HOLY SHIT, LEDA thought in a blurred daze. What was happening?
She was walking with the Altitude waitress—Miriam … Mariane … no, Mariel, she remembered, that was it. The other girl had one hand around Leda’s waist and another on her forearm, closed tight around her like a vise. Somehow they’d walked along a service road far upstream of The Mirrors, and were down by the ocean. The dark waters of the Persian Gulf were there on her right, looking cold and implacable. Leda glanced around in every direction, but didn’t see anyone.
“I want to go back to the party.” She tried to pull on Mariel’s arm, but the other girl was dragging her stubbornly forward. She looked down at her feet and realized they were bare. “What happened to my shoes?”
“We took them off, because you couldn’t walk in them on the sand,” Mariel said patiently.
“But I don’t want to be on the sand. I want to go back to the party.”
“Let’s sit for just a minute,” Mariel suggested instead, in a low, soothing voice. “You’re too drunk to go back to the party.”
It was true. Leda felt sleepy and disoriented, all her neurons firing at quarter-speed. Her feet tripped sluggishly down the beach toward the water. The wind whipped around them, its fingers reaching up into Leda’s hair to tear her curls loose, but Leda hardly felt it. How had she gotten this smashed? The last thing she remembered was having that drink with Mariel … surely she’d had more than one, otherwise she wouldn’t feel this way …
“Here.” Mariel tried to guide Leda down a steep slope toward the shore. Leda shook her head in mute protest. She didn’t want to step that close to the water. Its black surface caught the moonlight and reflected it back at her, shining and opaque, making it impossible to gauge its depths. “Come on, Leda,” Mariel insisted, her tone brooking no argument, and pinched Leda’s side through her filmy gown.
“Hey,” Leda protested. She half slipped, half fell down the sand dune, landing on her side. She tried to stand, but wasn’t strong enough. She gritted her teeth and just managed to push herself into a seated position.
A few buildings rose up out of the darkness like primordial monsters, full of angry-looking machinery and hydrojets. Leda suddenly longed for the pulse and laughter of the party. She didn’t like this. What had happened to Watt? Did he know where she was?
“Here we go,” Mariel said, trying to scoot Leda closer to the water. Leda shrank back uneasily, but the other girl was much stronger. One of Leda’s bare toes accidentally touched a wave, and she let out a yelp. It was ice cold. Wasn’t this a tropical ocean? Or was she so drunk she couldn’t feel anything properly anymore?
“We need to talk. It’s about Eris.” Mariel’s eyes bored into Leda’s.
Something wasn’t right. Every instinct in Leda’s body was screaming at her to run away, to get out; but she couldn’t move, she was trapped in this strange place as Mariel crouched there next to her.
“How do you know Eris?” she asked, and something menacing glittered in Mariel’s eyes.
“She was my friend,” the other girl said slowly.
“Mine too,” Leda slurred. Her mouth found it difficult to form sentences.
“But what happened the night she died?” Mariel pressed. “I know she didn’t fall. She wasn’t even drunk. What happened that you aren’t telling me?”
Leda burst into sudden tears—angry, ugly sobs that racked her body. She marveled at the clarity of her own emotion. What was happening to her? She was long past drunk; she was high, maybe, but this was unlike any drug she’d ever taken, as if she’d become detached from her own body and was hovering far above it. She was suddenly very afraid. Watt’s face kept swimming up in her consciousness, the eerie way he’d listened to her confession, without blinking. He hadn’t hesitated to hurt her. He didn’t care about her. No one cared about her. She didn’t deserve to be cared about.
“It’s okay, Leda. I’m here,” Mariel was saying, over and over, the repetition vaguely soothing. “I’m listening. It’s okay.”
“I want my mom,” Leda heard herself say. She wanted to run into Ilara’s arms, the way she had when she was little, and admit what she’d done. My sweet Leda, her mom would always say, tucking Leda’s hair behind her ear, you’re too stubborn for your own good. Don’t you understand that things won’t always go your way? And then her mom would punish her, but Leda always accepted it, because she knew there was love behind the punishment.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered now, as if her mom were right here and listening. Her eyes were closed.
“What do you mean?”
“They were all there, Watt and Avery and Rylin. They knew it was dangerous. They should have pulled me away from the edge, shouldn’t have let Eris get so close. I didn’t mean to push her!”
“You pushed Eris off the roof?”
“I told you, it was an accident!” Leda cried out, rasping. A fire seemed to be kindling in her head, flames licking at the inside of her brain, where Watt kept his computer. She imagined the blaze burning everything, leaving nothing in its wake but ash.
“How did you keep the others from telling the police, if they were up there?” Mariel was shaking with disgust.
“I knew things about them. I told them that they had to keep my secret, or I wouldn’t keep theirs.” In utter horror, Leda heard herself telling Mariel everything. About Avery and Atlas. About Rylin stealing from Cord. And worst of all, Watt’s secret, that he had an illegal quantum computer lodged in his brain.
Some dazed part of Leda knew that she shouldn’t be saying these things; but she couldn’t help it, it was as if someone else was saying the words, as if they were being pulled out of her of their own volition.
“You people are even worse than I thought,” Mariel said at last, when Leda was through.
“Yes.” Leda moaned, knowing she deserved this, welcoming it.
“You should never have brought Eris into all this. It wasn’t fair,” Mariel hissed, and Leda could hear the naked hatred in her voice. Mariel despised her.
A wounded stubbornness elbowed its way to the forefront of Leda’s mind. “Yeah, right. Eris was part of it too,” she protested. “She was fucking my dad, after all.”
Mariel was deathly silent.
Leda tried to rise to her feet, but her body wasn’t working properly, and she crashed violently to the ground. Her legs were bent at an awkward angle beneath her. The sand felt rough and grainy on her cheek. She closed her eyes, wincing at the pain, tears blurring her vision, but it had already been blurred anyway. “Please. Help me get back,” she croaked. She still didn’t understand how she’d gotten this drunk. “How many drinks did I have?”
Mariel leaned over her. Her face was as hard and unyielding as if it had been carved from stone. “Just the one. But I drugged it.”
What? Why? Leda wanted to ask, but pushed that aside in favor of her more immediate problem. “Please, help me get back.” The water was so close, and the tide was rising, creeping toward her with ice-cold fingers. She could see it, like a dangerous black mirror, as full of secrets as her own black heart.
No, she thought, she didn’t have any secrets anymore, she’d given them all away. Even the ones that weren’t hers to give.
Mariel laughed, a sharp laugh that had no mirth in it. The sound was like a million small slaps to Leda’s face. “Leda Cole. You really think I’m helping you go back so that you can keep screwing with other people’s lives? You killed the girl I loved.”
“I didn’t mean to …” Leda tried to say, but she wasn’t sure if she’d really spoken the words, or just thought them. Her eyes were too heavy to keep open. Her hand was touching the water, but she couldn’t move it. She felt a distant twinge of panic, imagining the water slowly flowing over her whole body, its darkness pulling insistently toward the matching darkness inside her.
“Before I leave, there’s one thing you should know. Eris wasn’t having an affair with your dad.” Mariel spoke slowly, each word delivered with frosty clarity. “She was spending time with him, yes, but not for the reason you think. Which just goes to show how bad a person you are, that you assume the worst of people.”
The words seemed to be coming from very far away, and Leda was falling, but with every last force of her being she listened, reaching up to hear what Mariel was saying, because it frightened her; and because she could hear the truth behind the hatred, ringing with the force of a gong.
“Your dad was Eris’s dad too. You killed your sister, Leda,” Mariel spat.
And then Leda did fall into the blackness, and there was nothing more.