EVERYTHING FELT WRONG to Leda these days.
She stumbled through the world at the center of a cloud of wrongness, which seemed to pervade everything, closing its fingers stealthily around her throat. The ground felt unsteady beneath her, like the surface of a ship, like melting quicksand.
It was the same as last year, when she came back from Dubai with the knowledge that Eris had been her half sister—except that this time it was worse, because this time Leda had no idea what she had done. Could she have truly killed Mariel and blacked it out? Why did the world keep doing this to her, piling one brutal revelation atop another until she couldn’t stand it?
All she wanted was to forget. To fight back against the dark cloud with a cloud of her own.
So at lunch on Monday, instead of sitting with Avery in the cafeteria, Leda retreated to the secret garden.
The garden wasn’t actually secret; that was just what the elementary school kids called it. Tucked along the inner border of campus, it stretched long and narrow behind the lower school cafeteria, fed by enormous sun-bulbs overhead. It was technically part of Berkeley’s sustainability initiative, to keep the school up to oxygen input-output codes. But Leda had also found that it was the easiest place on campus to be alone—especially when what you wanted to do alone was smoke up.
Autumn had always been her favorite time of year in the garden. In the spring it was too pastel, and in the winter it was even worse, with all those white-and-red candy cane plants and holographic gingerbread men running around for the little kids. But right now the garden was a rich explosion of fall colors, not just brown, but reds and oranges and occasionally a smoky forest green. The leaves crunched pleasantly underfoot. Balloon pumpkins—which had been genetically engineered to be less dense than air—floated at waist height, tethered to the ground by their gnarled green stalks. As Leda walked, the pumpkins bobbed a little in her wake.
She turned the corner, past the massive golden beehive and a burbling fountain, to station herself beneath an air vent. It was barely perceptible from the ground, since the ceiling was nine meters high—you had to be really know what you were looking for to even notice that it was up there.
Leda’s hands shook as she fumbled in her bag for her gleaming white halluci-lighter, the tiny compact pipe that you could smoke almost anything in. Her chest felt like a bundle of twitching wires. She touched the pipe to the heat pad on the edge of her beauty-wand, gently toasting the weed within. Nothing fancy, just your usual marijuana-serotonin blend, because god help her, she needed a little kick of happiness right now.
Leda inhaled deeply, letting the smoke curl delicately into her lungs, suffusing her with an instant warmth. Suddenly, she wished someone were here with her. Not Watt—she was still stung by his accusation, and hadn’t answered any of his pings since she’d run away from his room. She didn’t know when she would be able to face him.
Still, she wouldn’t hate having someone here right now, just to hear another voice. She was always at odds these days; when she was alone she wanted to be with other people, and when she was with other people she just wanted be alone.
Footsteps sounded on the flagstones. Leda quickly twisted her arm behind her back to hide the halluci-lighter, cursing, because the smell was definitely still there—
Then she saw who it was, and let out a disbelieving laugh.
“Since when do you skip lunch to come smoke?” she asked Rylin, a challenging edge to the question.
Rylin strode over and reached for Leda’s halluci-lighter. She took a single slow breath, with the cool composure of someone who had done this many times before, then nonchalantly exhaled the smoke into a perfect green O. Totally badass, Leda thought grudgingly.
“I don’t know if it counts as skipping lunch if I actually came here to eat,” Rylin replied, holding up a recyclable go-bag from the cafeteria. She settled on the lower step of the fountain, her plaid skirt fanning out over her lap, and unfolded the waxy sandwich paper.
Leda smiled in spite of herself. Even though they went to the same school, she hadn’t seen much of Rylin this year, except, of course, for that emergency meeting at Avery’s. She found herself wishing that they had stayed better friends after that brief truce in Dubai. Leda would never have admitted it aloud, but she saw something of herself in Rylin’s no-nonsense attitude, her deeply private nature, her impatience with the world’s conventions.
She sank down next to Rylin and tucked her legs behind her mermaid-style, still clutching the halluci-lighter in one hand. When Rylin wordlessly held out half her sandwich, Leda took it with a nod of thanks. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.
They sat for a while like that, the silence broken only by the crunch of the crispy pretzel bread, the occasional listless puff of the abandoned halluci-lighter. Leda offered the pipe to Rylin again, but to her surprise, the other girl shook her head.
“Smoking isn’t really my thing anymore, after . . .”
“After Cord broke up with you for stealing his drugs?” Leda prompted, then cringed at the callousness of the wording. “I didn’t mean—”
Rylin waved away the apology. “Yeah, that. Also, after my ex-boyfriend got arrested for dealing.”
“Sorry. I had no idea.” Leda twisted the halluci-lighter back and forth in her hands.
Rylin glanced over. “Are you okay, Leda?”
The simplicity of the question nearly broke Leda’s self-control. People didn’t do that often enough—just look at each other and ask Are you okay?
“Did you bomb the SATs or something?” Rylin guessed.
“The SATs?” Leda’s college applications felt oddly detached from her, as if they had never really belonged to her in the first place. So much of what she had wanted before felt that way now. Watt’s revelation seemed to have cleaved the world into two universes: the one where she was just Leda, and the one where she might be a killer.
No, she corrected, might be a killer was the wrong way to put it. She already knew she was a killer. She had killed Eris.
But instead of confronting what she’d done, Leda had tried to bury it every way she knew how—by blackmailing people to keep the secret for her, by doing drugs until she blacked out. She had turned forcibly away from the truth, even when the truth literally dragged her to the brink of death.
“Is it about the Mariel investigation?” Rylin tried again.
Leda glanced over at her. Strangely, she wasn’t afraid of discussing this with Rylin. They were already so inextricably bound together, each in possession of the other’s secret. And Rylin—more than Avery with her picture-perfect life; more even than Watt, who walked around with a computer in his brain—would understand what it felt like to be lost.
“Sort of,” Leda admitted, and tossed the pipe aside. “I’ve done some really shitty things, you know.”
“News flash, Leda, we all have.”
“But these are mistakes I can’t undo! I can’t make it right! How do you live with yourself after something like that?”
“You live with yourself because you have to.” Rylin stared into the refracted blue surface of the fountain. “You forgive yourself for what you’ve done. It can only kill you when you try to run from it. If you just look it in the eye and face it, it becomes part of you, and it can’t hurt you anymore.”
Leda looked down. She had folded the empty wax paper over and over, into a tiny triangle. “You have a sister, don’t you? What’s it like?”
“Having a sister?”
“Yes.”
Rylin bit her lip. “A sister is a built-in best friend. She knows me better than I know myself, because she’s lived my life alongside me, and helped me through the best and the worst of it,” she said. “We fight, but no matter what I say, I know that Chrissa will always forgive me.”
Rylin’s words fell into Leda’s mind, and burned where they landed. That was what having a sister should be like. And instead, Leda had killed hers.
“I have to go,” Leda said abruptly. There was something important she needed to take care of.
But before she reached the entrance to the secret garden, Leda paused. “One more thing,” she added. “What were you doing hiding down here during lunch instead of sitting with Cord?”
“I—I have a lot going on—” Rylin stammered.
“I’ve seen you two dancing around each other all year. Can you please give it a shot? For my sake, if nothing else.” Leda smiled. “I could really use something to root for.”
Later that afternoon, Leda took the monorail to Cifleur Cemetery, in New Jersey.
It was cold out, the Tower looming over the water like a dusky shadow. She paused to look in the floral vending machine at the cemetery’s gates, but everything inside felt too trite, all white wreaths tied with satin bows. Leda quickly logged on to her contacts and ordered something that was much more Eris: a profusion of oversized vivid blooms, with a few incandescents tucked in, twinkling like fireflies. The flowers appeared by drone-drop within minutes.
Leda had been to Eris’s grave only once: the day that Eris was buried. She realized with a mortified pang that this visit was overdue.
“Hey, Eris,” she began, her voice ragged. This stuff didn’t come easily to her. “It’s Leda. But, um, maybe you knew that already.”
A hologram flared to life before her, and Leda stumbled back a step. It was an image of Eris, standing before her headstone, waving and smiling like a prom queen greeting her subjects. Leda assumed the holo was voice-activated, by the use of Eris’s name.
She took a breath, trying to get over the weirdness of seeing hologram-Eris here. “I brought you some flowers,” she said, setting down the bouquet. It had a heady, dusky scent that Eris would have liked. Actually, knowing Eris, she would have plucked a rosebud from the arrangement, tucked it behind one ear, then promptly forgotten all about it.
It would have been Eris’s birthday that week. Leda wished so fervently that she were still here. Leda would have thrown her a party, complete with those bubbles of champagne Eris had loved so much—hell, an entire blimp full of champagne.
She knelt awkwardly before the headstone, as if she were in church. Her eyes darted over every last detail of holographic Eris, desperate to find something they had in common, some proof of their shared DNA.
She remembered the day she’d first met Eris. It was in seventh grade, back when Leda was still silent and invisible, before she’d mustered up the confidence to approach Avery. Leda and Eris were both in the children’s theater club, which was performing The Little Mermaid. Eris, unsurprisingly, had been cast as the mermaid.
Half an hour before their first show, Leda was checking the prop table backstage when she heard Eris’s voice emanating from a dressing room. “Is anyone out there? I need help!”
“What is it?” Leda pushed open the door, only to find Eris standing inside, completely topless.
“I can’t get this to fasten.” Eris held out her glittery shell bra, utterly unselfconscious. Even back then she was all curves and smiles. Behind her glimmered a holographic tail, projected from a single-process beam on the back of a headband.
“I’ll find you some insta-stick.” Leda had darted out of the closet, painfully aware of her bulky sea anemone costume.
As the years went by, the two girls saw each other more, drawn together as they were by the common thread of Avery. But Leda had never really understood Eris. Eris seemed to flit around like a firefly, always coming up with some wild and impractical idea, dragging her friends on adventures from which she alone bounced back unscathed. She fell recklessly in and out of love, laughed when she was happy, dissolved into public tears when she was upset. It had seemed so foolish to Leda, who did everything in her power to conceal what she was feeling. But she saw now that it was brave, in its own way—wearing your heart on your sleeve like that.
What would things have been like if Eris hadn’t died? If instead of pushing her, Leda had taken her hand and actually listened? Perhaps they would have joined forces and gone to talk to their dad together. Perhaps by now they would be doing all those things Rylin had talked about—supporting each other, trusting each other, sharing their fears and secrets.
Accident or not, Leda had killed her half sister, then forced all the witnesses to help cover it up. What kind of sister did that?
“Eris. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I can’t believe that I’m here and you aren’t. I wish . . .” Leda faltered, because there were so many things she wished, she could never list them all. “I wish we could start over.”
She had tried so hard, for so long, to avoid thinking of what she’d done to Eris—to amputate that part of herself and start over. But the damage was still there, buried deep within her like scar tissue. Real grief left that kind of mark on you.
The only way to heal from grief like that was roughly: step by clumsy step, as you muddled your way back toward some form of peace, or redemption, or forgiveness, if you were lucky enough to get it.
Leda couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t bring Eris or Mariel back to life. She could only do the best she could from now on. Whatever that was.
The holo seemed to flicker for a moment, almost as if it were nodding. Leda couldn’t look at it anymore; she waved her hand through it to dispel it. Now it was just her, alone in the hushed shadows of the cemetery. Which she deserved.
Leda closed her eyes and kneeled before Eris’s headstone, her head bowed in prayer. It had been a long time since she prayed like this.
But if anyone needed a prayer right now, it was her.