“Wait for the system to be shut down.” Lowering a hand, as if timing it, he said, Aaaand… go!”
Running as fast as I could, I sprinted for another rooftop doorway one hundred yards away. There, I tore open the door and flew down the stairs. Finally, I came to a platform before metal elevator doors.
As I tried to catch my breath, I wondered what would happen. A year stood between us. I knew I had changed. Maybe she wasn’t the same either. And then there were my terrible plans for her father. Should I tell her? What would she think? What would she feel? Would she slap my face or try to choke me to death right here?
The doors weren’t opening. Why was this taking so long? This wasn’t good. They were supposed to open immediately. I began to panic that I had been double-crossed or that her father had discovered the plan.
From below, deep in the building, I heard a roar. It was the audience. Someone had just won the coveted Intel-Sunbeam. Maybe it was Isé–B.
The doors opened. Jumping back, ready to hit the floor and try and roll away from fashion gun fire, I saw that it was just her.
Inside the scratched utility elevator she stood in a beautifully simple near-black dress. The fabric looked like a plutonium glazed 2x2 alloy twill, and a bias carbon ribbon finished the scooped neck where, from a rhodium chain, hung two black satellite pearls. Her hair was like it had been on Celebrity Research—shorter and with tinges of black as though she too had escaped fire. On her feet she wore matt-black, handmade hifi pumps. It pained me that the right was obviously thinner than the left.
Tears ran from her dark eyes down her cheeks, and at first I thought she was hurt or sick, distraught, or that something was terribly wrong. But as I parted my dry lips to speak, to tell her how much I missed her, how I loved her exactly as before, she smiled, and I understood that the tears were for joy.
Bending, slowly, she picked up a charcoal bassinet. Beneath a soft, nano-wool blanket, she had brought our baby.