“Miss, I can’t tell you anything,” he snapped, harassed and impatient.
Leda hadn’t let go of his sleeve. “Please. Avery is my best friend,” she begged, and something in her expression must have touched him, because he let out an impatient breath, ignoring all the other people trying to catch his eye.
“You say you’re her best friend?”
“Yes. My name is Leda Cole. I’m on the approved entry list, you can check,” she said, her voice ringing with desperation. “Please—is Avery okay? Are her parents up there?”
“The mayor and his wife are on their way.”
Leda wondered why they weren’t here already. Maybe they couldn’t face it. Then she realized, with a beat of panic, that he had only told her about Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and not Avery.
“Where’s Avery?” she asked again.
In answer the fire marshal turned around, making a brusque gesture for her to follow. “Why don’t you come on in, Miss Cole. It’s safe enough now.”
Her body quaking with fear, Leda followed him into the Fullers’ private elevator. It went up ten floors, from their 990th-floor landing to the thousandth floor, but they might as well have been traveling to another planet. Because when they emerged into the Fullers’ entryway, it looked utterly alien and unfamiliar to Leda, even though she’d been here so many times.
Everything was burned. It was a blackened corpse of an apartment, hollowed-out and devastated. The mirrors were cracked and streaked with soot. Leda saw the damage to the apartment reflected in their shattered surfaces, over and over, a million mirrored worlds of devastation.
The door to the living room was gone, ripped clean off the wall, so it stood wide open like a vacant, untoothed mouth. Firebots swarmed inside, emitting streams of black oxygen-inhibitor, which smelled sickly sweet, almost like icing; though the fire had long since been extinguished.
“Can you confirm which room is Avery’s?” the fire marshal asked. “It’s hard to tell right now.”
“Oh. Um—okay,” Leda said hesitantly, and started down the hallway. A dense cloud of ash rose with each footfall—blackened, coarse ash that settled back down on the ground in new patterns, like snow from hell. She kept tripping over debris, over the rancid dark sludge that coated the Fullers’ floor, but she didn’t slow down.
When she got to Avery’s room—or rather, what was left of it—Leda sucked in a breath.
The bed was a smoldering heap of ash, still licking with a few stray flames.
The last vestiges of Leda’s self-control snapped, and she ran blindly forward, falling to her knees before the bed and sifting through the wreckage. She tore at a square of fabric, a wooden bed support—not caring that her palm was seared and blistering, that she had splinters digging into her fingers. Avery was in this apartment somewhere. She had to be, because Leda refused to accept any alternative.
“Hey, hey,” the fire marshal said, reaching his arms around Leda from behind to lift her up, as easily as if she weighed nothing. Leda kept writhing, beating her fists at him like a drunkard in a bar brawl, screaming a loud and incoherent wail. She felt like a woman gone mad.
When he deposited her back in the living room, Leda had fallen still. Her throat stung from screaming, or maybe from all the ash. “I’m sorry about your friend,” the fire marshal said gruffly.
He disappeared for a moment, and when he came back he was holding a half-full bottle of peach schnapps. “Take a sip. Doctor’s orders. Sorry,” he added, as she sat there staring at the label, “it was the only unbroken one I could find. The rest were all shattered.”
Leda was too dazed to do anything but obey. She took a generous pull of the schnapps, her legs stretched out before her. She realized that she had started crying again, because she knew this bottle: She’d gotten it for Avery’s sixteenth birthday as a joke, and it had survived in the Fullers’ liquor cabinet this long simply because no one had ever wanted any.
She set the bottle aside and slumped forward, pulling her knees to her chest. Oh, Avery, she thought disconsolately, what have you done?
The fire marshal didn’t disturb her. He just moved on with his efforts, leaving Leda to cry her heart out on the Fullers’ ashen living room floor.
She cried for Avery, the sister she had chosen, and Eris, the sister she hadn’t known until too late. Leda’s two sisters: her blood sister and the sister of her heart, now both lost to her for good. How would she go on living without them?
She’d hoped that by confessing to the police, she could wipe away her guilt. But Avery had beaten her to it. Avery had given herself up for Leda in a drastic act of self-sacrifice, the kind of sacrifice you could never take back.
The only way Leda could ever hope to deserve that sacrifice was to do better in the future than she had in the past.
She was intimately familiar with all her bad deeds, every last machination and manipulation and scheme. They were inscribed indelibly upon her heart.
But maybe her good deeds were there too, she thought, no matter how outnumbered they might be. Her love for her family and friends—and for Watt.
Maybe if Leda tried hard enough, if she worked at being patient and thoughtful and curious and kind, her good deeds might eventually outweigh the bad. Maybe then, someday, she would actually be worthy of this tremendous gift Avery had given her.