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The Thousandth Floor
Katharine McGee


Welcome to Manhattan, 2118.A thousand-storey tower stretching into the sky. A glittering vision of the future, where anything is possible – if you want it enough.A hundred years in the future, New York's elite of the super-tower lie, backstab and betray each other to find their place at the top of the world. Everyone wants something… and everyone has something to lose.As the privileged inhabitants of the upper floors recklessly navigate the successes and pitfalls of the luxury life, forbidden desires are indulged and carefree lives teeter on the brink of catastrophe. Whilst lower-floor workers are tempted by a world – and unexpected romance – dangling just out of reach. And on the thousandth floor is Avery Fuller, the girl genetically designed to be perfect. The girl who seems to have it all – yet is tormented by the one thing she can never have.So when a young woman falls from the top of the supertower, her death is the culmination of a scandal that has ensnared the top-floor elite and bottom-floor. But who plummeted from the roof? And what dark secrets led to her fall?Friends will be betrayed and enemies forged as promises are broken. When you’re this high up, there’s nowhere to go but down…























Copyright (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., in 2016

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by HarperCollins Children’s Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF.

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Copyright © Alloy Entertainment and Katharine McGee 2016

Cover photographs © Ilina Simeonova/Trevillion Images (woman figure); Westend61/Getty (window); Hongqi Zhang/Alamy (cityscape); Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com) (woman head).

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2016

Katharine McGee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008179977

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008179960

Version: 2016-08-04


For Lizzy


Contents

Cover (#u093a6319-9071-5929-afec-12d741187fa2)

Title Page (#uf40ff833-6787-560f-aa75-eb1eb7dfce25)

Copyright

Dedication (#u889816a4-2bae-5360-93e8-8503d25c5cb0)

Prologue

Avery

Leda

Rylin

Eris

Watt

Avery

Leda

Avery

Eris

Rylin

Watt

Leda

Avery

Eris

Rylin

Avery

Watt

Eris

Leda

Rylin

Eris

Avery

Eris

Watt

Rylin

Watt

Leda

Eris

Leda

Avery

Rylin

Leda

Avery

Eris

Rylin

Leda

Avery

Watt

Rylin

Eris

Leda

Watt

Rylin

Avery

Leda

Eris

Avery

Watt

Leda

Avery

Watt

Rylin

Eris

Leda

Avery

Leda

Watt

Rylin

Eris

Watt

Rylin

Leda

Eris

Avery

Leda

Rylin

Eris

Rylin

Leda

Watt

Avery

Mariel

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher




PROLOGUE (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


November 2118

THE SOUNDS OF laughter and music were dying down on the thousandth floor, the party breaking up by bits and pieces as even the rowdiest guests finally stumbled into the elevators and down to their homes. The floor-to-ceiling windows were squares of velvety darkness, though in the distance the sun was quietly rising, the skyline turning ocher and pale pink and a soft, shimmering gold.

And then a scream cut abruptly through the silence as a girl fell toward the ground, her body falling ever faster through the cool predawn air.

In just three minutes, the girl would collide with the unforgiving cement of East Avenue. But now—her hair whipped up like a banner, the silk dress snapping around the curves of her body, her bright red mouth frozen in a perfect O of shock—now, in this instant, she was more beautiful than she had ever been.

They say that before death, people’s lives flash before their eyes. But as the ground rushed ever faster toward her, the girl could think only of the past few hours, the path she’d taken that ended here. If only she hadn’t talked to him. If only she hadn’t been so foolish. If only she hadn’t gone up there in the first place.

When the dock monitor found what remained of her body and shakily pinged in a report of the incident, all he knew was that the girl was the first person to fall from the Tower in its twenty-five years. He didn’t know who she was, or how she’d gotten outside.

He didn’t know whether she’d fallen, or been pushed, or whether—crushed by the weight of unspoken secrets—she’d decided to jump.




AVERY (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


Two months earlier

“I HAD A great time tonight,” Zay Wagner said as he walked Avery Fuller to the door of her family’s penthouse. They’d been down at the New York Aquarium on the 830th floor, dancing in the soft glow of the fish tanks and familiar faces. Not that Avery cared much about the aquarium. But as her friend Eris always said, a party was a party, right?

“Me too.” Avery tilted her bright blond head toward the retinal scanner, and the door unlocked. She offered Zay a smile. “Night.”

He reached for her hand. “I was thinking maybe I could come in? Since your parents are away and everything …”

“I’m sorry,” Avery mumbled, hiding her annoyance with a fake yawn. He’d been finding excuses to touch her all night; she should have seen this coming. “I’m exhausted.”

“Avery.” Zay dropped her hand and took a step back, running his fingers through his hair. “We’ve been doing this for weeks now. Do you even like me?”

Avery opened her mouth, then fell silent. She had no idea what to say.

Something flickered over Zay’s expression—irritation? confusion? “Got it. I’ll see you later.” He retreated to the elevator, then turned back, his eyes traveling over her once more. “You looked really beautiful tonight,” he added. The elevator doors closed behind him with a click.

Avery sighed and stepped into the grand entryway of her apartment. Back before she was born, when the Tower was under construction, her parents had bid aggressively to get this place—the entire top floor, with the only two-story foyer in the entire structure. They were so proud of this entryway, but Avery hated it: the hollow way it made her footsteps echo, the glinting mirrors on every surface. She couldn’t look anywhere without seeing her reflection.

She kicked off her heels and walked barefoot toward her room, leaving the shoes in the middle of the hallway. Someone would pick them up tomorrow, one of the bots, or Sarah, if she actually showed up on time.

Poor Zay. Avery did like him: he was funny in a loud, fizzy way that made her laugh. But she just didn’t feel anything when they kissed.

But the only boy Avery did want to kiss was the one she never, ever could.

She stepped into her room and heard the soft hum as the room comp whizzed to life, scanning her vitals and adjusting the temperature accordingly. An ice water appeared on the table next to her antique four-poster bed—probably because of the champagne still turning in her empty stomach, though Avery didn’t bother asking. After Atlas skipped town, she’d disabled the voice function on the comp. He’d been the one to set it on the British accent and name it Jenkins. Talking to Jenkins without him was too depressing.

Zay’s words echoed in her head. You looked really beautiful tonight. He was just trying to give her a compliment, of course; he couldn’t have known how much Avery hated that word. All her life she’d been hearing how beautiful she was—from teachers, boys, her parents. By now the phrase had lost all meaning. Atlas, her adopted brother, was the only one who knew better than to compliment her.

The Fullers had spent years and a great deal of money conceiving Avery. She wasn’t sure how expensive she’d actually been to make, though she guessed her value at slightly below that of their apartment. Her parents, who were both of middling height with ordinary looks and thinning brown hair, had flown in the world’s leading researcher from Switzerland to help mine their genetic material. Somewhere in the million combinations of their very average DNA, they found the single possibility that led to Avery.

She wondered, sometimes, how she would’ve turned out if her parents had made her naturally, or just screened for diseases like most people on the upper floors. Would she have inherited her mom’s skinny shoulders, or her father’s big teeth? Not that it mattered. Pierson and Elizabeth Fuller had paid for this daughter, with honey-colored hair and long legs and deep blue eyes, her dad’s intelligence, and her mom’s quick wit. Atlas always joked that stubbornness was her one imperfection.

Avery wished that was the only thing wrong with her.

She shook out her hair, yanked it into a loose bun, and walked purposefully from her room. In the kitchen she swung open the pantry door, already reaching for the hidden handle to the mech panel. She’d found it years ago during a game of hide-and-seek with Atlas. She wasn’t even sure whether her parents knew about it; it wasn’t as if they ever set foot in here.

Avery pushed the metal panel inward, and a ladder swung down into the narrow pantry space. Clutching the skirts of her ivory silk gown with both hands, she folded herself into the crawl space and started up, counting the rungs instinctively in Italian as she did, uno, due, tre. She wondered if Atlas had spent any time in Italy this year, if he’d even gone to Europe at all.

Balancing on the top rung, she reached to release the trapdoor and stepped eagerly into the wind-whipped darkness.

Beneath the deafening roar of the wind, Avery heard the rumbling of various machines on the roof around her, huddled under their weatherproof boxes or photovoltaic panels. Her bare feet were cold on the metal slabs of the platform. Steel supports arced from each corner, joining overhead to form the Tower’s iconic spire.

It was a clear night, no clouds in the air to dampen her eyelashes or bead into moisture on her skin. The stars glittered like crushed glass against the dark vastness of the night sky. If anyone knew she was up here, she’d be grounded for life. Exterior access over the 150th floor was forbidden; all the terraces above that level were protected from the high-speed winds by heavy panes of polyethylene glass.

Avery wondered if anyone had ever set foot up here besides her. There were safety railings along one side of the roof, presumably in case maintenance workers came up, but to her knowledge, no one ever had.

She’d never told Atlas. It was one of only two secrets she had kept from him. If he found out, he would make sure she didn’t come back, and Avery couldn’t bear the thought of giving this up. She loved it here—loved the wind battering her face and tangling her hair, bringing tears to her eyes, howling so loud that it drowned out her own wild thoughts.

She stepped closer to the edge, relishing the twist of vertigo in her stomach as she gazed out over the city, the monorails curving through the air below like fluorescent snakes. The horizon seemed impossibly far. She could see from the lights of New Jersey in the west to the streets of the Sprawl in the south, to Brooklyn in the east, and farther, the pewter gleam of the Atlantic.

And beneath her bare feet lay the biggest structure on earth, a whole world unto itself. How strange that there were millions of people below her at this very moment, eating, sleeping, dreaming, touching. Avery blinked, feeling suddenly and acutely alone. They were strangers, all of them, even the ones she knew. What did she care about them, or about herself, or about anything, really?

She leaned her elbows on the railing and shivered. One wrong move could send her over. Not for the first time, she wondered how it would feel, falling two and a half miles. She imagined it would be strangely peaceful, the feeling of weightlessness as she reached terminal velocity. And she’d be dead of a heart attack long before she hit the ground. Closing her eyes, she tilted forward, curling her silver-painted toes over the edge—just as the back of her eyelids lit up, her contacts registering an incoming ping.

She hesitated, a wave of guilty excitement crashing over her at the sight of his name. She’d done so well avoiding this all summer, distracting herself with the study abroad program in Florence, and more recently with Zay. But after a moment, Avery turned and clattered quickly back down the ladder.

“Hey,” she said breathlessly when she was back in the pantry, whispering even though there was no one around to hear. “You haven’t called for a while. Where are you?”

“Somewhere new. You’d love it here.” His voice in her ear sounded the same, warm and rich as always. “How’re things, Aves?”

And there it was: the reason Avery had to climb into a windstorm to escape her thoughts, the part of her engineering that had gone horribly wrong.

On the other end of the call was Atlas, her brother—and the reason she never wanted to kiss anyone else.




LEDA (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


AS THE COPTER crossed the East River into Manhattan, Leda Cole leaned forward, pressing her face against the flexiglass for a better look.

There was always something magical about this first glimpse of the city, especially now, with the windows of the upper floors blazing in the afternoon sun. Beneath the neochrome surface Leda caught flashes of color where the elevators shot past, the veins of the city pumping its lifeblood up and down. It was the same as ever, she thought, utterly modern and yet somehow timeless. Leda had seen countless pics of the old New York skyline, the one people always romanticized. But compared to the Tower she thought it looked jagged and ugly.

“Glad to be home?” her mom asked carefully, glancing at her from across the aisle. Leda gave a curt nod, not bothering to answer. She’d barely spoken to her parents since they’d picked her up from rehab earlier this morning. Or really, since the incident back in July that had sent her there.

“Can we order Miatza tonight? I’ve been craving a dodo burger for weeks,” her brother, Jamie, said, in a clear attempt to cheer her up. Leda ignored him. Jamie was only eleven months older, about to start his senior year, but he and Leda weren’t all that close. Probably because they were nothing alike.

With Jamie everything was simple and straightforward, and he never seemed to worry that much at all. He and Leda didn’t even look alike—where Leda was dark and spritely like their mom, Jamie’s skin was almost as pale as their dad’s, and despite Leda’s best efforts he always looked sloppy. Right now he was sporting a wiry beard that he’d apparently spent the summer growing.

“Whatever Leda wants,” Leda’s dad replied. Sure, because letting her choose their takeout would make up for everything.

“I don’t care.” Leda glanced down at her wrist. Two tiny puncture wounds, remnants of the monitor bracelet that had clung to her all summer, were the only evidence of her time at Silver Cove. Which had been located perversely far from the ocean, in central Nevada.

Not that Leda could really blame her parents. If she’d walked in on the scene they’d witnessed back in July, she would have sent her to rehab too. She’d been an utter mess when she arrived there: vicious and angry, hyped up on xenperheidren and who knew what else. It had taken a full day of what the other girls at Silver Cove called “happy juice”—a potent IV drip of sedatives and dopamine—before she even agreed to speak with the doctors.

As the drugs seeped slowly from Leda’s system, though, the acrid taste of her resentment had begun to fade. Shame flushed over her instead: a sticky, uncomfortable shame. She’d always promised herself that she would remain in control, that she wouldn’t be one of those pathetic addicts they showed in the health class holos at school. Yet there she was, with an IV drip taped into her vein.

“You okay?” one of the nurses had said, watching her expression.

Never let them see you cry, Leda had reminded herself, blinking back tears. “Of course,” she managed, her voice steady.

Eventually Leda did find a sort of peace at rehab: not with her worthless psych doctor, but in meditation. She spent almost every morning there, sitting cross-legged and repeating the mantras that Guru Vashmi intoned. May my actions be purposeful. I am my own greatest ally. I am enough in myself. Occasionally Leda would open her eyes and glance around through the lavender smoke at the other girls in the yoga tepee. They all had a haunted, hunted look about them, as if they’d been chased here and were too afraid to leave. I’m not like them, Leda had told herself, squaring her shoulders and closing her eyes again. She didn’t need the drugs, not the way those girls did.

Now they were only a few minutes from the Tower. Sudden anxiety twisted in Leda’s stomach. Was she ready for this—ready to come back here and face everything that had sent her into a tailspin in the first place?

Not everything. Atlas was still gone.

Closing her eyes, Leda muttered a few words signaling her contacts to open her inbox, which she’d been checking nonstop since she left rehab this morning and got service again. Three thousand accumulated messages instantly pinged in her ears, invitations and vid-alerts cascading over one another like musical notes. The rumble of attention was oddly soothing.

At the top of the queue was a new message from Avery. When are you back?

Every summer, Leda’s family forced her to come on their annual visit “home” to Podunk, middle-of-nowhere Illinois. “Home is New York,” Leda would always protest, but her parents ignored her. Leda honestly didn’t even understand why her parents wanted to keep visiting year after year. If she’d done what they did—moved from Danville to New York as newlyweds, right when the Tower was built, and slowly worked their way up until they could afford to live in the coveted upper floors—she wouldn’t have looked back.

Yet her parents were determined to return to their hometown every year and stay with Leda and Jamie’s grandparents, in a tech-dark house stocked with nothing but soy butter and frozen meal packets. Leda had actually enjoyed it back when she was a kid and it felt like an adventure. As she got older, though, she started begging to stay behind. She dreaded being around her cousins, with their tacky mass-produced clothing and eerie contactless pupils. But no matter how much she protested, she never could worm her way out of going. Until this year.

I’m back now! Leda replied, saying the message aloud and nodding to send it. Part of her knew she should tell Avery about Silver Cove: they’d talked a lot in rehab about accountability, and asking friends for help. But the thought of telling Avery made Leda clutch at the seat beneath her until her knuckles were white. She couldn’t do it; couldn’t reveal that kind of weakness to her perfect best friend. Avery would be polite about it, of course, but Leda knew that on some level she would judge her, would always look at Leda differently. And Leda couldn’t handle that.

Avery knew a little of the truth: that Leda had started taking xenperheidren occasionally, before exams, to sharpen her thinking … and that a few times she’d taken some stronger stuff, with Cord and Rick and the rest of that crowd. But Avery had no idea how bad it had gotten toward the end of last year, after the Andes—and she definitely didn’t know the truth about this summer.

They pulled up to the Tower. The copter swayed drunkenly for a moment at the entrance to the seven-hundredth-floor helipad; even with stabilizers, it still faltered in the gale-force winds that whipped around the Tower. Then it made a final push and came to a rest inside the hangar. Leda unfolded herself from her seat and clattered down the staircase after her parents. Her mom was already on a call, probably muttering about a deal gone bad.

“Leda!” A blond whirlwind hurtled forward to engulf her in a hug.

“Avery.” Leda smiled into her friend’s hair, gently disentangling herself. She took a step back and looked up—and faltered momentarily, her old insecurities rushing back. Seeing Avery again was always a shock to the system. Leda tried not to let it bother her, but sometimes she couldn’t help thinking how unfair it was. Avery already had the perfect life, up in the thousandth-floor penthouse. Did she really have to be perfect too? Seeing Avery next to the Fullers, Leda could never quite believe that she’d been created from their DNA.

It sucked sometimes, being best friends with the girl too flawless to come from nature. Leda, on the other hand, probably came from a night of tequila shots on her parents’ anniversary.

“Want to get out of here?” Avery asked, pleading.

“Yes,” Leda said. She would do anything for Avery, although this time she didn’t really need to be coaxed.

Avery turned to embrace Leda’s parents. “Mr. Cole! Mrs. Cole! Welcome home.” Leda watched as they laughed and hugged her back, opening up like flowers in sunlight. No one was immune to Avery’s spell.

“Can I steal your daughter?” Avery asked, and they nodded. “Thanks. I’ll have her home by dinner!” Avery called out, her arm already in Leda’s, tugging her insistently toward the seven-hundredth-floor thoroughfare.

“Wait a sec.” Next to Avery’s crisp red skirt and cropped shirt, Leda’s end-of-rehab outfit—a plain gray T-shirt and jeans—looked positively drab. “I want to change if we’re going out.”

“I was thinking we’d just go to the park?” Avery blinked rapidly, her pupils darting back and forth as she summoned a hover. “A bunch of the girls are hanging out there, and everyone wants to see you. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Leda said automatically, shoving aside the prickle of annoyance she felt that they weren’t hanging out one-on-one.

They walked out the helipad’s double doors and into the thoroughfare, a massive transportation hub that spanned several city blocks. The ceilings overhead glowed a bright cerulean. To Leda, they seemed just as beautiful as anything she’d seen on her afternoon hikes at Silver Cove. But Leda wasn’t the type to look for beauty in nature. Beauty was a word she reserved for expensive jewelry, and dresses, and Avery’s face.

“So tell me about it,” Avery said in that direct way of hers, as they stepped onto the carbon-composite sidewalks that lined the silver hover paths. Cylindrical snackbots hummed past on enormous wheels, selling dehydrated fruit and coffee pods.

“What?” Leda tried to snap to attention. Hovers streamed down the street to her left, their movements darting and coordinated like a school of fish, colored green or red depending on whether they were free. She instinctively moved a little closer to Avery.

“Illinois. Was it as bad as usual?” Avery’s eyes went distant. “Hover call,” she said under her breath, and one of the vehicles darted out of the pack.

“You want to hover all the way to the park?” Leda asked, dodging the question, trying to sound normal. She’d forgotten the sheer volume of people here—parents dragging their children, businesspeople talking loudly into their contacts, couples holding hands. It felt overwhelming after the curated calm of rehab.

“You’re back, it’s a special occasion!” Avery exclaimed.

Leda took a deep breath and smiled just as their hover pulled up. It was a narrow two-seater with a plush eggshell interior, floating several centimeters above the ground thanks to the magnetic propulsion bars in its floor. Avery took the seat across from Leda and keyed in their destination, sending the hover on its way.

“Maybe next year they’ll let you miss it. And then you and I can travel together,” Avery went on as the hover dropped into one of the Tower’s vertical corridors. The yellow track lighting on the tunnel walls danced in strange patterns across her cheekbones.

“Maybe.” Leda shrugged. She wanted to change the subject. “You’re insanely tan, by the way. That’s from Florence?”

“Monaco. Best beaches in the world.”

“Not better than your grandmother’s house in Maine.” They’d spent a week there after freshman year, lying outside in the sun and sneaking sips of Grandma Lasserre’s port wine.

“True. There weren’t even any cute lifeguards in Monaco,” Avery said with a laugh.

Their hover slowed, then began to move horizontally as it turned onto 307. Normally coming to a floor so low would count as serious downsliding, but visits to Central Park were an exception. As they pulled to a stop at the north-northeast park entrance, Avery turned to Leda, her deep blue eyes suddenly serious. “I’m glad you’re back, Leda. I missed you this summer.”

“Me too,” Leda said quietly.

She followed Avery through the park entrance, past the famous cherry tree that had been reclaimed from the original Central Park. A few tourists were leaning on the fence that surrounded it, taking snaps and reading the tree’s history on the interactive touch screen alongside it. There was nothing else left of the original park, which lay beneath the Tower’s foundations, far below their feet.

They turned toward the hill where Leda already knew their friends would be. Avery and Leda had discovered this spot together in seventh grade; after a great deal of experimentation, they’d concluded it was the best place to soak in the UV-free rays of the solar lamp. As they walked, the spectragrass along the path shifted from mint green to a soft lavender. A holographic cartoon gnome ran through a park on their left, followed by a line of squealing children.

“Avery!” Risha was the first to catch sight of them. The other girls, all reclining on brightly colored beach towels, glanced up and waved. “And Leda! When did you get back?”

Avery plopped in the center of the group, tucking a strand of flaxen hair behind one ear, and Leda settled down next to her. “Just now. I’m straight from the copter,” she said, pulling her mom’s vintage sunglasses out of her bag. She could have put her contacts on light-blocking mode, of course, but the glasses were sort of her signature. She’d always liked how they made her expression unreadable.

“Where’s Eris?” she wondered aloud, not that she particularly missed her. But you could usually count on Eris to show up for tanning.

“Probably shopping. Or with Cord,” said Ming Jiaozu, a suppressed bitterness in her tone.

Leda said nothing, feeling caught off guard. She hadn’t seen anything about Eris and Cord on the feeds when she checked this morning. Then again, she could never really keep up with Eris, who’d dated—or at least messed around with—nearly half the boys and girls in their class, some of them more than once. But Eris was Avery’s oldest friend, and came from old family money, and because of that she got away with pretty much anything.

“How was your summer, Leda?” Ming went on. “You were with your family in Illinois, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That must have been awful, being in the middle of nowhere like that.” Ming’s tone was sickly sweet.

“Well, I survived,” Leda said lightly, refusing to let the other girl provoke her. Ming knew how much Leda hated talking about her parents’ background. It was a reminder that she wasn’t from this world the way the rest of them were, that she’d moved up in seventh grade from midTower suburbia.

“What about you?” Leda asked. “How was Spain? Did you hang out with any of the locals?”

“Not really.”

“Funny. From the feeds, it looked like you made some really close friends.” In her mass-download on the plane earlier, Leda had seen a few snaps of Ming with a Spanish boy, and she could tell that something had happened between them—from their body language, the lack of captions under the snaps, most of all from the flush that was now creeping up Ming’s neck.

Ming fell silent. Leda allowed herself a small smile. When people pushed her buttons, she pushed back.

“Avery,” Jess McClane said, leaning forward. “Did you end things with Zay? I ran into him earlier, and he seemed down.”

“Yeah,” Avery said slowly. “I mean, I think so? I do like him, but …” she trailed off halfheartedly.

“Oh my god, Avery. You really should just do it, and get it over with!” Jess exclaimed. The gold bangles on her wrists glimmered in the solar panel’s light. “What are you waiting for, exactly? Or maybe I should say, who are you waiting for?”

“Give it a rest, Jess. You can’t exactly talk,” Leda snapped. People always made comments like that to Avery, because there was nothing else to really criticize her about. But it made even less sense coming from Jess, who was a virgin too.

“As a matter of fact, I can,” Jess said meaningfully.

A chorus of squeals erupted at that—“Wait, you and Patrick?” “When?” “Where?”—and Jess grinned, clearly eager to share the details. Leda leaned back, pretending to listen. As far as the girls all knew, she was a virgin too. She hadn’t told anyone the truth, not even Avery. And she never would.

It had happened in January, on the annual ski trip to Catyan. Their families had been going for years: at first just the Fullers and the Andertons, and then once Leda and Avery became such good friends, the Coles too. The Andes were the best skiing left on earth; even Colorado and the Alps relied almost exclusively on snow machines these days. Only in Chile, on the highest peaks in the Andes, was there enough natural snow for true skiing anymore.

The second day of the trip, they were all out drone-skiing—Avery, Leda, Atlas, Jamie, Cord, even Cord’s older brother, Brice—falling from the jump seats of their individual ski-drones to land on the powder, cut a line through the trees, and reach back up to grab their drones before the drop-off at the glacier’s edge. Leda wasn’t as strong a skier as the others, but she’d swallowed an adrenaline drop on the ride up and was feeling good, almost as good as when she stole the really good stuff from her mom. She followed Atlas through the trees, trying her best to keep up, loving the way the wind clawed at the contours of her polydown suit. She could hear nothing but the swish of her skis through the snow, and, beneath it, the deep, hollow sound of emptiness. It struck her that they were tempting fate, hurtling through the paper-thin air up there on a glacier, at the very edge of the sky.

That was when Avery had screamed.

Everything afterward was a blur. Leda fumbled in her glove to push the red emergency button that would summon her ski-drone, but Avery was already being scooped up a few meters away. Her leg jutted out at a garish angle.

By the time they got back to the hotel’s penthouse suite, Avery was already on a jet home. She would be fine, Mr. Fuller assured them; she just needed her knee re-fused, and he wanted her to see experts in New York. Leda knew what that meant. Avery would visit Everett Radson afterward to have the surgery microlasered. God forbid there be the slightest trace of a scar on her perfect body.

Later that night the kids were all in the hot tub on the deck, passing around frosted bottles of whiskeycream, toasting to Avery, the Andes, the snow that had started falling. As it started to come down ever faster, the others eventually grumbled in protest and retreated to bed. But Leda, who was sitting next to Atlas, stayed behind. He hadn’t moved yet either.

She’d wanted Atlas for years, ever since she and Avery became friends, since the moment she first met him at Avery’s apartment, when he walked in on them singing Disney songs and she turned bright red with embarrassment. But Leda had never really thought she had a chance with him. He was two years older, and besides, he was Avery’s brother. Until now, as everyone was clambering out of the hot tub and she hesitated, wondering if maybe, possibly … She felt hyperaware of where her knee brushed Atlas’s under the water, sending tingles up her entire left side.

“Want some?” he murmured, passing her the bottle.

“Thanks.” Leda forced herself to look away from his eyelashes, where snowflakes were clumping like tiny liquid stars. She took a long sip of the whiskeycream. It was smooth, sweet like a dessert, with an aftertaste that burned in her throat. She felt light-headed, dizzy from the heat of the hot tub, of Atlas so close to her. Maybe the adrenaline drop hadn’t worn off yet, or maybe it was just her own raw excitement that made her feel strangely reckless.

“Atlas,” she said softly. When he turned to her, an eyebrow raised, she leaned forward and kissed him.

After a moment’s hesitation he kissed her back, his hands reaching up into the heavy curls of her hair, dusted with snow. Leda lost all sense of time. At some point her bikini top came off, and her bottoms too—well, it wasn’t like she was wearing much clothing to begin with—and Atlas was whispering “Are you sure?” Leda nodded, her heart hammering. Of course she was sure. She’d never been so sure of anything.

The next morning she nearly skipped into the kitchen, her hair still damp from the hot tub’s steam, the memory of Atlas’s touch carved indelibly on her skin, like an inktat. But he was gone.

He’d taken the first jet back to New York. To check on Avery, his dad said. Leda nodded coolly, but inside she felt sick. She knew the truth, why Atlas had really left. He was avoiding her. Fine, she thought, anger swirling in to cover the pang of loss; she would show him. She wouldn’t care either.

Except that Leda never got a chance to confront Atlas. He went missing later that week, before classes resumed, even though it should have been the spring semester of his senior year. There was a brief and frantic search for him, limited only to Avery’s family. It ended within hours, when his parents learned he was okay.

Now, almost a year later, Atlas’s disappearance was old news. His parents publicly laughed it off as a youthful indulgence: Leda had heard them at countless cocktail parties, claiming that he was traveling the world on a gap year, that it had been their idea all along. That was their story and they were sticking to it, but Avery had told Leda the truth. The Fullers had no idea where Atlas was, and when—or if—he would ever come back. He called Avery periodically to check in, but always with the location heavily encrypted, and by then he was about to move on anyway.

Leda never told Avery about that night in the Andes. She didn’t know how to bring it up in the wake of Atlas’s disappearance, and the longer she kept it to herself, the more of a secret it became. It ached like a bruise, the realization that the only boy she’d ever cared about had literally run away after sleeping with her. Leda tried to stay angry; feeling angry seemed safer than letting herself feel hurt. But even the anger wasn’t enough to quiet the pain that pounded dully through her at the thought of him.

Which was how she’d ended up in rehab.

“Leda, will you come with me?” Avery’s voice broke into her thoughts. Leda blinked. “To my dad’s office, to pick something up,” Avery repeated. Her eyes were wide with meaning; Avery’s dad’s office was the excuse they’d been using for years, when one of them wanted to ditch whoever they were with.

“Doesn’t your dad have messenger bots for that?” Ming asked.

Leda ignored her. “Of course,” she said to Avery, standing up and brushing bits of grass off her jeans. “Let’s go.”

They waved good-bye and started on the path toward the nearest transport station, where the clear vertical column of the express C line shot upward. The sides were startlingly transparent; Leda could see inside to a group of elderly women whose heads were tipped together in conversation, and a toddler picking his nose.

“Atlas pinged me last night,” Avery whispered as they moved to stand on the upTower platform.

Leda stiffened. She knew that Avery had stopped telling her parents about Atlas’s calls. She said it only upset them. But there was something weird about the fact that Avery didn’t share this with anyone except Leda.

Then again, Avery had always been oddly protective of Atlas. Whenever he dated anyone, she invariably acted polite, but a little aloof—as if she didn’t quite approve, or thought that Atlas had made a mistake. Leda wondered if it had to do with Atlas being adopted, if Avery worried he was somehow more vulnerable, because of the life he’d come from, and felt an impulse to protect him as a result.

“Really?” she asked, keeping her voice steady. “Could you tell where he was?”

“I heard a lot of loud voices in the background. Probably a bar somewhere.” Avery shrugged. “You know how Atlas is.”

No, I really don’t. Maybe if she understood Atlas, Leda would be able to make sense of her own confused feelings. She gave her friend’s arm a squeeze.

“Anyway,” Avery said with forced brightness, “he’ll come home soon, when he’s ready. Right?”

She looked at Leda with a question in her eyes. For a moment, Leda was struck by how much Avery reminded her of Atlas. They weren’t related by blood, and yet they had the same white-hot intensity. When they turned the full force of their attention on you, it was as blinding as looking into the sun.

Leda shifted uncomfortably. “Of course,” she said. “He’ll come back soon.”

She prayed it wasn’t true, and at the same time, she couldn’t help hoping it was.




RYLIN (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


THE NEXT EVENING, Rylin Myers stood at the door to her apartment, struggling to wave her ID ring over the scanner while balancing a bag of groceries in one arm and a half-full energy drink in the other. Of course, she thought as she kicked shamelessly at the door, this wouldn’t be a problem if they had a retinal scanner, or those glitzy computerized lenses that the highlier kids all wore. But no one could afford anything like that where Rylin lived, here on 32.

Just as she was drawing back her leg to kick again, the door opened. “Finally,” Rylin muttered, shoving past her fourteen-year-old sister.

“If you got your ID ring fixed like I keep telling you to, this wouldn’t happen,” Chrissa quipped. “Then again, what would you say? ‘Sorry, officers, I keep using my ID ring to open beer bottles, and now it’s stopped working’?”

Rylin ignored her. Taking a long sip of her energy drink, she heaved the grocery bag onto the counter and tossed her sister a box of veggie-rice. “Can you put this stuff away? I’m running late.” The Ifty—Intra Floor Transit system—was down again, so she’d been forced to walk all twenty blocks from the lift stop to their apartment.

Chrissa looked up. “You’re going out tonight?” She’d inherited their mom’s soft Korean features, her delicate nose and high arched brow, while Rylin looked much more like their square-jawed dad. But they’d both somehow gotten their mom’s bright green eyes, which glowed against their skin like beryls.

“Um, yeah. It’s Saturday,” Rylin answered, purposefully ignoring her sister’s meaning. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened on this day a year ago—the day their mom died and their entire world fell apart. She would never forget how Child Services came to their house that very night, while the girls were still holding each other crying, to tell them about the foster system.

Rylin had listened to them for a while, Chrissa’s head turned into her shoulder as she kept on sobbing. Her sister was smart, really smart, and good enough at volleyball to have a serious shot at a college scholarship. But Rylin knew enough about foster care to know what it would do to them. Especially to Chrissa.

She would do anything to keep this family together, no matter what it cost her.

The very next day she’d gone to the nearest family court and declared legal adulthood, so that she could start working her terrible job at the monorail stop full-time. What other choice did she have? Even now, they were barely keeping up—Rylin had just gotten yet another warning notice from their landlord; they were always at least a month behind on rent. Not to mention all their mom’s hospital bills. Rylin had been trying to pay those down for the last year, but at this interest rate the mountain of debt was actually starting to grow. Sometimes Rylin felt like she’d never be free of it.

This was their life now, and it wasn’t changing anytime soon.

“Rylin. Please?”

“I’m already late,” Rylin said, retreating into her roped-off section of their tiny bedroom; thinking about what she would wear, about the fact that she didn’t have to go into work for a whole thirty-six hours, about anything but the reproachful look in her sister’s green eyes, which looked so painfully like their mom’s.

Rylin and her boyfriend, Hiral, clattered down the steps of the Tower’s Exit 12. “There they are,” Rylin muttered, raising a hand against the glare of the sun. Their friends were gathered at the usual meeting place, a hot metal bench across the street at 127th and Morningside.

She glanced at Hiral. “Are you sure you don’t have anything with you?” she asked again. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about the fact that Hiral had started selling—at first just to their friends, then on an even bigger level—but it had been a long week, and she was still on edge after her conversation with Chrissa. She could really use a hit, of relaxants or halluci-lighter, anything to silence the thoughts that were cycling endlessly through her brain.

Hiral shook his head. “Sorry. Cleared my whole inventory this week.” He glanced at her. “Everything okay?”

Rylin was quiet. Hiral reached for her hand, and she let him take it. His palms were rough with work, and there were black circles of grease underneath his fingernails. Hiral had dropped out of school last year to work as a liftie, repairing the Tower’s massive elevators from the inside. He spent his days suspended hundreds of meters in the air like a human spider.

“Ry!” her best friend, Lux, exclaimed, rushing over. Her hair, cut in jagged bangs, was ash-blond this week. “You made it! I was worried you weren’t going to come.”

“Sorry. Got caught up,” Rylin apologized.

Andrés snorted. “Had to get a little transmission in before the concert?” He made a crude gesture with his hands.

Lux rolled her eyes and pulled Rylin into a hug. “How are you holding up?” she murmured.

“Fine.” Rylin didn’t know what else to say. She felt a confused pang of gratefulness that Lux had remembered what day it was, mingled with irritation at the reminder. She caught herself toying with her mom’s old necklace and quickly let go of it. Hadn’t she come out precisely to avoid thinking about her mom?

Shaking her head, Rylin let her gaze roam over the rest of the group. Andrés was leaning back on the bench, stubbornly wearing a leather jacket in spite of the heat. Hiral stood next to him, his deeply bronzed skin gleaming in the setting sun. And on the far side of the bench was Indigo, wearing a shirt that she’d barely managed to turn into a dress, and sky-high boots.

“Where’s V?” Rylin asked.

“Providing the fun. Unless you were planning on bringing today?” Indigo said sarcastically.

“Just partaking, thanks,” Rylin replied. Indigo rolled her eyes and went back to messaging on her tablet.

Rylin took plenty of illegal drugs, of course—they all did—but she drew the line at buying or selling. No one cared much about a few smoking teenagers, but the laws were harsher on dealers. If she ended up in jail, Chrissa would go straight to foster care. Rylin couldn’t risk that.

Andrés glanced up from his tablet. “V’s meeting us there. Let’s go.”

A blistering wind tossed a few stray pieces of trash along the sidewalk. Rylin stepped over them, taking a deep, bracing breath. The air out here might be hot, but at least it wasn’t the recycled, oxygen-heavy air of the Tower.

Across the street, Hiral was already crouched at the side of the Tower, sliding a blade beneath the edge of a steel panel and peeling it back. “All clear,” he murmured. Their hands brushed as Rylin stepped into the opening, and they exchanged a look; then Rylin was stepping into the steel forest.

The sounds of outside instantly vanished, replaced by the low hum of voices and drugged-out laughter, and the whoosh of air cycling from the bottom of the Tower. They were in the underworld beneath the first floor; a strange, dark space of pipes and steel columns. Rylin and Lux walked softly through the shadows, nodding at the other groups as they passed. One cluster was gathered around the dim pink glow of a halluci-lighter. Another, half clothed and sprawled out on a pile of pillows, was clearly about to start an Oxytose orgy. Rylin saw the telltale gleam of the machine room door ahead, and started to walk a little faster.

“You can all go ahead and thank me now,” came a voice from the shadows, and she almost jumped. V.

He wasn’t as tall as Andrés, but V had to weigh at least twenty kilos more, and it was all muscle. His broad shoulders and arms were covered entirely in inktats, which danced across his body in a swirling chaos; shapes forming, breaking apart, and reforming elsewhere. Rylin winced at the thought of inking that much skin.

“Okay, guys.” V reached into his bag and produced a stack of bright gold patches, each the size of Rylin’s thumbnail. “Who’s in for communals?”

“Holy shit,” Lux exclaimed, laughing. “How did you score these?”

“Hell, yes!” Hiral high-fived Andrés.

“Seriously?” Rylin asked, her voice cutting through the celebrations. She didn’t like communals. They induced a shared group high, which felt somehow invasive, like having sex with a bunch of strangers. The worst part was being unable to control the high, putting herself entirely in someone else’s hands. “I thought we were smoking tonight,” she said. She’d even brought her halluci-lighter, the tiny compact pipe that could be used for almost anything—darklights, crispies, and of course the hallucinogenic weed it had been created for.

“Scared, Myers?” V challenged, after a moment.

“I’m not scared.” Rylin drew herself up to her full height and stared at V. “I just wanted to do something else.”

Her tablet vibrated with an incoming message. She looked down to see a text from Chrissa. I made Mom’s baked apple bites,she’d written. In case you want to come home!

V was watching her, an open challenge in his gaze. “Whatever,” Rylin said under her breath. “Why the hell not?” She reached out to grab the patches in V’s hand and slapped one on her inner arm, right by the elbow where her vein was close to the surface.

“That’s what I thought,” V said as the others began eagerly reaching for the patches.

They stepped into the machine room, and suddenly all Rylin could hear was the electronic music. It slammed angrily into her skull, obliterating any other thought. Lux grabbed her arm and began jumping hysterically, shouting something unintelligible.

“Who’s ready to party?!” the DJ exclaimed from where he stood perched on a coolant tank, an amplifier spreading his voice throughout the room. The space, hot and close with cramped bodies, erupted in screams. “All right,” he went on. “If you’ve got a gold, put it on now. Because I’m DJ Lowy, and I’m about to take you on the most insane ride of your life.” The dim light reflected off the sea of communal patches. Almost everyone here was patched up, Rylin realized. This would be intense.

“Three—” Lowy shouted, counting down. Lux gave an eager laugh and jumped higher on her tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd. Rylin glanced at V; his inktats were swirling even wilder than usual in the space surrounding his patch, as if his very skin knew what was about to happen.

“Two—” Most of the crowd had joined in the count. Hiral came to stand behind Rylin and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her head. She leaned back into him and closed her eyes, bracing herself for the communals’ activation.

“One!” The scream reverberated through the room. Lowy reached for the tablet hovering before him and flicked on the electromagnetic pulse, tuned to the frequency of the communals. Instantly all the patches in the room released waves of stimulants into the bloodstream of everyone wearing them. The ultimate synchronized high.

The music turned up and Rylin threw her hands into the air, joining the loud, seemingly endless scream. She could already feel the communal taking over her system. The world had realigned to the music, everything—the flashing of the lights overhead, her breathing, her heartbeat, everyone’s heartbeats—timed perfectly with the deep, insistent pulse of the bass.

Don’t you love this? Lux mouthed, or at least that’s what it seemed like she said, though Rylin couldn’t be sure. Already she was losing her grip on her thoughts. Chrissa and her text messages didn’t matter, her job and her asshole boss didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except this moment. She felt invincible, untouchable, like she would be this way forever: young and dancing and electric and alive.

Lights. A flask of something strong being passed to her. She took a sip without tasting what it was. A touch on her hip—Hiral, she thought, pulling his hand closer in invitation. But then she saw Hiral a few rows forward, jumping and punching at the sky with Andrés. She spun around only to see V’s face whirl up out of the darkness. He held up another gold patch, an eyebrow raised suggestively. Rylin shook her head. She wasn’t even sure how she’d pay him back for the one she’d already taken.

But V was already peeling back the adhesive on the back side. “No charge,” he whispered, as if reading her thoughts, or had she spoken them aloud? He reached down to sweep her hair back from her neck. “A little secret: The closer it is to your brain, the faster it kicks in.”

Rylin closed her eyes, dazed, as the second wave of drugs snapped through her. It was a razor-sharp rush, setting all her nerves afire. She was dancing and somehow also floating when she sensed a vibration in her front pocket. She ignored it and kept jumping, but there it was again, drawing her painstakingly back into her awkward, physical body. Fumbling, she managed to grab her tablet. “Hello?” Rylin said, gasping as her breathing became irregular, no longer in time with the music.

“Rylin Myers?”

“What the—who is this?” She couldn’t hear. The crowd was still buffeting her back and forth.

There was a pause, as if the speaker couldn’t believe the question. “Cord Anderton,” he said finally, and Rylin blinked in shock. Her mom had worked as a maid for the Andertons, back before she got sick. Dimly Rylin realized that she did recognize the voice, from the few times she’d been up there. But why the hell was Cord Anderton calling her?

“So, can you come work my party?”

“I don’t … what are you talking about?” She tried to shout over the music, but it came out more like a rasp.

“I sent you a message. I’m throwing a party tonight.” His voice was fast, impatient. “I need someone here—to keep everything clean, help with the caterers, all the stuff your mom used to do.” Rylin flinched at the mention of her mom, but of course he couldn’t see. “My usual help bailed last minute, but then I remembered you and looked you up. Do you want the job or not?”

Rylin wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. Who did Cord Anderton think he was, summoning her on a Saturday night? She opened her mouth to tell this rich, entitled asshole to shove the job right up his—

“I forgot,” he added, “it pays two hundred nanos.”

Rylin choked back her words. Two hundred nanodollars for just one night of dealing with drunk rich kids? “How soon do you need me there?”

“Oh, half an hour ago.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, the room still spinning. “But—”

“Great.” Cord ended the ping.

With a herculean effort, Rylin pulled the patch from her arm, and then, wincing, ripped off the one on her neck. She glanced back at the others—Hiral was dancing, oblivious; Lux was wrapped around a stranger with her tongue down his throat; Indigo was sitting on Andrés’s shoulders. She turned to go. V was still watching her, but Rylin didn’t say good-bye. She just stepped out into the hot stickiness of the night, letting the used gold patches flutter slowly to the ground behind her.




ERIS (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


ERIS DODD-RADSON BURROWED deeper under her fluffy silk pillow, angry at the ringing that was playing incessantly in her eartennas. “Five more minutes,” she mumbled. The ringing didn’t stop. “I said snooze!” she snapped, before realizing that this wasn’t her alarm. It was Avery’s ringtone, which Eris had long ago set on full override, so that it would wake her up even when she was sleeping. “Accept ping,” she mumbled.

“Are you on your way?” Avery’s voice sounded in her ear, pitched louder than usual over the clamor of the party. Eris glanced at the time, illuminated in bright pink numbers in her lower left field of vision. Cord’s party had started half an hour ago and she was still lying in bed, with no idea what to wear.

“Obviously.” She was already halfway to her closet, shimmying out of her oversized T-shirt as she picked her way through discarded clothes and stray pillows. “I just—ow!” she yelped, clutching a stubbed toe.

“Oh my god. You’re still home,” Avery accused, but she was laughing. “What happened? Oversleep your beauty nap again?”

“I just like making everyone wait so they’ll be that much more excited to see me,” Eris answered.

“And by ‘everyone,’ you mean Cord.”

“No, I mean everyone. Especially you, Avery,” Eris said. “Don’t go having too much fun without me, ’kay?”

“I promise. Flick me when you’re on your way?” Avery said, and ended the ping.

Eris blamed her dad for this one. Her eighteenth birthday was in a few weeks, and today she’d had to visit the family attorney to start her trust fund paperwork. It was all excessively boring, signing countless documents with an official witness present, taking drug and DNA tests. She hadn’t even understood all of it, except that if she signed everything, she’d be rich someday.

Eris’s dad came from old money—his family had invented the magnetic repulsion technology that kept hovercrafts aloft. And Everett had only added to the already-massive fortune, by becoming the world’s premier plastisurgeon. The only mistakes he’d ever made were two expensive divorces before he finally met Eris’s mom, when he was forty and she was a twenty-five-year-old model. He didn’t ever talk about those previous marriages, and since there were no children from either, Eris never asked about them. She didn’t really like thinking about it, to be honest.

Stepping into her closet, she drew a circle on the mirrored wall, and it turned into a touch screen that lit up with her closet’s full inventory. Every year Cord threw this back-to-school costume party, and every year there was a fierce and unspoken competition for best costume. She sighed and began sorting through her various options: the gold flapper dress, the faux-fur hood her mom had given her, a hot pink sequinned gown from last Halloween. None of it seemed right.

Screw it, she decided. Why was she trying to find a costume anyway? Wouldn’t she stand out more without one?

“The black Alicia top,” she announced to her closet, which spit the item into the output chute at the bottom. Eris pulled the top on over her lace bra and stepped into her favorite suede pants, which she knew made her ass look fantastic. She snapped a set of silver cuffs on her elbows and reached up to yank out her ponytail, letting her strawberry-blond hair fall around her shoulders in a wild tangle.

Biting her lip, she plopped down at her vanity and placed her hands on the hairstyler’s two electropulsers. “Straight,” she ordered, closing her eyes and bracing herself.

A tingle spread from her palms, up her arms, and into her scalp as the machine jolted her with a wave of electricity. The other girls at school always complained about the styler, but Eris secretly enjoyed the feeling: the hot, clean way it set all her nerves afire, almost like pain. When she looked up, her hair had fallen into straight layers around her face. She tapped at the screen of her vanity and closed her eyes as a fine spray of makeup misted over her. When she looked up again, eyeliner now brought out the strange and arresting amber flecks in her irises, and a blush softened her cheekbones, highlighting the smattering of freckles along her nose. But something was still missing.

Before she could second-guess herself, Eris was moving through the darkness of her parents’ room and into her mom’s closet. She felt for the jewelry safe and typed the passcode, which she’d figured out at age ten. Nestled inside, next to a colorful array of gemstones and a rope of thick black pearls, were her mom’s stained glass earrings. The rare, old-fashioned kind of glass—not flexiglass, but the kind of glass that could actually break.

The earrings were exorbitantly expensive, hand-blown from the panes of an old church window. Eris’s dad had bought them at an auction, as a twentieth-anniversary present. Pushing aside her twinge of guilt, Eris reached up and screwed the delicate droplets into her ears.

She was almost at the front door when her dad called out from the living room. “Eris? Where are you headed?”

“Hey, Dad.” She turned around, keeping one heeled bootie in the hallway so she could make a quick exit. Her dad was sitting in his favorite corner of the brown leather couch, reading something on his tablet, probably a medical journal or patient record. His thick hair was almost entirely gray, and his eyes were creased with worry lines, which he refused to surge away like most of Eris’s friends’ parents did. He said that patients found the lines reassuring. Eris secretly thought it was kind of cool of her dad, to insist on aging naturally.

“I’m going to a friend’s party,” she explained. Her dad glanced over her outfit, and Eris realized a second too late that she hadn’t concealed the earrings. She discreetly tried to pull her hair forward to hide them, but Everett was already shaking his head. “Eris, you can’t wear those,” he said, sounding a little amused. “They’re the most expensive thing in this apartment.”

“That’s an exaggeration, and you know it.” Eris’s mom sailed in from the kitchen wearing a scarlet evening dress, her hair piled atop her head in a cascade of curls. “Hey, sweetie,” Caroline Dodd said, turning to her daughter. “Want some bubbly before you go? I’m about to open a bottle of that Montès rosé you like.”

“The one from the vineyard where we swam in the pool?”

“The one with the ‘Pool Closed’ sign, you mean.” A smile lifted up the corners of her dad’s mouth. That had been a particularly ridiculous family trip. Eris’s parents had let her drink the wine pairings at lunch, and it was so hot out that Eris and her mom kept trying to fan each other with their napkins the whole meal, then ended up sneaking, giggling, into a gated-off hotel pool and jumping in fully clothed.

“We never saw that sign!” Caroline laughed in protest and popped the bottle. The sound reverberated through the apartment. Eris took the outstretched glass with a shrug. It was her favorite.

“So whose party is it?” Caroline prompted.

“Cord’s. And I’m already late …” Eris still hadn’t told her mom about her and Cord. She shared almost everything with her mom, but never the hookup stuff.

“I believe it’s called fashionably late,” her dad added. “And you’ll only be a minute later and just as fashionable once you put the earrings back.”

“Oh, come on, Everett. What harm can she do?”

Eris’s dad shook his head, giving in, as Eris had known he would. “All right, Caroline. If you aren’t upset, then Eris can wear them.”

“Outvoted again,” Eris teased, and exchanged a knowing smile with her dad. He always joked about being the least powerful person in the apartment, outnumbered as he was by two highly opinionated women.

“Every time.” Everett laughed.

“How could I say no when they look so gorgeous on you?” Caroline put her hands on Eris’s shoulders and turned her around to face the massive antique mirror on the wall.

Eris looked like a younger version of her mom. The only tiny differences, aside from age, were the slight modifications Eris’s dad had agreed to give her this spring—nothing major, just the insertion of the gold flecks in her eyes and the lasering on of a few freckles for texture. There was nothing else to be done for her, really. Eris’s features were all her own, her full mouth and cute upturned nose and most of all her hair, a lustrous riot of color, copper and honey and strawberry and sunrise. Eris’s hair was her greatest beauty, but then, there was nothing about her that wasn’t beautiful, as she was well aware.

She gave her head an impatient toss and the earrings danced, catching all the glorious colors of her hair as if lit from within.

“Have fun tonight,” Eris’s mom said. Eris met her eyes in the mirror and smiled.

“Thanks. I’ll take good care of these.” She finished her champagne and set it on the table. “Love you,” she said to both her parents on her way out. The earrings glowed against her hair like twin stars.

The downTower C lift was pulling up right as she walked into the station, which Eris considered a good sign. Maybe it was because she was named after a Greek goddess, but she’d always attributed an omen-like significance to even the smallest things. Last year there had been a smudge on her window that looked like a heart. She never reported it to outside maintenance, so it stayed that way for weeks, until the next rain day finally washed it away. She liked to imagine that it had brought her good luck.

Eris followed the crowds on board and edged toward the side of the lift. Normally she might have taken a hover, but she was running late and this was faster; and anyway, the C line had always been her favorite, with its transparent view panels. She loved watching the floors shoot past, light and shadow alternating with the heavy metal framework that separated each level, the crowds waiting for the local lifts blurring together into an indistinguishable stream of color.

Mere seconds later, the elevator pulled to a stop. Eris pushed past the swirl of activity around the express station, the waiting hovers and the newsfeed salesbots, and turned onto the main avenue. Like her, Cord lived on the expensive north-facing side of the Tower, with a view uncluttered by the buildings of midtown, or the Sprawl. His floor was slightly larger—the Tower narrowed as it got higher, ending in Avery’s apartment, which was the only thing on the top level—but she could feel the difference even in those sixteen floors. The streets were just as wide, lined with tiny grass plots and real trees, fed by discreetly hidden misters. The solar lamps overhead had dimmed to match the real sun, which was only visible from the outward-facing apartments. But the energy down here was somehow different, louder and a little more vibrant. Maybe it was thanks to the commercial space that lined the center avenue, even if it was only a coffee shop and a Brooks Brothers fitting room.

Eris reached Cord’s street—really just the shadowed cul-de-sac that ended in the Andertons’ front steps; no one else lived on this block. A dramatic 1A was inscribed over the doorway, as if anyone needed reminding whose home this was. Like the rest of the world, Eris wondered why Cord had continued to live here after his parents died and his older brother, Brice, moved out. It was way too much space for one person.

Inside, the apartment was already crammed wall-to-wall with people, and growing warmer despite the ventilation system. Eris saw Maxton Feld in the enclosed greenhouse, trying to reprogram the hydration system to make it rain beer. She paused at the dining room, where someone had propped the table on hovercoasters for a game of floating pong, but didn’t see Cord’s telltale dark head in there either. And there was no one in the kitchen except a girl Eris didn’t recognize, in a dark ponytail and formfitting jeans. Eris wondered idly who she was, just as the girl began stacking dishes and carrying them away. So Cord had a new maid—a maid who was already out of uniform. Eris still didn’t understand why he paid for a maid; only people like the Fullers, or Eris’s grandmother, had them anymore. Everyone else just bought all the various cleaning bots on the market and set them loose whenever things seemed dirty. But maybe that was the point: to pay for the human, un-automated-ness of it all.

What are you supposed to be? “Too cool for costumes”? “Oversleeper”? Avery flickered her.

I prefer “professional attention-getter,” Eris replied, smiling as she glanced around the room.

Avery was at the living room windows, dressed in a simple white shift with a pair of holo-wings and a halo floating above her head. On anyone else it would look like a lame last-minute angel costume, but Avery was, of course, ethereal. Next to her stood Leda, in a black feathery thing, and Ming, who was wearing a stupid devil costume. She’d probably heard that Avery was being an angel and wanted to seem like they were a set. How pathetic. Eris didn’t feel like talking to either girl, so she flickered Avery that she would be back and kept on looking for Cord.

They’d started hooking up this summer, when they had both been stuck in town. Eris had been a little worried at first—everyone else was jetting off to Europe or the Hamptons or the beaches in Maine, while she’d be stranded here in the city, interning at her dad’s medical practice. It was the trade he’d insisted on in exchange for the surges he did last spring. “You need work experience,” he’d said. As if she planned on working a day in her life. Still, Eris had agreed. She wanted the surges that badly.

And it was all just as boring as she’d expected, until the night she ran into Cord at Lightning Lounge. One thing led to another, and soon they were taking atomic shots, and walking out onto the enclosed balcony. It was there, pressed up against the enforced flexiglass, that they had kissed for the first time.

Now Eris could only wonder why it hadn’t happened sooner. God knows she’d been around Cord for years, ever since her family moved back to New York when she was eight. They’d spent several years in Switzerland so her dad could study all the latest European surge techniques. Eris had attended first and second grades at the American School of Lausanne, but when she came back—speaking a strange polyglot of French and English, with no understanding of a multiplication table—Berkeley Academy had gently suggested she repeat second grade.

She would never forget that first day back, when she’d walked into the lunchroom not knowing anyone in her new class. It was Cord who had slid into the seat beside her at her empty table. “Wanna see a cool zombie game?” he’d asked, and showed her how to set her contacts so the cafeteria food looked like brains. Eris had laughed so hard she’d almost snorted into her spaghetti.

That was two years before his parents died.

She found Cord in the game room, seated around the massive antique table with Drew Lawton and Joaquin Suarez, all of them holding real paper playing cards in their hands. It was one of Cord’s weird quirks, how he insisted on playing Idleness with that old card set. He claimed that everyone looked too vacant when they played on contacts, sitting around a table but staring away from one another, into space.

Eris stood there a moment, admiring him. He was so insanely gorgeous. Not in the smoothly perfect way that Avery was, but in a swarthy, rugged sort of way; his features a perfect mix of his mom’s Brazilian sensuality and the classic Anderton jaw and nose. Eris took a step forward, and Cord glanced up. She was gratified by the flash of appreciation in his ice-blue eyes.

“Hey there,” he said as she pulled up an empty chair. She leaned on her elbows so that the neckline of her top skimmed lower over her breasts, and studied him across the table. There was something shockingly intimate in his gaze. It felt like he could reach over and touch her with nothing but his eyes.

“Want to play?” Cord swept a pile of cards toward her.

“I don’t know. I might go dance.” It was so quiet in here. She wanted to go back to the loud chaos of the party.

“Come on, one hand. Right now it’s just me against these two. And it hasn’t been that fun, playing with myself,” Cord quipped.

“Fine. But I’m with Joaquin,” Eris said, for no real reason except that she wanted to push him a little. “And you know I always win.”

“Maybe not this time.” Cord laughed.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, the pile of chips in front of her and Joaquin had tripled in size. Eris stretched her arms overhead and pushed her chair back from the table. “I’m getting a drink,” she said meaningfully. “Anyone want one?”

“Why not?” Cord met her eyes. “I’ll come with you.”

They stumbled into the coatroom, their bodies pressed close together. “You look fantastic tonight,” Cord whispered.

“No more talking.” Eris yanked his head down and kissed him, hard.

Cord leaned forward in response, his mouth hot on hers. He snaked his hand around her waist, playing with the hem of her shirt. Eris could feel his pulse quickening where his wrist touched her bare skin. The kiss deepened, became more insistent.

She pulled away and stepped back, leaving Cord to stumble forward. “What?” he gasped.

“I’m going to dance,” she said simply, reaching up to straighten her bra and smooth her hair; her motions brisk, neat, practiced. This was her favorite part, reminding Cord that he wanted her. Making him just a little bit desperate. “See you later.”

As she started down the hallway, Eris could feel the weight of Cord’s gaze tracing the long lines of her body. She didn’t let herself look back. But the corner of her mouth, her red paintstick just a little bit smudged, turned up in a triumphant smirk.




WATT (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


“REMIND ME WHY we’re here again?”Watzahn Bakradi—Watt to everyone but his teachers—comm-linked his best friend, Derrick Rawls.

“I told you, this place makes girls go crazy,” Derrick said. His voice filtered through Watt’s eartennas, which were playing a drowsy jazz beat, blocking out all the other noise of the club. “Some of us need all the help we can get,” he added, without resentment.

Watt didn’t argue. In the past hour alone he’d received seven flick-link requests, while Derrick was yet to get a single one. “Fine,” he conceded. “I’m getting a drink.”

“Grab me a beer while you’re there?” Derrick asked, unable to look away from a brunette who was swaying near them, her eyes closed, arms moving in no apparent rhythm.

“I would, except I’m not buying.” Watt laughed. At the bar, he switched off his music and turned to stare out over the club, listening as the shuffling feet and chorus of whispers echoed eerily in the quiet.

They’d come to Pulse, the midTower silent disco, where music was blasted directly into each person’s eartennas instead of coming from external speakers. But the strange thing about Pulse was that each eartenna feed differed: no two guests were hearing the same song at the same time. Watt supposed it was fun for most people, trying to guess what others were listening to, laughing at the fact that they were streaming a slow song while their date had EDM. But to him it just meant everyone awkwardly stumbled over one another on the dance floor.

He leaned back carelessly on his elbows and met the gaze of a girl across the bar. She was gorgeous, tall and willowy with wide-set eyes, definitely out of Watt’s league. But he had a secret weapon, and knew exactly how long to make eye contact before looking away. According to Nadia’s estimates the girl would come over in three, two—

His eartennas sounded with the double beep that indicated a ping request. He nodded his acceptance and the girl’s voice sounded in his ear, the wireless link allowing them to speak directly to each other over their individual music, though of course Watt’s was already off. “Buy me a drink,” she said, sidling up next to him at the bar. It was a command, not a question. This girl knew how much hotter she was than him.

“What are you drinking?” Watt tapped the bar’s surface, and it lit up into a touch screen menu.

The girl shrugged and began drawing circles on the menu pad, scrolling through brightly colored bubbles representing the drink categories. There was a small inktat on the inside of her wrist, a rosebud that kept opening into a blossom and then furling back. “Guess.”

Watt put his hand over hers to still it. She glanced up at him, an eyebrow raised. “If I guess right, you’re buying,” he challenged.

“Sure. But you’ll never guess.”

“I think …” He flipped through the categories for a moment as if weighing the various options. But he already knew what she really wanted, and it wasn’t on the menu. “Something special,” he concluded, pushing OTHER, and pulling up a keypad to type squid ink martini.

The girl tossed her head back in laughter. “You cheated somehow,” she accused, her eyes roving over Watt with new interest. She leaned forward to order their drinks from the bot-tender.

Watt grinned. He felt attention shifting toward them, everyone clearly wondering what he’d said to attract a girl like that. Watt couldn’t help it; he loved this part, loved feeling like he’d won some unspoken contest.

“Thanks,” he said as the girl slid him a dark beer.

“How did you know what I wanted?” she asked.

“I figured, an unusual drink for an unusually beautiful girl.” Thank you, Nadia, he added silently.

I wouldn’t waste your time with this one. Girls 2 and 6 were more interesting, Nadia—Watt’s quantum computer—answered, flashing the words across his contacts. When they were alone Nadia spoke directly into his ears, but she defaulted to text whenever Watt was with someone else. He found it too disorienting, trying to carry on two conversations at once.

Well, this one is prettier, Watt replied, smiling in amusement as he sent the sentence directly to Nadia. She couldn’t read his every thought, only the ones he intended for her.

Re-rank selection criteria for potential romantic partners appeared in his to-do list, alongside buying a present for his brother and sister’s birthday, and his summer reading.

SometimesI wish I hadn’t programmed you to be so snarky. Watt had constructed Nadia’s mental architecture to favor oblique and associative thinking over strictly logical if-then. In other words, to be an interesting conversationalist, instead of just a powerful calculator. But these days her speech pattern bordered on what could only be called sarcasm.

Nadia had been with Watt for almost five years now, ever since he had created her as a thirteen-year-old scholarship student at an MIT summer program. He’d known, of course, that it was technically illegal: the creation of any quantum computer with a Robbens quotient of over 3.0 had been banned worldwide since the AI incident of 2093. But he’d been so lonely on that college campus, surrounded by older students who pointedly ignored him, and it hadn’t seemed like it would do any harm … He’d started tinkering with a few spare parts, and soon, bit by qubit, he was building a quantum supercomp.

Until the professor in charge of their program caught him working on Nadia, late one night in the engineering lab.

“You need to destroy that—that thing,” she’d said, a note of hysteria in her tone. She took several steps back in fear. They both knew that if Watt was caught with a quant, he’d go to prison for life—and she would probably be arrested too, simply for failing to stop him. “I swear, if you don’t, I’ll report you!”

Watt nodded and promised to do as she said, cursing his own stupidity; he should have known better than to work in a nonsecure space. The moment the professor left, he frantically transferred Nadia onto a smaller piece of hardware, then smashed the box he’d first housed her in and delivered it silently to his professor. He had no desire to go to prison. And he needed a nice recommendation from her so that he could get into MIT in a few years.

By the time Watt’s summer program was over, Nadia consisted of a qubic core the size of his fist. He wedged her in his suitcase, in the toe of a shoe, and snuck her back to the Tower.

Thus began Watt’s—and Nadia’s—hacking career.

They started small, mainly messing around with Watt’s friends and classmates, reading their private flickers or hacking their feeds to post funny, incriminating inside jokes. But as time went on and Watt discovered what a truly powerful computer he had on his hands, he got bolder. Nadia could do so much more than crack teenagers’ passwords; she could scan thousands of lines of code in less than a millisecond and find the single weak sequence, the break in a security system, that might let them inside. Armed with Nadia, he could access all kinds of restricted data. He could make money off it too, if he was careful enough. For years Watt kept Nadia safe in his bedroom, periodically upgrading her into smaller, easier-to-hide pieces of hardware.

And then, two summers ago, Watt took what had seemed like a normal hacking job, a request for removal of a criminal record. When it came time for payment, though, the messages got strangely threatening—in a way that made Watt suspect the client somehow knew about Nadia.

Watt was suddenly and powerfully afraid. He usually tried not to think about what would happen if he got caught, but he realized now how foolish that had been. He was in possession of an illegal quant, and he needed to hide her somewhere she could never be found.

He’d tucked Nadia in his pocket and taken the next monorail downtown.

He got off at South Station and stepped into another world, a cluttered maze of alleys and unmarked doorways and pushcarts selling hot, greasy cones of fried wheatchips. The steel form of the Tower loomed overhead, casting most of the Sprawl—the neighborhood south of Houston Street—in shadow.

Watt turned toward the water, blinking at the sudden onslaught of the wind. Green and yellow buoys bobbed in the aquaculture pens over the long-submerged Battery Park. They were supposed to be farming kelp and krill, but Watt knew many of them also grew ocea-pharms, the highly addictive drugs cultured in jellyfish. Keeping his head down, he found the doorway he was looking for and stepped inside.

“What can I do for you?” A burly man stepped forward. His hair was clipped close to his scalp, and he was wearing a gray plastic jacket and surgical gloves.

Dr. Smith, as he called himself, had a reputation for performing illegal surgeries like drug wipes, fingerprint replacements, even retina transfers. They said there was nothing he couldn’t do. But when Watt explained what he wanted, the doctor shook his head. “Impossible,” he muttered.

“Are you sure?” Watt challenged, reaching into his pocket to hold Nadia out for inspection. Her hardware burned hot on his palm.

Smith took an involuntary step closer and gasped. “You’re telling me that’s a quant?”

“Yeah.” Watt felt a surge of satisfaction. Nadia was pretty damn impressive.

“All right,” Smith said reluctantly. “I can try.” He peeled off one of his surgical gloves and held out his hand. It had six fingers. “Dexterity boost,” he boasted, noticing Watt’s gaze. “Helps in surgery. Did it myself, with the left one.”

Watt shook the doctor’s six-fingered hand and gave Nadia to him, praying this crazy idea would work.

Leaning against the bar at Pulse, Watt brushed his fingers over the slight bump above his right ear, the only evidence left from that day. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe the surgery had succeeded. Now Nadia was always with him—at the edge of his temporal lobe, where Smith had embedded her, drawing her power from the piezoelectric pulse of Watt’s own blood flow. The authorities hadn’t ended up tracking them down, but still, Watt felt safer this way. If anything bad ever did happen, no one would think to look for a computer in Watt’s own brain.

“Do you come here a lot?” Squid Ink Martini Girl asked. She took a small sip of her martini, its purplish liquid swirling in the glass like a gathering storm.

Several lines of text instantly flashed across Watt’s contacts. She was a year older, a student at the local college majoring in art studies.

“I like coming here to observe,” Watt said. “It helps me with my art.”

“You’re an artist? What kind of art?”

He sighed. “Well, I used to work primarily in 3-D sculpture installations, but lately I worry they’re a little overdone. I’m thinking of incorporating more audio into my work. That’s part of why I’m here, to read everyone’s responses to the music.” He turned to look the girl in the eye; she blinked under the force of his gaze. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I totally agree,” she whispered, though he hadn’t really stated an opinion at all. “It’s like you read my mind.”

This was the side effect of having Nadia in his brain that Watt hadn’t anticipated—that she’d become his secret weapon for getting girls. Before the procedure, Watt’s batting average had been exactly that: average. He wasn’t unattractive, with his olive-gold skin and dark eyes, but he wasn’t particularly tall, or confident. Having Nadia changed all that.

Of course, up here in midTower—almost a mile higher than where he and Derrick actually lived—everyone could afford pretty decent contacts. You could look things up on your contacts while talking to someone, if you wanted, but you’d have to speak the question aloud. Aside from a few preprogrammed commands like nodding to accept an incoming call or blinking repeatedly to take a snap, contacts were still voice-operated. And while it was normal to mumble while you were on the Ifty or at home, it was definitely uncool to give contact commands mid-conversation.

Nadia was different. Because she was in Watt’s head, they could communicate through what Watt had dubbed “transcranial telepathy mode,” meaning that he could think questions and Nadia would answer him. And when he talked to girls, she could follow the conversation, instantly feeding him any relevant information.

In the case of Squid Ink Martini Girl, for instance, Nadia had made a complete study of the girl in under ten milliseconds. She’d hacked the girl’s flickers, found every place she’d checked into and who her friends were; she even read all twelve thousand pages of the girl’s feeds history, and calculated what Watt should do in order to keep the conversation going. Now Watt was self-assured, even smooth, because he always knew the exact right thing to say.

Martini Girl studied him as she idly twirled the stem of her glass. Watt stayed silent, knowing that she didn’t like overly aggressive guys, that she wanted to feel like she was making the first move. Sure enough—

“Wanna get out of here?”

She was gorgeous. Yet Watt didn’t even feel excited as he automatically said, “Sure. Let’s go.”

He slid a hand low around the girl’s waist, walking with her toward the entrance, noticing the envious stares of all the other guys. He usually felt a thrill of victory at times like this, his stubbornly competitive streak coming out. Now he couldn’t bring himself to care. It all felt too easy, and predictable. He’d already forgotten this girl’s name and she’d told him twice.

“Winner’s curse,” Nadia whispered into his eartennas, and he could swear he heard amusement in her tone. “Where the victor gets exactly what he wants, only to find that it isn’t quite as he expected.”




AVERY (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


“ZAY’S TALKING TO Daniela Leon.” Leda’s eyes narrowed at the other girl, who stood below them wearing some kind of black flouncy dress. Daniela tipped her head back and rested a hand lightly on Zay’s forearm, laughing uproariously at whatever he’d just said.

Avery followed Leda’s gaze, though she didn’t particularly care who Zay talked to. “It’s fine.”

“What’s she supposed to be, anyway, in that weird dress? A matador?” Leda snapped, turning to Avery.

“I think it’s a French maid costume?” Avery volunteered, trying to keep from laughing as she reached for her drink, which floated on a hovercoaster near her elbow.

But Leda wasn’t listening. She’d turned her attention inward and was muttering to herself, probably planning revenge on Daniela. That was typical Leda, though; when she thought Avery had been slighted, her reaction was swift and uncompromising. It was just her brand of friendship, and Avery accepted it, because she knew what love and fierce loyalty were behind it. I hope I never piss you off, she always joked, and Leda would just laugh and roll her eyes as if the very idea was ludicrous.

The two friends were standing on Cord’s second-floor landing, right at the top of the stairs. Avery’s eyes scanned the crowded room below. It had been overwhelming down there earlier, with guy after guy telling her how amazing she looked tonight. She leaned forward on the railing and the halo above her head followed, its tiny microhovers programmed to track her movements.

Everyone was here. There was Kemball Brown, wearing intricate Viking armor that looked fantastic against his dark, muscled shoulders. Laura Saunders, the light catching all the sequins of her low-cut pirate bodice. And in a liftie uniform was Leda’s older brother, Jamie, covered in a tangle of facial hair.

“What’s up with Jamie’s beard?” Avery asked Leda, amused.

“I know,” Leda agreed as her eyes returned to regular focus. “When I first saw it the other day, I was grossed out too.”

“The other day?” Avery repeated, confused. “Wasn’t Jamie with you all summer?”

Leda wavered for a moment, so quick that Avery might have imagined it. “He was, of course. I meant when I saw the whole thing together, with the uniform. You know it’s a real one—he bought it off an actual liftie.”

Leda’s words were normal enough. Avery had to be imagining the weirdness in her voice, right? “I need a refill,” she decided, sending her drink back toward the bar. “Want one?”

“I’m okay,” Leda protested. Her glass was still mostly full. Come to think of it, Avery realized, Leda hadn’t been drinking much at all tonight. “Looks like you need to catch up,” she teased.

There was that hesitation again. The sounds drifting up from below seemed suddenly amplified. “Guess I’m not back in party shape yet,” Leda answered, but her laughter was hollow.

Avery watched her best friend, the way she shifted back and forth, studying the tiny bows on her black heels. She was lying about something.

The realization made Avery’s chest hurt a little. She’d thought she and Leda told each other everything. “You can talk to me, you know.”

“I know,” Leda said quickly, though she didn’t sound like she believed it.

“Where were you this summer, really?” Avery pressed.

“Just let it go, okay?”

“I promise I won’t—”

Leda’s mouth formed a hard line, and her next words came out cold and formal. “Seriously. I said let it go.”

Avery recoiled, a little stung. “I just don’t understand why you won’t talk to me.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes it’s not about you, Avery.”

Avery started to reply just as a commotion sounded from downstairs, voices rising up in greeting. She glanced down in curiosity—and saw the figure at the center of all the turmoil.

Everything came to a halt, the room suddenly devoid of air. Avery struggled to think. Next to her she felt Leda stiffen in surprise, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away long enough to look at her friend.

He was back.

“Atlas,” she whispered, though of course he couldn’t hear.

She ran blindly down the stairs, the crowds parting to let her pass, hundreds of eyes on her, probably taking snaps and loading them straight to the feeds. None of it mattered. Atlas was home.

The next thing she knew, Avery was in his arms, burrowing her face in his shoulder, inhaling his familiar scent for a single precious moment before the rules of normal behavior forced her away.

“You’re back,” she said stupidly, her eyes drinking in every inch of him. He was wearing rumpled khakis and a navy sweater. He looked a little stronger than she remembered, and his light brown hair was longer, curling around his ears like it used to when he was little. But everything else was the same: his chocolate eyes framed by thick lashes, almost too thick to be masculine; the sprinkling of freckles across his nose; the way one of his bottom teeth was slightly turned, a reminder that he wasn’t perfect. That was one of the things she’d loved about Atlas when her parents brought him home twelve years ago—the fact that he had actual, visible flaws.

“I’m back,” he repeated. There was a shadow of rough stubble along his jaw. Avery’s hands itched to reach out and touch it. “How’s it going?”

“Where were you?” She winced at the sound of her own voice and lowered her tone. No one but Leda knew that Atlas hadn’t told his family where he was this whole time.

“All over the place.”

“Oh,” was all she could think to say. It was hard to form coherent thoughts with Atlas so close. She wanted to run back into his arms and hold him so tight he could never leave again; to run her hands over his shoulders and assure herself he was really here, really real. She’d made so much progress this summer, and yet here she was, fighting the familiar need to reach out and touch him.

“Well, I’m glad you’re home,” she managed.

“You’d better be.” His face broke out into a broad, easy smile, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to show up at a party unannounced after being gone for ten months.

“Atlas …” She hesitated, unsure what she wanted to say. She’d been so worried. For his safety, sure, but even worse had been the worry at the back of her mind—the terrible, persistent fear that he might never come back.

“Yeah?” he said softly.

Avery took a step forward. Her body was reacting instinctively to his nearness, like a plant that had been too long in the dark and was finally exposed to sunlight.

“Fuller!” Ty Rodrick barreled over and slapped Atlas on the back. The rest of the hockey guys appeared, pulling him forward, their voices loud.

Avery bit back a protest and stepped away. Act normal, she reminded herself. Over the chaos she locked eyes with Atlas, and he winked at her. Later, he mouthed.

She nodded, breaking every promise to herself, loving him.




LEDA (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


LEDA DROPPED HER clutch on the marble countertop of Cord’s bathroom and blinked at her reflection. Her hair was pulled into a bun and adorned with feathers, and her black ballerina costume clung to her in all the right places, even managing to create the illusion of cleavage. Real, illegal peacock feathers dusted the hem of her tutu. She reached down to run her fingers along them. Totally worth the import bribes.

Leda had long ago accepted that she wasn’t beautiful. She was too severe, all sharp edges and narrow angles, and her chest was painfully small. Still, she had her mother’s rich brown skin and her father’s full mouth. And there was something interesting in her face—a bright, hard intelligence that made people look twice.

She took a deep breath, trying to ignore the sense of uneasiness prickling over her. It almost didn’t seem possible, yet after all these months, it had finally happened.

Atlas was back.

Music played suddenly in her eartennas, the upbeat melody of a pop song she and Avery had been obsessed with last spring. Avery’s ringtone, again. Leda shook her head to decline the ping. She knew Avery was looking for her, but she couldn’t face her best friend yet, not after the way Leda had blown up at her earlier. She hadn’t meant to; she was just on edge and defensive about the rehab stuff. Why couldn’t Avery just stop pushing and give her some space? Leda didn’t want to talk about it.

Especially not now, when the whole reason she’d broken down in the first place was back again, and as gorgeous as ever.

Snap out of it, Leda told herself. Reflexively she reached into her bag for her lip gloss and reapplied, then stepped back out into the party, her head held high. She wouldn’t let Atlas get to her. She couldn’t afford to, not again.

“Leda.” Cord fell into step alongside her, wearing a dark costume with a sash slung across his chest. “Long time, no see.”

“Hey,” Leda said cautiously. She’d always been a little unsure of herself around Cord. Unlike Avery and Eris, she hadn’t known him since childhood, and ever since she had asked him for help getting xenperheidren a few years ago, it felt somehow like he had the upper hand.

“How was your summer?” he asked, reaching for a pair of atomic shots from a passing tray and handing her one. “Cheers,” he added before tossing his back.

Leda’s fingers curled around the glass of clear liquid. She’d promised her mom she wouldn’t drink tonight. Cord watched her, reading her hesitation, missing nothing. He raised an eyebrow in sardonic amusement.

Then she heard a familiar burst of laughter from behind them—Atlas was walking past. Why not? Leda thought suddenly; it wasn’t like one atomic would send her back to popping xenperheidren. She raised the shot to her lips and took it in a single gulp. It burned her throat, not unpleasantly.

“Now I remember why I like you,” Leda said, setting the shot glass down.

He laughed in approval. “I missed you this summer, Cole. I could have really used my smoke buddy.”

“Please. You have plenty of other people to get high with.”

“None as interesting as you,” Cord insisted. “Everyone else just gets dumber the more stuff they take.”

Leda shifted uncomfortably at the reminder. I’m sharp enough without xenperheidren, she told herself, but the words didn’t ring as true as they had just a few days ago. Mumbling an excuse, she turned and moved farther into the party. The feathers on her ballerina skirt had started falling off, leaving a little trail on the floor.

Hey, where are you? she flickered to Avery. Avery didn’t know about how she used to smoke occasionally with Cord—and Leda didn’t want to tell her—but seeing her might help calm Leda down.

“Leda?”

She turned slowly, trying to seem like she didn’t care, though of course she did.

Atlas was standing in a group of his old hockey friends. Leda waited, unmoving, as he mumbled something to the guys and came over toward her. “Hey,” he said simply.

Leda’s temper flared. That was all he had to say, when the last time they’d seen each other was naked in a hot tub, halfway across the world?

“So where were you?”

Atlas blinked. “I took a gap year, traveled around.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit.” She crossed her arms. “I know the truth, okay?”

“I don’t …”

“It was a pretty shitty thing to do, leaving like that. Especially after—you know.” Her mind flashed to that night, to the way he’d touched her and the snow that had fallen over both of them, melting wherever it met the heat of their skin. She felt herself flush at the memory.

“Fuller!” Henry Strittmayer yelled out. “We’re starting Spinners! Get your ass over here.”

“In a minute.” Atlas’s eyes were locked on hers. “I’m glad you said something, Leda. I was thinking about you a lot while I was gone.”

“Oh?” she said cautiously, trying not to get her hopes up.

“I owe you an apology.”

Leda felt like she’d been slapped. “You don’t owe me anything,” she said quickly, defensive. Stupid, she chided herself, thinking that Atlas might have missed her, when all he apparently felt was that he owed her. God, she hated that word. It was about as far from romantic as you could get.

They looked at each other in layered silence. “Want to play Spinners?” he asked after a moment.

“No.” The last thing she wanted was to sit next to Atlas like everything was normal, and play a game that might end with them being forced to kiss. “I’m going to find Avery,” she amended. “She seemed a little drunk earlier.”

“I’ll come with you,” Atlas offered, but she was already pushing past him.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, heading into the hall. “I’ve got it.”

The pull she felt toward him was as insistent and powerful as it had been in Catyan, when their bodies were so intertwined that he’d felt like a part of her. Yet she didn’t understand him any better now than she had then. Maybe she never would.

Leda’s stomach gave a sudden twist, her head pounding angrily. It felt like something was pressing at her from within, the way she used to feel when she came down too abruptly from a high—

She needed to get out of here. Now.

She elbowed through the hot, teeming crowd that filled Cord’s apartment, a mechanical smile pasted on her face, and slipped into the first hover she could find.

By the time she got home Leda was nearly frantic. She raced down the hall to her room and flung open the door, reaching for her lavender-scented aromatherapy pillow and burying her face in it, taking several deep, desperate breaths. Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. God, she was an idiot. She couldn’t believe how easily seeing Atlas had sent her veering toward the edge.

Finally Leda plopped into the chair at her vanity. She began wiping the makeup—and the tears—from her face with brusque, angry movements. Her body was so tense it was almost shaking.

A tentative knock sounded at her door. “Leda?” Ilara Cole appeared in her daughter’s doorway. “How was the party?”

“You didn’t need to stay up.” Leda didn’t turn, just met her mom’s gaze in the mirror. Ilara never used to wait up for her before.

Her mom ignored the comment. “I saw some of the snaps, from the feeds,” she persisted, in a clear attempt to be upbeat. “All the costumes looked fantastic. Especially you and Avery together!”

Leda spun around on the vanity chair and stood up, her hands clenching into sudden fists. “You’re spying on me now? I thought you said you would trust me this year!”

“And you said that if I let you go to the party, you wouldn’t drink!”

Leda recoiled, and her mom’s tone softened. “I’m sorry,” Ilara went on. “But, Leda, I’m not stupid. I can smell the atomic from here. What am I supposed to think?”

“It was just one drink,” Leda said tersely. “That’s not exactly going on a xenperheidren bender last I checked.”

Ilara started to put a hand on her shoulder, but Leda brushed it away, and she lowered her hand in defeat. “Leda, please,” she said softly. “I’m trying here. I want to trust you again. But trust has to be earned. And so far I’m not seeing any effort from you, to—”

“Fine,” Leda said woodenly, interrupting her mom. “The party was great. Thank you for letting me go. I promise I won’t drink at the next one.”

They stared at each other, neither of them sure what to say next. There was affection on both their faces, but wariness too. They weren’t sure how to act around each other anymore.

Finally Ilara sighed and turned away. “I’m glad you had fun. See you in the morning.” The door clicked shut behind her.

Leda yanked off her dress and shimmied into her monogrammed pajamas. She sent a quick flicker to Avery, apologizing for her earlier outburst and saying that she’d left the party early. Then she crawled into bed, her mind spinning.

She wondered if Avery and Atlas were still at the party. Was it weird of her, to have left early? Was Avery upset with her about earlier? Why couldn’t Avery just accept that some things in Leda’s life were private? And now, as if she didn’t have enough to deal with, her stupid mom had started monitoring her every move on the feeds. Leda hadn’t even realized Ilara knew how to look that stuff up.

At the thought of the feeds, she decided to pull up Atlas’s, though she already knew what she would find. Sure enough, it was as vague as it had always been. While most of the guys she knew lived their entire lives on the feeds, Atlas’s profile had nothing but an old picture of him at his grandparents’ beach house and a few favorite quotes. He was so maddeningly opaque.

If only Leda could see past the public profile, to his messages and hidden check-ins and everything else he wasn’t sharing with the world. If only she knew what he was thinking, maybe she could put all this behind her and finally move on.

Or maybe she could get him back, part of her whispered; the part she couldn’t seem to ignore.

Leda rolled onto her stomach, tangling her fists in her sheets in frustration—and had an idea so simple that it must either be brilliant, or stupid.

Atlas might be hard to read, but maybe there was another way to figure him out.




AVERY (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


SEVERAL HOURS INTO the party, Avery found herself in the liquor closet off Cord’s kitchen. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d come in here: maybe for some of the gold-leafed bourbon lined up on the top shelf, or the stash of illegal retros. She paused, swirling the ice chips in her empty cup. Her two empty cups, she realized; she had one in each hand.

Atlas was back. The look on his face when he saw her—and that word, later—kept replaying in her head. She’d been desperate for him to come home for so long, and yet now that he was finally here she didn’t know what it meant. So she’d decided the best course of action was to get as drunk as possible. Evidently she’d succeeded.

A shaft of light sliced through the darkness as the door was pushed open. “Avery?”

Cord. She sighed, wanting to just be alone with her thoughts right now. “Hey. Great party,” she murmured.

“Here’s to your guy,” he said, and reached over her to grab a handle of the bourbon. He took a long, slow sip, his eyes glittering in the dim light.

“Who?” she asked sharply. Did Cord somehow know? If anyone could figure it out, she thought darkly, it would be him. He’d known her forever. And he was screwed up enough himself to guess the crazy, twisted truth.

“Whoever got you so hot and bothered, and brought out Double-Fisting Fuller. Because it isn’t Zay Wagner. Even I can tell that.”

“You’re a real asshole sometimes, you know,” Avery said without thinking.

He barked out a laugh. “I do know. But I throw such great parties people forgive me for it. Kind of like they forgive you for being prudish and unreadable, because you’re the best-looking person on earth.”

Avery wanted to be angry with him, but for some reason she wasn’t. Maybe because she knew what Cord was really like, under all the layers of sarcasm.

“Remember when we were kids?” she said suddenly. “When you dared me to climb into the trash chute, and I got stuck inside? You waited with me the whole time until the safety bots came so I wouldn’t be in there alone.”

The lights in the liquor closet flickered off. They must have been standing very still to turn off the motion sensors. Cord was nothing but a shadow.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “So?”

“We’re all very different now, aren’t we?” Shaking her head, Avery pushed out the door and into the hallway.

She looped idly around the party for a while, saying hi to everyone she hadn’t seen since the end of last spring, drinking steadily from her two different cups. She couldn’t stop thinking about Atlas—or Leda. Where had Leda been all summer, that she refused to tell Avery about it? Whatever was going on, Avery felt terrible for the way she’d pressed the issue and clearly upset Leda. It wasn’t like her to leave a party early. Avery knew she should go to the Coles’ and check on her, yet she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving while Atlas was still here. After all those months apart, she just wanted to stay close to him.

I’m sorry about earlier. See you tomorrow? she sent to Leda, pushing aside her guilt.

Eventually she found Atlas in the downstairs library, playing a game of Spinners, and paused near the doorway to watch. He was leaning over the table as he Spun, his lashes casting subtle shadows on his cheekbones. Avery hadn’t played Spinners in years, since that time when she was fourteen—at another of Cord’s parties, in this very room. If she closed her eyes, it almost felt like it had happened yesterday, not three years ago.

She’d been so nervous to play. It was her first time drinking, and though she hadn’t told anyone, it was her first time at Spinners. She’d never even been kissed. What if they could all tell?

“Hurry up, Fuller!” Marc Rojas, a senior, had groaned at her hesitation. “Spin!”

“Spin! Spin!” the rest of the room took up the chant. Biting her lip, Avery reached up to swipe the holographic dial projected in the middle of the table.

The arrow whipped around the room in a blur. Everyone leaned forward to watch its progress. Finally it began to slow, and paused in front of Breccan Doyle. Avery braced herself, on the edge of her seat.

With its very last bit of momentum, the arrow shifted onto Atlas.

The game console immediately cast a privacy cone where they sat, refracting the light to hide them from the rest of the room, and deflecting all sound waves. Beyond the shimmering wall of photons—which rippled and bent like the surface of water in a pond—Avery could see the others, though they couldn’t see her. They were shouting and waving at the gaming console, probably trying to reset the game and make her spin again. Nothing fun about having siblings together in the cone, right?

“You okay?” Atlas asked quietly. He had a half-full bottle of atomic in his hand, and tried to pass it to her, but she shook her head. She was already confused, and the alcohol was stirring up her feelings for Atlas in a dangerous way.

“I’ve never kissed anyone before. I’m going to be terrible at it,” she blurted out, and cringed. What had made her say that?

Atlas took a long pull of the atomic, then set it down carefully. To his credit, he didn’t laugh. “Don’t worry,” he finally said. “I’m sure you’ll be a great kisser.”

“I don’t even know what to do!” Outside the cone, Avery saw Tracy Ellison, who had a huge crush on Atlas, gesturing angrily.

“You just need practice.” Atlas smiled and shrugged. “Sorry it’s me in here instead of Breccan.”

“Are you kidding? I’d rather—” Avery halted. She couldn’t let herself finish that sentence.

Atlas looked at her curiously. His brow furrowed in an expression she couldn’t quite read. “Aves,” he said, but it came out more like a question. He leaned closer. Avery held her breath …

The invisibility cone dissolved, letting reality back in.

Avery had never been sure whether that almost kiss was real, or whether she’d just imagined it. As the memory washed over her now, she looked at Atlas, who glanced up, seeming to feel her gaze. But if he was thinking of that night too, he didn’t give any indication. He just studied her for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. “I’m out this round,” he said, disengaging from the game and walking over to where she stood.

“Hey.” He gently pulled the drinks from her hands and set them on a table. Avery had forgotten she was holding them. She tripped forward a little.

“Want me to take you home?” Atlas reached out to steady her. It was just like always; Atlas knowing what she wanted without her even having to say it. Except, of course, for the one thing he could never know.

“Yes,” Avery said, a little too quickly.

He nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

They walked out onto Cord’s doorstep and took the hover that Atlas had called. Avery leaned back on the seat and closed her eyes, letting the familiar hum of the magnetic propulsion system wash over her. She listened for the rise and fall of Atlas’s breathing. He really was here, she kept telling herself. It wasn’t just another one of her dreams.

When they reached the thousandth-floor penthouse Avery fell backward onto her bed, still in her dress. Everything was a little dizzy. “You okay?” Atlas asked, settling onto the corner of her enormous cream-colored comforter.

“Mmm-hmm,” she murmured. She was better than she’d been in months, here, alone, with Atlas, in the semidarkness. He scooted over a little. She closed her eyes. Right now, with him sitting on her bed, Avery could almost pretend he was just a boy she’d met and brought home. Not someone her parents adopted when she was five years old, because she was lonely and they didn’t have time for her.

“Remember when you first came here?” she asked. She’d been sitting on the playroom floor brushing her doll’s hair, and the front door had opened to reveal her mom, holding the hand of a hopeful, lost-looking boy. “This is Atlas,” her mom had said, and the boy had given a tentative smile. From that moment on Avery adored him.

“Of course I remember,” Atlas teased. “You demanded that I go straight to the park with you, and drag you along on your hoverboard so you could pretend it was a pirate ship.”

“I did not!” Avery propped herself up on her elbows to glare at him in mock anger.

“It’s okay. I didn’t mind,” he said softly.

Avery leaned back on her pillows. How strange that there had ever been a time in her life before Atlas. It didn’t seem possible anymore.

“Aves?” she heard Atlas say. “If there was something I needed to know, you would tell me, right?”

She opened her eyes and looked at his face, so clear and guileless. He wasn’t suggesting the truth—was he? He couldn’t be. He didn’t know what it was like, wanting something you could never have; how impossible it was to un-want it once you’d let the feeling in.

“I’m glad you’re back. I missed you,” she told him.

“Me too.”

The silence stretched between them. Avery fought to stay awake, to drink in Atlas’s presence, but sleep was dragging her down. After a moment he stood and walked to the hallway.

“I love you,” he said, and pulled the door quietly shut behind him.

I love you too, her heart whispered, curling around the phrase like a prayer.




ERIS (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


I’M HEADING HOME, Eris flickered Cord, not bothering to wait for his response. His apartment was emptying as the party began to slowly disintegrate, people stumbling home alone or in pairs. Everywhere she looked Eris saw the debris of an epic night, scattered cups and lost costume pieces and broken halluci-lighters.

She hadn’t meant to stay this long. She’d been flitting from group to group and lost all sense of time. She wasn’t sure where Cord was and she felt too exhausted, suddenly, to go looking for him. All she wanted was a cleansteam shower and her thousand-thread-count sheets.

Eris started toward the door, scrolling idly through her messages, and realized with a start that she had several missed pings from home. They were timestamped from a couple of hours ago—she’d been on the dance floor; she remembered tossing her head back and forth, ignoring them—but she hadn’t registered at the time that they were from her parents. She wondered what was going on.

When she reached her apartment on 985, Eris opened the door as slowly as she could, her black shoes in one hand and her clutch in the other. She knew the moment she stepped inside that something was wrong. The lights were on their brightest setting, and an awful strangled sound came from the living room. Oh god. It was her mom, crying.

Eris dropped her shoes on the floor with a loud clatter.

“Eris?” Caroline lifted her head from where she lay curled on the couch. She was still wearing her evening gown, a beautiful scarlet question mark against the white cushions.

Eris ran forward to throw her arms around her mom, pulling her close. She thought suddenly of when she was little and her parents would come home from parties. Eris would hear her mom’s heels clacking in the hallway—a sound she’d always found strangely reassuring—and no matter how late it was, Caroline had always come to brush Eris’s hair and tell her about all the wonderful, magical, grown-up things she’d seen that night. How many times had Eris fallen asleep listening to the sound of her mom’s voice?

“It’s okay,” Eris said softly, though clearly it wasn’t. Her eyes darted nervously around the apartment. Where was her dad?

“No, it’s not okay.” Caroline took a deep breath, and pulled back to look Eris squarely in the eye. Mascara-filled tears etched black rivers down her face. “I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?” Eris scooted back from her mom to sit upright, the movement brusquer than she’d intended. “Where’s Dad?”

“He … left.” Caroline looked down, studying the hands clasped tight in her lap, the crumpled folds of her magnificent crimson dress.

“What do you mean, he left?”

“Remember that DNA test you took today?”

Eris nodded impatiently. Of course she remembered; she’d taken countless tests, given a cheek swab and peed on a stick, and signed so many old-fashioned paper documents with a real ink pen that her hand had cramped with the unfamiliar movement.

Wordlessly Eris’s mom tapped the coffee table, which, like all the surfaces in their apartment, had touch-screen capabilities. A few quick swipes and she’d pulled an attachment from her message queue. Eris leaned forward to look.

Her DNA was mapped there in all its glory, its strands an unrealistic bubblegum pink, but Eris’s eyes were already skimming past that, to the jumble of medical words and bar charts below. She knew they’d run her DNA against her dad’s, which was already on file, yet she couldn’t process what she was seeing now. What did it all have to do with her?

Her eyes caught on a single line at the bottom—percentage match: 0.00%—and she reached out a hand to steady herself. An ugly, sticky realization was closing around her throat.

“I don’t believe this.” She sat up straighter, her voice gaining volume. “The lab messed up the sequencing. We need to ping them back, get them to redo it.”

“They did redo it. It’s not wrong.” It seemed as if her mom was talking from very far away, as if Eris were underwater, or buried under a mountain of sand.

“No,” Eris repeated blindly.

“It’s true, Eris.”

The finality in Caroline’s tone made Eris cold all over. And then she understood why her DNA wasn’t a match, why her mom wasn’t acting more surprised. Because Eris wasn’t her father’s daughter, after all.

Her mom had cheated on her dad, and kept it a secret for the past eighteen years.

Eris shut her eyes. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. If she kept her eyes closed it would go away, like a bad dream.

Her mom reached out a hand and Eris shot to her feet, knocking over the coffee table as she did. Neither of them looked at it. They just stared at each other, mother and daughter, so painfully alike—and yet to Eris they had never felt more like strangers.

“Why?” she asked, because it was the only word her mind could process. “Why did you lie to me all those years?”

“Oh, Eris. I didn’t mean—it wasn’t about you—”

“Are you serious? Of course it’s about me!”

Caroline winced. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just … whatever happens between me and Everett—it’s not your fault.”

“I know, because it’s your fault!”

Neither of them spoke. The silence scraped at Eris’s eardrums.

“Where did Dad go? When is he coming back?” she asked finally.

“I’m not sure.” Her mom sighed. “I’m sorry, Eris.”

“Stop saying that!” By now Eris was screaming. She couldn’t help it; she didn’t want to hear another apology from her mom. Apologies meant nothing when the person you trusted the most had been lying to you your whole life.

Her mom was utterly still. “I know this is really hard on you, and you must have a lot of questions. I’m here to answer—”

“Fuck you and your fucking explanations,” Eris interrupted, enunciating each word.

Her mom drew back in wounded shock, but Eris ignored it. Her mind was shuffling through all her memories of her mom: of when Caroline would come wake her up for elementary school, only to snuggle into Eris’s bed with her and fall back asleep, forcing Eris’s dad to come wake them both up, laughing about what sleeping beauties his girls were. Of the Christmases they had baked cookies to put under the tree for Santa, made almost entirely from raw dough, and then Dad would go eat them in the middle of the night even long after Eris knew Santa wasn’t real. Of every year before her birthday, when Caroline would make up a fake doctor’s appointment and pull Eris out of school to go shopping so they could pick out her presents and then go to Bergdorf’s for tea. “Your mom is so cool,” the other girls always said, because none of their moms ever let them out of school just for fun, and Eris would laugh and say, “Yeah, I know, she’s the best.”

It all felt fake now. Every gesture, every I love you; all of it was tinted by the great ugly lie underpinning her life. Eris blinked in confusion at her mom’s familiar face. “So you’ve known my entire life,” she said bitterly.

“No. I wasn’t sure.” Her mom’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears, but she managed to hold them back. “I always thought—hoped—that you were Everett’s. But I never knew for certain until now.”

“Why the hell did you let me take that DNA test, then?”

“You think if I knew there was a test I would’ve let you go?” her mom cried out.

Eris didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand how her mom could have done this to her, to her dad, to their family.

“Please, Eris. I want to make this right,” Caroline began, but Eris shook her head.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said slowly, and turned away.

Somehow Eris stumbled to her round bed, nestled to one side of her enormous circular room. Shock and fear were swirling dangerously in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She clawed suddenly at the neck of her shirt, still damp with her mom’s tears, and yanked it brutally over her head, then took a desperate, ragged breath. She was pretty sure she’d heard one of the seams rip out.

Can I be of assistance? her contacts prompted, sensing that she was almost crying. “Shut up!” she muttered, and they obediently powered down.

Everett Radson wasn’t her father. The truth of it kept ricocheting painfully against her skull like gunfire. Her poor dad—she wondered what he’d said when he got the lab results. Where was he now? A hotel, the hospital? She wanted to go talk to him, yet at the same time she wasn’t quite ready to face him. She knew that when she saw him—when she truly came face-to-face with it all—that everything would be different, for good.

Eris closed her eyes, but the world kept spinning around her. She wasn’t even drunk tonight. This must be the feeling, she thought bitterly, of her life coming untethered.

She sat up and studied her room with an odd sense of detachment. Everywhere she looked were expensive things—the crystal vase with its ever-young roses, the closet filled with delicate, colorful dresses, the custom-made vanity cluttered with gleaming pieces of tech. All the trappings of her life, everything that made her Eris Dodd-Radson.

She started to lean back onto her pillows and cursed aloud as something sharp dug into her ear. Her mom’s earrings. She’d forgotten all about them.

Eris unscrewed the right earring and held it out on her palm. It was so beautiful; a glass sphere glowing with whorls of color, like the eye of a coming storm. A beautiful, rare, expensive present from her dad to her mom. Suddenly the earring and everything it stood for struck Eris as unbearably false.

She pulled back her arm and hurled the earring against the wall with all the strength she had. It exploded into a million pieces, which scattered over the floor like shards of glittering tears.




RYLIN (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


AS THE LAST guests stumbled from Cord’s party into a waiting hover, Rylin heaved a sigh of relief. The night had felt endless—cleaning up all those drunk kids’ messes, pretending not to notice how some of the guys looked at her. She was exhausted, and her head still pounded from being yanked out of the communal. But thank god she was finally done.

Stretching her arms overhead, she wandered to the windows in Cord’s living room and gazed hungrily at the horizon line in the distance. The view screens in her apartment were so old that they didn’t even look like windows anymore, more like garish cartoons of a fake view, with a too-bright sun and overly green trees. There was a window along the side of her monorail stop at work—Rylin’s snack stand was at the Crayne Boulevard stop, between Manhattan and Jersey—but even that was too close to see anything except the Tower, squatting like a giant steel toad that blocked out the sky. Impulsively she pressed her face to the glass. It felt blissfully cool on her aching forehead.

Finally Rylin peeled herself away and started upstairs, to check in with Cord and get the hell out of there. As she walked, the lights behind her turned off and the ones ahead of her clicked on, illuminating a hallway lined with antique paintings. She passed an enormous bathroom, filled with plush hand towels and touch screens on every surface. Hell, the floor was probably even a touch screen: Rylin was willing to bet that it could read your weight, or heat up on voice command. Everything here was the best, the newest, the most expensive—everywhere she looked, she saw money. She walked a little faster.

When she reached the holoden, Rylin hesitated. Projected on the wall wasn’t the action immersion or dumb comedy she had expected. It was old family vids.

“Oh, no! Don’t you dare!” Cord’s mom exclaimed, in vibrant 3-D.

A four-year-old Cord grinned, holding a garden hose. Where was this, Rylin wondered, on vacation somewhere?

“Oops!” he proclaimed, without an ounce of contrition, as he turned the hose on his mom. She laughed, throwing up her tanned arms, her dark hair streaming with water like a mermaid’s. Rylin had forgotten how pretty she was.

Cord leaned forward eagerly, sitting almost on the edge of his leather armchair. A smile played on his lips as he watched his dad chase his younger self around the yard.

Rylin retreated a step. She would just—

The floor creaked under her feet, and Cord’s head shot up. Instantly the vid cut off.

“I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I just wanted to let you know I’m finished. So I’m heading out.”

Cord’s eyes traveled slowly over her outfit, her tight jeans and low-cut shirt and the tangle of neon bracelets at her wrists.

“I didn’t have time to go home and change,” she added, not sure why she was explaining herself to him. “You didn’t give me much notice.”

Cord just stared at her, saying nothing. Rylin realized with a start that he hadn’t recognized her. Then again, why should he? They hadn’t seen each other in years, since that Christmas his parents had invited her family over for presents and cookies. Rylin remembered how magical it had seemed to her and Chrissa, playing in the snow in the enclosed greenhouse, like a real-life version of the snow-globe toy her mom always got out for the holidays. Cord had spent the whole time in some holo-game, oblivious.

“Rylin Myers,” Cord said at last, as if she had stumbled into his party by chance rather than been paid to work it. “How the hell are you?” He gestured to the seat next to him, and Rylin surprised herself by sinking into it, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged.

“Aside from being groped by your friends, just great,” she said without thinking. “Sorry,” she added quickly, “it’s been a long night.” She wondered where Hiral and the gang were, if they’d finally noticed her disappearance.

“Well, most of them aren’t my friends,” Cord said matter-of-factly. He shifted his weight, and Rylin couldn’t help noticing the way his shoulders rippled under his button-down shirt. She sensed suddenly that his carelessness was deceptive, that beneath it all he was watching her intently.

For a moment they both stared at the dark screen. It was funny, Rylin thought; if you’d told her earlier that her night would end here, hanging out with Cord Anderton, she would have laughed.

“What is that?” Cord asked, and Rylin realized she was playing with her necklace again. She dropped her hands to her lap.

“It was my mom’s,” she said shortly, hoping that would end it. She’d given the necklace to her mom as a birthday present one year, and after that her mom never took it off. Rylin remembered the pang she’d felt when the hospital sent it back to her, folded in plastiwrap and labeled with a cheerful orange tag. Her mom’s death hadn’t felt real until that moment.

“Why the Eiffel Tower?” Cord pressed, sounding interested.

Why the hell do you care, Rylin wanted to snap back, but caught herself. “It was an inside joke of ours,” she said simply. “We used to always say that if we ever had the money, we would take the train to Paris, eat at a fancy ‘Café Paris.’” She didn’t bother explaining how she and Chrissa used to turn their kitchen into a snooty French café. They would make paper berets and draw mustaches on their faces with their mom’s paintstick, and adopt terrible French accents as they served her the “chef’s special”—whatever frozen food packet had been on sale that week. It always made their mom smile after a long day’s work.

“Did you ever end up going?” Cord asked.

Rylin almost laughed at the stupidity of the question. “I’ve barely left the Tower.”

The room sounded with sudden shouting and water spraying, as the screen lit back up with the holovid. Cord quickly shut it off. His parents had died years ago, Rylin remembered, in a commercial airline crash.

“It’s nice that you have those vids,” she said into the silence. She understood why he would be possessive about them; she would have done the same if she and Chrissa had any. “I wish we had more of my mom.”

“I’m sorry,” Cord said quietly.

“It’s fine.” She shrugged, though of course it wasn’t fine. It wouldn’t be fine ever again.

The tension was broken by a sudden rumble sounding in the room. It took Rylin a moment to realize that it had come from her own stomach. Cord looked at her curiously. “You hungry?” he asked, though the answer was obvious. “We could break out the leftovers, if you want.”

“Yes,” Rylin said, more enthusiastically than she’d meant to. She hadn’t eaten since lunch.

“Next time you should eat the catering,” Cord said as they started out of the holoden and down the sweeping glass staircase. “Guess I should have told you that.” Rylin wondered what made him think there would be a next time.

When they reached the kitchen, the fridge cheerfully informed Cord that he’d consumed four thousand calories so far today, 40 percent of which were from alcohol, and per his “Muscle Regime 2118” he was allowed nothing else. A glass of water materialized in the fridge’s export slot.

“Muscle regime. I should get one of those,” Rylin deadpanned.

“I’m trying to be healthy.” Cord turned back to the machine. “Guest override, please,” he mumbled, then looked at Rylin, redder than she’d ever seen him. “Um, could you just put your hand on the fridge to prove you’re here?”

Rylin placed her palm on the refrigerator, which dutifully swung open. Cord began pulling out containers at random, pumpkin seed milk bars and hundred-layer lasagna and fresh appleberries. Rylin grabbed a box of pizza cones out of his hand and tore into one. It was cheesy and fried and perfect, maybe even better cold. When Cord handed her a napkin, she realized that sauce had dripped onto her chin, but somehow she didn’t care.

As he leaned back against the counter, Rylin caught sight of something over his shoulder, and let out a squeal. “Oh my god. Are those Gummy Buddies? Do they actually move when you bite off their heads, like they do in the adverts?”

“You’ve never had a Gummy Buddy?”

“No.” A bag of Gummy Buddies cost more than what she and Chrissa spent on food in a week. They were the first edible electronics, with microscopic radio frequency ID tags inside each candy.

“Come on.” Cord tossed her the bag. “Try one.”

Rylin pulled out a bright green gummy and popped it whole into her mouth. She chewed expectantly, then glowered at him when nothing happened.

“You didn’t do it right.” Cord seemed to be struggling to keep his face straight. “You have to bite off the head, or the legs. You can’t just eat it all at once.”

She grabbed another gummy and bit off the bottom half. The RFID chip in the remaining top part of the gummy abruptly let out a high-pitched scream.

“Crap!” Rylin yelled, dropping the gummy head on the floor. It kept twitching near her feet, and she took a step back.

Cord laughed and grabbed the rest of the gummy, tossing it into the trash, which suctioned it off to the sorting center. “Here, try again,” he said, holding out the bag. “If you bite off the head, they don’t scream, just move around.”

“I’m good, thanks.” Rylin tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and glanced back up at Cord. Something about the way he was looking at her made her fall silent.

Then he was closing the distance between them, and lowering his mouth to hers.

At first Rylin was too startled to react. Cord kissed her slowly, almost languidly, pressing her back against the counter. The edge of it dug sharply into Rylin’s hip, jarring her back to reality. She put both hands on his chest and pushed, hard.

She crossed her arms as Cord stumbled backward, his breath ragged, his eyes dancing with amusement. A smile curled at the corners of his lips.

Something about that look made Rylin shake with anger. She was furious with Cord for laughing at the situation, with herself for letting it unfold—and deep down, for enjoying it, for a single bewildered instant.

Without stopping to think, she raised her arm and slapped him. The noise cracked through the air like a whip.

“I’m sorry,” Cord finally said, into the painful stillness. “I obviously misread the situation.”

Rylin watched the red mark of her hand blossoming on his face. She’d gone too far. He wouldn’t pay her for tonight, and all that hard work would have been for nothing. “I—um, I should get going.”

She was halfway out the front door when she heard footsteps in the entryway. “Hey, Myers,” Cord called out from behind her. “Catch.”

She turned and caught the bag of Gummy Buddies in midair.

“Thanks,” she said, confused, but the door was already closing behind him.

Rylin leaned against the door of Cord’s apartment and closed her eyes, trying to gather the frayed and tangled strands of her thoughts. Her mouth felt bruised, almost seared. She could still feel where Cord had held her tight around the waist.

With an angry sigh, she hurried down the three brick stairs that led to his entrance and started down the carbon-paved streets.

The entire two and a half miles home, Rylin pulled the heads off the Gummy Buddies one by one, letting their small screams fill the empty elevator car.




WATT (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


“WATT!” A TINY pink form barreled down the hallway as he walked inside the next day.

“Hey, Zahra.” Watt laughed, scooping his five-year-old sister into his arms. Her dark curls had something sticky in them, and a costume tiara was perched precariously atop her head. Watt noticed that her pajama pants, which used to drag along the ground, now barely hit mid-calf. He made a mental note to buy her a new set the next time he was paid. Zahra giggled, then wriggled impatiently out of his arms to run back into the living room, where her twin brother, Amir, was building something out of plastifoam blocks.

“Watzahn, is that you?” Watt’s mom called from the kitchen.

“Yeah, Mom?” It was never a good sign when she used his full name.

You might want to change first, Nadia suggested, but Watt was already at the doorway. Shirin hovered over the cook surface, pouring water into an instant noodle dinner. Watt remembered back before the twins were born, when she used to cook elaborate Persian meals from scratch: rich lamb stews and golden flatbreads and rice sprinkled with sumac. Then she’d unexpectedly gotten pregnant and stopped cooking altogether, claiming the smell of spices made her nauseous. But even after the twins were born, the home-cooked Persian meals never came back. There wasn’t enough time anymore.

Shirin pushed the cook-dial to high heat and turned to Watt. “You were at Derrick’s all day?” she asked, with a glance at his rumpled clothes from last night. Watt reddened. Nadia said nothing, but he could practically feel her thinking I told you so.

“Yeah. I stayed at Derrick’s last night,” Watt said to his mom, but she just stared at him blankly. “Today was our last day of summer, and we wanted to try finishing this game …” He trailed off.

It was true, though. He’d barely spent any time at Squid Ink Martini Girl’s last night—Nadia was right, she didn’t have much to say, and he felt somehow foolish for having left the bar with her. He’d ducked out almost immediately to head for Derrick’s. He’d spent the night there, and this morning they’d eaten enormous sandwiches from the bagel shop and watched soccer on the tiny screen in Derrick’s living room. It wasn’t that Watt had been avoiding home, exactly. But Derrick didn’t have two younger siblings who needed constant attention. His parents basically let him do what he wanted, as long as he kept up his grades.

“I could have used your help today,” Shirin went on, sounding more defeated than angry. “The twins had a checkup this afternoon. I had to get Tasha to fill in for me at the center so that I could take them, since I couldn’t find you. I’ll have to work double shifts the rest of the week just to make up the time.”

Watt felt like utter crap. “You could have pinged me,” he said lamely, pretty sure he’d ignored a call at some point last night.

“You were too busy playing that holo game,” his mom snapped, then let out a sigh. “It’s fine. Just get your brother and sister.” She set bowls and spoons on the table as the door opened again, eliciting more excited squeals from Zahra. Moments later Watt’s dad was in the kitchen, a twin on each hip. He usually had to work much later than this—having him home for dinner was practically a special occasion.

“Dinner’s ready, Rashid.” Watt’s mom greeted him with a tired kiss on the cheek.

They all crammed around the small table. Watt shoved the instant noodles and canned vegetables into his mouth without tasting them, not that they had much taste to begin with. He was angry with his mom for making him feel guilty. What was wrong with him occasionally blowing off steam at a midTower bar? Or spending the last day of summer hanging out with his friend?

The moment Zahra yawned, her hands making small fists over her head, Watt stood up as if on cue. “The bedtime monorail is about to leave! All aboard!” he announced, in a too-deep voice.

“Choo choo!” Zahra and Amir attempted a train noise and trotted alongside Watt. The actual monorail was silent, of course, but the twins watched tons of animated train holos and loved making that sound. Watt’s dad smiled, watching them. Shirin pursed her lips and said nothing.

Watt led the twins down a winding imaginary train track to the end of the hall. Their room was tiny, but still bigger than his: this used to be Watt’s room, actually, before they were born and he moved into the office nook. The dim light barely illuminated the bunk beds built into the wall. Watt had repeatedly tried to route more electricity to the twins, but it never seemed to be enough. He had a sinking suspicion that it was his fault, because of all the power-hungry hardware he’d set up in his room.

He helped the twins laser-clean their teeth and tucked them into bed. They didn’t have a room comp down here, of course, but Nadia did the best vitals check she could, watching the twins’ breathing and eye movement. When she’d confirmed they were asleep, Watt shut the door quietly and moved down the hallway to his makeshift bedroom.

He sank gratefully into his ergonomic swivel chair—which he’d lifted from an office space that was about to be foreclosed—and clicked on the high-def screen at his desk, which took up most of the room. His bed was shoved far to the corner, his clothes tucked on hoverbeams up near the ceiling. Nadia didn’t need the screen, of course, since she could project anything directly onto his contacts. But Watt still liked surfing the i-Net this way whenever possible. Even he thought it was weird sometimes, replacing your entire field of vision with the digital overlay.

He flipped through all the messages from the girls he’d met at Pulse last night, then closed out without answering any of them. Instead he logged into H@cker Haus, his favorite dark-web site for postings of “data services” jobs.

Watt’s family always needed money. His parents had moved from Isfahad to New York the year before he was born, when the Tower was new and the whole world was excited about it: before Shanghai and Hong Kong and São Paulo all got their own thousand story megatowers. Watt knew his parents had immigrated for his sake, hoping he would have a chance at a better future.

It hadn’t turned out the way they’d hoped. Back in Iran, Watt’s dad had attended the top mechanical engineering school, and his mom had been studying as a doctor. But Rashid now worked repairing industrial coolant and sewage systems. Shirin had been forced to get a job as a caregiver at a nursing home, just so they could keep their apartment. They never complained, but Watt knew it wasn’t easy on them, working long days hammering machinery and dealing with crotchety old people, then coming downstairs to take care of the family. And no matter how hard they tried, money always seemed to be tight. Especially now that the twins were getting older.

Which was why Watt had started saving for college. Well, for MIT. Their microsystems engineering program was the best in the world—and Watt’s best shot at someday working on one of the few legal quants left, the ones owned by the UN and NASA. He wasn’t applying to any safety schools. His parents worried that his insistence was stubborn and overconfident, but Watt didn’t care; he knew he would get in. The real question was how he would pay for it. He’d been applying to scholarships, and had won a few small grants here and there, but nowhere near enough to pay for four years at an expensive private university.

So Watt had started making money a different way: by venturing to the darker part of the i-Net, and answering ads for what were euphemistically called “information services.” In other words, hacking. Together he and Nadia falsified employment records, changed students’ grades at various school systems, even broke into flicker accounts for people who thought their significant others were cheating. Only once did they try hacking a bank’s security system, and that ended almost immediately, when Nadia detected a virus hurtling toward them and shut herself off.

After that, Watt tried to steer clear of anything too illegal, except of course for the fact of Nadia’s existence. But he took on jobs whenever he could, depositing most of the proceeds in a savings account and giving the rest to his parents. They knew he was good with technology; when he told them the money came from tech support jobs online, they didn’t question it.

He scrolled idly through the H@cker Haus requests, stifling a yawn. As usual, most were too absurd or too illegal for him to take on, but he flagged a few for later review. One in particular caught his eye, asking for information on a missing person. Those were usually easy jobs if the person was still in the country; Nadia had long ago hacked the national security-cam link, and could use facial recognition to find people in a matter of minutes. Curious, Watt read further, an eyebrow raised. It certainly was an unusual request.

The author of the post wanted information on someone who had been missing this past year, but who had since returned. I need to know where he’s been this whole time, and why he came home, the person requested. Sounded easy enough.

Watt immediately composed a reply, introducing himself as Nadia—the name he used for all his hacking jobs, because, well, why not?—and saying that he’d love to help. He leaned back, drumming his fingers on the armrests.

I might be interested,the person who’d written the post replied. But I need proof you can actually do what you say you can do.

Well, well. A newbie. Everyone who repeatedly posted on these forums knew enough about Watt to know he was a professional. He wondered who this person was. “Nadia, can you—”

“Yes,” Nadia answered, knowing his question before he even finished speaking, and hacking into the sender’s security to find the hardware address. “Got her. Here she is.”

On the screen appeared the girl’s feed profile. She was Watt’s age, and lived right here in the Tower, up on the 962nd floor.

What did you have in mind? he answered, a little intrigued.

His name is Atlas Fuller. Tell me something I don’t know about him, and the job is yours.

Nadia found Atlas instantly. He was at home—on the thousandth floor. Watt was stunned. This guy actually lived on the thousandth floor? Not that Watt had given the Tower’s penthouse much thought, but if pressed, he wouldn’t have guessed a teenager lived there. What an idiot, Watt thought, running away when that was your life.

“Can we hack their home comp?”Watt asked Nadia, thinking maybe he could get a snap of Atlas in his bedroom.

But Nadia wasn’t having any luck. “It’s an incredibly sophisticated system,” she told Watt, which he knew meant that it could take weeks. Better to get something now. This job was too good to lose.

His messages, then. That would be easier to hack. Sure enough, Nadia immediately pulled up Atlas’s most recent messages. A few had been sent to guys named Ty and Maxton, and the rest to someone named Avery. None were that exciting. Watt sent them all over anyway.

Moments later the girl’s reply came in.

Congratulations, you’re hired. Now I need you to find as much as you can about what Atlas has been doing the past year.

As you wish, Watt couldn’t help replying.

In addition, the girl went on, ignoring the sarcastic turn of phrase, I’m offering a weekly payment in exchange for constant updates on him—what he’s doing, where he’s going, any information you can provide. This is all for his own safety,she concluded, in an incredibly unconvincing afterthought.

His safety, sure, Watt thought with a laugh. He knew a spurned-lover post when he saw one. This had to be either Atlas’s ex-girlfriend trying to win him back, or a current girlfriend worried about him cheating on her. Either way, the job was a freaking gold mine. Watt had never even seen a request for a hacker on retainer before; most H@cker Haus posts were one-time gigs, because most hacks were, by nature, one-and-dones. This girl wanted to send him weekly payments, just to track her crush’s movements? It was easy money, and he had no intention of messing it up.

“Leda Cole,” Watt said aloud as he pushed SEND, “it’s going to be a real pleasure doing business with you.”




LEDA (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)


“GOOD AFTERNOON, MISS Cole,” said Jeffrey, the doorman at Altitude Club, as Leda walked up to the elevator bank the next day. Altitude had biosecurity too, of course: Leda knew her retina had been scanned the moment she stepped into the entrance hall. But Jeffrey was the kind of personalized and old-fashioned touch that made Altitude membership so expensive. He was a constant fixture of the club, practically an institution himself by now—always at the elevator wearing white gloves and a green jacket and a warm, crinkly smile.

Jeffrey moved aside, and Leda walked into the enormous brass members-only elevator. The doors closed behind her with a satisfying click as she was whisked up from the 930th floor entrance hall, past the tennis courts and spa treatment rooms to the club’s main floor.

The Altitude lobby was lined with imposing dark mahogany and portraits of dead members. Afternoon sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the north and west walls. Leda glanced at the various groups gathered near empty fireplaces and clusters of couches, trying to seem nonchalant as she searched for Atlas. If this so-called “Nadia” person was right, his squash game should be ending right about now.

She still couldn’t believe she’d posted on that sketchy website. It had been nerve-racking—and yet a little thrilling too, doing something so clearly illegal, and dangerous.

She’d tried to upgrade her security first, but Leda still couldn’t help wondering if Nadia knew more than he or she was letting on: about who Leda was, and why she was curious about Atlas. Oh well, she thought, none of it really mattered. “Nadia” probably didn’t live in the Tower—probably wasn’t even a girl. And Leda had no intentions of dealing with her, or him, ever again once she’d gotten what she wanted.

A moment later she saw Atlas walking out of the locker room. He had on a soft blue polo that brought out the caramel-colored strands of his hair, still wet from the shower. Nice work, Nadia. “Atlas,” she said, with what she hoped was the right amount of surprise. “What are you up to?”

“Just finished a squash match with David York.” He flashed her a smile.

“Sounds like it’s all back to normal, then,” Leda replied, a little more sarcastically than she’d meant to. She wondered what the Fullers thought about his reappearance, the way he’d just materialized inexplicably at Cord’s party and jumped right back into their lives as if nothing had happened. Then again, they were the ones obsessed with maintaining appearances; this whole illusion of normalcy was probably their idea.

“About that.” He sighed. “I wish I could explain everything, but it’s complicated.”

Isn’t it always, with you? “I’m just glad you’re back okay.”

“Me too,” Atlas said softly, then glanced around the club as if noticing the flow of activity for the first time: kids heading to afternoon tennis lessons and friends meeting up for drinks on the enclosed terrace. “Sorry, were you waiting for someone?”

“I was on my way to the juice bar,” Leda lied. “Want to come?”

“You and Avery still drink that liquid spinach?” Atlas laughed, shaking his head. “I’ll pass, thanks. Wanna do the Grill instead?”

“I guess I have time,” Leda said casually, though this was exactly the kind of thing she’d been hoping for.

They headed across the lobby to Altitude’s casual grill and grabbed a table near the back, next to the window. Even though she loved the view here, Leda took the seat that faced away from the flexiglass so she could look out over the restaurant. She liked keeping track of everyone coming and going.

“I haven’t been here in ages,” Leda admitted as they settled in. She thought suddenly of middle school, before her family had gotten into the club, when she always spent the night at Avery’s and then came to Saturday brunch here with the Fullers. She and Avery would pile their plates with egg whites and lemon cakes and try to sneak sips from the mimosa fountain, while Atlas rolled his eyes at their antics and messaged his friends.

“Yeah, me neither,” Atlas said, then laughed. “Obviously.”

Drew, who’d been the waiter at the Grill since Leda could remember, walked up to their table. “Miss Cole. And Mr. Fuller! We’re all so glad you’re back.”

“Glad to be back.” Atlas smiled.

“Can I get you two something to drink?”

“I’d love a beer, actually,” Atlas said, and Drew winked; Atlas had recently turned eighteen, so he was legal, but Drew had been sneaking them drinks for years now.

“Iced tea would be great, thanks,” Leda murmured.

“What, no whiskeycream?” Atlas quipped as Drew walked away.

“You know that’s an Andes-only drink.” Leda tried to play it cool, but her heart was racing. What was he doing, referencing that?

“Thanks, by the way, for the other night,” Atlas went on. Leda hesitated. “About Avery,” he clarified. “You were right, she was really drunk. I ended up taking her home after that game of Spinners.”

“Oh. Sure,” Leda agreed, hiding her confusion. She’d just made that up in order to keep from playing Spinners. She was surprised, actually, to learn that it had been true; Avery wasn’t usually the girl who needed to be taken home. She hoped everything was okay.

“Anyway.” He grinned, and Leda felt that rush again, of being the focus of Atlas’s attention. It was a frighteningly addictive sensation. “I’m so out of the loop. Tell me everything I’ve missed this year.”

She saw what he was doing, deflecting attention away from himself, from questions about where he’d been. Well, she could play along.

“I’m sure you’ve heard about Eris and Cord,” Leda began, taking a quick breath to steady herself. She tried to mentally recite a meditation chant, but none came to mind. “Did you hear about Anandra, though?”

The conversation meandered. Leda told him about Anandra Khemka’s stealing spree, about Grayson Baxter’s parents getting back together, about Avery and Zay, everything that had happened in the year he was away. Thankfully Atlas didn’t seem to notice that her stories were light on details about the past summer. He just listened, and nodded, and even suggested that they share an order of nachos. “Sure,” Leda agreed, trying not to read into it; but there was something intimate about eating off the same plate, the way their hands kept brushing as they reached for the same avocado-smothered quinoa chips. Was it her imagination, or was this feeling more and more like a date?

Drew finally came back over. The table’s view screen projected the bill in front of them, the numbers a dark blue holo on a white background. “Do you want me to charge to your separate—” he started, but Atlas was already waving his hand to put the whole charge on the Fullers’ account.

“No way. It’s my treat,” Atlas said.

Maybe he was just being chivalrous … or maybe she was right, and this was turning into a date. “What are your plans this week? Want to do something?” she ventured.

Time seemed to freeze, the way it used to right before an exam when she’d popped a xenperheidren. Atlas’s hand lay there on the table between them. Leda couldn’t think of anything but the way that hand had been tangled up in her hair, tipping her head back, that night ten months ago. She wondered if Atlas thought back on that night the way she did. If he wondered what could’ve happened between them, if he hadn’t left.

She looked up and met his gaze. Her heart was pounding so hard she almost couldn’t hear. He was about to say something. She leaned in—

“Hey!” Avery pulled up a seat next to Leda and pulled a perfectly toned, tanned arm forward in a stretch. “Man, antigrav yoga today was killer. How are you guys?”

“Hey, Avery.” Leda smiled, hiding her disappointment at her best friend’s timing. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed her arrival; she’d been so focused on Atlas that she’d forgotten to watch the Grill’s entrance the way she usually did.

“I missed you in class, Leda.” It wasn’t a reproof, just a question. Avery’s eyes flicked to Leda and Atlas, his empty beer mug and the remains of the nachos on the table between them.

Leda shifted uncomfortably. She’d gotten so excited about Nadia’s intel on Atlas that she’d forgotten to answer Avery’s flicker from last night, about hanging out today. “Oh, yeah,” she said guiltily. “I just came by for a juice. I’ve been totally lazy all day.”

“And then I talked Leda into nachos instead. Sorry we didn’t leave you any.” Atlas gestured wryly at the empty plate.

“No worries.” Avery’s eyes were back to Leda. “Are you guys heading home? Want to share a hover?”

“Works for me. You ready to go?” Atlas said, turning to her.

“Sure,” Leda said, telling herself that she’d get more time with Atlas soon enough. What Nadia had done once, she could easily do again.

As they started back toward the club’s entrance, Avery reached to pull Leda back. “Can we talk about last night?”

“Right. Sorry I left without telling you,” Leda said, deliberately misunderstanding. “I just got really tired all of a sudden, and I couldn’t find you to say bye. You know how it is.”

“No, I meant about earlier. I didn’t mean to push you, about—”

“I told you, it’s fine,” Leda said, more curtly than she meant to. But seriously, couldn’t Avery just take a hint?

“Okay. If you want to talk about it, I’m here.”

“Thanks.” Leda glanced warily at Avery and decided to turn the tables. “What about you? Atlas said you were really drunk at the end of the night? That he had to take you home?”

“First party back, guess I got a little carried away.” There was something funny in Avery’s tone, though Leda couldn’t say exactly what.

“I get it. That was a great party,” she concurred, not sure why she was overcompensating.

“Definitely.” Avery wasn’t even looking at Leda. “It was great.”

They didn’t say anything else until they caught up with Atlas near the entrance. Leda couldn’t remember the last time she and Avery had been at a loss for words.

Then again, I’ve never kept a secret from her before, Leda thought, just as Atlas turned back to smile at them both, and she realized of course that wasn’t true at all; her biggest secret was standing right there before her.

She just hoped he wasn’t also her biggest mistake.




AVERY (#ulink_2de82e64-f106-580c-a96a-8bb394625cfb)


“SO THERE I was, standing alone on a rainy cobblestone street—and I couldn’t get any kind of signal because, you know, Florence is a tech-dark mess—and this group of midTower kids comes up!” Avery was telling the story on autopilot, talking without fully registering what she was saying, a skill she’d picked up from her mom. She couldn’t shake the strange feeling that had settled over her when she saw Leda and Atlas together. It doesn’t mean anything, she kept telling herself, but part of her knew that wasn’t true. It meant something to Leda.

When she’d first seen them across the grill, Avery had smiled and waved, only to lower her hand self-consciously. They were too absorbed in their conversation to notice her. For a brief instant, she wondered what they were talking about—and then she saw the look on Leda’s face, and the realization hit her like a punch to the stomach.

Leda liked Atlas.

Why hadn’t Leda ever told her? Because he’s your brother, the rational part of her mind supplied, but Avery was too shocked and hurt to think rationally. There aren’t supposed to be any secrets between me and Leda, she thought bitterly, momentarily forgetting that she was keeping the same secret.

Not to mention Leda’s defensive, overwrought reaction when Avery caught her in a lie about the summer. Why can’t you just let it go? Leda had exclaimed—and Avery wanted to let it go, except Leda’s reaction had worried her. She felt a sudden flash of anger. She’d been so concerned about her friend that she’d been planning to stop by Leda’s on the way home from yoga. And the whole time Leda had been eating nachos and flirting with Atlas.

When had she and Leda started hiding so much from each other?

“Then what happened?” Atlas prompted.

Avery turned in her seat to answer; she’d selfishly, and strategically, taken the hover’s middle spot. “They offered to help me find my dorm! Because I was wearing your old hockey sweatshirt and they apparently played us last year. Can you believe it? Mile-high kids, all the way in Italy! What are the chances?”

“That’s crazy,” Leda said flatly, and Avery felt a burst of shame for the way she’d told the story. “Mile-high” was the term upTower kids used for the suburban wasteland of the middle floors, since it was literally a mile above ground level. Leda had been a mile-higher, once upon a time.




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