The Towering Sky
Avery stood up abruptly, steeling herself, and tossed a spark-stick in here too, moving quickly on before she could witness the carnage.
It only took a couple of minutes for the apartment to become a furnace. The smell of burning furniture varnish and carpet, the rubbery scent of melting tech, made her gag. Swirls of black smoke gathered near the ceiling. Avery hurried onward, ahead of the advancing wall of crimson. She tried to ignore the yelling in her ears, as if the fiends of hell were crying out at her for what she was about to do.
The kitchen was trickiest, because there were so many inflammable surfaces in here. Avery settled for throwing one last spark-stick on the counter, though it didn’t really matter; the apartment was already destroyed. Sparks shot upward, then floated down like burning flecks of snow.
No, Avery realized, arrested by the sight of something out the window. That was real snow. Today was the first snowfall of the year.
The snowflakes seemed frozen between the window frames, like a still-life painting. For a moment Avery expected them to fly back upward, back to the clouds as if summoned there by magic.
A wave of heat blasted toward her, scorching the bare skin of her neck. She lunged forward, stumbling toward the pantry.
Only one way out now.
She yanked the old retractable ladder down from the ceiling. Her heart thudded stickily in her chest. A flicker of fear rose up in her, like a tongue of flame, but it was too late now; she’d committed to this course of action.
At the top of the ladder, Avery pushed up the trapdoor—it offered a moment’s token resistance, but someone had clearly tampered with its electronic command system, because it gave way almost instantly. Thank god Watt had kept his promise.
She emerged onto the roof and took a deep breath, pulling the trapdoor shut behind her. The air burned the inside of her nostrils, singed the edges of her hair.
The roof looked the same as she had left it a year ago. A few machines humming under photovoltaic surfaces, a few rain-collection tubs gathering water and cycling it downTower for filtration. Avery kicked off her shoes and walked toward the edge. The pavement felt rough on her bare feet. She lifted her head, her profile proud and sharp and beautiful.
She felt very high up. The snow was falling harder now, as if pieces of the sky were breaking off to swirl rapidly downward.
The city below her was a study in dark and light, like an old-fashioned film without color—a city of extremes, Avery thought. So full of love and hate, but perhaps that was the way the world worked. Perhaps the price of a forever love was to feel forever lonely, once you had lost it.
Avery didn’t want to exist in a world where she wasn’t free to love the person her heart called her to.
She was glad that she’d confessed to what happened to Eris and to Mariel. If she was giving it all up anyway, she might as well take the blame. Leda didn’t deserve to lose her freedom over those deaths. No, she thought fervently, Leda deserved to live, to move on from her mistakes in a way that Avery could no longer do. Leda deserved redemption, and Avery had found a way to give it to her.
Her parting gift to her best friend—a life for a life, an even trade. She knew Eris would have wanted it this way.
Avery wasn’t particularly religious, yet she closed her eyes for a final prayer. She prayed that Leda would find peace, that her parents would forgive her, that Atlas would be okay, wherever he was.
She stared at the glorious beauty of the horizon one last time, studying the way the snow began to dust everything, blanketing the city’s flaws, evening out its imperfections. Its flakes settled in her hair, on the white of her sweater.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and stepped right up to the edge, her eyes still closed.
They were the last words Avery Fuller ever spoke.
WATT
FROM HIS UNEXPECTED vantage point on the East River, Watt was one of the first people to see the thousandth floor catch fire.
It was striking, really: the brightness of the flames curling above the Tower, an elegant orange-red brushstroke. Opalescent gray thunderheads coalesced around the rain-blimps, hanging in that low winter way that portended the first dusting of snow. There was something magical about it, even now that the whole thing was engineered: the delicate crystalline miracle reduced to a chemical reaction, the mating of hydrosulphates and carbon.
The magic was in the air, in the way people reacted. New Yorkers loved the first snowfall of the year—they wore hats inside the Tower and smiled at strangers and started humming holiday music. Watt remembered hearing that at MIT, the freshmen class went streaking on the evening of the first snowfall. Not that he would ever get to see it.
He wondered how Leda was doing. He’d tried pinging her a few times—okay, maybe a lot of times—since she left him at the inauguration ball on Saturday night, but she had steadfastly ignored him. He understood that she had a lot of things to work through; especially now, after what her best friend had done. Watt had plenty to think about, himself.
This morning he had turned off Nadia to ponder it all in silence, in the privacy of his own mind. And he’d rented a boat for the first time in his life. Or rather, borrowed one without asking.
The dock was closed when he got there: It was far too early, especially on a scheduled weather day. WARNING: PRECIPITATION ALERT, the screen had flashed, refusing to let him rent anything, but Watt wasn’t about to let that stop him. Even without Nadia, it was the work of a few moments for him to hack the rental shop’s operational computer.