The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

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.”

  “She didn’t write down our secrets,” Leda repeated hesitantly. “You’re right. There’s nothing here that can incriminate us.”

  “We’re safe, Leda. We’re actually safe.”

  She tilted her head thoughtfully. Her newly short hair curled around her ears, curls that Watt used to wrap his hands in, when he would tip Leda’s head back to kiss her. Then, to Watt’s surprise, she began to laugh—a joyful, relieved laugh, deeper and heartier than you would expect, given how small she was. Watt missed that laugh.

  He would have fallen in love with her right then, all over again, if he didn’t already love her with every atom of his being.

  “We really are safe,” she said wonderingly.

  Something in Leda’s voice gave him pause. She was different, Watt thought, trying to pinpoint what exactly had changed. Then he realized—her force field was down.

  All this time, Leda had been holding herself at arm’s length, at a stiff and safe distance from the world, and most of all from him. But now her shield was lowered, her electric fence switched off, every last barrier between the two of them zapped into oblivion. He felt as if he was looking at Leda for the first time in months.

  Watt held his breath as she leaned in to kiss him.

  The kiss was like a jolt of nitrogen, of electricity, dancing down every last nerve ending in his body. Her hands closed over his shoulders, slipping under the edges of his sweater, and where her bare skin touched his it felt somehow significant, like the imprint of her hand would be forever tattooed there. Leda’s pulse was as erratic as his.

  It astonished Watt how utterly right everything suddenly felt. Why had he wasted all those months spinning madly like a top, trying so desperately to forget Leda, when just touching her made the world seem so simple?

  When she finally pulled away, Watt felt dazed. “I thought . . .”

  “I changed my mind. Girls do that sometimes, you know.” Leda smiled softly and leaned in to kiss him again.

  RYLIN

  “INBOX,” RYLIN MUTTERED yet again as she headed warily toward the monorail stop. Her contacts obediently pulled up her messages, but as before, there was nothing new from Hiral.

  It was Thursday night, when Hiral would normally have been at work. Except that he had sent a cryptic message that afternoon, asking if Rylin could come meet him here.

  She couldn’t shake the sense that there had been something strange about Hiral’s mood this past week. He’d been dodging her messages, had barely even looked her in the eye when she brought his favorite muffins over one morning before school. Whatever was on his mind, he clearly didn’t want to share it with her.

  Though she wasn’t exactly sharing everything with him right now, either.

  She turned onto the platform and saw him there, wearing a simple gray sweatshirt and jeans, a backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder. Maybe he’d packed a picnic, planned some kind of surprise excursion to the outer boroughs, Rylin tried to tell herself. She didn’t quite believe it.

  “Hey, you.” She rose up to kiss him.

  “Thanks for coming,” Hiral said gruffly and
shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m glad you made it.”

  “Of course I made it,” she replied, but Hiral didn’t return her smile.

  Rylin’s eyes flicked up to the departures board, and a new dread twisted in her stomach. This monorail only went to the airport. “Hiral,” she said slowly, “what’s going on?”

  “I’m leaving.” He seemed to be speaking in as few words as possible, as if each syllable caused him unthinkable pain.

  “Leaving? What are you talking about?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you, except I had to say good-bye.”

  “Good-bye?” Rylin stumbled back a step, toward a vending machine illuminated with a coffee icon. The bitter scent of coffee grounds emanated from its surface. Her sense of foreboding had stretched itself into something much greater, something Rylin knew she wouldn’t be able to fix.

  “I’m leaving New York for good. I took a job on Undina, harvesting algae. My flight leaves in two hours,” Hiral said quietly.

  “What the hell?” Rylin cried out, her throat raw. “You decided to leave, with no input from me? We aren’t even going to discuss this?”

  Hiral frowned in confusion. “We did discuss it, and you made it clear that you didn’t want to leave.”

  “That was barely a conversation!” This couldn’t be happening. Was Hiral, the boy she’d known her entire life, really turning his back on everything?

  “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, but I thought this was the right thing to do.”

  The monorail pulled up in a sudden and violent rush of air, lifting Rylin’s ponytail from the back of her neck. Hiral turned to watch its arrival, his eyes following its progress along the track, before turning back to her.

  “So you’re giving up,” Rylin said slowly. “You didn’t even give me a chance to fight for us.”

  “Rylin,” he replied, “do you even want to fight for us?”

  “Of course I do!”

  The doors opened and people poured out of the monorail, flooding past Rylin and Hiral toward wherever they were headed. Rylin barely registered them, even when they bumped right into her. Her eyes were locked on Hiral’s.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” he said heavily. “I think you know that we’re over, just like I do.”

  “No! You don’t get to just decide that we’re over!” she cried out, attracting a few stares from passersby. Why was Hiral just standing here, looking at her with such defeated resignation?

  Rylin was getting pretty sick of the boys in her life making decisions without bothering to consult her. They kept kissing her when she didn’t want to be kissed, or not kissing her when that was all she wanted; hitting on her and breaking up with her; forcing her to steal drugs and sell drugs and then forgive the whole thing; pulling her this way and that until she was stretched unbearably thin. When did Rylin get to make up her own mind, for once? When would she get a damned say in any of it?

  Hiral didn’t get to just take their relationship into his own hands, with no thought for her. “You can’t do this. You can’t just walk away after everything we’ve been through,” she insisted, with less vehemence.

  “It’s because of everything we’ve been through that I have to walk away. Because you deserve better!” Hiral exclaimed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you my plan, okay? But I was worried that you might try to convince me to stay—and if you did, I knew it would be hard for me to say no to you.” He let out a long breath. “I really need to leave.”

  “Why?”

  Passengers began to board the monorail car, bringing with them their suitcases or babies, their regrets or hopes. Most of them were grinning with visible excitement, as if they couldn’t wait to reach their destination, wherever it was.

  Hiral hesitated. “I was in trouble. Last year before I was arrested, I ran up some debts with V and his supplier, a debt that I never really paid off.”

  Even though she was wounded and stung, Rylin felt her blood prickle on Hiral’s behalf. “Never paid off? You were arrested and they weren’t! How is that fair?”

  “Who said any of this was fair?” he demanded. Rylin could tell that he hated to admit this to her. “I owed those guys a lot of money. I tried to pay it off bit by bit, but it wasn’t fast enough for them. They kept pressuring me to deal again. They said if I didn’t get the money, they would frame me, send me back to jail—and this time I wouldn’t be found innocent. I would go to prison. For years, maybe.”

  “Oh, Hiral,” Rylin breathed, reaching for his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted so desperately to be worthy of you, Rylin. More than anything I wanted to hold myself to the promise I made you when we got back together. I swore that I wouldn’t hurt you ever again.”

  The monorail was still waiting there, hushed and expectant, its eerie lights reflecting around the curved inside of its surface. Rylin felt a stab of panic. Those doors would only stay open another minute.

  “We can figure this out,” she said impulsively.

  Hiral shook his head, gently detangling her hands from his. “Your place is here, Ry. With Chrissa, going to college, studying holography. Becoming the person you deserve to be.”

  And Rylin knew that he was right, no matter how much it hurt.

  He gave a brave smile. “Besides, I think I’m going to like Undina.”

  Rylin tried to picture Hiral there, in that enormous modular floating city located off Polynesia: living in employee housing, spending his days scraping algae from massive nets, his hair sun-kissed and shaggy. Making friends with all the other young people—there were thousands of them; Undina had a bottomless demand for labor. And it was its own sovereign nation, with no citizenship requirements: the natural destination for anyone who wanted to start over.

  Anyone who wanted to leave their old life without a backward glance.

  She realized, with a pang of regret, that he wasn’t changing his mind. “I love you,” she whispered.

  “I know that you do. And I love you too. But I also know that I’m not enough for you.”

  The train’s lights began flashing; it was about to pull out of the station. Hiral shot Rylin an anguished glance. “I hope I see you again someday,” he said quickly. “But even if I don’t, I’ll always be thinking of you.”

  “Hiral, I—” she stammered as he pulled her close to kiss her one last time. Then he sprinted through the closing train doors.

  Rylin’s vision became blurry. She watched Hiral wave at her through the flexiglass as the monorail swooped off into the night, and he became just another silhouette in the window. Then he was gone.

  It was a long time before Rylin finally made her way back home.

  WATT

  “I’M REALLY GLAD you decided to stay.” Watt leaned against the door, reluctant to say good-bye to Leda. He didn’t want her to leave, didn’t want this charmed moment between them to be over.

  “I know. But I really have to go,” she said, and smiled. There was a new bloom of color to her cheeks, a translucent liquid glow shining through her skin. When she was like this—when she was happy—Leda was more magnetic and beautiful than anyone in the world.

  “Leda—”

  She turned to him expectantly, and Watt swallowed. His throat felt dry.

  “Thank you for trusting me again. For letting me back in.”

  Leda sighed and sank back onto his bed. She pulled up one leg to cross it over her ankle, seeming lost in thought. “Did I ever tell you why my parents sent me to rehab?” she murmured.

  Watt shook his head.

  Leda bit her lip and looked down, hunching her shoulders forward as if to ward off a blow. “After I learned that Eris was my half sister, I went to a really dark place, until one night I overdosed. I don’t even remember what I took—I didn’t actually think it was that much, but anyway . . .”

  Leda’s voice sounded haunted at the memory. “When I finally woke up, I was on top of my bed, fully dressed. I guess I’d cut myself at some point, because th
ere was blood all over my shirt and on my hands. I didn’t remember anything, Watt.” She stared determinedly down to avoid looking at him. “I had no idea where I had been the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Leda. I’m so sorry.” Watt remembered the hollow, haunted look in Leda’s eyes when she’d come back from rehab and broke up with him. He had never realized how drastically she veered off the deep end.

  Watt, Nadia’s words cut into his consciousness. You need to find out when this happened.

  He was so deeply shocked by Leda’s story that he didn’t even question Nadia. “When was this, Leda?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of days before I went to rehab. The first week of February, I guess?”

  Mariel died that week, Nadia reminded him, very gently. Leda has a block of time that she can’t account for—after which she woke up covered in blood—during the same few days that Mariel was killed.

  There was a sudden ringing in Watt’s ears, as if the entire world had spun wildly on its axis and then ground to an abrupt halt. No.

  “Watt? What is it?”

  Leda had gone on a horrific drug-fueled spiral after learning that Eris had been her half sister—which was right around the time that Mariel had died.

  Maybe Watt had seen this coming, in a blind, subconscious way, as if the truth were around a corner that he refused to turn. He thought of all those times he’d paused, thinking over Mariel’s death—all those unsettling moments when the story hadn’t quite fit, and how his mind lingered over it, puzzling out the pieces. The answer had been there, but Watt never saw it because he didn’t want to see it.

  No, he told himself again. He hadn’t seen it because it was impossible. Leda was many things, ruthless and willful and passionate, but a cold-blooded killer wasn’t one of them. He’d seen Leda push Eris; he knew she’d never meant to kill her—that it was an accident.

  But now that the doubt was in his brain, he couldn’t prevent it from worming even deeper. Wouldn’t Leda do anything to protect the people she loved? If she thought Mariel was coming after her friends—if she thought Mariel was going to destroy Avery and Rylin and Watt—she might have killed Mariel in the middle of her wild, drugged-out bender and then blacked it out, her own mind shielding her from what she had done.