Dylan grabbed my forearm and led me further away from the elevator doors. “We need to get you off the streets before people start to pay attention to your peculiar outfit.”
I glanced at my clothes. They stood out like a whale in a tropical rainforest. “Good point. Where are we going to go?”
Dylan led me down one of the less-crowded side streets that branched out from the entrance. “To where I live. In the meantime, you can wear one of my mom’s outfits.”
While Dylan guided me through narrow pathways behind buildings where there were hardly any people to notice me, I merely kept gazing around in awe. Very few of the buildings appeared to be lower than fifty stories or so and they pressed in so closely in some areas that I had to crane my neck at a ninety-degree angle just to see.
The handful of people we did run into had starkly different ways of dressing and styling their hair than I was used to. Short, straight, and tidily pulled back if long, seemed to be the norm for hair, unlike the short, rigid, spiky hair more common in cities on land. None of the clothes was highly decorated or had funny sayings on it. Most were some sort of geometric style with curves dominating the edges of what appeared to be casual clothes.
“How much longer is it going to be?” I wondered, my tired legs screaming at me from our swift pace.
“Well, usually it would only be around a five-minute train ride, but taking the train would draw too much attention to you, so we have to walk.”
I frowned. “You’re not answering my question.”
I scrunched my lips to the left side in an annoyance but kept quiet. I had to admit that the allure of the city was too much to resist and I found myself reading the names and observing the variety of colors of the various different structures we passed. Almost everything had a nautical element to it. Street-level windows were shaped in wavy curves instead of squares, and names like Ocean Tower and Seashell Shop identified the buildings. The benches lining the pathways curved like the waves on the sea. No adjacent structures had the same color painted on the outside, making me wonder what the designer of the city had in mind.
Dylan stopped me in my tracks and pointed ahead to a tall white building. “This is where I live.”
I peered up at the arch above the doorway. Two sets of double doors glided in what appeared to be gold taking up nearly the entire span of the archway. Wide, broad columns stood to either side, seemingly more for decoration than support. Grooves were carved from the top of the columns all the way down to the solid bottom platform. At the top edge of both the arches and the columns were intricately carved designs to give the building a bit of character. Somehow, it reminded me of the expensive houses out east in Boston and New York City with ample amounts of charm. Trailing my eyes up the side of the building, I roughly counted sixty stories. “Wow,” was all I could say, mentally kicking myself for my lack of varied interjections so far.
“Come on.”
Dylan gestured for me to follow through the door. A wide corridor took us to a large, oval-shaped reception area and beyond that to an elevator. We took the elevator to the forty-seventh floor and took a right immediately after we got off.
“We kind of lucked out since our apartment is pretty much right across from the elevator,” spoke Dylan, punching in a code next to the doorway of his apartment.
A thought suddenly occurred to me and I stated, “No one else is home, right?”
“Nope, my parents work during the day and usually even at night. They’re serious workaholics.”
“Oh.” Inwardly, I sighed in relief. There wouldn’t be any adults lurking around asking me questions.
Dylan must have been thinking the same thing because he replied, “Don’t worry, I’ve already thought up an excuse if anyone asks me who you are. I could always say you’re a new classmate that I met at the end of last year.”
Dylan opened the door to the apartment and I was immediately stunned. The entire apartment was very modern, clean, and as organized as can be. A medium-sized kitchen to the right divided the space between dining and living. From the foyer, a step down led to a living room in the center of the large space with floor to ceiling windows. Walking down the step into the partially sunken living room, I could see two half-open hallways branching off the main living space.
I didn’t know what to expect of a home beneath the sea, but this wasn’t exactly it. Beach-colored hardwood covered all the floors except those in the kitchen, which were a mixture of white and black marble. White-paint coated almost every interior wall save for one accent wall to the left that was the blue color of early morning dawn. The two couches to my left and right matched the sterile-colored theme. Sighing, I couldn’t understand the obsession with white that Oceanians seemed to have. What was wrong with some color?
Making a beeline for the left side of the apartment, we passed into the half-open hallway. Ignoring the first two doors, Dylan pushed open the one at the end, beckoning me to come on inside too.
I slowed, trying to get a good look at the apartment. A few holoscreens with indistinguishable images of paintings hung on the wall. Nearly every one of them displayed
