The Dazzling Heights

And then, to Calliope’s shock, they flung their bodies together and kissed.

At first Calliope assumed she’d been mistaken. But the more she zoomed, the more certain she felt that it was definitely Avery and Atlas. She watched in fascinated horror as the kiss went on and on, Avery rising up on tiptoe, her hands in Atlas’s hair.

Calliope blinked her vision back to normal and looked away. She took a few deep breaths, a dull roar echoing through her scorched brain. It all made an awful, twisted kind of sense.

She remembered Atlas telling her that he’d run away to Africa because he’d gotten himself into a “complicated mess.” She remembered the bitter resentment Avery had shown her that morning after the Under the Sea party when she’d realized that Calliope had slept over. Even the way Avery and Atlas talked about each other, the way they always seemed to have a radar on what the other was doing; Calliope had assumed that was just excessive sibling fondness, but clearly it was so much more. All the pieces were fitting together into the truth, like shards of a warped, broken mirror that couldn’t possibly depict reality. Except it did.

She stood there for a while, listening to the wind whistle around the corners of this extravagant tower—you could barely hear it beneath the music and gossip and laughter, but it was there. Calliope imagined that the wind was angry at being ignored. She understood the feeling.

She leaned forward on the railing, thinking of Avery and all the threats she’d delivered earlier, and smiled. There was nothing soft in the expression; it was a cold, calculating smile, a smile of victory. Because Calliope was done being pushed around by any of the Fullers.

So Avery Fuller wanted to play games. Well, Calliope could play games too. She’d played with the best of them, all over the world, and she had no intention of losing, now that she had something on Avery—something just as dangerous as what Avery had on her. She knew what she’d seen, and how she could use it to her advantage.

Avery could protest all she liked, but Calliope wasn’t going anywhere. She was in New York to stay.

LEDA

HOLY SHIT, LEDA thought in a blurred daze. What was happening?

She was walking with the Altitude waitress—Miriam … Mariane … no, Mariel, she remembered, that was it. The other girl had one hand around Leda’s waist and another on her forearm, closed tight around her like a vise. Somehow they’d walked along a service road far upstream of The Mirrors, and were down by the ocean. The dark waters of the Persian Gulf were there on her right, looking cold and implacable. Leda glanced around in every direction, but didn’t see anyone.

“I want to go back to the party.” She tried to pull on Mariel’s arm, but the other girl was dragging her stubbornly forward. She looked down at her feet and realized they were bare. “What happened to my shoes?”

“We took them off, because you couldn’t walk in them on the sand,” Mariel said patiently.

“But I don’t want to be on the sand. I want to go back to the party.”

“Let’s sit for just a minute,” Mariel suggested instead, in a low, soothing voice. “You’re too drunk to go back to the party.”

It was true. Leda felt sleepy and disoriented, all her neurons firing at quarter-speed. Her feet tripped sluggishly down the beach toward the water. The wind whipped around them, its fingers reaching up into Leda’s hair to tear her curls loose, but Leda hardly felt it. How had she gotten this smashed? The last thing she remembered was having that drink with Mariel … surely she’d had more than one, otherwise she wouldn’t feel this way …

“Here.” Mariel tried to guide Leda down a steep slope toward the shore. Leda shook her head in mute protest. She didn’t want to step that close to the water. Its black surface caught the moonlight and reflected it back at her, shining and opaque, making it impossible to gauge its depths. “Come on, Leda,” Mariel insisted, her tone brooking no argument, and pinched Leda’s side through her filmy gown.

“Hey,” Leda protested. She half slipped, half fell down the sand dune, landing on her side. She tried to stand, but wasn’t strong enough. She gritted her teeth and just managed to push herself into a seated position.

A few buildings rose up out of the darkness like primordial monsters, full of angry-looking machinery and hydrojets. Leda suddenly longed for the pulse and laughter of the party. She didn’t like this. What had happened to Watt? Did he know where she was?

“Here we go,” Mariel said, trying to scoot Leda closer to the water. Leda shrank back uneasily, but the other girl was much stronger. One of Leda’s bare toes accidentally touched a wave, and she let out a yelp. It was ice cold. Wasn’t this a tropical ocean? Or was she so drunk she couldn’t feel anything properly anymore?

“We need to talk. It’s about Eris.” Mariel’s eyes bored into Leda’s.

Something wasn’t right. Every instinct in Leda’s body was screaming at her to run away, to get out; but she couldn’t move, she was trapped in this strange place as Mariel crouched there next to her.

“How do you know Eris?” she asked, and something menacing glittered in Mariel’s eyes.

“She was my friend,” the other girl said slowly.

“Mine too,” Leda slurred. Her mouth found it difficult to form sentences.

“But what happened the night she died?” Mariel pressed. “I know she didn’t fall. She wasn’t even drunk. What happened that you aren’t telling me?”

Leda burst into sudden tears—angry, ugly sobs that racked her body. She marveled at the clarity of her own emotion. What was happening to her? She was long past drunk; she was high, maybe, but this was unlike any drug she’d ever taken, as if she’d become detached from her own body and was hovering far above it. She was suddenly very afraid. Watt’s face kept swimming up in her consciousness, the eerie way he’d listened to her confession, without blinking. He hadn’t hesitated to hurt her. He didn’t care about her. No one cared about her. She didn’t deserve to be cared about.

“It’s okay, Leda. I’m here,” Mariel was saying, over and over, the repetition vaguely soothing. “I’m listening. It’s okay.”

“I want my mom,” Leda heard herself say. She wanted to run into Ilara’s arms, the way she had when she was little, and admit what she’d done. My sweet Leda, her mom would always say, tucking Leda’s hair behind her ear, you’re too stubborn for your own good. Don’t you understand that things won’t always go your way? And then her mom would punish her, but Leda always accepted it, because she knew there was love behind the punishment.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered now, as if her mom were right here and listening. Her eyes were closed.

“What do you mean?”

“They were all there, Watt and Avery and Rylin. They knew it was dangerous. They should have pulled me away from the edge, shouldn’t have let Eris get so close. I didn’t mean to push her!”

“You pushed Eris off the roof?”

“I told you, it was an accident!” Leda cried out, rasping. A fire seemed to be kindling in her head, flames licking at the inside of her brain, where Watt kept his computer. She imagined the blaze burning everything, leaving nothing in its wake but ash.

“How did you keep the others from telling the police, if they were up there?” Mariel was shaking with disgust.

“I knew things about them. I told them that they had to keep my secret, or I wouldn’t keep theirs.” In utter horror, Leda heard herself telling Mariel everything. About Avery and Atlas. About Rylin stealing from Cord. And worst of all, Watt’s secret, that he had an illegal quantum computer lodged in his brain.

Some dazed part of Leda knew that she shouldn’t be saying these things; but she couldn’t help it, it was as if someone else was saying the words, as if they were being pulled out of her of their own volition.

“You people are even worse than I thought,” Mariel said at last, when Leda was through.

“Yes.” Leda moaned, knowing she deserved this, welcoming it.

“You should never have brought Eris into all this. It wasn’t fair,” Mariel hissed, and Leda could hear the naked hatred in her voice. Mariel despised her.