Page 9 of Escape Clause

“I was going to say minimalist.”

“It is,” he agreed. The sparseness was soothing to him.

On the planet’s surface, there was too much of everything. People crowded into squalid makeshift shelters sandwiched among the cloudtoppers. Vermin teemed among piles of refuse. Walkways were so pitted with potholes they looked bombed. Odorous smells assaulted the nose, and noise hammered the ears. Everywhere there was banging, clanging, shouting, wailing. Ubiquitousmegacommsblared and flashed government directives everyone ignored and product advertisements few could afford.

Surface life had improved—he’d made it betteras soon as he’d climbed his way up to governor-general—but the experience of having been born a surface dweller had burned a permanent scar on his psyche.

“What a view!” Crossing the seating area, she made a beeline for the wall of glass. The sky was the only artwork he needed, displaying brilliant swaths of tangerine, mauve, and scarlet at sunrise and sunset. Even during the day, the picture varied—sometimes gray, sometimes cloud-white, often bright blue, and then, at night, deep black.

His unit was so high in the sky, city lights weren’t visible until you looked down. Then they sparkled, creating beauty out of ugliness, a clear reminder of how distance affected perception. Sometimes, at night, he’d sit in the seating pit, roll back the ceiling, and gaze at the stars.

As she drew closer to the window, the floor turned transparent and seemed to vanish beneath her feet. She let out a scream and leaped back.

“Sorry, I should have warned you,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I thought I was going to fall.” She pressed a hand to her chest and crept to the edge of the floor as if peeking over a precipice.

From this distance, the city appeared tiny, insignificant, but if you were ensnared by it, it amounted to a huge, sprawling tangled web you had to fight to break free of. “It is like being on top of the world! How high up are we?” she asked.

She wouldn’t understand their units of distance. He did a quick, rough calculation. “About two and a half kilometers. This cloudtopper is the tallest building in all of Caradonia. The next tallest building in this province is about two kilometers high. We build up. It allows for an efficient use of space.” But the buildingsalso blocked the sunlight. Surface dwellers lived in the shadows.

“The floor is solid, right?”

“As an asteroid.”

She tapped the transparency with her foot before stepping onto it and inching to the window looking down over the city’s cloudtoppers and the surface. “This is enough to give me vertigo. Is the spaceport in one of the skyscrapers?”

He nodded. “Yes. But you can’t see it from here. Come with me, and I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

He led her to the second largest of the four bedrooms. An expansive bed covered in white silky fabric backed up against a padded headboard facing a wide window, perfect for viewing the ever-changing sky. “My room is down the hall,” he said matter-of-factly, answering the question he assumed would be on her mind. They would not be sharing a room. Theirs would be a marriage in name only for the duration.

She nodded. He couldn’t tell if she was relieved or not.

Two huge vases of summer blooms identical to the ones in his lobby stood beside the bed, one on each side.

She moved to the vases and cupped a flower in her hands. Her face lit up with a genuine smile, and she seemed to glow with happiness from the inside out.She likes flowers.His heart gave a funny little hitch. “I had them brought in along with the ones in my lobby.”

A little crease appeared between her brows.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“No. The flowers are…perfect like the ones in the lobby,” she said.

He’d added them in her bedroom, trying to be as welcoming as he would be to any guest, without giving her the wrong idea. The conversation they needed to have weighed on his mind.I should have told her already.

“Wardrobe and bath are here.” He touched a wall, and a spacious corridor lined by closets opened up. He set her bag—which he still held—inside the closet. She tiptoed past him to peek into the bath and then turned around. Her brows drew together in a frown. “What did you mean byyourlobby? You said you had flowers brought into your lobby.”

“Yes, this is true,” he said, not understanding.

“It’s not a shared space? With other tenants, owners?”

“No, it is not a shared space. It is my private entrance. I own the top floor of this cloudtopper.”

She blinked. “Oh…what exactly do you do to earn a living?”

“That is one of the things we must discuss. You need to understand my position. If you’ve seen enough here, let’s go into the other room.”

In the living area, he gestured for her to take a seat and then sat a cushion away. She angled toward him, her too-large dress slipping off one shoulder but covering her knees, which were pressed together. She looked tense, scared actually, and her trepidation pricked at his conscience. Since leaving the office to pick her up, he’d been grappling for a tactful, easy way to let her down without hurting her feelings.

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