AVERY STOOD AT the center of a group of people—Risha and Ming and a few others, their faces all seeming to float against the raucous backdrop of the dance floor. The world seemed to be tilting violently, as if the planet had spun wildly off course, and the sky was beneath her feet.
She had no idea how late it was. She’d been so studiously determined to ignore Atlas that she hadn’t seen him leave. Instead she’d focused all her energies on laughing and flirting, and drinking. She’d had so much to drink that her laughter eventually stopped feeling forced, and started feeling genuine.
“Hey there.” Cord’s hands were on her shoulders. Avery closed her eyes against the dizzying riot of color. “I think it’s time we got you home,” Cord said, and Avery managed an abbreviated nod.
Somehow she walked with him through the tattered remnants of the party, a smile fixed on her face. Cord held tight to her forearm as they went all the way up those steps and across the pier—whose stupid idea had it been to have an underwater party, anyway?—and back into the Tower, where Cord helped her into a waiting hover.
“Here.” He shrugged off the jacket of his tux and quickly placed it over her shoulders. Avery leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She listened to the familiar tapping as Cord entered an address on the hover’s internal view screen.
A frantic instinct forced her eyes open, and sure enough, there was her address on the thousandth floor, illuminated in bright white letters as their destination. “No,” she said automatically. “I don’t want to go home.”
Cord nodded, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for Avery to refuse to go back to her own apartment. He didn’t ask another question, and Avery didn’t answer. She just pulled his jacket tighter around her shoulders. She felt like she might vomit.
When they reached the 969th floor, Avery followed Cord into his massive living room. Her whole body was still shaking with shock, or maybe regret. Her skin felt hot and stretched tight over her body, as if her very flesh were expanding. She sank wordlessly onto the couch, her head in her hands.
“Do you want a T-shirt or anything?” Cord asked, with a nod toward her heavy dress.
His words broke through the stupor suffocating Avery, and she glanced around, truly seeing her surroundings for the first time. What was she doing at Cord’s apartment late at night? She stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry, I should go,” she said—only to stop in defeat.
There was a reason she hadn’t gone home. She didn’t want to see Atlas. She couldn’t face him, not yet.
Cord stood there watching it all. “Avery. What’s going on?” he asked carefully.
“I can’t go home. It’s—I’m—” she fumbled to speak, but there were no words to express her feelings. “I just can’t,” she finished, helplessly.
Cord was too understanding, or too polite, to press her. “Do you want to stay here?” he offered. “You know we have plenty of guest rooms.”
“Actually, yeah.” Avery was surprised to hear her voice crack. She swallowed anxiously and rubbed her hands over her arms. “And I’d love a T-shirt, if the offer still stands.”
“Of course.” Cord disappeared down the hallway.
Avery glanced curiously around the living room. She hadn’t been to Cord’s in a while, except for parties, when the space was packed with people. Of course, there was a time when she and Eris and Leda had been here constantly, with Cord and his friends—it was easiest here, with no adults to watch over them. Except for Brice, she supposed, but he didn’t really count. She remembered all the stupid things they’d done: like the time Cord pulled their gelatin shots from the rapid-freezer too early, and one of them exploded up onto the ceiling in a firework of gloppy green. Or the time that they’d set up a slip-and-slide down Cord’s enormous staircase, and they all ricocheted down from the second floor screaming and laughing. That had been Eris’s idea, Avery remembered; she’d seen it on some holo and wanted to re-create it, and of course they all joined in, caught up in her ineffable enthusiasm.
It all seemed childish and giddy, and very long ago.
“Here,” Cord said, returning with a neatly folded stack of clothes. Avery quickly ducked into the bathroom to change. It was funny, she thought; the shirt smelled like the normal UV-wand fresh scent but also somehow like Cord.
Moments later she emerged from the bathroom in an old school shirt and mesh shorts, her bare feet padding on the heated kitchen tiles; her hair still set in its elaborate twist, diamond studs in each ear. She knew she looked absurd, but she couldn’t find it in her to care.
“I got you all set up in the blue room, the one at the base of the stairs,” Cord told her as she returned. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Wait,” Avery blurted out as he started toward his room. Cord turned to look at her. She glanced hopefully at the couch. “Any chance you want to stay up for a while?” Just until her mind stopped whirling so frantically, until she could wipe her stupid fight with Atlas—all the pettiness between them—from her brain.
“Sure, yeah,” he said, still watching her.
Avery nestled into her old favorite corner of the couch and pulled her knees up to her chest. Cord sank down next to her, an arm’s length of space between them. His bow tie was loosened, his vest unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. It all cast his profile in a slightly rakish air.
“Do you want to talk about what’s going on,” he asked, “or should we watch a loud, dumb holo instead?”
“Loud, dumb holo. The more explosions, the better,” Avery said, with an attempt at a smile.
She couldn’t believe Atlas hadn’t pinged her or flickered her even once. What was he doing? And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him, since it hurt her so damned much?
“Loud, dumb holo it is.” Cord waved his hands in the air to call up the on-demand menu, then turned to her, his clear blue eyes lit up with a quiet intensity. The full weight of it was almost too much for Avery to bear. “Whatever’s going on, Avery, you know I’m always here if you want to talk about it.”
“Thanks.” For some reason she had to look away from Cord or she might cry. The holoscreen lit up with a hoverchase scene, and she stared at it gratefully, trying to lose herself in the mindless glowing action sequence. Maybe if she focused on the confusion on the screen, she could ignore the tangled, tender mess that her life had become.
Avery realized that the last time she’d been alone with Cord was months ago, when he’d told her that he and Eris had broken up—and she’d figured out that he liked someone new.
“Hey,” she said, eager to think about something else, “what ended up happening with you and that girl?”
Cord blinked, clearly startled. “You mean Rylin? It didn’t work out.”
“Wait—Rylin Myers, who now goes to our school? You were dating her?” The girl from the roof? How had she become so entwined in all of their lives?
“I was, until she lied to me.” Cord looked as if he wanted to be angry, but all he could call up was a wounded sort of regret. Avery knew the feeling. “It’s just hard to get past. I’m not sure how to trust her again, you know?”
“I do know.” She looked away.
“Hang on.” Cord vanished down the hallway, only to return holding a tapered gold candle, covered in flecks of glitter that caught and refracted the light.
“Is that an IntoxiCandle?” Avery had never burned one before. They were just normal candles, with air-transported endorphins and serotonin baked into the wax. But all candles were illegal in the Tower, due to the fire hazard—especially this high up, where the air was pumped with extra oxygen to compensate for the altitude.
“I thought you could use it. It used to help me, when I was drunk and moody.”
“I’m not moody!” Avery cried out, and Cord laughed at her. “Though I am pretty drunk,” she admitted. The room had stopped its slow spin, but she still felt a bizarre sense of unreality, as though none of this was quite believable.
“I can say with firsthand experience that you’re moody as hell, and unquestionably drunk,” Cord declared. She knew he was trying to be lighthearted, but his phrasing only heightened Avery’s sadness. “The candle was Eris’s, actually,” Cord went on. “She bought it for—”
He broke off awkwardly.
“No, it’s okay.” For some reason it felt good talking about Eris, as if by turning to the older, more aching hurt, Avery could ignore the new one that burned in her chest. “I like the idea of using something that was hers. She would want us to burn it.” Avery watched as Cord hunted for an old-fashioned lighter, since no bot would burn anything, not inside.
“I miss her a lot,” she added softly, as he clicked a small flame to life and held it to the candle’s taper.
“I miss her too.” Cord glanced down. The light of the candle cast small shadows under his eyes.
“You know, if I met Eris now, I think I would be intimidated by her. She was so unapologetically original,” Avery mused aloud, fumbling for the words. “But we’d been friends for so long that I took her for granted.” I can’t take anyone for granted ever again, she promised herself, except that she was already losing the people she cared about. Leda hated her, Watt obviously resented her, she and Atlas were fighting, and her parents were watching her like a pair of hawks. When had all of Avery’s relationships started falling apart?
“Eris’s funeral didn’t do her justice,” Cord was saying. “It was too generic for her. She needed something spectacular, like confetti bombs. Or bubbles.”
“Eris would have loved that.” Avery smiled and took a deep breath, letting the scent of the candle travel from her lungs all the way to the farthest corners of her body, seeping into her hair, to the tips of her fingers. It smelled like honey and toast and campfires.
The holo switched to a commercial for a new karaoke game. A silence stretched between her and Cord—the sort of easy, companionable silence that falls between two people who’ve known each other a long time.
She nodded at the commercial. “Why don’t we ever play games like that anymore?”
“Because you’re a terrible singer. Which I’ve never understood, given the whole genetic engineering thing.”
“Not fair!” Avery protested, though she secretly liked it when Cord brought up the fact that she was a custom-order baby. No one else ever dared to.
“It’s okay. There are more important things,” Cord said, and there was a strange note in his voice that made her look up. At some point—she wasn’t sure when—he’d shifted nearer to her, or maybe she’d been the one to move. Either way, here they were.
Time seemed to stretch out like a liquid. Avery’s face was so close to Cord’s, and he was looking at her with that unfamiliar blue-eyed intensity, none of his usual nonchalance or sarcasm, his gaze focused and resolute. Avery couldn’t breathe over the pounding of her heart. She knew she should pull away, but she didn’t, she couldn’t move, it was all too sudden and unexpected. She’d stepped into some strange universe where Cord Anderton might lean in and kiss her.
Then suddenly Cord was sitting back, making another teasing comment about how her singing sucked, and Avery wasn’t sure what had happened, or if anything had even happened at all.
Her eyes lit on the candle, which still flickered there on the table. Little pockets of happiness melted out to drift blissfully upward, beads of wax sliding down the sides to gather in golden pools at the bottom.
Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing.
Avery’s eyes fluttered open and she shut them again, shifting in her bed. Except that she wasn’t in her bed at all. She was lying on the Andertons’ couch.
She sat up quickly, reaching up to touch the matted knot of her hair. Her eyes frantically skimmed the room. The candle was still on the table, its flame long since guttered out. Early morning light streamed through Cord’s enormous floor-to-ceiling windows.
She couldn’t even remember falling asleep. She and Cord had been talking about Eris, and he’d lit the candle to help her relax … that must have been when she drifted off.
Her gown was right where she’d left it, draped over the back of a chair. Avery stumbled to the hallway closet where the Andertons kept self-steaming garment bags; she quickly grabbed one and tossed her dress in it, then slipped on her satin heels and muttered under her breath for a hover, already halfway out the door. At the last minute, an unbidden impulse caused her to turn back and grab the melted remains of the candle. There was still a good hour left to burn, and she had a feeling she might need it.
Safe inside the hover, Avery leaned back and closed her eyes, struggling to sort through the events of the last twelve hours. She still felt hurt by her stupid fight with Atlas; but also ashamed of her immature reaction, setting out to flirt with another boy in order to irritate him. No wonder he hadn’t flickered her. He must have seen her laughing and dancing, taking all those shots with Cord, then stumbling home with him at the end of the night.
Her cheeks colored. What did Atlas think of her? For all she knew he might assume that something had actually happened between her and Cord.
Had it, almost?
Avery kept replaying that moment, trying to parse out what it was and what it meant. Had Cord almost kissed her, or was it just the product of her alcohol-soaked, IntoxiCandled mind? Well, she thought firmly, thank god nothing had happened in the end.
The hover raced upstairs, getting ever closer to the thousandth floor. Avery leaned forward, her head in her hands, trying to shut out the world. What would she do when she saw Atlas—storm past him, ignore him, talk to him?
Kiss him and tell him it’ll be okay, no matter what, her mind whispered to her, and she knew that it was true. She’d hated seeing him flirt with Calliope, but in the cold light of day, she knew he was right: it didn’t mean anything, and if it helped divert their parents’ suspicions, then so be it. She loved Atlas, and nothing else really mattered. They would figure it out, she told herself, like they always did.
The hover pulled up to their front door and Avery walked inside, the dress floating alongside her in the garment bag. She started to turn left toward Atlas’s room, but she heard the sound of clanging of pans, and broke into an involuntary smile. She knew she looked like the definition of a walk of shame, wearing a boy’s clothes and holding her silver micro-clutch, but she would explain everything the moment she saw him.
“Atlas?” she called out, walking into the kitchen. “I hope you’re making chili eggs—”
Avery’s words cut off abruptly when she saw who was there, because it wasn’t Atlas at all.
Calliope stood at the stovetop, wearing Atlas’s boxers and T-shirt—a shirt Avery had bought for him, she realized, stunned. Her feet were bare, and her riotous dark waves were piled atop her head, pinned with one of Avery’s favorite clips.
Calliope caught sight of Avery in the refrigerator’s reflective surface and grinned. “Good morning, sunshine. Sorry it’s not Atlas’s chili eggs, but I’m making toast and bacon if you want some.”
Avery couldn’t speak. The world was spinning again and the pain was back; far, far worse than before.
Calliope turned around, holding her hands beneath the UV-cleanser. Her eyes traveled up and down Avery’s attire, and she winked. “Nice outfit. Makes me feel a little less shameful, knowing I’m not the only one.”
“Is that my hair clip?” Avery heard herself ask. She started to walk toward Calliope. Was she really going to pull it out of her hair? she thought wildly, watching her actions as if another person were performing them. Calliope beat her to the punch, tossing the clip on the counter.
“Sorry,” Calliope said carefully, clearly aware she’d done something wrong. “I knocked on your door, but you weren’t there, so I just grabbed it from your counter. I didn’t have any hair bands in my purse.”
Avery grabbed the clip. She had become an enormous well of grief, as if someone had shaved off the edges of her nerve endings and they were dripping raw, liquid pain into her body. Somehow—though it took every last shred of her self-control, though she knew she would pay for it all day long—she managed a tight smile, and nodded at the sizzling bacon.
“It’s fine. And thank you for the offer, but I’m not really hungry.”