The Dazzling Heights

“Travis?” she asked, which was the name he’d given her this summer, though she’d suspected at the time it wasn’t real. Then again, neither was hers. Thank god she’d been using Calliope so much lately.

He winced, and looked around as if to see whether anyone had heard. “It’s Atlas, actually. I wasn’t quite honest with you this summer.”

“You lied to me about your name?” she said indignantly, though of course she didn’t mind. If anything, she was intrigued.

“It’s a long story. But, Calliope …” He ran a hand through his hair, suddenly awkward. “What are you doing here?”

She tipped back the rest of her pomegranate champagne, then deposited the empty flute on a passing tray. “At the moment, I’m at a party,” she replied flippantly. “What about you?”

“I live here,” Atlas answered.

Holy. Shit. Calliope prided herself on being prepared for anything, but even she needed a moment to process this turn of events. The boy she’d met this summer, who’d bummed around Africa with her like a pair of nomads, was a Fuller. He wasn’t just rich—his family was in its own stratosphere of wealth, so high that they had their own zip code. Literally.

She could work this to her advantage. She wasn’t sure how quite yet, but she felt confident that a situation would arise, some way that she could walk away from Atlas richer than when she’d met him.

“All that time we spent haggling over the price of beer, and you live here?” She laughed.

Atlas joined in, shaking his head appreciatively. “God, you haven’t changed at all. But what are you doing in New York?” he persisted.

“Why don’t you tell me why you were hiding your name, and I’ll tell you what brought me here?” Calliope challenged, even as she tried to remember what exactly she’d told him about herself. She smiled—her absolute best smile, the one she held in reserve for special occasions, which blossomed into something so bright and dazzling, that most people had to look away. Atlas held her gaze. She wanted him all the more for it.

The truth was, she’d wanted Atlas from the first moment she saw him.

She’d been standing in the British Air lounge at the Nairobi airport, trying to figure out where to go next, when he walked past, a tattered backpack slung over one shoulder. Every instinct in her body—honed to precision after years of practice—screamed at her to go go go in pursuit of him. So she did, tailing him all the way to a safari lodge, where she watched him apply for a job as a valet. He was hired on the spot.

She kept watching.

He was a mark, all right, for all that he was wearing a regulation khaki uniform, greeting guests, helping carry their luggage. He came from money. Calliope could see it in his brilliant smile, in the way he held his head, the way his eyes traveled over the room, confident and easy, but somehow not overly entitled. She just hadn’t guessed how very much money.

She’d showed up at the lodge’s employee party that weekend, wearing a crimson silk dress that draped all the way to the floor, hugging the curves of her hips and her chest. She wasn’t wearing any underwear and the dress made that fact abundantly clear. But as her mom always said, you only got one good chance to bait the hook.

The party was far behind the lodge, past the enormous shed where they kept the flexiglass safari hovers. It was more crowded than she’d expected: dozens of young, good-looking employees were gathered around one of those fake bonfires—the holographic kind that threw off real heat—all dancing and laughing and drinking a bright lemony liquid. Calliope wordlessly took a cup and leaned back against a fence post. Her expert eyes picked him out at once. He was standing with several friends, grinning at something they had said, when he looked up and saw her.

A few other people approached, but Calliope waved them off. She crossed her legs to better reveal the slit in her dress, her long legs beneath. Calliope never made the first move, at least, not with boys. She’d found that they bought into a romance more quickly when they were the ones that came to you.

“You won’t dance?” he asked when he’d finally come to stand near her. He sounded American. Good. She could pass for anything, but she always preferred being from London; and American boys were usually fascinated by that husky, sexy accent.

“Not with anyone who’s asked me so far,” she replied, raising one eyebrow.

“Dance with me.” There it was again, that self-assurance, tinged with just a hint of recklessness. He was acting out of character. He was trying to escape something—a terrible thing he’d done, maybe, or a relationship that had ended badly. Well, she should know; she was running from a mistake herself.

Calliope let him lead her past the fire. The little bell earrings she’d bought in the open-air market that morning jangled with each step. Music blared from speakers; it was instrumental and wild, with a drumbeat pounding relentlessly through it. “I’m Calliope,” she decided. It had been one of her favorite aliases, ever since she read it in an old-fashioned play, and she always felt like she had good luck as Calliope. The shadows from the holo-fire flickered over the boy’s face. He had prominent cheekbones, a high forehead, a light dusting of freckles beneath his slight sunburn.

“Travis.” She thought she heard a falsehood in his voice. He wasn’t practiced at lying. Unlike Calliope, who’d been telling lies for so long she’d half forgotten how to tell the truth.

“Nice to meet you,” she told him.

When the party drew to a close, Travis didn’t invite her over. Calliope found to her surprise that she was glad of it. But as they said good-bye, she realized that her mom had been right: cons were much easier to manage when the mark was ugly. This boy was too attractive for her own good.

Now, as Calliope’s eyes traveled over Atlas—the one boy she’d never been able to hook, never even kissed—she knew she was tempting fate.

She couldn’t predict what he might do, and that made him dangerous. Calliope and Elise didn’t like the unknown. They didn’t like not being in control.

Calliope tossed her head restlessly, a little bit of a challenge in it. She’d slipped up with Atlas once, but now she was wiser, and determined. There never had been a boy she couldn’t get, once she set her mind to it.

Atlas didn’t stand a chance.

AVERY

“THE SPARKLING COCKTAIL, please,” Avery said, the tulle skirt of her gold lamé dress—which her mom had insisted she wear, “for the holiday theme”—swishing a little as she approached the bar.

The bartender tapped a tall cylindrical beaker on his counter, which re-formed into a round pitcher, its crystals moving along their preprogrammed patterns. Then he grabbed the pitcher by the handle and poured her drink into a glass, adding a festive sprig of holly for good measure.

The walls of Avery’s apartment were festooned with bright green garlands and gold twinkle lights. Tentlike bars soared on both sides of the room, flanked by miniature reindeer, which were tethered to a real-life sleigh with enormous bows. Thanks to holo-renderers, the ceiling seemed to disappear into a vast snow-filled sky. The apartment was more crowded than Avery had ever seen it—full of men and women in cocktail attire, clutching their sparkling red drinks and laughing at the holographic snow.

Avery just hoped it was because of people’s interest in the Dubai tower, rather than their morbid curiosity about her, and what had happened on the thousandth floor the night Eris died.

Her father threw this holiday party for Fuller Investments every year, to schmooze his stockholders and biggest clients and, of course, to show off. Every December since they were children, Avery and Atlas had been expected to attend these events, to act charming and look perfect. That didn’t change as they got older; if anything, the pressure was even greater now.

Back in middle school, Eris used to always be Avery’s partner in crime on these nights. They would sneak plates of cake from the dessert bar and listen to all the lavishly dressed adults trying to impress one another. Eris had this funny habit of making up the conversations they couldn’t overhear. She would use exaggerated voices and accents, spinning outrageous dialogues full of unearthed secrets and lovers’ quarrels and families reunited. “You watch too many trashy holos,” Avery would say through her muffled laughter. That had been one of her favorite things about Eris: her wild, sky-high imagination.