Starlight's Edge (2 page)

“What's that smell?” she asked.

“Oh, uh, yeah.” David hesitated. “They started transmissions while you were getting chipped.”

Zee realized the burning smell must be the residue of human cells. It made her feel a bit sick to think about, and she couldn't help wondering if she was inhaling a molecule of Piper.

“Come on,” David said, taking her hand. “No sense waiting. Let's go.”

He led her to a stairway she hadn't noticed before, a smooth fold in the wall that turned out to be a kind of glass escalator. Staring down through the glass, she couldn't see any machinery at all. The glass steps seemed to move upward of their own accord, depositing them in a large, circular room like the one below. Half of the room was ringed with what at first seemed to be a series of low, curving benches that disappeared into a larger, curving tube that encircled the other half of the room. Then she saw that the bench was slowly rotating, and that it wasn't a bench but a conveyor belt. People were lining up to lie down on it; each long seat was in fact a kind of cradle. Once they disappeared into the tube, people did not come out.

Zee was suddenly terrified. A cold chill gripped her stomach. “I—I don't know if I can do this.”

He put his arms around her. “The first time is scary.
This
part is, anyway. The before part. The actual transmission isn't as bad as waiting for it.”

Zee straightened her shoulders and looked straight into David's gray eyes. As always, the connection was there, that special spark, strong and immediate. “You're right. Let's go.”

David got on the conveyor belt ahead of her. The idea of transmission and the pain it entailed still scared her, but knowing David had just gone through the same thing would make it easier.

“See you soon,” David called back to her. “In about a millennium and a half.”

It wasn't a great joke, but Zee smiled anyway. If anything went wrong, that was what she wanted David to remember: her smiling.

But nothing was going to go wrong, she told herself as she lay down on the conveyor. Everything was going to be fine. Still, her heart was beating hard and her chest felt tight. The belt inched forward slowly, an agonizing snail's crawl, giving her imagination time to envision all the things that might go wrong. What if she couldn't adapt to life on New Earth? What if she'd been wrong to think the love she and David shared was strong enough to bridge any gap?

After what seemed an eternity, she advanced into the dark tube. At first she could see nothing, and her only sensation was movement as the conveyor continued its slow crawl. Then she began to sense bursts of light exploding somewhere in the darkness ahead. She lifted her head for a better look, but before she could see anything, a domed glass shield lowered over her.
Like the lid of coffin
, Zee thought with a shudder. After a few moments, the shield began to glow with tiny pinpoints of light, like a night sky filled with more stars than anyone could count. Their light obscured the outline of the shield, and for a moment, Zee imagined they actually
were
stars, dancing millions of miles above her head. Maybe what she'd thought was a shield was actually a window. No, for the pinpoints began to pulsate, and their color changed from white to blue to violet. Zee gasped at the soothing, unexpected beauty of it.

Suddenly, the lights exploded and a searing pain ripped through her, so intense she couldn't breathe. But before she could register the full force of the pain or experience the panic of suffocation, her molecules crumbled into a handful of dust, were swept away by a burst of pressurized air, and the twenty-third century into which she'd been born went on without her.

 

CHAPTER TWO

ARRIVAL

She was cold. A needling, cramping cold that enveloped her entire body, like the white fog that clouded her vision. For a moment, she couldn't remember where she was or where she had just been. Then her memory banks kicked in and she thought, I didn't make it. I must have died.

But her fingertips were warm with the pressure of someone squeezing them.
You're fine
, an answering voice said.
Just remember what I said—be bold with your life, Zee.

Ellie Hart! The elderly patient she'd worked with as an empath at the Royal London Hospital. The only patient who'd become a true friend, and who had died months ago.

“Mrs. Hart?”

“No. No, it's me, Zee.” The pressure on her fingers increased, but the voice wasn't the same. Zee struggled to a sitting position, and the white fog receded.

“David!” She tried to stand but fell back.

“Easy,” he cautioned. “The first time can leave you a bit dizzy.” He took her other hand and drew her slowly to her feet, then folded his arms around her, warming her with his body.

“What…? Where are—” But even as she tried to formulate the questions, she remembered. “We're on New Earth, right?”

As if in answer to her question, the same digitized voice she'd heard before said, “The Alliance of World Democracies welcomes you to Transport Base One. You are currently on Level Seven. The London ghost is departing from Level Three tonight. The New York ghost has been delayed due to undersea tectonic activity and will be arriving at Level Four in thirty minutes. Please proceed to check-in. The time in Reykjavik is 19:10, Friday, May 6, 3718.”

“Why did they give the time in Iceland?” Zee asked David as they moved along with the crowd.

“Because we're in the Atlantic Ocean, just south of Iceland.”

Zee's face fell. Iceland was almost twelve hundred miles from London. It seemed her journey had just begun.

“
Another
trip?”

“Don't worry,” David said, looping an arm around her. “The ghost will get us home.”

“The ghost? Is it like a vactrain?” But even the vactrains they'd used in London couldn't have gotten them home tonight. “How long will it take?”

“Counting pressurization and deceleration? We'll be in London in about twenty minutes.” He grinned, clearly enjoying the look of surprise on Zee's face. “Just one of the wonders of New Earth you'll come to love.”

“I hope you're right,” she murmured.

She'd spent months trying to picture New Earth, and now realized she'd failed completely. The scene before her was so different from anything she'd imagined that she had the dizzying sensation of looking into a constantly shifting kaleidoscope. Doors seemed to open out of nowhere. Curving stairways banded with soft blue neon light hung from the levels above. Without walls or visible support, they looked like spirals of ribbon.

Zee found herself searching the crowd for Piper. Difficult as their relationship had been, Piper was the only person who might understand what she was feeling now, or share her sense of dislocation. But she'd lost her chance and couldn't see Piper anywhere.

As David guided them toward one of the stairways, Zee saw that the stairs were moving and wondered how she'd manage not to tumble over the edge. But when she stepped on, the blue light rose to meet her hand and she closed her fingers around a solid but nearly invisible handrail. Only when they began to rise did she see that a transparent membrane, too thin to be glass, enclosed them and kept passengers from tumbling off.

At Level Five, it was their turn to get off. After they'd both been scanned, a uniformed guard led them to a small privacy booth. David shot Zee an apologetic glance. “I forgot about this part,” he whispered as the guard motioned both of them to sit.

“Do I get chipped again? Or questioned?”

“Nope. This time it's me. Just a few questions.”

There was a soft whir as a holocam, or whatever they called recording cameras on New Earth, started up. The guard recited the date and the time, motioned toward a chair for Zee to sit in, then focused his gaze on David. Was the person with him now Zee McAdams, and was she his chosen passenger? Yes. Did he agree to take responsibility for her welfare for a period of no less than ten years? Yes. Did he realize she would be the one chosen passenger he would be allowed in his lifetime, even if they became alienated and independent from each other? Yes.

“And what is your relationship to this person?” the guard asked.

“I love her, sir.”

A tremor of emotion ran through Zee, not a surge of joy but something more solemn, something whose meaning swept far into her future, carrying her with it.

“And you understand, and agree, that you will be held responsible for any crime or trespass she commits against New Earth or the Alliance of World Democracies?”

“I do.”

“And you understand, and agree, that you will be punished as if you yourself had committed such crimes?”

“I do.”

Zee's tremor of emotion turned to anxiety. What if she did something wrong without knowing, and David was punished for it? For the first time, she understood how difficult the path she'd chosen might be.

*   *   *

The ghost looked nothing like Zee had imagined. She'd pictured something like the vactrains she was familiar with, sleek tube-shaped carriages that rushed along a magnetized rail bed. Instead, the ghost looked like a blunt-nosed arrowhead the size of an airbus.

“We're going to fly home?”

“Sort of,” David answered. “Sort of like flying. Underwater.”

The large crowd they'd been in had thinned out, and as they boarded, Zee looked again for Piper. When she didn't see her, she began to wonder if Piper had ever been there at all. The morning had been surreal, tense with emotion and anxiety. It wouldn't be surprising if she'd been mistaken.

Inside, the ghost was comfortingly familiar, not all that different from the London underground or a New York subway, a round tube with rows of seats facing each other. The seats looked like hard plastic but proved soft and yielding when Zee sat in one. Above the windows, there were advertisements that changed every few minutes.

Stopping in London? Stay at the New Buckingham Palace.

Madame Ospinskaya. Past. Future. Now. 54 Hanbury Street.

Storr-It stores it right. Plans begin at 500 yottabytes and 10 materializations per month. Safe. Insured. Reliable.

Deep D Clinics. Fast cures for your depression. 50,000 branches worldwide.

This summer, make it Antarctica!

The ghost rolled forward and Zee automatically reached for her seat belt. She realized there was nothing there but felt suction, a force pulling her tight against her seat.

When Zee glanced at the windows, she saw they were surrounded by water. A red light began to flash overhead, and a voice counted down from ten. At zero there was a jolt forward and they began to accelerate. The pull was enormous, then there was no sense of movement at all.

“We've stopped,” Zee said.

“No, we're in the bubble.” David explained that when the ghost reached a certain speed, tiny gas bubbles coming off the wings merged into one huge bubble to create a vacuum around them.

“So we're still moving?”

“Yeah. We'll be in London in about fifteen minutes.”

“Wow. If we'd had this before, I would have commuted from New York and never moved to London at all.” Her life had been lived in two pieces, she thought with a pang of bittersweet memory. There was her childhood in upstate New York, then moving to London to train as an empath and live in the residence hall. Leaving home at the young age required had been difficult, but she had loved both parts of her life. If she hadn't taken the leap, she'd never have met her friends Rani and Jasmine. She'd never have met David. Now a third piece of her life was beginning with him,
because
of him. A sudden calm happiness swept over her. She wanted to touch his face and feel his familiar warmth beneath her palm, but realized he was telling her about the ghost and smiled to show she was listening.

“… Actually, they were already working on the idea back then. They had the basics figured out, but couldn't yet solve the big problem.”

“What was that?”

“Stopping.”

“Stopping?” Zee felt a giggle tickling her throat.

David nodded. “We're going almost six thousand kilometers an hour, over thirty-five hundred miles per hour. So, stopping. Stopping was the big problem.”

The giggle freed itself from Zee's throat and became a laugh. “Stopping!” She shook her head. “Who would ever have guessed? Stopping.”

“This is the first time you've laughed all day,” he said, and Zee felt him relax beside her.

At Ramsgate Air Base on the eastern coast of England, they transferred to the vactrain shuttle and, two minutes later, were aboveground at Victoria Station. It cheered Zee to know there was still a Victoria Station, though it looked more like the transport base in Iceland than the station she remembered. Like the base, the station had spiraling stairways and a glass tube elevator that took them to a cab stand on the roof. David pressed a button and a pod left the elevated skyway and slipped down the curving ramp to where they stood. Inside the pod, David tapped information into the payscreen, then confirmed with his fingerprint. The cab rolled toward an on-ramp. Zee saw five layers of skyways, each with dozens of lanes stretching high over London.

David looked at the traffic and frowned. “Friday-night rush hour. This is always the longest leg of the trip.”

“I don't mind,” Zee said. It was the first time they'd been alone together since leaving London that morning. Now a different London bloomed, unrecognizable, below her. A London that would be her home with David for the rest of their lives. She did what she'd wanted to do on the ghost. She put her palm to his face and felt the magic she felt whenever they touched. Some things never changed. Not even in a thousand years.

David took her hand in his. “And now we're home, Zee.”