Poor Watt, Leda thought drowsily, he always rambled when he got anxious. It was so endearing.

And then her mind flagged to sudden, violent alert as she remembered. Watt couldn’t be trusted—Watt was the enemy.

“Let me go!” she shouted, though it came out raspy and broken. She tried to stand up only to tumble toward the floor instead. Watt swooped down and caught her.

“Shh, Leda, it’s okay,” he murmured, settling her back on the cushions, but not before she’d gotten a look at their surroundings. They were in their hotel room in the Moon Tower. She regretted not booking Watt his own room, the way she’d done for rehab. Where could she escape now?

“What happened?” he asked again.

Leda reached deep within herself, gathering every last shred of her strength. It wasn’t much, because she felt as though she’d been crunched beneath the weight of the Tower itself. But she managed to lean back, her eyes half closed; and then in a quick, sudden motion she shot her fist upward toward Watt’s head.

It hit his skull with a satisfying, resounding crack, right where she’d been aiming—at the spot where Nadia was implanted.

Watt yelped, momentarily blinded by pain. Leda took advantage of his confusion, pushing herself up and trying to run away—she staggered a few steps but the world spun off-kilter, the ground veering dangerously upward, and she fell heavily back to the carpet.

“What the hell, Leda! Next time your head might hit a table, okay?”

This time Watt kept his distance, crouching a few meters from where she lay on her side. He seemed to know better than to try to help her.

Slowly Leda sat up. Her head was pounding, and her mouth felt dry. The brightness hurt her eyes, and she lifted a hand to shade them, but the room was already growing dimmer. She looked sharply at Watt—she hadn’t seen him make any motions for the room comp—then realized that, of course, his damned supercomputer had done it.

“I hate you,” she managed to say, through her pain and her violent, rending grief. “Go to hell, Watt.”

“Whatever happened to you, I didn’t do it. What do you remember?” he asked urgently.

Leda pulled her knees to her chest. She didn’t care that her gorgeous white gown was ruined, ripped at the hem, smudged with dirt and blood. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was here, still breathing, still alive. That bitch left her for dead—wanted her to fall into the ocean and drown—yet she’d survived.

“Have you sent me to jail yet, or were you waiting till I was awake?” she snapped. “Don’t lie to me anymore, Watt. I know your computer is in your brain. You were recording me earlier, when I told you about Eris. Weren’t you?”

Watt stared at her in evident shock, the color draining from his face. He reached unconsciously up to that same spot on his head, as if to check whether Nadia was still there. “How did you know?”

“So you don’t deny it?”

“No. I mean, yes, I was recording,” he stammered, “but I’m not sending you to jail, Leda. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Why on earth should I believe you, when you’ve been pretending to care about me this whole time?”

“Because I do care about you,” he said softly.

She narrowed her eyes, unconvinced.

“Leda, are these yours?” he went on, reaching for something on a table behind him. He held out a handful of cheap drug vials, the kind that people shot directly into their veins.

Leda shook her head. “I’ve never taken anything like that.”

“They were in your pocket when we found you,” Watt said slowly. She noticed the we, and realized that he meant himself and Nadia, and her anger flared up again. “If you didn’t take these, what did you take last night?”

“I didn’t mean to take anything,” Leda protested. “It was a girl named Mariel. She drugged me …”

She remembered how Mariel had bragged about slipping something in her drink—it had to be truth juice, the inhibition-reducing “chattiness” drug that Leda had given Watt when she convinced him to tell her about Atlas and Avery, what felt like a lifetime ago. God, talk about karmic justice. Leda had offered Mariel all her secrets, which she’d protected so carefully for so long, as casually as if she’d been remarking on the weather. She shivered, recalling the look in Mariel’s eyes when she’d left Leda for dead. And that awful, final thing Mariel had said about Eris, that Eris was Leda’s half sister—could it be true?

Leda wanted to explain, but for some reason she’d started crying. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to make herself impossibly small, to contain this loud, awful grief.

She was mourning everything she’d done, and everything she’d lost. She was mourning the Leda she had been, long ago, before drugs and Atlas and Eris’s death. She wanted to go back in time—to shake some sense into that Leda, to warn her—but that Leda was long gone.

Watt’s arms wrapped around her, and he pulled her close, his head tucked over her shoulder. “It’s okay, we’ll figure it out,” he assured her. Leda closed her eyes, relishing the feeling of safety, even though she knew it was temporary.

“You aren’t sending me to jail?” she asked, her voice strained.

“Leda, I meant what I said. I wouldn’t do that. I’m …” Watt swallowed. “I’m falling for you.”

“I’m falling for you too,” Leda said quietly.

Watt leaned forward—carefully, as if still not certain whether she might hit him again—and kissed her.

When they pulled apart, the winds of the ice storm tearing through Leda’s mind had settled into a bright cold clarity. She knew what she had to do.

“We need Rylin and Avery,” she said.

“I actually already had Nadia send Avery a message from you, when I was really worried,” Watt said, sounding a little embarrassed for hacking her contacts yet again. “She didn’t come.”

“Then it clearly wasn’t urgent enough.” Leda nodded and spoke aloud, sending a flicker. “To Avery and Rylin. SOS. Room 175.”

Then she looked back at Watt. “We need to tell them what happened. Mariel knows.”

“What exactly does she know?” Watt asked quietly, and Leda hated what she had to say next.

“Everything.”

WATT

WATT GLANCED AROUND the living room of their hotel suite. It was filled with pristine white furniture, fluffy white carpets, delicate white side tables, and blindingly white couches that Watt was almost nervous to sit on. Right now Leda was nestled in the corner of the couch wearing an oversized sweater, her bare feet pulled up onto the cushions next to her. Nadia was still keeping an eye on her vitals, tracking the pulse in the curve of her throat, the temperature radiating from her slight form.

He’d watched, just now, as Leda sent the SOS message to Avery and Rylin. “What’s going on?” he’d asked, but she just shook her head and insisted that they wait for the other two.

“They need to hear this. They’re involved, whether they like it or not.”

Nadia sent a message across his vision, and Watt looked up at Leda. “Nadia says you can take a sleeping pill later, if you want. Your heart rate has evened out enough that it should be safe.”

“I don’t take pills anymore. I haven’t had a single one since that night,” Leda replied, hugging a white-tasseled pillow to her chest. She looked at the spot over Watt’s ear where Nadia had been implanted. “Nadia, you can talk to me directly, you know. You don’t have to go through Watt.”

“Very well,” Nadia said, through the room’s internal speaker system. It made Watt jump a little. Leda noticed the movement, and shrugged apologetically.

“Sorry, but I’d prefer that Nadia talk aloud when I’m here, if that’s okay. I know by now that if I’m dating you, I’m dating Nadia too.”

Dating, Watt mused, trying out the word to see how it fit. He’d never dated anyone before. He didn’t even know how to start. Hopefully Leda would need as much of a learning curve as he did.