At last we reach the floor of the plant, the heart of the beast. We’re up above it on a kind of walkway enclosed in glass, peering down like far-off gods. There’s something very strange about looking out windows and seeing inside. You expect trees when you look out a window. Or, if your view is unlovely, then cars, parking lots, the outside of the house across the way. But to look out a window and see in is dizzying. Also, because we’re so high, the floor so far below, I can’t quite make out what I’m looking at. But slowly it resolves. Vats upon vats upon vats, pipes snaking into their tops, out from their bottoms, crisscrossing in layers of chrome and steel, bending hard at right angles and veering away, plunging into the floor only to reemerge somewhere farther along, like loons. They are punctuated at intervals even as railroad ties by bolts that rise like nipples from their rounded hulls.
I don’t know if Apple was wrong or lying or being lied to herself, but this place is not a leaky mess in need of repair. This place is perfect, pristine, and ready to go.
I’m having trouble catching my breath.
“You okay?” River looks at me, worried.
I nod. He takes my hand. This does not make it any easier to breathe.
“You’re kind of pale.”
“I’m fine. Really.” He looks unconvinced. “It’s not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
A fair question. Smaller. Dirtier. Brokener. Less whole.
Less ready.
“It’s so…” I trail off because I cannot tell him any of that, can I? But he seems to get it anyway.
“They hauled so much out of here. You can’t believe the cursing my father does into his phone every day. All new this, all new that, tear out those, get rid of that other thing. They had to fly in some kind of special cleaning crew.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess the stuff that was already here was too old?”
“For what?”
“For whatever they’re going to make next.”
And when I don’t say anything to that, he says, very gently, “What did you think reopening the plant meant?”
I shake my head. I do not know.
He smiles. “Don’t worry. We’ll find what you’re looking for.” He holds out his fists, and I choose one. He opens it, empty, waves it over the other, also empty, and shows me the first again with its prize gleaming in the center of his palm. “After all, we have the key.”
So I lean over and kiss him.
I don’t know why.
It’s terrible. Atrocious. My sisters would scream if they saw. My mother would be dismayed beyond the power of speech. But I can’t think what else to do. Being in here is so overwhelming and strange that what’s steady and safe is actually River. Though he’s new and the plant’s older than I am, comparatively speaking he’s what feels familiar and comforting. Possible.
And even though my mother would label me treasonous right now, I’m here on her quest. She started it. She’s the one who told us to find out what we could from River. Plus, he’s betraying his parents more than I’m betraying mine, and he’s done it for us, for me. Stealing those emails, stealing that key, these are the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. When I started kissing him, it was just spontaneous, a thing to do, an opportunity—and maybe the only one I’ll ever get—but now it might be something more than that because after I start I don’t stop. It was kind of him to bring me here. It was kind of him to worry about me. It was kind of him to promise me his key. I doubt he did it so I’d kiss him. But I don’t know why he did do it. Or, really, why I am either.
It’s terrible, it is, but also it’s amazing.
First he tastes surprised.
Then he tastes euphoric.
Or maybe it’s not taste but some new sense that’s feeding that information straight into my brain. When he puts his arms around me, I can feel him pressing that key against my lower back. When I put mine around his shoulders, I can feel those muscles that flexed when he changed gears. I can feel his mouth, outside and in, and his breath, bated as mine.
We kiss for a little while which is surprising because when you think about your first kiss, you think of it like a finite thing, measurable, contained, begun in a blink and over just as fast, but this is not contained. This sprawls and wanes, except the waning is actually waiting, the begging of more to come, and then more does come, and that’s all part of it, a small thing that proves to be part of a much larger, growing one. Expanding. Like the universe. But eventually, we part.