THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Watt waited for Cynthia at the corner of Madison Square Park in midTower. I still think this is a bad idea, he told Nadia, watching the flow of people on the carbonite sidewalk that lined the hover path. Tourists wandered around in their awful tourist clothes, jeans and fanny packs and those T-shirts that said I ♥ NY with the iconic image of the Tower emblazoned on the ♥. A group of girls across the street bought ice cream from an enormous cone-shaped snack bot, while periodically shooting glances at Watt and giggling.
“Did you have a better idea?” Nadia whispered into his eartennas.
I’m just curious, how many scenarios did you run for this? What likelihood of success did you calculate?
“My calculations are incomplete, given how much I’m lacking on the input variables.”
So, basically null.
“Watt! I can’t believe you agreed to come with me.” Cynthia turned the corner with a smile.
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it,” Watt said quickly.
Cynthia shot him a sidelong glance. “Really. You’re telling me you’re as excited as I am for the Whitney’s new exhibit on postmodern sound-wave art?”
“To be honest, I’m just here because you wanted to go,” Watt admitted, which elicited an even broader smile. Cynthia had been asking Watt and Derrick to come to this art thing with her for weeks—and now that Watt wanted to butter her up and ask a favor, he’d finally agreed.
That part had been Nadia’s idea. Actually, Nadia was the one who’d suggested he ask for Cynthia’s help in the first place.
Ever since Leda came over, Watt had been thinking about Nadia’s idea. If Leda trusted him—if she thought that he was her friend, that he was on her side—maybe, just maybe, she would say the truth aloud. All Watt needed was one mention, one reference to that night, to get out from under her thumb.
He’d kept asking Nadia how to approach Leda, but she’d referred him to Cynthia. There are some human behaviors that are impossible to predict, she’d said frankly. Studies have proven that asking a friend for advice is the most effective way to tackle trust-related issues in interpersonal dynamics.
Sometimes I think you make these so-called studies up, Watt had replied, skeptical. Nadia sent him thousands of pages of research in silent response.
He and Cynthia headed through the museum’s automatic doors into a stark, austere lobby. Watt nodded twice as he passed the payment machine, which scanned his retinas and charged him for the two tickets. “You didn’t need to get mine,” Cynthia said, sounding confused.
Watt cleared his throat. “Actually, I did,” he said slowly. “To tell you the truth, I have an ulterior motive for coming here today.”
“Yeah?” Cynthia asked. Watt wondered why Nadia was uncharacteristically silent, but then, she often shut up when he was talking to Cynthia.
“I need advice,” he said bluntly.
“Oh. Okay,” Cynthia breathed as they turned into the start of the exhibit, and fell silent.
It was a vast, dimly lit space filled entirely with metal pipes—the kind that still carried water and sewage throughout the Tower, like the ones that Watt’s dad worked with as a mechanic. But the artist had painted them in a spectrum of discordantly cheerful colors, yellow and candy-apple green and watermelon pink. As they progressed through the space, lines of music whispered into Watt’s ear before quickly changing to a new song, a new refrain. Watt realized the pipes were just for show. Miniature speakers were projecting the sound waves toward him in rapid iteration.
“What kind of advice?”
Cynthia’s words echoed strangely over the sounds in the exhibit, as if coming from very far away. Watt shook his head, disoriented, and grabbed her wrist to pull her back into the hallway. Lost-sounding snatches of music drifted through the open door toward him, echoing strangely in his mind, or maybe the thought of Leda was literally driving him insane.
“I’m completely stuck. This girl—” He shook his head, immediately regretting the choice of wording; that made it sound like he liked Leda. Although maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, he realized, if Cynthia thought he needed romantic advice. It was better than letting her guess the truth.
Cynthia stared at him in that piercing way of hers. For some reason Watt held his breath, trying not to even blink.
“Who is this girl?” she asked at last.
“Her name is Leda Cole.” Watt tried not to let his irritation creep through, but he could hear it in his own voice.
“And your typical … techniques aren’t working with her?”
Don’t lie, Nadia urged him. “She’s not a typical girl.” That definitely wasn’t a lie.
Cynthia turned back toward the stairs. “Come on,” she said, sounding resigned.
“Wait, but your exhibit—don’t you want to go through it first?”
“I’ll come back another time, without you. Your life sounds like a mess,” Cynthia proclaimed. Watt didn’t argue, because she was right.
A few minutes later they were seated on one of the rotating hexagonal benches in the sculpture garden outside. “Okay. Tell me about Leda. What’s she like?” Cynthia commanded.
“She lives upTower, goes to a highlier school. She has one brother. She plays field hockey, I think, and—”
“Watt. I don’t want her résumé. What is she like? Introverted? Optimistic? Judgmental? Does she watch cartoons on Saturday mornings? Does she get along with her brother?”
“She’s cute,” he began carefully, “and smart.” Dangerously so. Nadia was feeding him more, but Watt couldn’t keep up this charade. The words began to pour from him like venom. “She’s also shallow and petty, and insecure. Self-centered and manipulative.”
Nice going.
You’re the one who told me to tell the truth!
Cynthia shifted on the bench to face him. “I don’t understand. I thought you liked her?”
Watt let his gaze drift to the trees nearby, genetically engineered to grow dozens of fruits on the same branch. An oversized lemon hung next to bunches of cherries, alongside a row of pinecones. “Actually, I don’t like Leda at all,” Watt confessed. “And she doesn’t like me. She might even hate me. Normally I wouldn’t care that I’m at the top of her shit list, except that she has something on me.”
“What do you mean, she ‘has something on you’?” Cynthia narrowed her eyes. “This is about your hacking jobs, isn’t it?”
Watt looked up sharply. “How do you know about those?”
“I’m not stupid, Watt. The amount of money you’ve got is more than you could make as an ‘IT consultant.’” She lifted her hands to make air quotes around the phrase. “Besides, you always seem to know just a little too much about people.”
Watt could feel Nadia’s uneasiness like a hand on his wrist. We can trust her, he thought silently.
If you say so, Nadia conceded.
“You’re not wrong about the hacking,” he told Cynthia, and part of him was relieved to finally admit at least this much of the truth to his friend.
“So what’s happened that you’re now asking me advice about Leda?”
“Like I said, Leda isn’t my biggest fan. And with what she knows …” He shifted uncomfortably, and swallowed. “I really need her to not tell anyone. If she trusted me—or at least, if she stopped despising me—maybe she wouldn’t tell.”
Cynthia waited, but he didn’t continue. “What would happen, if she told what she knows?” she prodded.
“It would be very, very bad.”
Cynthia let out a deep breath. “For the record, I don’t like this at all.”
“The record has been duly noted,” Watt assured her, smiling in relief. “So you’ll help?”
“I’ll try my best. I can’t make any promises,” Cynthia warned. Watt nodded, but the weight pressing down on his chest already felt lighter, just from the knowledge that Cynthia was here, and willing to try.
“First things first,” she declared. “When are you going to see her again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should probably ask her to hang out, so that you can take charge of the situation, reset the dynamic,” Cynthia suggested.
The thought of voluntarily hanging out with Leda was so strange to Watt that he visibly flinched. Cynthia caught the expression and rolled her eyes. “Watt, this girl won’t stop hating you if she doesn’t ever spend time with you. Now, what are you going to say when you see her?”
“Hi, Leda,” he tried.
“Wow,” Cynthia deadpanned. “You overwhelm me with your incredible wit and conversational skills.”
“What am I supposed to say?” he burst out, exasperated. “All I want is not to go to jail!”
Cynthia went very quiet and still. Watt realized with a sinking feeling that he’d said too much.
“Jail, Watt?” she asked. He nodded miserably.
Cynthia closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they shone with a new resolve. “You’re going to have to be convincing as hell.” She stood up and walked a few steps toward the museum, then turned around. “Pretend I’m Leda and I just arrived. Say something nice to me. Not just ‘Hi, Leda.’”
Compliment her, Nadia offered. “Leda,” Watt began, suppressing a smile in spite of everything at the silliness of the role-play. “It’s great to see you.”
“That’s a start. This time, try it without sounding like you’re getting a full-body exam from a med-bot.”
Watt blinked at her in surprise.
“Come on,” Cynthia urged. “You’re going to have to be a better liar to make this highlier girl believe you. Think of someone else when you say the words, if it helps, but say it like you mean it.”
Nadia automatically projected a series of images onto his contacts—some holo-celebrities that Watt had always found cute; and a picture of Avery, from the one night they actually went out, when she was wearing that slinky mirrored gown and his incandescent behind her ear. Not helping, Nadia, he thought angrily, and she backed off, chastened. He wasn’t in the mood to think about Avery. He wasn’t sure he ever would be.
Watt looked up again at Cynthia, who was still standing there, hand on hip. He cleared his throat self-consciously. “Hey there, Leda.” He stood and moved aside as if to offer her a nonexistent chair. He managed to brush her arm as she maneuvered past him, his touch so slight that it could have been an accident. “You look fantastic tonight,” he whispered into her ear, as if imparting some delicious secret.
Cynthia was absolutely still, her mouth a silent O. Watt was quite certain that he saw her shiver a little. He smiled, pleased with himself. Nice to know I’ve still got it, right? he thought to Nadia, who sent him a sarcastic thumbs-up in response.
“Watt …” Cynthia said slowly, shaking her head a little. “Cut the seduction crap. I thought you wanted this girl to trust you, not jump into bed with you.”
That sounded like a trick question, so Watt didn’t answer it.
“Girls have feelings, Watt.” Cynthia looked down, toying with her purse, running its metal chain idly back and forth through her palms. “Feelings that can be easily hurt. You should remember that.”
“I’m sorry,” Watt said, not quite sure why he was apologizing, but feeling that it was needed. He sensed that there was some meaning behind her words, yet he couldn’t suss it out, and Nadia wasn’t offering anything.
Cynthia shook her head, and the moment passed. “I’m the one who should feel sorry for you. From everything you’ve told me, this isn’t going to be easy.”
She muttered a command to summon a waiter-bot from the museum’s indoor café, and one of them floated over, a menu projected on its holo-screen. Cynthia typed a few keystrokes.
“We’re gonna be here awhile,” she said, gesturing for Watt to lean forward and pay. “The least you can do is buy me some freaking cake.”
An hour and a half later, Watt felt as physically drained as if he’d been hacking all day. His very brain felt sore. But he had to admit, Nadia had been right to suggest that he ask Cynthia for advice. He wondered why he hadn’t ever asked for her help before.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bench, a few crumbs of red velvet cake on the plate between them. “Okay,” she said again, coaching him through the lines they’d practiced. “And what do you say next?”
Watt looked Cynthia straight in the eyes—intently, as if he could see into her very soul. “Leda. I hope you know you can trust me. After everything we’ve been through, you can tell me anything,” he said solemnly.
Cynthia was quiet for a moment, and Watt thought he’d screwed it up yet again, but then she was laughing. The “after everything we’ve been through” line had been her idea, and though Watt wasn’t quite sure about it, it did have a nice flourish. “God, I’m good,” Cynthia boasted. “My work here is done.”
“You’re not going to believe this,” Watt said as his contacts lit up with an incoming flicker. Now he was the one laughing, “Leda just beat me to the punch.”
“Read me the message!” Cynthia demanded.
“‘Watt. I need you to be my date to the Hudson Conservancy Ball next weekend. Don’t bother giving me any excuses, we both know you already have the tux. You can pick me up at eight. The theme is Under the Sea.’”
“Wow. How romantic,” Cynthia said sarcastically.
“Why did it have to be another formal event?” Watt groaned, standing up and offering his friend a hand. “These people can’t be for real.”
“Please, Watt,” Cynthia said, her hand still in his, and the fear in her eyes was unmistakable. “Be careful with this girl.”
He nodded, knowing that she was right. Spending time with Leda was a dangerous gamble.
He might set himself free—or he might destroy life as he knew it.