“You know,” Livya went on, almost conversationally, “I saw the strangest thing in our apartment earlier this week. I could have sworn that I saw someone sneaking out late, on a weeknight, wearing a slutty silver dress.”
Calliope could have kicked herself. She’d grown sloppy, playing the same role for far longer than was good for anyone. This was exactly why their cons usually had a four-month time limit: The longer they stayed in one place, the greater their risk of being found out. No matter how convincing a story you wove, eventually the lies and blank spaces would begin to catch up with you. Eventually you would slip up.
“You might want to be careful, taking too many practice SAT tests in a row,” Calliope replied with remarkable self-possession. “It sounds like you’re beginning to hallucinate.”
“Right. Because a girl like you, out to dig wells or save the fishies or whatever it is you and your mom care about—a girl like you would never sneak out,” Livya said sweetly.
“Exactly.” Calliope had pulled the tablet back up and was scrolling viciously through the color bar, faster and faster, changing the shades of their dresses so rapidly that it was becoming nauseating.
Just then, Elise’s and Tamar’s footsteps sounded from the dressing room. Calliope quickly lowered the tablet to her side, leaving their gowns at a pale dove gray.
“Oh! This is it!” Tamar crowed as she sailed into the room wearing a webbed purple thing with long sleeves that tapered to a point over her wrists. In Calliope’s opinion, it made her look even more witchlike than ever.
Tamar turned to Miranda peremptorily. “The dresses will be perfect in this soft gray. It’s a fall wedding, after all.”
“How lovely!” Elise exclaimed, good-natured as always. She tried to hug her future mother-in-law, who just stood there in stiff-backed silence.
Then Elise stepped forward and wrapped an arm around each of the teenagers, pulling them closer, as if they were all one happy family. “My two girls,” she said quietly.
“Your dress is stunning, Mom,” Calliope replied. Elise’s gown had long sleeves and a high neck, but instead of looking dowdy it was elegant and demure, a swirl of hand-stitched lace scattered with tiny crystals that caught the light.
Livya cut in, not to be outdone. “You look absolutely perfect, Elise,” she simpered, in her prim, kiss-up voice—no trace of the threatening creature who had been there a moment previously.
Calliope looked up to where their three reflected faces hovered together, illuminated by the ambient light. Her eyes met Livya’s in the mirror. The other girl was staring at her hungrily, looking suddenly like a predator, alert and watchful for the slightest sign of weakness.
Calliope held her gaze, refusing to blink.
LEDA
LEDA TRAILED DOWN the unfamiliar street after Watt, wondering what exactly she’d gotten herself into.
He’d flickered her earlier this afternoon that he needed to show her something, about Mariel. Meet me at the Bammell Lane monorail station at nine, he’d insisted.
Leda had taken a slow yoga breath, trying to settle her mind. She wasn’t ready to see Watt again, to let him disturb the fragile equilibrium she’d worked so hard to maintain. But even worse than her fear of facing Watt was her fear of what would happen if this investigation dug up the truth.
And honestly, Leda was already pretty unsettled. Ever since that questioning at the police station, she’d been having the old nightmares again, even worse than before—because now the images of Eris’s death alternated with flickering visions of Mariel, drowning, reaching for Leda with icy, implacable hands. Leda would gasp, fighting her off, but Mariel kept dragging her down. . . .
Okay. I’ll be there, she told Watt.
When their monorail car uncoiled itself from the city and began to snake through the air, Leda couldn’t help looking down at the surface of the East River. A few boats sliced through the water on silent motors, the V’s of their wakes disappearing in the darkness.
It seemed terrifyingly cold, the light of the quarter moon breaking and fragmenting on the river’s choppy surface. Leda shivered and moved unconsciously closer to Watt, trying not to think about her nightmares.
The streetlamps flickered to life around her, their light falling in golden pools onto the pavement, which glittered with the telltale sparkle of the magnetic shavings that kept hovercraft aloft. Not that any hovercraft were zipping past. Brooklyn had been slowly draining of people for years, now that it went dark around noon, thanks to the hulking shadow cast by the Tower.
Leda couldn’t quite believe that she was here, with Watt, standing next to him again after all these months. It felt oddly surreal, like she’d slipped through the meshes of reality only to find herself back where she’d been a year ago. She kept stealing small glances at him, as if to compare this Watt with the one she remembered—his hair a little thicker and more unruly, his eyes as bright as ever.
He caught her staring and smiled. Leda bit the inside of her cheek, flushing with mortification.
“Where are we going?” She felt a desperate need to say something, anything, as if the silence was becoming infused with layers of meaning she didn’t know how to interpret. “Or do we not have a destination at all? Are we just wandering aimlessly out here in the wilderness?”
“Right, because Brooklyn is definitely the wilderness,” Watt deadpanned.