WATT HAD BEEN looking for Leda for an hour now.
He’d circled the entire party at least three times, barreling clumsily into the thick of the dance floor, edging through the gardens alongside the Tower to check whether Leda might be in there. He’d gone upstairs to check the hotel room, but it was empty. Desperate, he’d even flickered Avery to ask whether she’d seen Leda, but Avery hadn’t answered.
Normally, of course, he would’ve just gotten Nadia to hack Leda’s contacts and determined her location that way. But her contacts feed was blank, which meant that wherever she was, Leda was asleep or passed out. Or dead, some horrible voice in him whispered, which he studiously ignored.
Any update, Nadia? She was doggedly searching through the contact feeds of everyone at the party, keeping an eye out for any hint of where Leda had gone.
This was all his fault. If he hadn’t run away from Leda when she opened up to him, none of this would have happened. He couldn’t imagine how rejected she must have felt—confiding in him, only to have him turn and disappear.
“Actually, I might,” Nadia replied, and Watt sprung to alertness.
“I’m not sure it’s Leda,” Nadia hastened to assure him. “But there’s a girl passed out on the beach, a couple kilometers north of the party. Someone just filed an anonymous report to security, saying the person was a threat.”
A threat? Who would have reported that about Leda? Watt had already started running toward the northern exit. When will security get there?
“They haven’t mobilized yet. I intercepted the report before it hit their monitors. Do you want me to wipe it from the log?”
Watt closed his eyes against the wind, feeling a cold sweat break out at his hairline. He had a terrible feeling that something had happened, something awful that Leda wouldn’t want security to see. He remembered their visit to rehab, how well her recovery was going. If she’d done drugs tonight, and the Fullers’ Dubai security brought her in, her parents would send Leda back to rehab for sure—and probably to a more intense place this time. Somewhere that Watt would never get to see her.
And if she’d truly done something threatening, she would need his help.
He felt suddenly selfish. What if Leda was in real danger, and by holding off the security bots, he risked her life?
“Watt?” Nadia prompted.
Keep it cloaked from security for now, he told Nadia, hoping he wouldn’t regret this. What’s the fastest way to the girl’s location?
Nadia directed his gaze to a stray hoverboard that lay propped at the edge of the party. Watt had never ridden one of these before—they were an expensive highlier toy, but how hard could it be? He grabbed the board. It beeped in momentary protest, since it was registered to a different thumbprint and voice ID, but Nadia quickly hacked it, and the tiny micromotors whizzed to life. Ghostly arrows overlaid his field of vision, like some kind of real-life video game quest.
Watt inclined his weight onto his toes and the board leapt forward, responding to the command. He tried to make it go faster, but it bucked upward. He cursed under his breath.
Nadia, can you drive? Nadia obediently took over the hoverboard’s directional system, pushing the board to max speed as it skimmed forward, just centimeters above the uneven surface of the ground.
The wind tore at his hair and the fabric of his tux, stinging Watt’s eyes so hard that he was forced to close them, trusting everything to Nadia, but it wouldn’t be the first time. He held his breath and crouched lower on the board, letting his fingers trace blindly along its aerodynamic surface.
Finally, it came to a stop and Watt half tumbled off. There she was—Leda, looking like some strange version of herself, crumpled unnaturally on the sand. Her white dress fanned around her like an angel’s wings, a sharp contrast to her smooth dark skin. Her legs were already partially submerged in the rising tide of the ocean.
Oh god, oh god, he thought, scrambling down to pull Leda into his arms; and then his heart leapt with joy, because she was shivering, and that at least meant she was alive.
“Why is she freezing like this?” he said aloud, rubbing his hands on Leda’s bare shoulders to create some friction, but her head tipped back alarmingly, forcing him to cradle it in one hand. “Is it the ocean?” He trailed one hand in the water, but it was a pleasant, tropical lukewarm, just as he’d expected.
“I believe she’s taken some drugs,” Nadia was saying. “I would need a med-bot to do a full exam, but whatever they are, they’ve severely constricted her arteries. She’s not getting any blood to her extremities.”
Watt shrugged off his tux jacket and wrapped it around Leda like a cocoon. He cradled Leda in his arms and began to carry her back to the hoverboard, one hand still placed carefully behind her neck and the other under her knees. He managed to settle her sloppily onto the board, curling her on her side and then strapping her down with the emergency safety cord.
“Nadia,” he said hoarsely, “how are we going to get her back?”
“We’ll smuggle her into the hotel on the hover. Leave that part to me.”
Into Watt’s mind came the sudden realization that he and Nadia had gotten it all wrong. He’d set out to change Leda’s opinion of him, but he was the one whose mind had ended up changing, about her.
What was it she’d said all those weeks ago? “We’re the same, Watt, you and me.” And she’d been right. He knew Leda, not just physically but mentally, emotionally—hell, he might know her better than he knew anyone else in his life. She was maddening and stubborn and tormented and deeply flawed, but so was he, and maybe the important thing wasn’t finding someone without flaws, but just someone whose flaws complemented your own.
The hoverboard started toward the hotel, moving more slowly now, to keep Leda from falling off. Watt took off running in its wake.
“You really care about her, don’t you?” Nadia asked him, oddly subdued.
Yeah. Watt couldn’t believe it had taken a life-or-death crisis for him to realize it, but he really did.