Pulse

the States, where a hundred million people lived on top of one another. She was interested in her Tablet, her music, her art, her height. Boys.
    Faith liked to sit on the steps of what was once an Old Navy, as she did now, and buy a song. Songs were cheap; a single Coin paid for dozens of them. Faith had thousands of songs already. They made her feel things, and feeling was something she liked very much. And it always felt somehow right to make her purchases as she sat in the shadow of retail wreckage all around her. She had sat in the very same spot fifteen days before and purchased something expensive, something she’d saved a lot of Coin for. It was the shipping that cleaned her out. The distance between her and the nearest State, where what she wanted was manufactured, was so great, it was difficult to connect.
    Ninety-six Coin for the jeans she was wearing, the jeans that were long enough for her exceptionally long legs.
    When she’d purchased her song and it was playing in her ears, Faith stood in her fifteen-day-old jeans and walked past a vacant store—Macy’s, the sign said—then turned sharply and walked out of the empty parking lot. Her old school, a mile in the opposite direction, had closed a month earlier as enrollment slipped below a hundred. She’d moved schools three times already in the past two years, so she was used to it; but this was the first time she’d been part of a merge between two dying schools so close to each other. Faith had also relocated twice from cities farther away, where the emptiness had pushed her family out. Her parents always stayed where they were as long as they could, but the end result was the same: they moved closer to the Western State, its shadow growing larger.
    She forced herself to forget even the names of dead schools, the friends she’d lost, the feeling of not knowing who would be missing from one day to the next. This was her reality: things changed, people vanished, everything got smaller and emptier. And one day, when no one else remained, she, too, would be forced to join the State; and her way of life would come to a close. The end was near enough; she could almost reach out and touch it. This created in her not sadness, but a reckless sense of having to fit very much inside of a little time.
    She could make out the school now, up on the hill, staring down at her through an early-morning mist that clung to the trees. She felt the tightness of her jeans and smiled at the prospect of more, not fewer, boys, because falling in love was high on her list of things having to get done in the space of a little time.
    “When are we getting that car again? This has got to stop.”
    Liz Brinn was coming down the sidewalk, alternately staring at Faith and at her Tablet, which was in its pocket size. She held it in one hand, tapping out a message on the small screen with her thumb.
    “Unless you’ve got about a million Coin hidden in your Tablet, I think we’re on foot for the rest of our lives,” Faith said. “It’s not so bad. Beautiful day. And you should look up when you’re walking.”
    Liz, who was a full head shorter than Faith, looked up from her Tablet and glanced behind her. “It was a long way over here, longer than the last place we went to school.”
    “Maybe you should get a bike,” Faith suggested. Liz and Faith had been inseparable ever since Liz’s boyfriend, Noah, had vanished into the Western State. His departure devastated Liz, left her confused and fragile. After Noah it was just the two of them—Faith and Liz—holding on to each other and not letting go. As they watched more and more people leave, they’d renewed a promise: We see this through until the end, and we don’t let anyone else in. Too risky, too painful. Better to gut it out and hold on to each other. Looking at Liz, there in front of a new school full of people who would soon be leaving, Faith wondered if the day would come when she’d find herself without her only friend.
    “You and me to the end, like we talked about,” Liz said, but then she smiled a sly smile and raised her dark eyebrows. “Maybe we’ll find you a short-term boyfriend, just for fun.”
    Faith felt a rush of anticipation. She’d recently been obsessing over the idea of a boyfriend, something that had eluded her for a little too long. She was sure this was because she was tall and lanky like a stork, and no boy wanted to date a girl taller than he was. There was also the unfortunate matter