The Towering Sky (The Thousandth Floor #3)(3)

“I would vote no,” Avery butted in. It wasn’t the most popular opinion among young people, and her dad would have been appalled, but she felt a perverse desire to grab this boy’s attention. And, anyway, it was the truth.

He gave an ironic, half-foreign bow in her direction, inviting her to continue.

“It’s just that London wouldn’t feel like London anymore,” Avery went on. It would become another of her dad’s sleek automated cities, another vertical sea of anonymity.

The boy’s eyes crinkled pleasantly when he smiled. “Have you seen the proposal? There are battalions of architects and designers to make sure that the feeling of London is preserved, that it’s better than before, even.”

“But it never really turns out like that. When you’re in a tower, there’s less sense of connection, of spontaneity. Less of”—she held out her hands a little helplessly—“of this.”

“Party crashing? For some reason, I think people do that in skyscrapers just fine.”

Avery knew she should be flushing with embarrassment, but instead she burst out laughing.

“Maximilian von Strauss. Call me Max,” the boy introduced himself. He had just finished his first year at Oxford, he explained, studying economics and philosophy. He wanted to get a PhD and become a professor, or an author of obscure books about the economy.

There was something decidedly old-fashioned about Max, Avery thought; it was as if he’d stepped through a portal from another century and ended up here. Perhaps it was his earnestness. In New York, everyone seemed to measure their superiority by how contemptuous and cynical they were. Max wasn’t afraid to care about things, publicly and unironically.

Within a few days he and Avery were spending most of their free time together. They studied at the same table in the Bodleian Library, surrounded by the tattered spines of old novels. They sat outside at the local pub, listening to the amateur student bands, or the soft sound of locusts in the warm summer night. And not once did they cross the bounds of friendship.

Initially Avery treated it like an experiment. Max was like one of those bandages from before people invented mediwands; he was helping her forget how much she was still hurting after losing Atlas.

But at some point it stopped feeling like a Band-Aid, and started feeling real.

They were walking home one evening along the river, a pair of twilight shadows against a tapestry of trees. The wind picked up, sending ripples along the surface of the water. In the distance, the university’s white limestone arches gleamed pale blue in the moonlight.

Avery reached tentatively for Max’s hand. She felt him jolt a little in surprise.

“I assumed you had a boyfriend back home,” he remarked, as if in answer to some question she’d asked, which perhaps she had.

“No,” Avery said quietly. “I was just . . . getting over something that I lost.”

His dark eyes held hers, catching the glow of moonlight. “Are you over it now?”

“I will be.”

Now, in the enormous plush seats of her father’s copter, she shifted toward Max. The cushions were upholstered in a scrolling navy-and-gold pattern that, upon closer inspection, revealed itself to be a series of interlocking cursive Fs. Even the carpet below her feet was emblazoned with her family monogram.

She wondered, not for the first time, what Max thought of it all. How would he handle meeting her parents? She had already met his family, one weekend in Würzburg this summer. Max’s mom was a professor of linguistics and his dad wrote novels, delightfully lurid mysteries where people were murdered at least three times per book. Neither of them spoke much English. They had both just hugged Avery profusely, using their contacts’ funny auto-translate setting, which despite years of upgrades still made people sound like drunken toddlers. “It’s because language has so many musics,” Max’s mom tried to explain, which Avery took to mean nuances of meaning.

Besides, they had all communicated just fine with gestures and laughter.

Avery knew that her parents would be nothing like that. She loved them, of course, but there had always been a carefully maintained distance between them and her. Sometimes, when she was younger, Avery used to see her friends with their mothers and feel a sharp stab of jealousy: at the way Eris and her mom romped arm in arm through Bergdorf’s, bent over in conspiratorial giggles, looking more like friends than mother and daughter. Or even Leda and her mom, who had famously explosive fights but always cried and hugged and made up afterward.

The Fullers didn’t show affection that way. Even when Avery was a toddler, they never cuddled with her or sat near her bedside when she was sick. In their minds, that was what the help was for. Just because they weren’t the touchy-feely type didn’t mean that they loved her any less, Avery reminded herself. And yet—she wondered sometimes what it would be like to have parents she could pal around with, parents she could be irreverent with.

Avery’s parents knew that she was dating someone, and they had said that they couldn’t wait to meet him. But she couldn’t help worrying that they would take one look at Max, in all his disheveled German glory, and try to send him packing. Now that her dad was running for mayor of New York, he seemed more obsessed than ever with their family image. Whatever that meant.

“What are you thinking about? Worried your friends won’t like me?” Max asked, cutting surprisingly close to the truth.