LEDA
LEDA STEPPED UP to the NYPD headquarters, queasy with anxiety.
Her contacts lit up with an incoming ping, and she turned quickly aside, hoping for a split second that it was Avery—but no, it was Watt. Again. Leda let the ping roll on, unanswered.
Watt had been trying her practically once an hour for the past day. Leda kept on ignoring him. She had nothing to say to Watt right now.
Because she still loved him. And Leda knew that if she let herself speak to him, if she heard his voice for even a single instant, she would lose her nerve and back down from what she was about to do.
She tried Avery one final time, her heart hammering. She’d been so certain that Avery would be here—Avery had promised she would, late last night, when Leda had pinged her in twisted, cold fear. “Of course I’ll be there,” Avery had assured her. “Let’s meet at the station at seven.”
“Can you come here first, to my place?” Leda asked, her voice small. She wanted to be walked to her murder confession, like a child being walked to school.
“I’ll meet you at the station, I swear,” Avery answered.
Now it was almost 7:20, and Avery still hadn’t shown. Leda was starting to think she wasn’t coming. She couldn’t blame her: Avery had plenty to deal with right now; she didn’t need Leda’s mess piled on top of her own.
Still, Leda wished she didn’t have to do this alone.
She’d barely made it through breakfast with her parents. They had coptered back from the Hamptons late last night. Leda could tell that things weren’t completely resolved between them—she could see the questions in her mom’s eyes—but she also knew that her mom hadn’t left. And when she came downstairs this morning, her dad was cooking waffles: the delightfully fat kind, loaded with chocolate chips and whipped cream. The way he always used to, back when they ate breakfast as a family.
When her mom came down and started to set the table, Leda realized that it would be okay. Her family might not be anywhere near healed yet, but it would be, eventually.
She almost—almost—changed her mind about confessing.
“You okay, sweetie?” her mom had asked. Leda startled, wondering if Ilara had somehow guessed her plans; but then she realized that her mom meant the Avery-Atlas news.
Instead Leda mumbled that she was worried about Avery and took a bite of her waffle. She forced herself to finish the entire plate, because she didn’t know when she would get to eat again. What would they feed her in prison?
She’d taken a hover down to the police station, a last little act of extravagance. As it slid seamlessly down her street, Leda had leaned against the flexiglass window, staring out at the view for once, instead of flicking through the feeds on her contacts. She tried to memorize every detail of her neighborhood, every iron gate and brick step and shining entrance pad. It all felt imbued with a new poignant significance, because Leda was seeing it for the last time.
She passed a woman jogging, a baby floating along next to her in a runner’s stroller; Leda suddenly remembered that the woman had once asked her to babysit. Leda had rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of the request. Isn’t that what room comps are for? she’d replied, and the woman had just laughed. Some people want their children cared for by humans, not bots.
Leda wondered how old that baby would be when she got out of prison someday.
She shifted, feeling suddenly ridiculous in her pleated school skirt and uniform shirt. She had debated wearing something else this morning, only to decide it would tip her parents off. Besides, maybe if the police arrested her like this, it would remind them how young she was, and encourage them not to be too harsh with her.
7:25. Avery still wasn’t here. Leda was lingering. She couldn’t help hesitating a little, right here at the brink—the way she used to freeze up on the high dive, paralyzed in fear of jumping off.
But there was no going back down the ladder once you’d climbed it. So Leda gathered the frayed remnants of her strength from somewhere deep within herself, and walked through the entrance.
She had come this early on purpose, at that bleary moment when the night shift traded for the day. She’d expected the officers to be glazed over with sleepy lethargy, their hands curled around cups of powdered coffee. But there was a little shiver of energy in the air, people walking back and forth down hallways with brisk steps, voices conferring behind closed doors. So much for catching the police at a slow moment.
“Yes?” said the officer behind the front desk, a friendly-looking man with OFFICER REYNOLDS on his name tag.
Leda shrank into herself like a snail in a shell, prolonging this moment, her last one of freedom. “I’m here to offer some information,” she declared.
“Information regarding . . . ?”
“The death of Eris Dodd-Radson.”
Just saying Eris’s name pulled her back toward that dark, bitter despair. Don’t cry, she told herself, blinking back tears. Leda never cried in public. It was one of her cardinal rules.
“Ah. The girl who fell off the roof?” Reynolds mused aloud, and it struck Leda speechless that he barely remembered who Eris was. That she’d been nothing to him but a name, while Leda had been thinking about her nonstop for the past few months.
“Also, the death of Mariel Valconsuelo.” She’d practiced the sentence dozens of times, sounded it out in her head, but still it came out shaky and nervous.