The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

  Leda nodded numbly. Her throat felt closed up, her mind still roaring and blank all at once. She walked out of the police station with dazed steps, like someone who was drunk, or very lost.

  What was Avery doing, confessing like that? “Ping to Avery,” she said into her contacts, and when that went to voice mail, “Ping to Atlas.” Atlas would know what was going on, would tell her what was happening up there on the thousandth floor . . .

  But Atlas’s contacts never rang. All Leda got was a flat single-note tone, and a command not valid error.

  Leda stumbled forward, leaning against a nearby bench, trying to regain her balance. This didn’t make sense. Atlas was gone. Atlas, the only real tether holding Avery in place. Had he run away again . . . Or did his parents get rid of him?

  Leda thought of Avery yesterday, insisting that Leda had always been the brave one, looking out for everyone around her. And she realized what had happened.

  Avery had confessed for Leda’s sake.

  She was taking Leda’s guilt onto herself. Letting herself be dragged down beneath it all, so that Leda could go free. Avery was giving Leda her life back—sacrificing herself for Leda’s sake—in one last, ultimate gesture of friendship. And if she was doing that, Leda realized in a panic, it could only mean one thing.

  She turned and sprinted toward the nearest upTower elevator, hoping she wasn’t too late.

  AVERY

  SEVERAL HUNDRED FLOORS upTower, Avery was putting the final pieces of her plan in action.

  “Avery Elizabeth Fuller!” Her father’s words echoed furiously off the polished marble floors, the high arched ceilings, the mirrored walls of their apartment’s two-story entryway. “What the hell is this about?”

  Of course Pierson Fuller was angry, given the way the past forty-eight hours had gone, at least from his perspective. All the glamorous victory of the inauguration ball had been followed by the revelation that Avery and Atlas loved each other—a fact that came to light in an ugly and very public way. The Fullers had gone from being the most celebrated, most envied family in New York, to the butt of a vulgar joke.

  He’d gotten rid of Atlas, hoping that would solve the problem, only to be confronted by something even worse—the police pounding on his door in the early hours of the morning. I’m sorry, sir, Avery imagined them saying, but we have your daughter in custody at the station.

  “Why didn’t you warn us? You just went down to the police station alone?” Elizabeth threw her arms around her daughter, her voice breaking. “Is this about Atlas?”

  Avery pulled herself roughly from her mom’s embrace. “No, you think?” she demanded.

  “This isn’t about Atlas,” Pierson bellowed. “It’s about you, Avery! You violated our trust. As if learning about you and Atlas wasn’t hard enough, now we have the police coming for us at six a.m. saying that our daughter has gone down to the station and inexplicably confessed to killing someone?”

  “Two people, actually,” Avery couldn’t help reminding him.

  “Avery didn’t kill anyone,” Elizabeth pronounced in the same tone she would have used to say, This tablecloth shouldn’t be blue. As if by saying it, she could will it to reality. “She didn’t even know that Mariel girl.”

  “I did know her, actually,” Avery said, and then prepared herself to deliver the punch line, the lethal blow: “She knew the truth about me and Atlas, you see.”

  Silence. The shock of her words seemed to reverberate in the air.

  “Don’t you dare say that again,” her father threatened, and now his voice was frighteningly low. “Don’t you even think about saying that, or anything like it. Do you realize how hard it was for me just to get you back home, after that ridiculous confession? I had to pull every string I had and then some, not to mention pay an obscene amount of money for temporary bail.”

  “God forbid you have to spend money on me,” Avery said bitterly. “But then, everything has a price tag to you, doesn’t it, Dad? Even my happiness?”

  Her mom gasped aloud, but Avery wasn’t looking at her. She had eyes only for her father.

  He ran a hand wearily over his features. “What the hell were you thinking, Avery?”

  “When I killed her, or when I told the police?”

  “Stop saying that you killed her!”

  “What does it matter to you anyway?” she shouted. “Nothing is sacred to you but your own ambition! You wouldn’t care if I actually had killed her, you only care that I confessed to it!” Her hands had balled into fists at her sides, her nails inscribing themselves into her skin.

  “So you’re admitting that you didn’t do it.” Her father reached roughly for Avery’s arm. “I want to protect you, Avery, but I can’t help if you won’t talk to us. Who are you covering for? Was it Atlas?”

  “Of course it wasn’t Atlas!” This was taking too long, she thought frantically. She needed them to leave before Leda found out what she had done, or before the sun rose too high.

  Her mother was still wringing her hands, her voice breaking. “Then why are you—”

  “I hate you!” Avery screamed as wildly and cruelly as she could, wanting to lash out, to hurt them. “I hate you for what you said to Atlas! He asked for your support, for your love, and what did you do in return? You made him disappear!” She began to cry—it wasn’t that hard, really, after everything she’d been through. “I just want you both to leave me alone!”

  Her father was looking at her as if she was insane, or a stranger. “We’ll discuss this later,” he said at last, already stepping back through the front door. It was clear he couldn’t get away from her fast enough. “There’s no reasoning with you when you’re like this.”

  Elizabeth paused at the doorway and turned back, her heartbreak written on her face. The sight of it almost changed Avery’s mind.

  “I’m locking you in this apartment,” Pierson declared, tapping at the touch screen and scanning his iris to confirm his identity. “No more sneaking out to police stations or to see your friends or anywhere else.”

  “Where would I go, now that you’ve taken Atlas from me and all of New York despises me?”

  “They don’t despise you, Avery. They’re disgusted by you. As am I.”

  Her father’s features hardened, and Avery’s resolve hardened too. So this is how it will be, she thought. This is our last good-bye.

  “You stay here and think about what you’ve done,” her father snapped. Her mom was still crying, softly.

  And then the elevator doors clicked shut behind them, leaving Avery alone on the thousandth floor.

  She hurried breathlessly to her room and grabbed the bag she’d shoved under her bed late last night. Inside were dozens of fat red cylinders—spark-sticks, the tiny, single-use lighters that burst into flame when you pulled off their neoprene tab. These were the high-grade kind, producing an extra hot superflame, intended for campers stuck in the wild. In the Tower it was illegal even to possess something like this, especially up here where the oxygen circulated so freely, where everything was already a little too flammable.

  Avery pulled the neoprene tab from the first one, and a flame leapt instantly out one side.

  It wavered and flickered, seeming to contain a multitude of colors at once, colors she didn’t normally see in the Tower—not just red, but rich oranges and golds and even a bright liquid blue that seemed to crackle and spark over the whole thing like summer lightning. It was beautiful.

  She tossed the spark-stick onto her bed, covered in its white lace pillows and coverlet, and watched dispassionately as it went up in flames.

  From there Avery moved briskly around the apartment, tossing a live spark-stick on every surface. She noted with grim satisfaction that none of the smoke alarms went off. The tongues of flame fed hungrily on one another, growing higher and higher, casting a wild gleam on the bones of her face. Her eyes were narrowed, her cheekbones more sharply prominent than usual. She’d dressed for the occasion in jeans and a slim white sweater, di
amond studs at her ears, looking for all the world like an avenging angel, heralding ash and brimstone and destruction. A pale smile curled on her lips as she watched her parents’ apartment burn to oblivion. The symbol of their wealth and status and sickening ambition, the most expensive thing they’d ever bought, except perhaps for Avery herself. Soon both would be gone.

  Her steps faltered at Atlas’s room. This was sacred ground, and she could still feel his presence here, no matter how hard her parents had tried to erase him from it. She let herself sit for a moment on the bed, running her hands over the pillows, imagining that they still smelled like him—

  Avery stood up abruptly, steeling herself, and tossed a spark-stick in here too, moving quickly on before she could witness the carnage.

  It only took a couple of minutes for the apartment to become a furnace. The smell of burning furniture varnish and carpet, the rubbery scent of melting tech, made her gag. Swirls of black smoke gathered near the ceiling. Avery hurried onward, ahead of the advancing wall of crimson. She tried to ignore the yelling in her ears, as if the fiends of hell were crying out at her for what she was about to do.

  The kitchen was trickiest, because there were so many inflammable surfaces in here. Avery settled for throwing one last spark-stick on the counter, though it didn’t really matter; the apartment was already destroyed. Sparks shot upward, then floated down like burning flecks of snow.

  No, Avery realized, arrested by the sight of something out the window. That was real snow. Today was the first snowfall of the year.

  The snowflakes seemed frozen between the window frames, like a still-life painting. For a moment Avery expected them to fly back upward, back to the clouds as if summoned there by magic.

  A wave of heat blasted toward her, scorching the bare skin of her neck. She lunged forward, stumbling toward the pantry.

  Only one way out now.

  She yanked the old retractable ladder down from the ceiling. Her heart thudded stickily in her chest. A flicker of fear rose up in her, like a tongue of flame, but it was too late now; she’d committed to this course of action.

  At the top of the ladder, Avery pushed up the trapdoor—it offered a moment’s token resistance, but someone had clearly tampered with its electronic command system, because it gave way almost instantly. Thank god Watt had kept his promise.

  She emerged onto the roof and took a deep breath, pulling the trapdoor shut behind her. The air burned the inside of her nostrils, singed the edges of her hair.

  The roof looked the same as she had left it a year ago. A few machines humming under photovoltaic surfaces, a few rain-collection tubs gathering water and cycling it downTower for filtration. Avery kicked off her shoes and walked toward the edge. The pavement felt rough on her bare feet. She lifted her head, her profile proud and sharp and beautiful.

  She felt very high up. The snow was falling harder now, as if pieces of the sky were breaking off to swirl rapidly downward.

  The city below her was a study in dark and light, like an old-fashioned film without color—a city of extremes, Avery thought. So full of love and hate, but perhaps that was the way the world worked. Perhaps the price of a forever love was to feel forever lonely, once you had lost it.

  Avery didn’t want to exist in a world where she wasn’t free to love the person her heart called her to.

  She was glad that she’d confessed to what happened to Eris and to Mariel. If she was giving it all up anyway, she might as well take the blame. Leda didn’t deserve to lose her freedom over those deaths. No, she thought fervently, Leda deserved to live, to move on from her mistakes in a way that Avery could no longer do. Leda deserved redemption, and Avery had found a way to give it to her.

  Her parting gift to her best friend—a life for a life, an even trade. She knew Eris would have wanted it this way.

  Avery wasn’t particularly religious, yet she closed her eyes for a final prayer. She prayed that Leda would find peace, that her parents would forgive her, that Atlas would be okay, wherever he was.

  She stared at the glorious beauty of the horizon one last time, studying the way the snow began to dust everything, blanketing the city’s flaws, evening out its imperfections. Its flakes settled in her hair, on the white of her sweater.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and stepped right up to the edge, her eyes still closed.

  They were the last words Avery Fuller ever spoke.

  WATT

  FROM HIS UNEXPECTED vantage point on the East River, Watt was one of the first people to see the thousandth floor catch fire.

  It was striking, really: the brightness of the flames curling above the Tower, an elegant orange-red brushstroke. Opalescent gray thunderheads coalesced around the rain-blimps, hanging in that low winter way that portended the first dusting of snow. There was something magical about it, even now that the whole thing was engineered: the delicate crystalline miracle reduced to a chemical reaction, the mating of hydrosulphates and carbon.

  The magic was in the air, in the way people reacted. New Yorkers loved the first snowfall of the year—they wore hats inside the Tower and smiled at strangers and started humming holiday music. Watt remembered hearing that at MIT, the freshmen class went streaking on the evening of the first snowfall. Not that he would ever get to see it.

  He wondered how Leda was doing. He’d tried pinging her a few times—okay, maybe a lot of times—since she left him at the inauguration ball on Saturday night, but she had steadfastly ignored him. He understood that she had a lot of things to work through; especially now, after what her best friend had done. Watt had plenty to think about, himself.

  This morning he had turned off Nadia to ponder it all in silence, in the privacy of his own mind. And he’d rented a boat for the first time in his life. Or rather, borrowed one without asking.

  The dock was closed when he got there: It was far too early, especially on a scheduled weather day. WARNING: PRECIPITATION ALERT, the screen had flashed, refusing to let him rent anything, but Watt wasn’t about to let that stop him. Even without Nadia, it was the work of a few moments for him to hack the rental shop’s operational computer.

  He settled on a blue quadro-blade, one of the small speedboats that skimmed above the choppy surface of the waves, lifted on hydrofoil wings. He typed his destination into the boat’s GPS and leaned back as it darted him upriver, like a bug zipping over the water.

  Watt saw the infrastructure along the east side of the Tower rip past him without actually registering it. He had an idea too unspeakable to even put into words, and he needed to step back from it—to let himself view it out of the corner of his eye, in his peripheral vision—before he could bear to face it head-on.

  Right on schedule, the snow began to fall. It stung Watt into alertness as he sped along. A BrightRain hovercover floated out of the back of the boat; Watt considered putting it away but decided it wasn’t worth the bother. The hovercover floated softly over his head and began to emit a soft yellow glow. Its conductive membrane was converting the kinetic energy of the snowfall into electricity.

  Watt pulled up along the spot where Mariel had drowned, near a dock on the East River. He killed the motor. The boat’s foils retracted back into its sides, lowering the boat softly into the water, to be rocked back and forth by the waves.

  He stared at the pier. Along this stretch of it, for several hundred meters, extended a multiuse dock—the kind of place you could recharge autocars or pull up a boat. Half the dock was covered by a roof, while the other half was open to the elements, lined with sunplates. A small shed in the corner probably housed spare equipment, maybe a human employee during working hours.

  Watt tried to imagine Leda, high and vengeful, logging on to the feeds and figuring out where Mariel was. Following her here from José’s party, then pushing her violently into the water. Except, how would Leda have known that Mariel was going to walk home instead of taking the monorail? Or was Leda reckless and high enough to act on impulse, to follow Mariel not knowi
ng where she was headed? Did Leda know that it was going to rain that night or that Mariel couldn’t swim?

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that Leda wasn’t capable of such a thing, no matter how desperate or afraid she’d felt.

  Watt’s eyes drank in every detail of the charging station. He watched the autocars dart in and out, watched a few empty boats rock listlessly at the docks. Hulking transport bots rolled back and forth on their programmed routes, their wheels heavy on the pavement.

  The idea in Watt’s mind became more substantial, until finally he could ignore it no longer. Because pushing Mariel into the water on a dark and stormy night—the perfect conditions to make something look like an accident, at least at first glance—didn’t sound like Leda. It was too neat, too rational, too much the perfect crime.

  Watt knew who might have done it.

  “Quant on,” he muttered, and felt the familiar textured deepening of his own awareness as Nadia stirred to life. He waited for Nadia to ask what they were doing out here. When she said nothing, his certainty began to calcify. He felt an unfamiliar urge to cry.

  “Nadia. Did you kill Mariel?”

  “Yes,” she answered, with startling simplicity.

  “Why?” he cried out, the wind biting at his words.

  “I did it for you, Watt. Mariel knew too much. She was a liability.”

  The morning seemed to condense around him, the snowflakes vibrating in midair. Watt felt an anguished swoop in his gut and closed his eyes.

  He could have solved this whole mystery months ago if he had simply thought of asking Nadia. She had no choice but to tell him the truth. She was able to withhold information from him—she had to; if Watt’s brain tried to hold everything she did, it would literally break down and die. He had built her with the ability to keep secrets from him, because there was no other way to build her.

  But Nadia couldn’t lie to him, not when he asked her a direct question. He had just never thought to ask this one, until now.