Wattys shortlist 2021. One morning the sun rises a few hours early, striking levitating skyscrapers in Soliara ahead of schedule. People in the streets stop to look up at the sky and then down at their watches. Most of them, puzzled but disbelieving...
The snow Leander stepped out onto glowed, the sky painted pink with city air pollution.
He turned back toward Louis's office, but it was gone — instead, the paved courtyard of Potestas Tower appeared in front of him, and his eyes followed the glass skyscraper up some fifty stories until it — the building — stopped just briefly, only to begin again way up. The top dozen floors and penthouse dangled from the sky.
There was half a building flying up there.
A balcony at the edge of the patio glanced over the city streets. The last hints of voices carried down to Leander accompanied by jazz.
Another stranger watched him gawk at the tower from two blocks down the street. Cristo disguised his face behind a golden fox head half mask. He stopped and peeked at his watch. Seven minutes past midnight. Right on the minute, when the second hand ticked into position, Cristo watched Leander slide inside the automatic doors to Potestas Tower. He hadn't expected the tourist's arrival to be so timely.
One second later, he was on the top floor, quick as a snap, or a flash of lightning, looking out at the guests on the rooftop patio through a glass door in the penthouse. A direct link had flashed him a thousand feet up. Instantly, the music became a hundred times louder, voices yelling over it. Cristo slipped out through a door that opened itself for him. What a crowd. He slowed, aware that despite his striking appearance — with his three piece dinner suit and gold vest, his black hair and brown skin and sharp facial planes — he did fit right in with these people. Leaning against a column in the cold night air, the chill reduced infinitesimally by magic lamps, he waited for Leander to catch up.
Downstairs, Leander's shoes splattered slushy pools from melted tracked in snow on the hard slate floors. The atrium of Potestas Tower extended to high ceilings many floors up, the space unnecessarily palatial — and guarded by a teenager behind a glass front desk.
Flashes of his final moments flickered in his mind's eye when he tried to focus — shouldn't he reflect on his own passing? He oughta be angry. But it was like watching a silent movie in black and white projected on a wall. He'd seen that at a bar once — the movie projected on exposed brick, absent the intended musical score and accompanied instead by progressive coldwave trance music. And shouted conversations.
He could see Dianthea projected on that screen, the scowl she wore all the time, the way her eyes grimaced at him even when she grinned, like when she told a sardonic joke, but the smile didn't make it to those eyes.
Then she faded, and he was back in this new world.
The strangest thing about this place was that it wasn't strange. Beyond the front desk, an elevator headed down to the ground floor — unsuspended, traveling gracefully and steadily as if on rails, but it wasn't.
Yet still, an elevator. Just like home.
An urgency compelled him toward the desk — bewildered that he felt any pull at all to obey Louis's request. His own story felt muted; it really was like sleepwalking. Or like waking up from his real life to find that it had been a dream — but so was this, the present, a dream.
"I'm Leander Prince," he said to the teenager behind the desk. "I want to speak with Mr. Potestas. Louis Reveur sent me."
The teenager didn't seem interested in any of this information, but Leander was missing something else that would allow him entry. "Don't you have a mask?" He gave Leander a disapproving frown and head tilt, and passed him a white blank face.
Security seemed lax.
"The elevator will take you up. This way, please."
Leander marched in the direction he was directed.
He tried again to call up those final moments, that end to his story. The anger had been gone from Dianthea's eyes when she pulled the trigger. At least there was that. On the brick wall those eyes welled up to cry, welled up with pity. He could see a flicker of the bar behind her, the rows of liquor bottles glimmering with flashes of camera strokes. The smoke curling up from the cigarette of a friend who just stood by and watched. That other woman in black. A red neon sign reading some word he couldn't bring into focus behind her, behind her black hat.
That woman in black who was supposed to be dead. A ghost in black. Their betrayed expressions. The click of the gun that sounded to them like retribution and justice. His hand went to his chest where the bullet had been. Felt fine now.
It seemed, vaguely, that he should be angry at Dianthea. She had killed him. Shot him. He was dead. Everything that had mattered was gone, including her.
He should still be angry. She did pull that trigger.
But he had a message to deliver from a dead man, and, impossibly, that seemed important. Like it couldn't possibly matter to him — he didn't know any of these people — and at the same time it was the only thing that mattered.
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