“Takes one to know one.”
Leda rolled her eyes and took a bite of her favorite goat-cheese-and-asparagus pizza. She felt oddly glad that Watt had decided to show up tonight, whatever his reasons. It was nice having him around. As a friend, of course.
She shifted to look at him, suddenly curious. “How do you do it? Hack things, I mean?”
Watt seemed surprised by the question. “A lot of it is Nadia. I couldn’t do it nearly as quickly without her.”
“You built Nadia,” Leda reminded him. “So don’t try to pass off the credit on her. How do you do it, really?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because.” Because she wanted to understand this part of Watt’s life, this thing that he was so startlingly talented at. Because it was important to him.
Watt shrugged and wiped his hands on one of the synthetic napkins, then pushed aside the takeout boxes to clear a space on the coffee table. He tapped at its surface, the false mosaic quickly melting away to reveal a touch screen. “Can I get into your room comp system?”
“I didn’t mean—you don’t have to hack something right this minute,” she spluttered, confused.
“And miss the chance to show off for you? Never.”
“Grant access,” Leda said, a little flustered, and the room comp automatically admitted Watt to its system.
He lifted an eyebrow, his fingers poised over the touch screen. “So who’ll it be tonight? One of your friends? That German guy Avery is dating?”
Leda imagined asking Watt to hack Calliope’s page on the feeds, or Max’s, or even Mariel’s, which was still saved to the i-Net auto caches. Not long ago, she would have unhesitatingly jumped at the chance to learn more secrets. That was how she and Watt had been brought together the first time: by snooping and spying on people.
But Leda had learned the hard way what happened when you went digging for secrets you were never meant to learn.
“Show me how you accessed the Bakehouse order,” she said instead.
Watt rolled up his sleeves. Leda found her gaze lingering on his bare forearms. “This one is easy,” he boasted. The holo-monitor before them danced rapidly from one display to the next as he synced up her family’s system with whatever he used. “There aren’t many authenticity certificates, so I don’t even have to go through side channels.”
Leda watched in fascination as his fingers flew over the surface of the table. There was something captivating about the sight of him, sitting there, relaxed and blazingly confident.
She’d forgotten how sexy Watt was when he was hacking things on her behalf.
“How did you get so good at computers? I mean, it’s a whole other language,” she asked, with reluctant admiration.
“Honestly, computer language makes more sense to me than verbal language. At least its meaning is always clear. People, on the other hand, never really say what they think. They might as well be speaking in hieroglyphics.”
“Hieroglyphics wasn’t a spoken language,” Leda said faintly, though she was caught off guard by the insight.
Watt shrugged. “I guess I always hoped that if I studied computers, I might make a difference; make the world better, even in some small way.”
Make the world better, Leda thought, surprised by his earnestness. Maybe Dr. Reasoner had been wrong when she insisted that being around Watt would resurrect the old, dark Leda.
Maybe he wasn’t such a trigger after all.
Watt met her gaze and she flushed, reaching down to smooth the napkin on her lap. She felt as if she were all energy, a bundle of raw, restless movement. As if her body were throwing off real, sizzling sparks.
Her pulse picked up speed. Watt was so close that she could trace the bow-shaped curve of his lips—those lips she had kissed so many times. She couldn’t help wondering, a bit jealously, how many other girls had kissed him since then.
Watt leaned closer. Something was unfurling in the space between them, and Leda didn’t know how to fight it anymore, or maybe she just didn’t want to. . . .
As she tipped her head back to kiss him, Watt pulled away.
Leda’s breath caught. She felt torn between relief and a wild sense of disappointment.
“Leda.” Watt was looking at her in a way that made her blood pound close to the surface. “What do you want, really?”
Such a simple question, and yet it wasn’t simple at all. What did she want? Leda imagined opening her brain, unspooling all her tangled thoughts like a skein of woven cloth, trying to make sense of them.
For so much of her life, she had wanted to be the best. The cleverest, the most successful, because of course she could never be the prettiest, not with Avery around. That was why she’d first hired Watt, wasn’t it? So she could gain the next step on her ever-ascending staircase toward whatever she was chasing?
Now all Leda wanted was to be safe from the darkness within herself. And that meant staying away from Watt. Or at least, she had thought it did.
“I should go,” Watt said before she could answer.
“Watt—” Leda swallowed, not quite certain what she was about to say; and perhaps he knew that, because he shook his head.
“It’s fine. I’ll see you later.” His footsteps echoed on the way out her front door.
Leda collapsed back onto the couch with a defeated sigh. Her eyes drifted toward the bag of takeout, and she reached for it listlessly, only to realize that there was another box at the bottom, still sealed shut. She pulled the box onto her lap and peeled it open.
It was a slice of chocolate cake, with thick cream cheese icing smeared all over the top. Her absolute favorite, the cake that Leda’s parents ordered every year for her birthday. But she hadn’t ordered it tonight.
Watt. She shook her head and reached for the tiny foldable fork with a private smile.
RYLIN
AS SOON AS the three-tone chime sounded the end of the school day, the Berkeley hallways flooded with students. Everyone herded toward the main front doors, where they would pour themselves into waiting hovers or pause at the edge of the school’s virtual tech-net, muttering furiously into their contacts as they replied to their queue of messages. Standing there, they looked like the edge of an undulating human bubble.
Rylin walked into the mounting tide of students, toward the science building. She had missed psychology class earlier and needed to make up the lab if she didn’t want to fail.
This morning she had messaged Berkeley to tell them she wasn’t feeling well. She had her tampered mediwand all prepped and ready to use—she and Chrissa had rigged it years ago to mark them sick whenever it scanned—but the Berkeley administrators didn’t even request proof of her supposed illness. They just took her word for it, which sparked a feeling of guilt Rylin hadn’t anticipated. She did her best to push that guilt aside and focus on Hiral.
She hadn’t seen him since last weekend at the mall—which had gone much better than Rylin expected. Hiral had stayed to help her and Cord run the experiment, and then they had all gotten milkshakes together at the famous blend-bar in the food court. To Rylin’s surprise, and delight, it had seemed as if Cord and Hiral were getting along. Or at least they were pretending to, for her sake.
But since that day, Hiral had been mysteriously absent. He kept saying that he was busy, that there were “things” he needed to “take care of,” but he didn’t volunteer any details, and Rylin didn’t press for them. She didn’t get the sense that he was angry with her about Cord. Actually . . . Rylin couldn’t help being unpleasantly reminded of his behavior the last time they dated, when he’d started dealing drugs with V.
He wasn’t doing that anymore, she reminded herself. She knew that he wasn’t. What Chrissa said last weekend was just messing with her head.
So today Rylin had decided to take the morning off and steal a few hours with Hiral before his late work shift. She’d cooked breakfast tacos and curled up with him in bed, her arm thrown across his chest, her head nestled into h
is shoulder. And even though he’d smiled and said all the right things, Rylin still couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t wholly there with her, in the moment, but somewhere far away.
She turned now into the psych classroom, where Professor Wang was standing behind her desk, shuffling a few items into her forest-green shoulder bag.
“Hi, Professor. I’m sorry I missed class earlier; I wasn’t feeling well.” Rylin’s eyes roved over the equipment arranged on her lab console, patches and wires covered with the little red hearts that marked them as medical devices.
The professor brushed aside her excuse. “Another student missed class today as well, so you won’t have to perform this lab alone. It’s much better when these questions come from a human instead of a computer program.” She gave a brisk nod. “Here he is now.”
Cord strode into the room, grinning even wider when he saw Rylin at their usual station. “Rylin. I guess we’re both stuck doing penance this afternoon.”
Professor Wang snapped her bag shut with a decided click. “Yes, the irony wasn’t lost on me, that the two of you missed class on the same morning,” she said coolly.
“Lucky us,” Cord said lightly. “I guess it’s true what they say, that timing is everything.”
The professor glanced impassively from Rylin to Cord, and Rylin couldn’t help feeling that in that single moment, she’d grasped their entire history. After all, she did study people for a living. “You two know the drill by now. When you’re finished, submit your results electronically. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.” She crossed the room and pulled the door shut behind her.
Cord immediately rounded on Rylin. “So, Myers, spill. Where were you this morning?”
“I was sick.” She didn’t exactly want to tell Cord that she’d been in bed with Hiral. “What about you—were you playing hooky?” She tried to deliver the phrase the way Cord always did, but couldn’t quite manage his insouciance.
“I was,” he said levelly, his gaze fixed on her. “You should come with me next time. It’s been a while.”
Rylin flushed and tapped quickly at the tablet to avoid having to answer. “Playing hooky” was what Cord called it when he went to his dad’s old garage in West Hampton and raced illegal driver-run cars along the Long Island Expressway. He’d actually taken Rylin there once last year to show her just how heart-stoppingly fast those cars could go. They’d ended up driving to the beach and building a sandcastle like children.
Then they’d slept together for the first time—right there on the beach, in the middle of a rainstorm, because they couldn’t wait another minute to get their hands on each other.
She wondered if Cord was thinking about that day too, only to remember that she shouldn’t be thinking about it. They were friends, and nothing more.
Friends who happened to have a romantic history.
“Lie detector lab,” Rylin read aloud, letting her hair sweep forward to block her face. “Students will use somatic feedback and biosensors to determine when the other is telling an untruth. The average person . . .”
Rylin trailed off there, and perhaps Cord was reading the same thing at the same time, because he didn’t ask her to continue.
The average person tells a lie at least two times per day. Being deceitful—to protect ourselves, to protect the feelings of others, or to promote our own interests—is so common that we even have a saying: “To lie is human.” Yet most people can detect falsehoods in others with less than 30 percent accuracy. In this lab, we will re-create a version of the conditions used by law enforcement in official lie-detection procedures. . . .
“I nominate you as the first victim,” Cord declared. Rylin didn’t protest. She felt a cold dread twisting in the pit of her stomach, like some scaly creature stirring to life. If she got called in for questioning about Mariel’s death, would the police do something like this? It wouldn’t matter, she told herself; she didn’t know anything about what had happened to Mariel.
But what if they discovered what Mariel had on Rylin—that she had been stealing drugs? Maybe she could deny it, Rylin thought wildly; after all, it was her word against a dead girl’s.
If nothing else, maybe this lab would give her some useful practice at lying under pressure.
She held out her wrists, letting Cord swab them with an antiseptic pad, deliberately avoiding making eye contact with him. He peeled the backs from a series of sensor patches before placing one on each of her wrists, and another at the center of her forehead. His touch on her skin was very precise and methodical.
The average person tells a lie at least two times per day. How many times had Rylin lied so far today—to Hiral, to the school, to Chrissa? And those were just the recent ones. As she began to tally up all her mistruths and half-truths, Rylin felt a little sick.
She’d lied to Hiral about Cord, and to Cord about Hiral, and to the police about what happened to Eris. She’d lied to Chrissa too, in an effort to keep her safe. And most of all Rylin had lied to herself, when she absolved herself from all of it. She’d told herself over and over that she didn’t have a choice. Didn’t she?
The biosensors kicked on, and Rylin’s vitals were suddenly depicted on the tablet before them, pink and yellow lines tracking her elevated heart rate, capillary dilation, and sweat levels. The official government machines were exponentially more accurate than this, she knew; those also tracked rapid eye movement and neural firings in the brain.
“Your heart rate is already a little elevated,” Cord pointed out, a curious note in his voice. “Let’s start with a couple of control questions. What’s your name?”
“Rylin Myers.” The lines stayed horizontal.
“Where do you live?”
She had a feeling he wanted her to say New York or the Tower, but Rylin couldn’t resist. “The thirty-second floor.”
Cord nodded, his lips curling a little at the edges. “Where are you applying to college next year?”
Rylin tried to sit up straighter, to see the questions written there on the tablet, but Cord had angled the screen away from her. Was that really one of the lab prompts?
“NYU,” she said slowly. “I’m applying other places, but NYU is my top choice. It has the strongest holography program in the country. Besides, I don’t want to leave New York, not when Chrissa still has two more years of high school.”
She didn’t mention Hiral, though he was another reason for staying in New York. He kept saying how proud he was that Rylin was applying to college, studying something she loved. Though he did clam up a little whenever she mentioned it.
But even if she did get into NYU, Rylin wasn’t sure how she would pay for it. She’d been surreptitiously applying for holography scholarships, leadership scholarships, anything she could think of. Not that she especially wanted to share this with Cord, who’d never faced a financial problem in his life. He wouldn’t understand.
“You’ll get into NYU,” Cord declared. “After the faculty see Starfall, there’s no way they won’t admit you.”
“You watched Starfall?” She hadn’t told anyone at school about her film. How did Cord even find out about it?
“Of course I did. I loved it,” he told her. Rylin felt oddly touched.
“Though I have to ask,” Cord went on, “which character was based on me? The neighbor, or the new guy at the end of the film?”
Rylin rolled her eyes, fighting a smile. Of course Cord would think that he was in the movie somehow. “Where are you applying to college?” she asked, realizing that she didn’t know.
“I’m not sure. I think I’ll just file the Common Application a bunch of places and see who takes me.” He gave an uncertain shrug. “I still have some time to figure it out.”
Rylin felt a little catch in her chest, because she recognized Cord’s confusion for what it was: the feeling of not knowing what to do, what step to take next, when you had no parents to advise you. It was the terrifying feeling of making a monumental life decision and knowing that whether y
ou failed or succeeded, you would do so wholly on your own.
“Sorry, we’ll keep going.” Cord slid his finger along the screen to reveal the next question. “How many times have you been in love?”
“What? What kind of question is that?” she spluttered.
“I don’t know, Rylin, it’s right there on the instructions!” Cord held out the tablet as evidence; and sure enough, there it was, written in the signature bold-faced type of the lab program. “Probably just Wang trying to get a laugh out of a bunch of seniors,” he added, but Rylin had a different theory.
“Or she wrote a specific set of lab questions just for us. To punish us for missing class.”
“It does sound like something she would do. She’s got a bit of a masochistic streak.”
Rylin let out a strangled half laugh. She couldn’t help it: This was all so bizarre, being here with Cord, trying to be friends with him despite constant reminders of their awkward, tangled history. “She’s probably filming us right now!”
To her relief, Cord burst out laughing too. “You’re right. We’re probably test subjects in some experiment of hers!”
The laughter seemed to loosen something between them, and Rylin’s chest eased up a little. But she still hadn’t answered the question. The lab wouldn’t let them move on until she did.
“Two,” she heard herself say, her voice almost a whisper. Cord’s head whipped up in surprise.
She didn’t need to clarify what she meant. She had been in love twice—with Hiral, and with Cord.
“Rylin,” Cord said softly, and leaned forward to brush a hair back from her cheek.
She stayed very still. She knew she should pull away, should tell Cord to stop—
The door swung open with a violent clatter, and Rylin tore herself away, the air rushing into her chest. Her eyes darted guiltily to the doorway. It was only one of the cleaning bots.
“Look, Rylin,” Cord began again, with a bursting sort of desperation. “I wasn’t joking earlier, when I told Professor Wang that timing is everything. Our timing has never been right.”
The Towering Sky Page 14
