The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

  Leda’s voice was very small. “Maybe I did.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Leda said helplessly. “But I might have. I might have killed her that night when I was on my bender, after we came back from Dubai. I have a whole block of time that I can’t account for. What if I killed her?”

  “That’s a pretty big stretch,” Avery said dubiously. “Just because you blacked out doesn’t mean you committed murder.”

  “How can you say that when you’ve already seen me kill someone?”

  “You didn’t mean to kill Eris,” Avery reminded her.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that it happened!” Leda stared down at her hands, picking at the polish on one of her fingers, twisting a ring back and forth. Avery knew better than to interrupt. She looked out the window, to where the sun had moved from behind a cloud, rising ever higher into the towering sky.

  “I have no idea what I’m capable of,” Leda said softly. “Do you know what I was trying to forget, that day I took all those drugs and overdosed, after we got back from Dubai?”

  “Probably the fact that Mariel hurt you and left you for dead.”

  Leda ignored her. “It was something Mariel told me, that night in Dubai. She said that Eris was my half sister. That my dad was Eris’s dad too.”

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, Avery felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. She was reminded of the time when she was little, playing tag with Cord, and somehow she ran straight into a wall of flexiglass. Look, she’d said to Cord, through her bleeding lip. I didn’t see that coming.

  This felt a little like that: the bright cold truth you never saw coming and yet once you collided with it, you wondered how you hadn’t noticed it there. You felt there had been so many signs, glaringly obvious signs, but you missed them until it was too late.

  “It makes more sense than what you thought was going on—that Eris was having an affair with your dad.” Avery sighed. “Leda. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  Leda looked utterly broken. “Because I was ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had killed my sister. I wanted to forget it all, to wipe the slate clean and move on. That’s what my doctor told me, at least,” she said softly. “That’s why I tried to cut out everything related to my old life when I came back from rehab.”

  Avery thought of what her dad had said as he signed her transfer papers for Oxford—that it was no use running from things if you would have to face them eventually. She and Leda had both tried to run, in their own ways. And look where it had gotten them.

  Her heart ached for Leda, wrestling with so much unthinkable guilt. For Eris, who had died too young. For all of them, hemmed in by things beyond their control. If Leda’s dad hadn’t cheated on her mom; if he’d told Leda the truth about Eris; if Avery’s parents had adopted another boy instead of Atlas; if the zetta hadn’t caught them in the elevator last night—if, if, if. It struck Avery as irrational and cruel that the world was built on so many ifs, so many small choices that seem like nothing at the time, but become the axes upon which whole lives turn.

  “You couldn’t have known,” she said to Leda, who shook her head.

  “When I saw them sneaking around, meeting up in secret, I just assumed they were having an affair. I never asked any questions. I never guessed that”—her voice shook a little as she went on, gaining momentum—“that Eris was my half sister. I was always so brusque and impatient with her; I never even tried to be her friend, and then I killed her, and I might have killed Mariel too!”

  She took a deep breath. “Which is why I’m going to the police, to confess to pushing Eris. And to tell them that I could have killed Mariel, while I was blacked out.”

  There was something chillingly final about the way she announced it: the stubborn lift to her head, the implacable set of her jaw. But Avery saw the shadow of fear glinting in her eyes.

  “Leda,” Avery said softly. “Telling the truth about how Eris died won’t bring her back.”

  Avery didn’t mention what would happen to Leda if she confessed to pushing Eris and then lying to cover it up. It would go badly for her: much worse, in fact, than if she had told the truth in the first place. At least then she could have pleaded involuntary manslaughter. Now she would also be confessing to obstruction of justice, to willfully concealing the truth for a year. And the truth would probably come out—that Leda and Eris had been related—and Avery knew a jury wouldn’t view that sympathetically. It might look like some twisted motive for murder, as if Leda had wanted to get her half sister out of the way. Not to mention the damage it would do to both families.

  “I know I’ll do prison time,” Leda said, reading her mind. “It’s no more than I deserve. And at least then I’ll have a clear conscience.”

  A clear conscience. Avery couldn’t remember the last time she’d had one of those. She wondered if she ever would, after what she’d done to Max.

  “You don’t deserve that, Leda. I was there; I saw—I remember how Eris ran toward you, and there wasn’t a safety railing, and she was wearing those enormous sky-high platform shoes, and it was so windy, we were screaming into it. . . .” She trailed off and took a slow breath. “Leda. Do you want that single, accidental mistake to define you for the rest of your life?”

  “What do you want me to do, forget it ever happened? I can’t!”

  “Of course not. I want you to remember. No offense,” Avery went on, “but I knew Eris better than you did, and I don’t think she would want you to confess. She would want you, her half sister—the only sister she ever had—to go off and live your life to the fullest. To honor her memory by living.”

  “What about Mariel?” Leda whispered. “Maybe if I talk to the police about it, they’ll share some of the details, explain why they reopened the case as a murder investigation. Maybe something they say will trigger my memory, and I’ll know for sure whether I killed her or not.”

  “That’s a pretty flimsy reason to confess to something you aren’t sure you did,” Avery snapped.

  Leda shook her head. “The police have already made the connection between Eris’s death and Mariel’s. Sooner or later they’ll learn that Mariel knew our secrets—the ones I told her. It will look as if someone killed her to cover up what she knew. At least this way I’ll take the fall. Then you’ll all be safe.”

  There was something oddly heroic about Leda’s decision. It was as if she’d reached a searing conclusion within herself and was determined to follow it through, no matter the consequences. Typical Leda, Avery thought. Stubborn until the bitter end.

  “Don’t do anything drastic. At least wait for a day,” Avery pleaded. It was the best she could come up with. “Just promise me you’ll think it over, and then if you still want to go through with this tomorrow, I swear I’ll be there with you.”

  Leda looked up, tremulous and hopeful. “You would do that?”

  “Of course. No one should have to confess to murder alone,” Avery assured her. “Haven’t you heard? That’s what best friends are for.”

  To Avery’s surprise, Leda gave a strangled, snorting laugh—and then just as quickly, the laugh dissolved into tears. It was as if the taut strain under which she had been operating was finally snapped.

  Avery slid her chair closer to Leda, who leaned her head on Avery’s shoulder and kept on sobbing with reckless abandon.

  “God,” Leda sniffed at one point, “why can’t I stop crying?”

  “When was the last time you cried?” Avery asked.

  Leda shook her head. “I don’t remember.”

  “Then it sounds like you have some catching up to do.”

  Avery stayed there, her arm on Leda’s back as if she were comforting a child, as tears slid down her own face.

  She was crying for her best friend’s anguish, and what had happened to Eris, and what she had done to Max. She was crying for her and Atlas, and her own selfish fear that she would lose him—that this crazy, broken world
would refuse to let them be together, and it would cost them everything.

  The stares were much worse on the way home from Leda’s.

  It was after noon; by now the article had gone completely viral, shared and re-shared in countless grotesque incarnations. Avery had been fine on the way downTower, but now, heading home, her confidence faltered.

  The entire Tower had become a sea of hot, eager whispers and searching eyes. Everyone was looking her up and down, staring at her with a collective disgusted fascination. Avery wasn’t unaccustomed to being stared at. Her whole life, people had looked at her and said things: She’s so beautiful; she’s not as beautiful as I expected; I hear she’s a slut; I hear she’s a prude; and on and on and on. Avery had learned to let it slide right off her. Until now.

  “Whore,” she heard one girl mutter under her breath, as she boarded the C local lift upTower. The girl’s friends giggled maliciously.

  I haven’t done anything wrong. All I did was fall in love with someone they think I shouldn’t be with, Avery reminded herself. She tried to feel sorry for these people, for being so pitifully narrow-minded.

  It got worse when the lift paused at the express stop on 965, and a group of her friends stepped on board.

  They were chatting loosely among themselves, clearly coming from a hungover post-party brunch. Avery remembered those brunches: sitting across from her friends at Bakehouse or Miatza, ordering truffle fries and bacon and exchanging stories from the night before, laughing over the silly things everyone had done. They now felt like memories that belonged to a different person.

  The moment they saw her, everyone in the group fell silent.

  Avery made eye contact with Zay Wagner, but he quickly flushed and glanced down. Behind him, Ming stared at Avery, her lips parted in horrified shock, before she spun around to start a conversation with Maxton Feld. Avery’s gaze sought Risha’s—Risha, her friend since fourth grade—and she watched, almost in slow motion, as Risha turned her back on her. “I left something at the table,” Risha said in a loud, false voice. “Can we go back?”

  Before the doors could slide shut, Avery’s friends had all turned and escaped the lift with an audible sigh of relief, leaving her alone, surrounded by strangers. The entire scene had taken less than five seconds.

  This was a lot of people to be on an elevator this high, Avery thought, a little dazed; and then she realized that of course it wasn’t a coincidence. They had come hoping to see her, to get a glimpse of the infamous Avery Fuller.

  A few of them stepped closer. She felt their eyes drilling into her, scraping at her—it was as if they could see straight through her clothes, to her naked, raw self beneath.

  “Disgusting,” muttered one of the men, and he spit on her shoes, a great wad of mucus dripping there on her black suede boot.

  Avery kept her chin up, blinking furiously to keep her eyes from welling with tears, but her silence must have emboldened them, because then another person—a boy only a few years younger than her—was calling out in her direction. “Hey, Fuller, heading home to do it with your brother?”

  “Some princess of New York.”

  “Why don’t you try this on for size instead?” one man cried out, making a lewd gesture.

  “What a dirty little—”

  And then the floodgates were truly open, and everyone was shouting at her, calling her vulgar, ugly names—things that she would never in a million years say to another human being, especially to someone she didn’t know. Foul slurs that Avery had never dreamed would be hurled in her direction.

  The strangest part, she thought in a daze, was the raw delight on their expressions. They were all so eager to witness her downfall. They relished it.

  Someone tossed a soda on her. Avery didn’t even speak up, just let the syrup collect in her hair, viscous and foul. It stung her eyes, or maybe that was her tears.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself: This was just soda, and these were just words. Love would always be stronger than hate.

  When the elevator finally stopped at 990, Avery saw in shock that there was a whole crowd of people there, gathered around the landing. Reporters and bystanders and zettas, flocks of them. They all immediately whirled on her, shouting her name, asking if she wanted to comment—

  Avery ducked her head down and shoved through the center of them, past the security checkpoint, the place these people couldn’t follow. When she stepped into her family’s private elevator, she was gasping as if she’d run a marathon. Her cheeks were wet and sticky with soda and sadness.

  She needed to see Atlas, no matter the consequences. She needed the warm, comforting feel of his skin on hers, to remind herself that they had each other, that they loved each other. That together they could face anything.

  But when she knocked on the door to his room, no one answered. Avery tentatively pushed it open, and what she saw made her breath catch in her chest.

  Every trace of Atlas was gone.

  She walked past the bed, crisp and folded with hospital corners, and opened the door to the closet, already knowing what she would find. It was empty.

  She tried the massive chest, violently yanking the handle of each drawer in succession, but they were empty too. There were no instaphotos tacked to Atlas’s favorite spot on the wall, no collection of knickknacks on the shelves, nothing at all to prove that he had ever lived here. It was as cold and impersonal as a hotel room; as if the memory of him had been forcibly vacuumed out of the apartment.

  “Avery? What happened to you?”

  Her mom stood in the doorway, a stricken expression on her face.

  “What have you done?” Avery demanded. “Did you send Atlas away? Is he in Dubai?”

  Her father stepped forward to join her mom, his arms crossed implacably over his chest. “No, he’s not in Dubai,” he said curtly.

  “Avery, this is for your own good, I promise,” her mom insisted.

  Avery ignored them, speaking a few commands to ping Atlas—but all she got was a flat monotone beep. Command not valid, her contacts informed her.

  Atlas had been cut off the grid.

  “Where is he?” she cried out.

  “I’m sorry, Avery. This is hard for us too,” her father said, watching her with careful eyes. “I know it feels cruel now, but you’ll thank me someday, when you understand why we had to do it.”

  Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She had crumpled against the doorway and started quietly sobbing again.

  Avery pushed blindly past her parents, down the hallway to her room. She wanted to cry, except she felt oddly past the point of tears. Perhaps she’d used them all up earlier, and now there were none left in the aching cavity inside her.

  She paused at the sight of a white compostable box waiting in the output slot of her room comp, the place where her daily vitamins or frosted glasses of water were dispensed. It was a food delivery, flagged for her. Except she hadn’t ordered anything.

  Avery walked over with slow, terrified steps, and opened the box.

  It was a dozen bright pink cupcakes, accompanied by a generic Happy Birthday slip. On the note, where the custom birthday message went, it said: Always know that my heart is out there, somewhere in the world, beating in time with yours.

  “Oh, Atlas,” she whispered, and it turned out she did have more tears after all, because she was crying again, soft silent tears streaking down her face. Her dad had blocked their communication, but somehow—maybe in the last moments before they took away his tablet—Atlas had thought of this instead. The only way he could contact her, one last time.

  She reached for a cupcake and took a single bite, though it tasted like salt in her mouth.

  Where was he now? Was he okay; was he hurt? What was he thinking about?

  Avery abandoned the cupcake and stumbled into her bathroom, turning all the lights on their highest wattage, setting the shower to scalding hot. Her movements were quick but clumsy, her hands shaking. She stripped off her clothes, tossing them into
an angry pile on the floor, and looked up at her reflection through blurry, tear-filled eyes.

  There it was in all its naked glory: the body her parents had purchased for her. Avery made a few motions, as if she were a puppet being pulled by invisible strings. She twisted a wrist, lifted a shoulder, turned her head back and forth. Whenever she moved, the pale girl in the mirror moved also, staring back at her with hollow eyes. It all felt oddly distant from her. Who was that girl in the mirror, really, and what connection did she have to Avery Fuller?

  She studied her own body with an almost scientific detachment, examining its long, lean curves, the hair tumbling over the shoulders, the perfect hip-to-waist and lip-to-eye and chin-to-mouth ratios. This was what you got when you spent millions of nanodollars to custom-design your daughter from the combined pool of your DNA.

  It wasn’t worth it, she thought. It had never been worth it.

  If only she could take it all back, could rewind her own life to last year, or earlier even—so far back that she could brutally erase all the mistakes she had made. So far back that she could be someone else, could be a normal person, not this cherry-picked human weighed down with a million expectations and strictures. All those awful words that the people had said on the elevator today seemed to fall on Avery at once, in an acid rain of hate.

  She stepped into the shower and scrubbed her skin until it was red and raw, crying herself empty. She cried until her anguish had dulled, until all that was left was a vacant dead feeling. It felt as if part of her soul had been clipped away.

  As the hot water prickled over her, Avery realized that she could do one more good deed. She might be past saving, but there was someone who wasn’t—not yet.

  She closed her eyes, and began to formulate one last plan.

  CALLIOPE

  THE NEXT MORNING, Calliope followed her mom onto the Rail Iberia platform in a daze. She felt oddly like a child, being led blindly by the hand, but for some reason she couldn’t summon the ability to do anything for herself right now.