LEDA KEPT GLANCING nervously over her shoulder as they turned onto Mariel’s street. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. Actually, I can’t believe you’re doing this. I don’t really have a choice, but you . . .” She glanced over at Watt, seeming disconcerted. “There’s no reason you should be doing this for me.”
Watt thought it was pretty obvious why he was here: He would take any opportunity to spend time with Leda, in any context. Even if it meant asking questions about a girl’s murder.
He hadn’t seen Leda since he dropped by her apartment with the Bakehouse order. They had been flickering back and forth all week, discussing what to do about Mariel’s diary—studiously avoiding any mention of their almost-kiss on Leda’s couch. Watt was so glad that Leda was still talking to him, he had even agreed to her initial idea: that they should just show up at the Valconsuelos’ apartment and ask to be let inside.
“We’re here,” he realized, pausing at the door marked 2704.
The Valconsuelos’ apartment was on the 103rd floor, on a street called Baneberry Lane. It was only a hundred and forty floors below where Watt lived with his family, but the difference was palpable. Down here the streets felt less like streets, and more like wide hallways that happened to be floored in carbon-composite, lined with metal studs. The overhead lights were fluorescent and distinctly unforgiving. Even Watt, who hadn’t known Eris very long, had trouble picturing her here. It made him cringe to think of what it must be like for Rylin, down on the 32nd floor.
“Okay,” Leda said in an oddly small voice. She poised her finger on the doorbell—and held it there, uncertain. Watt understood her reluctance. This felt much more serious than sneaking into a party.
Wordlessly, he put his hand over Leda’s to help press the bell. They heard the sound of it on the other side of the front door, echoing through the apartment. Leda pulled her hand out from beneath Watt’s, though he couldn’t help noticing that it wasn’t all that quickly. The thought made him smile, in spite of everything.
The door swung open to reveal a woman in a cozy purple dress. Her hair rose to a widow’s peak at her brow, and her brown eyes crinkled with lines, the pleasant sort of lines that came from a lifetime of smiling. But she wasn’t smiling right now.
“Can I help you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Valconsuelo. We’re friends of Mariel,” Watt said quickly.
For a moment Mrs. Valconsuelo simply stared at them both, as if trying to place them.
She doesn’t believe you, Nadia told Watt. Her nostrils are flaring, her hands tensing, the classic signs of mistrust.
Nadia was right; they should have known better than to try to lie to a mom. Moms had a bullshit meter that was hard to sneak anything past.
“I should have said that we were friends of Eris. I only met Mariel once,” Watt amended, and nudged Leda sharply in her side. She blinked, seeming jarred to life.
“We’re so sorry to bother you. Eris”—Leda faltered for only a fraction of an instant over the name—“had something of mine, something she borrowed, and I’ve been trying to track it down. It seems as if Eris might have lent it to Mariel. I wouldn’t ask, except it’s something important.”
“What is it?” Mrs. Valconsuelo asked.
Leda’s chin tipped imperceptibly higher; the face she made when she was about to lie. She was so tremulous, so fiercely vulnerable, Watt marveled that Mrs. Valconsuelo didn’t see it.
“A scarf,” Leda decided, and Watt felt a pang of sympathy for her, because he knew exactly which scarf she was thinking of. The one that Leda’s father had given Eris, which started the entire cascade of misunderstandings. “It has sentimental value, otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”
“I understand.” Mrs. Valconsuelo stepped aside to let them in.
An oppressive silence hovered in the apartment. Watt could tell that it wasn’t normally this quiet; this was the type of apartment that should be ringing with laughter. The silence was a stranger here, lurking around every corner with heavy footsteps, as uninvited and unwelcome a guest as he and Leda.
They followed Mariel’s mom down the hall to a door that was covered in loud, brightly colored stickers. Mrs. Valconsuelo kept her eyes deliberately averted from her daughter’s bedroom. “Feel free to look around. Everything is the way she left it, except for whatever the police might have moved when they came by.” With that, Mrs. Valconsuelo hurried back down the hall, as if she couldn’t get away from the painful memories fast enough.
So the police had already been here. Whatever they found, if they found anything at all, Watt and Leda could assume that the police had already seen it. At least this way, they would know what the police knew.
They exchanged a glance and stepped into the dead girl’s bedroom.
The overhead lights, sensing their movement, flicked on. Dust motes hung suspended in the air. The room was much as Watt had expected: a narrow bed with a multicolored quilt; a small desk with a cream-white top and embedded touch-controls, easily the most expensive thing in the room. A chair was tucked to one side, only slightly visible under the mountain of jackets flung casually over its back. It felt oddly as if Mariel had just walked out and might return again at any moment.
“Should we divide the room in half?” Watt suggested, passing off Nadia’s idea as his own.
“Good thinking. I’ll start with the closet.”
They moved quickly through the room, searching beneath the mattress, inside drawers, in the closet. Watt noticed that Leda wasn’t moving very fast. She kept running her hand over the quilted bedspread or picking up an item of clothing and setting it down again.
I wish we could figure out Mariel’s death, he thought to Nadia, in a burst of frustration. No matter how many times he reasoned through it, Watt couldn’t shake the sense that he had all the right pieces to the puzzle—that the answer to Mariel’s death was somehow right before him, and he just wasn’t seeing it. Was it really a murder? If so, who had done it and why? What evidence did the police have suggesting foul play?
You aren’t here to solve her murder, Nadia reminded him. Just to find out what she was doing before she died. Whether the police might have found the connection between her and you.
Nadia was right, of course. But part of Watt still wished he could solve it. Maybe if he found out who killed Mariel, he could give the answer to the police and make the whole investigation go away.
“This feels weird,” Leda said at last, holding up a framed instaphoto.
“I know.” Watt had been thinking of Mariel only as the girl who attacked Leda in Dubai. But standing in her bedroom, surrounded by all the accumulated clutter of her life, Mariel felt much less like a goddess of vengeance, and much more like a teenage girl. A misguided girl who was desperately hurt by the loss of the person she’d loved.
“No, you don’t know. It isn’t your fault,” Leda replied, her voice breaking. Watt glanced over in surprise. She was still holding the framed instaphoto, staring at it furiously, as if it might reveal some new secret. It was a photo, Watt realized, of Mariel and Eris.
“It’s all my fault,” she said again fiercely. “If I hadn’t pushed Eris, none of this would have happened! Mariel and Eris would still be together, and Mariel would never have followed us to Dubai—you and I would still be together—”
Leda crumpled a little, still holding tightly to the frame. Watt hurried forward and folded her in his arms. She didn’t lean in, but she didn’t push him away either. “It isn’t your fault that Mariel tried to enact some kind of Old Testament vengeance on us,” he told her. “Stop trying to carry all the guilt in the entire world by yourself. There’s enough blame to go around, I promise.”
A breath shuddered through Leda’s thin body. Watt fought back the urge to hug her tighter. “Why do you keep doing this?” she demanded.
“Doing what?”
“Being so nice, acting like you still care about me.”
“Because I do still care about you. You know that.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said tersely, taking a step back. “I’m no good for you, Watt.”
“Stop saying that. I know you, Leda, the real you—”
“That’s just it! You know me too well! You know the real me, the me that no one else has seen. You’re the only person I ever told about me and Eris being related,” she added quietly.
Watt was strangely touched by that. “I do know you, Leda,” he said softly. “I like to think I know you in a way that no one else does. That I can see a core of goodness in you that the rest of the world is too hurried or careless to see.”
Leda looked up. There was a new softness at the corner of her lips and eyes. Then her gaze drifted past Watt, and she cried out in sudden excitement.
“Watt, look!” Leda stepped forward to pull a notebook from a shelf behind him. It had a tattered black-and-white cover, like the notebooks Watt had used back in elementary school.
“What are you two still doing here?”
Mariel’s mom stood in the doorway, a hand on one hip. “Can I help you find your scarf?” she asked pointedly. They had clearly overstayed their welcome.
Somehow Leda concealed the notebook behind her back. “I couldn’t find my scarf. Maybe Eris never lent it to Mariel after all. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“Thank you,” Watt mumbled, and hurried with Leda out the Valconsuelos’ home.
The moment they turned the corner, Leda began to flip open the notebook. Nadia sent off sirens in Watt’s mind, not that he needed them. He quickly reached over Leda to slam the spiral shut. “Not here!” he hissed, his heartbeat skipping. “Not in public!”
Leda gave a reluctant nod. “Should we go to my place?” she asked impatiently.
“Mine is closer.”
They took off, racing toward the upTower lift, then sprinting the two blocks to Watt’s apartment. He heard muffled noises emanating from the kitchen but charged on past, dragging Leda to his bedroom and pulling the door shut behind them.
Even in the midst of everything, Watt felt strangely relieved that his room was clean, if cluttered. His desk was scattered with pieces of computer hardware, which were reflected on the flat-screen monitor tacked to the wall. Clothes on hoverbeams clustered near the ceiling like a woven storm cloud.
Leda flopped onto Watt’s mattress with familiar ease, scooting over to create space for him. He sat gingerly next to her, on the edge of the bed, feeling oddly afraid that he might spook her. Then he looked on, his heart pounding, as Leda began to read.
The journal tracked Leda’s movements—obsessively. Leda turned page after page of Mariel’s cramped, spidery writing, recounting where Leda was going, and when, and with whom. Mariel had obviously been stalking her.
No wonder the police had questioned Leda, if they saw this notebook.
Watt fought back a dull sense of horror. He should have protected Leda from this; but then, how could he have known? He and Nadia couldn’t access anything that wasn’t tech-based. Recording things this way, by hand and on paper, provided more security than any firewall.
Leda pursed her lips and flipped toward the back of the notebook. Watt froze at the sight of his own name.
“These are the entries after Dubai,” Leda breathed, in evident horror.
Here, Mariel had written about all of them, not just Leda. The section on Avery was the biggest—unsurprisingly, since Eris had died at Avery’s apartment. Watt frowned, reading how Mariel had painstakingly tracked Avery’s movements from Eris’s death onward. She’d taken notes about Avery’s dad’s campaign, Avery’s public appearances, even the few pics that Avery had posted from her semester in Oxford.
There were fewer notes about Rylin and Watt, but then, there was much less about them in the public domain.
There’s nothing here to incriminate you, Nadia assured him, and Watt realized in a daze that she was right. His chest brimmed with hope as Leda turned to the final page.
It was like some kind of inspiration board: Mariel had written all four of their names in heavy, fat-tipped marker, with arrows scrawled across the page, connecting each of the names to one another. The lines overlapped and twisted like snakes, with biting comments written along each arrow, such as ATLAS connecting Leda to Avery; or DRUGS connecting Rylin to Leda.
Then Watt saw the arrow linking himself to Leda and felt dizzy. NADIA was written there, in Mariel’s scrawling, angry letters.
It’s really not that bad, Nadia chimed in, tracking the movements of his pupils. If anything, it looks like Nadia is just the name of a girl that got between you and Leda.
Leda glanced up. Her hands were curled tight around the edges of the journal. “This is freaking me out. All these obsessive notes, this speculation about how we’re connected, it looks as if Mariel was searching for a weak spot. Trying to plan how she could break us apart!”
“That’s exactly what she was doing,” Watt agreed. “But it doesn’t matter. Leda—we’re okay.”
“Okay? Our names are all over this notebook, and we know the police have seen it!”
“So what? There isn’t anything here they can build a case on. It’s just a bunch of cryptic shorthand notes. All they know is that Mariel was stalking us.” Watt grabbed Leda by the shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “She didn’t write down our secrets, or the fact that you pushed Eris. That’s the important thing. Even if they want to question us about Mariel’s death, so what? None of us were involved. They won’t find anything.”
“She didn’t write down our secrets,” Leda repeated hesitantly. “You’re right. There’s nothing here that can incriminate us.”
“We’re safe, Leda. We’re actually safe.”
She tilted her head thoughtfully. Her newly short hair curled around her ears, curls that Watt used to wrap his hands in, when he would tip Leda’s head back to kiss her. Then, to Watt’s surprise, she began to laugh—a joyful, relieved laugh, deeper and heartier than you would expect, given how small she was. Watt missed that laugh.
He would have fallen in love with her right then, all over again, if he didn’t already love her with every atom of his being.
“We really are safe,” she said wonderingly.
Something in Leda’s voice gave him pause. She was different, Watt thought, trying to pinpoint what exactly had changed. Then he realized—her force field was down.
All this time, Leda had been holding herself at arm’s length, at a stiff and safe distance from the world, and most of all from him. But now her shield was lowered, her electric fence switched off, every last barrier between the two of them zapped into oblivion. He felt as if he was looking at Leda for the first time in months.
Watt held his breath as she leaned in to kiss him.
The kiss was like a jolt of nitrogen, of electricity, dancing down every last nerve ending in his body. Her hands closed over his shoulders, slipping under the edges of his sweater, and where her bare skin touched his it felt somehow significant, like the imprint of her hand would be forever tattooed there. Leda’s pulse was as erratic as his.
It astonished Watt how utterly right everything suddenly felt. Why had he wasted all those months spinning madly like a top, trying so desperately to forget Leda, when just touching her made the world seem so simple?
When she finally pulled away, Watt felt dazed. “I thought . . .”
“I changed my mind. Girls do that sometimes, you know.” Leda smiled softly and leaned in to kiss him again.