“Yeah,” he answered. “Alone and miserable and crying into a camera lens at eight o’clock tonight.”
I rode to my hotel. The driver tuned the car radio with his flexi-screen since I didn’t have my own. All the songs were the same anyway. Girls singing about falling asleep in their party clothes, about glamming up their profiles. Boys singing about cycling through disposable shirts, about their screens too tight on their arms. Lyrics about things I’d never experienced and didn’t understand. They’d fake alien accents, something I’d gotten good at in the last couple of weeks, or they’d affect drunkenness and slur their lyrics. The song would build to a climax, there’d be that moment, that one bit of emotion I could grab on to. And back to talk of hairstyles and camping out on high-speed trains.
Not like when Cole sang—when he sang a song he wrote, anyway. The whole thing so charged through with feeling, the emotion so palpable it made ladders in the air. One day I was going to reach out and touch them and climb up to somewhere.
At the camera-free suite I had come to call home, it was a ration day—no air-conditioning. The balcony doors let in smog and not much else. The same news story kept looping on the wall monitor: “The taskforce will attempt to train people with strong vorpals to cross into the Other Place, which will strengthen the link that allows solar energy to flow into the alternate universe.” I’d already heard all about it, already wondered how they’d find anyone with a vorpal strong enough to sense the Other Place. They’d been trying for years now. I switched it off.
Cole came in. He had his own apartment where we sometimes moped together for the cameras, but we could only drop the act here in my suite. He dragged out the battered guitar he kept stashed there, clipped a guitar string, and used it to override the a/c controls.
We collapsed in front of the a/c unit and lay where we had fallen, looking like a fashion spread of third-world heat casualties. “I’ve lived L.A. by camera light,” Cole sang lazily, strumming his guitar, “swelter days, blackout nights.”
Then his fingers left the guitar strings and trailed to my arm, my hair. He traced circles and lines on my neck as though mimicking some foreign and complicated pattern. My heart tried to follow it, surging in time with his movements. When he leaned in for a kiss I reminded him there weren’t any cameras around. He reminded me not to be an ass. We added a little more heat to the world.
Until Cole stopped mid-kiss, pulled away as usual, that defeated look coming into his eye again—same as when we played for the cameras. It had gotten to where I couldn’t tell when that look wasn’t real. “I’m not actually an alien,” I told him. “I’ve got all the right anatomy and everything.”
He didn’t laugh. “They didn’t go for your idea.”
“What idea—the thing where we run away together?” I tried to angle myself close to him again, missing the weight of his arm around me. “Preferably to Europe. I could use a vacation from this place.”
He rolled onto his feet, fiddled with the a/c knob again. “Yeah, I just said they didn’t go for it.”
I huddled on the couch, stung. “Is that what you and the producer were talking about? Did you tell him London is completely blanketed with lenses? All those old surveillance cameras are connected to the Internet now.”
“They said it would cut all the tension we’ve been building.”
I sat up. “Who’s they?”
“Producer, rep.”
“She’s in town? When did you talk to her?” I leaned forward until I could put my hand on his back. “What if, like, we can’t get passports—nobody can get entry to England right now—and then we have to get smuggled in—”
He turned to face me. “We don’t have a lot of choice here. If they don’t want to do it, we can’t do it.” His arms were trembling. What wasn’t he saying?
He pushed my hair behind my ear. I ran my fingers over his arm, inviting him closer, but he didn’t budge. I thought for a moment he was about to confess something, his expression was so rabbit-scared. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“This whole thing was our idea to start with,” I said. “My idea.”
“And it’s their money.”
“I didn’t know you had so much loyalty to Microsoft-Verizon,” I said sourly.
He twitched. The floor was suddenly so fascinating that he couldn’t look me in the eye. “It’s their town houses our families are living in, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t.”
He let his shirt balloon around him with cold air from the unit. “That’s how it works, Epony. Someone else sets the price and we pay it. SeedBank, the governor with his damn levees. That’s how it always works.”