The Dazzling Heights

“Oh really? And what was the best day?” she asked with a smile.

She expected Atlas to say that the best day was when they confessed their love for each other. But he surprised her. “Today,” he said simply. “Which will only last until tomorrow, and then tomorrow will be the best day. Because every day with you is better than the one before.”

He leaned over to kiss her lightly, just as a knock sounded on the door.

“Atlas?”

For a terrible instant, every cell in Avery’s body was frozen. She looked up at Atlas and saw her own terror reflected on his handsome face.

His door was locked, but here—like everywhere in the apartment—Mr. and Mrs. Fuller had the ability to override.

“One second, Dad,” Atlas called out, a little too loudly.

Avery stumbled out of bed, wearing her ivory satin shorts and a bra, and stumbled breathlessly toward Atlas’s closet. Her bare feet nearly tripped over a shoe as she ran.

She’d just managed to pull the door shut behind her when Pierson Fuller strode into his adopted son’s room. The overhead lights flicked on with his steps.

“Everything okay in here?” Did she hear a note of suspicion in her dad’s voice, or was she imagining it?

“What’s going on, Dad?” Typical Atlas, answering a question with a question. But it was a good deflective technique.

“I just heard back from Jean-Pierre LaClos, in the Paris office,” Avery’s dad said slowly. “It looks like the French might finally let us build something next to that antique eyesore of theirs.” His form was just visible through the slats of the closet door. Avery stayed utterly still, pressing back into a gray wool coat, her arms crossed over her chest. Her heart was pounding so erratically she felt certain her dad would hear it.

Atlas’s closet was much smaller than hers. There was nowhere to hide, if Pierson came to open the door. There was no possible explanation for why she would be here, wearing a bra and pajama shorts in Atlas’s room, except, of course, for the real reason.

Out there in the bedroom, her pink shirt lay on the floor like a glaring searchlight.

“Okay,” Atlas replied, and Avery heard the unspoken query. Why was their dad coming over in the middle of the night, for something that didn’t sound particularly urgent?

After what was surely too long a silence, Pierson cleared his throat. “You’ll have to come early to the development meeting tomorrow. We’re going to need to do a full analysis of their streets and waterways, to start prepping.”

“I’ll be there,” Atlas said tersely. He was standing directly on top of the shirt, trying to discreetly cover it with one of his feet. Avery willed her dad not to notice the movement.

“Sounds good.” A moment later Avery heard the door to her brother’s room click shut.

She leaned back and slid helplessly down the wall to a seated position. It felt like tiny needles were prickling all over her skin, like that time she’d been vitamin-checked at the doctor, except laced with adrenaline. She felt restless and reckless and strangely exhilarated, as if she’d tripped into quicksand and somehow emerged on the other side unharmed.

Atlas flung open the closet. “You okay, Aves?”

The closet lights turned on as he opened the doors; but for an impossibly brief instant, Avery was in the dark while Atlas seemed illuminated from behind—light streaming around him, gilding the edges of his form, making him seem almost otherworldly. It seemed suddenly impossible that he was real, and here, and hers.

And in truth, it was impossible. Everything about their relationship kept proving impossible at every turn, yet somehow they had willed it into being.

“I’m fine.” She stood up to run her hands up his arms, settling them finally on his shoulders, but he took a reflexive step back and reached for her top, which still lay there on the ground.

“That was not good, Aves.” Atlas held out the shirt, his features creased with worry.

“He didn’t see me,” Avery argued, but she knew that wasn’t the point. Neither of them mentioned what their dad might have already seen: Avery’s bedroom, on the other side of the apartment, her pristine white bedcovers rumpled but decidedly empty.

“We need to be more careful.” Atlas sounded resigned.

Avery pulled her shirt over her head and looked up at him, her chest constricting at what he wasn’t saying. “There’s no more sleeping over, is there?” she asked, though she already knew the answer. They couldn’t risk it, not anymore.

“No. Aves, you need to go.”

“I will. Starting tomorrow,” she promised, and pulled his mouth to hers. Now more than ever Avery knew how dangerous it was, but that just made each moment with Atlas infinitely more precious. She knew the risks. She knew they were walking a tightrope; that it would be so, so easy to fall.

If this was their last night sleeping over, then she was going to make it count.

She wished she could tell him everything, but instead she willed it all into her kisses: all the silent apologies, the confessions, the promises to love him forever. If she couldn’t tell him aloud, there was no other way to tell him than this.

Clutching Atlas by the shoulders, she yanked him forward, and he followed her into the closet as the overhead light clicked back off.

WATT

WATZAHN BAKRADI LEANED back in the stiff auditorium chair, studying the chessboard currently displayed over his field of vision. Move rook three spaces on the left diagonal. The chessboard, projected in ghostly white and black onto the high-res contacts he constantly wore, changed accordingly.

That wasn’t a wise move, pointed out Nadia, the quantum computer embedded in Watt’s brain. Her knight immediately swooped forward to capture his king.

Watt stifled a groan, eliciting a few strange looks from the friends and classmates seated around him. He quickly fell silent and focused his gaze forward, to where a man in a crimson blazer stood at a podium, explaining the liberal arts offerings at Stringer West University. Watt tuned him out, just like he’d done all the other speakers at this mandatory assembly for the junior class. As if Watt had any intention of taking a history or English class again after high school was over.

You’ve been losing to me on average eleven minutes more quickly than normal. I believe it’s a sign of distraction, Nadia added, flashing the words over his contacts like an incoming flicker.

You think? Watt thought testily. Watt had good reason to be distracted lately. He’d taken what seemed like an easy hacking job for a highlier girl named Leda, only to fall for her best friend, Avery. Until he’d learned that Avery was actually in love with Atlas, the very same person Leda had hired him to spy on. Then he’d accidentally delivered that secret straight to Leda, who was vicious and high and out for revenge. An innocent girl had ended up dying because of it. And Watt had just stood there and let it happen, let Leda walk away scot-free—because Leda knew about Nadia.

Watt wasn’t sure how she’d figured it out, but somehow, she’d learned Watt’s most dangerous secret. Anytime she wanted, Leda could turn Watt in for possession of an illegal quantum computer. Nadia, of course, would be destroyed forever. As for Watt, he’d go to jail for life. If he was lucky.

“Watt!” Nadia hissed, sending a zap of electric shock down his system. The Stringer representative was stepping down from the podium, replaced by a woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair and a serious expression. Vivian Marsh, the head of admissions at MIT.

“Few of you will apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even fewer of you have the grades to get in,” she said without preamble. “But for those of you who do, you’ll find that our program rests upon three tenets: explore, experience, evolve.”

Watt heard a soft pattering of fingers on tablets. He glanced around; some of the kids from his advanced math classes were typing furiously, hanging on Vivian’s every word. His friend Cynthia—a pretty Japanese American girl who’d been in Watt’s classes since practically kindergarten—was on the edge of her seat, her eyes lit up. Watt hadn’t even known Cynthia was interested in MIT. Would he have to compete against her for the limited spots?

Watt hadn’t really considered what he would do if he didn’t get into MIT. For years he had dreamed of attending their extremely competitive microsystems engineering program. It was the research team in that very department that had invented the millichip, and entanglement software, and the room-temperature supermagnets that prevented quantum decoherence.