Read Dreams in the Tower Part 3 for Free Online

recognized. And she could wear baggier clothes to make her gender and body type more ambiguous. Maybe she could borrow some stuff from Jason. Would that be too much to ask of him considering what she was about to do?
    But right now she didn’t want to think about that.
    Right now she just wanted to lean on this rail and watch the slow, monotonous rolling of the ocean. The sun was hot on her neck and the wind whirled her hair everywhere, but there was solace in that blue-green vastness; something in the stretching depths made the entire world’s problems seem small and insignificant. The oceans were old—billions of years old—and they had done this same dance while continents rose and collided, while lesser seas formed and dried up, while entire families of organisms evolved and went extinct in what would seem like brief moments to the oceans if they had minds to observe such things. Oceans shaped the land, they birthed life, consumed death—and they would probably be little changed long after the last complex life was gone from the earth. It was easy to forget about even the most desperate situations of humanity’s civilizations when you thought about the oceans.
    Eventually, though, Dellia would have to turn her back on the soothing water. So she did; she pushed off from the rail and navigated her way back to the door and then down to the lower deck, her mind never fully leaving the peaceful scene she had turned away from.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    23
     
    “Congrats on your bill passing. Glad you’re on my side for once.”
    As Chris read the message from Alana for the third time, he still had trouble believing what had happened. He had never heard of anything getting done this fast in Washington—at least not in the last fifty years or so. After he gave his presentation, the late morning vote on the Freedom of Non-Physical Persons Act had been a narrow success. A mere hour later, it had passed the House overwhelmingly. And now, a few minutes before 5 p.m., the president had given his support, and the mocking messages and calls Chris had been expecting before the vote were instead words of congratulation.
    Not that he was complaining or anything.
    Running his hands through his hair to smooth out the day’s excitement, he straightened up in his desk and made sure nothing below his lapel would be in the camera’s view; he wouldn’t want the water pitcher or one of his desk ornaments getting in the shot and making him appear unprofessional for the final interview of the day. It had been his idea to do this interview in his own office rather than a more typical setting like a conference room or somewhere outside with the Capitol building as a backdrop. This particular interview was something he had agreed to reluctantly, so he was at least going to do it from the comfort of his own desk, in his own office.
    “Two minutes, Senator Colmin,” Baz said, popping up on the wall screen across from the desk.
    “Great,” he said. “Let me see the shot. Give me a standard background.”
    Up on the massive screen his image from the shoulders up appeared in front of a hulking white marble pillar with an American flag draped from a pole off to the side. He used the screen as a mirror to straighten his collar and adjust his tie. For once, he was happy with how his hair looked, but he wished he had thought of bringing in a makeup artist: the shot was close, giving his face much more exposure than he was comfortable with at the end of a very long, tediously eventful day. But that was the price of celebrity, as fleeting as it was in this sensationalist town.
    “Do they know what’s off limits?” Chris asked. This was Bare Facts News, a citizen-driven online news outlet dedicated to getting to ‘the truth’—not one of the corporate media giants that probably wouldn’t press him on anything more dangerous than what he thought of the Anti-Corp protest tragedy.
    “I have briefed them