The Towering Sky

“I adjusted the order. You’re welcome,” Watt said cheekily.

“But—”

“Don’t worry—your weird veggie pizza is still here.” He slid a box toward her. “But seriously. Who orders pizza without pepperoni?”

“You’re insufferable. You know that, right?”

“Takes one to know one.”

Leda rolled her eyes and took a bite of her favorite goat-cheese-and-asparagus pizza. She felt oddly glad that Watt had decided to show up tonight, whatever his reasons. It was nice having him around. As a friend, of course.

She shifted to look at him, suddenly curious. “How do you do it? Hack things, I mean?”

Watt seemed surprised by the question. “A lot of it is Nadia. I couldn’t do it nearly as quickly without her.”

“You built Nadia,” Leda reminded him. “So don’t try to pass off the credit on her. How do you do it, really?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because.” Because she wanted to understand this part of Watt’s life, this thing that he was so startlingly talented at. Because it was important to him.

Watt shrugged and wiped his hands on one of the synthetic napkins, then pushed aside the takeout boxes to clear a space on the coffee table. He tapped at its surface, the false mosaic quickly melting away to reveal a touch screen. “Can I get into your room comp system?”

“I didn’t mean—you don’t have to hack something right this minute,” she spluttered, confused.

“And miss the chance to show off for you? Never.”

“Grant access,” Leda said, a little flustered, and the room comp automatically admitted Watt to its system.

He lifted an eyebrow, his fingers poised over the touch screen. “So who’ll it be tonight? One of your friends? That German guy Avery is dating?”

Leda imagined asking Watt to hack Calliope’s page on the feeds, or Max’s, or even Mariel’s, which was still saved to the i-Net auto caches. Not long ago, she would have unhesitatingly jumped at the chance to learn more secrets. That was how she and Watt had been brought together the first time: by snooping and spying on people.

But Leda had learned the hard way what happened when you went digging for secrets you were never meant to learn.

“Show me how you accessed the Bakehouse order,” she said instead.

Watt rolled up his sleeves. Leda found her gaze lingering on his bare forearms. “This one is easy,” he boasted. The holo-monitor before them danced rapidly from one display to the next as he synced up her family’s system with whatever he used. “There aren’t many authenticity certificates, so I don’t even have to go through side channels.”

Leda watched in fascination as his fingers flew over the surface of the table. There was something captivating about the sight of him, sitting there, relaxed and blazingly confident.

She’d forgotten how sexy Watt was when he was hacking things on her behalf.

“How did you get so good at computers? I mean, it’s a whole other language,” she asked, with reluctant admiration.

“Honestly, computer language makes more sense to me than verbal language. At least its meaning is always clear. People, on the other hand, never really say what they think. They might as well be speaking in hieroglyphics.”

“Hieroglyphics wasn’t a spoken language,” Leda said faintly, though she was caught off guard by the insight.

Watt shrugged. “I guess I always hoped that if I studied computers, I might make a difference; make the world better, even in some small way.”

Make the world better, Leda thought, surprised by his earnestness. Maybe Dr. Reasoner had been wrong when she insisted that being around Watt would resurrect the old, dark Leda.

Maybe he wasn’t such a trigger after all.

Watt met her gaze and she flushed, reaching down to smooth the napkin on her lap. She felt as if she were all energy, a bundle of raw, restless movement. As if her body were throwing off real, sizzling sparks.

Her pulse picked up speed. Watt was so close that she could trace the bow-shaped curve of his lips—those lips she had kissed so many times. She couldn’t help wondering, a bit jealously, how many other girls had kissed him since then.

Watt leaned closer. Something was unfurling in the space between them, and Leda didn’t know how to fight it anymore, or maybe she just didn’t want to. . . .

As she tipped her head back to kiss him, Watt pulled away.

Leda’s breath caught. She felt torn between relief and a wild sense of disappointment.

“Leda.” Watt was looking at her in a way that made her blood pound close to the surface. “What do you want, really?”

Such a simple question, and yet it wasn’t simple at all. What did she want? Leda imagined opening her brain, unspooling all her tangled thoughts like a skein of woven cloth, trying to make sense of them.

For so much of her life, she had wanted to be the best. The cleverest, the most successful, because of course she could never be the prettiest, not with Avery around. That was why she’d first hired Watt, wasn’t it? So she could gain the next step on her ever-ascending staircase toward whatever she was chasing?

Now all Leda wanted was to be safe from the darkness within herself. And that meant staying away from Watt. Or at least, she had thought it did.