85

I couldn’t tell why I stood up even if my life depended on it. Maybe out of habit of doing anything he told me to.

“You didn’t feel like going back home yet?” he asked as we headed back to the Square together.

I shook my head, wondering why I was so incapable of saying no to him.

“And you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

I shook my head again. No matter how pathetic it sounded, there was no point in lying after he’d found me like that.

When we reached the parking lot, he took me around the Square to a door on the west side. He pressed his thumb on a touchscreen on the frame and waited. It took a moment to slide open, revealing a glass elevator that ran on the outer side of the building. I’d never been on that side of the lot, basically because I had nothing to do there, so I’d never seen the elevator before. We got in and the booth started up the glass well, letting the city skyline show up past the trees that surrounded the lot fence. The booth had no buttons: it had only one destina