“Is it about the Mariel investigation?” Rylin tried again.
Leda glanced over at her. Strangely, she wasn’t afraid of discussing this with Rylin. They were already so inextricably bound together, each in possession of the other’s secret. And Rylin—more than Avery with her picture-perfect life; more even than Watt, who walked around with a computer in his brain—would understand what it felt like to be lost.
“Sort of,” Leda admitted, and tossed the pipe aside. “I’ve done some really shitty things, you know.”
“News flash, Leda, we all have.”
“But these are mistakes I can’t undo! I can’t make it right! How do you live with yourself after something like that?”
“You live with yourself because you have to.” Rylin stared into the refracted blue surface of the fountain. “You forgive yourself for what you’ve done. It can only kill you when you try to run from it. If you just look it in the eye and face it, it becomes part of you, and it can’t hurt you anymore.”
Leda looked down. She had folded the empty wax paper over and over, into a tiny triangle. “You have a sister, don’t you? What’s it like?”
“Having a sister?”
“Yes.”
Rylin bit her lip. “A sister is a built-in best friend. She knows me better than I know myself, because she’s lived my life alongside me, and helped me through the best and the worst of it,” she said. “We fight, but no matter what I say, I know that Chrissa will always forgive me.”
Rylin’s words fell into Leda’s mind, and burned where they landed. That was what having a sister should be like. And instead, Leda had killed hers.
“I have to go,” Leda said abruptly. There was something important she needed to take care of.
But before she reached the entrance to the secret garden, Leda paused. “One more thing,” she added. “What were you doing hiding down here during lunch instead of sitting with Cord?”
“I—I have a lot going on—” Rylin stammered.
“I’ve seen you two dancing around each other all year. Can you please give it a shot? For my sake, if nothing else.” Leda smiled. “I could really use something to root for.”
Later that afternoon, Leda took the monorail to Cifleur Cemetery, in New Jersey.
It was cold out, the Tower looming over the water like a dusky shadow. She paused to look in the floral vending machine at the cemetery’s gates, but everything inside felt too trite, all white wreaths tied with satin bows. Leda quickly logged on to her contacts and ordered something that was much more Eris: a profusion of oversized vivid blooms, with a few incandescents tucked in, twinkling like fireflies. The flowers appeared by drone-drop within minutes.
Leda had been to Eris’s grave only once: the day that Eris was buried. She realized with a mortified pang that this visit was overdue.
“Hey, Eris,” she began, her voice ragged. This stuff didn’t come easily to her. “It’s Leda. But, um, maybe you knew that already.”
A hologram flared to life before her, and Leda stumbled back a step. It was an image of Eris, standing before her headstone, waving and smiling like a prom queen greeting her subjects. Leda assumed the holo was voice-activated, by the use of Eris’s name.
She took a breath, trying to get over the weirdness of seeing hologram-Eris here. “I brought you some flowers,” she said, setting down the bouquet. It had a heady, dusky scent that Eris would have liked. Actually, knowing Eris, she would have plucked a rosebud from the arrangement, tucked it behind one ear, then promptly forgotten all about it.
It would have been Eris’s birthday that week. Leda wished so fervently that she were still here. Leda would have thrown her a party, complete with those bubbles of champagne Eris had loved so much—hell, an entire blimp full of champagne.
She knelt awkwardly before the headstone, as if she were in church. Her eyes darted over every last detail of holographic Eris, desperate to find something they had in common, some proof of their shared DNA.
She remembered the day she’d first met Eris. It was in seventh grade, back when Leda was still silent and invisible, before she’d mustered up the confidence to approach Avery. Leda and Eris were both in the children’s theater club, which was performing The Little Mermaid. Eris, unsurprisingly, had been cast as the mermaid.
Half an hour before their first show, Leda was checking the prop table backstage when she heard Eris’s voice emanating from a dressing room. “Is anyone out there? I need help!”
“What is it?” Leda pushed open the door, only to find Eris standing inside, completely topless.
“I can’t get this to fasten.” Eris held out her glittery shell bra, utterly unselfconscious. Even back then she was all curves and smiles. Behind her glimmered a holographic tail, projected from a single-process beam on the back of a headband.
“I’ll find you some insta-stick.” Leda had darted out of the closet, painfully aware of her bulky sea anemone costume.
As the years went by, the two girls saw each other more, drawn together as they were by the common thread of Avery. But Leda had never really understood Eris. Eris seemed to flit around like a firefly, always coming up with some wild and impractical idea, dragging her friends on adventures from which she alone bounced back unscathed. She fell recklessly in and out of love, laughed when she was happy, dissolved into public tears when she was upset. It had seemed so foolish to Leda, who did everything in her power to conceal what she was feeling. But she saw now that it was brave, in its own way—wearing your heart on your sleeve like that.