The Towering Sky. Катарина Макги

true. You and I make each other better,” he tried to protest.

      Leda shook her head. “Please,” she begged. “I just want to move on. If you care about me at all, you’ll leave me alone, for my own good.”

      The door shut behind her with a definitive click.

      “Hey, step back!” someone shouted. Watt realized in a daze that he had wandered past the painted safety line, toward the gaping maw of the helipad.

      “Sorry,” he muttered, and retreated a few steps. He didn’t even attempt to explain. What would he tell those people, exactly? That there was something soothing about looking out over the edge? That it was a sharp reminder of how small and insignificant he was, surrounded by this vast city? Of how little his pain mattered in the scheme of things?

      Finally Watt turned and walked away from the bar, just as he had forced himself to walk away from Leda all those months ago.

RYLIN

      RYLIN MYERS SAT cross-legged on the floor, old vid-storage devices scattered around her. Some of them were shaped like shiny circular discs, others boxy and square. Rylin’s delicate half-Korean features pulled into a frown as she considered each piece of hardware in turn, pausing over it as if internally debating its merits, before shaking her head and moving on. She was so engrossed in her task that she missed the footsteps that sounded in the doorway.

      “I didn’t expect you to work so hard on your last day.” It was Rylin’s boss, Raquel.

      “I wanted to organize this last collection for you before I go. We’re almost up to 2030,” Rylin said eagerly.

      To Rylin’s surprise, Raquel came and knelt on the floor next to her. The lightning bolt inktat on her forearm—which was timed to flash every sixty seconds—appeared, darkened, then vanished again like smoke. “What do you think this one is?” Raquel mused aloud, reaching for a disc that was emblazoned with an animated snowflake and a pair of girls with braids.

      “I like that one,” Rylin quickly said, reaching for the disc before Raquel could dismiss it. She sorted it into the pile marked SAVE: POSSIBLE ADAPTATION.

      A smile curled at the corner of Raquel’s mouth. “I’m going to miss you, Rylin. I’m really glad you applied for this job.”

      “Me too.”

      Rylin had spent most of last year, her junior year, attending an upper-floor private high school on scholarship. She had assumed that when June arrived, she would do the same thing she did every summer and get a mindless job downTower to pay the bills. But just when she’d been about to swallow her pride and beg for her old job at a monorail snack station, Rylin had learned that her scholarship actually continued through the summer—as long as she got an academic internship.

      She had applied to as many internships as she could find, especially ones that had to do with holography, the creation of three-dimensional holographic films. And she had found this internship: working for the Walt Disney archivist.

      Rylin had been startled to learn that the job was located here, in the bowels of the main public library location, in midTower. She’d never been to this location, though Rylin and her best friend, Lux, used to spend hours at their nearest public library. They would trade their favorite e-texts back and forth, then make up plays about them and stage them for their bemused parents, complete with a loud, improvised sound track.

      On her first day, Rylin had walked in to find Raquel sitting cross-legged on a swivel chair, spinning it back and forth like a distracted child, her ponytail whipping sideways to smack at her cheek. “You’re the new intern?” Raquel had asked, somewhat impatiently, and Rylin nodded.

      Raquel explained that Disney had hired her to sort through all the old films from the pre-holo age and flag any that were ripe for adaptation. “Holographs fully saturated the market fifty years ago,” she told Rylin. “At that point, everyone stopped producing 2-D films, and the machinery to play them. A lot of content was adapted in those first few decades, but there are still so many that no one has ever bothered to redo.”

      Rylin knew that 2-D–to–3-D conversion was an expensive and painstaking process. It was like turning a stick figure into a sculpture, taking a flat sheet of pixels and making it inhabit space. The whole thing required hundreds of hours of computer design and human creativity.

      “Why isn’t this stuff on the cloud somewhere?” Rylin had wondered, gesturing at the walls of old tapes and discs.

      “Some of it is: the big blockbusters and all the classics. But people lost interest trying to catalog and upload every last thing. That’s where we come in.”

      To Rylin’s surprise, the more time she spent watching these old 2-D films, the more she appreciated them. The directors had so little to work with, yet accomplished so much with what they had. There was an elegance beneath the films’ celluloid flatness.

      “By the way,” Raquel said now, as they kept methodically sorting the boxes, “I really enjoyed Starfall.”

      Rylin glanced up in surprise. “You watched it?”

      Starfall was a short holo that Rylin had written and directed this spring, in several weeks of angst-ridden shooting after her return from Dubai. It featured some dark interior shots of the Tower, juxtaposed with sweeping views from the terraces and zoomed-in shots of Lux’s eyes: because of course Lux and Chrissa, Rylin’s sister, were the only actors she’d been able to coerce into it.

      “It’s a lovely film,” Raquel replied. “You made your friend feel almost . . . capricious. Is she like that in real life?”

      “She is,” Rylin managed to reply, gratefulness blooming in her chest. Raquel was acting as if it wasn’t a big deal—and maybe it wasn’t, for her to have watched a five-minute film—but it meant a lot to Rylin.

      After she’d said good-bye, Rylin trotted out the library’s main entrance, with its grandiose carved stone lions. She boarded the A express lift downTower, disembarking on thirty-two and walking the ten blocks to her local neighborhood recreation center. Then it was through the broad double doors, down a long hallway, and out into the direct afternoon sunlight.

      Rylin lifted a hand to shade her eyes. She glanced around the deck, the narrow strip of the 32nd floor that extended out farther than the floor above. The sun felt like a searing kiss on her skin after the cool darkness of the library, even though the library was hundreds of floors above her. She quickly shrugged out of her soft green zip-up and started through the maze of basketball courts, searching for one person in particular.

      Several courts later, she found him.

      He didn’t notice her at first. He was too focused on the team of fifth-grade boys that he coached. They were running drills now, jogging back and forth in trailing zigzag lines as they passed the ball back and forth. Rylin stifled a smile as she leaned on the railing to watch her boyfriend, silently cataloging all the things she loved about him. The strong tanned lines of his arms as he demonstrated something to the group. The way his hair curled around his ears. The quickness of his laughter.

      He looked up and noticed her, and his entire face broke out into a grin. “Look, guys! We have an audience,” he announced, flashing Rylin a geeky thumbs-up.

      She laughed and shook her head, tucking a strand of dark hair behind one ear. After she and Hiral broke up the first time, Rylin had never guessed that they would get back together. Which was incontestable proof that you couldn’t predict where life might take you.

      Rylin had started dating Hiral Karadjan when they were both in eighth grade. He lived near her on the 32nd floor and went to her school. Rylin remembered being instantly drawn to him: He had an effervescent sort of energy, so palpable she imagined she could see it. She came to realize that it was joy—a hazy afterglow of laughter, like the light that still streaks across the sky after a shooting star has disappeared.

      Hiral