The Towering Sky

“Come on!” Brice exclaimed, jumping up and down along with everyone else. Calliope wondered, with a sneaking suspicion, if he’d been the one to request this song—maybe even bribed the band to play it. Because he suspected that it would break her out of her rigid, forced role.

And he was right.

She let her head tilt back, her hair falling from her updo to hang loose around her face, and let herself dance. She danced as if she were alone, unapologetically and unabashedly, smiling so wide that her jaw hurt. Brice took her hands and jumped alongside her, both of them shouting the words to the song—

“Calliope!”

Livya was pushing through the dance floor toward her. “Your mom is looking for you. She’s ready to cut the cake.”

Calliope instantly stopped jumping. She took a quick, even breath and reached up to tuck her stray hair behind her ears. “Thanks for coming to get me,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She shot an apologetic look at Brice, who nodded in understanding. “Bring me back a slice,” he replied, with a touch of mischief.

Calliope noticed that Livya pointedly refused to look in Brice’s direction. She just turned back toward the front of the room, where Elise was standing next to an enormous tiered cake.

“Calliope,” the other girl said as they walked, “I know you’re new here and can’t be expected to know everything about everyone.” Try me, Calliope thought, I bet I know fifty times what you know. “But Brice Anderton is bad news.”

Good thing you aren’t the one he was flirting with. “Bad news?” Calliope repeated, all innocence.

“I just want you to be careful. A nice girl like you should stay far away from boys like that. Boys with reputations.”

This was the part where Calliope should back down. But part of her felt sharply resentful. Who was Livya to say what she could or couldn’t do? “He doesn’t seem that bad to me,” she protested.

Livya gave a smug smile. “I’m just looking out for you. After you disappeared the other night—”

“Disappeared?” Calliope asked blankly.

“I checked with your calculus professor, and she said that there wasn’t any review session that evening. Where did you really go?” Livya pressed.

Calliope didn’t answer. All the bright, breathless joy she had felt with Brice seemed to vacuum away, leaving nothing but a dull sense of anger.

Livya laced her fingers deliberately in Calliope’s. To all the onlookers, it probably looked sweet, that the two girls were holding hands. But Livya’s nails were pressing into the soft flesh of Calliope’s palm like a row of tiny claws.

Calliope had never hated a role so much as she did now—god, not even that time she’d had to work as a nurse and wash out bedpans to try to sneak her mom into that Belgian hospital. At least then she’d been able to say what she wanted.

She wished she could break out in screams, tear her hand violently from Livya’s. Instead she forced herself to swallow it back. This isn’t real, she assured herself. I’m not really this cold, unfeeling person. I’m just playing a part. It isn’t real.

“Thank you for the advice,” she said woodenly.

“Of course. I’m your stepsister, Calliope. I’m family now,” Livya simpered, that ugly smile still pasted on her face. “And I would do anything to protect my family.”

Calliope couldn’t let a threat like that go unanswered. “So would I,” she replied and smiled right back at her.



AVERY



“THANKS AGAIN FOR tonight,” Avery told Max, lingering on the landing to her family’s private elevator. She wasn’t quite ready to go inside.

She didn’t want to risk seeing Atlas.

Avery still couldn’t believe that he had moved back into their apartment. He had unpacked in his old room and was heading off to work every day with their dad, slipping nonchalantly back into his old life as if no time at all had passed since he left for Dubai. As if nothing had changed.

Except that everything had changed, Avery thought furiously. She had changed. And it wasn’t fair that he was suddenly here, when she’d gone to such painful lengths to move on from him.

“Are you okay, Avery?” Max asked, sensing her hesitation.

“I just wish that I could stay with you tonight,” she said, and meant it. Avery had slept over in Max’s dorm room the past few evenings. She wished she could keep staying there indefinitely—but her mom had made a pointed comment about it this morning, and Avery didn’t want to push her luck.

“Me too.” Max pulled her into a hug, tucking his chin above her head. “I’m sorry this election stuff has been so intense. I never realized how much it would affect you. We aren’t so obsessed with the candidates’ families in Germany.”

“That sounds nice.” Avery smiled. “Maybe next time my dad can run for mayor of Würzburg.”

In the week since her dad’s election, her parents had become more committed than ever to maintaining their image as New York’s first family. “New York royalty,” the feeds kept calling them. Even worse, they had dubbed Avery the so-called princess of New York.

Her inbox was now flooded with interview requests—which she found ludicrous, given that she wasn’t an authority in anything except, perhaps, being a teenager. Or hiding an illicit romance from her parents.