Just then, her eartennas began to ring, and her contacts lit up with an incoming ping. Avery. Eris declined it. Avery had no idea what was going on, of course: Eris hadn’t told anyone. But whatever Avery wanted to talk about, Eris couldn’t handle it right now. The problems of the upper floors felt a lifetime away.
She slumped against the wall in the hallway, biting back a scream.
“I know you.”
Eris turned, furious at whoever dared talk to her. A Hispanic girl about her own age stood several doors down. She was wearing fake-leather pants, a gold bandeau top, and jangly earrings. One hand was holding a plain black halluci-lighter, which she held up now to take a long, slow drag, puckering her lips into an O as she exhaled the bright green smoke. Potshots, then.
“I don’t think so,” Eris said shortly.
“You’re a member at the club where I work. Altitude.”
Eris glanced at the girl—her heart-shaped face framed by black bangs, her legs casually crossed, ending in bright blue cowboy boots. She didn’t recognize her. “You were sort of rude to me, in fact,” the girl went on, dark eyes narrowed.
Eris said nothing. If this girl was looking for an apology, she wasn’t going to get it.
“So.” The girl’s eyes traveled up and down Eris’s outfit, her designer jeans and the pearl studs in her ears. “What the hell are you doing down here?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Suit yourself.” The girl shrugged.
Eris eyed the girl’s halluci-lighter. No way that it was the good stuff she usually smoked, but suddenly she felt an overwhelming and desperate urge for a hit. Screw it. Her life was already in shambles; why not smoke up with an Altitude waitress who apparently hated her?
“I just found out that my dad’s not my dad,” Eris said bluntly, and walked over. The girl held out the halluci-lighter, revealing a small inktat at the base of her wrist. “What’s that supposed to be?” Eris asked, distracted. She didn’t recognize the angular shape.
“It’s part of a set.”
“Where are the others?”
The girl laughed, giving her crisp dark curls a shake. She smelled like smoke and cheap perfume, and underneath, something spicy, like the scent of amber candles. “Like you’ll ever see them.”
Eris couldn’t be bothered to rise to the bait. She took a long, deep drag of the lighter, exhaling the smoke in a perfect ring. The girl raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Anyway,” Eris went on, “my dad had all the money, so now … it’s just the two of us.”
“Wow. Wasn’t expecting that.”
“Yeah, me neither, obviously.”
They stood in a strange silence for a while, passing the halluci-lighter back and forth. Eris kept waiting for someone to come tell them off—up on 985, she’d always had to smoke right by the vents, to keep the regulators from showing up—but the girl seemed surprisingly nonchalant. Maybe no one cared what went on down here.
Eventually the lighter was almost out of weed. The girl dropped it carelessly to the ground and crunched it to a fine black powder under her feet, then smeared the powder around with her heel. It was one of those cheap disposable lighters, Eris realized. “See you around. My name is Mariel, by the way.”
“Eris.”
“Well, Eris,” Mariel repeated, with a hint of laughter, still seeming amused at finding Eris down here. “Welcome to Baneberry Lane.”
“Is that really what this street is called?” Eris couldn’t believe anyone would give this dismal place such a happy-sounding name. It was delusional.
“Look up baneberries,” Mariel called out, disappearing into her apartment. So Eris did.
They were highly poisonous plants, often used in medieval suicides.
“Now it makes sense,” Eris muttered, wiping at a sudden angry tear.
She started to turn back toward 2704, but hesitated upon hearing voices in Mariel’s apartment—a low, adult voice in particular. Probably Mariel’s dad. For some reason the sound of it sparked Eris into motion. She couldn’t just wait around smoking any longer, wondering what her dad was thinking. She had to talk to him.
She turned in the opposite direction and headed for the nearest express lift upTower.
* * *
It was Sunday, so the plastisurge department of the Vensonn-Seyun Hospital on floor 890 wasn’t all that crowded.
“Hey, Eris. He’s in his office,” Slaite, the department’s receptionist, offered as she walked up. Eris barely nodded, already hurrying onward.
She passed the experimental center, where various DNA forms were being recombined in tiny petri dishes, and the nerve farm, where spinal cords were grown in enormous translucent tanks, heading toward her dad’s office at the end of the hall.
EVERETT RADSON, MD, DIRECTOR OF COSMETIC PROCEDURES AND MODIFICATIONS, read the printed nameplate above the door. Eris took a breath and stepped inside.
He was slumped at his desk, wearing a half-zip golf sweater and blue scrubs pants, one hand wrapped around a mostly empty handle of Scotch. The unflattering hospital light caught the strands of gray in his hair, and there were new worry lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He looked, for the first time in her life, like an old man.
“Eris.” He sighed, his hand gripped tight around the Scotch. There was something funny about the way he pronounced her name, like his mouth was having trouble forming the sounds.
She opened her mouth, uncertain what she should say now that she was actually here. “I kept waiting for you to ping me,” she began, knowing it sounded accusatory.
“I’m sorry,” her father said. “I just needed to get away, for a little while.”
Neither of them spoke.
Eris glanced around the office, from the 3-D screens in the corner to the closet with the real human skeleton, which she used to come look at sometimes in elementary school, fascinated, until Avery had told her it was morbid and weird. But Eris hadn’t been afraid of the skeleton. She’d never feared much of anything, she realized, until now.
Her eyes drifted back to her dad. He was holding something in his hand, staring at it in bewilderment, as if uncertain what it was. It was his gold wedding ring.
All the words she’d planned on saying were wiped from her mind. “What’s going to happen with you and Mom?”
“I don’t know.” Her dad sighed and placed the ring on his desk, then finally glanced up at Eris. “You look so much like her,” he added, and his voice was laced with sadness.
Eris had never before hated how much she resembled her mom. It was probably all her father saw now, when he looked at her—she was the living proof of her mom’s betrayal. Nothing connected her to him anymore, she realized with a jolt, except that they’d both spent the past eighteen years being lied to by the same person.
“I’m sorry,” Eris whispered.
“Me too.” He started to pick up the Scotch, then stopped, as if remembering she was there.
“Dad—or Everett—”
“I’m sorry, Eris, but I need some time,” he interrupted. His voice was shaking. “I’m just … struggling here.”
Eris bit her lip. She’d come to the hospital hoping her dad would fix everything the way he always did, and yet he seemed even more broken than she was. “I miss you,” she said helplessly.
“I miss the way things were,” he said in answer, and Eris’s heart sank. Part of her wanted to shake him, scream at him—Look at me, she wanted to say, I’m hurting too. I don’t want to lose you! Tears welled in her specially surged amber eyes. But the old familiar pride held them back, stuck the words in her throat.
“I’m sorry. I just need time,” Everett said again. “Please.”
Eris nodded, feeling as though she were falling a great distance. She didn’t know what would happen to her parents; she didn’t know when—or even if—her father would be ready to see her again.
She started back out toward the crowded elevator. But even pressed into the crushing sea of people, Eris had never felt more acutely alone.
RYLIN