The Thousandth Floor. Катарина Макги

her and fall back asleep, forcing Eris’s dad to come wake them both up, laughing about what sleeping beauties his girls were. Of the Christmases they had baked cookies to put under the tree for Santa, made almost entirely from raw dough, and then Dad would go eat them in the middle of the night even long after Eris knew Santa wasn’t real. Of every year before her birthday, when Caroline would make up a fake doctor’s appointment and pull Eris out of school to go shopping so they could pick out her presents and then go to Bergdorf’s for tea. “Your mom is so cool,” the other girls always said, because none of their moms ever let them out of school just for fun, and Eris would laugh and say, “Yeah, I know, she’s the best.”

      It all felt fake now. Every gesture, every I love you; all of it was tinted by the great ugly lie underpinning her life. Eris blinked in confusion at her mom’s familiar face. “So you’ve known my entire life,” she said bitterly.

      “No. I wasn’t sure.” Her mom’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears, but she managed to hold them back. “I always thought—hoped—that you were Everett’s. But I never knew for certain until now.”

      “Why the hell did you let me take that DNA test, then?”

      “You think if I knew there was a test I would’ve let you go?” her mom cried out.

      Eris didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand how her mom could have done this to her, to her dad, to their family.

      “Please, Eris. I want to make this right,” Caroline began, but Eris shook her head.

      “Don’t talk to me,” she said slowly, and turned away.

      Somehow Eris stumbled to her round bed, nestled to one side of her enormous circular room. Shock and fear were swirling dangerously in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She clawed suddenly at the neck of her shirt, still damp with her mom’s tears, and yanked it brutally over her head, then took a desperate, ragged breath. She was pretty sure she’d heard one of the seams rip out.

      Can I be of assistance? her contacts prompted, sensing that she was almost crying. “Shut up!” she muttered, and they obediently powered down.

      Everett Radson wasn’t her father. The truth of it kept ricocheting painfully against her skull like gunfire. Her poor dad—she wondered what he’d said when he got the lab results. Where was he now? A hotel, the hospital? She wanted to go talk to him, yet at the same time she wasn’t quite ready to face him. She knew that when she saw him—when she truly came face-to-face with it all—that everything would be different, for good.

      Eris closed her eyes, but the world kept spinning around her. She wasn’t even drunk tonight. This must be the feeling, she thought bitterly, of her life coming untethered.

      She sat up and studied her room with an odd sense of detachment. Everywhere she looked were expensive things—the crystal vase with its ever-young roses, the closet filled with delicate, colorful dresses, the custom-made vanity cluttered with gleaming pieces of tech. All the trappings of her life, everything that made her Eris Dodd-Radson.

      She started to lean back onto her pillows and cursed aloud as something sharp dug into her ear. Her mom’s earrings. She’d forgotten all about them.

      Eris unscrewed the right earring and held it out on her palm. It was so beautiful; a glass sphere glowing with whorls of color, like the eye of a coming storm. A beautiful, rare, expensive present from her dad to her mom. Suddenly the earring and everything it stood for struck Eris as unbearably false.

      She pulled back her arm and hurled the earring against the wall with all the strength she had. It exploded into a million pieces, which scattered over the floor like shards of glittering tears.

       RYLIN

      AS THE LAST guests stumbled from Cord’s party into a waiting hover, Rylin heaved a sigh of relief. The night had felt endless—cleaning up all those drunk kids’ messes, pretending not to notice how some of the guys looked at her. She was exhausted, and her head still pounded from being yanked out of the communal. But thank god she was finally done.

      Stretching her arms overhead, she wandered to the windows in Cord’s living room and gazed hungrily at the horizon line in the distance. The view screens in her apartment were so old that they didn’t even look like windows anymore, more like garish cartoons of a fake view, with a too-bright sun and overly green trees. There was a window along the side of her monorail stop at work—Rylin’s snack stand was at the Crayne Boulevard stop, between Manhattan and Jersey—but even that was too close to see anything except the Tower, squatting like a giant steel toad that blocked out the sky. Impulsively she pressed her face to the glass. It felt blissfully cool on her aching forehead.

      Finally Rylin peeled herself away and started upstairs, to check in with Cord and get the hell out of there. As she walked, the lights behind her turned off and the ones ahead of her clicked on, illuminating a hallway lined with antique paintings. She passed an enormous bathroom, filled with plush hand towels and touch screens on every surface. Hell, the floor was probably even a touch screen: Rylin was willing to bet that it could read your weight, or heat up on voice command. Everything here was the best, the newest, the most expensive—everywhere she looked, she saw money. She walked a little faster.

      When she reached the holoden, Rylin hesitated. Projected on the wall wasn’t the action immersion or dumb comedy she had expected. It was old family vids.

      “Oh, no! Don’t you dare!” Cord’s mom exclaimed, in vibrant 3-D.

      A four-year-old Cord grinned, holding a garden hose. Where was this, Rylin wondered, on vacation somewhere?

      “Oops!” he proclaimed, without an ounce of contrition, as he turned the hose on his mom. She laughed, throwing up her tanned arms, her dark hair streaming with water like a mermaid’s. Rylin had forgotten how pretty she was.

      Cord leaned forward eagerly, sitting almost on the edge of his leather armchair. A smile played on his lips as he watched his dad chase his younger self around the yard.

      Rylin retreated a step. She would just—

      The floor creaked under her feet, and Cord’s head shot up. Instantly the vid cut off.

      “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I just wanted to let you know I’m finished. So I’m heading out.”

      Cord’s eyes traveled slowly over her outfit, her tight jeans and low-cut shirt and the tangle of neon bracelets at her wrists.

      “I didn’t have time to go home and change,” she added, not sure why she was explaining herself to him. “You didn’t give me much notice.”

      Cord just stared at her, saying nothing. Rylin realized with a start that he hadn’t recognized her. Then again, why should he? They hadn’t seen each other in years, since that Christmas his parents had invited her family over for presents and cookies. Rylin remembered how magical it had seemed to her and Chrissa, playing in the snow in the enclosed greenhouse, like a real-life version of the snow-globe toy her mom always got out for the holidays. Cord had spent the whole time in some holo-game, oblivious.

      “Rylin Myers,” Cord said at last, as if she had stumbled into his party by chance rather than been paid to work it. “How the hell are you?” He gestured to the seat next to him, and Rylin surprised herself by sinking into it, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged.

      “Aside from being groped by your friends, just great,” she said without thinking. “Sorry,” she added quickly, “it’s been a long night.” She wondered where Hiral and the gang were, if they’d finally noticed her disappearance.

      “Well, most of them aren’t my friends,” Cord said matter-of-factly. He shifted his weight, and Rylin couldn’t help noticing the way his shoulders rippled under his button-down shirt. She sensed suddenly that his carelessness was deceptive, that beneath it all he was watching her intently.

      For a moment they