The Towering Sky. Катарина Макги

      Max reached into his pocket for his tablet, which had started buzzing. He still refused to wear contacts—which was one of the many things Avery loved about him.

      “A couple people from my dorm are seeing a holo tonight,” he told her, looking up. “Want to go?”

      “Sure,” Avery said easily. Sitting in a dark, anonymous theater sounded nice right now.

      As they headed back toward the museum’s main entrance, they had to walk through the antiquities gallery. Its shelves were crowded with countless small broken things, items of jewelry or eating utensils, now reduced to fragments of discolored clay.

      “I never liked this room.” Avery paused before a few shards of something that were labeled, simply, USE UNKNOWN. “People created these things, probably to help themselves survive, and now we don’t even know what they were for.” There was something eerily sad about it all. It made her wonder what people would say about modern devices, centuries in the future—if a scientist would someday excavate her beauty-wand and wonder what its purpose was.

      “What does it matter what these things were for?” Max shrugged. “It’s interesting to study, but it doesn’t have any real impact on the present. The most important thing is to focus on making the world a better place right now, while we’re still in it.”

      Avery was momentarily struck by how uncannily like her dad Max sounded.

      “And, of course, spending time with you. That’s my main focus,” Max added, with a smile that wiped away any hesitations. She leaned up to brush her lips against his.

      “Mine too,” she said emphatically.

CALLIOPE

      CALLIOPE TWISTED BACK and forth on the circular podium, utterly disgusted with what she saw reflected in the mirror.

      She was wearing what had to be the most appalling bridesmaid’s dress of all time. It was a horrific confection of tulle and satin, with a square neckline and enormous puffed sleeves that tightened at the elbows and extended to the wrists. Layers of tulle were bunched over and over on the voluminous skirt. As if that wasn’t enough, the dress came complete with a cape, which tied around the neck with ribbons.

      The only part of Calliope not covered in all these swaths of fabric was her face. She felt as if she were wearing curtains.

      On the podium next to her stood Livya, sinking underneath the same monstrosity of a dress. She looked pale and washed out, as always, her hair falling in thin listless strands around her heart-shaped face.

      “What do you think, girls?” asked Elise. Calliope didn’t miss the way her mom’s eyes darted anxiously toward Nadav’s mother, Tamar, her future mother-in-law, who was seated in a nearby armchair, her hands clasped primly in her lap. She’d been the one to select these dresses.

      “They’re great,” Calliope said weakly. Honestly, she hadn’t known there was a garment on earth that could make her look this ugly. There was a first time for everything, she supposed.

      “I think they’re divine,” Livya gushed, moving past Elise as if she weren’t even there and heading straight to her grandmother. She planted a kiss on the old lady’s cheek. “Thank you, Boo Boo.”

      Calliope refrained from rolling her eyes at the absurd nickname.

      They were in the wedding boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue, which, perversely enough, was no longer located on Fifth Avenue at all, but on Serra Street, toward the center of the Tower. The fitting room looked like a wedding cake come to life, with its peach velvet settees, white plush carpets, even a tray of little iced petit fours arranged on the sideboard.

      Most striking of all, though, were the mirrors. They were ubiquitous, so that a girl could see herself from every conceivable angle, and perhaps a few inconceivable ones too.

      Normally, being places like this—cool, expensive boutiques full of beautiful things—calmed Calliope. It was something in the proud look of them, the expectant hush as their doors swung open and you saw all those beautiful rich things arranged within. But today her surroundings seemed to be mocking her.

      Livya sank into an armchair next to her grandmother and began tapping furiously at her tablet, her face sour. The dress poufed comically around her, making her look like a human-sized loofah with skinny, protruding arms. Calliope would have laughed at the sight, except that she sort of wanted to cry.

      “Elise,” said Miranda, the bridal sales associate. “Do you think we could make a final decision on color? The superlooms are fast, but I’m getting concerned about timing.”

      The sample dresses that Livya and Calliope were wearing had been spun from smartthreads: the playful, cheap-looking material patented thirty years ago. The final dresses that they wore at the wedding would be real fabric, of course, because who would actually want their bridesmaid dresses to change color? These smartthread models were for sales purposes only.

      No one had asked Livya to move, yet she stood with an audible, resigned groan and stepped back onto the podium alongside Calliope. She kept her arms crossed over her chest, as if to convey how utterly pointless she found this entire exercise.

      “Let’s start with the purples.” Miranda reached for her tablet. A colorful bar on one side depicted all the colors of the rainbow, red bleeding through to yellow and then purple again. As Miranda’s fingers moved slowly down the palette, the fabric of Calliope’s and Livya’s dresses shifted accordingly, deepening from lilac to violet to a dark wine color.

      “I need to see it with the flowers,” Elise said eagerly, turning to a marble console table along the edge of the room. It was littered with sample bouquets that their florist had sent over, everything from simple all-white arrangements to vast multicolored sprays of foliage. The room smelled pleasantly like a garden.