LEDA PULLED HER feet up onto the cream-colored couch that dominated her parents’ living room. It was scratchy and stiff, not particularly inviting, but still her favorite place in the apartment. Probably because it was right at the center of things.
She was home alone tonight, watching an old holo, letting its familiar dialogue lap pleasantly against her mind. At school earlier, Avery had asked if Leda wanted to come to some campaign event that Avery’s parents were forcing her to attend, but Leda had refused. Max would be there to keep Avery company, and besides, it didn’t sound like fun.
She found herself wondering what Watt was doing tonight, then scolded herself for thinking about him. And yet . . . she had liked spending time with him the other day. Even if that time was spent at a random party in Brooklyn, investigating the death of a girl who’d known their darkest secrets.
They had been flickering back and forth ever since, discussing what to do about Mariel’s diary. They both assumed that it was in the Valconsuelos’ apartment, but couldn’t agree on their next step. Watt wanted to break into the apartment and try to steal it, which Leda insisted was too risky. What if instead they pretended to be friends of Mariel’s, she suggested, and concocted some excuse for needing to search her room?
Every time she tried to bring it up, though, Watt would inevitably pull the conversation off-topic: to ask Leda whether she missed him (no), whether she thought he needed a haircut (still no), what class she was in (stop hacking my school tablet; I’m trying to focus). When he interrupted her SAT tutoring session, Leda demanded in mock frustration that he hunt down the SAT answers to make it up to her.
And deprive you of the joy of knowing that you beat everyone all on your own? Absolutely not, Watt had replied. Leda shook her head, fighting back a smile.
At least she no longer dreaded falling asleep. She was still having the nightmares, but they were shallower, easier to wake herself up from; especially now that she was waking up to a series of waiting flickers from Watt. There was something comforting in the knowledge that he was on her side. For the first time in months, Leda no longer felt alone.
A buzz sounded through the apartment, and Leda’s head shot up. It wasn’t the delivery she’d ordered from Bakehouse; that would have scanned automatically into the kitchen. She pulled her hair into a messy bun and went to answer the door.
Watt was standing on the other side, holding a massive double-handled bag with the Bakehouse logo. “Delivery for Miss Cole?”
She gave a strangled laugh. “Did you just hack my delivery bot?”
“I was in the neighborhood,” Watt told her, which they both knew was a lie. “And don’t worry, I’ve hacked far worse.”
Leda realized belatedly that she was wearing her oversized school sweatshirt and artech leggings. “Sorry. I would have dressed up, but I wasn’t expecting company. Then again, I don’t know if you count as company when you show up uninvited.”
“In some cultures, it’s rude to insult people who show up on your doorstep bearing food.”
“Except that you’re acting like a human delivery bot, bringing me food I ordered.”
“You’re calling me a human bot? Rude again.” Watt’s dark eyes were bright with laughter.
“It’s not rude if it’s accurate.” Leda reached for the delivery bag and paused, trying not to make her next words sound like a big deal. “You might as well stay, since you’re already here. I always over-order.”
“I’d love to,” Watt said, in a show of surprise, though Leda knew this was exactly what he’d hoped for.
Watt followed her back into the living room and set the Bakehouse bag on the coffee table, scattering the disposable boxes over its imitation mosaic surface. His eyes flicked to the holo, and he grinned. “You’re watching The Lottery?” he teased. Leda started to turn it off, but Watt threw a hand out in protest. “Oh, come on! At least wait until they win!”
“That’s not until the very end,” she reminded him, a little surprised that he’d even seen this holo. It was something she and her mom used to watch, back when Leda was really young.
“Good thing we have all night,” Watt replied. Leda wondered what he meant by that.
She stretched across the coffee table to reach for a pizza slice, only to frown at it in confusion. “This isn’t my pizza.”
“I adjusted the order. You’re welcome,” Watt said cheekily.
“But—”
“Don’t worry—your weird veggie pizza is still here.” He slid a box toward her. “But seriously. Who orders pizza without pepperoni?”
“You’re insufferable. You know that, right?”
“Takes one to know one.”
Leda rolled her eyes and took a bite of her favorite goat-cheese-and-asparagus pizza. She felt oddly glad that Watt had decided to show up tonight, whatever his reasons. It was nice having him around. As a friend, of course.
She shifted to look at him, suddenly curious. “How do you do it? Hack things, I mean?”
Watt seemed surprised by the question. “A lot of it is Nadia. I couldn’t do it nearly as quickly without her.”
“You built Nadia,” Leda reminded him. “So don’t try to pass off the credit on her. How do you do it, really?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because.” Because she wanted to understand this part of Watt’s life, this thing that he was so startlingly talented at. Because it was important to him.
Watt shrugged and wiped his hands on one of the synthetic napkins, then pushed aside the takeout boxes to clear a space on the coffee table. He tapped at its surface, the false mosaic quickly melting away to reveal a touch screen. “Can I get into your room comp system?”
“I didn’t mean—you don’t have to hack something right this minute,” she spluttered, confused.
“And miss the chance to show off for you? Never.”
“Grant access,” Leda said, a little flustered, and the room comp automatically admitted Watt to its system.
He lifted an eyebrow, his fingers poised over the touch screen. “So who’ll it be tonight? One of your friends? That German guy Avery is dating?”
Leda imagined asking Watt to hack Calliope’s page on the feeds, or Max’s, or even Mariel’s, which was still saved to the i-Net auto caches. Not long ago, she would have unhesitatingly jumped at the chance to learn more secrets. That was how she and Watt had been brought together the first time: by snooping and spying on people.
But Leda had learned the hard way what happened when you went digging for secrets you were never meant to learn.
“Show me how you accessed the Bakehouse order,” she said instead.
Watt rolled up his sleeves. Leda found her gaze lingering on his bare forearms. “This one is easy,” he boasted. The holo-monitor before them danced rapidly from one display to the next as he synced up her family’s system with whatever he used. “There aren’t many authenticity certificates, so I don’t even have to go through side channels.”
Leda watched in fascination as his fingers flew over the surface of the table. There was something captivating about the sight of him, sitting there, relaxed and blazingly confident.
She’d forgotten how sexy Watt was when he was hacking things on her behalf.
“How did you get so good at computers? I mean, it’s a whole other language,” she asked, with reluctant admiration.
“Honestly, computer language makes more sense to me than verbal language. At least its meaning is always clear. People, on the other hand, never really say what they think. They might as well be speaking in hieroglyphics.”
“Hieroglyphics wasn’t a spoken language,” Leda said faintly, though she was caught off guard by the insight.
Watt shrugged. “I guess I always hoped that if I studied computers, I might make a difference; make the world better, even in some small way.”
Make the world better, Leda thought, surprised by his earnestness. Maybe Dr. Reasoner had been wrong when she insisted that being around Watt would resurrect the old, dark Leda.
Maybe he wasn’t such a trigger after all.
Watt met her gaze and she flushed, reaching down to smooth the napkin on her lap. She felt as if she were all energy, a bundle of raw, restless movement. As if her body were throwing off real, sizzling sparks.
Her pulse picked up speed. Watt was so close that she could trace the bow-shaped curve of his lips—those lips she had kissed so many times. She couldn’t help wondering, a bit jealously, how many other girls had kissed him since then.
Watt leaned closer. Something was unfurling in the space between them, and Leda didn’t know how to fight it anymore, or maybe she just didn’t want to. . . .
As she tipped her head back to kiss him, Watt pulled away.
Leda’s breath caught. She felt torn between relief and a wild sense of disappointment.
“Leda.” Watt was looking at her in a way that made her blood pound close to the surface. “What do you want, really?”
Such a simple question, and yet it wasn’t simple at all. What did she want? Leda imagined opening her brain, unspooling all her tangled thoughts like a skein of woven cloth, trying to make sense of them.
For so much of her life, she had wanted to be the best. The cleverest, the most successful, because of course she could never be the prettiest, not with Avery around. That was why she’d first hired Watt, wasn’t it? So she could gain the next step on her ever-ascending staircase toward whatever she was chasing?
Now all Leda wanted was to be safe from the darkness within herself. And that meant staying away from Watt. Or at least, she had thought it did.
“I should go,” Watt said before she could answer.
“Watt—” Leda swallowed, not quite certain what she was about to say; and perhaps he knew that, because he shook his head.
“It’s fine. I’ll see you later.” His footsteps echoed on the way out her front door.
Leda collapsed back onto the couch with a defeated sigh. Her eyes drifted toward the bag of takeout, and she reached for it listlessly, only to realize that there was another box at the bottom, still sealed shut. She pulled the box onto her lap and peeled it open.
It was a slice of chocolate cake, with thick cream cheese icing smeared all over the top. Her absolute favorite, the cake that Leda’s parents ordered every year for her birthday. But she hadn’t ordered it tonight.
Watt. She shook her head and reached for the tiny foldable fork with a private smile.