The Towering Sky

“Because I do still care about you. You know that.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said tersely, taking a step back. “I’m no good for you, Watt.”

“Stop saying that. I know you, Leda, the real you—”

“That’s just it! You know me too well! You know the real me, the me that no one else has seen. You’re the only person I ever told about me and Eris being related,” she added quietly.

Watt was strangely touched by that. “I do know you, Leda,” he said softly. “I like to think I know you in a way that no one else does. That I can see a core of goodness in you that the rest of the world is too hurried or careless to see.”

Leda looked up. There was a new softness at the corner of her lips and eyes. Then her gaze drifted past Watt, and she cried out in sudden excitement.

“Watt, look!” Leda stepped forward to pull a notebook from a shelf behind him. It had a tattered black-and-white cover, like the notebooks Watt had used back in elementary school.

“What are you two still doing here?”

Mariel’s mom stood in the doorway, a hand on one hip. “Can I help you find your scarf?” she asked pointedly. They had clearly overstayed their welcome.

Somehow Leda concealed the notebook behind her back. “I couldn’t find my scarf. Maybe Eris never lent it to Mariel after all. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Thank you,” Watt mumbled, and hurried with Leda out the Valconsuelos’ home.

The moment they turned the corner, Leda began to flip open the notebook. Nadia sent off sirens in Watt’s mind, not that he needed them. He quickly reached over Leda to slam the spiral shut. “Not here!” he hissed, his heartbeat skipping. “Not in public!”

Leda gave a reluctant nod. “Should we go to my place?” she asked impatiently.

“Mine is closer.”

They took off, racing toward the upTower lift, then sprinting the two blocks to Watt’s apartment. He heard muffled noises emanating from the kitchen but charged on past, dragging Leda to his bedroom and pulling the door shut behind them.

Even in the midst of everything, Watt felt strangely relieved that his room was clean, if cluttered. His desk was scattered with pieces of computer hardware, which were reflected on the flat-screen monitor tacked to the wall. Clothes on hoverbeams clustered near the ceiling like a woven storm cloud.

Leda flopped onto Watt’s mattress with familiar ease, scooting over to create space for him. He sat gingerly next to her, on the edge of the bed, feeling oddly afraid that he might spook her. Then he looked on, his heart pounding, as Leda began to read.

The journal tracked Leda’s movements—obsessively. Leda turned page after page of Mariel’s cramped, spidery writing, recounting where Leda was going, and when, and with whom. Mariel had obviously been stalking her.

No wonder the police had questioned Leda, if they saw this notebook.

Watt fought back a dull sense of horror. He should have protected Leda from this; but then, how could he have known? He and Nadia couldn’t access anything that wasn’t tech-based. Recording things this way, by hand and on paper, provided more security than any firewall.

Leda pursed her lips and flipped toward the back of the notebook. Watt froze at the sight of his own name.

“These are the entries after Dubai,” Leda breathed, in evident horror.

Here, Mariel had written about all of them, not just Leda. The section on Avery was the biggest—unsurprisingly, since Eris had died at Avery’s apartment. Watt frowned, reading how Mariel had painstakingly tracked Avery’s movements from Eris’s death onward. She’d taken notes about Avery’s dad’s campaign, Avery’s public appearances, even the few pics that Avery had posted from her semester in Oxford.

There were fewer notes about Rylin and Watt, but then, there was much less about them in the public domain.

There’s nothing here to incriminate you, Nadia assured him, and Watt realized in a daze that she was right. His chest brimmed with hope as Leda turned to the final page.

It was like some kind of inspiration board: Mariel had written all four of their names in heavy, fat-tipped marker, with arrows scrawled across the page, connecting each of the names to one another. The lines overlapped and twisted like snakes, with biting comments written along each arrow, such as ATLAS connecting Leda to Avery; or DRUGS connecting Rylin to Leda.

Then Watt saw the arrow linking himself to Leda and felt dizzy. NADIA was written there, in Mariel’s scrawling, angry letters.

It’s really not that bad, Nadia chimed in, tracking the movements of his pupils. If anything, it looks like Nadia is just the name of a girl that got between you and Leda.

Leda glanced up. Her hands were curled tight around the edges of the journal. “This is freaking me out. All these obsessive notes, this speculation about how we’re connected, it looks as if Mariel was searching for a weak spot. Trying to plan how she could break us apart!”

“That’s exactly what she was doing,” Watt agreed. “But it doesn’t matter. Leda—we’re okay.”

“Okay? Our names are all over this notebook, and we know the police have seen it!”

“So what? There isn’t anything here they can build a case on. It’s just a bunch of cryptic shorthand notes. All they know is that Mariel was stalking us.” Watt grabbed Leda by the shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “She didn’t write down our secrets, or the fact that you pushed Eris. That’s the important thing. Even if they want to question us about Mariel’s death, so what? None of us were involved. They won’t find anything.”