By: Maria Brekke
“Last stop,” a frosty voice announces. “Minneapolis-in-the-Sky, 18,000 feet.”
The rocket train screeches to a halt at the top of the aerial elevator, and Tully unstraps her harness, wishing she could stay on for the return trip. She might even take the elevator all the way to the poisoned earth floor, just to avoid Clem.
As Tully steps onto the platform, a sparkly mist sprays up from the nozzles on the ground, coating her red coveralls with gold specks. Glitter cleanser, Tully realizes, and she tries to shake it off, with little success. Are city people completely unaware of what the people on the other levels think of them, or do they just not care? Thinking longingly of her clouds, Tully almost hops back on the train. But the door is sliding shut, and a girl wearing stiletto galoshes is squealing her name.
“Tully!” Clem waves her arms and runs across the platform, her raindrop coat drizzling onto the virtual marble floor. She throws her dewy arms around Tully’s shoulders, and Tully feels like she’s back at home. Her waterproof coveralls wick away the moisture, and she’s glad she wore them to the city, despite her mom’s protests. When Tully was fifteen, she started working in the test plot to get away from Clem and her aerobatic stunts. The little experimental cross-section of sky became Tully’s haven, the coveralls her armor. It wasn’t perfect. Clem would show up every couple weeks, just to prove she was better at research too. But when she turned eighteen, Clem was recruited into the climate academy and left for the big city. For the first time in her life, Tully could look up from placing a row of end-burning flares along the walkway and not see someone half a row ahead of her.
Tully was born one day after her cousin, and that twenty-four-hour setback pretty much sums up their relationship. Clem’s always been first in school, clouds ahead of Tully at flying the seed generator planes, even better at talking to relatives. Now Clem’s a star fashion designer in the city, and Tully has to convince her to upend her entire business model. Fat chance, she told the family, but they appointed her as their messenger anyway. You girls understand each other, Grandpa had said as he clambered back into his plane after dropping Tully off at the station. Clementine will do the right thing. Just help her see what it means for the farm. And there was no arguing with Grandpa, not when the farm was involved.
She still works hours there each day, crossing suspended walkways in the clouds and trying out new formulas of ice crystals and nutrients. Tully likes the person she’s become without Clem out in front of her. She’s not sure that version of herself will stick around now that they’re reunited.
Clem steps back and simpers. “I’m so glad you made it. The trip can be a little rough for people who aren’t used to traveling.”
“You mean farmers? Like you?”
Clem shushes Tully and guides her toward the constellation-patterned escalator. “Farming isn’t really part of my image.”
Tully knows all about Clem’s “image.” Not only is Clem part of the most elite climate-reversal firm in the UpMidWest, but she’s also managed to start her own clothing line and adopted three birds from a rescue. Aunt Norma won’t shut up about any of it.
Tully nods at Clem’s jacket. “Bit on-the-nose for a raincoat, isn’t it?”
“It’s fashion,” Clem says, tossing her hair.
“About that,” Tully says. “We need to talk about what you’re doing to the seeding generators; the price is going—”
“You have to see this first.” Clem grabs Tully’s arm and drags her up the last few steps, skipping right over Orion, and pulls her out of the station. It might be altitude sickness—home is 5,000 feet lower on the elevator, at the center of the clouds—but the city takes her breath away. Minneapolis-in-the-Sky is verdant, like the earth below them used to be, before human carelessness coated it in thousand-year chemicals. It’s the sort of green Tully’s family, and other cloud farmers, are trying to recreate on ground level, introducing healing chemicals into the cloud cover and carefully orchestrating the moisture the earth needs. Buildings reach into the gray-blue sky—a sky Tully has only seen in photographs. The pictures don’t do it justice. The expanse above her is boundless and deafening and suffocating all at once. It is utterly unlike the clouds that wrap around her at home, where her coveralls are the only barrier between her body and the moisture.
Clem eyes her smugly. “Just wait until you see the stars.”
* * *
Tully’s head is spinning by the time they get to Clem’s apartment. “It’s the height,” Clem says. “It’ll get better the more you move around. Put this on, we’re going to Strat.”
Tully unwraps the package on the bed. Clementine’s Sweets, the label reads. Inside is an entire dress made of the ice crystals Tully uses to add moisture to her clouds.
“Clem, this is exactly the—”
The door closes with a decisive click. One of Clem’s birds squawks from its lamp-top perch.
Tully runs a finger across one of the crystals, her touch feather-light. Most people would only see ice, but Tully sees all the silver iodide used to create and sustain it, silver iodide that is vital to the farm’s climate-renewal efforts.
You girls understand each other, Grandpa had said as he clambered back into his plane after dropping Tully off at the station. Clementine will do the right thing. Just help her see what it means for the farm.
The dress may be exactly the problem with what Clem is doing, but it’s also a piece of home, and it’s the armor Tully needs to pretend she belongs here. She has to admit, as she slides it on, that it feels phenomenal. More than once, she has imagined leaping off her walkway and into the clouds, not from any wish to harm herself but because of an urge to sink her body and mind into the clouds she works so hard to cultivate, an instinctual wish to give every ounce of her being to help them thrive. Clem’s dress feels a little bit like that.
* * *
The cloudline hovers at the base of Minneapolis-in-the-Sky, providing an intentional moisture border. The only place where the clouds rise higher than the city’s base is the Mississippi, a cloud recreation of the mighty river below. As Clem leads Tully across a bridge laid with virtual cobblestones, Tully can’t turn her eyes away, trying to imagine that much water existing in one spot. No one sees what’s left of the real Mississippi anymore—ground level is too toxic for anything but alligators and cockroaches to survive. Humans live far above the earth, on aerial elevators built over their old cities, where they have recreated the things they deem most important. Like the Owamniyomni Falls spilling out in front of Tully, a whirling waterfall of clouds tumbling over themselves into the river below. Just downstream of the Falls, a glass dome rises out of the river, splitting the clouds around it.
“That’s where we’re going,” Clem announces. “Club Strat.”
The line snakes down the club’s walkway, but Clem pushes her way to the front, tugging Tully by her wrist. Tully mumbles apologies that no one hears because they’re too busy staring at her cousin.
A woman guards the door, and she’s the first person who doesn’t look impressed to see Clem.
“Zaz,” Clem says with a shake of her hair. “Meet my cousin, Tully.”
Zaz blows a bubble with her pink chewing gum and lets it pop.
“Zaz was in the academy with me, at least until…”
“I flunked out,” Zaz says, shrugging. “Couldn’t pass hydrostatics.”
Clem presses her lips together in what she clearly thinks is a sympathetic expression. “Hydrostatics was brutal.”
“Says the cadet who graduated at the top of our class,” Zaz says lightly, like maybe once she resented Clem, but now she’s in a better place, one where she can see the humor in things. Tully wishes she could be in that place with her.
Inside, the first thing Tully notices is the way the stars somehow shine brighter through the dome’s glass ceiling than they did outside. They light up the room in dazzling celestial patterns. The second thing she notices is that everyone is wearing the same shoes as Clem. They are made of dark gray smoke, enveloping the dancers’ feet and trailing behind them as they step across the floor.
“Another Clem original?” Tully asks.
Clem smiles. “Just released this week. I made them with the burn-in-place flares.”
For a moment, Tully is begrudgingly impressed. But then she thinks about how important those flares are to her work. The silver iodide smoke the flares emit is essential to forming ice crystals in the clouds and, ultimately, creating precipitation. And here in this club, hundreds of those flares are being used up, their precious contents wasted for a gimmick. Everyone back home acts like Clem is such a hotshot, but we’re the ones doing the actual work.
“Clementine!” A man with winged eyebrows skips over, showing off his smoky shoes. “Darling, I adored your lecture on the modification of silver iodide flares for use in the deep sea. The impact you could have on ocean detox. Incomparable!”
Tully’s self-righteous indignation evaporates into little wisps of white gas—no, it’s the crystals on her dress vaporizing, dissolving in the tepid air of the club. “Um, Clem? Should I have worn something under—”
But Clem spins into a group of admirers, showing off her pantsuit. “I call it fractured moonlight,” she says to gasps of delight.
“Don’t worry,” someone says. Tully whirls, causing more tendrils of cloud to escape from her dress. Zaz is leaning against the bar, sipping a fluorescent drink through a bendy straw. “The inner layer’s waterproof silk. Everyone was wearing them last month, and by the end of the night, they were just standing there in their shifts.”
“Are you saying the dress Clem gave me is,” Tully lowers her voice, “last season?”
“It’s practically retro, with how fast fashion moves these days.” Zaz gives Tully a half-smile and sets down her drink. “You’d better come dance with me before your finery vanishes, Cinderella.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be watching the door?”
“My shift ended when you walked in.”
Tully raises an eyebrow, but she lets Zaz lead her to the mirrored dance floor, and the feeling of her fingers enclosed around Tully’s wrist is the exact opposite of Clem’s vicelike hold. Tully drinks in the stars, but they don’t hold a candle to dancing with Zaz.
What feels like hours later, Tully emerges from the smoke and glitter of the dance floor to find Clem sitting alone in a corner booth, sketching on her tablet.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Clem says without looking up.
“What are you drawing?”
Clem flips the tablet around, showing Tully a sketch. “Did you know that a diamond has a similar structure to silicon? I think I can grow diamond nanowire by adapting the Pretzing-Elodi method. The fashion possibilities are endless.”
“Are they?” Tully asks. “And, um, would those possibilities include the use of cloud-seeding equipment?”
Clem slaps her tablet onto the table. “No, but do you know how long it will take to research and develop something like this? We’re talking years, if not longer.”
The farm doesn’t have years. “What other options are you exploring in the meantime?”
Clem seems to know exactly what Tully is getting at. “In the meantime, I’m going to keep running my successful design studio, using every technology available to me, on top of going for partner at the best climate-reversal firm in town. And you know what, Tully? If you can’t support me, maybe you should go back to the farm.”
“I can’t go back to the farm,” Tully said, finally letting out her frustration, “because you’re destroying it! Because of you and everyone copying your designs, the price of cloud-seeding equipment has gone up four hundred percent!”
“You think you’re telling me anything I don’t know? I’m doing what I can to control production and go after the knock-offs, but I am building something here, Tully. You can’t expect me to give it all up! If Grandpa would just accept my—”
“He doesn’t need your charity,” Tully snaps.
Clem grabs her tablet and stands, looking coolly down at Tully. “Apparently, he does.”
Tully sits at the booth for the rest of the night, replaying the conversation and wondering what she could have said to Clem to get her to understand. When she gets back to the apartment, Clem is already in bed. In the morning, she is gone. At work, the note says. Meet you at Strat tonight? An olive branch lies beneath it—another Clem original. Tully thumbs the wrapping, then shoves the package into a drawer without opening it. She needs Clem to take her seriously, and she knows just how to do it.
* * *
Tully waits in line this time, fiddling with her collar and dusting off as many gold flecks as she can.
Zaz is at the door again, and she lights up when she sees Tully. “Oh, I can’t wait to see this,” she says, beckoning Tully inside and falling in step behind her.
“Don’t you have a door to watch?”
Zaz presses a button, and the door closes. “At capacity,” an automated voice announces to the hopefuls outside. “Please try again tomorrow.”
Tully waits in the shadowed vestibule, worried her grand statement might be a little too bold.
“Don’t think, just dance,” Zaz says, pulling Tully forward.
“I’m not sure I can.” Tully looks around for a corner to hide in.
“Trust me.” Tully lets Zaz lead her by the wrist toward the dance floor. But this time, Zaz goes around it until they reach a lavender staircase on the other side. “Let’s go down tonight. I think you’ll like the other side.”
“What other—”
But halfway down the stairs, the world flips upside down. Tully stumbles through the last few steps as down becomes up and up becomes down. She emerges onto another dance floor covered in mirrored glass—one that’s different than last night, yet the same. It’s not a dome; it’s a sphere.
The ceiling on this side doesn’t face out to the sky. Instead, it looks up into the swirling cloud currents of the Mississippi, even though Tully knows full well that those clouds are beneath her.
She tugs Zaz’s arm. “Tell me the clouds didn’t just eat the Strat.”
“Ha—I wish! It’s grav-reverse,” Zaz shouts over the music. “This side’s a mirror of the other half.”
Tully doesn’t know what question to ask next, but then she hears a screech, and Clem comes out of nowhere to claw at her arm. Tully barely feels it through the thick protection of her insulated sleeve.
“What are you wearing?” Clem asks.
“My farm clothes,” Tully says, drawing confidence from the familiar blanket of clouds. “I thought they might remind you where you came from and what you’re choosing to tear apart.”
“Okay, because that’s not dramatic at all.”
The man with the winged eyebrows pops out from behind Clem. “Is this one of yours too, Clem?”
“What? Absolutely not.”
“Because I would literally kill for that outfit,” the man continues with greedy eyes on Tully’s coveralls.
“Sorry, Plinth, but she’s one of a kind.” Zaz puts her arm around Tully.
“Actually, you can get them at—”
Zaz is looking at her like someone would look at an extremely loveable, but very stupid, puppy. “I wasn’t talking about the coveralls.”
Oh. Tully flushes, then she grabs Zaz’s arm and spins her onto the dance floor under the clouds. City people can keep their stars, Tully decides.
When Clem sets off the ejectable flares strategically placed across her dress and they dissolve into a patterned weave of ice crystal and mist, no one notices. By the end of the night, Tully can’t take a step without someone asking her about her coveralls. Tully tells them about the work she does on the farm, making sure to mention the healing nature of her work and how important it is that they have access to equipment.
* * *
Tully wakes to the squawking of Clem’s birds and the feeling that her brains are being pecked by sharp beaks.
“I’m going for a walk,” she tells Clem, but her cousin doesn’t look up from her book. The title flashes on the back of her reader: Carbon Emissions and the Jewelry Industry: From Coal to Diamonds.
Tully follows the Mississippi, running her hand through the wisps of cloud that sweep over the railing. She walks along the river from Clem’s neighborhood to a retail district, marveling at holographic clothing displays that arrange their clothes on Tully’s own body when she walks by before switching to the next window shopper. She wonders if any of the wild outfits are Clem’s designs.
The shops make way for towering glass structures as Tully gets closer to the center of the city. Clem works in one of those buildings, pioneering programs to reverse the damage done to the earth. How can these people know what the earth needs, locked away up here, as far from the ground as they can get? They’ve never run their hands through the clouds, never fed them the nutrients they need to neutralize the acidity of the surface with their rain.
Tully crosses a skyway to wind back along the other bank, thinking about her small role in healing the earth and trying not to compare it to Clem’s impact. She ends up back at Strat almost without meaning to.
When Zaz sees her, she beckons a teenage boy out of the line. “There’s no way you’re getting in, babyface,” she says. “But if you stand by this door all night, I’ll look the other way tomorrow, got it?”
The boy nods, eyes popping out of his head.
Zaz is wearing pink contacts, and her face is decorated with floral stickers. “Just wait ‘til you see,” she tells Tully. She pushes the door open. Inside, it’s like the first night at the club, where everyone was wearing the same shoes, but this time they’re all wearing Tully’s outfit. Genuine cloud-seeding red coveralls, almost all of them coated with a sheen of gold glitter. Tully feels something bubble in her throat, and then she can’t help it, she’s laughing.
By the time Clem marches up to them, Tully and Zaz are leaning on each other and holding their sides.
Tully wipes her eyes and tries to stop giggling as she looks at her cousin, the only person not wearing farm clothes. “Yes?”
“You win, okay? I’ll find something else—something even better—to make my clothes. But you’ve worn out your welcome. Get out of my city.”
Tully raises a single, un-winged eyebrow.
“Please,” Clem adds.
“Sell me your cloud seeding equipment—at pre-Clementine’s-Sweets pricing—and we have a deal.”
Clem looks so mad that Tully half-expects ejectable flares to shoot out of her ears. “Fine. But you know what? If you ever decide to get out from under Grandpa’s thumb, don’t come crying to me for help getting a fresh start.”
“Always a pleasure doing business with you, Clem,” Tully says. “Do let me know how the diamond lattice project goes. I’d like to keep abreast of the competition to my coverall empire.”
Clem swipes at Tully, but Zaz is already pulling her back down the stairs. This time, when down becomes up, Tully doesn’t falter.
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