The Dazzling Heights

“I did. You never asked me about her, though.”

“Have you hacked their school?” An idea was forming in his mind. “What if we messed with Leda a little—put Rylin in all her classes, so Leda can never escape her?”

“Like I haven’t already done that. You underestimate me,” Nadia said, sounding self-satisfied.

Watt couldn’t help smiling into the darkness. “I think the more time you spend in my brain, the more my personality has grafted itself onto you,” he mused aloud.

“Yes. I’d venture to say I know you better than you know yourself.”

Now there was a terrifying notion, Watt thought in amusement.

“Nadia?” he added as he started to drift off. “Please don’t ever turn off around Leda again, no matter what commands I’ve given in the past. I need you, around her.”

“That you do,” Nadia agreed.

RYLIN

RYLIN STRODE QUICKLY down Berkeley’s main hallway, keeping her gaze forward to avoid accidentally making eye contact with Leda—or worse, Cord. At least it was finally Friday afternoon, the end of her seemingly endless first week here.

She followed the directions on her school tablet, past an enormous sandstone bell tower and a shining statue of the school’s founder, whose head moved majestically to follow her progress as she walked. She turned left at the athletic center toward the art wing, ignoring the somewhat morbid shrine to Eris that had been erected in one corner of the hallway, full of candles and instaphotos of her and notes from students who probably hadn’t even known her that well. It gave Rylin the creeps. Though she wasn’t sure whether that was because she’d seen Eris die, or because of the fact that she was here on scholarship, taking Eris’s spot in their class, which made Rylin’s existence a bizarre sort of living shrine.

When she pushed open the door to Arts Suite 105, a dozen heads whipped toward her—almost entirely girls’. Rylin paused, confused.

“Is this holography?” she asked. The room was black, lined with dark view screens and a velvet charcoal carpet.

“It is,” Leda Cole called out from where she sat in the back row, next to the only available seat in the room.

“Thanks.” Rylin’s heart sank as she took the empty desk, wondering what exactly she’d gotten herself into. She pulled out her school tablet and doodled a few loopy cartoons in its notepad function, but she still felt Leda’s eyes on her.

Finally Leda grabbed something from her bag—a blue cone-shaped silencer, inscribed with calligraphied letters that read Lux et Veritas. She should get one of these for Lux, Rylin thought sarcastically. Of course Leda was the type of person who would buy branded gear from a university bookstore before she’d even gotten in.

Leda flicked on the silencer, and the rest of the room immediately hushed, the machine distorting sound waves to create a little pocket of silence. “Okay. How did you get in here?” she snapped.

“I thought we’d been through this. I go to school with you now, remember?”

“Look around. These are all seniors.” Leda gestured sharply to the other girls in the class. “This is the most popular elective at school, with a ninety-person waiting list. The only reason I’m even here is because they reserve a few spots for juniors, and my application essay was best.” She clenched the edge of her desk as if she wished she could break it. “What’s your explanation?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Rylin admitted. “I was just assigned this class. It appeared on my schedule the other day, so here I am.” She shoved her tablet toward Leda as if to offer proof. Accelerated Studies in Holography; instructor, Xiayne Radimajdi.

“Watt,” Leda muttered under her breath, saying it as if it were a curse word.

“What?” Rylin couldn’t have heard correctly. Wasn’t that the boy from the roof, who’d come with them to the police that night?

Leda sighed. “Never mind. Just don’t screw this up for me, okay? I’m hoping to get a recommendation out of it.”

“To Yale?” Rylin said drily, glancing at the silencer.

“Shane went there,” Leda snapped. At Rylin’s confused look, she sighed. “Xiayne Radimajdi. He teaches this class! His name is right there on your tablet.” She rapped sharply at the evidence, and cut her eyes to Rylin in evident disbelief.

“Oh.” Rylin hadn’t realized that Leda was saying the name Xiayne. She’d been wondering how to pronounce it. “Who is he?”

“The triple-Oscar-winning director!” Leda exclaimed. Rylin just stared at her blankly. “You haven’t seen Metropolis? Or Empty Skies? That’s why this class only meets on Fridays—because he works the rest of the week!”

Rylin shrugged. “The last holo I saw was a cartoon. But those things you just mentioned sound depressing anyway.”

“Oh my god. This class is wasted on you.” Leda tossed the silencer back into her bag, turning away from Rylin just as the door swung inward. The whole room seemed to edge forward, collectively holding its breath. And then Rylin understood why the class was composed mostly of girls.

Into the room walked the most incredibly attractive guy Rylin had ever seen.

He was tall, and not much older than they were—in his early twenties, maybe—with deep olive skin and shaggy dark curls. Unlike her other professors, who all wore neckties and blazers, he dressed with shocking disregard for the dress code, in a thin white T-shirt, a jacket with zippers all over it, and skinny jeans. Rylin glanced around and noticed that she and Leda were the only ones not swooning.

“Sorry I’m late. I just got off the ’loop from London,” he announced. “As you all probably know, I just started filming a new project there.”

“The royalty one?” a girl in the front row exclaimed.

Xiayne turned. The girl shifted, but then Xiayne gave a devilish smile, and she visibly relaxed. “I’m not supposed to share this, but yes, it’s about the final queen of England. A little more romantic than my usual material.” The announcement elicited a few gasps and ooohs.

“Now, Livya, since you were so eager to volunteer, can you tell me what we discussed in the last class about Sir Jared Sun?”

Livya sat up straighter. “Sir Jared patented the refractive technology that allowed holographs to obtain motion perfectly aligned with the observer, creating the illusion of presence.”

The door to the classroom slid open again, and a familiar form appeared there. Rylin instinctively sank lower in her seat, wishing she could sink all the way into the floor—farther, even; into the mechanical jumble of the interstitial level and the floor below, all the way down to the ground itself, littered with trash and god knows what else, it didn’t matter—she just wanted to disappear.

“Mr. Anderton,” Xiayne said, sounding amused and unsurprised. “You’re late. Again.”

“I got held up,” Cord offered by way of explanation, and Rylin couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t exactly said he was sorry.

Xiayne glanced around the room as if searching for some explanation for why he was missing a desk. He seemed to register Rylin’s presence with some astonishment. He hadn’t singled her out yet, hadn’t made her do one of those awful self-introductions that some of the other professors insisted on. What if he did so now, and in front of Cord?

But to Rylin’s shock, the professor winked at her, in a way that could only be described as conspiratorial.

“Well, Mr. Anderton, it seems you need somewhere to sit.” Xiayne pushed a button and a desk rose up out of the floor, directly in front of Rylin.

Cord didn’t glance Rylin’s way as he took his seat. Only the tension in his shoulders betrayed any reaction to her presence. Rylin sank miserably lower.

“As we discussed last week,” Xiayne continued, undeterred, “settings are the easiest aspect of the world to re-create in holographic form, because, of course, they are stable. A far more difficult task is the portrayal of something living. Why is that?” He snapped his fingers, and a cat leapt from behind his desk onto the top of it.

Rylin barely refrained from gasping aloud. She’d seen plenty of holograms before: on their screen at home, and of course the adverts that popped up whenever she went shopping. But those were loud and flashy and low-resolution. This cat felt different. It was rendered in exquisite detail, and moved so realistically in a thousand small ways—the lazy flick of its tail, the way its chest lifted lightly with its breath, the challenging blink of its eyes.