“You know Cole’s not going to come with me.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. “He can stay and play out the act as the jilted lover. I’m sure his fans will love it.”
“And that’s what you want—to leave Cole?” She frowned down at my belongings scattered on the coffee table: some crumpled candy wrappers, an envelope that had once held Elixir guitar strings, a book of Girl Queen stories. “I think I’ve come to know you better than that.”
She touched the Elixir envelope and I cringed. I debated telling her that I’d only saved Cole’s trash because he’d scribbled lyrics on it that I couldn’t bear to throw out.
The rep laughed. “I think I had you figured out from the beginning. That’s my job, figuring people out.”
“Then you knew from the beginning I didn’t want this as much as Cole wanted it.” That day in my kitchen came back to me: the cold-water glare from Cole, and the rep looking on with her smug smile. “That’s why you set this up the way you did, isn’t it? Giving us that terrible idea in the beginning about us pretending to be cousins. Letting me think that our alien act was really my idea when that’s what you were hoping for all along.”
She didn’t deny it. She seemed almost pleased I had figured her out, happy I had become an apprentice to her art.
I crossed my arms to try to stop my trembling. “Well, now Cole can go on just as well without me.” It hurt me to say it. But I had to admit it: Cole wouldn’t leave with me. He’d stay and play the game. “You made sure of that. You roped in that girl so you could keep the act going even if I left it.”
I started toward the door, but she angled herself to block me. “Isn’t that why you chose the role you did? So you could give Cole a good reason to reject you?”
I shook my head, mired in confusion.
“You knew Cole wouldn’t stay with his small-town girlfriend,” she explained.
Something in my stomach bucked, but my anger was like sand running through a sieve. “You don’t know anything about us,” I said weakly. “You’re like those high-con fans who trust everything that comes through a camera lens.”
“I know what I saw on Cole’s face when he looked at those girls in the coffee shop in Woodbury.” She leaned closer. “Your hold on him might be strong. But it’s not strong enough. Not when you remind him of everything he wants to leave behind.”
My insides turned molten.
I smelled the sharp smell of black coffee. Felt Cole’s fingertips touching mine. Saw that hole in his shirt, the only thing that kept him from walking out with those girls—the only thing that kept him stuck, sitting there with me.
I ducked around her and left to find Cole.
He’d gotten halfway to my hotel by the time I caught up to him on the street. His flexi-screen was gone, and so was the cameraman. He ducked into an alley and motioned for me to follow him away from the street cameras.
I turned the corner and ran right into him. He caught my wrists, my freakish bare wrists with no screen and no red tag. No way to tap into my credits in a store, no profile to prove my identity. I had come all the way to the camera capital of the country to be invisible.
“They wouldn’t let me tell you about her,” he said, his eyes wide and mournful.
“You don’t have to go along with it.”
He didn’t say anything to that. I felt the slow, weak pulse of his heart, the tepid blood ebbing through it. Things impossible to feel, but I felt them. Was it my own pulse, beating against his fingers wrapped around my wrists?
I felt his vorpal, withering in the smoggy heat.
I knew the feeling well: I had felt it before, a vibration on his skin. I’d heard it. In his music—that hum beneath his voice that made the air rise.
How could I have not recognized it before? All along, I’d felt the pull of his vorpal on mine. But I’d never known it until now.
And I knew something more: My vorpal was stronger than his.
“You can’t leave.” He pulled my arms against his chest, against his slow-beating heart. “You don’t have a profile. How are you going to live? Making wildflower salads in the park?”
“Come and see.”
He pushed away from me. “And our families will do what exactly? Live on Microsoft-Verizon’s generosity?” He gave a derisive laugh. “We’ve really screwed this up, haven’t we?”
His hollow voice made me sick with dread. I sank back against the cold metal of a Dumpster. “We shouldn’t have done any of it in the first place.”
Cole’s expression darkened. “We had to. What else were we supposed to do? We were nobodies. The state flooded our whole town to save cities better than ours.”
“And to save people better than us?” I asked, because I knew that was how he felt. “Funny how it works: They put a camera on you and suddenly you exist.” I glared at him, daring him to deny he believed that.
He pulled at the neck of his thin shirt, as if stifled by the rotten-alley air. “This whole act was your idea in the first place. I went along with the script you wanted.”
My stomach churned.