Avery stepped aside and he walked past her, shutting the door. “Took you long enough,” she muttered.

“I had a lot to think about.”

But Avery wasn’t finished. “I assume so. You really screwed up this time, Atlas.”

“I’m sorry, I screwed up? Don’t you hear yourself? You came back that morning from Cord’s! Who are you to talk?”

“You know full well that Cord and I are just friends.” Avery felt oddly pleased to have made him shout.

“I don’t know anything anymore,” Atlas replied, with a bitterness that surprised her.

They were standing beneath an enormous crystal chandelier, utterly still. It was as if the act of finally having this conversation had anchored them to the ground, and neither of them could move until they resolved things one way or another.

Avery bit her lip, wishing she’d rehearsed some kind of speech. “Look, I’m sorry about how I reacted when I saw you flirting with Calliope. It was stupid and immature. I came back that morning wanting to tell you I was sorry—but then I found her, prancing around in your underwear!” She blinked back a fresh onslaught of tears. “Atlas, I know we fought, but you didn’t have to sleep with her that same night!”

“Nothing happened between me and Calliope,” Atlas insisted. “Not that you’ll believe me, since you seem determined to think exactly what you want.”

Avery sighed. “Even if you didn’t sleep with her, you shouldn’t have brought her home. Don’t you see? When something bad happened, you went straight to her. You ran away.” To someone easier. Someone you could actually be with, in public, she wanted to add.

“It wasn’t just me. We both ran away to someone else.”

“Like I said, nothing happened between me and Cord.” Avery wasn’t quite sure why she wanted to make the point, but it didn’t matter; Atlas was shaking his head.

“I believe you. But what about next time, Aves? Maybe something will happen then, for either of us. Don’t you see what a huge problem it is that when we fought, we both turned to someone else, someone more …”

“Easy. Uncomplicated. Which is exactly what you and I are not,” she finished for him.

Atlas looked up at her. “Is that why you love me?” he asked, very quietly.

At first she didn’t understand. “What?”

“Did you fall in love with me because it was complicated, and forbidden—because I was the only thing in the entire world that you were ever denied? The only thing you ever wanted that you were told ‘no,’ instead of ‘yes’?”

Avery felt the blood drain from her face. “That’s cruel, Atlas. You don’t mean that.”

At the hurt in her voice, something of the old Atlas came back to his features, and he let out a breath. “I had to ask,” he replied, sounding more defeated than upset. It scared Avery, because she knew it meant he was shutting himself away from her, forcing himself not to feel, not to care.

“You know I love you,” she insisted.

“And you know I love you. After all this, though …”

Avery heard the note of finality in his voice. And she realized, with a terrifying sense of clarity, that it was the beginning of the end.

“It isn’t working, is it?” she said quietly, because the words were so very painful, and Atlas shouldn’t have to be the one to say them.

“It can’t ever work. It’s impossible. Aves, it might be best for us to just … stop.”

Atlas spoke hollowly, almost formally, as though Avery were a client to whom he was proposing a new construction plan. But Avery knew his mind better, almost, than she knew her own—she could see what this was doing to him, the excruciating effort he was making to keep from breaking down in front of her.

I love you, and nothing else matters, she wanted to say, but she held the words back, because in the end they weren’t useful. Everything else mattered. She loved Atlas, and Atlas loved her, and yet it would never work between them.

She knew the events of last Saturday were her fault. She’d picked at their relationship, peeling off little pieces of it like a destructive child, until it all inevitably came to a head. But their problem was bigger than that one evening. Atlas was right, what had happened was just a symptom of the larger issue: the sheer impossibility of them being together.

There was nowhere they could go that was safe; nowhere that the truth of who they were, the forbiddenness of their love, wouldn’t come chasing them.

Maybe love wasn’t enough after all. Not when every last obstacle was arrayed against you, all the odds stacked to make you fail. When the entire world was keeping you apart.

“Okay,” Avery said, as the universe quietly rent itself in two. “Let’s just … I mean …”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Let’s just go back to the way things were before? Go back to being brother and sister, after everything they had shared?

Atlas seemed to understand her, the way he always did. “I’m going to take the Dubai job. I’ll be halfway around the world soon. That should make it easier on you. I’m sorry,” he added.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there after he left, her eyes still closed. A single tear ran down her cheek.

It felt to Avery as if someone had died. And in some sense there had been a death, she thought: of her relationship with Atlas. It had been a living, breathing thing, full of sound and color, until the two of them just dealt it the final blow.

Atlas was leaving, and he wasn’t coming back.

LEDA

LEDA SAT IN bed, trying to catch up on her reading for English class, but her mind was racing too fast to focus on the words. She couldn’t stop thinking about Watt, and what had happened on Saturday night.

She’d woken the next morning to find nothing but rumpled bedcovers, Watt already gone. Then she’d remembered everything—the press of his mouth on hers, the strong, certain way his hands had traveled over her body—and she’d rolled over to bury her face in her pillow, stifling a groan. Thank god she hadn’t let it go too far. What had she been thinking, bringing home Watt Bakradi? She didn’t even like him. Might, in fact, detest him.

Well, she decided crisply, at least not liking him meant that it would be easy to erase this whole incident. No need to bring it up ever again.

Except that even now, she couldn’t hold back the memories flashing hot and bright through her mind, faster and faster. She closed her eyes against them, but that just made them come more quickly—

“Leda,” her mom said, pushing open her bedroom door.

“I thought we agreed that you were going to start knocking.” Leda couldn’t help being immediately on the defensive. She hoped the flush on her cheeks didn’t somehow betray what she’d just been thinking about.

Her mom wandered over to her closet, tapping angrily through the clothing display on Leda’s touch screen. She’d always found a strange comfort in clothes, as if by organizing the single perfect outfit she could ward off all the unpleasantness of life.

“I’m worried about you,” Ilara said, still looking at the screen. She was wearing silk pajamas that were covered in printed chickens, which for some reason struck Leda as absurdly comical. “I’ve been worried since before Eris died. Which is why we’re going to your check-in at Silver Cove next weekend, just you and me.”

Leda jumped out of bed, startled. “What? No!” Leda didn’t want to go back there—especially not with her mom.

“Leda, the four-month follow-up is a recommended part of your treatment. I think it would be good for you, given everything that’s been going on. Dr. Vanderstein agrees with me.”

“God, Mom, you have got to stop discussing me with him! It is completely unethical!” Leda cried out. She took a deep breath and tried to regain a measure of calm. “I don’t need to go. I promise.”

Leda couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Silver Cove. It was crowded with too many memories. If she went back, she would be forced to confront everything that had happened in the past few months—would have to remember the Leda Cole who’d first shown up there; young and wounded and still in love with Atlas. That girl may have been stupid, but at least she was better than this new Leda, who had killed someone, then blackmailed others into lying about it.