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There were only two apartments on the eighty-ninth floor. According to the schematic I’d seen, they both were huge. Carol Amanda Harving’s was apartment A. I didn’t need a map to identify it. Her side of the hall was lined with artwork and flowers and, on either side of the door, life-size pictures of her looking tall and lean, covered in diamonds and sparkly gowns. In one photograph, she stood in front of an Ebony Meiboch? Triumph, a sleek, absurdly luxurious car with thin flame-orange highlights that cut through the matte darkness of its surface. It was like lava cracked through black stone.
I knew this exact car. Everyone knew it. It belonged to Silas Rog.
In the other photo, she stood on the red carpet, bare-armed in a slinky, luxurious, diamond-studded silk dress, her neck draped with strands and strands of pearls. She had so much, it seemed, that her prosperity had spilled out beyond her apartment walls.
Her pictures infuriated me. My clothes were damp and cold from sweat, but coal-like hatred warmed me. It should have been Saretha up here. Had their positions been reversed, Saretha would have treated Carol Amanda Harving with far more kindness. It seemed entirely unfair. Carol Amanda Harving’s eyes were cold and lifeless. Fruitlessly glaring at the hallway shrine she had made to herself, I realized Carol Amanda Harving’s advantage: she was empty, soulless and without compassion. It was easy for her to let Saretha be destroyed. I could see it in the chill of her icy blue eyes.
I shook myself. If I let my anger grow, I worried what I might do when I got inside. I forced myself to focus. I wasn’t here to hurt her. I was here to make her understand. It was pointless to meditate on how—I needed to act.
But I suddenly had a feeling she wasn’t there. Something about the hallway air seemed stale and unlived in. The carpet looked untouched. But maybe that was what I wanted to believe. I told myself she could be anywhere—filming, vacationing, living in one of a dozen homes in any dome she liked. How many, I wondered, had she seen?
If she was gone, that might be easier. It felt safer. I could look through her home for evidence that might prove her birthday was a lie, or that she used drugs, or for anything else I might use against her. And I wouldn’t need to speak—or hurt her.
I couldn’t let myself hope too much. I had to prepare to face her, right now, and whoever might be with her.
The door unlocked after an undue amount of fiddling with its magnetic innards. A heavy clunk released as a thick metal bolt retracted. The door slid open, and the room came into focus through the darkness. Something about it felt very, very wrong.
There was a couch in the center of an enormous room, and—that was all. I peered inside. Carol Amanda Harving’s apartment had one couch, facing out toward the apartment’s gargantuan window, and nothing more. How was this possible? Was she some Buddhist star who wanted to lead a perfect, uncluttered life? Did she even live here? Was this just a space for her to entertain? The whole apartment reminded me of an oversized Squelch, not a home.
I stepped inside, puzzled and somehow angrier than before. My body tensed. Who was this woman? The door slid closed behind me. The window, which in theory overlooked the dome, was black as night. I walked toward it, silent in the darkness. It was opaque. I touched it with my hand.
At once, it clicked to life with enormous, vivid, three-dimensional depictions of the natural world. It cycled through images of forests, seashores and deserts. From where I stood, everything looked oddly distorted. The view was calibrated specifically for the couch.
The apartment had no bedroom, or kitchen or bathroom. It was literally just one enormous, empty room, like a theater. I looked for hidden buttons or seams in the walls that might give some indication there was something else, yet I knew the dimensions well enough to know there was nothing more. Her walls were clean and smooth, with none of the ugly striations we had in our home from cheap printing.
The wall changed to a movie preview, flat and two-dimensional, like a classic film, but this was a new remake of a film I’d seen two years before about a clever female spy.
A man sipped at a glass of wine, a twinkle in his eye, his head hung low as he eyed the woman across from him. The lights in the distance behind him were reduced to beautiful gold circles by the camera’s blur. A soft, romantic rock guitar played beneath the scene.
“So, what is it you do?” The man smiled, head cocked charmingly to one side. I knew the actor, Martin Cross. He had been digitally de-aged to look younger.
The woman across from him flashed a smile—Saretha’s smile. It was Carol Amanda Harving. Her hair was dark now, like my sister’s, though she was blonde in some films, and often her skin was lighter. But her eyes were still the same—empty, ice-cold diamonds. She sipped some drink through a straw, coyly, and did not answer him. Instead, she reached out. In close-up, they held hands, fingers intertwined, probably hand models. Something did not match about it.
When the shot went wide, each actor’s name floated slowly above their heads as the music grew louder. Carol Amanda Harving looked a little less like Saretha, probably because Saretha had put on some weight in her exile. Meanwhile, the actress looked muscled, but achingly thin. Her arms were like pencils, and yet they looked sleek and long, without the knobbiness you would expect. I wondered if they had a surgery for that. I shuddered at the thought of shaved bone.
I stepped closer to the window, looking closely at her hands. Even they looked thin and tiny in Martin Cross’s grasp. How do you lose weight in your hands?
“Miss Dart.” A thick, dark-skinned man was standing over them suddenly. He wore an all-black suit and sunglasses, even though it was night. “It’s time.” Martin Cross’s character looked at the man with surprise. Carol Amanda Harving stood, and her small red dress flitted around her, tight across her tiny waist. Her boobs were bigger than the last time I’d seen her, but this wasn’t any great surprise. She was now in a starring role. If she hadn’t requested a little plastic surgery, the studio would have insisted on it.
“Sorry,” she said, blowing Martin a kiss. She ran to the balcony and did a flip over the edge. The stunt bothered me. It reminded me of the video footage of Bridgette Pell. It didn’t look entirely real, but that didn’t really lessen the sting. They often switched to CGI for stunts. The studio wouldn’t want to be sued for a broken leg or chipped nail.
Then again, none of it looked quite right. The music rocked harder, drums pounding like an engine as Carol Amanda Harving shot guns, launched grenades and generally unleashed chaos on a bunch of swarthy-looking villains the movie put in her path.