Three months earlier
AVERY DRUMMED HER fingers restlessly on the armrest of her family’s chopper. She felt her boyfriend’s gaze on her and glanced up. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, teasing.
“Like what? Like I want to kiss you?” Max answered his own question by leaning over to drop a kiss on her lips. “You may not realize it, Avery, but I always want to kiss you.”
“Please prepare yourselves for the final approach to New York,” the chopper’s autopilot cut in, projecting the words through unseen speakers. Not that Avery needed the update; she’d been tracking their progress this entire trip.
“You okay?” Max’s eyes were warm on hers.
Avery shifted, struggling to explain. The last thing she wanted was for Max to think she was anxious about him. “It’s just . . . so much happened while I was gone.” It had been a long time. Seven months, the longest she’d ever spent away from New York in all her eighteen years.
“Including me.” Max gave a conspiratorial grin.
“Especially you,” Avery told him, mirroring his smile.
The Tower swam up rapidly to dominate the view through their flexiglass windows. Avery had seen it from this perspective plenty of times—all those years of traveling with her family, or with her friend Eris and her parents—but she’d never before noticed how much it looked like a massive chrome headstone. Like Eris’s headstone.
Avery shoved that thought aside. She focused instead on the autumn sunlight dancing over the choppy surface of the river, burnishing the golden torch of the Statue of Liberty, which once seemed so tall but now was absurdly dwarfed by its great neighbor, the thousand-story megatower that sprouted from the concrete surface of Manhattan. The Tower that her father’s company had helped build, in which the Fullers occupied the top floor, the highest penthouse in the entire world.
Avery let her gaze swoop to the boats and autocars buzzing below, the monorails suspended in the air as delicately as strands of spider’s silk.
She’d left New York in February, soon after the launch of her father’s new vertical living complex in Dubai. That was the night when she and Atlas had decided that they couldn’t be together, no matter how much they loved each other. Because even though they weren’t related by blood, Atlas was Avery’s adopted brother.
Avery had thought then that her entire world was shattered. Or maybe she herself was shattered—into so many infinitesimally small pieces that she’d become the character from the nursery rhyme, the one who could never be put back together. She had been certain she would die from the pain of it.
How foolish she’d been, to think that a broken heart would kill her, but it was how she’d felt.
Yet hearts are funny, stubborn, elastic little organs. When she didn’t die after all, Avery realized that she wanted to leave—to get away from New York, with its painful memories and familiar faces. Just as Atlas had.
She had already applied to Oxford’s summer program; now she simply pinged the admissions office and asked if she could transfer early, in time for the spring semester. She met with the dean at Berkeley Academy to request high school credit for Oxford’s college courses. Of course they all agreed. As if anyone would say no to Pierson Fuller’s daughter.
The only source of resistance, surprisingly enough, was Pierson himself.
“What’s this about, Avery?” he’d demanded, when she came to him with her transfer papers.
“I need to leave. To go somewhere far away, somewhere completely free of memories.”
Her father’s eyes darkened. “I know you miss her, but this feels extreme.”
Of course. He assumed that this was about Eris’s death. And it was, in part—but Avery was grieving Atlas too.
“I just need some time away from Berkeley. Everyone stares at me in the halls, whispering about me,” she insisted, telling the truth. “I just want to get away. To somewhere no one knows me, and I don’t know them.”
“They know you all over the world, Avery. Or if they don’t yet, they will soon enough,” her father said softly. “I was going to tell you—I’m running for mayor of New York this year.”
Avery stared at him for a moment in mute shock. Though she shouldn’t really have been surprised. Her father was never satisfied with what he had. Now that he was the richest man in the city, of course he would want to be the most prominent too.
“You’ll be back next fall, for the election,” Pierson told her. It wasn’t a question.
“So I can go?” Avery asked, her chest seizing with a violent, almost nauseous relief.
Her father sighed and began to sign her permission papers. “Someday, Avery, you’ll learn that it’s not much use running away from things if you have to eventually come back and face them.”
The next week, Avery and a jostling band of mover-bots made their way down the narrow streets of Oxford. The dorms had been full midsemester, but Avery posted an anonymous ad to the school discussion boards, and found a room in an off-campus cottage with a delightfully overgrown square of garden out back. It even came with a roommate, a poetry student named Neha. And, it turned out, a house full of boys next door.
Avery slid easily into Oxford life. She loved how unmodern everything felt: the way her professors wrote on green boards with funny white stencils; the way people actually looked at her when they spoke, rather than letting their eyes slide constantly toward the edge of their vision to check the feeds. Most people here didn’t even own the computerized contacts Avery had grown up using. The linkages in Oxford were so weak that Avery had ended up taking hers out too, living like a premodern human with nothing but a tablet to communicate. Her vision felt delightfully raw and unencumbered.
One evening as she worked on an essay for her East Asian art class, Avery was distracted by noises from next door. Her neighbors were having a party.
Back in New York, she would simply have turned on her silencer: the device that blocked incoming sound waves, creating a little pocket of quiet even in the loudest places. Actually, this wouldn’t have happened in New York, because in New York Avery didn’t have next-door neighbors, just the sky stretching out from the Fuller apartment on all sides.
She cupped her hands into earmuffs over her ears, trying to focus, but the raucous shouts and laughter grew even louder. Finally she stood up and marched next door, not caring that she was wearing athletic shorts, her honey-colored hair piled atop her head and fastened with a turtle-shaped clip that Eris had given her years ago.
That was when she saw Max.
He stood at the center of a group in the backyard, telling a story with animated fervor. He had shaggy dark hair that stuck out in all directions and wore a blue sweater paired with blue jeans, something the girls back home would have teased him mercilessly for. But Avery saw it as a sign of his elemental impatience, as if he was too preoccupied to be bothered by something as mundane as clothes.
She felt suddenly ridiculous. What had she been planning to do, come over here and scold her neighbors for having fun? She retreated a step—just as the boy telling the story looked up, directly into her eyes. He smiled knowingly. Then his gaze slid past her, and he kept talking without a break in narrative thread.
Avery was startled by the flash of irritation she felt. She wasn’t accustomed to being ignored.
“Of course I would vote for the referendum, if I could vote here,” the boy was saying. He had a German accent, his voice sliding up and down along a wild range of emotion. “London must expand upward. A city is a living thing; if it doesn’t grow, it withers and dies.”
He was talking about her dad’s bill, Avery realized. After years of lobbying the British Parliament, Pierson Fuller had finally gotten his nationwide referendum, to determine whether Britain would tear down their capital city and rebuild it as a massive supertower. So many cities around the world had already done so—Rio, Hong Kong, Beijing, Dubai, and of course New York first of all, two decades ago—but some of the older European cities were more reluctant.
“I would vote no,” Avery butted in. It wasn’t the most popular opinion among young people, and her dad would have been appalled, but she felt a perverse desire to grab this boy’s attention. And, anyway, it was the truth.
He gave an ironic, half-foreign bow in her direction, inviting her to continue.
“It’s just that London wouldn’t feel like London anymore,” Avery went on. It would become another of her dad’s sleek automated cities, another vertical sea of anonymity.
The boy’s eyes crinkled pleasantly when he smiled. “Have you seen the proposal? There are battalions of architects and designers to make sure that the feeling of London is preserved, that it’s better than before, even.”
“But it never really turns out like that. When you’re in a tower, there’s less sense of connection, of spontaneity. Less of”—she held out her hands a little helplessly—“of this.”
“Party crashing? For some reason, I think people do that in skyscrapers just fine.”
Avery knew she should be flushing with embarrassment, but instead she burst out laughing.
“Maximilian von Strauss. Call me Max,” the boy introduced himself. He had just finished his first year at Oxford, he explained, studying economics and philosophy. He wanted to get a PhD and become a professor, or an author of obscure books about the economy.
There was something decidedly old-fashioned about Max, Avery thought; it was as if he’d stepped through a portal from another century and ended up here. Perhaps it was his earnestness. In New York, everyone seemed to measure their superiority by how contemptuous and cynical they were. Max wasn’t afraid to care about things, publicly and unironically.
Within a few days he and Avery were spending most of their free time together. They studied at the same table in the Bodleian Library, surrounded by the tattered spines of old novels. They sat outside at the local pub, listening to the amateur student bands, or the soft sound of locusts in the warm summer night. And not once did they cross the bounds of friendship.
Initially Avery treated it like an experiment. Max was like one of those bandages from before people invented mediwands; he was helping her forget how much she was still hurting after losing Atlas.
But at some point it stopped feeling like a Band-Aid, and started feeling real.
They were walking home one evening along the river, a pair of twilight shadows against a tapestry of trees. The wind picked up, sending ripples along the surface of the water. In the distance, the university’s white limestone arches gleamed pale blue in the moonlight.
Avery reached tentatively for Max’s hand. She felt him jolt a little in surprise.
“I assumed you had a boyfriend back home,” he remarked, as if in answer to some question she’d asked, which perhaps she had.
“No,” Avery said quietly. “I was just . . . getting over something that I lost.”
His dark eyes held hers, catching the glow of moonlight. “Are you over it now?”
“I will be.”
Now, in the enormous plush seats of her father’s copter, she shifted toward Max. The cushions were upholstered in a scrolling navy-and-gold pattern that, upon closer inspection, revealed itself to be a series of interlocking cursive Fs. Even the carpet below her feet was emblazoned with her family monogram.
She wondered, not for the first time, what Max thought of it all. How would he handle meeting her parents? She had already met his family, one weekend in Würzburg this summer. Max’s mom was a professor of linguistics and his dad wrote novels, delightfully lurid mysteries where people were murdered at least three times per book. Neither of them spoke much English. They had both just hugged Avery profusely, using their contacts’ funny auto-translate setting, which despite years of upgrades still made people sound like drunken toddlers. “It’s because language has so many musics,” Max’s mom tried to explain, which Avery took to mean nuances of meaning.
Besides, they had all communicated just fine with gestures and laughter.
Avery knew that her parents would be nothing like that. She loved them, of course, but there had always been a carefully maintained distance between them and her. Sometimes, when she was younger, Avery used to see her friends with their mothers and feel a sharp stab of jealousy: at the way Eris and her mom romped arm in arm through Bergdorf’s, bent over in conspiratorial giggles, looking more like friends than mother and daughter. Or even Leda and her mom, who had famously explosive fights but always cried and hugged and made up afterward.
The Fullers didn’t show affection that way. Even when Avery was a toddler, they never cuddled with her or sat near her bedside when she was sick. In their minds, that was what the help was for. Just because they weren’t the touchy-feely type didn’t mean that they loved her any less, Avery reminded herself. And yet—she wondered sometimes what it would be like to have parents she could pal around with, parents she could be irreverent with.
Avery’s parents knew that she was dating someone, and they had said that they couldn’t wait to meet him. But she couldn’t help worrying that they would take one look at Max, in all his disheveled German glory, and try to send him packing. Now that her dad was running for mayor of New York, he seemed more obsessed than ever with their family image. Whatever that meant.
“What are you thinking about? Worried your friends won’t like me?” Max asked, cutting surprisingly close to the truth.
“Of course they will,” she said resolutely. Though she didn’t know what to expect of her friends right now, least of all her best friend, Leda Cole. When Avery left last spring, Leda hadn’t exactly been in a great state of mind.
“I’m so glad you came with me,” she added. Max would only stay in New York a few days before heading back for the start of his sophomore year at Oxford. It meant a lot that he’d crossed the ocean for her, to meet the people she cared about and see the city she came from.
“As if I would pass up the chance for more time with you.” Max reached to brush his thumb lightly over Avery’s knuckles. A thin woven bracelet, a memoriam to a childhood friend who had died young, slid down Max’s wrist. Avery squeezed his hand.
They tipped a few degrees sideways, tilting into the airstream that shot around the edge of the Tower. Even their copter, which was weighted on all sides to prevent turbulence, couldn’t avoid being buffeted in winds this strong. Avery braced herself, and then the gaping mouth of the helipad was before them: sliced from the wall of the Tower in perfect ninety-degree angles, everything stark and flat and gleaming, as if to scream at you that it was new. How different from Oxford, where curved uneven roofs rose into the wine-colored sky.
Their copter lurched into the helipad, whipping up the hair of the waiting crowds. Avery blinked in surprise. What were all these people doing here? They jostled together, clutching small image capturers, with lenses gleaming in the middle like cyclopean eyes. Probably vloggers or i-Net reporters.
“Looks like New York is glad you’re back,” Max remarked, sparking a rueful smile from Avery.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.” She was used to the occasional fashion bloggers taking snaps of her outfits, but nothing like this.
Then she caught sight of her parents, and Avery realized exactly whose fault this was. Her dad had decided to make her homecoming a PR moment.
The copter’s door opened, its staircase unfolding like an accordion. Avery exchanged a final glance with Max before starting down.
Elizabeth Fuller swept forward, wearing a tailored luncheon dress and heels. “Welcome home, sweetie! We missed you.”
Avery forgot her irritation that their reunion was happening like this, in the heat and noise of a crowded helipad. She forgot everything except the fact that she was seeing her mom again after so many months apart. “I missed you too!” she exclaimed, pulling her mom into a tight hug.
“Avery!” Her father turned away from Max, who had been shaking his hand. “I’m so glad you’re back!”
He hugged Avery too, and she closed her eyes, returning the embrace—until her dad deftly swiveled her around to better angle her toward the cameras. He stepped back, looking sleek and self-satisfied in his crisp white shirt, beaming with pride. Avery tried to hide her disappointment—that her dad had turned her homecoming into a stunt, and that the media had obliged him.
“Thank you all!” he declared in his booming, charming voice, for the benefit of everyone recording. What he was thanking them for, Avery didn’t exactly understand, but from the nodding faces of the reporters, it didn’t seem to matter. “We are thrilled that our daughter, Avery, has returned from her semester abroad just in time for the election! Avery would be delighted to answer a few questions,” her dad added, nudging her gently forward.
She wouldn’t, actually, but Avery didn’t have a choice.
“Avery! What are they wearing in England right now?” one of them cried out, a fashion blogger whom Avery recognized.
“Um . . .” No matter how many times she said she wasn’t a fashionista, no one seemed to believe her. Avery turned a pleading glance toward Max—not that he would really be any help—and her attention fastened on the neckline of his flannel shirt. Most of the buttons that marched up the collar were dark brown, but one was much lighter, a soft fawn color. He must have lost that button and replaced it with another, not caring that it didn’t go with the others.
“Clashing buttons,” she heard herself say. “I mean, buttons that don’t match. On purpose.”
Max caught her eye, one eyebrow lifted in amusement. She forced herself to look away so she wouldn’t burst out laughing.
“And who is this? Your new boyfriend?” another of the bloggers asked, causing the group’s focus to swerve hungrily toward Max. He gave a genial shrug.
Avery couldn’t help noticing that her parents’ gazes had hardened as they focused on Max. “Yes. This is my boyfriend, Max,” she declared.
There was a mild uproar at her words, and before Avery could say anything else, Pierson had put a protective arm around her. “Thank you for your support! We are so glad to have Avery back in New York,” he said again. “And now, if you’ll excuse us, we need some time alone as a family.”
“Clashing buttons?” Max fell into step alongside her. “Wonder where that came from.”
“You should be thanking me. I just made you the most stylish guy in New York,” Avery joked, reaching for his hand.
“Exactly! How will I handle that kind of pressure?”
As they walked toward the waiting hover, Avery’s mind drifted back to her father’s final words. Some time alone as a family. Except they weren’t a family right now, because they were missing one very important person.
Avery knew she shouldn’t be thinking about him, yet she couldn’t help wondering what Atlas was doing, half a world away.