The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

  Nadia, he thought silently. Are you saying that Leda might have killed Mariel and doesn’t remember it?

  I’m just pointing out the pieces of evidence, Watt. I’m not drawing any conclusions.

  Watt felt nauseous, but he had to ask.

  “Leda. Do you think that you could have killed Mariel?”

  LEDA

  “WHAT ARE YOU talking about?” Surely she had misheard.

  “Mariel died the very same week that you were . . . unaccounted for,” Watt said haltingly. “When we got back from Dubai, when you bought all those drugs.”

  “You think I faked an overdose so I could kill Mariel? You think I’ve been lying about it all this time?” she cried out, sitting up angrily.

  “No, no,” Watt scrambled to say. “I’m not suggesting that you planned to kill her. But maybe you were so messed up that you didn’t even realize what you were doing. You might have run into her outside the Tower and remembered what she’d tried to do to you, and you were so afraid that you pushed her into the water. Or maybe she attacked you,” he added, his eyes lighting up; he seemed to prefer that idea. “She could have come at you, trying to finish what she started, and you killed her in self-defense! You just don’t remember because you blacked it out.”

  No, Leda thought wildly. It couldn’t be.

  Every one of her nerves was strumming at its highest, sharpest pitch. She put her hands on her knees, feeling dizzy. A horrible chthonic monster had stirred in the depths of her mind, a terrible, faceless fear—what if Watt was right?—but she wouldn’t look at it right now; she couldn’t or she would start screaming. She would face it later, when she couldn’t see Watt’s eyes.

  “Leda, it’s okay. Whatever happened, it’ll be okay.” Watt reached a tentative hand toward her, but Leda whirled on him. She was never fiercer or more cruel than when she felt cornered.

  “How dare you?” she breathed. “You, of all people.”

  “Leda, I’m trying to help!”

  “You told me earlier today that you see a goodness inside me that the rest of the world is too careless to see,” she reminded him, her voice breaking. “And yet you think I’m capable of killing someone.”

  “I just wanted to ask if it was possible,” Watt said helplessly. Leda threw up her hands.

  “Why are you even asking me? I clearly have no idea; according to you, I’ve forgotten the whole thing. Ask the computer you keep in your brain. That’s how you solve all your problems anyway!”

  Watt flinched at that, but Leda hardly noticed; she was trembling.

  “Don’t worry. I’m leaving,” she announced in a chilly, remote voice that didn’t belong to her at all.

  A small, foolish part of her hoped that Watt might run after her. But he just let her storm away in silence.

  Somehow Leda made it home and into her own bed. She felt cold all over, the way she had felt in Dubai when Mariel left her to drown, as if fingers of ice were creeping up her spine. Her breaths came shallow and ragged.

  Everything swirled through her mind at once, and she closed her eyes, trying to make sense of it.

  Could she have really killed Mariel and blacked it out?

  Leda cast her mind back to that night. She’d been so devastated after Dubai, all she had wanted was to forget that she had killed her half sister. To wipe that knowledge brutally from her mind and start fresh.

  What a reckless, stupid thing to have done, Leda thought. Forgetting never fixed anything. She remembered something Eris used to say when she drank until she blacked out. If you don’t remember it, it doesn’t count.

  But this wasn’t a drinking game or a sloppy dance-floor makeout, something to wince and laugh about the next day. If this had really happened, it was murder.

  Was she capable of that—of killing a girl in cold blood? Even a girl who hated her and left her for dead?

  Whatever she’d done that day, Leda only remembered it in flashes. She remembered being in class, thoughts of Eris chasing one another desperately around her mind . . . escaping to the park to meet her dealer, Ross . . . the hollow look of her eyes in a mirror somewhere, as she fumbled in her bag for another pill . . . lights, pulsing and sharp, as if at a club . . . Everything else was a sticky, dark blur.

  Every instinct in Leda screamed at her not to push further. She was afraid of the truths she might find buried there. Still, she tried to dredge through her mind for the missing memory.

  She imagined seeing Mariel outside near the river. Screaming at Mariel, pushing her into the water. Leda pinched her fingernails into the soft flesh of her leg until it brought tears to her eyes, willing herself to remember, but her mind remained stubbornly blank.

  She so desperately wanted it to be impossible. But wanting to believe things wasn’t enough to make them true.

  Leda wished she could cry. It seemed almost worse this way, as if her grief lay in some foreign land, far past tears. A bottomless grief, opening like a dark chasm within her. She kept blinking, not sure if her eyes had dried out.

  She collapsed back onto her coverlet and just lay there, staring numbly into the darkness, for what might have been an hour or might have been a minute, the way that time warps in strange ways when you’re in pain. The house felt utterly still, and the stillness settled on Leda like a fine, cold mist. It chilled her to the bone. She felt miles away from any other warm, living thing; even though her parents were probably right here in the apartment, a few dozen meters away.

  What stung the most was the fact that the accusation had come from Watt. Just when Leda had changed her mind, had decided to take a chance on him again, he’d proven that all her fears were right.

  He knew what she was capable of and didn’t hesitate to assume the worst of her. And really, could she blame him?

  There was a gentle knocking at her door. “Leda, sweetie. Are you up?” her mom called out from the hallway. It seemed to Leda that her mom’s voice emanated from another world, a world where Leda wasn’t a hideous murderer.

  If only her mom could take her to that world, so she could escape the horror she was currently living.

  “Where were you?” Ilara asked.

  “I was out. I think I’m getting sick,” Leda replied, deliberately vague. Her mom started to come inside, but Leda raised her voice, sharpening it like a weapon. “Please, just go.”

  To her relief, Ilara didn’t ask any more questions, and retreated.

  It was for the best, Leda told herself. Confronting the monster within herself was a task that could only be done alone.

  CALLIOPE

  CALLIOPE SAT CONTENTEDLY on the floor of her mom’s closet, watching through half-lidded eyes as Elise packed for her honeymoon.

  She had always found it oddly soothing, watching her mom pack a suitcase. It might have been the way Elise picked up various items—a flowy crepe de chine skirt, a pair of cropped jeans, a dangly pair of earrings—and sorted them into careful piles. The way she wrapped them, in delicate no-wrinkle paper, each shoe lovingly tucked into a padded bag. There was something comforting and ritualistic about it all, especially since packing a bag usually meant their con was drawing to a close. It was the last mile marker before they left town for good.

  Calliope yawned and stretched her legs out before her. There was a linen-tufted bench that ran the length of the closet, but she didn’t want to sit on it; the oyster-colored carpet was so soft and fluffy. She found herself surprisingly glad that Elise and Nadav had decided to wait a few days before leaving on their honeymoon. It was nice to have a moment alone with her mom.

  Calliope just wasn’t used to watching her mom actually get married. Although she’d been engaged fourteen times, Elise usually skipped town long before the actual ceremony, with the ring and any other gifts she could take with her. Only once before had she actually gone through with the wedding—to a Polish lord, with real papers of nobility—and Calliope felt certain that Elise had done it because she wanted to secretly call herself a lady for the rest of her life. I
t was the ultimate f-you to her old boss, Mrs. Houghton.

  “Don’t forget swimsuits,” Calliope reminded her mom, trying to be helpful.

  “I won’t need a swimsuit, sweetie.”

  “There isn’t even a hot tub in the Gobi Desert?”

  “It’s northern Mongolia,” Elise corrected. “To visit the woolly mammoth reculturation center. We’ll be volunteering on the steppe, helping dig up the permafrost that obstructs their grazing sites.”

  God, her poor mom had given that speech so many times, she practically believed her own con. “Sorry you couldn’t convince Nadav to take you to Bali, or the Maldives.” If her mom was going to actually be married to this guy, at least she should get a beach vacation out of it.

  “Oh, I don’t mind. And we’re going to Japan for a few days afterward to relax.”

  “Japan, to relax? You hate it there!”

  “Japan can be relaxing. All those zen gardens and tea ceremonies.”

  Calliope was surprised how hurt she felt at the idea of her mom having tea without her. “You made us leave Japan early the one time we went,” she reminded Elise. “You said it was loud and chaotic, and impossible to navigate unless you speak Japanese.”

  “Nadav speaks Japanese.”

  It was the weirdest thing, but her mom actually seemed excited about this honeymoon. Maybe she was just ready to get away from all the madness of the wedding, and her ice queen of a mother-in-law. Calliope didn’t blame her.

  She felt guilty all over again for the sacrifice she had asked her mom to make: agreeing to stay here in New York, to trade their nomadic existence for a settled family life. Surely by now Elise was getting restless. Wasn’t she counting down the days till it was all over?

  Wasn’t Calliope?

  She thought briefly, longingly, of Brice—but then she remembered Livya, and that ominous threat she’d made at the wedding. There was no way Calliope would ever really get to date Brice, not with her new stepsister breathing down her neck.

  It doesn’t matter, she told herself, trying not to feel disappointed. Her flirtation with Brice had been just that—a flirtation. It hadn’t meant anything.

  Calliope stood up and wandered over to the marble-topped dresser where her mom was sorting a stack of ivory pajamas. She cleared her throat. “Mom, I don’t know if this is worth it anymore.”

  “What do you mean, sweetie?”

  “It’s my fault that we’re here. I’m the one who wanted to stay and actually live somewhere for once, play out this con for another year. But it’s getting ridiculous. New York isn’t worth this. Nowhere is worth this. We aren’t even having any fun here—we’re stuck pretending to be prim and proper and boring, just to maintain your meaningless relationship with Nadav!”

  “It isn’t meaningless,” Elise said quietly, though Calliope didn’t hear her at first.

  “You shouldn’t have to suffer through that awful honeymoon. Why don’t we just leave? Besides, it’s getting too risky. I think Livya—”

  Elise took Calliope’s hands in hers. “I don’t want to leave,” she said quietly.

  Calliope blinked, stunned, as the truth hurtled inescapably toward her. It couldn’t be.

  “Surely you don’t— I mean—” she stammered.

  “I love him.”

  Calliope thought back to all her mom’s girlish exclamations of delight, the starry-eyed way she’d looked at Nadav during the wedding. Had those smiles been real? “After all the times you told me never to let myself care about a mark?”

  Her voice had risen too loud, but Elise didn’t chide her. “I love Nadav,” she stated simply. “This marriage is real. It isn’t just a con to me, not anymore.”

  This is just a job, her mom used to say, in clipped, unsentimental tones. It’s temporary and unpredictable. Caring about people will only hurt you. Don’t let it happen. And now Elise, arguably the world’s greatest con artist, was violating her own cardinal rule—and for who? A nerdy cybernetics engineer.

  Calliope stared wonderingly at her mom, suddenly realizing just how drastically Elise had changed.

  Of course, Elise had changed constantly over the years. As they moved from place to place, playing out their various cons, she’d been forced to keep altering her appearance: widening and then re-thinning her nose, changing her hair and eye color, tweaking the curve of her chin. She was always beautiful, yet each time her mom emerged from surgery with a new face and new irises, Calliope had to get used to her all over again.

  This was completely different. This time, Elise had actually become someone new.

  “How . . . ? I mean when . . . ?”

  Elise sank down onto the bench with a sigh, pulling Calliope to sit next to her. “I don’t know,” she confessed. She looked suddenly girlish and innocent, the light gleaming on her pearl stud earrings. “Maybe it’s that I’ve been with him for so long, much longer than I’ve been with anyone else. But I really care about him.”

  “Even though he thinks you’re a goody-goody philanthropist?”

  “Yes, even though he thinks I’m a goody-goody philanthropist,” Elise repeated, in such a matter-of-fact tone that Calliope couldn’t help laughing. She laughed at the sheer unlikely madness of it all, and after a moment Elise was laughing too.

  “I don’t understand,” Calliope said at last. “How can you love him when you aren’t even yourself with him? I mean, he thinks you actually want to spend your honeymoon volunteering, scooping up woolly mammoth poop!”

  “I’ve had plenty of beach vacations in my life. I don’t really need another one,” Elise said, in a way that made it seem as if she truly didn’t mind at all. That must be real love, Calliope thought wonderingly—being able to efface your own desires for the person you care about.

  She wondered if she would ever feel that way about anyone. Brice’s face rose stubbornly into her consciousness, but she quickly forced it away.

  “It’s really worth it to you?” she asked. “Staying in New York is worth playing this role forever?”

  “Nadav is worth it,” Elise corrected. “New York was always your thing. I like it here, but I wouldn’t really care where we were, as long as I was with him.”

  It was so outlandish that it had to be true. Wow, Calliope thought again in silent shock. Sweet, fumbling Nadav: so well-meaning but gruff. Who would’ve guessed that Elise would end up falling for him?

  “If you really love him, I’m happy for you,” she decided, and was gratified by her mom’s smile.

  Then Calliope remembered what Livya had said to her at Saks and again at the wedding. Her heart sank.

  She glanced down at her hands, clasped in her lap, her fingernails filed into careful half-moons and utterly devoid of polish—because of course nail polish, even nude colors, wasn’t in character. “I think Livya suspects something.”

  “What do you mean?” Elise asked carefully.

  “She confronted me while we were dress shopping and at the reception. She suggested that we’re gold diggers, and that we aren’t who we say we are.” Calliope paused to let her well-trained eidetic memory kick in. “She said that most of the women who’ve dated Nadav in the past were just in it for the money, and that one of the reasons he loves you is because of how selfless you claim to be.”

  Her mom listened to this with surprising calm. “Any girl would say that about a stranger marrying her wealthy father. It doesn’t sound like Livya really knows anything.”

  Calliope winced. “She did catch me sneaking out. Twice.” She refrained from mentioning the fact that it was to see Brice.

  “Then you can’t sneak out again,” Elise admonished. “Not with Livya watching us so closely. We can’t afford to do anything suspicious.”

  Elise didn’t have to spell it out for Calliope to know what she meant. Nadav’s moral code was severe and uncompromising. If he learned the truth about them—that they were high-class grifters who’d left a string of broken hearts in their wake; that Elise had, in fact, first targeted Nad
av for his money—he wouldn’t just send them packing. He might very well send them to jail.

  “Promise me you’ll behave. Don’t risk everything just because of some boy,” Elise pleaded.

  And even though she’d been telling herself that it meant nothing, that it was just a flirtation, Calliope bristled at her mom’s words. “He isn’t just some boy.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. But no more sneaking out, no more acting sarcastic or opinionated. Just keep your head down and act like the sweet, selfless girl that I told everyone you are,” Elise asked. “It’ll all be over in less than a year when you graduate. Then you can go off and be whoever you want to be. Please, for my sake, promise me.”

  Calliope sighed in resignation, watching as her reflection in the mirror did the same. For once, the sight didn’t make her smile. “Why did you tell Nadav that we were philanthropists, again?”

  “Because it was so clearly his type,” Elise said softly and sighed. “I’m sorry this is such a mess. To think that of all the people we’ve conned, he is the one I ended up staying with.”

  “More like, of all the roles we’ve played, this is the one we ended up stuck with,” Calliope exclaimed. “Why couldn’t you have pitched us as something else? Eccentric heiresses to a shipping fortune, or bohemian artists, or what about French nobility? I loved that time we were comtesses.”

  “You were an appalling comtesse,” Elise declared, and they both smiled wistfully at the memory.

  “Poor Nadav, in love with a made-up character.”

  “Maybe I can change,” Elise said with surprising vigor. “Maybe I can become the person he’s fallen in love with, if I give it enough time.”

  Calliope wasn’t sure that was the best foundation for a relationship, but what did she know? She’d never exactly had a real relationship either.

  “Besides,” Elise went on, “this way if you go to college next year, you’ll actually have somewhere to come home to.”