The Towering Sky

So at lunch on Monday, instead of sitting with Avery in the cafeteria, Leda retreated to the secret garden.

The garden wasn’t actually secret; that was just what the elementary school kids called it. Tucked along the inner border of campus, it stretched long and narrow behind the lower school cafeteria, fed by enormous sun-bulbs overhead. It was technically part of Berkeley’s sustainability initiative, to keep the school up to oxygen input-output codes. But Leda had also found that it was the easiest place on campus to be alone—especially when what you wanted to do alone was smoke up.

Autumn had always been her favorite time of year in the garden. In the spring it was too pastel, and in the winter it was even worse, with all those white-and-red candy cane plants and holographic gingerbread men running around for the little kids. But right now the garden was a rich explosion of fall colors, not just brown, but reds and oranges and occasionally a smoky forest green. The leaves crunched pleasantly underfoot. Balloon pumpkins—which had been genetically engineered to be less dense than air—floated at waist height, tethered to the ground by their gnarled green stalks. As Leda walked, the pumpkins bobbed a little in her wake.

She turned the corner, past the massive golden beehive and a burbling fountain, to station herself beneath an air vent. It was barely perceptible from the ground, since the ceiling was nine meters high—you had to be really know what you were looking for to even notice that it was up there.

Leda’s hands shook as she fumbled in her bag for her gleaming white halluci-lighter, the tiny compact pipe that you could smoke almost anything in. Her chest felt like a bundle of twitching wires. She touched the pipe to the heat pad on the edge of her beauty-wand, gently toasting the weed within. Nothing fancy, just your usual marijuana-serotonin blend, because god help her, she needed a little kick of happiness right now.

Leda inhaled deeply, letting the smoke curl delicately into her lungs, suffusing her with an instant warmth. Suddenly, she wished someone were here with her. Not Watt—she was still stung by his accusation, and hadn’t answered any of his pings since she’d run away from his room. She didn’t know when she would be able to face him.

Still, she wouldn’t hate having someone here right now, just to hear another voice. She was always at odds these days; when she was alone she wanted to be with other people, and when she was with other people she just wanted be alone.

Footsteps sounded on the flagstones. Leda quickly twisted her arm behind her back to hide the halluci-lighter, cursing, because the smell was definitely still there—

Then she saw who it was, and let out a disbelieving laugh.

“Since when do you skip lunch to come smoke?” she asked Rylin, a challenging edge to the question.

Rylin strode over and reached for Leda’s halluci-lighter. She took a single slow breath, with the cool composure of someone who had done this many times before, then nonchalantly exhaled the smoke into a perfect green O. Totally badass, Leda thought grudgingly.

“I don’t know if it counts as skipping lunch if I actually came here to eat,” Rylin replied, holding up a recyclable go-bag from the cafeteria. She settled on the lower step of the fountain, her plaid skirt fanning out over her lap, and unfolded the waxy sandwich paper.

Leda smiled in spite of herself. Even though they went to the same school, she hadn’t seen much of Rylin this year, except, of course, for that emergency meeting at Avery’s. She found herself wishing that they had stayed better friends after that brief truce in Dubai. Leda would never have admitted it aloud, but she saw something of herself in Rylin’s no-nonsense attitude, her deeply private nature, her impatience with the world’s conventions.

She sank down next to Rylin and tucked her legs behind her mermaid-style, still clutching the halluci-lighter in one hand. When Rylin wordlessly held out half her sandwich, Leda took it with a nod of thanks. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

They sat for a while like that, the silence broken only by the crunch of the crispy pretzel bread, the occasional listless puff of the abandoned halluci-lighter. Leda offered the pipe to Rylin again, but to her surprise, the other girl shook her head.

“Smoking isn’t really my thing anymore, after . . .”

“After Cord broke up with you for stealing his drugs?” Leda prompted, then cringed at the callousness of the wording. “I didn’t mean—”

Rylin waved away the apology. “Yeah, that. Also, after my ex-boyfriend got arrested for dealing.”

“Sorry. I had no idea.” Leda twisted the halluci-lighter back and forth in her hands.

Rylin glanced over. “Are you okay, Leda?”

The simplicity of the question nearly broke Leda’s self-control. People didn’t do that often enough—just look at each other and ask Are you okay?

“Did you bomb the SATs or something?” Rylin guessed.

“The SATs?” Leda’s college applications felt oddly detached from her, as if they had never really belonged to her in the first place. So much of what she had wanted before felt that way now. Watt’s revelation seemed to have cleaved the world into two universes: the one where she was just Leda, and the one where she might be a killer.

No, she corrected, might be a killer was the wrong way to put it. She already knew she was a killer. She had killed Eris.

But instead of confronting what she’d done, Leda had tried to bury it every way she knew how—by blackmailing people to keep the secret for her, by doing drugs until she blacked out. She had turned forcibly away from the truth, even when the truth literally dragged her to the brink of death.