Free to Fall (21 page)

22

“WHAT IF SOMEONE ASKS HOW WE GOT INVITED?”

“No one’s going to ask,” North said. “It’s a huge ballroom. We’ll blend.” I caught sight of my reflection in the tinted windows of the train and almost didn’t recognize myself. Noelle, the girl at the computer repair shop, had loaned me her homecoming dress, a calf-length black bustier that was in no way high school dance appropriate, and Kate had done my makeup, hiding the constellation of dark freckles across my nose under spray foundation and lining my eyes in charcoal shadow. My hair I’d done myself, preferring to have it loose and wavy around my face in case I needed to hide behind it.

North was even more incognito. His Mohawk was combed down flat and his tattoos were hidden under the sleeves of a gray herringbone jacket. Between the suit and his tortoise-shell Wayfarers and the Bluetooth earbud clipped to his ear, he looked like a prep school kid on his way to a party. Precisely the part he was playing tonight.

He was on his handheld now, checking our progress on his map. It was going to be tight; we had to get to Boston, to the party, somehow get Griffin alone, then get back to the train and to campus before the library closed at midnight. I’d left my Gemini there, hidden in the stacks, with location services turned on. North had created a program that would auto-post status updates twice in the six-plus hours we’d be gone, in case anyone was looking for me. It wouldn’t do me much good if anyone actually came to the library to find me, but it’d keep me off the radar as long as no one did. Theden’s rules about leaving campus were lenient, as long as you stayed close by. We weren’t allowed to go outside a five-mile radius of the campus gates without written permission from the Dean. If I got caught tonight, I’d be expelled.

To calm the cyclone in my stomach, I watched North, memorizing every detail of his face. Even in the train’s harsh fluorescent light, he was handsome. Classically handsome, I saw now. His skin was cinnamon colored and the corners of his eyes were angled down, but his nose was straight and his jaw was strong and the whole of his face came together with beautiful symmetry.

He turned and caught me looking at him.

“You look really pretty,” he said, touching the tip of my nose with his finger. “But I miss your freckles.” I tilted my head back and kissed his palm. His finger slid down my neck, tracing the contours of my collarbone toward my right shoulder. He hooked the thin strap of my dress, lifting it a millimeter before skimming over it and down my arm. My skin crackled with heat.

“You don’t look bad yourself,” I said, my voice airy. I could still feel the path his finger had made, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him tugging my straps down, unzipping the back of my dress. I’d kissed only one boy before North, and now I was picturing myself topless with him. I suspected both Lux and the voice in my head would reel this one in, but I wasn’t consulting either of them right now. I gripped the edge of my plastic chair and reminded myself where thoughts like that had gotten my mom.

“So there’s a nine-fifteen and a ten-oh-five train back,” North was saying. “If we take the later one, we won’t get into the Theden station until eleven fifty.”

“That’s not enough time,” I said, although the truth was I had no idea if ten minutes was enough time to get from Theden Central Station back to campus on North’s motorbike. Using Lux for so many years had completely destroyed my ability to assess travel times. Lux told me when to leave, which way to go, and what time it would be when I arrived. How little attention I’d paid to the details, trusting Lux to get me wherever I needed to go. And invariably, it had.

“It’ll be tight,” North said, “but if we have to, we can make it. Still, we should aim for the nine-fifteen.” He glanced back at his handheld. “We’re the next stop.”

My heart started drumming in my chest. Oddly, I was more worried about getting into the party than I was about confronting its famous host. I wasn’t expecting the ambush to go well, necessarily, but I knew he’d at least believe I was who I said I was. Even dressed like this, with all the makeup, I bore an uncanny resemblance to my mom.

“You ready for this?” North asked as the train pulled into Back Bay Station. I nodded. I had to be. And with North by my side, maybe I was. He slipped his hand in mine as we made our way onto the platform and through the building to the taxi stand outside.

“Copley Square,” North told the cab driver. “The Boston Public Library.” The man grunted and we were off. The station was only half a mile from the library where the party was being held. Walkable if I hadn’t been wearing three-inch heels. So the cab ride didn’t give me much time to collect myself. Two minutes after getting in, it was time to get out.

We’d pulled up in front of a massive stone building with arched windows that occupied an entire city block. It looked more like a palace than a library, and nothing like Seattle’s glass and metal Central Library back home. It didn’t hurt that it was lit up like a castle, with warm, yellow spotlights illuminating its stone face. Above the lights and the row of arched windows was the word
GOLD
projected in 3D. There was a red carpet on the front steps and a velvet rope and throngs of photographers hovering on the plaza out front. This was an odd place, as it were, for a tech launch party, considering Gnosis had made public libraries irrelevant when it started offering e-books to borrow for free. None of the old buildings even housed books anymore—not paper ones, anyway. They were basically just big tablet terminals, with rows and rows of desks with screens built in, and public media rooms where you could surf the Web and watch TV.

With shaky hands, I pushed open the taxi’s door and stepped out onto the pavement.

“Here,” North said in a low voice, pulling a second handheld from his pocket and slipping it into the small purse on my arm. “When they scan it at the door, it’ll pull up the name I added to the guest list. Jessica Sizemore. She’s an undergrad at Harvard. Her dad’s a shareholder.”

“What if she shows up?” I hissed. We were approaching the edge of the crowd waiting to get in.

“She won’t. She RSVPed no the day after invitations went out, and according to Forum, she’s still on campus right now.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “Just act natural. Once we’re inside, it won’t matter.”

I leaned against his shoulder and tried to relax. We blended in easily with the well-dressed twenty-somethings milling around us, immersed in their screens as they waited to get in.

The girl taking tickets smiled as we stepped up to the red carpet. “Welcome to the future,” she said, reaching for our handhelds. I held my breath as she scanned them. “Enjoy the party, guys.” She handed them back to us and lifted the velvet rope.

We were in.

The main event was in the open-air courtyard in the center of the building, which Gnosis had transformed into a metallic garden. The fountain in the center was lit up from under the surface of the water and seemed to be pouring liquid gold. Servers in black ties were circling with shiny gold trays of champagne, and there were tiny gold
G
s projected on the stone walls all around us. There were high tables constructed out of shiny gold Legos and standing chandeliers made of bright gold coins. “Wow,” I breathed, taking it in.

North grabbed two flutes of champagne off a server’s tray and handed me one. “Props,” he said. The next server had some sort of ahi tuna cupcake with avocado “icing.” I reached for one.

“Snacks,” I said, biting into it. “Ohmygod, this is amazing. You have to try one.”

“Focus, Jessica Sizemore, focus. We’ve got an hour to find your father.” But before the server stepped away, North grabbed a tuna cupcake and popped the whole thing in his mouth.

Now that we were on the other side of the velvet rope, I was calmer. No one was paying any attention to us, and it was easy to move along the periphery of the party, along the walkway that encased the courtyard, subtly scanning the crowd for Griffin. As we made our way along the eastern wall, walking slowly so as not to draw any attention, I let myself pretend for a second that we hadn’t snuck into this party, that we’d been invited like everyone else. It struck me that it probably wasn’t a far-off fantasy. Not anymore. This was the kind of stuff that came with a Theden diploma. Parties like these, people like this. If I stayed on track, I wouldn’t have to lie my way into these places. I’d belong.

I was between North and the wall as we rounded the corner at the southeast end of the courtyard and saw her. A beautiful black woman in a winter white pantsuit standing by the fountain. There was no one between us. If she turned just slightly to her left and looked up, she’d see me.

North heard me gasp.

“What is it?” he asked in a low voice, inclining his face toward mine.

“Kiss me,” I whispered. “Right now.”

I didn’t have to ask twice. His hands came to my hips as he pushed me gently against the wall, the edge of my crystal flute clinking against its polished surface. I wrapped my free arm around his neck, pressing my body into his as if I could disappear against him, closing my eyes as his lips touched mine. Had she seen me? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure. North’s elbows were on the wall now, one on either side of my face, somehow holding his champagne glass without spilling it as he kissed me. For a second I got lost in the sensation, thinking nothing and feeling everything, from the flutter in my chest to the static in my stomach to the tingle in my tongue every time it touched the tip of his. But then Tarsus’s face came slamming back into my brain and my whole body tensed up. North felt it and pulled back.

“I sense that kiss served a purpose beyond the fulfillment of about five of my fantasies,” he said, his face still inches off mine.

“She’s here,” I whispered. “Dr. Tarsus.”

“Shit. Did she see you?”

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “You hid me.” My arms were still around his neck, so I traced his earlobe with my thumb, careful to keep my body behind his as I shimmied along the wall behind a column.

“Where is she now?” He leaned ever so slightly to the left, as if he was nuzzling my neck, so I could scan the courtyard. A crowd of newcomers had arrived, and they stood between us and the fountain, blocking our view.

“I don’t see her anymore,” I said. “She was by the fountain.”

“What is she doing here?”

“No idea. Gnosis is a big funding source for Theden—maybe that’s the connection?” Still, it was odd to see her here, at a trendy tech launch party. Odd, and very unlucky for us.

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” I told him. “This is our best shot at getting to Griffin. We’ve gotten this close—I can’t give up now. We’ll just have to make sure she doesn’t see us.” I felt a boldness in my chest. It was an unfamiliar feeling, but not an unpleasant one. I wasn’t used to being so sure about things. Not without Lux calling the shots, anyway.

North slipped his hand in mind. “If that happens to require a few more of those kisses, I suppose I could oblige.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve still got an hour until Griffin’s speech, so he’s probably in the crowd somewhere. Assuming we can find him, the trick will be getting him alone.”

“Not once he sees me,” I said, confident in that.

It was even easier than I hoped. As we were making our way through the crowd, my head angled down to avoid being spotted, we passed right by Griffin, who was talking to a group of women in expensive cocktail dresses. North elbowed me, I lifted my head, and there he was, two feet away from me, looking like he’d been airbrushed into the room. The first thought that popped into my head was
How did the offspring of two gorgeous people end up looking like me?
The second was
He is smiling, but his eyes are sad.

I opened my mouth to say something but didn’t have to. Griffin was already staring at me, his mouth slightly ajar. “Excuse me,” he said to the women, cutting one of them off, his eyes still on me. He stepped through them as if they weren’t there. They swiveled their heads to look at me.

“I think you knew my mother,” I said lamely. “Av—”

“You’re her
daughter
,” he said, then made a sound that was like a laugh but coarser. “Of course. For a second, I thought— But of course you couldn’t be.” His eyes lifted to look past me then fell back to my own. “Is—Is your mother here?” There was such unbridled hope in his voice that my own caught in my throat. I just shook my head.

“Rory needs to talk to you,” North said then. Griffin looked over at North as if seeing him for the first time. North offered his hand. “Gavin West,” North said, giving him his cover name. We’d agreed I wouldn’t use mine.

Griffin shook it, but his eyes were back on me. His smile was kind, but his eyes were even sadder now, almost wistful. “Rory. Have we met before? I know I’d remember your face, but your voice—it’s familiar. And your name.”

“We met at the Theden Masquerade Ball,” I told him. “On the balcony.”

“You were the girl in the peacock mask,” Griffin said, and I nodded. “Well, it’s nice to meet you again, Rory.”

“You too,” I said. My nerves made it difficult to smile. Griffin seemed to notice. He glanced at North then back at me.

“It’s quieter inside,” he said then. “How about we talk there?”

We followed him through a side door and into the library’s small café. The chairs were stacked on the tables and there was a sign blocking the entrance, but Griffin stepped past it and took down two chairs.

“I’ll wait over there,” North said, pointing to a bench by the stairs.

I nodded and looked at Griffin. His face was half curiosity and half confusion. I needed to say something before his guard came up.
Please don’t let me screw this up,
I prayed. I didn’t want to ambush him with what I knew, not if I wanted the truth, but I didn’t have time to skate around it either. His keynote was scheduled for eight o’clock, and it was already seven twenty-five.

“Thanks for agreeing to talk to me,” I began. “I—I have a lot of questions, and no one to answer them.”

“Your mom,” Griffin said then. “Something happened to her, didn’t it.” His voice didn’t go up at the end because it wasn’t a question.