Where Futures End Page 12

  He turned to face me. “We don’t have a lot of choice here. If they don’t want to do it, we can’t do it.” His arms were trembling. What wasn’t he saying?

  He pushed my hair behind my ear. I ran my fingers over his arm, inviting him closer, but he didn’t budge. I thought for a moment he was about to confess something, his expression was so rabbit-scared. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “This whole thing was our idea to start with,” I said. “My idea.”

  “And it’s their money.”

  “I didn’t know you had so much loyalty to Microsoft-Verizon,” I said sourly.

  He twitched. The floor was suddenly so fascinating that he couldn’t look me in the eye. “It’s their town houses our families are living in, in case you forgot.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He let his shirt balloon around him with cold air from the unit. “That’s how it works, Epony. Someone else sets the price and we pay it. SeedBank, the governor with his damn levees. That’s how it always works.”

  He left to go down to find some fans who could crowd him, crowd out his thoughts, while I watched his feed on the wall monitor.

  At eight, I showed up at his place, right on schedule. I knew what scene I’d find on the other side of his door: Cole crushed and lonely, afraid we’d never be together because the FBI was watching us now. They weren’t really watching us. But our fans believed what they wanted to believe.

  What’s next? I wondered while I waited for him to answer the door. We’d given our fans forbidden romance, underage lovers, police in pursuit. And we were only a month into the act. What else would we have to do to hold their interest?

  Cole yanked the door open, surprise registering on his face. Not the good kind of surprise, not relief. A moment of confusion on my part while I waited for an embrace that didn’t come. And then I saw her. And thought, Those bastards.

  “It’s better this way,” Cole said. “Better for you.” Then he stepped close, close enough that I could see the transparent mic clipped under his chin. “They’re watching us,” he said in a stage whisper.

  I pulled out of his grip, stumbled back. What the hell? Nobody had told me about this new direction. Why hadn’t they told me?

  Because they wanted this reaction. Genuine shock. Hurt, humiliation.

  I fled down the hallway, downstairs. I heard him loping after me in his soft boots, shouting some line they’d fed him.

  I barreled down the street and finally into a cafe. Every table monitor was playing Cole’s feed. He was already back inside his air-conditioned den, reveling in the new girl’s method of consoling him.

  “Fake kissing is still real kissing,” I shouted at the screens.

  I shot back out into the street. The late-night traffic crawled past, weary drivers peering out at the girl with bare arms and tear-streaked face. The thrum of idling engines was nauseating, the streetlights sad, dirty yellow.

  Visions flicked through my head of Hayden. He’d sat next to me on the bed while I was reading, and I’d leaned into him, thinking he might kiss me. I pictured now the puzzled tilt of his head. “I couldn’t ever feel that way about you,” he’d said. “Don’t you know? The way you look, the way you are, it’s nothing like what I could ever want.” It was the last time I’d seen him. Even now, I could feel the stifling heat of the attic room that had been my hideout those final sweltering weeks of September.

  One of the cars in the line of crawling traffic had stopped altogether. The driver craned her neck to get a good look at me. A horn blared. The woman went on staring. Had she seen Cole’s feed? She was too old to care about high-con.

  Her gaze was fascinated, piercing. Her arm resting on the steering wheel was encircled with a red bracelet.

  When I was fifteen, cancer made Grandpop’s skin dull, his eyes bleary. I felt like I was always seeing him through fogged glass in those days. His hair grew in patches. I could never get a good look at him. He cowered.

  I didn’t realize it was indecision weighing on him. The cancer was just one more stone on the scale.

  Grandpop showed me a map with a red scrawl encircling a large area of Washington State, including the Cascadia parks. “Almost time for me to head out.”

  I slumped in the backseat of one of his junkers, legs dangling out in the long grass. “Why are you going?” It was my way of saying Don’t.

  The insects buzzed as if to lend sound to Grandpop’s wry smile. “The world has already started saying its good-bye. Time I caught up.”

  My heart crumpled.

  “I won’t be able to come back to you.” He squeezed my chin. The bugs made the evening air sizzle. “Maybe someday you’ll follow me.”

  I looked up, finally, unsure of what he meant. But the two of us only ever exchanged questions, never answers. I tried to hand him the map but he pushed it back toward me, and this time I noted the million red dots concentrated mostly in the circle he had drawn. Pinpointing locations. Locations of what? Before I could ask him about it, he loaded his old, failing body into the most serviceable junker. A minute later, it coughed away down the road.

  For two days after I saw Cole kissing someone else, I refused all calls: Cole’s, the producer’s, the rep’s. I think our songwriter even tried once.

  I lived off room service and watched newsfeeds and willed my heart to stop sinking like a stone. I tried to put it all together: Grandpop’s map with the red dots, and the way people from the Other Place sometimes stared at me—on the street, and in the coffee shop in Woodbury, where I’d thought the alien there was staring at Cole.

  I watched Cole’s feed, like all his other fans did. Admired the clever love triangle they’d set up, even while I fumed over the betrayal.

  I decided it was time to get back to playing my own game.

  They paid the new girl to go in and out of grocery stores while Cole pined for her near the cart return. The two of them were supposed to be fighting. Over me, I suppose. Sometimes when she walked out, he looked at her like he was missing something and she had it in her shopping bag. I didn’t think he was in love with her. In fact, I happened to know that he hated that pouty city look, the fake needle marks, the black-smudged under-eyes. But there were a lot of things missing in Cole’s life and it was probably easier for him if he could put them all in one bag.

  I ambushed Cole while they had an actual cameraman camped in view of the fluorescent storefront of the grocery store.

  Cole was stunned to see me, in a five-million-volt stun gun kind of way. “Are you—what’re you—?” he sputtered. “Are you okay?”

  I waved away his We shouldn’t be meeting like this but I’m so glad to see you attempt. “I have to talk to you. I’m going back.”

  “Back?”

  “Home.”

  He shook his head, genuinely confused. Home was underwater, along with busted-up levees. But I wasn’t talking about home home. I was playing for the cameras. I was giving us a way out.

  “I’m going to the Other Place,” I said.

  Cole shrank back, surprised. I almost reached for him. Even now, hurt as I was, I felt he was a magnet and I was metal.

  “I want you to come with me,” I said, and almost grimaced at how my voice cracked.

  “How—how can I? What’re you—”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.” Leaving L.A., even if you don’t come with me. Quitting this act.

  He pulled me aside, as if the cameraman couldn’t change angles. “What are you talking about?”

  “I won’t do this anymore.” I lowered my voice to a tone I hoped his mic wouldn’t pick up. “I know you hate it too. Come with me.” I touched his arm, slid my hand down to twine my fingertips in his.

  I knew he wanted to say it: Come with you where, exactly? He didn’t believe, of course, that we could go to the Other Place. But he couldn’t break the act while he was
wearing a microphone and the cameraman was behind my shoulder. He wouldn’t go that far off-script.

  And I hardly knew myself how serious I was. I wanted to leave L.A. and leave the act. Something inside me stirred when I thought about trying to cross into the Other Place. But was it adrenaline, or my vorpal, long dormant and finally coming to life?

  I tried to find it, tried to reach out with it and make Cole listen to me. I slipped Grandpop’s old map into Cole’s hand. “There’s a train. Tomorrow morning.”

  Cole glanced at the map and thrust it into his pocket before the camera could get a good view of it. “What the hell is this all about?”

  I glanced through the window at rows and rows of boxed food—rice and pasta and powdered salty cheese mix. Cole’s other girl was there, oblivious to what was happening out on the sidewalk. She was scrutinizing a package of instant rice. I remembered Grandpop’s comment about knowing a people by learning about their food. I imagined the girl as a student of the L.A. species and almost laughed. Funny how a person’s jokes can outlast him.

  Cole was waiting for me to say something.

  I touched his hand again. “Just come with me.”

  “You know I can’t.” Was he saying it for the cameras, because he couldn’t cross into the Other Place? Or was he saying it for me, because he wouldn’t leave the act?

  Nothing in his gaze would tell me. I pulled my elbow out of his grip and strode away.

  The Microsoft-Verizon rep was waiting in my hotel room when I got back. Her smile had widened into a shark’s grin.

  “You’ve decided to go off-script,” she said.

  The wall monitor was tuned to Cole’s feed, as always. He was alone in his kitchen with a stack of canned black beans and his guitar. I spent a few moments listening to the low tone of his song, letting his voice fill up the dim space of my hotel room: “If the world is a creek bend, you’re my city. It’s pretty to pretend. Then it ends.”

  I turned to the rep, my insides full of daggers. “Remember? I wrote the script in the first place.”

  “And Microsoft-Verizon financed it. Your whole act.” She smiled at the pleasantly poignant sight of Cole singing to his empty kitchen. “I wonder where your parents are going to live after you and Cole have run away together.”

  I imagined my sisters sighing over Cole’s feed, urging him to come back to me. Would they be surprised if I disappeared? They might believe I had been an alien all along, and then someday a month or a year from now they’d look up from the screen and say, Wait? Wasn’t she just our sister?

  “You know Cole’s not going to come with me.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. “He can stay and play out the act as the jilted lover. I’m sure his fans will love it.”

  “And that’s what you want—to leave Cole?” She frowned down at my belongings scattered on the coffee table: some crumpled candy wrappers, an envelope that had once held Elixir guitar strings, a book of Girl Queen stories. “I think I’ve come to know you better than that.”

  She touched the Elixir envelope and I cringed. I debated telling her that I’d only saved Cole’s trash because he’d scribbled lyrics on it that I couldn’t bear to throw out.

  The rep laughed. “I think I had you figured out from the beginning. That’s my job, figuring people out.”

  “Then you knew from the beginning I didn’t want this as much as Cole wanted it.” That day in my kitchen came back to me: the cold-water glare from Cole, and the rep looking on with her smug smile. “That’s why you set this up the way you did, isn’t it? Giving us that terrible idea in the beginning about us pretending to be cousins. Letting me think that our alien act was really my idea when that’s what you were hoping for all along.”

  She didn’t deny it. She seemed almost pleased I had figured her out, happy I had become an apprentice to her art.

  I crossed my arms to try to stop my trembling. “Well, now Cole can go on just as well without me.” It hurt me to say it. But I had to admit it: Cole wouldn’t leave with me. He’d stay and play the game. “You made sure of that. You roped in that girl so you could keep the act going even if I left it.”

  I started toward the door, but she angled herself to block me. “Isn’t that why you chose the role you did? So you could give Cole a good reason to reject you?”

  I shook my head, mired in confusion.

  “You knew Cole wouldn’t stay with his small-town girlfriend,” she explained.

  Something in my stomach bucked, but my anger was like sand running through a sieve. “You don’t know anything about us,” I said weakly. “You’re like those high-con fans who trust everything that comes through a camera lens.”

  “I know what I saw on Cole’s face when he looked at those girls in the coffee shop in Woodbury.” She leaned closer. “Your hold on him might be strong. But it’s not strong enough. Not when you remind him of everything he wants to leave behind.”

  My insides turned molten.

  I smelled the sharp smell of black coffee. Felt Cole’s finger-tips touching mine. Saw that hole in his shirt, the only thing that kept him from walking out with those girls—the only thing that kept him stuck, sitting there with me.

  I ducked around her and left to find Cole.

  He’d gotten halfway to my hotel by the time I caught up to him on the street. His flexi-screen was gone, and so was the cameraman. He ducked into an alley and motioned for me to follow him away from the street cameras.

  I turned the corner and ran right into him. He caught my wrists, my freakish bare wrists with no screen and no red tag. No way to tap into my credits in a store, no profile to prove my identity. I had come all the way to the camera capital of the country to be invisible.

  “They wouldn’t let me tell you about her,” he said, his eyes wide and mournful.

  “You don’t have to go along with it.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. I felt the slow, weak pulse of his heart, the tepid blood ebbing through it. Things impossible to feel, but I felt them. Was it my own pulse, beating against his fingers wrapped around my wrists?

  I felt his vorpal, withering in the smoggy heat.

  I knew the feeling well: I had felt it before, a vibration on his skin. I’d heard it. In his music—that hum beneath his voice that made the air rise.

  How could I have not recognized it before? All along, I’d felt the pull of his vorpal on mine. But I’d never known it until now.

  And I knew something more: My vorpal was stronger than his.

  “You can’t leave.” He pulled my arms against his chest, against his slow-beating heart. “You don’t have a profile. How are you going to live? Making wildflower salads in the park?”

  “Come and see.”

  He pushed away from me. “And our families will do what exactly? Live on Microsoft-Verizon’s generosity?” He gave a derisive laugh. “We’ve really screwed this up, haven’t we?”

  His hollow voice made me sick with dread. I sank back against the cold metal of a Dumpster. “We shouldn’t have done any of it in the first place.”

  Cole’s expression darkened. “We had to. What else were we supposed to do? We were nobodies. The state flooded our whole town to save cities better than ours.”

  “And to save people better than us?” I asked, because I knew that was how he felt. “Funny how it works: They put a camera on you and suddenly you exist.” I glared at him, daring him to deny he believed that.

  He pulled at the neck of his thin shirt, as if stifled by the rotten-alley air. “This whole act was your idea in the first place. I went along with the script you wanted.”

  My stomach churned.

  I could convince him to come with me without saying a word. I could overpower his vorpal with mine.

  I almost said it again: Come with me. And he would have.

  But then I looked at his neon-white shirt, at
his soft boots so thin I could see his restless feet flexing inside them. “I wish we could go back home,” I told him instead.

  Cole gave me a slow shrug. “There was nothing there, really.” He turned toward the mouth of the alley. The streetlights shone in his eyes. A thousand unblinking cameras waited for him.

  I wouldn’t try any longer to change his mind. And I wouldn’t stay.

  So I did the disappearing thing I’d gotten good at.

  When I was fourteen, Grandpop told me to keep my eyes on the newsfeeds. Watch the waves of famine, the mass migrations, the border wars. The green bloom of algae in the dead zones at the mouths of the Yangtze and the Mississippi alike. He said, “The world is shrinking. It’s drying out. We’ve lived how we wanted to live, and now we’re paying the price for it.”

  “The people from the Other Place are going to fix it all,” I said. “Once we find a way to cross over into their world, things will start to get better. It’ll take time, like you said. But everything will get better.”

  Grandpop peered at me from his leather chair. For a moment, I thought the creak of springs was the sound of his weary bones shifting. “Yes. They get some of our energy, we get a solution for our problems. And all we have to do is visit their world of wonders. It’s more than fair, isn’t it?”

  He settled back in his groaning chair and narrowed his eyes at his pipe. “It’s a nice story, anyway.”

  I took the high-speed. The guy at the ticket booth was a fan, so I didn’t have to explain why I had no credits.

  One brief glance around the station and then onto the train alone to bullet through bushy Oregon to Washington State.

  I used the seat monitor on the train to navigate to a website I’d discovered while I’d been holed up in my hotel room. A forum where people posted maps like the one Grandpop had given me. I left a message there.

  Epony 9:56pm

  *maybe someday you’ll follow me*

  If you can’t meet me, send someone who can. Seattle high-speed station, tomorrow morning.