The Thousandth Floor

Besides, she thought unfairly, Leda was the one who’d started it all, by acting weird when she came back from summer break—lying to Avery about where she’d been, hiding her crush on Atlas. And Leda wasn’t exactly making a huge effort with her right now either.

Avery sighed and turned back to the clothes scattered over her pale blue carpet. She was cleaning out her closet before next week’s Designer Day, when all the best international designers would set up in boutiques throughout the Tower and reveal their next season’s collections. By now the designers all recognized Avery. A lot of them invited her into their portable privacy-coned dressing rooms, so she could actually try on the sample items they’d brought, which was way more fun than just projecting clothes onto her 3-D body scan. But it could also be embarrassing; every year at least one designer would proclaim that Avery was his or her muse, that she’d inspired the whole collection, and then she’d feel uncomfortably obligated to buy one of everything until Leda led her firmly away. That was the nice thing about shopping with Leda. She was the only person, aside from Atlas, whom Avery could trust to tell her no.

At some point Avery and Leda had started this tradition, of cleaning out their closets the week before Designer Day to make room for new purchases. It was always a fun game, trying on their old things and making fun of each other’s fashion faux pas, reminiscing about past adventures. Avery felt a pang of loss. She missed the way she and Leda had been before, back when everything was easy. They would have it again, though, she promised herself; once things between Leda and Atlas fizzled out, as surely they would.

She stepped into a flowy white-and-yellow dress she’d worn to her cousin’s wedding two years ago and tapped the smart mirror, changing her reflection so that it showed a braided updo instead of her current style, long and wavy. But not even fixing the hairstyle could save this one. “Too dated,” she said aloud, and hung the dress on her closet’s input rod, where it was swept into the donation bin.

Next she pulled on a vibrant tangerine Oscar de la Renta gown, with a long train and a bow on one hip—from last summer’s Whitney young members’ gala, if Avery remembered right. She was struggling with the zipper when a knock sounded at her door.

“Come on in, Mom,” she called out, thinking she’d heard her mom’s voice. “I need you to zip me up—”

Atlas walked through the door. “I thought you were out,” Avery stammered, holding her dress awkwardly in place.

“I was,” Atlas said simply. Avery wondered if he’d been with Leda but didn’t dare ask. “I can zip you, if you want,” he offered.

Avery turned around, shivering at the intimacy of the gesture. His hands were warm where they brushed her back.

“You look amazing,” Atlas told her as she swished back to face him, the heavy skirt dragging over the carpet. “But it still needs something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been wanting to give you this.” Atlas pulled a drawstring pouch from his pocket. Avery reached for it, her breath catching a little.

Inside was a necklace that glittered with unfamiliar stones. They looked almost like black diamonds, but each had a swirling orange streak through the middle, reminding Avery of the smoldering embers of a real wood fire.

“Volcanic glass from Kilimanjaro. The moment I saw it, I thought of you.” Atlas looped the necklace around her neck, reaching to pull the blond curtain of her hair from underneath. His hands were certain, no fumbling with the clasp, and Avery couldn’t help wondering how often he’d done this before, with other girls. Her heart sank a little.

She turned and looked at her reflection. Atlas was still standing behind her, his tall, broad silhouette outlining hers. Their eyes met in the mirror just as his hands released the clasp and fell to his sides. Avery wished he would grab her bare shoulders, whisper in her ear, kiss her at the base of her neck where his hands had just been.

She stepped quickly away, as if to get a closer look at the necklace.

It really was beautiful. Usually Avery looked all bright and sunshiny, but the dark stones captured something else in her, the shadows flitting across her face and along the curve of her collarbone. “Thank you,” she said, and turned back around. “When were you at Kilimanjaro?”

“For a few days in April. I worked my way from South Africa up to Tanzania. You would have loved it, Aves. The view’s even better than this.” He gestured toward the windows that lined two of her walls, where a bright orange sunset burned its way into the atmosphere.

“Why did you do it, though? Leave like that?” Avery whispered. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t press him on this, but she couldn’t help it anymore; she was sick of not talking about it, of pretending that nothing in their perfect family had ever gone wrong.

He looked away. “A lot of reasons,” he said. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Atlas—” She reached out and grabbed his arm, feeling suddenly desperate, as if he might float off unless she anchored him here. “Promise me you won’t do that again. You can’t just run off like that, okay? I was worried.”

Atlas looked at her. For a moment Avery thought there was something alert and watchful in his gaze, but it disappeared before she could be sure of it. “I promise,” he told her. “Sorry I made you worry. That was why I kept calling you—so that at least you would know everything was fine,” he added.