The Towering Sky
Katharine McGee
The final book in Katharine McGee's epic The Thousandth Floor series.It's New York City, 2118.In Manhattan’s glamorous thousand-story supertower, millions of people are living scandalous lives. Leda, Watt, Rylin, Avery, and Calliope are all struggling to hide the biggest secrets of all, secrets that could destroy everything, and send their perfect worlds toppling over the edge.Because every rise has a fall.With all the drama, romance and hidden secrets from The Thousandth Floor and The Dazzling Heights, this explosive finale will not disappoint.
First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. in 2018
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018
Published in this ebook edition in 2018
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
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Copyright © Alloy Entertainment and Katharine McGee 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover images © Fancy/Veer/Corbis/GettyImages (fashion model red dress); Shutterstock (all other images)
Katharine McGee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008179915
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008179908
Version: 2018-08-20
For Deedo, and in loving memory of Snake
CONTENTS
Cover (#ud1904d1d-e2cf-5a29-96ff-f171426798f9)
Title Page (#uea898371-2c2b-5627-af29-3e1ff4ed6c98)
Copyright (#ubcf0ee78-ef82-51f4-8718-f549fd275e8d)
Dedication (#uf6352bd8-f03e-5a1a-8721-38175669814c)
Prologue (#ulink_cee7e4f3-20ad-53db-a728-3178df360a41)
Avery (#ulink_f9660533-499f-5c96-8b72-bab97d4d9c98)
Leda (#ulink_48558e4d-716e-571f-88f1-4bd679f578ab)
Calliope (#ulink_25172f78-680d-5c71-8b0e-5ddb38bbe031)
Watt (#ulink_550b2787-6940-5190-843c-67e97f95e635)
Rylin (#ulink_76b4d164-b877-5e07-961b-cbdf4f624dc6)
Avery (#ulink_6db7a98f-f8fc-5948-8b69-9b255b0b1db4)
Calliope (#ulink_74b618e5-2a74-5d14-9f51-18feab9eb90b)
Rylin (#ulink_148bafe9-1ad6-5311-beee-80d2687e6bd5)
Leda (#ulink_cacbc787-d7d4-5386-86e7-6905c2b28f7c)
Watt (#ulink_4890385f-c5d8-5169-9cf8-f83f51b7ed98)
Avery (#ulink_f3a66d4d-0aa1-56de-958f-ba4cfbebed4d)
Calliope (#ulink_16774bf3-1821-5f07-a1ee-6db2d03e061d)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Avery (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Leda (#litres_trial_promo)
Calliope (#litres_trial_promo)
Rylin (#litres_trial_promo)
Watt (#litres_trial_promo)
Atlas (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Katharine McGee (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_e7d4cc15-adfb-5aac-9d7c-d50aeedf0001)
December 2119
THERE HAS ALWAYS been something otherworldly about the first snow of the year in New York.
It gilds the city’s flaws, its hard edges, transforming Manhattan into a proud, glittering northern place. Magic hangs heavy in the air. On the morning of the first snow, even the most jaded New Yorkers pause in the streets to look up at the sky, stilled by a quiet sense of awe. As if every hot summer they forgot that this was possible, and only when the first flakes of snow kiss their faces can they believe in it again.
It seems almost that the snowfall might wash the city clean, reveal all the monstrous secrets buried beneath its surface.
But then, some secrets are best kept buried.
It was on one of these mornings of cold, enchanted silence that a girl stood on the roof of Manhattan’s enormous skyscraper.
She stepped closer to the edge, and the wind whipped at her hair. Snowflakes danced around her in splintered crystals. Her skin glowed like an overexposed hologram in the predawn light. If anyone had been up there to see her, they would have said that she looked troubled, and sharply beautiful. And afraid.
She hadn’t been on the roof in over a year, yet it looked the same as ever. Photovoltaic panels huddled on its surface, waiting to drink in the sun and convert it to usable power. An enormous steel spire twisted up to collide with the sky. And below her hummed an entire city—a thousand-story tower, teeming with millions of people.
Some of them she had loved, some of them she had resented. Many she had never known at all. Yet in their own ways they had betrayed her, every last one of them. They had made her life unbearable by depriving her of the one person she had ever loved.
The girl knew she’d been up here too long. She was starting to feel the familiar slippery light-headedness as her body slowed down, struggling to adjust to the decreased oxygen, to pull resources in toward her core. She curled her toes. They were numb. The air downstairs was oxygenated and infused with vitamins, but here on the roof it felt whip-thin.
She hoped they would forgive her for what she was about to do. But she didn’t have a choice. It was either this, or go on leading a shriveled, starved, half life: a life deprived of the only person who made it worth living. She felt a pang of guilt, but even stronger was her profound sense of relief, that at least—at last—it would soon be over.
The girl reached up to wipe at her eyes, as if the wind had stung them to tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, though there was no one around to hear. Who was she talking to, anyway? Maybe the city below her or the entire world or her own quiet conscience.
And what did it matter? New York would go on with or without her, the same as ever, just as loud and electric and raucous and bright. New York didn’t care that those were the last words Avery Fuller ever spoke.
AVERY (#ulink_0ddc0dc7-8bbc-5eb6-bec3-f444fe48cc5f)
Three months earlier
AVERY DRUMMED HER fingers restlessly on the armrest of her family’s chopper. She felt her boyfriend’s gaze on her and glanced up. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, teasing.
“Like what? Like I want to kiss you?” Max answered his own question by leaning over to drop a kiss on her lips. “You may not realize it, Avery, but I always want to kiss you.”
“Please prepare yourselves for the final approach to New York,” the chopper’s autopilot cut in, projecting the words through unseen speakers. Not that Avery needed the update; she’d been tracking their progress this entire trip.
“You okay?” Max’s eyes were warm on hers.
Avery shifted, struggling to explain. The last thing she wanted was for Max to think she was anxious about him. “It’s just . . . so much happened while I was gone.” It had been a long time. Seven months, the longest she’d ever spent away from New York in all her eighteen years.
“Including me.” Max gave a conspiratorial grin.
“Especially you,” Avery told him, mirroring his smile.
The Tower swam up rapidly to dominate the view through their flexiglass windows. Avery had seen it from this perspective plenty of times—all those years of traveling with her family, or with her friend Eris and her parents—but she’d never before noticed how much it looked like a massive chrome headstone. Like Eris’s headstone.
Avery shoved that thought aside. She focused instead on the autumn sunlight dancing over the choppy surface of the river, burnishing the golden torch of the Statue of Liberty, which once seemed so tall but now was absurdly dwarfed by its great neighbor, the thousand-story megatower that sprouted from the concrete surface of Manhattan. The Tower that her father’s company had helped build, in which the Fullers occupied the top floor, the highest penthouse in the entire world.
Avery let her gaze swoop to the boats and autocars buzzing below, the monorails suspended in the air as delicately as strands of spider’s silk.
She’d left New York in February, soon after the launch of her father’s new vertical living complex in Dubai. That was the night when she and Atlas had decided that they couldn’t be together, no matter how much they loved each other. Because even though they weren’t related by blood, Atlas was Avery’s adopted brother.
Avery had thought then that her entire world was shattered. Or maybe she herself was shattered—into so many infinitesimally small pieces that she’d become the character from the nursery rhyme, the one who could never be put back together. She had been certain she would die from the pain of it.
How foolish she’d been, to think that a broken heart would kill her, but it was how she’d felt.
Yet hearts are funny, stubborn, elastic little organs. When she didn’t die after all, Avery realized that she wanted to leave—to get away from New York, with its painful memories and familiar faces. Just as Atlas had.
She had already applied to Oxford’s summer program; now she simply pinged the admissions office and asked if she could transfer early, in time for the spring semester. She met with the dean at Berkeley Academy to request high school credit for Oxford’s college courses. Of course they all agreed. As if anyone would say no to Pierson Fuller’s daughter.
The only source of resistance, surprisingly enough, was Pierson himself.
“What’s this about, Avery?” he’d demanded, when she came to him with her transfer papers.
“I need to leave. To go somewhere far away, somewhere completely free of memories.”
Her father’s eyes darkened. “I know you miss her, but this feels extreme.”
Of course. He assumed that this was about Eris’s death. And it was, in part—but Avery was grieving Atlas too.
“I just need some time away from Berkeley. Everyone stares at me in the halls, whispering about me,” she insisted, telling the truth. “I just want to get away. To somewhere no one knows me, and I don’t know them.”
“They know you all over the world, Avery. Or if they don’t yet, they will soon enough,” her father said softly. “I was going to tell you—I’m running for mayor of New York this year.”
Avery stared at him for a moment in mute shock. Though she shouldn’t really have been surprised. Her father was never satisfied with what he had. Now that he was the richest man in the city, of course he would want to be the most prominent too.
“You’ll be back next fall, for the election,” Pierson told her. It wasn’t a question.
“So I can go?” Avery asked, her chest seizing with a violent, almost nauseous relief.
Her father sighed and began to sign her permission papers. “Someday, Avery, you’ll learn that it’s not much use running away from things if you have to eventually come back and face them.”
The next week, Avery and a jostling band of mover-bots made their way down the narrow streets of Oxford. The dorms had been full midsemester, but Avery posted an anonymous ad to the school discussion boards, and found a room in an off-campus cottage with a delightfully overgrown square of garden out back. It even came with a roommate, a poetry student named Neha. And, it turned out, a house full of boys next door.
Avery slid easily into Oxford life. She loved how unmodern everything felt: the way her professors wrote on green boards with funny white stencils; the way people actually looked at her when they spoke, rather than letting their eyes slide constantly toward the edge of their vision to check the feeds. Most people here didn’t even own the computerized contacts Avery had grown up using. The linkages in Oxford were so weak that Avery had ended up taking hers out too, living like a premodern human with nothing but a tablet to communicate. Her vision felt delightfully raw and unencumbered.
One evening as she worked on an essay for her East Asian art class, Avery was distracted by noises from next door. Her neighbors were having a party.
Back in New York, she would simply have turned on her silencer: the device that blocked incoming sound waves, creating a little pocket of quiet even in the loudest places. Actually, this wouldn’t have happened in New York, because in New York Avery didn’t have next-door neighbors, just the sky stretching out from the Fuller apartment on all sides.
She cupped her hands into earmuffs over her ears, trying to focus, but the raucous shouts and laughter grew even louder. Finally she stood up and marched next door, not caring that she was wearing athletic shorts, her honey-colored hair piled atop her head and fastened with a turtle-shaped clip that Eris had given her years ago.
That was when she saw Max.
He stood at the center of a group in the backyard, telling a story with animated fervor. He had shaggy dark hair that stuck out in all directions and wore a blue sweater paired with blue jeans, something the girls back home would have teased him mercilessly for. But Avery saw it as a sign of his elemental impatience, as if he was too preoccupied to be bothered by something as mundane as clothes.
She felt suddenly ridiculous. What had she been planning to do, come over here and scold her neighbors for having fun? She retreated a step—just as the boy telling the story looked up, directly into her eyes. He smiled knowingly. Then his gaze slid past her, and he kept talking without a break in narrative thread.
Avery was startled by the flash of irritation she felt. She wasn’t accustomed to being ignored.
“Of course I would vote for the referendum, if I could vote here,” the boy was saying. He had a German accent, his voice sliding up and down along a wild range of emotion. “London must expand upward. A city is a living thing; if it doesn’t grow, it withers and dies.”
He was talking about her dad’s bill, Avery realized. After years of lobbying the British Parliament, Pierson Fuller had finally gotten his nationwide referendum, to determine whether Britain would tear down their capital city and rebuild it as a massive supertower. So many cities around the world had already done so—Rio, Hong Kong, Beijing, Dubai, and of course New York first of all, two decades ago—but some of the older European cities were more reluctant.
“I would vote no,” Avery butted in. It wasn’t the most popular opinion among young people, and her dad would have been appalled, but she felt a perverse desire to grab this boy’s attention. And, anyway, it was the truth.
He gave an ironic, half-foreign bow in her direction, inviting her to continue.
“It’s just that London wouldn’t feel like London anymore,” Avery went on. It would become another of her dad’s sleek automated cities, another vertical sea of anonymity.
The boy’s eyes crinkled pleasantly when he smiled. “Have you seen the proposal? There are battalions of architects and designers to make sure that the feeling of London is preserved, that it’s better than before, even.”
“But it never really turns out like that. When you’re in a tower, there’s less sense of connection, of spontaneity. Less of”—she held out her hands a little helplessly—“of this.”
“Party crashing? For some reason, I think people do that in skyscrapers just fine.”
Avery knew she should be flushing with embarrassment, but instead she burst out laughing.
“Maximilian von Strauss. Call me Max,” the boy introduced himself. He had just finished his first year at Oxford, he explained, studying economics and philosophy. He wanted to get a PhD and become a professor, or an author of obscure books about the economy.
There was something decidedly old-fashioned about Max, Avery thought; it was as if he’d stepped through a portal from another century and ended up here. Perhaps it was his earnestness. In New York, everyone seemed to measure their superiority by how contemptuous and cynical they were. Max wasn’t afraid to care about things, publicly and unironically.
Within a few days he and Avery were spending most of their free time together. They studied at the same table in the Bodleian Library, surrounded by the tattered spines of old novels. They sat outside at the local pub, listening to the amateur student bands, or the soft sound of locusts in the warm summer night. And not once did they cross the bounds of friendship.
Initially Avery treated it like an experiment. Max was like one of those bandages from before people invented mediwands; he was helping her forget how much she was still hurting after losing Atlas.
But at some point it stopped feeling like a Band-Aid, and started feeling real.
They were walking home one evening along the river, a pair of twilight shadows against a tapestry of trees. The wind picked up, sending ripples along the surface of the water. In the distance, the university’s white limestone arches gleamed pale blue in the moonlight.
Avery reached tentatively for Max’s hand. She felt him jolt a little in surprise.
“I assumed you had a boyfriend back home,” he remarked, as if in answer to some question she’d asked, which perhaps she had.
“No,” Avery said quietly. “I was just . . . getting over something that I lost.”
His dark eyes held hers, catching the glow of moonlight. “Are you over it now?”
“I will be.”
Now, in the enormous plush seats of her father’s copter, she shifted toward Max. The cushions were upholstered in a scrolling navy-and-gold pattern that, upon closer inspection, revealed itself to be a series of interlocking cursive Fs. Even the carpet below her feet was emblazoned with her family monogram.
She wondered, not for the first time, what Max thought of it all. How would he handle meeting her parents? She had already met his family, one weekend in Würzburg this summer. Max’s mom was a professor of linguistics and his dad wrote novels, delightfully lurid mysteries where people were murdered at least three times per book. Neither of them spoke much English. They had both just hugged Avery profusely, using their contacts’ funny auto-translate setting, which despite years of upgrades still made people sound like drunken toddlers. “It’s because language has so many musics,” Max’s mom tried to explain, which Avery took to mean nuances of meaning.
Besides, they had all communicated just fine with gestures and laughter.
Avery knew that her parents would be nothing like that. She loved them, of course, but there had always been a carefully maintained distance between them and her. Sometimes, when she was younger, Avery used to see her friends with their mothers and feel a sharp stab of jealousy: at the way Eris and her mom romped arm in arm through Bergdorf’s, bent over in conspiratorial giggles, looking more like friends than mother and daughter. Or even Leda and her mom, who had famously explosive fights but always cried and hugged and made up afterward.
The Fullers didn’t show affection that way. Even when Avery was a toddler, they never cuddled with her or sat near her bedside when she was sick. In their minds, that was what the help was for. Just because they weren’t the touchy-feely type didn’t mean that they loved her any less, Avery reminded herself. And yet—she wondered sometimes what it would be like to have parents she could pal around with, parents she could be irreverent with.
Avery’s parents knew that she was dating someone, and they had said that they couldn’t wait to meet him. But she couldn’t help worrying that they would take one look at Max, in all his disheveled German glory, and try to send him packing. Now that her dad was running for mayor of New York, he seemed more obsessed than ever with their family image. Whatever that meant.
“What are you thinking about? Worried your friends won’t like me?” Max asked, cutting surprisingly close to the truth.
“Of course they will,” she said resolutely. Though she didn’t know what to expect of her friends right now, least of all her best friend, Leda Cole. When Avery left last spring, Leda hadn’t exactly been in a great state of mind.
“I’m so glad you came with me,” she added. Max would only stay in New York a few days before heading back for the start of his sophomore year at Oxford. It meant a lot that he’d crossed the ocean for her, to meet the people she cared about and see the city she came from.
“As if I would pass up the chance for more time with you.” Max reached to brush his thumb lightly over Avery’s knuckles. A thin woven bracelet, a memoriam to a childhood friend who had died young, slid down Max’s wrist. Avery squeezed his hand.
They tipped a few degrees sideways, tilting into the airstream that shot around the edge of the Tower. Even their copter, which was weighted on all sides to prevent turbulence, couldn’t avoid being buffeted in winds this strong. Avery braced herself, and then the gaping mouth of the helipad was before them: sliced from the wall of the Tower in perfect ninety-degree angles, everything stark and flat and gleaming, as if to scream at you that it was new. How different from Oxford, where curved uneven roofs rose into the wine-colored sky.
Their copter lurched into the helipad, whipping up the hair of the waiting crowds. Avery blinked in surprise. What were all these people doing here? They jostled together, clutching small image capturers, with lenses gleaming in the middle like cyclopean eyes. Probably vloggers or i-Net reporters.
“Looks like New York is glad you’re back,” Max remarked, sparking a rueful smile from Avery.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.” She was used to the occasional fashion bloggers taking snaps of her outfits, but nothing like this.
Then she caught sight of her parents, and Avery realized exactly whose fault this was. Her dad had decided to make her homecoming a PR moment.
The copter’s door opened, its staircase unfolding like an accordion. Avery exchanged a final glance with Max before starting down.
Elizabeth Fuller swept forward, wearing a tailored luncheon dress and heels. “Welcome home, sweetie! We missed you.”
Avery forgot her irritation that their reunion was happening like this, in the heat and noise of a crowded helipad. She forgot everything except the fact that she was seeing her mom again after so many months apart. “I missed you too!” she exclaimed, pulling her mom into a tight hug.
“Avery!” Her father turned away from Max, who had been shaking his hand. “I’m so glad you’re back!”
He hugged Avery too, and she closed her eyes, returning the embrace—until her dad deftly swiveled her around to better angle her toward the cameras. He stepped back, looking sleek and self-satisfied in his crisp white shirt, beaming with pride. Avery tried to hide her disappointment—that her dad had turned her homecoming into a stunt, and that the media had obliged him.
“Thank you all!” he declared in his booming, charming voice, for the benefit of everyone recording. What he was thanking them for, Avery didn’t exactly understand, but from the nodding faces of the reporters, it didn’t seem to matter. “We are thrilled that our daughter, Avery, has returned from her semester abroad just in time for the election! Avery would be delighted to answer a few questions,” her dad added, nudging her gently forward.
She wouldn’t, actually, but Avery didn’t have a choice.
“Avery! What are they wearing in England right now?” one of them cried out, a fashion blogger whom Avery recognized.
“Um . . .” No matter how many times she said she wasn’t a fashionista, no one seemed to believe her. Avery turned a pleading glance toward Max—not that he would really be any help—and her attention fastened on the neckline of his flannel shirt. Most of the buttons that marched up the collar were dark brown, but one was much lighter, a soft fawn color. He must have lost that button and replaced it with another, not caring that it didn’t go with the others.
“Clashing buttons,” she heard herself say. “I mean, buttons that don’t match. On purpose.”
Max caught her eye, one eyebrow lifted in amusement. She forced herself to look away so she wouldn’t burst out laughing.
“And who is this? Your new boyfriend?” another of the bloggers asked, causing the group’s focus to swerve hungrily toward Max. He gave a genial shrug.
Avery couldn’t help noticing that her parents’ gazes had hardened as they focused on Max. “Yes. This is my boyfriend, Max,” she declared.
There was a mild uproar at her words, and before Avery could say anything else, Pierson had put a protective arm around her. “Thank you for your support! We are so glad to have Avery back in New York,” he said again. “And now, if you’ll excuse us, we need some time alone as a family.”
“Clashing buttons?” Max fell into step alongside her. “Wonder where that came from.”
“You should be thanking me. I just made you the most stylish guy in New York,” Avery joked, reaching for his hand.
“Exactly! How will I handle that kind of pressure?”
As they walked toward the waiting hover, Avery’s mind drifted back to her father’s final words. Some time alone as a family. Except they weren’t a family right now, because they were missing one very important person.
Avery knew she shouldn’t be thinking about him, yet she couldn’t help wondering what Atlas was doing, half a world away.
LEDA (#ulink_9b81d9e8-9b40-516a-9958-7c054d5dbe75)
“ISN’T THIS NICE?” Leda Cole’s mom attempted, her tone remorselessly upbeat.
Leda cast a brief, disinterested glance around. She and Ilara were standing in waist-deep warm water, surrounded by the jagged boulders of the Blue Lagoon. The ceiling of the 834th floor soared overhead, colored a cheerful azure that clashed with Leda’s mood.
“Sure,” she mumbled, ignoring the hurt that darted over her mom’s features. She hadn’t wanted to come out today at all. She’d been perfectly fine in her room, alone with her slender, solitary sadness.
Leda knew that her mom was only trying to help. She wondered if this forced outing had been suggested by Dr. Vanderstein, the psychiatrist who treated both of them. Why don’t you try some “girl time”? Leda could hear him saying, with invisible air quotes. Ilara would have seized gratefully on the idea. Anything to drag her daughter out of this unshakable dark mood.
A year ago it would have worked. Leda so rarely got a chunk of her mom’s time; she would have been grateful just for the chance to hang out with her. And the old Leda had always loved going to a hot new spa or restaurant before anyone else.
The Blue Lagoon had opened just a few days ago. After last year’s unexpected earthquake, which sent most of Iceland sliding back into the ocean, a development company had bought the now submerged lagoon from the bewildered Icelandic government at a bargain price. They’d spent months excavating every last sliver of volcanic rock, shipping the whole thing to New York, and re-creating it here, stone by stone.
Typical New Yorkers, forever determined to bring the world to them, as if they couldn’t be bothered to leave their tiny island. Whatever you have, they seemed to be saying to the rest of the world, we can build it here—and better.
Leda used to possess that same kind of cool self-confidence. She had been the girl who knew everything about everyone, who dispensed gossip and favors, who tried to bend the universe to her will. But that was before.
She ran a hand dispassionately through the water, wondering if it was treated with light-bending particles to make it that impossible blue color. Unlike the original lagoon, this one wasn’t filled from a real hot spring. It was just heated tap water, infused with multivitamins and a hint of aloe, supposedly much better than that old foul-smelling sulfuric stuff.
Leda had also heard a rumor that the lagoon managers pumped illegal relaxants into the air: nothing serious, just enough to make up 0.02 percent of the air composition. Well, she could use a little relaxing right now.
“I saw that Avery’s back in town,” Ilara ventured, and the name splintered through Leda’s protective shell of numbness.
It had been easy not to think about Avery while she was in England. Avery had never been reliable at vid-chatting; as long as Leda replied to her occasional one-line message, Avery was distracted into thinking that everything was fine. But what if seeing Avery again dredged up all those memories—the ones Leda forced herself not to think about, the ones she had buried deep within her, in the pitch-darkness—
No, she told herself, Avery wouldn’t want to think about the past any more than Leda did. She was with Max now.
“She has a new boyfriend, right?” Ilara fiddled with the strap of her black one-piece. “Do you know anything about him?”
“A little. His name is Max.”
Her mom nodded. They both knew that the old Leda would have bubbled over at the question, offering various conjectures and speculation about Max, and whether or not he was good enough for her best friend. “What about you, Leda? I haven’t heard you talk about any boys lately,” her mom went on, even though she knew perfectly well that Leda had been alone all summer.
“That’s because there’s nothing to talk about.” Leda’s jaw tightened, and she sank a little lower in the water.
Ilara hesitated, then apparently decided to forge ahead. “I know you’re still not over Watt, but maybe it’s time to—”
“Seriously, Mom?” Leda snapped.
“You’ve had such a rough year, Leda; I just want you to be happy! And Watt . . .” She paused. “You never really told me what happened with him.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Before her mom could press her further, Leda held her breath and ducked all the way under the surface of the lagoon, not caring that the weird vitamins would make her hair crunchy. The water felt warm and pleasantly quiet, stifling all sound. She wished she could stay submerged forever, down here where there were no failures or pains, no mistakes and misunderstandings, no wrong decisions. Wash me and I shall be clean, she remembered from her days at Sunday school, except Leda would never be clean, not if she stayed under forever. Not after what she had done.
First there had been that whole mess with Avery and Atlas. Hard to believe now, but Leda used to like Atlas—even, foolishly, thought that she loved him. Until she learned that he and Avery were secretly together. Leda flinched, remembering how she’d confronted Avery about it on the roof, the night when everything went so terribly wrong.
Their friend Eris had tried to calm down Leda, despite Leda’s shouts that she should back off. When Eris came close, Leda pushed her away—and inadvertently pushed her off the side of the Tower.
After that, it was no surprise that Avery wanted to leave New York. And Avery didn’t even know the full story. Only Leda had learned the darkest and most shameful part of the truth.
Eris had been Leda’s half sister.
Leda found out last winter, from Eris’s ex-girlfriend, Mariel Valconsuelo. Mariel had told her about it at the launch party for the new Dubai tower—right before she drugged Leda and left her for dead, abandoning her at the water’s edge during a rising tide.
The truth of Mariel’s words had resonated in Leda with sickening finality. It made so much more sense than what she thought was going on: that Eris was secretly having an affair with Leda’s dad. Instead, Eris and Leda shared a dad; and worse, Eris had known the truth before she died. Leda realized that now. It was what Eris had been trying to tell her, that night on the roof, which Leda so drastically misunderstood.
The knowledge that she’d killed her own sister burned Leda from within. She wanted to pound her fists and scream until the sky split open. She couldn’t sleep, haunted by plaintive images of Eris up on the roof, staring balefully at her with those amber-flecked eyes.
There was only one way to find relief from this kind of pain, and Leda had sworn never to touch it again. But she couldn’t help herself. With a shaking voice, Leda pinged her old drug dealer.
She took more and more pills, mixing and combining them with a shocking recklessness. She didn’t care what the hell she took as long as it numbed her. And then, as she’d probably known deep down that she would, Leda took one too many pills.
She was missing for an entire day. When her mom found her the next morning, Leda was curled atop her bed, her jeans and her shoes still on. At some point Leda must have gotten a nosebleed. The blood had trailed down her shirt to crust in sticky flakes all over her chest. Her forehead felt clammy and damp with sweat.
“Where were you?” her mom cried out, horrified.
“I don’t know,” Leda admitted. There was a flutter in the empty cavity of her chest where her heart should have been. The last thing she really remembered was getting high with her old dealer, Ross. She couldn’t account for anything else in the last twenty-four hours; she didn’t even know how she had managed to drag herself home.
Her parents sent her to rehab, terrified that Leda had meant to kill herself. Maybe, on some subconscious level, she had. She would only be finishing what Mariel started.
And then, to Leda’s surprise, she learned that Mariel was dead too.
In the aftermath of that terrifying confrontation in Dubai, Leda had set an i-Net alert to flag any mentions of Mariel’s name. She’d never expected it to catch an obituary. But one day in rehab, she found the obit waiting in her inbox: Mariel Arellano Valconsuelo, age 17, has gone to the Lord. She is survived by her parents, Eduardo and Marina Valconsuelo, and her brother Marcos. . . .
Has gone to the Lord. That was even more vague than the usual passed away or died suddenly. Leda had no idea what had happened to Mariel, whether she’d been in an accident or suffered a sudden illness. Perhaps she too had turned to drugs—out of grief at losing Eris, or regret for what she’d done to Leda in Dubai.
At the news of Mariel’s death, a chilling new fear began to seep into Leda. It felt oddly like some kind of omen, like a terrible portent of things to come.
“I need to get better,” she announced to her doctor that afternoon.
Dr. Reasoner smiled. “Of course, Leda. We all want that for you.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Leda insisted, almost frantic. “I’m caught in this vicious cycle of hurt, and I want to break away from it, but I don’t know how!”
“Life is hard, and drugs are easy. They insulate you from real life, protect you from feeling anything too deeply,” Dr. Reasoner said softly. Leda caught her breath, wishing she could explain that her problem was more than just drugs. It was the gaping vortex of darkness within her that seemed to pull her, and everyone around her, inexorably downward.
“Leda,” the doctor went on, “you need to break the emotional patterns that cause your addiction, and start over. Which is why I’ve recommended that your parents send you to boarding school when you’ve finished your treatment here. You need a fresh start.”
“I can’t go to boarding school!” Leda couldn’t stand the thought of being away from her friends—or her family, as broken and fragile as it was.
“Then the only way you can escape this cycle is with a complete and total overhaul.”
Dr. Reasoner explained that Leda would have to amputate the poisoned parts of her life, like a surgeon with a scalpel, and move forward with whatever remained. She needed to cut out anything that might trigger her problematic behavior, and rebuild.
“What about my boyfriend?” Leda had whispered, and Dr. Reasoner sighed. She had actually met Watt earlier that year, when he came to Leda’s rehab check-in.
“I think that Watt is the worst trigger of them all.”
Even amid the blind haze of her pain, Leda realized that the doctor was right. Watt knew her—really knew her, beneath every last scrap of deceit, all her insecurities and fears, all the terrible things she had done. Watt was too tangled up in who she had been, and Leda needed to focus on who she was becoming.
So when she got back from rehab, she broke up with Watt for good.
Leda’s thoughts were interrupted by a bright-red notification flashing in the corner of her vision. “Look! It’s time for our massages!” Ilara exclaimed, glancing hopefully at her daughter.
Leda tried to muster up a smile, though she didn’t really care about massages anymore. Massages were something that had belonged to the old Leda.
She waded through the water after her mom, past the mud mask station and carved ice bar to the cordoned-off area reserved for private spa treatments. They stepped through an invisible sound barrier, and the laughter and voices of the Blue Lagoon cut off sharply, replaced by harp music that was piped in through speakers.
Two flotation mats were arranged in the sheltered space, each anchored to the bottom of the pool with an ivory ribbon. Leda froze with her hands on her mat. Suddenly, all she could see was the cream-colored ribbon of Eris’s scarf, fluttering against her red-gold hair as she tumbled into the darkness. The scarf that Leda had so drastically misinterpreted, because it was a gift from Leda’s dad—
“Leda? Is everything okay?” her mom asked, her brow furrowed in concern.
“Of course,” Leda said stiffly, and she hauled herself onto her massage mat. It began heating up, its sensors determining where she was sore and customizing her treatment.
Leda tried to force her eyes shut and relax. Everything would be fine, now that all the darkness of last year was behind her. She wouldn’t let the mistakes of her past weigh her down.
She let her hands trail in the artificially blue waters of the lagoon, trying to empty her mind, but her fingers kept splaying and then closing anxiously into a fist.
I’ll be fine, she repeated to herself. As long as she kept herself remote, cut away from anything that might trigger her old addictions, she would be safe from the world.
And the world would be safe from her.
CALLIOPE (#ulink_0d552e21-a385-58c2-bcac-492e6291358a)
CALLIOPE BROWN LEANED her palms on the cast-iron railing, looking down at the street seventy stories below.
“Oh, Nadav!” her mom, Elise, exclaimed behind her. “You were right. This is absolutely perfect for the wedding reception.”
They were standing on the outdoor terrace of the Museum of Natural History: a real exposed terrace, its doors thrown open to the syrupy golden air of September. The sky gleamed with the polished brilliance of enamel. This was one of the very last floors where you could actually step outside. Any higher and the terraces were no longer real terraces, just rooms with a nice view, enclosed in polyethylene glass.
Calliope’s soon-to-be stepsister, Nadav’s daughter, Livya, gave a little ooh of approval from where she stood near the doors. Calliope didn’t bother turning around. She was getting pretty tired of Livya, though she did her utmost to hide the feeling.
She and Livya were never going to be friends. Livya was an insufferable rule follower, the type of girl who still sent embossed thank-you notes and gave a shrill fake laugh whenever one of their teachers told a lame joke. Worse, there was something unavoidably sly and beady-eyed about her. Calliope had the sense that if you whispered secrets behind a closed door, Livya would be the one with her ear pressed hungrily to the keyhole.
She heard Nadav say something indistinguishable behind her, probably another quiet I love you to Elise. Poor Nadav. He really had no idea what he’d gotten into when he proposed to Calliope’s mom at the Fullers’ Dubai launch party. He couldn’t know that Elise was a professional at getting engaged, that his was the fourteenth proposal she’d received in the past few years.
When Calliope was a child, living in London, her mother had worked as a personal assistant to a cold, wealthy woman named Mrs. Houghton, who claimed to be descended from the aristocracy. Whether or not that was even true—which Calliope doubted—it certainly didn’t give Mrs. Houghton the right to abuse Calliope’s mom the way she did. Eventually the situation reached a breaking point, and Calliope and Elise ran away from London. Calliope was only eleven.
They had embarked upon a life of glamorous nomadism: jetting around the world, using their wits and beauty to, as Elise liked to phrase it, relieve wealthy people of their excess wealth. One of their many strategies for doing so was a proposal. Elise would trap someone into loving her, get engaged, then take the ring and run before the wedding. But it wasn’t just fake engagements; over the years, Elise and her daughter had fabricated all types of stories, from long-lost relatives to investment scams, tales of tears and passion—whatever it took to make people dip into their bitbanc accounts. The moment they had separated the mark from his or her money, Calliope and Elise would disappear.
It wasn’t easy slipping off the grid like that, not in this day and age. But they were very, very good at it. Calliope had been caught only once, and she still didn’t know how it had happened.
It was the night of the Dubai party, just after Nadav and Elise had gotten engaged—after Elise had turned to Calliope and offered to stay in New York for real. To actually go through with the wedding and live here, instead of taking the first train away. Calliope’s blood pounded in excitement at the prospect. She had been feeling a strange urge lately to settle down, to live a real life, and New York seemed like the perfect place to do it.
Then Avery Fuller had confronted her.
“I know the truth about you and your mom. So now you’re both going to get the hell out of New York,” Avery had threatened, unbearably icy and distant. Calliope knew then that she had to back down. She didn’t have a choice.
Until a few hours later, when she saw Avery and Atlas kissing, and realized she had something on Avery that was just as treacherous as what Avery had on her.
She’d confronted Avery about it back in New York. “I’m not going anywhere,” she’d declared. “And if you tell anyone what you know about me, I’ll tell what I know about you. You can take me down, but you’d better believe you’re going down with me.” Avery had just looked at Calliope with weary red-rimmed eyes, as if she weren’t even seeing her: as if Calliope were as insubstantial as a ghost.
Calliope hadn’t realized back then what she was signing on for, staying in New York and playing out this con. She should have paid more attention to her mom’s narrative. Elise always tailored their backstory for whomever she was trying to target—and for intense, soft-spoken Nadav, the quiet cybernetics engineer, Elise had gone all out. She presented herself and Calliope as a pair of sweet, serious, bleeding-heart philanthropists who had traveled the world for years, volunteering for various causes.
Calliope got to stay in New York and live a stable, “normal” life for the first time in years. But it came with a tremendous price tag: She couldn’t be herself.
Although, was anyone really themselves in New York? Wasn’t this the city full of people from nowhere, people who remade themselves the moment they arrived? Calliope glanced down at the twin rivers, flowing around Manhattan like the cold River Lethe—as if the moment you crossed them, your entire past became irrelevant, and you were reborn as someone new.
That was what she loved about New York. That feeling of utter aliveness, a rush and flow of ruthless, furious energy. That New York belief that this was the center of the world, and god help you if you were anywhere else.
She glanced in resignation at her costume—she refused to think of it as her outfit, because it was nothing she would have chosen for herself—a tailored knee-length dress and low kitten heels. Her rich brown hair was pulled into a low ponytail, showing off a pair of modest aquamarine earrings. The whole thing was ladylike and elegant, and excruciatingly dull.
She had tried at first to push the limits of Nadav’s tolerance. After all, he was engaged to her mom, not to Calliope. Why should he care if she wore tight dresses and stayed out late? He’d seen her at the Under the Sea ball and the Dubai party. Surely he knew that Elise’s daughter wasn’t as well-behaved as Elise was—or rather, as she was pretending to be.
Yet Nadav had quickly made it clear that he expected Calliope to follow the same rules as Livya. Everything about him was direct and uncompromising. He seemed to view the entire world like a computer problem, in stark black and white. Unlike Calliope and her mom, who operated in shades of gray.
For months, Calliope had thrown herself headfirst into this part. She’d kept her head down, actually studied at school, obeyed curfew. But it had been a long time, much longer than she’d ever kept up any con, and Calliope was starting to chafe beneath her constraints. She felt as if she were losing herself in this never-ending performance—drowning in it, even.
She leaned her elbows onto the railing. The wind teased at her hair, tugged at the fabric of her dress. A shard of doubt had wiggled into her mind, and she couldn’t seem to dislodge it. Was staying in New York truly worth all this?
The sun had lowered in the distance, a furious golden blaze above the dragon-back skyline of Jersey. But the city showed no signs of slowing down. Autocars moved in coordinated strands along the West Side Highway. Motes of the setting sun danced over the Hudson, glazing it a fine warm bronze. Down in the river, an old ship had been repurposed into a bar, where New Yorkers stubbornly clutched their beers as the waves buffeted them. Calliope had a sudden, fervent urge to be down there among them, caught up in the laughter and the rocking of the boat—instead of standing up here like a quiet, breathing statue.
“I was thinking the guests could do cocktail hour out here, while we’re finishing our photos,” Nadav was saying. The corners of his mouth almost, but not quite, turned up in a smile.
Elise clapped her hands girlishly. “I love it!” she exclaimed. “Of course, it won’t work if we end up with a rain day, but—”
“I’ve already filed our weather request with the Metropolitan Weather Bureau,” Nadav cut in eagerly. “It should be a perfect evening, just like this one.” He threw his arm out as if offering the sunset as a present, which Calliope supposed was exactly what he was doing.
She should have known that you could purchase good weather on your wedding day, she thought wryly. Everything in New York was for sale, in the end.
Elise held up a hand in protest. “You shouldn’t have! I can’t imagine how much that must have cost—you have to cancel it and donate that money instead. . . .”
“Absolutely not,” Nadav countered, leaning in to kiss Calliope’s mom. “For once, everything is going to be about you.”
Calliope just barely refrained from rolling her eyes. As if everything wasn’t always about Elise and what she wanted. Nadav had no idea that he was falling for one of the world’s most basic manipulation tricks: reverse psychology. With certain people, the more you begged them not to spend money on you, the more determined they became to do exactly that.
The museum’s event planner ducked out onto the terrace to inform them that the appetizer tasting was ready. As they began to file through the doors, Calliope cast a lingering look over her shoulder, at the great wide expanse of sky. Then she turned to walk with dutiful, mechanical steps back inside.
WATT (#ulink_41c895f0-c17c-540f-9199-fb833d83e015)
IT WAS FRIDAY evening, and Watzahn Bakradi was doing the same thing he did every Friday. He was out at a bar.
Tonight’s bar of choice was called Helipad. The midTower clientele probably thought that was some kind of hilarious hipster irony, but Watt had another theory: It was called Helipad because no one had bothered to name it anything more creative.
Though Watt had to admit that this place was pretty cool. During the day it was a real, functioning helipad—there were actual skid marks on the gray carbon-composite floor, mere hours old—until every night after the final copter departure, when it transformed into an illicit bar.
The ceiling soared above them like a cavernous steel rib cage. Behind a folding table, human bartenders mixed drinks out of coolers: No one dared bring a bot-tender up here, because a bot would report all the safety violations. Dozens of young people, dressed in midriff-baring tops or flickering instaprinted T-shirts, clustered in the center of the space. The air hummed with excitement and attraction and the low pulse of speakers. Most striking of all, though, were the helipad’s main double doors—which had been thrown open jaggedly, as if an enormous shark had taken a bite out of the Tower’s exterior wall. The cool night air whipped around the side of the building. Watt could hear it beneath the music, an odd disembodied hum.
The partygoers kept glancing that way, their gazes drawn to the velvety night sky, but no one ventured too close. There was an unspoken rule to stay on this side of the red-painted safety line, about twenty meters from the gaping edge of the hangar.
Any closer and people might think you were planning to jump.
Watt had heard that copters did sometimes, unpredictably, land here at night, for patients with medical emergencies. If that happened, the entire bar would pick up and evacuate with four minutes’ notice. The type of people who came here didn’t mind the uncertainty. That was part of the appeal: the thrill of flirting with danger.
He shifted his weight, holding a frosted beer bottle determinedly in one hand. It wasn’t his first of the evening. When he began coming out like this, right after Leda broke up with him, he would skulk around the edges of whatever bar he’d come to, trying to conceal his hurt, which only made it hurt worse. Now at least the wound was scarred over enough for him to stand at the center of the crowd. It made Watt feel marginally less lonely.
Your blood alcohol levels are higher than the legal limit, reported Nadia, the quantum computer embedded in Watt’s brain. She projected the words over his contacts like an incoming flicker, communicating the way she always did when Watt was in a public setting.
Tell me something I don’t know, Watt thought somewhat immaturely.
I just worry about you drinking alone.
I’m not drinking alone, Watt pointed out mirthlessly. All these people are here with me.
Nadia didn’t laugh at the joke.
Watt’s gaze was drawn to a pretty, long-limbed girl with olive skin. He tossed his empty beer bottle into the recycle chute and started over.
“Want to dance?” he asked once he was standing next to her. Nadia had gone utterly silent. Come on, Nadia. Please.
The girl pulled her lower lip into her teeth and glanced around. “No one else is dancing. . . .”
“Which is why we should be the first,” Watt countered, just as the music abruptly switched tracks to a grating pop song.
The girl’s reluctance visibly melted away, and she laughed. “This is actually my favorite song!” she exclaimed, taking Watt’s hand.
“Really?” Watt asked, as if he didn’t already know. It was because of him—well, because of Nadia—that the song was playing. Nadia had hacked the girl’s page on the feeds to determine her favorite music, then hijacked the bar’s speakers to play it, all in less than a second.
Thanks, Nadia.
Are you sure you want to thank me? This song is garbage, Nadia shot back, so vehemently that Watt couldn’t help cracking a smile.
Nadia was Watt’s secret weapon. Everyone could search the i-Net on their computerized contacts, of course, but even the latest contacts operated by voice-command—which meant that if you wanted to look something up, you had to say it aloud, the way you sent a flicker. Only Watt could search the i-Net in surreptitious silence, because only Watt had a computer embedded in his brain.
Whenever Watt met someone, Nadia would instantly scan the girl’s page on the feeds, then determine what he should say in order to win her over. Maybe the girl was a tattooed graphic artist, and Watt would pretend to love old 2-D sketches and small-batch whiskey. Maybe she was a foreign exchange student, and Watt would act urbane and sophisticated; or maybe she was a passionate political advocate, and Watt would claim to espouse her cause, whatever it was. The script always changed, but in each case, it was easy to follow.
These girls were all looking for someone like them. Someone who echoed their own opinions, who said what they wanted to hear, who didn’t push them or contradict them. Leda was the only girl Watt had ever met who didn’t want that, who actually preferred to be called out on her bullshit.
He forced away the thought of Leda, focusing on the bright-eyed girl before him.
“I’m Jaya,” she said, stepping closer and draping her arms around Watt’s shoulders.
“Watt.”
Nadia provided him with a few conversation starters, questions about Jaya’s interests or her family, but Watt wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. “I have to leave soon,” he heard himself say.
Wow, really jumping the gun tonight, aren’t you? Nadia remarked drily. He didn’t bother to reply.
Jaya startled a little, but Watt quickly forged ahead. “I’m fostering a rescue puppy from the shelter,” he said, “and I need to go check on him. I have one of those pet-minder bots, but I still feel weird leaving it with him. He’s so young, you know?”
Jaya’s expression had instantly softened. Her dream was to be a veterinarian. “Of course I understand. What kind of puppy?”
“We think he’s a border terrier, but we aren’t totally sure. Apparently he was found alone in Central Park.” For some reason the lie tasted rancid in Watt’s mouth.
“No way! I have a border terrier rescue too! His name is Frederick,” Jaya exclaimed. “They found him under the old Queensboro Bridge.”
“What a coincidence,” Watt said flatly.
Jaya didn’t seem to notice his lack of surprise. She looked at him through her thick fluttering lashes. “Want me to come help? I’m really good with rescues,” she offered.
It was exactly what Watt had been fishing for, yet now that Jaya had suggested it, he was shockingly uninterested. He felt as if nothing or no one would surprise him ever again.
“I think I’ll be okay,” he offered. “But thanks.”
Jaya recoiled. “Okay, then,” she said coolly, and stalked away.
Watt ran a hand wearily over his face. What was wrong with him? Derrick would never let him hear the end of it if he knew Watt was rejecting cute girls who invited themselves over. Except that he didn’t actually want any of those girls, because none of them could erase the memory of the one he’d lost. The only one he had ever really cared about.
Instead of heading for the exit, Watt found himself walking the other direction. His toes edged against the painted safety line. The stars glittered far up in the sky. To think that their light was careening wildly toward him at three hundred million meters per second. But what about darkness? How fast did the darkness rush toward you after a star died and its light went out for good?
No matter how fast light traveled, Watt thought, the darkness always seemed to have gotten there first.
Inevitably, his thoughts turned back to Leda. This time he didn’t even try to distract himself.
It was his fault. He should have watched Leda more closely, those first few weeks after Dubai. She had insisted that she needed some time alone, after everything that happened. Watt tried to respect her wishes—until he learned that she had overdosed and was going back to rehab.
When she got home several weeks later, Leda didn’t seem all that eager to see him.
“Hey, Watt,” she’d said woodenly, holding open the front door. She was wearing an oversized charcoal sweater and black plasticky shorts, her feet bare on the hardwood floor of her entryway. “I’m glad you came by. We need to talk.”
Those four words filled Watt with a shiver of foreboding. “I—I was so worried about you,” he’d stammered, taking a step forward. “They wouldn’t let me talk to you at rehab. I thought that you were . . .”
Leda abruptly talked over him. “Watt, we need to stop seeing each other. I can’t be with you, not after everything I’ve done.”
Watt’s heart thudded. “I don’t care,” he assured her. “I know what you’ve done and I don’t care, because I—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Leda cried out. “Watt, Eris and I shared a father. I killed my half sister!”
Her words reverberated in the air. Watt felt his throat close up. Everything he wanted to tell her now seemed inadequate.
“I need to start over, okay?” Her voice was shaking, and she seemed determined not to meet his eyes. “I can’t get better with you around. You’re one of my triggers—the worst of my triggers—and as long as I’m with you, I’ll keep turning back to my old behaviors. I can’t afford to do that.”
“That isn’t true. You and I make each other better,” he tried to protest.
Leda shook her head. “Please,” she begged. “I just want to move on. If you care about me at all, you’ll leave me alone, for my own good.”
The door shut behind her with a definitive click.
“Hey, step back!” someone shouted. Watt realized in a daze that he had wandered past the painted safety line, toward the gaping maw of the helipad.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and retreated a few steps. He didn’t even attempt to explain. What would he tell those people, exactly? That there was something soothing about looking out over the edge? That it was a sharp reminder of how small and insignificant he was, surrounded by this vast city? Of how little his pain mattered in the scheme of things?
Finally Watt turned and walked away from the bar, just as he had forced himself to walk away from Leda all those months ago.
RYLIN (#ulink_7085ef09-776e-529a-b150-8355af4447d9)
RYLIN MYERS SAT cross-legged on the floor, old vid-storage devices scattered around her. Some of them were shaped like shiny circular discs, others boxy and square. Rylin’s delicate half-Korean features pulled into a frown as she considered each piece of hardware in turn, pausing over it as if internally debating its merits, before shaking her head and moving on. She was so engrossed in her task that she missed the footsteps that sounded in the doorway.
“I didn’t expect you to work so hard on your last day.” It was Rylin’s boss, Raquel.
“I wanted to organize this last collection for you before I go. We’re almost up to 2030,” Rylin said eagerly.
To Rylin’s surprise, Raquel came and knelt on the floor next to her. The lightning bolt inktat on her forearm—which was timed to flash every sixty seconds—appeared, darkened, then vanished again like smoke. “What do you think this one is?” Raquel mused aloud, reaching for a disc that was emblazoned with an animated snowflake and a pair of girls with braids.
“I like that one,” Rylin quickly said, reaching for the disc before Raquel could dismiss it. She sorted it into the pile marked SAVE: POSSIBLE ADAPTATION.
A smile curled at the corner of Raquel’s mouth. “I’m going to miss you, Rylin. I’m really glad you applied for this job.”
“Me too.”
Rylin had spent most of last year, her junior year, attending an upper-floor private high school on scholarship. She had assumed that when June arrived, she would do the same thing she did every summer and get a mindless job downTower to pay the bills. But just when she’d been about to swallow her pride and beg for her old job at a monorail snack station, Rylin had learned that her scholarship actually continued through the summer—as long as she got an academic internship.
She had applied to as many internships as she could find, especially ones that had to do with holography, the creation of three-dimensional holographic films. And she had found this internship: working for the Walt Disney archivist.
Rylin had been startled to learn that the job was located here, in the bowels of the main public library location, in midTower. She’d never been to this location, though Rylin and her best friend, Lux, used to spend hours at their nearest public library. They would trade their favorite e-texts back and forth, then make up plays about them and stage them for their bemused parents, complete with a loud, improvised sound track.
On her first day, Rylin had walked in to find Raquel sitting cross-legged on a swivel chair, spinning it back and forth like a distracted child, her ponytail whipping sideways to smack at her cheek. “You’re the new intern?” Raquel had asked, somewhat impatiently, and Rylin nodded.
Raquel explained that Disney had hired her to sort through all the old films from the pre-holo age and flag any that were ripe for adaptation. “Holographs fully saturated the market fifty years ago,” she told Rylin. “At that point, everyone stopped producing 2-D films, and the machinery to play them. A lot of content was adapted in those first few decades, but there are still so many that no one has ever bothered to redo.”
Rylin knew that 2-D–to–3-D conversion was an expensive and painstaking process. It was like turning a stick figure into a sculpture, taking a flat sheet of pixels and making it inhabit space. The whole thing required hundreds of hours of computer design and human creativity.
“Why isn’t this stuff on the cloud somewhere?” Rylin had wondered, gesturing at the walls of old tapes and discs.
“Some of it is: the big blockbusters and all the classics. But people lost interest trying to catalog and upload every last thing. That’s where we come in.”
To Rylin’s surprise, the more time she spent watching these old 2-D films, the more she appreciated them. The directors had so little to work with, yet accomplished so much with what they had. There was an elegance beneath the films’ celluloid flatness.
“By the way,” Raquel said now, as they kept methodically sorting the boxes, “I really enjoyed Starfall.”
Rylin glanced up in surprise. “You watched it?”
Starfall was a short holo that Rylin had written and directed this spring, in several weeks of angst-ridden shooting after her return from Dubai. It featured some dark interior shots of the Tower, juxtaposed with sweeping views from the terraces and zoomed-in shots of Lux’s eyes: because of course Lux and Chrissa, Rylin’s sister, were the only actors she’d been able to coerce into it.
“It’s a lovely film,” Raquel replied. “You made your friend feel almost . . . capricious. Is she like that in real life?”
“She is,” Rylin managed to reply, gratefulness blooming in her chest. Raquel was acting as if it wasn’t a big deal—and maybe it wasn’t, for her to have watched a five-minute film—but it meant a lot to Rylin.
After she’d said good-bye, Rylin trotted out the library’s main entrance, with its grandiose carved stone lions. She boarded the A express lift downTower, disembarking on thirty-two and walking the ten blocks to her local neighborhood recreation center. Then it was through the broad double doors, down a long hallway, and out into the direct afternoon sunlight.
Rylin lifted a hand to shade her eyes. She glanced around the deck, the narrow strip of the 32nd floor that extended out farther than the floor above. The sun felt like a searing kiss on her skin after the cool darkness of the library, even though the library was hundreds of floors above her. She quickly shrugged out of her soft green zip-up and started through the maze of basketball courts, searching for one person in particular.
Several courts later, she found him.
He didn’t notice her at first. He was too focused on the team of fifth-grade boys that he coached. They were running drills now, jogging back and forth in trailing zigzag lines as they passed the ball back and forth. Rylin stifled a smile as she leaned on the railing to watch her boyfriend, silently cataloging all the things she loved about him. The strong tanned lines of his arms as he demonstrated something to the group. The way his hair curled around his ears. The quickness of his laughter.
He looked up and noticed her, and his entire face broke out into a grin. “Look, guys! We have an audience,” he announced, flashing Rylin a geeky thumbs-up.
She laughed and shook her head, tucking a strand of dark hair behind one ear. After she and Hiral broke up the first time, Rylin had never guessed that they would get back together. Which was incontestable proof that you couldn’t predict where life might take you.
Rylin had started dating Hiral Karadjan when they were both in eighth grade. He lived near her on the 32nd floor and went to her school. Rylin remembered being instantly drawn to him: He had an effervescent sort of energy, so palpable she imagined she could see it. She came to realize that it was joy—a hazy afterglow of laughter, like the light that still streaks across the sky after a shooting star has disappeared.
Hiral laughed a lot back then. And he made Rylin laugh—the sort of deep, helpless laughter that you can only spark when you truly know someone. Rylin had loved that about Hiral: the way he seemed to understand her in a way that no one else ever could.
Until Cord.
Last fall Rylin had started working her mom’s old job, as maid for the Andertons on the 969th floor. In spite of her best intentions, she’d fallen headfirst for Cord Anderton. She tried to break up with Hiral, except by that point he was in jail, having been arrested for drug dealing. Things got messier and messier, until eventually Rylin ended up betraying Cord’s trust—and ruining things between them for good.
Then, unexpectedly, Rylin won a scholarship to Cord’s upper-floor private school, and she started to wonder if they might have another shot. She’d even gone to a party all the way in Dubai, hoping to win him back: only to stand there like a fool as he kissed Avery Fuller, the richest, most flawlessly beautiful girl on earth.
Rylin told herself that it was better this way. Cord belonged with someone like Avery, someone he’d known since childhood; someone who could join him on his life of lavish ski trips and black-tie parties and whatever else they did up there in the stratosphere.
Several weeks later, Hiral had knocked on Rylin’s front door. And for some reason—maybe because she felt so alone, or because she’d learned one too many times that people don’t always get the second chances they deserve—she opened it.
“Rylin. Hi.” Hiral had sounded shocked that she’d actually answered. Rylin felt the same way. “Can we talk?” he added, shifting his weight. He was wearing dark jeans and a crewneck sweater that Rylin didn’t recognize. And there was something else different about him, more than just the clothes. He looked softer, younger; the shadows erased from the hollows beneath his eyes.
“Okay,” she decided, and opened the door wider.
Hiral walked in tentatively, as if expecting some wild thing to jump out and attack him at any moment, which might have happened if Chrissa were home. As it was, Rylin followed him with slow steps to the kitchen table. The silence between them was so thick that she seemed to be wading through it.
She saw Hiral’s eyes dart to the missing table leg—he’d been the one to break it, in a burst of anger, when he learned that Rylin had hooked up with Cord—and his expression darkened.
“I owe you an apology,” he began clumsily. Rylin wanted to speak up, but some instinct bade her stay silent, let him say his piece. “The things I did and said to you, when I was in jail—”
Hiral broke off and looked down, tracing an irregular pattern carved into the surface of the table. It was a series of half-moon indentations, like bite marks, from where Chrissa used to bang her spoon as a baby. If this were a holo, Rylin thought bizarrely, the markings would be important. They would mean something. But this was real life, where so many things had no meaning at all.
“I’m sorry, Rylin. I was a complete asshole to you. The only thing I can say is that jail scared me shitless,” Hiral said baldly. “The other guys in there . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to. Rylin remembered visiting Hiral in jail: an adult jail, not juvie, because Hiral was over eighteen. It had felt unbearably soulless, permeated by a cold sense of despair.
“I know,” she said softly. “But that doesn’t excuse the things you said, and did.”
Hiral looked pained at the memory. “That was the drugs talking,” he said quickly. “I know it’s not an excuse, but, Rylin—I was so terrified that I kept on using, anything that I could get my hands on in jail. I’m not proud of it, and I wish I could take it back. I’m sorry.”
Rylin bit her lip. She knew plenty about doing things you wished you could undo.
“I’m not sure if you heard, but the trial went well. I got my old job back.” Hiral worked as a liftie, one of the technicians who repaired the Tower’s massive elevator shafts from the inside, suspended by thin cables, miles above the earth. It was dangerous work.
“I’m glad,” Rylin told him. She felt guilty that she hadn’t even shown up at his trial—she should have been there, if only for moral support, for the sake of their former friendship.
“Anyway, I just wanted to come say that I’m sorry. I’ve changed, Ry. I’m not that guy anymore, who was so awful to you. I’m sorry that I was ever that guy at all.” Hiral kept his eyes steady on hers, and Rylin could see the regret burning there. She felt oddly proud of him for apologizing. It couldn’t have been easy.
She thought, suddenly, of what Leda had said the other day in Dubai—that Rylin wasn’t the same girl who’d shown up at Berkeley, defensive and uncertain. Hiral might have changed, but she had changed too. They’d all changed. How could they not, after everything that had happened, after all they had lost?
Maybe this was what growing up felt like. It hurt more than Rylin had expected.
“I forgive you, Hiral.”
She hadn’t expected to say that, but once she did, she was glad that she had.
He looked up with an intake of breath. “Really?”
Rylin knew that she should say something else, but she felt overwhelmed by a sudden flurry of memories—of how it had been with Hiral before. The little notes Hiral used to leave for her in the silliest places, like on the peel of a banana. The anniversary when he’d served her a picnic dinner in the park, complete with flameless candles. That time she had to go on a long road trip to visit her grandparents, when Hiral had made a playlist for her that was sprinkled with little audio clips of himself telling jokes, saying again and again how much he loved her.
And when Rylin’s mom died, Hiral was the one who’d been there, steadying and certain, helping her make all the awful decisions that no daughter should ever have to make.
He stood up. “Thanks for letting me come by. I know you’re with Cord now, and I won’t bother you again. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“I’m not,” Rylin said. “With Cord, I mean.”
Hiral’s face broke into an incredulous smile. “You’re not?”
She shook her head.
“Rylin.” Hiral faltered, sounding hoarse. “Do you think that we could ever . . . try again?”
“I don’t know.” A week earlier Rylin would have said absolutely not. But she was starting to learn that things were always changing, that nothing was ever quite what you thought it was, and that perhaps that was a good thing.
“Maybe,” she clarified, and Hiral grinned.
“Maybe sounds good to me.”
Standing at the rec center now, watching Hiral run back and forth across the basketball court, Rylin was glad that she’d given him another chance.
They’d been together for months, and Hiral had remained true to his word. He was different. He was totally clean: He didn’t smoke or drink anymore, not even around their old friends. When he wasn’t at work or spending time with Rylin, he was here at the rec center, playing basketball with these kids.
“All right, team! Huddle up!” he cried out, and the boys all gathered in an eager cluster. They all put their arms toward the center and let out a yell.
When he’d high-fived the last few boys and sent them on their way, Hiral hopped to Rylin’s side of the fence. He threw an arm around her and leaned in to plant a kiss on her forehead.
“Hey, you’re all sweaty!” Rylin protested and pretended to duck from beneath his arm, though she didn’t really mind.
“The price you pay for dating a star athlete,” Hiral teased.
They turned along the path that edged the deck, lined with benches and sprays of foliage, a few burger and frozen fruit stands scattered along the way. Rylin saw a community yoga class clustered in one corner, tipping into salutations toward the sun. As always, the deck was crowded with people, all of them gossiping, arguing, bantering.
It was one of those glorious New York fall afternoons, with a rich clarity to the low light that cast a dreamlike significance over everything. Far below, particles of sun glittered on the traffic of 42nd Street, hovercars floating in and out of the Tower like swarms of jeweled flies.
“This is my favorite time of year,” Rylin declared. Autumn had always felt to her like the season of beginning, far more than spring. Children laughed on their way to school. The air was crisp and full of promise. The hours of daylight grew shorter, and therefore more precious.
Hiral lifted an eyebrow. “You do know that we live in a temperature-controlled building, right?”
“I know, but just look at this!” Rylin threw out an arm to indicate the deck, the hazy sunshine, then spun impulsively on her toes and kissed him.
When they pulled apart, Hiral was looking at her intently. “I’m going to miss you.”
Rylin knew what he meant. Even with her internship, they’d had a lot of time to spend together this summer. That was all about to change, now that Rylin would be commuting upTower for school again, focusing on homework. Applying for college scholarships.
“I know. I’m going to miss you too,” she said.
Neither of them mentioned the fact that Cord—the boy who had come between them last time—attended Rylin’s school too.
AVERY (#ulink_c549f9ff-1d4b-5929-82a2-125fccc2dc38)
“ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER costume party,” Avery joked, glancing to where Leda stood next to her. The other girl didn’t even crack a smile.
They were at the top of Cord’s staircase, the same place they always caught their breath at Cord’s annual back-to-school party, except it all felt wrong. Or rather, Leda felt wrong. Normally Leda was in her element at events like this, her energy seeming to increase in proportion to the number of people around her. But tonight she was subdued, even sullen, as if she resented Avery for dragging her here.
Ever since she got home, Avery had been asking when they could meet up, yet Leda kept putting her off with vague excuses. Finally Avery had decided to stop by on her way to Cord’s. She didn’t even pause to ring the doorbell, just blinked up at the Coles’ retina scanner; she’d been on the entry list for years. The door instantly swung open to admit her.
Leda’s mom stood in the living room, pulling a sumptuous coat around her shoulders. “Avery!” she had cried out, with audible relief. “I’m so glad you’re here. It’ll be good for Leda to see you.”
Good for Leda? Avery thought, marching up the stairs in confusion. Then she reached Leda’s bedroom and understood.
It was entirely changed. Gone were the bright persimmon carpet, the vintage Moroccan pillows, the hand-painted side tables. The shelves, which used to hold an eclectic assortment of things—a chipped celadon vase, a mobile sunlamp, a funny stuffed giraffe that sang “Happy Birthday” when you pressed on its stomach—were bare. Everything felt dismal and utterly Spartan. And most starkly changed was Leda herself, who stood in a pool of shadow near her closet.
Leda had always been thin, yet now she was startlingly skinny, new shadows gathering at the base of her collarbone. Her hair was cropped close to the scalp, making her look more boyish than ever. But it was her twitchy nervousness that frightened Avery the most.
“I’ve missed you,” Avery cried out, crossing the room and engulfing her friend in a hug. Leda stood there stiffly, barely returning it. When Avery stepped back, Leda crossed her arms over her chest in an instantaneous defensive motion.
“What’s going on, Leda?” How did I miss this? Avery remembered what she’d said to Max the other day, that a lot had happened while she was gone. Clearly much more than she’d realized.
“I made a few changes when I got back from rehab,” Leda said tersely. “My doctors wanted me to start over fresh, with no reminders of my old life. So I wouldn’t slide back into my old habits.”
Avery refrained from pointing out that when they told Leda to start over, the doctors probably hadn’t been talking about furniture. “Should we do dinner before Cord’s party? I’ll wait while you change.”
Leda hurried to shake her head. “That’s okay. I wasn’t planning on going.”
“You live for this party!”
“I used to,” Leda said quietly, her eyes hooded. “Not anymore.”
This wasn’t Leda at all. The person before her was a hollow pod-person version of Leda, a mannequin Leda, who looked and sounded like Leda but couldn’t possibly be Avery’s sharp and vibrant best friend.
Well, if anything could snap Leda back into herself, it was a good party.
“Too bad,” Avery said briskly, pressing her palm against Leda’s wall to open her closet. “You’re coming, even if I have to drag you the entire way. I promise not to let you drink a single thing,” she said loudly, over Leda’s stammered protests. “I’ll even vid-chat your rehab counselor in real time, if that’s what it takes. But you’re coming. I want you to meet Max.”
Now, as they looked out over Cord’s living room, Avery couldn’t help thinking that she’d made a mistake. Leda stood there vacant and glassy-eyed, utterly disinterested in her surroundings.
A pair of freshman girls strutted up the stairs, both of them wearing cat ears and holographic tails that swished lazily behind them. “That’s her. Avery Fuller,” one of them whispered. “She’s so gorgeous.”
“You would be too, if you were genetically designed for it.”
“Can you believe her dad is running for mayor?”
“I’m sure he’s buying his way in, the same way he bought Avery. . . .”
Avery tried not to listen as the girls brushed past, but her grip on the railing tightened imperceptibly. She should be used to the gossip by now; it had been going on her entire life.
Everyone in New York knew the story of Avery’s creation: that her parents had custom-built her from the pool of their combined DNA in a very expensive genetic mining procedure. The year of her birth, her baby photo had even been on the cover of Time digital magazine, under the headline “Engineering Perfection.” Avery hated it.
“Want me to kick them out?”
Avery looked over in surprise. Anger was stormclouding over Leda’s features, fracturing her formerly cool surface.
She felt the strangest urge to laugh in relief. The old Leda was still in there after all.
“We’re at a party. No need to stir up unnecessary drama,” Avery said quickly.
“Where else does unnecessary drama belong, if not at a party?” Leda asked and then smiled. It came out a little rigid, as if she hadn’t smiled in a while and had half forgotten how to do it, but it was a smile all the same.
Unnecessary drama. Suddenly, Avery couldn’t help thinking of this time last year, when she and Leda had been standing at the top of these very stairs, both hiding the same monumental secret—that they were in love with Atlas.
“Where is he, anyway?” Leda asked.
“Who?” Surely Leda hadn’t been thinking about—
“This Klaus von Schnitzel of yours.”
Oh, right. “It’s Max von Strauss,” Avery corrected, hoping Leda hadn’t heard the beat of hesitation. “And I’m not sure. He disappeared earlier this afternoon, saying that he had to do something urgent. He promised to meet me here, though.”
“How mysterious,” Leda said, and it was almost teasing.
Avery swallowed and decided to ask the same question she’d posed earlier. “Leda. What’s going on?”
Leda opened her mouth as if to reassure Avery with a lie, only to pause. “I didn’t have the easiest year,” she admitted. “I needed to work through some things.”
Avery knew precisely what Leda was wrestling with: the fact that she had killed Eris. “She wouldn’t want you to beat yourself up like this.” She didn’t bother clarifying who she meant. They both knew.
“It’s complicated,” Leda said evasively.
“I wish you’d told me.” Avery felt her chest clench with sorrow. Had Leda been like this all year long, avoiding their friends, hiding from the world in that hollowed-out bedroom?
“You couldn’t have helped,” Leda assured her. “But I’m glad you’re back. I missed you, Avery.”
“I missed you too.”
Avery glanced down at the living room, and her eyes lit up at the sight of Max, threading his way through the crowd below. He looked tall and imposing and woefully lost. The world felt instantly lighter.
“Max is here!” she exclaimed, and reached for Leda’s hand to tug her down the stairs. “Come on, I’m so excited for you guys to finally meet!”
“In a minute,” Leda said, gently untangling herself from Avery’s grip. “I need a breath of fresh air. Then I promise I’ll come find you both.”
Avery started to argue, then paused at the sight of Leda’s eyes, liquid and serious. “Okay,” she said at last, and then headed down the stairs alone.
When Max saw her, his entire face—his entire body, really—broke into a grin.
“You made it,” Avery breathed. Not that she had ever doubted he would. Max always showed up exactly where he’d promised to be, at the exact time he’d promised. Ruthless German efficiency, she supposed, even if he did usually look like a college professor who was running late to class. “You didn’t have any trouble finding the apartment?”
“Not at all. I chose the one with the girl throwing up outside,” Max replied. “Don’t worry, I put her into a hovertaxi home,” he hastened to add.
Avery shook her head in amusement. She watch Max glance around the room at all her classmates, dressed in wild assortments of sequins and neon spandex, their hair temporarily colored or lengthened thanks to the styler’s many custom settings. Compared to college parties, she realized, it probably felt silly and a bit affected.
“I’m sorry. I forgot to warn you that it’s a costume party.”
Max looked down at his own outfit for a moment, as if to check that he had, in fact, remembered to put on clothes that morning. “You’re right! What can we tell everyone I’m dressed as? A vagabond?”
Avery couldn’t help laughing. She felt everyone watching her, burning with curiosity about Avery Fuller’s new boyfriend. She knew they were all surprised that this was who she ended up with, after so many years of being pointedly single. Max was nothing like the boys she’d grown up with, with his floppy green shirt and clunky, unstylish boots. He was so lanky and European looking, that predatory hawk-like nose dominating his otherwise handsome face.
“You, of course, look stunning.” Max’s eyes skimmed over her outfit, a black sequined dress and feathered headpiece she’d thrown on at the last minute. “Who are you, Daisy Buchanan?”
“Absolutely not,” Avery said automatically. She had never liked The Great Gatsby. Something about Daisy’s isolation—cold and alone, surrounded by all her money—struck her with an odd sense of misgiving.
“You’re right; Daisy is far too frivolous. You’re more of a Zelda Fitzgerald, beautiful and brilliant.”
Avery waved away the compliment. “I’m so glad you made it. I’m dying to introduce you to everyone.”
“And I can’t wait to meet them all,” Max said heartily. “But I need to talk with you first, alone. Is that okay?”
His words sounded portentous. Avery wondered if it had to do with his mysterious errand from earlier. “This way,” she offered. She knew just the place.
As always at these parties, Cord’s greenhouse already contained a group of underclassmen trying to hotbox with their halluci-lighters. A heavy cloud of smoke hung around their heads. The moment they saw Avery, they scrambled to leave without being asked. She sighed and pushed the aerate button near the door, then leaned back as the greenhouse’s internal system cycled in new air.
She’d always loved it in here. The Andertons’ greenhouse was on the corner, so two of its walls were lined with triple-reinforced flexiglass, offering floor-to-ceiling views of the dusted purple sky. Unlike her parents’ greenhouse, which was strictly ordered and labeled, this one was a riot of color. Roses, bamboo, and sunflowers grew together in a haphazard tangle, all of them genetically tweaked to bloom in the Tower’s conditions. A few pea-sized pods were scattered in the soil—biosensors, monitoring the plants’ levels of water, glucose, even their temperatures, so the greenhouse could make adjustments on a micro level. Avery knew that this was exactly how Cord’s mom had left it.
The air seemed warm, as if Avery’s blood were rushing out to her extremities. It felt as if they were no longer in the Tower at all, but in some remote and uncharted jungle. She pushed toward the window and Max followed, ducking beneath one of the oversized orchids.
“I didn’t want to say anything before, in case it didn’t work out, but I just had a meeting at Columbia,” Max began and then paused, as if to gauge Avery’s reaction. When she didn’t answer, he forged ahead. “One of the professors here, Dr. Rhonda Wilde, is the world’s leading expert in political economics and urban structures. She advised my professor at Oxford when he was at university! I’ve always dreamed of the chance to study directly with her, and now I have it.”
Max took Avery’s hands and looked into her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is, Columbia and Oxford have both agreed to let me take my classes here this year as an exchange student. So I would spend the year in New York.”
Avery was momentarily bewildered. She and Max hadn’t discussed what would happen when he went back to England in a few days. She had hoped that they would stay together, but didn’t want to assume anything. Max was in college, after all.
“You’re saying you won’t go back to Oxford?” Avery repeated. “You’ll stay?”
“Only if you want me to,” Max said quickly. The lingering smoke seemed almost blue in the darkness; it gathered around his head like a halo.
Avery let out a breathless laugh and threw her arms around him in delight. “Of course I want you to!” she exclaimed, her words muffled into his chest. “But are you sure this is what you really want? You would be missing your sophomore year of college—all those traditions you love, house parties and that dawn banquet and your crew season—”
“It’s worth it, for the chance to study with Dr. Wilde. And to spend time with you,” Max assured her. “But are you sure that you’re okay with it? We never really talked about what would happen after the summer ended. I know it’s your senior year. I’ll understand if you want to just spend time with your friends, without your summer boyfriend hanging around.”
“Max. You know you’re more to me than a summer boyfriend,” Avery said quietly, and was warmed by the broad, eager smile that broke over his face.
“You’re more to me than a summer girlfriend, Avery. So much more. You’re part of my life now, and I want you to keep being part of it.”
He paused before the final three words, words that balanced on the edge of the sentence like droplets of rain. “I love you.”
Avery had known somehow that he would say it, and yet Max’s declaration still sent a delicious shiver down her spine. She let the words echo for a moment, savoring them, knowing that with those words their relationship had shifted into something new. “I love you too.”
She snaked her arms around Max to pull him closer, feeling the muscles of his back through the fabric of his shirt. He leaned forward to drop a kiss on her forehead, but Avery tilted her face up, so that his lips met hers instead.
The kiss was soft and tender at first, almost languid. But then Max’s hands were tracing over her body with increasing urgency, sending little tingling whorls up and down her nerves. It felt as if her entire body was sizzling beneath her skin, or maybe her skin had grown too small to contain her. Avery’s breath came faster. She clung tighter to Max, feeling like the vines draping along the walls, as if she wouldn’t be able to stand without his support—
“Oh my god, get a room,” someone said, sliding open the door. Avery tore herself back in a sudden panic. She recognized the voice as Cord’s.
“We have a room, thanks. It’s this one,” Max replied blithely.
Avery couldn’t even bring herself to speak. She just watched the horrified amusement spread over Cord’s face as he realized who he’d interrupted. “Sorry, Avery, I didn’t realize. You two, um, carry on.”
He gave a funny double tap on the wall and started to beat a hasty retreat, but Avery had found her voice at last. “Cord, I don’t know if you’ve met my boyfriend, Max?”
Cord looked the same as ever, Avery thought, broad and imposing in his pirate costume, a crimson sash flung dramatically across his open-necked white shirt. He was holding a packet of potshots; a couple other guys, Ty Rodrick and Maxton Feld, were clustered behind him. They’d clearly all been about to smoke.
Cord’s ice-blue eyes held hers for a meaningful moment. Avery wondered if he was thinking about that night too—the one and only time that they had kissed, back in Dubai. It had been reckless and foolish and Avery hadn’t cared; she’d been tumbling down a dark and perilous spiral after losing Atlas, and nothing at all had mattered to her. Not even the implications of that kiss, and what it might do to her relationship with Cord.
She knew it was cowardly and immature, but she and Cord had never spoken of it. She’d barely even seen him afterward; she’d left the next week for England, and then met Max. Part of her felt that she owed Cord an apology. Because afterward, in the cruel light of day, Avery saw that kiss for what it was: a selfish attempt to wipe Atlas from her brain. Cord deserved better.
He smiled at Max and held out a hand. “Great to meet you, Max. I’m Avery’s friend Cord.” And Avery understood without being told that everything was folded into that word, friend. She and Cord would be just fine.
“Oh. This is your greenhouse!” Max edged past Cord, toward the door. “In that case, we should find another room. Maybe one less in demand. Or more geographically convenient.” He said that last bit to Avery, though loud enough that the rest of them all heard. She pursed her lips against a smile and dragged him back out into the party.
The rest of the night passed in a joy-soaked blur. She introduced Max to everyone—Leda stayed just long enough to say hi, though Avery was glad to see that he coaxed a smile from her. Finally, as the party was winding down, they slid into a hovertaxi home.
“You and Cord used to date, didn’t you?” Max asked abruptly.
Avery blinked, caught off guard, but Max didn’t seem to notice.
“He’s the guy, isn’t he? The one who broke your heart before you came to England?” Max sounded almost proud of himself for having figured it out. “I just felt a strange vibe between you, and I wondered.”
Avery’s heart was pounding wildly, echoing in her ears. “You’re right,” she said quickly. “Cord and I had a thing. But it didn’t work out.”
“Of course it didn’t,” Max agreed, as if pointing out the obvious. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Because you belong with me.”
Avery loved that about Max: the way he seemed so self-assured, so certain of the world and his place in it. The way he noticed things no one else paid attention to. But right now she needed him to pay a little bit less attention, or he might realize that she hadn’t really told him the truth.
She hadn’t wanted to lie to Max, but what other choice did she have? He couldn’t ever know who had actually broken her heart last year. If he knew the truth, Max wouldn’t want her anymore.
It didn’t matter that she and Atlas were long since over. If anyone found out the truth about them, Avery knew, her life would come crashing down around her.
CALLIOPE (#ulink_335cd299-645e-5c32-a5a0-c546d29c99d2)
CALLIOPE HATED HER bedroom at Nadav’s apartment.
It used to be the formal guest room and still contained the same set of heavy furniture, with clawed feet and angry-looking eagle heads carved into each drawer. The heavy velvet drapes seemed to crush the very air from the room. On the wall facing the bed hung an antique image of dogs killing a deer. Calliope thought it was morbid, but Nadav had won it in an auction and was terribly proud of it. She’d gotten in the habit of throwing a sweater over the painting before she went to bed, so the deer’s mournful eyes wouldn’t haunt her in her sleep.
When Calliope first moved in, she’d instantly begun planning how she would redo the room. She would buy light, airy furniture and colorful pillows and paint the wall with pigmaspectrum paint, in the bold primary palette. But when she mentioned her intention one night at dinner, Nadav had been so shocked that he let his fork clatter loudly to his plate.
“That paint is intended for toddlers’ rooms,” he pointed out, clearly affronted by her suggestion.
Calliope didn’t care that the paint was made for children. She loved the way it subtly shifted colors throughout the day, from a deep angry red all the way to purple and back again. “If you hate it, I can pick something else,” she’d offered as Elise met her gaze meaningfully across the table.
Nadav shook his head. “I’m sorry, Calliope, but you can’t redecorate. We need that room as a guest room for when my mom comes to stay.”
Why couldn’t she change her room just because Nadav’s mom would eventually be sleeping there? “When your mom is staying in my room, where will I—”
“You’ll share Livya’s room, of course.”
The only person who’d seemed unhappier about that than Calliope was Livya, whose lips pursed into a thin, pale line.
Calliope had grown used to a long litany of no’s from Nadav. When she signed up for the school play: No, you should try student government instead. When she wanted to go to a party: No, you have to be home by curfew. When she wanted to get a puppy: No, puppies are a frivolous distraction—at your age, you need to be focused on your studies. As the months went by, Nadav had eventually started to say no before she’d finished voicing her question.
She told herself that it was fine, that she didn’t really care about that stuff anyway. Except maybe for the puppy. At least that would have made her feel less lonely.
Standing now in her bedroom, Calliope let out a petulant sigh. This room might as well have belonged to a stranger. Even after eight months, there was something decidedly temporary about it all, as if Calliope were only camping out here: boxes and suitcases stacked haphazardly in the closet like the belongings of a criminal who might have to run from the law at any moment.
She stepped toward the closet and pushed past the rows of hangers, covered in demure silk dresses and high-waisted slacks. Even the clothes didn’t feel like hers; before they moved in, her mom had sorted through Calliope’s wardrobe with ruthless abandon, tossing out anything tight or revealing or remotely sexy. Thank god that Calliope had secretly managed to salvage a few pieces before that bonfire of the vanities.
She stretched toward the edge of the wall, past an enormous wool coat, until her fingers brushed the bag she was looking for. Quickly she began sifting through it, pulling out an electric bracelet, a pair of gaudy clip-on earrings, her favorite red lip gloss: things she hadn’t worn in months. When she was finally ready, Calliope lifted her eyes to the only thing in the room she did like—the mirror-screen that took up an entire wall.
She kept the room bulbs on their maximum setting and gave a self-satisfied smirk. Her beauty was as vivid, and almost as harsh, as the overbright lighting.
“Here goes nothing,” she said to herself, and was down the hallway without a backward glance.
Calliope felt a little shiver of adventure as she slipped out of Nadav’s apartment. Because she wasn’t just sneaking out of the house. She was sneaking out of her life, shedding her skin, sliding neatly from the role of Calliope Brown into another role. One that she was making up as she went along.
She knew this was risky. But Calliope had hit breaking point. She couldn’t take another night in that cold, gilded apartment, with its thick carpets and ticking clocks. It was the sort of apartment where she knew exactly what was happening at any given moment, because it all ran with such monotonous efficiency. Even now, for instance, Nadav would be sitting at his modular recycled-aluminum desk to review some contract or message before going to sleep. Livya would be tucked safely into her four-poster princess bed, her room comp whispering SAT questions to her throughout the night for some osmosal learning. It was all so terrifyingly predictable.
As she stepped onto the downTower lift, filled with clamor and conversation—all the messy chaos of real life—Calliope felt an overwhelming sense of relief. New York was still here. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
She switched to the monorail at Grand Central, heading out of the Tower altogether, toward the lower Manhattan neighborhood known as the Sprawl. It was as unlike the sleek, ordered reality of the Tower as night from day; parts of it were still radically low-tech, with warped wooden floors and twisted railings. Church steeples rose into the sky alongside bright holograms.
Calliope glanced back at the Tower as she stepped off the monorail. From this angle it seemed to burn more brightly than ever. Next to it, the half-moon looked alone in its isolated glory.
She paused at the corner of Elizabeth and Prince Street, her eyes closed with deceptive nonchalance. It was almost nine on a weeknight and the streets were mostly quiet. But Calliope could feel the Sprawl’s thrum of excitement—the seething, excited pulse of things young and thrilling and illegal.
She pushed open an unmarked brown door and stepped inside.
A wall of sound roared up to meet her: crowds erupting in screams, the slippery beat of electronic music. Another turn down the stairs and Calliope emerged in a bar, all done up in neons and pulsing LED lights, like some kind of video-game speakeasy. The ceiling was lined in prisms of glass that reflected the garish illumination, separating it into a million glowing strands and tossing it down again. The colors were so vibrant that it almost hurt to look at them.
Calliope didn’t bother getting a drink, though she could have; she was over eighteen. She just lingered in the corner, her eyes flicking expertly around the room. It was crowded, with a mix of nerds, tourists, and others who were simply curious. The afternoon show was meant for children, she knew; but the night performance was supposedly much edgier—and more violent.
Someone sounded a gong. The crowd obediently shuffled through the bar to the stadium beyond, clutching their drinks to their chests. Calliope let herself be caught along in the surge, her hair falling loose around her bare shoulders. She was wearing a strapless silver dress and boots, and had even sprayed a temporary inktat patch on her tanned cheek, just for fun. It would leave a sticky film over her face for several days, but the effect was worth it.
The stadium smelled like popcorn and grease. Calliope sank eagerly into her seat and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, to study the ComBots—Combat Robots—waiting around the room. A team of handlers huddled near each of them, clutching tablets as they engaged in last-minute system checks. Calliope caught a surreptitious movement in the corner of her eye and smiled. Probably bookies, recording under-the-table bets. ComBattles might not be illegal, but gambling on them assuredly was.
ComBattles were an expensive and arguably illogical sport, like racing cars used to be—how wasteful to build these sleek, elaborate bots, only to let them tear one another apart. Calliope wondered what it was about humans that made them relish destruction. This was the modern version of gladiatorial fights, or bear baitings, or reality television. For whatever reason, people loved watching things explode.
She hadn’t been to a ComBattle in years, not since the time Elise took her to one in Shinjuku. She wasn’t really sure why she’d come here tonight. Perhaps the loud anonymity of it seemed reassuring. This was as far from the Mizrahis’ world as she could get.
Calliope let her eyes drift to the boy sitting next to her. “Did you bet on one?” she asked. For some reason the words came out in an Australian accent.
He looked around, startled, as she might be talking to some other, better someone lurking behind him. “Oh. Um, the three-headed snake,” he said after a moment.
“That thing? Mine will crush it,” Calliope declared, knowing that her voice would forgive the insult. Calliope’s voice—soft and purring, with that seductive accent—had always been her secret weapon. It allowed her to say anything she wanted and get away with it.
White teeth flashed against ebony skin as the young man smiled. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a gambler.”
“And why not? Where’s the fun, without a little risk to spice things up?”
He nodded, conceding the point. “Which did you bet on?”
“My money is on that scaly thing,” Calliope fabricated, pointing toward a robot that was half lion, half dragon. Little whirls of fire emerged from its gullet.
There was something whimsical about the battle bots, despite their ruthlessness. It was against international regulations to make robots that resembled people; and in America, it was also illegal for robots to resemble real animals. As a result, the ComBots became something almost otherworldly. Calliope saw a dinosaur, a fanged unicorn, and a winged tiger that sizzled with electricity.
“Care to up the stakes?” the guy asked and held out a hand. “I’m Endred, by the way.”
“Amada.” It was a name she’d used back in Australia. Easy to remember. “What did you have in mind, exactly?”
“Loser buys dinner?”
Calliope hadn’t come here to run a con. God knows she didn’t need anything off this guy; she could buy her own dinner, now that she had access to Nadav’s money. And yet . . . for her, it had always been as much about the thrill as it was about money. That eager breathless sensation of living on the edge, of knowing she was pulling off the impossible. That was what she wanted from Endred—attention, adventure, a night of being someone else, rather than the excruciatingly boring character she’d been playing these past eight months.
“I never say yes to dinner without drinks first,” she told him, with an inscrutable smile.
“Done.”
The stadium went suddenly dark and erupted in wild screaming as the first two ComBots faced off.
It was the dinosaur against her lion-dragon. Calliope reached beneath her seat for her glowstick and waved it in the air, shouting like everyone else until her throat was ragged, watching wide-eyed as the dinosaur and the hybrid creature began slashing at each other. They breathed fire; they shot small ballistics; they lunged forward and then quickly fell back. A pair of commentators narrated the action in a guttural, excited mix of English, Mandarin, and Spanish. Strobe lights flickered overhead. She felt Endred’s gaze heavy on her and couldn’t resist giving her head a proud toss.
The dinosaur’s barbed tail slashed at the hybrid. Calliope jumped to her feet, one hand still wrapped tightly around the lime-green glowstick. “Get him!” she cried out as the lion-dragon’s jaws unhinged—grotesquely wide, wider than a real creature’s jaws ever could—and a torrent of flames erupted from it. The dinosaur stumbled, a gash in its side exposing a bright red tangle of wires. Its arms flailed, as if its computer was short circuiting, and then it tottered to one side and fell still.
Amid the roar of the stadium, Endred looked over at her and grinned. “It seems congratulations are in order.”
“I always know how to pick a winner,” Calliope said provocatively.
Endred waved over a pitcher of a sticky lemon drink and handed her a glass. Down in the arena, a team of human specialists had run forward to sweep away the debris of the broken ComBot. The team managing the winning bot were high-fiving one another, readying themselves for another round.
Calliope took a tentative sip of the lemon drink, wincing at its tanginess. “So, Endred, tell me about yourself. Where are you from?”
Endred preened, predictably, beneath the attention. “Miami. Have you ever been?”
Calliope shook her head, though she and Elise had run cons in Miami countless times.
He began describing the city’s waterlogged streets; which had been flooded for half a century, ever since the sandbars surrounding Florida crumbled into the ocean. Calliope didn’t listen. As if she hadn’t taken a Jet Ski up and down those very streets. She loved Miami, loved the stubborn sexiness of the city, the way it refused to admit defeat even when it was flooded, and instead rose boldly from the waters like a modern super-Venice.
But Calliope could tell that Endred was the type of guy who could be easily won over by talking about himself. Like most boys.
As she peppered him with questions, slipping in the occasional lie about herself, Calliope felt herself reviving like a plant in water. She’d forgotten what a rush it was, playing this game. But now she was in her element again, and all her self-confidence came rushing back as she did what she did best: become someone else.
“If it isn’t Calliope Brown,” an unexpected voice said behind her.
Calliope turned around slowly, trying to mask her trepidation. It was Brice Anderton, Cord’s older brother. He wore a dark jacket and oversized sunglasses, which he lifted now, his eyes roving unabashedly over Calliope’s skintight dress. He was swarthy and tall and far too good-looking, and he knew it.
“I’m afraid you have the wrong girl,” Endred interrupted, oblivious to the tension between them. “This is Amada.”
“Yes. You must have me confused with someone else,” Calliope heard herself say in the Australian accent.
“My mistake.” Brice’s mouth twisted in amusement.
Endred tried to pick up their conversation where it had left off, but Calliope’s smile was beginning to slip from her frozen features. “Excuse me,” she murmured, and ducked back up the narrow stairs to the neon-decked bar just as the lights began to dim for the next fight.
Brice was leaning negligently against the bar, as if he’d known that she would come. “Calliope. What an unexpected pleasure,” he said in that unmistakable entitled drawl.
She refused to back down. “The unexpected pleasure is all mine. I had no idea you were into ComBattles.”
“I could say the same thing. This doesn’t exactly strike me as your scene.”
This is far closer to the real me than the Little Bo Peep version of me everyone has seen all year. “I like to think of myself as a thing of mystery,” she said flippantly.
“And I like to think of myself as a person who solves mysteries.”
The smart thing to do would be to ignore him and head home. Brice was the only person aside from Avery with the power to blow Calliope’s cover. She’d met him once before, in Singapore, when she’d conned his friend and then skipped town. Whether or not he recognized her—which she never could quite figure out—there was always a dangerous, and slightly magnetic, edge to their interactions.
But instead of leaving, Calliope leaned forward over the bar, kicking one boot behind the other. She held Brice’s gaze. “I haven’t seen you in a while. Since last year’s Under the Sea ball, I think.”
“I’ve been traveling a lot. To East Asia, Europe, all over the place.”
“Is New York too boring for you?”
“Not anymore,” Brice said meaningfully, his eyes on her. “But really, what were you doing in there, telling people your name is Amada, using that fake accent?”
For once, Calliope felt an urge to tell the truth. “I was bored. I guess I just wanted to be someone else for the night.”
“Want to be someone else somewhere else?” Brice offered. “There’s a great dumpling place around the corner, and I’m starving.”
The prospect was oddly tempting. But Calliope knew better. She’d already risked too much simply by coming out tonight; she couldn’t be seen with the infamous, notorious Brice Anderton. Not when she’d worked for so long to convince everyone on the upper floors that she was a soft-hearted philanthropist.
“I actually need to get home,” she told him, hating how much she sounded like a teenager on curfew. Part of her hoped that he would try to convince her to stay.
Brice just shrugged and took a step back. “All right, then,” he said easily. He disappeared downstairs, back into the roaring darkness of the ComBot arena, taking with him the only flicker of excitement that Calliope had felt in months.
RYLIN (#ulink_8501d34c-7900-507f-8516-355dde08c794)
THE FIRST DAY of school, Rylin stepped out of Berkeley’s main quadrangle, lifting a hand to her eyes to shade them even as her contacts switched to light-blocking mode: one of the few things they were able to do on school grounds. The UV-free solar beams prickled pleasantly on her arms.
Ahead of her rose the science building, surrounded by a turquoise reflecting pool that was filled with multicolored koi and a few croaking frogs. Rylin shuddered as she passed. She’d had to dissect a frog last year in biology class, and even though she knew it wasn’t real—that it was actually a synthetic frog-like thing built specifically for high school students to avoid animal cruelty—she still didn’t like the sound of the real ones.
She hadn’t wanted to take a science class this year at all, but since it was mandatory, Rylin had settled on the most innocuous-sounding option: Introduction to Psychology. Actually, her summer boss, Raquel, had been the one to suggest it. “All good storytellers study psychology,” she’d proclaimed, drumming her fingers idly over the film storage boxes. “Novelists, filmmakers, even actors. You have to know the rules of human behavior before you can make your characters break them.”
That sounded reasonable to Rylin. Besides, psychology seemed so much friendlier than the other options—no test tubes or scalpels, just surveys and “social experiments,” whatever that meant.
She started down the two-story science hallway past the robotics lab, where electrical sparks jumped from one wire to another like fiery spiders; past the meteoroculture lab, where students gathered around a massive holographic globe, studying the weather patterns that broke in soft gray waves over its surface; past the massive steel door marked SUBZERO LAB: THERMAL PROTECTION REQUIRED. The so-called “ice box,” where the Advanced Physics class conducted below-freezing experiments in subatomic particles. Rylin didn’t even want to know how much it cost to maintain that temperature.
When she turned into room 142 at the end of the hall, Rylin was relieved to see rows of two-person lab stations, each equipped with nothing but a pair of holo-goggles. She took a seat at one of the empty tables and pulled up the notepad function on her school tablet—just in time.
“Humans are illogical and irrational. That’s the first rule of psychology.” A glamorous Chinese woman strode into the classroom, instantly skewering them all with her stare. Her heels clicked lightly on the floor.
“Psychology as a science was born because humans have been trying for millennia to understand why we do the things we do. Psyche, meaning mind, and logos, study. We’ve been doing this since the ancient Greeks, and yet we still haven’t come close to making sense of it all.
“I’m Professor Heather Wang. Welcome to Introduction to Psychology,” she announced and narrowed her eyes. “If you’re here because you think this is the ‘easy’ science class compared to physics or chemistry, think again. At least elements and chemicals behave in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, are shockingly unpredictable.”
Rylin couldn’t agree more. Sometimes she felt as if she couldn’t even predict her own actions, let alone those of the people around her.
The door to the classroom pushed inward, and a familiar dark head appeared. Rylin barely bit back a sigh. Of all the classes he could have taken, Cord had to be in this one?
Professor Wang gazed coolly at him. “I know you’re all seniors and have one foot out the door already, but I don’t tolerate lateness from anyone.”
“I’m sorry, Professor Wang,” Cord said, with his usual charming forgive-me smile. Then he marched right over to Rylin’s lab console—ignoring the several other empty spots—and slid into the seat next to her.
Rylin kept her gaze studiously forward, pretending not to see him.
“Despite being coerced and at best halfhearted,” the professor went on, addressing the class, “what you just heard from Mr. Anderton was an apology, a prime example of the types of social interactions we will study this year. We will explore the different forces influencing human behavior, including established social norms. We’ll discuss how these norms came to be, and what happens when someone chooses to violate them.”
Like violating the unspoken norm of sitting next to your ex-girlfriend in class when there are plenty of open seats?
“Today we’ll be performing the Stroop effect, a classic demonstration of how easily the human brain can be tricked. Our brains are the computers with which we interpret the world, and yet their operations are compromised far too easily. We misremember information, we forget whole stretches of time. We convince ourselves of things we know to be untrue. Now let’s get started.” Professor Wang clapped, and their tablets all lit up with the text of the lab instructions.
Cord leaned forward onto the lab table. He’d rolled up his sleeves, in blatant defiance of the dress code, revealing the muscles of his forearms. “Long time no see, Myers.”
Rylin kept her eyes on the lab instructions to keep from looking at him. She’d been avoiding Cord since she saw him kiss Avery at the Dubai party last year. And she had been mostly successful, until now.
“It says here that one of us needs to put on the VR headset,” she pointed out. If Cord noticed that she was tapping at her tablet with unusual vehemence, he didn’t comment on it. He just kept looking at her with that amused smile, his lips slightly parted.
“How was your summer?”
Why was he trying to make small talk? “It was good,” Rylin said shortly. “You?”
“I traveled with Brice for a while, mostly around South America. Windsurfing, scuba, you know.” No, Rylin thought, I really don’t know.
Cord was close with his older brother, Brice, but then—like Rylin and Chrissa—they were all each other had. The Andertons had died years ago in a freak plane crash, making Cord an orphan, a celebrity, and a billionaire all at once. He had been ten years old.
When Rylin’s mom died, Rylin had inherited nothing but a massive stack of unpaid medical bills.
“What about you, did you go anywhere fun?” Cord asked.
Go anywhere fun? “Not really. I had a job working for an archivist, going through film at the public library.”
“Oh, right. I saw your snaps. That looked cool,” Cord agreed. Rylin was startled to hear that he’d been following her on the feeds.
“I missed you at my party on Saturday,” he added. “I was excited to see what you were going to be dressed as—I couldn’t decide which was more likely, Catwoman or a punk rocker.”
“I don’t really do costumes.” Did Cord seriously think that she would show up to the very party she’d worked for him last year, the party where he’d first kissed her?
“Don’t do costumes? Where’s the fun in that?”
“It doesn’t always have to be about ‘fun,’ you know,” Rylin snapped, more curtly than she’d meant to. She knew she wasn’t really being fair. But Cord needed to stop and think sometimes before just saying whatever popped into his mind.
And there wasn’t anyone else in Cord’s life who was about to call him out like that.
She picked up the virtual reality headpiece and settled it clunkily over her brow, shutting out the whole world, including Cord. “I’ll go first,” she said into the silence. Illuminated before her on the goggles was a blank white background.
After a moment, Cord tapped at something to begin the lab. “Tell me what color you see.”
The word hello appeared before her in vibrant green. Rylin blinked at it for a moment, disconcerted, before remembering that she was supposed to say the color. “Green.”
The word disappeared, to be replaced by a dark red block letters that read purple.
“Purple,” she said automatically and felt herself flush again. “No, wait, I mean, red—”
Cord laughed. She tried not to wonder what his expression looked like beyond her blocked-out field of vision.
“Don’t you see how easily your brain can be tricked!” Professor Wang’s voice crowed nearby.
Rylin flicked a switch on the side of the VR headset and its screen evaporated into transparency. She glanced through her now clear goggles to see the professor hovering near their lab station. “I just read the word automatically,” she tried to explain.
“Exactly!” the professor cried out. “Your analytical and visual identification neurons were firing at cross-purposes, and chaos broke out! Your own brain betrayed you!” She tapped one finger to her head before swishing off to another lab station.
It only betrays me when Cord is around, Rylin thought with some resentment.
She reached up to flick the side of her headset, letting the view screen repopulate with the lab program. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“Rylin . . .” Cord reached over as if to lift the VR headset from the crown of her head, but Rylin instinctively jerked back. He didn’t get to touch her hair as if it meant nothing. He’d forfeited that right a long time ago.
Cord seemed to realize that he’d crossed a line. “Sorry,” he mumbled, chastened. “But—I’m confused. What’s going on? I thought we were becoming friends again last year, and now I feel like you’re attacking me.”
We were becoming friends, until I wanted to be more, and then I saw you with Avery. “Don’t worry about it,” she said stiffly. “It’s fine.”
“It’s clearly not fine,” Cord protested.
“Look, can we just get this lab done with, and—”
“Forget the lab, Rylin.”
She was startled by the flash of anger that ran through Cord’s words. Reluctantly she took off the VR headset and set it on the table.
“What is it?”
“Why are you acting like this?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rylin protested weakly—because she knew exactly what he meant, and felt suddenly ashamed of herself. She fiddled awkwardly with the strap on the headset.
“Did I do something to upset you?” Cord pressed.
Their eyes met, and Rylin felt herself flush a bright agonized red. Telling Cord the truth meant admitting how she’d felt about him last year: that she’d gone all the way to Dubai chasing him. Yet some part of her insisted that she owed Cord an explanation, no matter how much it stung her pride.
“I saw you with Avery. In Dubai,” she said quietly.
Rylin watched as he sorted through the implications of her words. “You saw Avery kiss me?” he demanded at last.
Rylin gave a miserable nod, not trusting herself to speak. Even though it was months ago—even though she was with Hiral now, and it shouldn’t matter—Rylin felt the shame of that night stealing over her, as sticky and suffocating as ever.
She’d gone to Dubai buoyed by a ridiculous hope that she could find Cord and tell him how she felt. That they could start over. She’d looked for him that whole night, but when she’d finally found him, it was too late. He was with Avery. Kissing her.
“Nothing ever happened again between me and Avery,” Cord said slowly. “We’re just friends.”
Rylin had figured that out eventually, once Avery left for Europe and started dating that Belgian guy or whoever he was. She felt a little foolish. “You don’t owe me an explanation,” she said quickly. “It was all so long ago, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Except that it clearly does matter.” Cord’s eyes were unreadable. “I wish you’d said something,” he added softly.
Rylin felt her blood hammering underneath her skin. “Hiral and I got back together,” she felt a sudden need to say.
“Hiral?”
Rylin knew what Cord must be thinking. He was remembering what Hiral had done last year when she’d been working for Cord. “It’s different this time,” she added, not sure why she was explaining herself to Cord anyway.
“If you’re happy, Rylin, then I’m happy for you.”
“I am happy,” she agreed, and she meant it; she was happy with Hiral. Yet somehow the statement had come out a bit defensive.
Cord nodded. “Look, Rylin, can’t we start over?”
Start over. Was that even possible after everything they’d been through? Perhaps it wasn’t a start-over as much as a start-from-here. It sounded nice, actually.
“I’d like that,” Rylin decided.
Cord held out his hand toward her. For a moment Rylin was startled at the gesture, but then she tentatively reached out and shook his hand.
“Friends,” Cord declared. Then he reached for the VR goggles to begin his section of the lab.
Rylin glanced over at him, curious at something she thought she’d heard in his tone, but his expression was already hidden behind the bulky mask of the goggles.
LEDA (#ulink_6c49bdcc-320b-5888-8c38-3eebee981b17)
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Leda turned down the hallway toward the main entrance of the Berkeley School. The other students moved in coordinated flocks around her like uniformed birds, all wearing the same navy pants or plaid pleated skirts. Leda watched as they formed into groups, only to exchange a few snitches of gossip before breaking off again. The halls were thick with that frantic back-to-school hum, everyone rapidly recalibrating their relationships after three months apart.
Thank god some relationships didn’t change, she thought gratefully as Avery emerged from a classroom across the hall. Avery had no idea just how much Leda had needed her.
She was oddly glad that Avery had insisted she come to Cord’s the other night. Leda hadn’t exactly been the life of the party—it all felt so garishly loud and bright, and she kept worrying that the darkness would open up within her again, like an earthquake that might erupt at any moment. But nothing all that bad had happened. Actually, Leda realized, it had felt good, doing something almost normal again.
“Come with me to Altitude?” Avery asked, falling into step alongside her. “There’s a new thermo-shock yoga class I want to try. Super hot for the stretch, freezing for the cooldown.”
“I have some studying to do tonight,” Leda said, adjusting her crossbody bag over her shoulder.
“Our first day back? We don’t even have any homework yet!”
“It’s my SAT tutor. I need to push my score above a three thousand.” Leda was applying to Princeton. Her mom had gone there, and lately, Leda had found herself trying to be more and more like her. It was a new impulse, given that she’d spent the first eighteen years of her life trying to be the opposite of her mom.
“You’re welcome to come with me, if you want the extra practice,” she added, but Avery shook her head.
“I’m not taking the SAT. Oxford doesn’t recognize it.”
“Oh, right. Because of Max,” Leda said lightly as they walked through the school’s massive stone gates and out into the fabricated sunshine. Though Leda had to admit that she’d been pleasantly surprised by Max. He wasn’t at all what she’d expected. She couldn’t imagine being attracted to him herself, with his shaggy hair and eclectic Euro style; the way his attention flitted between distraction and sudden, intense focus. But she sensed something fundamentally warm and sturdy about him. He was the type of boy you could trust with your best friend’s heart.
“I wanted to go to Oxford before Max, remember?” Avery insisted, though a goofy smile played around her lips at the mention of him.
Leda froze at the unusual sight of two police officers lingering just past the school’s entrance. Their relaxed poses didn’t fool her one bit. They were watching the ebb and flow of students around the edge of the tech-net, looking for someone in particular.
Leda knew, with an instinctive animal certainty, that they were here for her.
One of the police officers—or maybe they were detectives?—met her gaze, and the flash of recognition in his eyes confirmed her suspicions.
“Miss Cole?” he asked, stepping forward. He was pale and plump, with a curling dark moustache and a name tag that said OFFICER CAMPBELL. In contrast, his partner was a young woman named Kiles; tall and willowy with a dark bronzed tan.
“That’s me,” Leda said reluctantly.
“We were hoping you would come down to the station, answer a few questions for us.”
“Leda . . .” Avery whispered, and bit her lip in alarm. Leda held her head high, ignoring the frantic pattering of her heart. On some level she had known that this day would come.
She just didn’t know which of her many transgressions she had to answer for.
“What is this regarding?” Leda was proud of how cool and unconcerned her voice came out. But then, Leda had plenty of practice at pretending not to care about things that actually mattered.
“We’ll fill you in at the station,” said Officer Kiles. Her eyes cut significantly to Avery. Through the haze of her panic, Leda felt a sharp curiosity. Whatever this was, it was confidential.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t just question my friend without reason,” Avery cut in. She had that stubborn, protective look she’d inherited from her father. “Do you have any paperwork?”
Kiles swerved on her. “Avery Fuller, right?”
The fact that they knew her name didn’t subdue Avery one bit. She was used to being recognized, especially these days. “If you think I’m going to let you drag my friend off without any formal request—”
“We’re not dragging anyone. We were hoping that Miss Cole would come voluntarily,” Kiles said smoothly.
“It’s okay, Avery,” Leda cut in, though she was touched by Avery’s defense of her. She knew what would happen if she told the police no. They would just go get whatever paperwork they needed, meaning she would still end up there involuntarily. And with far fewer niceties.
“I’m happy to come,” she told the officers, trying to project more confidence than she felt.
“How are you doing, Miss Cole?”
Leda barely refrained from rolling her eyes. She’d always hated that question. It reminded her far too much of what her therapist would ask.
“I’m fine, thank you.” She knew the police didn’t actually care how she was doing. The question was a vacuous courtesy or perhaps some kind of test.
She tucked her heels behind the legs of her dented metal chair and glanced impassively around the interrogation room. She didn’t see the telltale shimmer in the air, like a self-contained heat wave, that usually indicated a security cam—but that didn’t mean anything, did it? Surely the police were recording her some other way. Or would they need her parents’ consent for that, since she was still a minor?
Across the metal table, both police officers blinked at her, revealing nothing. Leda kept her lips pursed, content to let the silence swirl around her.
“Are you aware of why you’re here?” asked Officer Campbell.
“I’m here because you asked me,” Leda said crisply.
Campbell leaned forward. “What do you know about Mariel Valconsuelo?”
“Who is that?” Leda asked with more force than she should have.
“You don’t know her?” Campbell laid his palms on the table, causing a holographic insta-screen to flare to life before him. Leda craned her neck, but from her perspective the holo was just a flat, opaque rectangle of pixels. He tapped the screen to input a series of commands, and a hologram burst to life, visible to all of them.
It depicted a Hispanic girl around Leda’s age, with curling dark hair and conspicuous eyes. There was something fierce and determined in her features. She wasn’t smiling, the way most people did in their official ID photos.
It was the face that, along with Eris’s, had haunted Leda’s nightmares for the past year.
Suddenly Leda was back in Dubai, terrified and helpless on that beach, and Mariel was looming over her, her gaze sharp with hatred. You killed your sister, Leda, she’d spat. A light from the dock had illuminated Mariel from behind, limning the edges of her form, making her look like some kind of avenging angel in her black bartender’s outfit. An angel sent from hell, to hold Leda accountable for all the ugliness in her heart—
“It looks like you might recognize her,” Kiles said pointedly.
Shit. Leda tried to get a hold on her emotions. “Maybe I’ve seen her around? She seems familiar, but I don’t know why.”
“Mariel worked as a waitress at Altitude Club,” Campbell offered in a condescending tone. As if Leda was supposed to seize gratefully on that fact and thank him for it.
“I guess that explains it.” Leda shrugged, but the officer wasn’t done.
“She was also at the launch event for the Mirrors in Dubai. She was part of the Altitude Club staff that the Fullers brought over to work the event.” His eyes were twin globes of watchfulness. “According to her family, she was also dating Eris Dodd-Radson, before Eris’s death.”
Leda was very quiet and still. She tried to breathe silently, in and out through her nostrils, deliberate yoga breaths. She waited for the other shoe to drop.
Officer Kiles was the one who broke the silence. “You didn’t meet her in that context? As Eris’s girlfriend?”
“Eris didn’t exactly gush about her relationships with me.” That, at least, was true. “I didn’t know Mariel.”
“Didn’t know her?” Kiles repeated. “But apparently you know that she’s dead?”
God, what was wrong with her? “She’s dead?” Leda lifted her eyebrows, as if she couldn’t be bothered to know what had happened to Mariel. “I only used the past tense because Eris is dead. As you may be aware, I was actually on the roof of the Fullers’ apartment when it happened.” The worst day of my life.
Leda wondered, again, how Mariel had died. She hadn’t been able to find that information on the i-Net, and it wasn’t as if the obituary said what had happened; they never listed the cause of death. Presumably that was in poor taste.
Campbell leaned his elbows onto the table, trying to impress upon Leda how much sheer physical space he occupied. “Mariel drowned. Her body was found in the East River.”
Leda’s mind lurched violently to one side, as if yanked by a thin thread of memory, but it snapped off and floated away before she could be certain of it. She felt cold all over.
Mariel had ended up with the death she’d tried to give Leda. There was a dark irony there, as if this were some kind of poetic justice administered by the gods.
“What does this have to do with me?”
The two police officers glanced at Leda, then at each other, then at Leda again. They seemed to come to some unspoken understanding, because Kiles leaned forward with what she probably assumed was an encouraging expression. “You may not have known Mariel, but she certainly knew you. She was gathering information about you before she died. She had a file on you and your movements.”
Of course she did. Mariel had been planning her revenge on Leda, for what Leda had done to Eris. But the police didn’t know that—right? If they did, wouldn’t she have been brought here a long time ago?
Leda did her best to act afraid, which wasn’t difficult given that her nerves were stretching tighter and tighter over the empty pit of her panic. “Are you saying that Mariel was stalking me?” she demanded.
“That is what it looks like, yes.” There was a pause. “Do you have any idea why she might do that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? She was grief-stricken over the loss of Eris and wanted to feel close to her. So she turned to Eris’s friends.”
It was a gamble, but it was the best Leda could come up with on the fly.
There was a silence heavy with meaning, as if all the air in the room had gone stale. Finally Campbell lifted his brows. “You see, until now, we thought Mariel’s death was accidental. But we recently uncovered new evidence that suggests it might have been the result of foul play. So we’ve reopened the case as a murder investigation.”
Mariel had been murdered? But who would do such a thing, and why? Leda blinked, panicked that the subject of her thoughts was somehow visible.
“We’re trying to understand what was going on with Mariel before she died. Especially since she had been dating Eris.” Officer Campbell lifted an eyebrow to underscore the strangeness of it, that two young women should die under unexpected circumstances, so soon after dating each other.
“What kind of new evidence?” Leda asked as innocently as she could.
“That’s classified.”
Leda’s mind echoed with a strange, unsettling silence. It was a silence that rang with chilly finality, like the weight of a gravestone, as if the entire current of the East River was pressing down on her chest, forcing the air from her lungs. They might find out.
If the police were investigating Mariel, they might somehow discover Leda’s relationship to Eris—and worse, the fact that Leda had accidentally pushed her. . . .
“Mariel was very fixated on you,” Kiles was saying. “I don’t think it’s just because you were friends with Eris. Do you know of any other reason she might have been watching you?”
“I don’t know,” Leda said defensively, wishing she could put her hands over her ears to block out the terrifying silence. Fear and alarm were swirling wildly through her.
“Perhaps you—”
“I don’t know!”
The words burst out of her like bullets and rebounded sharply around the room. Leda put her hands firmly on the surface of the table to hide their trembling and stood.
“I have made every effort to be cooperative,” she said clearly. “But this line of questioning is useless. I didn’t know this Mariel person and have no information about what happened to her. If you need to get in touch with me again, please do so through my family’s lawyer. Otherwise, I believe we’re done here.”
Leda stormed away, half expecting one of the detectives to stop her. But neither of them said a thing.
Outside the station, she leaned against a wall for support, her mind spinning through the implications of what had just happened.
The police were reinvestigating Mariel’s death. They had already discovered the connection between Mariel and Leda. How long would it take before they found out the reason Mariel was stalking her: that Leda had pushed Eris off the roof?
And that wasn’t the only thing that Mariel had known before she died. There were also the other secrets: Rylin’s, and Avery’s, and Watt’s. The secrets that Leda told her in a drug-fueled haze. If the police kept digging, they might discover Mariel’s connection to the others too. They were in danger, and it was her fault.
She was going to have to see them again, she realized. All of them. Even Watt.
WATT (#ulink_9e90cc67-7aaa-5252-89a6-d312d254cd6f)
YOU’RE NERVOUS.
I’m not nervous, Watt insisted, then realized that he was perched on the very edge of Avery Fuller’s couch. He scooted back against the pillows self-consciously.
Okay, he told Nadia. Maybe a little nervous.
When Leda flickered him last night, Watt had practically slid out of his desk chair in shock. He almost thought the message was some kind of twisted practical joke from Nadia. He hadn’t been expecting to hear from Leda anytime soon—really, anytime ever—given the bleak finality of their good-bye last year.
Then Watt realized that it was a group message, and the other two recipients were Avery and Rylin. We need to talk—in person, Leda had written. I think we’re all in danger.
And despite the gravity of the situation, despite the fact that he should probably be concerned about whatever Leda had discovered, Watt couldn’t help feeling a fragile hope ballooning in his chest. He was going to see Leda again.
He’d shown up early to Avery’s apartment, hoping that he might catch Leda for a moment alone; after all, she was the one who’d summoned them all to this group meeting. But she hadn’t yet arrived. Watt just sat there silently, ignoring Avery’s pointed glances, trying to figure out what the hell he was going to say. How did you greet the girl you loved when you hadn’t seen her in eight months—when her last words to you were If you care about me at all, you’ll leave me alone?
He cast his gaze nervously around the room, all brocade carpets and blue-patterned wallpaper and carved antiques that looked as if they’d been shipped straight from Versailles. For all Watt knew, maybe they had. He’d forgotten how imposing it was simply to get this high: switching on the 990th floor to the private elevator that opened onto the Fullers’ landing, then stepping through that massive two-story entryway. He’d felt a bit like Hercules climbing the staircase of the gods to Mount Olympus.
Now here he was, in the fabled sky island, the bright human aerie perched atop the greatest structure in the world. Watt glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the flexiglass so impossibly clear that it looked like it wasn’t there at all. He felt like he could stretch out his hands and brush the sky. What was it like for the Fullers, having no neighbors except those below them? Didn’t it feel strange that their only connection with the rest of the city was the opening to their private elevator shaft?
His head darted up at the sound of the doorbell, but then he realized that of course Leda wouldn’t need to ring the doorbell at all. She was on the preapproved entry list here.
“I thought we were done with all this.” Rylin Myers sank into the opposite armchair.
“I thought it was over too. A long time ago.” The sleeve of Avery’s sweater dress fell forward as she reached for a glass of lemon water. A platter of snacks was arranged on the coffee table before them, completely untouched.
How like Avery to provide refreshments at a time like this. Yet Watt couldn’t help thinking that it was oddly comforting, as if Avery’s unobtrusive hospitality was helping diffuse the tension.
He’d almost forgotten that when he first met Avery, he’d thought he was infatuated with her. But after dating Leda—after realizing what it really felt like to fall for someone—Watt knew that all he’d felt for Avery was a crush. He and Avery were much better off this way, as occasional friends.
He heard footsteps again, and before he could figure out what his first words to her would be (Something witty, Nadia, help!) Leda stepped into the living room, knocking all the air from the immediate vicinity.
She was even thinner than before, draped in a black turtleneck sweater, and her hair was cut short. It drew attention to the stark architecture of her face.
Leda’s eyes automatically rose to meet his. For a moment there was no one in the room but the two of them. Watt swallowed against the maddening flood of old tendernesses and love and frustrations that rose up in him.
She was really here. For the first time in months, she was here, and Watt couldn’t believe it; he felt as if he’d taken an adrenaline boost, slapped a million caffeine patches over every last inch of his skin. It was as if he’d been in a trance these long months without Leda, and seeing her again had struck him violently back to life.
“I would apologize for being late, except I think you’re all early,” she said smoothly, taking a step forward. Watt had forgotten the way she moved, as if every motion began in her warm, dark eyes, and flowed unbroken all the way to her ballet flats. She sat down next to Avery and crossed one leg over the other, only the slight jangling of her foot betraying her anxiety.
“We’re early because your message was so terrifying and vague!” Rylin cut in. “What’s going on?”
“The police are investigating Mariel’s death.”
There was a beat of collective silence at Leda’s announcement. Avery twisted her hands in her lap. Rylin’s eyes were wide with horror.
Nadia, Watt thought fiercely, what do the police know so far? And why weren’t we keeping tabs on this?
I’m sorry. But you know I can’t hack the police department. They back up those files using location-specific hardware protections.
Leda explained that police detectives had called her in for questioning because they were reopening the investigation into Mariel’s death—this time as a homicide case. The cops had clearly found a connection between Leda and Mariel, but they didn’t seem to understand it yet.
Avery clutched a chenille pillow to her chest. “Did you tell them about Dubai?”
“You mean, did I tell them that Mariel tried to kill me? I don’t think it would make me look very good in a murder investigation. All I said was that I have no idea what happened to her.”
“None of us know anything!” Rylin burst out. “So we’re fine, right? That’s the end of it?”
“Except that Mariel knew our secrets,” Watt said, speaking up for the first time.
All three girls whirled around to face him. Avery’s and Rylin’s eyes were wide and startled and thick-lashed; but Leda just met his gaze evenly. She’d clearly already been down this line of thought.
“She knew our secrets,” he repeated. “There’s a clear connection between Mariel and us. Now that the police are digging into her death, it’s only a matter of time before they figure it out. After all, they already found Leda.”
Leda gave a terse nod of agreement, her dangle earrings brushing forward over the collar of her sweater.
“Are you saying that we’re suspects?” Rylin demanded.
Watt knew what she meant. If Mariel had been gathering files on all of them, it could look like they’d killed her to cover up what she knew. It was proof of motive, if nothing else.
“There’s no way,” Avery insisted. “We didn’t even know Mariel. Why would we be suspects?”
“Because the police seem to be questioning motive rather than means,” Watt explained. “They obviously don’t know who killed her, so they’re trying to figure out who might have wanted to kill her and working backward from there. And if they make the connection between Leda and Eris’s death—”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. If the police learned the truth about Eris’s death, the fact that Leda had blackmailed them all to keep it hidden, then they would clearly try to find out what that blackmail had entailed. Which would lead them straight to everyone’s secrets.
Avery gasped. The sun cast the shadow of her eyelashes on her cheekbones. “You’re saying that if the cops keep investigating, they might discover what Mariel had on all of us,” she summarized.
Silence hung in the air. Watt imagined he could see it, as if all their unspoken fears had been made tangible, swirling like snowflakes.
“Now you see why I wanted to meet up. I had to warn you guys,” Leda said miserably.
“I still don’t get it. If they have no clue who might have killed Mariel—if their only option is to guess at motive and work backward—then why did they reopen the case at all?” Avery asked.
“They must have some new evidence,” Rylin posited. “Something that made them think it was murder without suggesting who did it.”
Leda bit her lip. “The police told me how she died,” she said softly, and they all looked up, because that information definitely hadn’t been in the obit. “Mariel drowned in the East River.”
“She drowned?” Avery repeated. “That sounds like an accident to me. What new evidence could they possibly have found to prompt a reopening of the investigation?”
The room erupted into a storm of theories.
“Maybe they found new security footage of someone pushing her, but can’t see who it is?”
“Or maybe they found a weapon, and realized that someone used it to attack her.”
“But how would they know that weapon was used on Mariel? DNA?”
“Why can’t they just use location data to see who was there that day?”
“Location data isn’t stored for more than forty-eight hours, you know that. It was a landmark Supreme Court case—”
“Maybe they found a record of a security breach somewhere along the river but can’t tell who it was?”
“Enough!”
Leda had begun pacing back and forth like a caged lioness. When she reached one end of the carpet, she would turn automatically and start back in the other direction. Watt had forgotten that about her: the way she was always doubling and twisting on herself, as if it were impossible for her to ever fall still.
“I didn’t call you guys here to instigate a blind panic, okay? Especially since you might not even be involved! Mariel was obsessed with me. This is my problem. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all of yours. I only wanted to warn you, just in case,” she added a little less vehemently.
“It’s my problem too, Leda. If they find out about—” Avery faltered. “It wouldn’t be good, if anyone learned what Mariel knew about me.”
Rylin nodded. “Same.”
Nadia, did we ever find out what Leda had on Rylin?
She stole drugs, Nadia informed him.
Watt didn’t have to ask Avery’s secret, because he already knew what it was. Her relationship with Atlas.
He glanced over at Leda. Her secret—the fact that she had killed Eris, no matter that it was an accident, and had then tried to cover it up—was as dangerous as his. Maybe even the worst of all.
“We’re all in this together,” he said, which was true. The three other people in this room had once been strangers, but now their lives were inextricably bound with his.
“I have to go,” Rylin said abruptly. “Keep me posted if anything happens. And be careful.”
Leda was still pointedly refusing to look at Watt. “Thanks for letting us meet here, Avery.”
Watt nodded good-bye to Avery before following quickly on Leda’s heels. “Leda,” he called out, but she just kept walking down the Fullers’ long entryway, her footsteps quickening. Her heels echoed on the white marble tiles with their black border.
She’s avoiding you, Nadia pointed out unnecessarily.
Watt started running. “Leda!” he tried again, not that it would be any use—the elevator doors were opening, and she was hurriedly retreating inside.
He just barely managed to squeeze into the elevator before the heavy brass doors shut behind him with a resounding click. He didn’t have much time. Just the length of a single elevator ride, to convince the girl he loved that they had to see each other again.
“Hey, Leda.” He said it nonchalantly, as if he hadn’t just chased her down a hallway after a discussion about a murder investigation. As if it wasn’t a big deal that they were alone in the same space for the first time in months. Close enough to touch. Breathing the very same air. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Not about us.” Watt attempted to force a beat of normalcy into his voice, which was pretty much impossible. “I meant about this Mariel stuff. I want to help.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be fine. I only wanted to warn—”
“Warn us, yeah, I got it.” Watt leaned forward, bracing his arm against the elevator’s wall so he effectively boxed Leda in. “You need my help, Leda.”
“No, I don’t,” she insisted, ducking under his arm and retreating to the opposite side of the elevator. “Besides, Watt, this isn’t something you can hack your way out of.”
“Sure it is,” Watt said automatically, though he wasn’t actually sure where he would start. “Unless you already hired another hacker? Tell me who it is, so I can sabotage them.” He meant it as a joke, but the delivery was all wrong.
“I can’t afford to be spending time with you,” Leda said quickly. “It’s too risky—it could spark all my problematic behaviors, and if I spiral out of control again, my parents will send me to boarding school. I don’t want to risk it, okay?” A vein pulsed in her throat.
“Look, I’m sorry that I’m some kind of human trigger.” Watt sighed. “But you should know that I’m going to keep working on this either way. You’re not the only one who has a lot to lose, if those secrets get out.”
“I really am sorry. I never wanted you to get involved.” Leda seemed a bit softer. She’d been all sharp angles when he first stepped into the elevator, but now some of those angles were sanded down.
“I am involved, like it or not,” Watt said, trying to focus on his words and not how maddeningly close she was. “We can work separately on this, or we can combine forces. You know what they say, two brains are better than one.” In this case, maybe three were better than two, if you counted Nadia.
They reached the 990th-floor landing with a soft click, and the doors hissed open. Leda didn’t get out yet.
“All right,” she said, as gloriously prideful as ever. “I guess we can work together on this. You can be useful when you want to be.”
Watt knew that was the most eloquent request for assistance he was likely to get. Leda Cole never revealed vulnerability, and she never asked for help.
He felt a flush of eager excitement. No matter what she said—no matter the circumstances in which they were seeing each other again—he refused to believe that they were over. He was still Watt Bakradi, and she was still Leda Cole, and they deserved another shot.
He was going to take advantage of every minute he got to spend with her. Whatever it took, Watt swore, he would win Leda back.
AVERY (#ulink_eececb2a-ff3c-5139-af6c-5966470182f4)
“THANKS FOR COMING with me,” Avery said softly, as she and Max walked down the high-ceilinged gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Of course I came. I’ve missed you,” Max replied, even though he’d seen her only two days ago. He reached up to adjust his skinny linen scarf, which was covered in a scrolling red batik print. “Besides, the point of me staying in New York was to see all the places that matter to you, and this one is clearly high on the list.”
Avery nodded, a little surprised that Max didn’t realize how shaken and unsettled she felt. He seemed to think that this was just a spontaneous museum outing. But Avery had come here to clear her head. She was still reeling from that unexpected meeting yesterday, and Leda’s revelation that Mariel’s death was now under investigation. Now that her family’s entrance to the roof was closed, the trapdoor in their pantry sealed off, the Met was the only place Avery felt like she could escape.
The museum rose alongside the bubble of Central Park, its iconic pillars overlooking the diamond of the softball fields and the famous pale-pink ice rink that was always frozen, no matter the season. Supposedly the rink had been meant to change colors, but it froze at this shade of pink the week the park opened—and in that typical New York way, now no one would ever dream of changing it.
Avery took a deep breath. You could taste the difference in the air, in here: It was completely sterile to protect the art from oxidation or corrosion. The whole entrance to the museum felt oddly like a vacuum chamber, as if you were stepping into space, some grand new universe of artistic beauty.
“How was your first week?” she asked Max, trying her best to sound normal.
“It was incredible. Dr. Wilde is an even better lecturer than I expected! She’s actually agreed to read my thesis herself, instead of assigning it to a TA.”
Avery smiled. “That’s fantastic, Max.”
“And last night I went to a party in my hallway,” he went on, his eyes dancing. Max remained amused by the way American college students partied in whatever spaces were available to them, their parties spilling out into study rooms and dorm kitchens. “You’re going to love my neighbors, Avery. One of them is a sculpture student named Victoria who specializes in spun-wire.” He stumbled over the phrase, as if scared that he didn’t know what it meant, then declared, “I told her all about you.”
Avery reached to twine her fingers in his. “I can’t wait to meet them.”
Max had moved into one of the Columbia dorms on the 628th floor. Avery was secretly glad that he hadn’t asked to stay at the Fullers’ apartment. Her parents would never have allowed it. They had three guest suites, but no one actually used them, not even Avery’s grandparents when they came to visit. The rooms were just additional square footage meant to display Mrs. Fuller’s extensive collection of antiques, each surface carefully arranged with ceramic Staffordshire dogs or terra-cotta Chinese figures or blue-and-white Delft candlesticks. Each room had been featured in Architectural Digest or Glamorous Homes at least once. Besides, Avery had thought, it would be kind of weird having her boyfriend live down the hall from her and her parents.
She didn’t exactly have a good track record of dating boys who lived on the thousandth floor.
But to her relief, Max seemed absolutely thrilled to be living in a tiny dorm room. He kept talking about what an authentic, important part of the study abroad experience it was, to be immersed in school life. Already it sounded as if he’d made friends with everyone in his hall, and found the nearest coffee shop and twenty-four-hour diner.
They headed down the Impressionist wing. Light spilled through the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the broad canvases with their loose, spontaneous brushstrokes. Avery had always loved the Impressionists, if only for their manic obsession with color. None of their works had a drop of white or black paint. If you looked closely, you would realize that even the shadows, even the eyelashes, were done in greens or purples or shades of bronze.
“You okay?” Max asked gently.
I’m worried about an investigation into the death of a girl I barely knew, because it might uncover my secret relationship with my adopted brother. Oh, and also the fact that I lied about my friend Eris’s death.
She couldn’t say any of that, of course. Max wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t love her anymore, the moment he knew about her history with Atlas.
“Stressed about the election?” he guessed, and she almost laughed. In her worry about the police investigation, she’d half forgotten that the mayoral election was next week.
“I turned in my Oxford application last night. I guess that’s put me on edge,” she offered. Among other things.
“You’ll get in,” Max assured her.
Avery nodded, but she still felt nervous. It seemed as if more was riding on this application than just her college plans—because if she got in, then she and Max would probably be together for at least two more years after this one. And who knew what that might mean?
“How was school today?” Max pressed.
Avery thought of Leda, who still had a haunted, hunted look about her that made Avery’s heart break. She thought of how empty everything felt without Eris. “You know, typical high school drama,” she evaded.
Max grinned. “Actually, I don’t know. I went to the Homburg-Schlindle Academy for Boys. Very little room for drama.”
“No drama!” Avery gasped in mock horror. “How on earth did you entertain yourselves?”
“Fistfights, mostly.”
“Right, of course.” She tried unsuccessfully to imagine Max getting into a fight with someone. More likely he’d challenged anyone who bothered him to an epic chess match.
A pair of girls walked past, probably around fourteen. They were both wearing blouses stitched with buttons: along the collar, the wrists, even the hemline. Each row had at least one button that didn’t match the others.
The girls smiled shyly when they saw Avery, then tipped their heads together to whisper, gliding quickly past.
“You did that!” Max exclaimed in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” Avery hedged. The whole thing made her feel kind of weird.
Max just laughed. “You started this button frenzy, you might as well take ownership of it. Though I suppose I am the muse behind it all,” he couldn’t resist adding. “It’s a good thing I have such abysmal fashion sense.”
“Right,” Avery replied, playing along. “Otherwise where would I get my inspiration?”
They kept walking down the hallway, past Impressionism and into the early modern portrait galleries. Avery’s eyes skimmed over each canvas in turn, pausing over their familiar compositions. Max pretended to be looking at the paintings, but Avery saw that he was really looking at her.
“Which is your favorite?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t pick a favorite.”
“Of course you can,” Max insisted. “Pretend the museum is burning down and you only have time to save one thing. Which is it?”
For some reason, Avery didn’t like these what-if games. It wasn’t the first time Max had asked this sort of question; he was always trying to summarize his surroundings, organize things into clearly discernable categories and keep them there. He wanted to know Avery’s favorite painting, so if someone asked him about Avery’s art history classes, he could say, Yes, that’s what she studies, and she loves this work of art most of all.
Art history wasn’t about ranking or maximizing things. It was about thoughtfulness, and appreciation—the search for a cohesive thread among all the wondrous things people had created through the centuries, in an effort to say something, to feel a little bit less alone.
“Maybe . . . Madame X.” Avery nodded toward the famous portrait of the enigmatic woman in the slinky black gown. There was something subtly fragile about her, as if her real self was nothing like the face she presented to the world.
“Cool choice. Though she isn’t anywhere near as beautiful as you,” Max said. He had completely missed her point.
Atlas would have understood, Avery caught herself thinking, and instantly chastised herself for the thought. It wasn’t fair of her to expect Max to know her the way Atlas did. Max had met her less than a year ago, while Atlas had known her most of her life.
Max reached into his pocket for his tablet, which had started buzzing. He still refused to wear contacts—which was one of the many things Avery loved about him.
“A couple people from my dorm are seeing a holo tonight,” he told her, looking up. “Want to go?”
“Sure,” Avery said easily. Sitting in a dark, anonymous theater sounded nice right now.
As they headed back toward the museum’s main entrance, they had to walk through the antiquities gallery. Its shelves were crowded with countless small broken things, items of jewelry or eating utensils, now reduced to fragments of discolored clay.
“I never liked this room.” Avery paused before a few shards of something that were labeled, simply, USE UNKNOWN. “People created these things, probably to help themselves survive, and now we don’t even know what they were for.” There was something eerily sad about it all. It made her wonder what people would say about modern devices, centuries in the future—if a scientist would someday excavate her beauty-wand and wonder what its purpose was.
“What does it matter what these things were for?” Max shrugged. “It’s interesting to study, but it doesn’t have any real impact on the present. The most important thing is to focus on making the world a better place right now, while we’re still in it.”
Avery was momentarily struck by how uncannily like her dad Max sounded.
“And, of course, spending time with you. That’s my main focus,” Max added, with a smile that wiped away any hesitations. She leaned up to brush her lips against his.
“Mine too,” she said emphatically.
CALLIOPE (#ulink_d35b2aaa-2df0-5cc8-abb3-64d387ef5f3d)
CALLIOPE TWISTED BACK and forth on the circular podium, utterly disgusted with what she saw reflected in the mirror.
She was wearing what had to be the most appalling bridesmaid’s dress of all time. It was a horrific confection of tulle and satin, with a square neckline and enormous puffed sleeves that tightened at the elbows and extended to the wrists. Layers of tulle were bunched over and over on the voluminous skirt. As if that wasn’t enough, the dress came complete with a cape, which tied around the neck with ribbons.
The only part of Calliope not covered in all these swaths of fabric was her face. She felt as if she were wearing curtains.
On the podium next to her stood Livya, sinking underneath the same monstrosity of a dress. She looked pale and washed out, as always, her hair falling in thin listless strands around her heart-shaped face.
“What do you think, girls?” asked Elise. Calliope didn’t miss the way her mom’s eyes darted anxiously toward Nadav’s mother, Tamar, her future mother-in-law, who was seated in a nearby armchair, her hands clasped primly in her lap. She’d been the one to select these dresses.
“They’re great,” Calliope said weakly. Honestly, she hadn’t known there was a garment on earth that could make her look this ugly. There was a first time for everything, she supposed.
“I think they’re divine,” Livya gushed, moving past Elise as if she weren’t even there and heading straight to her grandmother. She planted a kiss on the old lady’s cheek. “Thank you, Boo Boo.”
Calliope refrained from rolling her eyes at the absurd nickname.
They were in the wedding boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue, which, perversely enough, was no longer located on Fifth Avenue at all, but on Serra Street, toward the center of the Tower. The fitting room looked like a wedding cake come to life, with its peach velvet settees, white plush carpets, even a tray of little iced petit fours arranged on the sideboard.
Most striking of all, though, were the mirrors. They were ubiquitous, so that a girl could see herself from every conceivable angle, and perhaps a few inconceivable ones too.
Normally, being places like this—cool, expensive boutiques full of beautiful things—calmed Calliope. It was something in the proud look of them, the expectant hush as their doors swung open and you saw all those beautiful rich things arranged within. But today her surroundings seemed to be mocking her.
Livya sank into an armchair next to her grandmother and began tapping furiously at her tablet, her face sour. The dress poufed comically around her, making her look like a human-sized loofah with skinny, protruding arms. Calliope would have laughed at the sight, except that she sort of wanted to cry.
“Elise,” said Miranda, the bridal sales associate. “Do you think we could make a final decision on color? The superlooms are fast, but I’m getting concerned about timing.”
The sample dresses that Livya and Calliope were wearing had been spun from smartthreads: the playful, cheap-looking material patented thirty years ago. The final dresses that they wore at the wedding would be real fabric, of course, because who would actually want their bridesmaid dresses to change color? These smartthread models were for sales purposes only.
No one had asked Livya to move, yet she stood with an audible, resigned groan and stepped back onto the podium alongside Calliope. She kept her arms crossed over her chest, as if to convey how utterly pointless she found this entire exercise.
“Let’s start with the purples.” Miranda reached for her tablet. A colorful bar on one side depicted all the colors of the rainbow, red bleeding through to yellow and then purple again. As Miranda’s fingers moved slowly down the palette, the fabric of Calliope’s and Livya’s dresses shifted accordingly, deepening from lilac to violet to a dark wine color.
“I need to see it with the flowers,” Elise said eagerly, turning to a marble console table along the edge of the room. It was littered with sample bouquets that their florist had sent over, everything from simple all-white arrangements to vast multicolored sprays of foliage. The room smelled pleasantly like a garden.
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