“What do you want?” she snapped, still lying down. Eris was perversely pleased to see that Caroline looked terrible, her eyes lined with hollow circles.
“How are you feeling?” Her mom started to sit on the curved edge of Eris’s bed, but Eris glared at her, and she retreated a step.
“How do you think I’m feeling?” Eris knew she was being spiteful, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Caroline let the question go. “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” she said, watching her daughter’s reaction. She wrung her hands and took a careful breath. “I know this is the last thing you want to deal with right now, but we can’t stay here.”
“What?” It was enough to make Eris sit straight up, hugging one of her hand-stitched pillows to her chest.
“It’s best that we leave. Your father should be able to come back here, without having to face … everything that’s going on.” Eris felt a rush of anger at the phrasing. It seemed cowardly to her somehow, as if Caroline were pretending she wasn’t the one responsible. “Your father needs some space right now, from us,” her mom finished.
“You mean from you! You said it yesterday, this isn’t my fault!”
“Yes, but—”
“You go ahead,” Eris said, turning away. Her entire body felt strangely numb. She found that she didn’t care what her mom did, one way or the other. “I’ll wait here for Dad.”
“I don’t know what your dad wants right now,” Caroline said softly. “I know he loves you, but it’s up to him to figure out how all this is going to work. And just in case, we should be prepared for the worst.”
The worst? Wasn’t this already the worst?
“It’s you and me now, Eris,” Caroline finished, with the ghost of a smile.
Eris wanted to argue but lacked the heart for it. “Where are we going?”
“I found us a new apartment downTower.”
“DownTower? We aren’t just going to the Nuage?”
“We can’t afford the Nuage,” Eris’s mom said quietly.
Suddenly Eris understood. Her mom, the former model, and her much older dad. The revelation that Eris’s mom had been with someone else. “You aren’t taking anything from Dad, are you? You want to prove that you didn’t marry him for the money.”
Her mom nodded. “It’s the right thing to do. I owe your father that much, at least. Don’t worry,” she said quickly, “I’m trying to keep this as normal as possible for you. I have some money saved, and your tuition is covered through the year, so you won’t have to change schools. I promise, it’ll all be okay.”
Eris felt a little sick at that statement. The idea that she might have to go to a downTower school wouldn’t even have occurred to her.
Her mom stood there a moment, as if she wanted to give Eris a hug, but Eris made no move toward her. After a moment, Caroline faltered and started for the door.
“Just one suitcase for now,” she said. “We’ll figure out the rest later.”
As the door shut behind her mom, Eris collapsed onto her pillows and turned the cartoons back on, wishing she could escape into them indefinitely.
* * *
An hour later Eris sat in a hover across from her mom, bags and boxes stacked around them in the tiny space. Her skin crawled with dread as the numbers etched into the vertical corridor’s titanium walls grew ever smaller. She kept expecting their hover to slow down and turn onto one of these floors, but it showed no signs of stopping.
“Mom,” she said sharply, “just how low, exactly, are we going?”
“It was the best I could do, given the short notice.”
“That’s not an answer,” Eris persisted.
The numbers dipped below three hundred. Her mom sighed. “I was poor once, too, you know.”
The dim light from the walls caught on Caroline’s bracelet, the one piece of jewelry she’d brought with her, as far as Eris could tell. It looked fake, probably because it predated Eris’s dad. There are millions of dollars worth of jewels in that safe, she thought in mounting frustration. Yet her mom had apparently picked today to abide by a strict moral code.
Eris looked out the window, crossing and uncrossing her legs, feeling suddenly itchy in her Denna jeans, as if her skin no longer fit. She got on her tablet and looked over her messages again—she didn’t want to do it on her contacts, in case her mom heard the verbal command and got upset with her for checking them constantly.
Still nothing. Like every other time she’d looked at them today.
Finally Eris felt the familiar weight of the hover decelerating, rotating just slightly as its electromagnetic propulsion slowed. She glanced up at the numbers marking the floor they had turned onto, and thought she might throw up. They were going to live on the 103rd floor?
The streets down here were so narrow that the hover was barely able to turn the corners. They weren’t even streets at all, really, certainly not the expansive streets of the upper floors that were designed to convince you that you might be outside, with real live trees and air that pumped through the floor in soft, breezy patterns. This was more of a hallway, with flickering fluorescent lights overhead and depressing, institutional white walls. Several heads turned and watched as they skimmed past. Eris got the sense that no one down here took hovers all that often.
They pulled to a stop in front of a dingy door marked 2704. Eris gulped. They were so far down, the floor here so big, that the numbers of each apartment didn’t even begin with the floor number. God, the 103rd floor must be almost as big as the Tower’s base. Up on 985, there had only been ten apartments total. Eris had known all her neighbors individually.
Bags on each shoulder swinging wildly, Caroline opened the door to the hover and began fishing in her purse for some kind of ID chip. No bioscanners down here, that was for sure.
Eris waited until the last possible instant, when the hover started beeping and informing her angrily that it would charge for the delay, before she peeled herself from the seat and walked slowly inside.
It was worse than she’d imagined. The ceilings were low, the lighting was bad, and there was nothing even resembling a window. Feeling dizzy, Eris held her wrist up to her nose and inhaled her jasmine perfume, but it wasn’t enough to cover the lingering odors of rot and trash that permeated this place. There were several boxes stacked in the middle of what was apparently her mom’s bedroom, containing the few things Caroline had managed to send ahead. A tiny bathroom was tucked off the main bedroom, as well as a narrow kitchen, not that Eris or her mom knew the first thing about cooking.
Caroline began sorting through the boxes. “This is just temporary, Eris,” she said, without looking up. “I’m going to get a job, figure something out.” A job doing what? Eris thought, kicking open the only door left, the one that must lead to her bedroom.
It was dusty and cramped, about half the size of Eris’s closet in her old life. There would barely be room for anything else once they got a bed moved in there.
Something crawled across the toe of her sandal. Eris looked down and saw a giant cockroach, its feet twitching madly. She jumped back with a wild shriek, and it skittered away.
“Eris?” her mom called from the other room. “Are you okay?”
“Of course not! None of this is okay!”
Her mom started toward her, but Eris was on a roll and there was no stopping her. “I hope it was worth it!” she screamed. “Cheating on Dad with some random guy. I really hope it was worth ruining our lives!”
“It wasn’t some random guy,” Caroline began, but Eris cut her off, putting her hands dramatically over her ears.
“Oh my god, I don’t want to hear about it!”
“Eris—”
“How can I believe anything you say anymore?” She stumbled blindly out the door and slammed it behind her, not caring where she went as long as she got away.