LEDA STEPPED UP to the NYPD headquarters, queasy with anxiety.
Her contacts lit up with an incoming ping, and she turned quickly aside, hoping for a split second that it was Avery—but no, it was Watt. Again. Leda let the ping roll on, unanswered.
Watt had been trying her practically once an hour for the past day. Leda kept on ignoring him. She had nothing to say to Watt right now.
Because she still loved him. And Leda knew that if she let herself speak to him, if she heard his voice for even a single instant, she would lose her nerve and back down from what she was about to do.
She tried Avery one final time, her heart hammering. She’d been so certain that Avery would be here—Avery had promised she would, late last night, when Leda had pinged her in twisted, cold fear. “Of course I’ll be there,” Avery had assured her. “Let’s meet at the station at seven.”
“Can you come here first, to my place?” Leda asked, her voice small. She wanted to be walked to her murder confession, like a child being walked to school.
“I’ll meet you at the station, I swear,” Avery answered.
Now it was almost 7:20, and Avery still hadn’t shown. Leda was starting to think she wasn’t coming. She couldn’t blame her: Avery had plenty to deal with right now; she didn’t need Leda’s mess piled on top of her own.
Still, Leda wished she didn’t have to do this alone.
She’d barely made it through breakfast with her parents. They had coptered back from the Hamptons late last night. Leda could tell that things weren’t completely resolved between them—she could see the questions in her mom’s eyes—but she also knew that her mom hadn’t left. And when she came downstairs this morning, her dad was cooking waffles: the delightfully fat kind, loaded with chocolate chips and whipped cream. The way he always used to, back when they ate breakfast as a family.
When her mom came down and started to set the table, Leda realized that it would be okay. Her family might not be anywhere near healed yet, but it would be, eventually.
She almost—almost—changed her mind about confessing.
“You okay, sweetie?” her mom had asked. Leda startled, wondering if Ilara had somehow guessed her plans; but then she realized that her mom meant the Avery-Atlas news.
Instead Leda mumbled that she was worried about Avery and took a bite of her waffle. She forced herself to finish the entire plate, because she didn’t know when she would get to eat again. What would they feed her in prison?
She’d taken a hover down to the police station, a last little act of extravagance. As it slid seamlessly down her street, Leda had leaned against the flexiglass window, staring out at the view for once, instead of flicking through the feeds on her contacts. She tried to memorize every detail of her neighborhood, every iron gate and brick step and shining entrance pad. It all felt imbued with a new poignant significance, because Leda was seeing it for the last time.
She passed a woman jogging, a baby floating along next to her in a runner’s stroller; Leda suddenly remembered that the woman had once asked her to babysit. Leda had rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of the request. Isn’t that what room comps are for? she’d replied, and the woman had just laughed. Some people want their children cared for by humans, not bots.
Leda wondered how old that baby would be when she got out of prison someday.
She shifted, feeling suddenly ridiculous in her pleated school skirt and uniform shirt. She had debated wearing something else this morning, only to decide it would tip her parents off. Besides, maybe if the police arrested her like this, it would remind them how young she was, and encourage them not to be too harsh with her.
7:25. Avery still wasn’t here. Leda was lingering. She couldn’t help hesitating a little, right here at the brink—the way she used to freeze up on the high dive, paralyzed in fear of jumping off.
But there was no going back down the ladder once you’d climbed it. So Leda gathered the frayed remnants of her strength from somewhere deep within herself, and walked through the entrance.
She had come this early on purpose, at that bleary moment when the night shift traded for the day. She’d expected the officers to be glazed over with sleepy lethargy, their hands curled around cups of powdered coffee. But there was a little shiver of energy in the air, people walking back and forth down hallways with brisk steps, voices conferring behind closed doors. So much for catching the police at a slow moment.
“Yes?” said the officer behind the front desk, a friendly-looking man with OFFICER REYNOLDS on his name tag.
Leda shrank into herself like a snail in a shell, prolonging this moment, her last one of freedom. “I’m here to offer some information,” she declared.
“Information regarding . . . ?”
“The death of Eris Dodd-Radson.”
Just saying Eris’s name pulled her back toward that dark, bitter despair. Don’t cry, she told herself, blinking back tears. Leda never cried in public. It was one of her cardinal rules.
“Ah. The girl who fell off the roof?” Reynolds mused aloud, and it struck Leda speechless that he barely remembered who Eris was. That she’d been nothing to him but a name, while Leda had been thinking about her nonstop for the past few months.
“Also, the death of Mariel Valconsuelo.” She’d practiced the sentence dozens of times, sounded it out in her head, but still it came out shaky and nervous.
Reynolds’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at her with new interest. “You’re Leda Cole, aren’t you?”
“I—” She opened her mouth, but her throat was sandpaper-dry. Did they already know she was guilty?
“Thanks for coming by so quickly,” he said, with an energy that surprised her, “but we aren’t quite ready to gather supporting testimonies. Honestly, after what Miss Fuller told us, we may not need it.”
Avery? What did she have to do with any of this?
“Supporting testimony?” she repeated.
“When your friend said you would be coming by, I didn’t realize she meant this morning,” he told Leda, almost genially.
“Avery was here?” That explained why the station was more awake than it should have been this early in the day: the frisson of electricity sizzling throughout the place, as if someone very important had just come through, causing quite a stir.
“She left barely half an hour ago,” Reynolds informed her, and then, more softly: “None of us had any idea what that girl was hiding.”
His words caused something in Leda to snap. “They aren’t even related, okay? Leave her alone! She’s already heard enough of that—that filth!”
Reynolds lifted an eyebrow. “I wasn’t talking about her family situation. I was talking about what she did. She just confessed to the deaths of Miss Dodd-Radson and Miss Valconsuelo. Her parents took her home on temporary bail.”
What? Leda felt suddenly dizzy. She pressed her hands against the desk to keep herself from toppling over. “Avery didn’t kill those girls,” she said very softly.
“She confessed to it. We have it on record.”
“No, she wouldn’t . . . Avery never . . .”
Reynolds gave a delicate cough. “Miss Cole, I’m sure you want to help your friend, but she’s already being helped quite a bit. Don’t forget who her father is. It’s too early for me to take your testimony, and anyway, you look tired,” he said, not unkindly, and gestured at her uniform. “Why don’t you go on to school?”
Leda nodded numbly. Her throat felt closed up, her mind still roaring and blank all at once. She walked out of the police station with dazed steps, like someone who was drunk, or very lost.
What was Avery doing, confessing like that? “Ping to Avery,” she said into her contacts, and when that went to voice mail, “Ping to Atlas.” Atlas would know what was going on, would tell her what was happening up there on the thousandth floor . . .
But Atlas’s contacts never rang. All Leda got was a flat single-note tone, and a command not valid error.
Leda stumbled forward, leaning against a nearby bench, trying to regain her balance. This didn’t make sense. Atlas was gone. Atlas, the only real tether holding Avery in place. Had he run away again . . . Or did his parents get rid of him?
Leda thought of Avery yesterday, insisting that Leda had always been the brave one, looking out for everyone around her. And she realized what had happened.
Avery had confessed for Leda’s sake.
She was taking Leda’s guilt onto herself. Letting herself be dragged down beneath it all, so that Leda could go free. Avery was giving Leda her life back—sacrificing herself for Leda’s sake—in one last, ultimate gesture of friendship. And if she was doing that, Leda realized in a panic, it could only mean one thing.
She turned and sprinted toward the nearest upTower elevator, hoping she wasn’t too late.