The Dazzling Heights

Lux tipped her head toward an enormous chair that someone had set up on the side of the pool, stacked precariously atop a table. Reed was sitting there, looking inordinately pleased with himself as he clinked shot glasses with a group of his friends.

“He’s on lifeguard duty for the hour. Like people used to do in ancient times! We had to turn the safety bots off, you know, to keep the police away.” Lux giggled. “He’s not taking it that seriously, though.”

Rylin had a feeling that human lifeguards were more recent than ancient times. She also had a feeling that Reed was in no shape to keep drunk teenagers from hurting themselves, but she smiled and held her tongue. “Let’s dance,” she said instead.

Lux nodded, and together they began to weave through the hot, crowded press of people. The vid-cam bobbed cheerfully above them, a tiny silver planet lost in a universe of glow lights.

WATT

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Watt waited for Cynthia at the corner of Madison Square Park in midTower. I still think this is a bad idea, he told Nadia, watching the flow of people on the carbonite sidewalk that lined the hover path. Tourists wandered around in their awful tourist clothes, jeans and fanny packs and those T-shirts that said I ♥ NY with the iconic image of the Tower emblazoned on the ♥. A group of girls across the street bought ice cream from an enormous cone-shaped snack bot, while periodically shooting glances at Watt and giggling.

“Did you have a better idea?” Nadia whispered into his eartennas.

I’m just curious, how many scenarios did you run for this? What likelihood of success did you calculate?

“My calculations are incomplete, given how much I’m lacking on the input variables.”

So, basically null.

“Watt! I can’t believe you agreed to come with me.” Cynthia turned the corner with a smile.

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it,” Watt said quickly.

Cynthia shot him a sidelong glance. “Really. You’re telling me you’re as excited as I am for the Whitney’s new exhibit on postmodern sound-wave art?”

“To be honest, I’m just here because you wanted to go,” Watt admitted, which elicited an even broader smile. Cynthia had been asking Watt and Derrick to come to this art thing with her for weeks—and now that Watt wanted to butter her up and ask a favor, he’d finally agreed.

That part had been Nadia’s idea. Actually, Nadia was the one who’d suggested he ask for Cynthia’s help in the first place.

Ever since Leda came over, Watt had been thinking about Nadia’s idea. If Leda trusted him—if she thought that he was her friend, that he was on her side—maybe, just maybe, she would say the truth aloud. All Watt needed was one mention, one reference to that night, to get out from under her thumb.

He’d kept asking Nadia how to approach Leda, but she’d referred him to Cynthia. There are some human behaviors that are impossible to predict, she’d said frankly. Studies have proven that asking a friend for advice is the most effective way to tackle trust-related issues in interpersonal dynamics.

Sometimes I think you make these so-called studies up, Watt had replied, skeptical. Nadia sent him thousands of pages of research in silent response.

He and Cynthia headed through the museum’s automatic doors into a stark, austere lobby. Watt nodded twice as he passed the payment machine, which scanned his retinas and charged him for the two tickets. “You didn’t need to get mine,” Cynthia said, sounding confused.

Watt cleared his throat. “Actually, I did,” he said slowly. “To tell you the truth, I have an ulterior motive for coming here today.”

“Yeah?” Cynthia asked. Watt wondered why Nadia was uncharacteristically silent, but then, she often shut up when he was talking to Cynthia.

“I need advice,” he said bluntly.

“Oh. Okay,” Cynthia breathed as they turned into the start of the exhibit, and fell silent.

It was a vast, dimly lit space filled entirely with metal pipes—the kind that still carried water and sewage throughout the Tower, like the ones that Watt’s dad worked with as a mechanic. But the artist had painted them in a spectrum of discordantly cheerful colors, yellow and candy-apple green and watermelon pink. As they progressed through the space, lines of music whispered into Watt’s ear before quickly changing to a new song, a new refrain. Watt realized the pipes were just for show. Miniature speakers were projecting the sound waves toward him in rapid iteration.

“What kind of advice?”

Cynthia’s words echoed strangely over the sounds in the exhibit, as if coming from very far away. Watt shook his head, disoriented, and grabbed her wrist to pull her back into the hallway. Lost-sounding snatches of music drifted through the open door toward him, echoing strangely in his mind, or maybe the thought of Leda was literally driving him insane.

“I’m completely stuck. This girl—” He shook his head, immediately regretting the choice of wording; that made it sound like he liked Leda. Although maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, he realized, if Cynthia thought he needed romantic advice. It was better than letting her guess the truth.

Cynthia stared at him in that piercing way of hers. For some reason Watt held his breath, trying not to even blink.

“Who is this girl?” she asked at last.

“Her name is Leda Cole.” Watt tried not to let his irritation creep through, but he could hear it in his own voice.

“And your typical … techniques aren’t working with her?”

Don’t lie, Nadia urged him. “She’s not a typical girl.” That definitely wasn’t a lie.

Cynthia turned back toward the stairs. “Come on,” she said, sounding resigned.

“Wait, but your exhibit—don’t you want to go through it first?”

“I’ll come back another time, without you. Your life sounds like a mess,” Cynthia proclaimed. Watt didn’t argue, because she was right.

A few minutes later they were seated on one of the rotating hexagonal benches in the sculpture garden outside. “Okay. Tell me about Leda. What’s she like?” Cynthia commanded.

“She lives upTower, goes to a highlier school. She has one brother. She plays field hockey, I think, and—”

“Watt. I don’t want her résumé. What is she like? Introverted? Optimistic? Judgmental? Does she watch cartoons on Saturday mornings? Does she get along with her brother?”

“She’s cute,” he began carefully, “and smart.” Dangerously so. Nadia was feeding him more, but Watt couldn’t keep up this charade. The words began to pour from him like venom. “She’s also shallow and petty, and insecure. Self-centered and manipulative.”

Nice going.

You’re the one who told me to tell the truth!

Cynthia shifted on the bench to face him. “I don’t understand. I thought you liked her?”

Watt let his gaze drift to the trees nearby, genetically engineered to grow dozens of fruits on the same branch. An oversized lemon hung next to bunches of cherries, alongside a row of pinecones. “Actually, I don’t like Leda at all,” Watt confessed. “And she doesn’t like me. She might even hate me. Normally I wouldn’t care that I’m at the top of her shit list, except that she has something on me.”

“What do you mean, she ‘has something on you’?” Cynthia narrowed her eyes. “This is about your hacking jobs, isn’t it?”

Watt looked up sharply. “How do you know about those?”

“I’m not stupid, Watt. The amount of money you’ve got is more than you could make as an ‘IT consultant.’” She lifted her hands to make air quotes around the phrase. “Besides, you always seem to know just a little too much about people.”

Watt could feel Nadia’s uneasiness like a hand on his wrist. We can trust her, he thought silently.

If you say so, Nadia conceded.

“You’re not wrong about the hacking,” he told Cynthia, and part of him was relieved to finally admit at least this much of the truth to his friend.

“So what’s happened that you’re now asking me advice about Leda?”