“WHAT ROOM SETTING would you prefer today, Leda?”
Leda Cole knew better than to roll her eyes. She just perched there, ramrod-straight on the taupe psychology couch, which she refused to lie back on no matter how many times Dr. Vanderstein invited her to. He was deluded if he thought reclining would encourage her to open up to him.
“This is fine.” Leda flicked her wrist to close the holographic window that had opened before her, displaying dozens of décor options for the color-shifting walls—a British rose garden, a hot Saharan desert, a cozy library—leaving the room in this bland base setting, with beige walls and a vomit-colored carpet. She knew this was probably a test she kept on failing, but she derived a sick joy from forcing the doctor to spend an hour in this depressing space with her. If she had to suffer through this appointment, then so did he.
As usual, he didn’t comment on her decision. “How are you feeling?” he asked instead.
You want to know how I’m feeling? Leda thought furiously. For starters, she’d been betrayed by her best friend and the only boy she’d ever really cared about, the boy she’d lost her virginity to. Now the two of them were together even though they were adopted siblings. On top of that, she’d caught her dad cheating on her mom with one of her classmates—Leda couldn’t bring herself to call Eris a friend. Oh, and then Eris had died, because Leda had accidentally pushed her from the roof of the Tower.
“I’m fine,” she said briskly.
She knew she’d have to offer up something more expansive than “fine” if she wanted to get out of this session easily. Leda had been to rehab; she’d learned the scripts. She took a deep breath and tried again. “What I mean is, I’m recovering, given the circumstances. It’s not easy, but I’m grateful to have the support of my friends.” Not that Leda actually cared about any of her friends right now. She’d learned the hard way that none of them could be trusted.
“Have you and Avery spoken about what happened? I know she was up there with you, when Eris fell—”
“Yes, Avery and I talk about it,” Leda interrupted quickly. Like hell we do. Avery Fuller, her so-called best friend, had proved to be the worst of them all. But Leda didn’t like hearing it spoken aloud, what had happened to Eris.
“And that helps?”
“It does.” Leda waited for Dr. Vanderstein to ask another question, but he was frowning, his eyes focused on the near distance as he studied some projection that only he could see. She felt a sudden twist of nausea. What if the doctor was using a lie detector on her? Just because she couldn’t see them didn’t mean this room wasn’t equipped with countless vitals scanners. Even now he might be tracking her heart rate or blood pressure, which were probably spiking like crazy.
The doctor gave a weary sigh. “Leda, I’ve been seeing you ever since your friend died, and we haven’t gotten anywhere. What do you think it will take, for you to feel better?”
“I do feel better!” Leda protested. “All thanks to you.” She gave Vanderstein a weak smile, but he wasn’t buying it.
“I see you aren’t taking your meds,” he said, changing tack.
Leda bit her lip. She hadn’t taken anything in the last month, not a single xenperheidren or mood stabilizer, not even a sleeping pill. She didn’t trust herself on anything artificial after what had happened on the roof. Eris might have been a gold-digging, home-wrecking whore, but Leda had never meant to—
No, she reminded herself, clenching her hands into fists at her sides. I didn’t kill her. It was an accident. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. She kept repeating the phrase over and over, like the yoga mantras she used to chant at Silver Cove.
If she repeated it enough, maybe it would become true.
“I’m trying to recover on my own. Given my history, and everything.” Leda hated bringing up rehab, but she was starting to feel cornered and didn’t know what else to say.
Vanderstein nodded with something that seemed like respect. “I understand. But it’s a big year for you, with college on the horizon, and I don’t want this … situation to adversely affect your academics.”
It’s more than a situation, Leda thought bitterly.
“According to your room comp, you aren’t sleeping well. I’m growing concerned,” Vanderstein added.
“Since when are you monitoring my room comp?” Leda cried out, momentarily forgetting her calm, unfazed tone.
The doctor had the grace to look embarrassed. “Just your sleep records,” he said quickly. “Your parents signed off on it—I thought they had informed you …”
Leda nodded curtly. She’d deal with her parents later. Just because she was still a minor didn’t mean they could keep invading her privacy. “I promise, I’m fine.”
Vanderstein was silent again. Leda waited. What else could he do, authorize her toilet to start tracking her urine the way the ones in rehab did? Well, he was welcome to it; he wouldn’t find a damned thing.
The doctor tapped a dispenser in the wall, and it spit out two small pills. They were a cheerful pink—the color of children’s toys, or Leda’s favorite cherry ice whip. “This is an over-the-counter sleeping pill, lowest dose. Why don’t you try it tonight, if you can’t fall asleep?” He frowned, probably taking in the hollow circles around her eyes, the sharp angles of her face, even thinner than usual.
He was right, of course. Leda wasn’t sleeping well. She dreaded falling asleep, tried to stay awake as long as she could, because she knew the horrific nightmares that awaited her. Whenever she did drift off, she woke almost instantly in a cold sweat, tormented by memories of that night—of what she’d hidden from everyone—
“Sure.” She snatched the pills and shoved them into her bag.
“I’d love for you to consider some of our other options—our light-recognition treatment, or perhaps trauma re-immersion therapy.”
“I highly doubt reliving the trauma will help, given what my trauma was,” Leda snapped. She’d never bought into the theory that reliving your painful moments in virtual reality would help you move past them. And she didn’t exactly want any machines creeping into her brain right now, in case they could somehow read the memory that lay buried there.
“What about your Dreamweaver?” the doctor persisted. “We could preload it with a few trigger memories of that night and see how your subconscious responds. You know that dreams are simply your deep brain matter making sense of everything that has happened to you, both joyful and painful …”
He was saying something else, calling dreams the brain’s “safe space,” but Leda was no longer listening. She’d flashed to a memory of Eris in ninth grade, bragging that she’d broken through the Dreamweaver’s parental controls to access the full suite of “adult content” dreams. “There’s even a celebrity setting,” Eris had announced to her rapt audience, with a knowing smirk. Leda remembered how inadequate she’d felt, hearing that Eris was immersed in steamy dreams about holo-stars while Leda couldn’t even imagine sex.
She stood up abruptly. “We need to end this session early. I just remembered something I have to go take care of. See you next time.”
She quickly stepped out the frosted flexiglass door of the Lyons Clinic, perched high on the east side of the 833rd floor, just as her eartennas began to chime a loud, brassy ringtone. Her mom. She shook her head to decline the incoming ping. Ilara would want to hear how the session had gone, would check that she was on her way home for dinner. But Leda wasn’t ready for that kind of forced, upbeat normalcy right now. She needed a moment to herself, to quiet the thoughts and regrets chasing one another in a wild tumult through her head.
She stepped onto the local C lift and disembarked a few stops upTower. Soon she was standing before an enormous stone archway, which had been transported stone by stone from some old British university, carved with enormous block letters that read THE BERKELEY SCHOOL.
Leda breathed a sigh of relief as she walked through the arch and her contacts automatically shut off. Before Eris’s death, she’d never realized how grateful she might feel for her high school’s tech-net.
Her footsteps echoed in the silent halls. It was sort of eerie here at night, everything cast in dim, bluish-gray shadows. She moved faster, past the lily pond and athletic complex, all the way to the blue door at the edge of campus. Normally this room was locked after hours, but Leda had schoolwide access thanks to her position on student council. She stepped forward, letting the security system register her retinas, and the door swung obediently inward.
She hadn’t been in the Observatory since her astronomy elective last spring. Yet it looked exactly as she remembered: a vast circular room lined with telescopes, high-resolution screens, and cluttered data processors Leda had never learned to use. A geodesic dome soared overhead. And in the center of the floor lay the pièce de résistance: a glittering patch of night.
The Observatory was one of the few places in the Tower that protruded out past the floor below it. Leda had never understood how the school had gotten the zoning permits for it, but she was glad now that they had, because it meant they could build the Oval Eye: a concave oval in the floor, about three meters long and two meters wide, made of triple-reinforced flexiglass. A glimpse of how high they really were, up here near the top of the Tower.
Leda edged closer to the Oval Eye. It was dark down there, nothing but shadows, and a few stray lights bobbing in what she thought were the public gardens on the fiftieth floor. What the hell, she thought wildly, and stepped out onto the flexiglass.
This sort of behavior was definitely off-limits, but Leda knew the structure would support her. She glanced down. Between her ballet flats was nothing but empty air, the impossible, endless space between her and the laminous darkness far below. This is what Eris saw when I pushed her, Leda thought, and despised herself.
She sank down, not caring that there was nothing protecting her from a two-mile fall except a few layers of fused carbon. Pulling her knees to her chest, she lowered her forehead and closed her eyes.
A shaft of light sliced into the room. Leda’s head shot up in panic. No one else had access to the Observatory except the rest of the student council, and the astronomy professors. What would she say to explain herself?
“Leda?”
Her heart sank as she realized who it was. “What are you doing here, Avery?”
“Same thing as you, I guess.”
Leda felt caught off guard. She hadn’t been alone with Avery since that night—when Leda confronted Avery about being with Atlas, and Avery led her up onto the roof, and everything spun violently out of control. She wanted desperately to say something, but her mind had strangely frozen. What could she say, with all the secrets she and Avery had made together, buried together?
After a moment, Leda was shocked to hear footsteps approaching, as Avery walked over to sit on the opposite edge of the Oval.
“How did you get in?” she couldn’t help asking. She wondered if Avery was still talking to Watt, the lower-floor hacker who’d helped Leda find out Avery’s secret in the first place—Leda hadn’t spoken to him since that night, either. But with the quantum computer he was hiding, Watt could hack basically anything.
Avery shrugged. “I asked the principal if I could have access to this room. It helps me, being here.”
Of course, Leda thought bitterly, she should have known it was as simple as that. Nothing was off-limits to the perfect Avery Fuller.
“I miss her too, you know,” Avery said quietly.
Leda looked down into the silent vastness of the night, to protect herself from what she saw in Avery’s eyes.
“What happened that night, Leda?” Avery whispered. “What were you on?”
Leda thought of all the various pills she’d popped that day, as she’d sunk ever deeper into a hot, angry maelstrom of regret. “It was a rough day for me. I learned the truth about a lot of people that day—people I had trusted. People who used me,” she said at last, and was perversely pleased to see Avery wince.
“I’m sorry,” Avery told her. “But, Leda, please. Talk to me.”
More than anything, Leda wanted to tell Avery all of it: how Leda had caught her cheating scumbag of a father having an affair with Eris; and how awful she’d felt, realizing that Atlas had only ever slept with her in a fucked-up attempt to forget Avery. How she’d had to drug Watt to uncover that particular grain of truth.
But the thing about the truth was that once you learned it, it became impossible to unlearn. No matter how many pills Leda popped, it was still there, lurking in the corners of her mind like an unwanted guest. There weren’t enough pills in the world to make it go away. So Leda had confronted Avery—screamed at her atop the roof, without fully knowing what she was saying; feeling disoriented and dizzy in the oxygen-thin air. Then Eris had come up the stairs, and told Leda she was sorry, as if a fucking apology would fix the damage she’d done to Leda’s family. Why had Eris kept walking toward her even when Leda told her to stop? It wasn’t Leda’s fault that she’d tried to push Eris away.
She had just pushed too hard.
All Leda wanted now was to confess everything to her best friend, to let herself cry about it like a child.
But stubborn, sticky pride muffled the words in her throat, kept her eyes narrowed and her head held high. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said wearily. What did it matter anyway? Eris was already gone.
“Then help me understand. We don’t have to be this way, Leda—threatening each other like this. Why won’t you just tell everyone it was an accident? I know you never meant to hurt her.”
They were the same words she’d thought to herself so many times, yet hearing them spoken by Avery wakened a cold panic that grasped at Leda like a fist.
Avery didn’t get it, because everything came so easily to her. But Leda knew what would happen if she tried to tell the truth. There would probably be an investigation, and a trial, all made worse by the fact that Leda had tried to cover it up—and the fact that Eris had been sleeping with Leda’s dad would inevitably come to light. It would put Leda’s family, her mom, through hell; and Leda wasn’t stupid. She knew that looked like a damned convincing motive for pushing Eris to her death.
What right did Avery think she had, anyway, gliding in here and granting absolution like some kind of goddess?
“Don’t you dare tell anyone. If you tell, I swear you’ll be sorry.” The threat fell angrily into the silence. It seemed to Leda that the room had grown several degrees colder.
She scrambled to her feet, suddenly desperate to leave. As she stepped from the Oval Eye onto the carpet, Leda felt something fall out of her bag. The two bright pink sleeping pills.
“Glad to see some things haven’t changed.” Avery’s voice was utterly flat.
Leda didn’t bother telling her how wrong she was. Avery would always see the world the way she wanted to.
At the doorway she paused to glance back. Avery had slid to kneel in the middle of the Oval Eye, her hands pressed against the flexiglass surface, her gaze focused on some point far below. There was something morbid and futile about it, as if she were kneeling there in prayer, trying to bring Eris back to life.
It took Leda a moment to realize that Avery was crying. She had to be the only girl in the world who somehow became more beautiful when she cried; her eyes turning an even brighter blue, the tears on her cheeks magnifying the startling perfection of her face. And just like that, Leda remembered all the reasons she resented Avery.
She turned away, leaving her former best friend to weep alone on a tiny fragment of sky.