The room itself was dominated by a vast ice-white bed. An all-in-one gym ate the remaining floor space. A quick glance in her Hoodie told her seven hundred Veneer options were available for this room, all for varying outrageous fees. She didn’t think she’d be allowed to expense turning her room into an aquarium.
She crossed to the window instead. After a moment struggling to figure out how to operate the curtains, she gave up and slipped behind them.
Her window faced the city. The view from the twenty-fifth floor gave her a new angle on the world. She was in one of the high-rise windows she’d seen from the bus, the ones catching the sun and bending it. The buildings that filled in the grid spread before her, most shorter than her own. Some had decorative features: spires, gargoyles, things she didn’t know how to name. Others were smooth, featureless, but no less beautiful in their attempts to reach the sky. One had a tower that spelled out BROMO SELTZER instead of numbers around an analog clockface; the clock was stopped, and she’d never learned to read one, anyway. Somehow the jumbled architecture combined for an aesthetically pleasing whole. She hadn’t been more than a few blocks yet, but even way up here she felt a hum, an energy, from the collected presence of so many people in one place. Or maybe it was the whizzing flocks of package and surveillance drones, or maybe she imagined it.
She pulled up her hood and looked out the window with a map overlay. Two point three miles to her destination, straight north. The overlay highlighted the direct route and offered some transit options cross-referenced with a risk map, cross-referenced with time of day. It looked safe enough to walk, at least while it was still light out. Five p.m., so there’d be plenty of time to stretch her legs, get there in daylight, and get a sense of the city. That was her mother’s phrase. After she had reassured her mother for the millionth time that she would be safe, her mother had said, “Well, if you have to go I’m so glad you’ll be there long enough to get a sense of the city.”
“What does that mean?” Rosemary had asked.
“Cities—at least how they used to be before, obviously I don’t know how they are now—have, well, not personalities, but flavors, I guess you could say? Some felt like they had a lot of history. And some felt modern, and some felt quaint, and some felt touristy or trendy or busy or laid-back.”
“Were you in that many?”
“It wasn’t a big deal then. You know that. I grew up in Boston, went to school in Chicago, took a job in Atlanta, then another in Pittsburgh. You were a city kid until you were six. You’d have been one for real if I had convinced your father to stay there, but he wanted land…”
Rosemary had heard all that before. She couldn’t imagine having grown up in a city. She’d gone to middle school and high school online, worked online, hung out with her friends online, dated online. She remembered classrooms from Before, had vague recollections of Fourth of July parades and the one baseball game. In her head, when she pictured those events now, she was the only one there.
“I thought you were glad we moved away, so you could raise me in a safe place.”
“I’ve never been so glad of anything. Look, I’ll deny this if you tell your father, but I like the idea of you having a little bit of adventure. Safe, controlled, message-your-mother-every-night-to-tell-her-you’re-alive adventure.”
Rosemary promised to be careful, promised to check in. Said she was tired, which was true, and probably going to bed early, which was not a lie because it had contained the word “probably.” Her eagerness to make up for failure in Jory beat out her exhaustion. She was going out.
Now, climbing a steep hill, Rosemary wondered how much personality the cities still had left. The streets near the hotel were nearly empty, though blooming Bradford pear trees added a festive and pungent note. She wasn’t sure whether people still worked in the office buildings towering overhead. The streets themselves looked well maintained—the asphalt glittered—and the shops looked closed for the evening, not forever.
She passed a museum, an honest-to-goodness museum, with thick security fencing. She wouldn’t even have known what it was if her map hadn’t told her. Inside, she pictured a few guards and an army of camera drones, showing the exhibits to the masses at home. She couldn’t remember whether she had ever visited this particular museum in hoodspace. She’d never thought about what the museum buildings themselves looked like, either; all their class trips spawned inside, and the drones had their own paths, flying through long hallways, zooming in and out and around the art. This exterior was stately and serene, elegant even behind the razor wire. She examined it for a moment then kept walking, looking for the city to reveal itself.
Aran Randall’s instructions guided her the last few blocks. There’s a row of empty storefronts on the block before, he had said. Notable for the fact that one was a clothing store, and before they locked the door they moved all the mannequins to the front. He hadn’t mentioned it had been a kids’ clothing store, and the mannequins were all kid-sized zombies, posed in the window like they were trying to get out. A hand outstretched here, a forehead pressed to the glass there. Some of the other abandoned stores had broken glass, but maybe this one was too creepy for anyone to mess with.
Cross the street, and on the opposite side, there’ll be a stretch of boarded-up row houses. They’ve all had their front steps stolen—they were marble, and don’t ask me how somebody can steal giant marble slabs without anybody noticing or saying anything, it happened way before we were around. The doors looked bizarre, standing three feet above the sidewalk, opening onto empty space. Some had spray-painted messages on the plywood-covered doors and windows. “Want to buy this house?” asked one, with a smaller “Hell no—it has no floors inside” handwritten beneath. “If you hear an animal trapped in here call the city” read another.
The first-floor windows on 2020 are boarded up, too, and they’ve soundproofed it, so you won’t see or hear much from the outside. You can tell which one it is because it still has its front steps, and the upstairs windows have glass. They turn on the outside light on nights when there are bands. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Rosemary had believed Aran’s directions; she’d ridden hundreds of miles to follow them. Still, she was relieved they played out as he’d described. The mannequins, the empty houses with the floating front doors, the lamp like a beacon. She didn’t know any reason why Aran would have taken the time to lie to her, but she hadn’t allowed herself to dismiss that possibility until she had seen the place with her own eyes. What had Victor said about Aran? “Don’t believe everything he says.” She’d never pursued that particular comment.
Nobody was outside when she walked past, but the lamp reassured her, as did the two battered gas cars out front. Nobody would park on this block if there weren’t something happening. Right? Of course, this was her first time here, and any absolutes crossing her mind were her own mind’s devising. She had always invented rules for her own reassurance, though some had proven truer than others. Logic wasn’t the point. Two cars might be a drug deal, or Aran could have sent her here to deliver her to a prostitution ring. That seemed too much trouble for him to go to.
Walking past, obviously too early, she realized there were details he hadn’t provided, and she hadn’t known to ask. What time they started, for example. She had never been to a live show, but StageHoloLive shows always took place at seven p.m. in their target time zone, so she had assumed music started at seven here as well.