The Towering Sky

Watt flinched at that, but Leda hardly noticed; she was trembling.

“Don’t worry. I’m leaving,” she announced in a chilly, remote voice that didn’t belong to her at all.

A small, foolish part of her hoped that Watt might run after her. But he just let her storm away in silence.

Somehow Leda made it home and into her own bed. She felt cold all over, the way she had felt in Dubai when Mariel left her to drown, as if fingers of ice were creeping up her spine. Her breaths came shallow and ragged.

Everything swirled through her mind at once, and she closed her eyes, trying to make sense of it.

Could she have really killed Mariel and blacked it out?

Leda cast her mind back to that night. She’d been so devastated after Dubai, all she had wanted was to forget that she had killed her half sister. To wipe that knowledge brutally from her mind and start fresh.

What a reckless, stupid thing to have done, Leda thought. Forgetting never fixed anything. She remembered something Eris used to say when she drank until she blacked out. If you don’t remember it, it doesn’t count.

But this wasn’t a drinking game or a sloppy dance-floor makeout, something to wince and laugh about the next day. If this had really happened, it was murder.

Was she capable of that—of killing a girl in cold blood? Even a girl who hated her and left her for dead?

Whatever she’d done that day, Leda only remembered it in flashes. She remembered being in class, thoughts of Eris chasing one another desperately around her mind . . . escaping to the park to meet her dealer, Ross . . . the hollow look of her eyes in a mirror somewhere, as she fumbled in her bag for another pill . . . lights, pulsing and sharp, as if at a club . . . Everything else was a sticky, dark blur.

Every instinct in Leda screamed at her not to push further. She was afraid of the truths she might find buried there. Still, she tried to dredge through her mind for the missing memory.

She imagined seeing Mariel outside near the river. Screaming at Mariel, pushing her into the water. Leda pinched her fingernails into the soft flesh of her leg until it brought tears to her eyes, willing herself to remember, but her mind remained stubbornly blank.

She so desperately wanted it to be impossible. But wanting to believe things wasn’t enough to make them true.

Leda wished she could cry. It seemed almost worse this way, as if her grief lay in some foreign land, far past tears. A bottomless grief, opening like a dark chasm within her. She kept blinking, not sure if her eyes had dried out.

She collapsed back onto her coverlet and just lay there, staring numbly into the darkness, for what might have been an hour or might have been a minute, the way that time warps in strange ways when you’re in pain. The house felt utterly still, and the stillness settled on Leda like a fine, cold mist. It chilled her to the bone. She felt miles away from any other warm, living thing; even though her parents were probably right here in the apartment, a few dozen meters away.

What stung the most was the fact that the accusation had come from Watt. Just when Leda had changed her mind, had decided to take a chance on him again, he’d proven that all her fears were right.

He knew what she was capable of and didn’t hesitate to assume the worst of her. And really, could she blame him?

There was a gentle knocking at her door. “Leda, sweetie. Are you up?” her mom called out from the hallway. It seemed to Leda that her mom’s voice emanated from another world, a world where Leda wasn’t a hideous murderer.

If only her mom could take her to that world, so she could escape the horror she was currently living.

“Where were you?” Ilara asked.

“I was out. I think I’m getting sick,” Leda replied, deliberately vague. Her mom started to come inside, but Leda raised her voice, sharpening it like a weapon. “Please, just go.”

To her relief, Ilara didn’t ask any more questions, and retreated.

It was for the best, Leda told herself. Confronting the monster within herself was a task that could only be done alone.



CALLIOPE



CALLIOPE SAT CONTENTEDLY on the floor of her mom’s closet, watching through half-lidded eyes as Elise packed for her honeymoon.

She had always found it oddly soothing, watching her mom pack a suitcase. It might have been the way Elise picked up various items—a flowy crepe de chine skirt, a pair of cropped jeans, a dangly pair of earrings—and sorted them into careful piles. The way she wrapped them, in delicate no-wrinkle paper, each shoe lovingly tucked into a padded bag. There was something comforting and ritualistic about it all, especially since packing a bag usually meant their con was drawing to a close. It was the last mile marker before they left town for good.

Calliope yawned and stretched her legs out before her. There was a linen-tufted bench that ran the length of the closet, but she didn’t want to sit on it; the oyster-colored carpet was so soft and fluffy. She found herself surprisingly glad that Elise and Nadav had decided to wait a few days before leaving on their honeymoon. It was nice to have a moment alone with her mom.

Calliope just wasn’t used to watching her mom actually get married. Although she’d been engaged fourteen times, Elise usually skipped town long before the actual ceremony, with the ring and any other gifts she could take with her. Only once before had she actually gone through with the wedding—to a Polish lord, with real papers of nobility—and Calliope felt certain that Elise had done it because she wanted to secretly call herself a lady for the rest of her life. It was the ultimate f-you to her old boss, Mrs. Houghton.