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“I’ll drop you off on the roof, okay? I thought we’d miss rush hour, but looking at this traffic . . . I’m not spending half an hour on ground level.”

“Okay.” Elissa pulled her bag up from the passenger-side footwell. If she hugged it to her, she could—sort of—calm the churning in her stomach. Just a bit earlier, when she’d first met the doctor, the surgery had seemed like the answer to everything. But now . . .

ELISSA PRESSED
her thumb to the thumb pad next to the students’ entrance, and the doors slid open on a rush of chilled air that, despite all the purifiers, still managed to smell of sweaty shoes and bubble gum. She pulled the cuffs of her sweatshirt down over her hands.

The doors slid shut behind her, cutting out all the dusty blaze of the spring day, closing her in with refrigerated air and the anemic, heatless sunlight that filtered through the antiglare windows.

She had only forty seconds after entering before the truancy system would kick in to send auto-messages to her parents. Otherwise she’d have gone to the bathroom, tried killing a little time there until she was too late to do anything more than sit in on the next lesson. Instead, she pulled her bag up over her shoulder, fingers tight on the strap, and made her way along the network of corridors to the girls’ changing room. Second period. Phys ed.

The changing room was already a buzz of voices as she opened the door—a buzz that, just for a moment, dropped as she entered. Under the makeup she’d applied along her jawline, up behind her ears, the bruises she couldn’t quite hide throbbed, responding to the sudden attention of twenty pairs of eyes, as if the combined gazes had an actual weight to them.

Elissa reached up to open her locker and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts, not looking up, not letting her face register anything. Behind her, after the space of a few heartbeats, the buzz started up again.

She tried to change quickly, but her fingers were clumsy—even after three years, she’d never gotten used to those breaths of silence when she came into a room, never gotten used to being the subject of so many stares—and she was almost the last to be ready, left fastening her shoes as the changing room cleared.

“Hey. Lissa?”

She looked up, aware of her face tightening as she did so, unable to keep farther and farther thoughtWhat are youit completely expressionless. Marissa stood in front of her, sleek and tawny blond, her long legs bare between her close-fitting black shorts and her black gym shoes, tanned a perfectly even shade of brown.

“Are you okay?”

Elissa stared at her. “What?”

Marissa shifted, tucking her thumbs into her back waistband. “I just . . .” Her eyes met Elissa’s for a moment, then she looked away, a sudden irritated movement. “Jeez, whatever. It’s not like you’re hiding those bruises from anyone, you know?”

Elissa stood. A million years ago there’d been the three
of them, Carlie and Rissa and Lissa—and yes, it had sounded dumb when you said their names like that, but they hadn’t cared. Best friends forever. They’d all said it, before they came up to high school. They would make new friends, sure, but they wouldn’t forget each other. They’d stand up for each other against anyone who tried to bully them. They’d meet up every weekend, just like they had since they were eight years old.

A million years ago.

“Is that what you want to know about?” The memories made her voice cold. “Who are you finding out for this time?”

Marissa rolled her eyes. It had been two years, but she knew very well what Elissa was talking about. Back then, Elissa had thought they were still friends. She’d made the mistake of telling Marissa the reason for her latest absence. And the next day she’d come into school to be met with not just the familiar whispers but outright laughter—and echoed phrases that she knew could only have reached them via Marissa.

That was when she’d gone past a group in the corridor, felt them turn to watch her, and heard, for the first time, the murmured comments.
Attention-seeking. Sad.

“I’m
asking
, that’s all,” Marissa said now. “This is, like, the tenth time you’ve been absent since the semester started—”

She’d counted? For a moment Elissa almost opened her mouth to say . . . she didn’t know what, exactly. But oh
God,
if she only had someone else to talk to . . .

She caught herself just in time. She and Marissa hadn’t been friends for years, but their parents still saw each other—at the Skyline Club, at parent-teacher evenings.

“That’s what your mother told you, didn’t she? Did she tell you to talk to me too?”

The guilty color rushed into Marissa’s face again. “Look—”

“No thanks.” Elissa pushed her locker door shut. “I’m really not that interested in being the topic of the day at your lunch table. I’m late. I had a doctor’s appointment. That’s all.”

“God, Marissa, didn’t I tell you not to bother?” The voice at the door was as cold as Elissa’s. She looked over to see Carlie, dark and curvy, with silver-spiked hair, the standard black gym outfit making her look like a cartoon assassin. “It’s Elissa’s choice. She’ll get help when she’s ready to.”

Get help?
Fury fizzed up into Elissa’s face. Her vision blurred. What did Carlie think all the freaking a split-second , c
doctors’
appointments were for? She clenched her hands, opened her mouth—

“
Girls
. What are you doing in here?” Ms. Frey came up behind Carlie, looking irritated. “Carline, I told you to check to see who was left, not stand here chatting.” Then her gaze went beyond the doorway, into the room. “Oh, Elissa! I didn’t realize you were back. Now—girls, come
on
, out of here—Elissa, are you up to joining in this morning? No headaches? No dizziness?”

Obedient to her impatient gesturing, they were out of the changing room now and in the gym, so the teacher’s question was asked in front of the whole class. Again, Elissa felt the weight of twenty stares, heard the merest whisper of laughter. She’d thrown up in this class before—not just once but three times.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“Well, if you feel unwell, make sure you tell me, all right? Anything—dizzy, blurry vision . . .”

“ . . . like you’re going to throw
up
 . . .” The whisper—then the giggles—came from behind Elissa. Ms. Frey didn’t react.

The teachers never whispered or laughed, obviously. Ever
since her symptoms started, the whole school staff had been scrupulously considerate about letting her out of class, sending her to lie down, signing permission slips without even asking what they were for. If they, too, thought she was attention-seeking, they didn’t say so.

Sometimes Elissa thought it might have been better if they’d been less tolerant, if they’d sometimes shown impatience about late homework or made her stay in at break time.

As the two team leaders chose their teams—every girl being picked in turn, the waiting group dwindling around Elissa, the single constant—she clenched herself against the tears she wouldn’t let prickle her eyes.

Four days
. This time, although the thought still came with an icy fist closing on her stomach, she didn’t find herself wanting to shut it out. She found herself repeating it like a charm.
Four days, and someone will tell them I’m absent not because of some weird mental thing that no one can understand and that I might have made up and that I could be doing to myself, but because I’m having surgery. Real, genuine, get-well-soon-Elissa surgery. And when I come back, there’ll be no more blackouts, no more bruises I can’t cover up. It’s way too late to ever be popular again, but I don’t have to be the class freak anymore. I can be just ordinary
.

Four days, and they’ll make everything better.

After school Elissa walked out of the ground-floor students’ entrance into sunlight crisscrossed into wedges and stripes by the network of rails and slidewalks rising all around the school building, and into heat that enveloped her, as tangible as a freshly dried towel.

In the mass of other students pouring out of the school—thinking of not much beyond logging on to get the messages
they weren’t allowed to check at school, or making their way to the recreation sections of the city, or getting home and t in the morning.”eming to urning on their favorite of a billion TV shows—she was all at once anonymous, completely uninteresting.

She let her bag drop down from her shoulder long enough to pull off her sweatshirt, feeling the sunlight pour over her bare arms like hot water from a shower, the knot of tension at the back of her neck dissolving.

A whole day and no hallucinations, no pain.
After four days, when I’ve had the op, that’s what every day is going to be like
. The thought of the process, the actual surgery, tried to edge into her mind, like an itch starting to develop. She pushed it away. She wasn’t going to think about what the doctors were going to do to her. She was just going to think about the result.

She pulled her bag back up onto her shoulder, joined one of the lines of students filing their way off the platform outside the school, and stepped onto the slidewalk that would take her home. As she stepped onto its rubberized central strip, safety fields quivered against her body, raising the hairs on the crown of her head, on the exposed skin of her arms. When she’d been little, she’d always been scared the fields would suddenly switch off, leaving her wobbling, miles up in the air, and even now, if she looked down for too long, the sickening swoop of vertigo would begin in her stomach.

She’d always preferred the old-style stationary walkways, built during the colonization of the canyon, where you were protected by permanent railings that curved over your head; sometimes there were even solid roofs in order to protect pedestrians from any falling debris. There were fewer of those
walkways now, though, as the ubiquitous solar-powered slidewalks gradually took over.

The slidewalk Elissa stood on rose in a deceptively slow helix, curling around and around through the crowded lower levels to join the first intersection. Elissa changed to the higher-speed slidewalk signed
SPACEPORT
, feeling the vibration of the separate safety fields briefly merging as she hopped from one slidewalk to the other, then she was swooping fast toward the west side of the city.

As the wall of the canyon side loomed before her, the slidewalk divided, the high-speed section zigzagging farther up to the very top of the canyon where the spaceport spread out all along the plateau. Elissa sidestepped onto the slow-walk. It spiraled up, then leveled out to take her along the side of the shelf where her house stood.

A semitransparent wall ran along the edge of the shelf. As Elissa glided past it, sensors picked up her ID, and concealed gates slid open. She stepped through the sixth gate onto the cool grass of the narrow communal garden that separated the row of houses and the edge of the shelf.

A tiny stream, protected from evaporating into the hot, dry air by an invisible shell of a force field, wriggled in between the circular paving stones that led from house to house. Above the flat roofs of the homes, dusty green leaves on the cliffside plants rattled against each other like tiny paper quills, each curled in on itself to conserve moisture.

Elissa’s house stood at the end of the shelf, a narrow shrub-filled gap between it and the far wall. The middle panel of its front wall was glass, and at this time of day her mother hadn’t switched on the privacy setting, so Elissa looked straight
through into the tiled entrance hall at the central staircase that rose through all four floors.

The front door recognized her and withdrew into the walls, glass disappearing into glass so seamlessly, it looked the way ice looks when it dissolves a split-second , c under warm water. Cool, cedar-scented air drifted out around her.

“Lissa?” Her mother’s voice came from the kitchen at the back of the house.

“It’s me.” She went in, dropping her bag next to the door as it slid back into place behind her. She pulled on her sweatshirt as goose bumps sprang up on her arms.

Mrs. Ivory was standing by the countertop at the far end of the kitchen, dropping mixed lettuce leaves, cucumber, and red onion into the separate chutes of the salad maker. In the wall oven next to her, a chicken turned, roasting, its smell sealed away with all the heat and spitting golden fat. A box of lemon-meringue pie mix stood next to the multimixer.