“I ran in after you,” Avery recalled.

“Wearing your new white sundress.” Leda exhaled a breath that was almost a laugh. “Your mom was so pissed.”

Avery nodded, torn between confusion and a mingled pang of gratefulness for the memory. She’d lost so many people in her life lately—Eris, Leda, now Atlas. Suddenly, all she wanted was for the cycle to end.

“Any chance you want to get a smoothie?” Leda asked, very quietly, as if reading her mind.

The silence in the aqua studio was suddenly deafening. Everyone had gone, leaving nothing but the quiet lapping of the saltwater pool, the intermittent flashing of the fairy lights. The holo on the brick wall before them flickered out.

“Can we make it tacos instead?” Avery’s blood was still pounding from class, her face flushed with exertion. She realized that for the first time in a week, she felt something other than howling grief—or worse, that terrible aching numbness. She wanted desperately to preserve this fragile sense of warmth before she clattered inevitably back to reality.

Leda smiled in response. “Cantina?”

“Where else?”

Avery wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea. She wasn’t sure how to treat Leda anymore, given everything that had happened between them. Were they best friends, or enemies, or strangers?

She slid her feet into her flower-printed sandals, determined to find out.

LEDA

CANTINA WAS THE same as always, slick and intimidating, its blazing white surfaces so pristine that Leda almost felt nervous to touch them. She remembered how wide-eyed she’d been the first time she came here, in eighth grade, with Avery and her parents. Everyone was so thin and expensively dressed that to Leda’s thirteen-year-old mind they’d all looked like models. Then again, some of them actually were.

Now she and Avery walked up the bold white staircase with spiky blue agave plants lining each step and settled into a cozy two-person booth upstairs. They’d both showered and used the stylers at Altitude before coming here; and now that they were no longer in the surreal quiet of the aqua studio—now that they looked like their normal, immaculate selves—Leda was questioning whether this was a good idea.

Avery saved her by speaking first. “How are you, Leda?” she asked, and for some reason the absurd formality of the question made Leda want to burst out laughing. All the countless hours they’d spent together at this very restaurant, and yet here they were, acting like a couple on the worst first date of all time. Suddenly she knew exactly what to say.

“I’m sorry,” she began, the words coming out awkwardly; she’d never been very good at apologies. “For everything I did, and said, that night on the roof. You know I didn’t mean for it to happen.” No need to clarify what it was; they both knew. “I swear it was an accident. I would never—”

“I know,” Avery said tersely, her hands clenching just a little under the table. “But you didn’t need to act all wild and threatening about it afterward, Leda. It would have been all right, if you’d come forward and told the truth.”

Leda stared at her blankly. Sometimes it shocked her how delusional Avery was. Sure, if it had been Avery Fuller who pushed Eris off the Tower, no one would give her more than a slap on the wrist. But Leda’s family was nowhere near as powerful or established as the Fullers, even though they did have money now. If Leda came forward, there would have been an investigation, probably even a trial. And Leda knew how the evidence looked.

A jury would have very happily convicted Leda for manslaughter. Unlike Avery, who was inherently unpunishable. No one would ever even consider sending her to prison. She was simply too beautiful for it.

“Maybe,” she said cautiously, hoping that would be enough. “I’m sorry for that too, though. I’m sorry for everything I said that night.”

Avery nodded, slowly, but didn’t answer.

Leda swallowed. “Eris did some stuff that really hurt me, some seriously messed-up stuff. I didn’t even want to talk to her, but she kept coming at me, even though I told her to back off—but still, I never meant—”

“What did Eris do?” Avery asked.

Leda nervously tucked her hair behind her ears. “She was sleeping with my dad,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but I saw them together—I saw them kissing!” Leda’s voice pitched wildly, she was so desperate to be believed. She took a deep breath and began the whole sordid story: How her dad had been acting funny, as if he was hiding something. The Calvadour scarf that Leda had found, which she then saw her dad give to Eris. How he’d lied and said he was at a client dinner, but instead she’d found him at dinner with Eris, holding hands and kissing across the table.

Avery was silent with shock. “Are you sure?” she asked finally.

“I know. I didn’t want to believe it of Eris either. Let alone my dad.” Leda couldn’t even look at Avery’s face right now, couldn’t face the shock, the disgust, that was surely written there, or she might burst into tears. She busied herself tapping on the surface of the table to place their order. “Medium or spicy guacamole?”

“Spicy. Plus queso,” Avery added. “God, Leda … I’m so sorry. Does your mom know?”

Leda shook her head. “I never told her.” Avery of all people would understand how painful it had been, keeping something that big from her family—how Leda had felt stretched thin by the secret, which pressed slowly and inexorably down on her, never relenting even for a minute.

“I’m sorry. That’s terrible.” Avery traced a circle on the pristine table. She didn’t seem able to make eye contact either. “How can I help?” she asked finally, looking up. Her eyes were brimming with tears.

Typical Avery, thinking she could take on all the problems of the world. “You can’t solve everything, you know,” Leda said, as a hovertray whirled over to deposit the guacamole on their table. It was chunky and fresh, made with real avocados, not the infused algae-protein cubes that they mashed up in midTower and called guacamole.

“I know. That was always your job.” Avery wiped at her eyes and sighed. “God. I wish we’d never fought in the first place.”

“Me neither!” Leda agreed. “Atlas wasn’t worth it. I mean, not to me, he wasn’t,” she fumbled to explain.

Across the table, Avery’s eyes were very blue and very serious.

“I never loved him. I realize that now,” Leda went on, bravely. She knew this wasn’t what Avery wanted to talk about—that it would be safer to avoid it altogether. But talking was the only way to make things right. Leda imagined her words spanning the space between her and Avery, like the etherium bridges that built themselves molecule by painstaking molecule.

“I thought I loved him, but it was just … infatuation. I loved the idea of him. Or maybe I should say that I wanted to love him, but I never succeeded in it.” That night in the Andes felt so long ago now, when Leda thought she’d fallen hopelessly for Atlas. But all it had really been was hormones and excitement.

Like what you feel for Watt? a voice in her whispered, a voice she tried desperately to silence. She hadn’t told anyone that she and Watt were hooking up. God, she and Watt didn’t even speak about it. But in the few days since they’d come back from Nevada, he’d come over to her place every night. She never even asked him—he just showed up the first evening and she let him wordlessly in the back door, and then they collapsed together onto her bed in a tangle of silent, crushing need.

Still, Leda hadn’t let Watt get too far. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. She kept holding something back, out of self-preservation.

Because she was developing feelings for him, and that was the one outcome she had never expected.

Next to Watt, what she’d felt for Atlas felt long-ago, and childish. She realized that she no longer even cared whether Avery dated him. Hell, why not? It wasn’t any more fucked-up than anything else in this crazy, fucked-up world.

“You love him, though, don’t you?” she asked, already knowing the answer.