I’m walking down the hall at school when this memory comes back to me, brought to my mind by the light glancing off the perfect circle of a girl’s earring as she stands next to a window. Once, I would have pushed away any memory of my father’s leaving. I used to try not to think about when and how he left, but now that I’m planning to follow I think about it all the time.
I picked up the globe and looked to see what was inside. Something swirling, white but clear, lit from within.
“I’ll leave it behind for you,” he said. “If anything goes wrong, use it if you can. If you can’t use it, break it.” I looked at him, at his graying hair and his eyes that seemed to be graying too. The expression on his face wasn’t quite an expression of happiness or satisfaction, but maybe a little of the hope of those things. But most of what I saw on his face could be summarized in a single word: purpose.
Someone bumps up against me and then pulls away as if I’ve burned them. I look up. It’s a girl I don’t know, younger than me. “Sorry,” she says. She seems embarrassed and I don’t know if she’s apologizing for bumping into me or for pulling away.
No one should have to pull away anymore.
But they all do. It started because of my father, and it continues now because of me.
I turn away from the girl and keep walking, listening. The people around me only discuss one thing. The Heavens Dance. Tonight.
I won’t be there.
Everyone in the school knows it and I know it and I move around Mia Turner in the hall, around her long silver-blond hair and her bright silver clothes and her voice and her laughter and her group and her big blue eyes staring right at me.
“Sora,” she says behind me, just as I’ve passed.
What does she want? I turn to look at her. She was a friend, last year, as they all were. Before my father left. Before I became Untouchable for those two weeks that changed everything. Them. Me.
“The assembly is this way,” she says, pointing toward the doors of the auditorium. The stage floats a few feet above the ground, and the chairs have been arranged in rows for us. She smiles. She’s standing right next to me. And then she reaches out to me.
For a moment, my heart almost stops. Not in fear, though I’ve seen what Mia Turner can do. But because with her hand outstretched and her eyes wide open like that, she looks like one of them. One of the Beautiful People from the Beautiful Time. The time we always try to recapture, here in the Globe, with our hair, our clothes, our music, the way we talk. We all wish we could have lived then, just before the Burn and the making of the Shapes. We’ve tried to recreate the era, but we’re missing the most important element of all: the Beautiful People themselves.
Bad things happened even in the Beautiful Time, but Beautiful People always came to the rescue. I’ve seen video footage of a giant wave, of an earthquake. All those devastated citizens, all that ruined land, and then a Beautiful Person came in and made everything fine. You could see it by the way the people smiled and reached out to touch the hands of the visitor.
I don’t say anything. But then Mia moves, impatient, and pulls back her hand. She’s not a Beautiful Person, not that kind anyway. She can’t heal anyone.
Fifteenth century, I think to myself, standing in the doorway, feeling perversely amused by th
e fact that people have to move around me so carefully in this tiny space. They’re moving around Mia as well, afraid to touch her too, but not for the same reasons. Maybe that’s the right century. Maybe that’s the time for me. They worked and went to church and ate and slept. They wouldn’t have had time for school like this. I imagine I can feel all the heavy weight of woolen skirts and long hair piled on my head or braided down my back. That’s a time when people like Mia would be called witches.
Which she is. A witch, and worse.
But wouldn’t I get hanged myself the minute I appeared there? In most eras, my clothes might get me stared at, laughed at, noticed, but I’d rather not get killed.
Not the fifteenth century, then.
“Go,” Mia says, shoving me a little, and I stumble forward toward the auditorium. I can feel exactly where she pushed me. Someone else behind her laughs nervously at her bravery at touching me. I don’t look back but I stand up straight. I won’t be here forever. They don’t know that, but I do.
I might even leave tonight.
I walk right through the auditorium and back out the door on the other side. I don’t know if Mia sees me leave. I don’t know why she tried to get me to go to the assembly, but I’m not going to do it. I’m going home. The crowning of the sun and moon and stars for the Heavens Dance happens every year. I’ve seen it before. Last year, before my father left, when things were still bad but he wasn’t gone, I sat there with friends and watched the students a year older than me get chosen. The most handsome boy: the sun. The prettiest girl: the moon. A handful of others—three boys, three girls—as the stars.
My father said you could only go backward, not forward. I wonder if he was right? Maybe I could go a hundred years from now. Maybe by then the Outside would be clean again and the trees would be growing and we could live beyond the Shapes. But maybe the air would be gone, even though the president says that we have plenty of everything if we just stay inside. Maybe the Globes would be empty of life and full of dead people.
There are plenty of little transports lined up in front of the school. The assembly isn’t mandatory, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t go. I climb inside a transport and punch in the coordinates of my apartment. The transport slides up along the metal gridwork that webs through our city. Other transports, more solid and secure than these intracity ones, go outside our Globe to the other Shapes. But only politicians, transport workers, and other approved citizens are permitted to leave, and even they are never truly Outside.
I lean my head against the plastic windowpane and look out at our tiny, tight world.
My father also said this: It’s probably best not to go back in your own life.
But if I could, I would go back in my own life to three years ago, before my father was really gone. I would go back to the day when Elio Morrow and I were with the rest of the class at the weather center for a field trip, and they chose the two of us to stay inside and make it rain. The weather center director showed us which buttons to push. We sat side by side with our arms brushing each other as we took turns. Elio didn’t flinch away. This was before I was Untouchable, of course, but I still noticed.
“What color should we make it rain?” the director asked, and Elio and I answered at the same time. We both said, “Orange,” and we looked at each other in surprise, and the director was surprised too. “We don’t do that often,” he said. “Everyone likes clear, or blue.”
Elio and I stood inside. We watched our classmates looking up to see what we would do. When the drops started to fall, everyone started to laugh, including Mia Turner. And Elio and I ran out together to join them, and everyone acted like we were kids, not thirteen and mostly grown, and it was one of the last times and one of the first times and certainly one of the best times.