WATT STOOD AT the edge of Tennebeth Park in Lower Manhattan, gazing out at the Statue of Liberty in the distance, her torch lifted determinedly into the flurry of gray skies. The snow hadn’t stopped. It caught in the folds of Watt’s jacket, dusted the tops of his boots.
He lifted a hand to just above his right ear, where a crinkly Medipatch was the only evidence of the surgery he’d just had. His head throbbed with a confused pain that was physical and emotional at once.
“You again?” the doctor had asked when Watt opened the door to his unmarked clinic. The self-styled Dr. Smith, official medical consultant of the black market—the person who had installed Nadia in Watt’s brain several years ago.
And now the doctor had uninstalled her.
Watt glanced down at the palm of his glove. The entire city lay behind him, vibrant and busy, but Watt’s focus had zeroed to a tiny fixed point: the disc he was holding.
There was something oddly intrusive about seeing Nadia this way, her qubits laid bare before him, almost as if he were seeing a girl without her clothes on. To think that this tiny quantum core, this warm pulsing piece of metal, contained the vastness that was Nadia.
It felt weird, not having her voice in his head. She had been there for so long that Watt had forgotten what it was like without her.
He was going to miss her. He would miss her sarcastic sense of humor, their constant chess matches. He would miss feeling as if he always had an ally—as if there were someone in his corner, no matter what.
But maybe he didn’t need to stop feeling that way, Watt thought, as a figure detached itself from the shadows to step toward him.
“Leda? How did you know where I was?”
“You told me,” she said, her nose wrinkled in adorable confusion, and Watt realized what must have happened.
Nadia must have messaged Leda for him, intuiting his emotions the way she always did. She had known that he would need a friend right now.
Or maybe, he amended, Nadia had known that Leda needed him.
The ambient light reflected off the snow to illuminate Leda’s face, which was bright with grief. Her features were drawn, her eyes glassy and brilliant with tears. Huddled into her puffy green jacket, her hands stuffed into her pockets, she looked frail; yet there was a new quiet strength to her movements.
“Are you okay?” he asked, though it was patently obvious that she wasn’t.
Leda threw her arms around him in response. Watt closed his eyes and hugged her back, hard.
As they stepped away, they both couldn’t help glancing up at the top of the Tower: too high to see properly from this close, but it didn’t really matter. They knew what it looked like up there.
“I still can’t believe what Avery did for me. For all of us.” Leda’s voice fractured over the words.
Watt shuddered a little. Avery must have felt incredibly trapped up there on the thousandth floor, to want to give it all up and let the rest of them go free.
But then, Watt had seen the turmoil over Avery and Atlas, the hateful things people had spewed at them both. It never ceased to amaze him, the way humans could hurt each other. No other animal was capable of that kind of vicious, useless cruelty. You’d think that people would have learned to do better by now, as a species.
Watt understood why Avery had wanted to get away from that. It was the kind of thing that would have chased her the rest of her life. She would never have escaped it.
He knew that he should feel guilty for the role he had played in helping her—he and Nadia both, really—except that he had a feeling Avery would have found a way to do exactly what she wanted, with or without his help.
He glanced down again to where Nadia was clutched tight in his palm like a talisman. Leda followed the movement, and her eyes widened.
“Is that Nadia?” she whispered.
Watt nodded. “I had her removed,” he managed to say. Just barely.
“Why?”
“Because she killed Mariel.”
Watt heard the sharp intake of breath, saw the final weight of uncertainty slide from Leda’s shoulders as she realized, once and for all, that Mariel’s death wasn’t her fault.
“I’m not a killer?” she said quietly, and Watt shook his head. The real killer was him, even if he hadn’t known or meant it.
He turned back toward the water, which was a smooth, mirrored gray, reflecting the hammered surface of the clouds overhead. Good-bye, Nadia. And this time, for the first time in years, she didn’t answer his silent thought, because she was no longer in his head to hear it. The only person who could hear his thoughts was Watt himself.
He hurled his arm back and threw Nadia out over the water in a single clean motion, as hard as he possibly could.
There was a moment of profound, acute silence when Watt wished he could undo what he’d just done, but it was too late—Nadia sailed in a flying arc over the water, gleaming in the pearly morning light, and hit the surface with a definitive, echoing plop.
That was it, Watt thought dazedly. Nadia was gone. The briny water of the bay was already corroding her, destroying her processors as she sank on and on toward the bottom. It was the same water in which Mariel had died.
Leda reached over and curled her fingers in his.
They stood there like that for a while, neither of them speaking. Watt could barely think over the twisted pain in his chest.
When his contacts lit up with a ping from an undisclosed caller, it took Watt a moment to realize that Nadia wasn’t going to hack the system and tell him who it was.
He gestured to Leda and stepped away, turning his head to accept the ping. “Hello?”
“Mr. Bakradi, it’s Vivian Marsh. From MIT,” she added, as if he didn’t already know. “Did you code this yourself?”
“Excuse me?”
“The files you just sent me, containing the code for a quantum computer. What are they from?”
Watt muttered frantically to his contacts to pull up his outgoing mailbox; when he saw his most recent message, his heart burst in his chest, because he’d sent the complete script of Nadia’s code over to MIT. Or rather, Nadia had sent it, during the procedure. It was an enormous file, so massive that she must have co-opted several local servers just to initiate the data transfer.
Watt braced himself to lie, to deny any knowledge of a highly illegal quantum computer, but the words wouldn’t come.
He had already told a lifetime’s worth of lies. Maybe it was time for him to own up to the things he had done.
“Yes. I wrote that code,” he said slowly, almost defiantly. His chin was tipped up, in a look he’d picked up from Leda without even realizing it.
“You know that to write code like this without authorization is a felony, under section 12.16 of the Computing Directives Act, and punishable by a federal court.”
“I know,” Watt said, feeling nauseous.
“Not to mention there’s a dangerous flaw in your core directive!” Vivian made a tsk noise, as if to chide him.
Watt’s interest momentarily surged above his fear. “You read the code?”
“Of course I read the code, don’t you remember that quantum engineering is my background?” Vivian exclaimed. “Honestly, Mr. Bakradi, I’m impressed. It’s remarkable, the way you’ve managed to stack and fold the code in on itself; you must have saved yourself at least a hundred cubic millimeters. Where is the computer?”
He realized in a daze that she meant Nadia. “Gone,” he said quickly. “I destroyed her—I mean it. I destroyed it.”
“Oh,” Vivian breathed, and it struck Watt that she sounded almost . . . disappointed. “It’s probably for the best, a computer of this kind, unregulated. You didn’t use it for anything, did you?”
“Um . . .” Hacking the police, hacking the Metropolitan Weather Bureau, hacking people’s flickers and messages, trying to make Leda like me, cheating at beer pong, oh, and summarizing Pride and Prejudice so I wouldn’t have to read it. The usual.
“On second thought,” Vivian amended, “Don’t answer that. If I knew you had actually used a computer like this, I would feel morally obligated to report you.”
Watt didn’t say anything.
“Can you come by this week for a second interview?” Vivian went on impatiently.
“Second interview?”
“Of course. I would like to revisit your application, now that I know what you’re capable of,” she told him. “If you still want to attend MIT, that is.”
Watt felt as if the entire world had suddenly turned several shades brighter. “Yes. Absolutely.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Vivian added. “It was risky, you know, sending over the code like that. I might have had you arrested.”
Watt felt a fist clench around his heart. He tried to imagine how Nadia would have answered if she were here. “I calculated the risks and decided it was worth it,” he said at last.
“Spoken like a true engineer.” Vivian sounded oddly close to laughter as she ended the ping. “I’m looking forward to seeing you this week, Mr. Bakradi.”
Watt could hardly think. Trust Nadia to find a way to do one last good deed on his behalf: to give herself up, in order to get him into MIT. Her grand finale, her swan song, her last good-bye.
Thank you, he thought fervently. I promise that I’ll make you proud.
Nadia didn’t answer.
Leda was watching him, a million questions in her eyes, and there were so many things that Watt was aching to tell her. But he couldn’t, not quite yet. He’d made a promise, and Watt intended to keep it.
“Was that MIT?” she asked, having clearly followed the gist of his conversation.
“Yeah. They want me to come interview again,” he said slowly.
“Watt! I’m so happy for you.” Leda paused, as if she had something else to tell him. She seemed oddly nervous. “Before anything else happens—I need to say something.”
Watt held his breath.
“I love you,” she told him.
All other sound seemed to stop, and it was just the two of them here, and Watt’s heart clenched in his chest beccause it was better than anything he could have hoped for. “I love you too,” he answered, though surely she already knew.
Leda threw herself into his arms, and Watt held her like that for a moment, content to let the gossamer threads of their love fold them back from the world. He didn’t even feel the need to kiss her. Standing like this—with her heartbeat echoing through his rib cage, breathing in the scent of her hair—felt more intimate, somehow.
Then Leda lifted her eyes to him, and he saw that she was smiling, and Watt broke out into an answering grin. “I knew it,” he couldn’t help saying. “I knew you would fall in love with me again.”
Leda shook her head, still smiling that sidelong smile. “Watt. What makes you think I ever stopped?”
He kissed her for that one.
When they pulled away, they both glanced back up at the Tower. “Are you ready to go back?” Leda asked.
“No,” Watt said honestly.
“Me neither. But if we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting forever.”
Watt knew she was right. He cast one last glance to where Nadia had disappeared into the water, then started back toward the monorail station with Leda, hand in hand, as the sun broke through the clouds above them. The snow had stopped, but it left a light dusting over the sidewalks, so that Watt had the bright clear sensation of walking on snow that no one else had touched. It felt like time was beginning over again.
He would get a bracing cup of coffee, and a peanut butter sandwich, and then Watt would face the world—clean and unfiltered, exactly the way it was meant to be seen.