edge after her conversation with Chrissa. She could really use a hit, of relaxants or halluci-lighter, anything to silence the thoughts that were cycling endlessly through her brain.