The Thousandth Floor

“See you.” There was a note of grudging respect in Cord’s tone, as if he hadn’t expected her to take everything so easily.

On her way out the front door, Eris realized that she would almost certainly be off the retinal scanner’s admit list starting tomorrow. Oh well, she thought, with a surprising lack of emotion. She was far less upset about the breakup—if it even counted as a breakup when you weren’t really dating—than she’d thought she’d be.

Maybe because it seemed so unimportant, in light of everything she’d already lost.



LEDA



THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Leda stood at the East Asian rock garden on the edge of campus. It was quiet here, and cold. Hardly anyone ever came this way. The only sounds were those of the tiny garden-bot, raking the stones into a rippled pattern, and a fountain burbling cheerfully in the corner.

She was waiting for Avery. They both had chemistry lab this period; they’d made sure of it when they picked classes last spring. They always scheduled their science classes together, and they always met here at the Zen garden before the first lab session, to walk over together and make sure they were partners. It had been their tradition since eighth grade.

Leda paced tight circles around the garden, watching the time on her school-issued tablet, waiting as long as she dared. Her contacts didn’t work within school grounds, so she couldn’t reach Avery. The garden-bot started to undo the swirls it had raked, replacing them with tiny squares. Real natural sunlight, filtered from outside the Tower using a system of mirrors, spilled through the skylight overhead. Leda bit her lip, frustrated. What a pointless garden. How could anyone feel Zen with this stupid thing constantly raking the stones?

Avery wasn’t coming. Leda needed to go—but first she stepped forward and gave the bot a sudden, violent kick. It sailed in an arc through the air, landing on its back with a satisfying crunch. Its wheels spun helplessly. If Avery had been there, she would have laughed. The thought only made Leda feel more upset. She left the bot there and hurried toward the science wing.

She made it to chemistry just as the three-tone chime sounded the beginning of class, only to find that Avery was already in the second row, her long legs crossed negligently in front of her. “Hey,” Leda hissed as she slid into the empty seat next to her friend. “I looked for you at the garden. Did you forget?”

“Oh, right. I’m sorry.” Avery turned back toward the front of the room, her stylus poised on the tablet to take notes.

Leda bit back a reply and tried to focus on Professor Pitkin’s opening remarks. He had a PhD in materials science and had authored the national chemistry textbook. That was the reason parents paid for Berkeley, because the teachers were leaders in their fields: the people who composed the lecture vids everyone else watched rather than public school preceptors. But when Leda looked at the professor, all she could think was that with his bald pate and bloodshot complexion, he resembled nothing so much as a purple, overripe fruit. Professor Plum, they would call him. She started writing the joke to Avery, then put down her stylus with a sigh.

Things between her and Avery were weird. Leda wasn’t sure whether it was because of Cord’s party—if Avery was still upset that Leda hadn’t told her the truth about this summer—or whether it was about Atlas. She’d acted a little strange during the whole AR thing, after all. Hadn’t she left the game at one point?

Leda wondered if Avery was upset that Leda hadn’t checked with her first, before asking Atlas out. It would be kind of weird for Avery, if her best friend started dating her brother. But this still seemed like an overreaction.

An overreaction if your friend dated your brother, sure, but not if she’d slept with him, Leda thought suddenly. The realization made her nauseated. Did Avery know about the Andes? That would certainly explain her behavior: she was pissed that Leda had lost her virginity to Atlas and didn’t even tell his sister, her best friend, about it.

But how exactly was Leda supposed to talk about that when Avery was always so weirdly protective of Atlas?

She glanced over at Avery’s profile, desperately trying to figure out what her friend was thinking. Should she apologize? She didn’t want to unless Avery actually knew. And Leda had no desire to march up to Atlas and ask whether he’d told his sister about their hookup.

The old familiar xenperheidren urge nipped at her, whispering that it had the answers, that it would smooth away all her insecurities. I am enough in myself, Leda repeated silently, but the mantra didn’t soothe her the way it had back at Silver Cove.

Maybe Nadia could figure out what was up with Avery. The hacker had been tracking Atlas’s movements over the last few days, providing transcripts of his flickers and receipts from his bitbanc, although none of it was particularly helpful. It wasn’t Nadia’s fault. The problem was Atlas; he was too private for any of that to be much use.

Avery looked up and met her gaze head-on, and Leda glanced away, annoyed that she’d been caught staring. She was uncomfortably reminded of the beginning of seventh grade, when she’d been so anxious about what everyone thought of her.

Compared to midTower, the upper floors had felt sleek and high-tech and oppressively expensive. And her classmates had done everything so fast, punch lines snapping back and forth between them in some kind of code. Leda wished she knew what they were saying, who their jokes were referencing. She had watched one group of girls in particular, blazing with confidence, led by a tall blonde almost too perfect to be real. She had wanted, desperately, to be one of them.