Where Futures End (13 page)

The tomatoes slipped out of my grip. “Turn it back off.”

A sound of thunder on the stairs and then my sisters barreled into the room. “Come see—you're on CelebriFeed!”

I stamped up after them on shaky legs.

“Stop running!” my dad called from the kitchen. “It's hot enough in here and the a/c won't turn up.”

“Dad!” I said.

“Did you get the groceries?” he called.

“Dad!”

“What?” He poked his head in. The wall monitor caught his eye. There was the image from our website, large as life on the screen. “Well, what in the world? I never saw a boy's hair look like that.” He turned his gaze to Cole's yellow thatch, nothing like the gelled nest of hair on-screen.

“Are you going to get in trouble?” my younger sister asked.

“For what?” Cole said.

She sidled up to him, as eager to bask in his annoyance as in any other form of his attention. “For interfering with an alien.”

“She's not an alien, she's your sister,” Dad said, and slumped back to the kitchen.

“Besides, she doesn't have a red bracelet,” my other sister said. “She's supposed to have ditched it. How will they
know anyone's interfering with her?”

“They'll know from CelebriFeed!”

Cole scooted away to leave them to their shrill bickering.

“
Are
we going to get in trouble for this?” I murmured to him.

“In trouble with who?”

“The FBI or someone.”

“The FBI won't believe that an alien could want a human. Aliens and humans aren't even the same species. Only high-con fans believe crap like this.”

He was right—I knew it firsthand. Aliens didn't fall in love with silly fourteen-year-old girls or even glammed-up seventeen-year-old girls. “The aliens, then. They'll be mad. They don't like to draw attention to themselves.”

“If they didn't want attention, they wouldn't wear those bright red bracelets.”

“They have to.” My younger sister had inched close again and stood inspecting the way Cole's sweat-dampened clothes stuck to him. “The government said so.”

Cole went to the a/c and tried to override the peak-usage sensor. “Anyway, the aliens can just go ahead and kiss it; they're not the ones whose egg is in the frying pan.”

For the next few days, CelebriFeed cycled our photo through a hundred times, each with a different headline.
Close Encounter Leads to Illegal Love . . . Vorpal Abuse: He's Under Her Spell . . . Does She Have a Tail?
Cole and I hid out in the township and let our mystique build. Then we flew out to L.A., city of camera angles.

I found out what heat was. The heat of the desert, the press of the crowds, heat from the tailpipes and the gleaming hoods of cars. The heat from Cole, coming close for a kiss in direct sight of a streetlamp camera. The burn of humiliation at realizing he was only mooning over me because he'd spotted a line of camera lenses embedded in a shop awning. It was the same game over and over: Pull close, pull away. Disappear around a corner, into a waiting car, to leave Cole feigning heartbreak. All for the cameras, for the act.

By the third week, when the cat-and-mouse thing started to get old, our new fans made it easy for us to evolve our act. When Cole went out, they'd swarm him like flies. I'd appear at the right moment, cutting a wide swath through the frightened crowd.
Is she really?
they'd whisper. Or,
Save him from her!
Later, Cole would get me alone with the cameras and try to tell me he didn't want those other girls. I'd tell him he should be with them, that it'd be better for him. A few tears on my part and then I'd leave. We kept it short. We always kept it short. They couldn't get enough.

When the temperatures soared, the rolling blackouts were a relief. The power to the city's cameras went out, giving Cole an excuse to be offline for a couple of days. He ditched his flexi-screen so no one could track him and we drove out to Santa Monica. From Ocean Avenue, we took in the sight of the storm-wrecked pier still in splinters, the Ferris wheel motionless above the dark water like a giant eye peering over the edge of an abyss.

“Don't care how they see you, I'll never leave you.”

“I'll keep us together, stay with you forever.”

Cole and I took turns singing over a thumping beat, crouched in an abandoned warehouse whose cameras couldn't be traced. The same building Warehouse Burn often used, according to our producer.

“Stay with you forever.”
Cole whispered into my ear, “Or at least until I get feeling back in my legs.” He shifted into an easier crouch, flashed me a quick smile. I hoped the mic hadn't picked up his joke.

Our producer stood out of sight, flapping his arms at us and mouthing,
More effing intensity!

“Stay with you forever!”
I belted. Then the breakaway wall crashed in and I slipped out of sight, leaving Cole to gape at vaguely threatening forms. The dark, hulking men could have been FBI or some kind of alien task force but were really day laborers in black turtlenecks. The cameras went dead on cue. The producer checked his flexi-screen and reported that we were already number forty-three on FeedBin.

“Intense as heck,” the producer said of either our performance or the ad revenue.

Forty-three didn't sound great to me, but he seemed confident we'd topple the teen mini-shows and the clips of skateboard tricks. I figured he knew better than I did.

He pointed a thick finger at Cole. “We need to talk before you go.”

I started to follow them but the producer waved me
away. “No, Epony. Just Cole. Vocal issues,” he said, pointing to his throat. “Don't worry about it. Separate cars out of here, and if you two are going to meet up later, for eff's sake make sure you've disabled any cameras. You're completely offline until prime time.”

I swiped Sheetrock dust from my shoulders and shook it out of my hair.

Cole was standing frozen, a spray of white dust turning half his face pale. I gave him a questioning look.

“Cole, did you hear me?” The edge in the producer's voice made me look up. Cole snapped out of whatever spell had held him, jerked his gaze away from me.

“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.”

He left to go down to find some fans who could crowd him, crowd out his thoughts, while I watched his feed on the wall monitor.

At eight, I showed up at his place, right on schedule. I knew what scene I'd find on the other side of his door: Cole crushed and lonely, afraid we'd never be together because the FBI was watching us now. They weren't really watching us. But our fans believed what they wanted to believe.

What's next?
I wondered while I waited for him to answer the door. We'd given our fans forbidden romance, underage lovers, police in pursuit. And we were only a month into the act. What else would we have to do to hold their interest?

Cole yanked the door open, surprise registering on his face. Not the good kind of surprise, not relief. A moment of confusion on my part while I waited for an embrace that didn't come. And then I saw her. And thought,
Those bastards
.

“It's better this way,” Cole said. “Better for
you
.” Then he stepped close, close enough that I could see the transparent mic clipped under his chin. “They're watching us,” he said in a stage whisper.

I pulled out of his grip, stumbled back.
What the hell?
Nobody had told me about this new direction. Why hadn't they told me?

Because they wanted this reaction. Genuine shock. Hurt, humiliation.

I fled down the hallway, downstairs. I heard him loping after me in his soft boots, shouting some line they'd fed him.

I barreled down the street and finally into a cafe. Every table monitor was playing Cole's feed. He was already back inside his air-conditioned den, reveling in the new girl's method of consoling him.

“Fake kissing is still real kissing,” I shouted at the screens.

I shot back out into the street. The late-night traffic crawled past, weary drivers peering out at the girl with bare arms and tear-streaked face. The thrum of idling engines was nauseating, the streetlights sad, dirty yellow.

Visions flicked through my head of Hayden. He'd sat next to me on the bed while I was reading, and I'd leaned
into him, thinking he might kiss me. I pictured now the puzzled tilt of his head.
“I couldn't ever feel that way about you,”
he'd said.
“Don't you know? The way you look, the way you are, it's nothing like what I could ever want.”
It was the last time I'd seen him. Even now, I could feel the stifling heat of the attic room that had been my hideout those final sweltering weeks of September.

One of the cars in the line of crawling traffic had stopped altogether. The driver craned her neck to get a good look at me. A horn blared. The woman went on staring. Had she seen Cole's feed? She was too old to care about high-con.

Her gaze was fascinated, piercing. Her arm resting on the steering wheel was encircled with a red bracelet.