The Towering Sky

Watt shuddered a little. Avery must have felt incredibly trapped up there on the thousandth floor, to want to give it all up and let the rest of them go free.

But then, Watt had seen the turmoil over Avery and Atlas, the hateful things people had spewed at them both. It never ceased to amaze him, the way humans could hurt each other. No other animal was capable of that kind of vicious, useless cruelty. You’d think that people would have learned to do better by now, as a species.

Watt understood why Avery had wanted to get away from that. It was the kind of thing that would have chased her the rest of her life. She would never have escaped it.

He knew that he should feel guilty for the role he had played in helping her—he and Nadia both, really—except that he had a feeling Avery would have found a way to do exactly what she wanted, with or without his help.

He glanced down again to where Nadia was clutched tight in his palm like a talisman. Leda followed the movement, and her eyes widened.

“Is that Nadia?” she whispered.

Watt nodded. “I had her removed,” he managed to say. Just barely.

“Why?”

“Because she killed Mariel.”

Watt heard the sharp intake of breath, saw the final weight of uncertainty slide from Leda’s shoulders as she realized, once and for all, that Mariel’s death wasn’t her fault.

“I’m not a killer?” she said quietly, and Watt shook his head. The real killer was him, even if he hadn’t known or meant it.

He turned back toward the water, which was a smooth, mirrored gray, reflecting the hammered surface of the clouds overhead. Good-bye, Nadia. And this time, for the first time in years, she didn’t answer his silent thought, because she was no longer in his head to hear it. The only person who could hear his thoughts was Watt himself.

He hurled his arm back and threw Nadia out over the water in a single clean motion, as hard as he possibly could.

There was a moment of profound, acute silence when Watt wished he could undo what he’d just done, but it was too late—Nadia sailed in a flying arc over the water, gleaming in the pearly morning light, and hit the surface with a definitive, echoing plop.

That was it, Watt thought dazedly. Nadia was gone. The briny water of the bay was already corroding her, destroying her processors as she sank on and on toward the bottom. It was the same water in which Mariel had died.

Leda reached over and curled her fingers in his.

They stood there like that for a while, neither of them speaking. Watt could barely think over the twisted pain in his chest.

When his contacts lit up with a ping from an undisclosed caller, it took Watt a moment to realize that Nadia wasn’t going to hack the system and tell him who it was.

He gestured to Leda and stepped away, turning his head to accept the ping. “Hello?”

“Mr. Bakradi, it’s Vivian Marsh. From MIT,” she added, as if he didn’t already know. “Did you code this yourself?”

“Excuse me?”

“The files you just sent me, containing the code for a quantum computer. What are they from?”

Watt muttered frantically to his contacts to pull up his outgoing mailbox; when he saw his most recent message, his heart burst in his chest, because he’d sent the complete script of Nadia’s code over to MIT. Or rather, Nadia had sent it, during the procedure. It was an enormous file, so massive that she must have co-opted several local servers just to initiate the data transfer.

Watt braced himself to lie, to deny any knowledge of a highly illegal quantum computer, but the words wouldn’t come.

He had already told a lifetime’s worth of lies. Maybe it was time for him to own up to the things he had done.

“Yes. I wrote that code,” he said slowly, almost defiantly. His chin was tipped up, in a look he’d picked up from Leda without even realizing it.

“You know that to write code like this without authorization is a felony, under section 12.16 of the Computing Directives Act, and punishable by a federal court.”

“I know,” Watt said, feeling nauseous.

“Not to mention there’s a dangerous flaw in your core directive!” Vivian made a tsk noise, as if to chide him.

Watt’s interest momentarily surged above his fear. “You read the code?”

“Of course I read the code, don’t you remember that quantum engineering is my background?” Vivian exclaimed. “Honestly, Mr. Bakradi, I’m impressed. It’s remarkable, the way you’ve managed to stack and fold the code in on itself; you must have saved yourself at least a hundred cubic millimeters. Where is the computer?”

He realized in a daze that she meant Nadia. “Gone,” he said quickly. “I destroyed her—I mean it. I destroyed it.”

“Oh,” Vivian breathed, and it struck Watt that she sounded almost . . . disappointed. “It’s probably for the best, a computer of this kind, unregulated. You didn’t use it for anything, did you?”

“Um . . .” Hacking the police, hacking the Metropolitan Weather Bureau, hacking people’s flickers and messages, trying to make Leda like me, cheating at beer pong, oh, and summarizing Pride and Prejudice so I wouldn’t have to read it. The usual.

“On second thought,” Vivian amended, “Don’t answer that. If I knew you had actually used a computer like this, I would feel morally obligated to report you.”