The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

  Had Nadia become too much of a crutch? He’d gotten so accustomed to her; she was the lens through which he observed, analyzed, responded to the world. Watt realized that he could hardly remember the last time he’d had a conversation without Nadia softly helping, prompting him on what to say, or looking up references so he didn’t seem foolish. Except, perhaps, with Leda.

  Maybe he should stop relying on Nadia and open up a damn book.

  Watt sat there for a long time, in the cold winter sunshine, watching the clouds chase one another across the burnished blue sky. He knew he should go back to New York, but he wasn’t ready. Because once he left campus, he would have to come to terms with the fact that he was seeing it for the last time.

  Coming to MIT had been his dream for most of his life. Somehow, through his own foolishness, Watt had lost hold of that dream. And it had taken less than thirty minutes’ worth of sand in an hourglass.

  Maybe there was such a thing as being too smart for your own good.

  AVERY

  THE OXFORD DEAN beamed, cheerful and red-cheeked, as he held open the door to his study. “Miss Fuller. Thank you for sharing your thoughts regarding the Romanesque influence on twenty-second-century supertowers. I must say, this was one of the liveliest interviews I’ve had in years.”

  “The pleasure was all mine, Dean Ozah,” Avery assured him. She turned outside, pulling her plaid jacket closer over her shoulders. When she saw the figure lounging past the dean’s front gate, she gave a small, private smile.

  Intermittent sunlight filtered through the branches and onto Max’s face, highlighting his bold cheekbones, his prominent nose. With that floppy dark coat and windswept hair, he looked like a sentinel from some historical novel. It had been the work of a single morning, she thought wryly, for Max to revert to his disordered Oxford self.

  “Avery! How did it go?” he exclaimed, hurrying forward. His eyes burned into her, as if he was trying to read the transcript of the interview on her face.

  “Not to brag, but I think I crushed it.”

  Max reached for Avery’s hands to twirl her in a clumsy dance move. “Of course you did!” he proclaimed, so loud that Avery had to shush him. “I knew you would!”

  Avery let him lift her into the air, spinning her around so the hood of her coat fell back over her shoulders. She collapsed against his chest in laughter. Max reached out to tuck a loosened strand of hair behind her ear, making Avery feel beautiful and windblown. “I’m so proud of you,” he added and reached into the pocket of his jacket, grinning. “Good thing I brought something to celebrate with.”

  He pulled out a crumpled paper bag from her favorite bakery. “Pumpkin or buttercream?”

  “Buttercream,” Avery decided, reaching for the scone. Its sugar crystals glittered like diamonds in the cold afternoon light. This was so typically thoughtful of Max. “I love you,” she said quickly through a flaky mouthful of scone.

  “Were you talking to me or to the buttercream?” Max teased. “You know what, actually, don’t answer that.”

  As they walked back toward town, Avery told Max about the interview in more detail. She had been in her element, talkative and eager and just a teensy bit provocative; and the dean had absolutely loved it. They’d discussed everything from the future of academia to medieval illuminated manuscripts to where you could find the best lamb tandoori in Oxford. Avery felt certain that she could go to Oxford if she wanted to.

  If she wanted to go? Where had that stray thought come from? Of course she wanted to go.

  The setting sun bronzed the air, casting the city in a cheerful glow. Avery tried to shake her inexplicable sense of unease. The interview was finally over and she was here with Max, eating scones, in a city that she loved. Best of all, she was out of New York, away from the inauguration plans, the prospect of constantly seeing Atlas. There were no zettas buzzing around her face, no one stopping her on the street to ask for an interview. So why did she still feel on edge?

  “Where should we go?” she asked. Maybe if she kept moving, she would shake off this strange restlessness. “Want to meet up with Luke and Tiana?”

  “We can,” Max said nonchalantly. “But there’s somewhere I want to take you first.”

  He led her along the bustle of Main Street, down a quieter avenue that Avery had never noticed before. A magical hush seemed to fall over them. The street was lined with an array of small buildings in charming colors. The cobblestones were so bright they seemed to sing beneath her feet.

  Max led her up a single flight of stairs to a heavy, carved door that was flanked by a pair of brassy light fixtures. “After you,” he said.

  Avery tried not to look too knowing as she started up the steps. One of their friends must have moved here, and Max had asked them to help organize a surprise party for her. A little presumptuous, given that she wasn’t technically admitted to Oxford, but Max was always ready to celebrate things that hadn’t happened yet.

  She paused to arrange her features into a suitably surprised face, and pushed at the front door. It swung open easily at her touch.

  The Surprise! she expected didn’t come. Avery blinked, puzzled, and stepped into the entryway.

  It was a charmingly old ramshackle apartment, with scuffed wooden floors and faded yellow walls. There were a few stray pieces of furniture, a heavy rug and a bookcase covered in a fine film of dust. She walked past the narrow kitchen to a small patio out back, where a single folding table and matching chairs had been arranged.

  “What do you think?” Max followed her outside.

  Avery turned around slowly, taking it all in. “Who lives here?”

  “We do. I mean, if you want to,” Max amended hastily. “I put in an offer this morning.”

  Avery felt suddenly light-headed. She sank into one of the metal folding chairs.

  “Max,” she said helplessly, “we don’t even know if I’ll get in. . . .”

  “Didn’t you just say that you crushed the interview? You’ll get in,” he declared. “I figured it makes sense for us to buy a place instead of paying rent; we’ll be in Oxford for the next four years at least, while you’re at university. Maybe longer, if I get into the PhD program, or if you decide to go to grad school.”

  “I’m not sure I want to get a PhD,” Avery protested.

  “Why not? You’re smart enough to,” Max declared. “This is a great place for us, Avery.”

  “It is,” she said softly, glancing around. This apartment seemed so . . . Max. But she wasn’t sure it felt like her.

  “I know it’s a little unfinished. It needs some rugs and art. Which is where you come in,” Max said and smiled. “But can’t you picture us here, curling up in the living room to grade papers? Having friends over for dinner? Standing out here on a warm summer night to watch the fireflies? You can almost see part of the river, if you look that way,” he added, pointing eagerly.

  Avery felt as if the air in her lungs was trapped. Max was only two years older than her, yet he was so much surer of himself. He had his whole life—or rather, both their lives—completely planned out.

  Max seemed unnerved by her silence. “Unless you don’t want to live here. I mean, if you aren’t ready yet. . . .”

  Even though she felt frozen by an inexplicable sense of panic, Avery recoiled from the prospect of hurting Max. Her face unfolded into a smile. “Of course I want to live here,” she assured him, and paused as another idea occurred to her. “Did you say that you bought this place? Max, please at least let me pay for half of it.”

  “It’s okay. I have some money saved. I wanted to do this, for you. For us.” Max leaned forward with a quiet intensity. “I love you, Avery Fuller,” he began, and even though they were both sitting—even though he wasn’t on one knee—Avery had the sensation that what he was about to say was something akin to a proposal.

  “The last year with you has been so perfect. You are perfect. You’re like a dream that I’ve been longing for my whole life and never thought I
would find. And now that I’ve found you, all I can think about is how much I want to be with you always.”

  Avery felt that flutter of panic again. “I’m not perfect, Max.” It wasn’t fair of him to ask that of her, to build her into some untenable ideal in his mind and then inevitably be disappointed when she failed to live up to it. No relationship could withstand that sort of pressure.

  Atlas had always known better than to use the word perfect with her.

  “Right, no one is perfect. You’re just as close as it is humanly possible to be,” Max replied, not understanding her meaning; and for some perverse reason Avery needed him to understand. The way Atlas always had.

  She also knew that she shouldn’t be thinking of Atlas right now.

  “I’m not perfect,” she repeated. Something in Max’s eyes frightened her, though she wasn’t sure why. “I’m impatient and defensive and petty, and I’m not worth that kind of blind devotion. No one is.”

  His face had gone pale. “What are you saying? Are you telling me not to love you?”

  “No, I just . . .” She let her head fall forward into her hands, fighting off a nameless sense of dread. “I don’t want to disappoint you.”

  “And I don’t want to disappoint you, Avery. But I’m sure I will, a thousand times, and I’m sure you’ll disappoint me too. As long as we’re honest with each other, we can get through anything.”

  As long as we’re honest with each other. Avery pushed aside the tiny voice that was reminding her of all the things she hadn’t told Max: The truth about Eris’s death. The investigation about Mariel. Her relationship with Atlas.

  But none of that mattered anymore, she reminded herself. Those secrets all belonged to the old Avery, and she had left the old Avery behind in New York. She was starting over.

  Max reached into his pocket.

  For a single, paralyzing moment Avery thought he was pulling out a ring, and her heart skipped and skidded wildly in her chest because she had no idea what she would do if he did.

  Then her breath let out, because it was only a set of old-fashioned brass key-chips, for automatic entry into the house. Max looked up and met her eyes. She wondered if he’d heard the relief in that sigh.

  “I love you,” he said simply. “All I want is to make you as happy as you make me. I want to see your first smile of the day when you wake up, and the last one before you go to sleep. I want to share my fears and my hopes and dreams with you. I want to build a life with you.” He slid one of the pair of key-chips toward her across the wrought-iron table.

  “I love you too,” Avery whispered, because she did.

  “Are you crying?” Max lifted a hand to her face, capturing the single tear that had escaped to run down her cheek. “I’m sorry, I know the apartment is kind of a fixer-upper. If you hate it, we can pick another one,” he hastened to add, and Avery shook her head.

  She wasn’t sure why she was crying. She loved Max. They fit together so easily, without conflict or friction or obstacles. He made Avery the best version of herself. So why wasn’t her love for him as free and unencumbered as his was for her?

  Why wasn’t she as blazingly certain of what she wanted as he seemed to be?

  “I’m crying because I’m so happy,” she said and leaned over to kiss him, wishing it were that simple.

  LEDA

  THAT SAME EVENING, Leda was sprawled on her bed, idly flicking through the feeds on her contacts, when a flicker from her mom appeared. It was addressed to Leda and her dad. I’m stuck at work, don’t wait for me for dinner!

  Leda’s mom, a corporate lawyer, had been working a lot of weekends recently. With Leda’s older brother, Jamie, away at college this year, that meant that Leda and her dad were often home alone—and ever since Eris’s death, they hadn’t been on the best of terms. They’d gotten in the habit of both claiming to have “a lot to do” and wolfing down their food as quickly as they could before fleeing in opposite directions.

  It saddened Leda. There had been a time, not long ago, when she felt incredibly close with her dad—when on nights like this, he would have looked at her with a guilty smile and asked if she wanted to go to their favorite Italian place around the corner, instead of staying at home. They would linger over double dessert, exchanging stories from the day, strategizing whatever problem was bothering Leda.

  In the wake of Eris’s death, Leda hadn’t known how to face her dad. Their relationship had become strained, and they drifted ever further apart. Now they met and spoke with the impersonal, courteous disinterest of strangers passing in the street.

  But this time, Leda wasn’t going to ignore her mom’s message the way she always did.

  She may not have figured out the truth in time to repair her relationship with Eris, but it wasn’t too late for Leda and her dad.

  She headed down the hall to his home office and paused at the door. A chorus of voices talked over one another on the other side; he must be on a vid-conference. She tapped at the door anyway.

  “Leda?” she heard her dad say, breaking off from his call. “Come in.”

  Matt Cole’s office was delightfully cozy, all bold colors and deep wood furniture. A glazed redwood trunk, hovering in the air in suspension, served as the desk. Before the antique étagère flickered a holoscreen, squared off into eight boxes, each containing the disembodied head of someone else on the vid-call. Leda wondered which of them were in Asia, or Europe, or South America.

  “I’ll need to see a revised deck by tomorrow morning. Thanks so much, everyone,” her dad concluded and sliced horizontally into the air to end the conference call. “Hey, Leda,” he said, turning hesitantly toward her. “I just have a few more things to wrap up before dinner.”

  “Actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Leda glanced at the sleek black chair before the desk but dismissed it as too businesslike, the type of place she would have sat if she were one of her dad’s clients. Instead she headed to the pair of armchairs nestled in one corner of the office.

  Her dad followed with cautious footsteps. Leda took a seat, curling her bare feet into the heated carpet and reached for the framed instaphoto on the nearby table. It was her mom’s wedding portrait.

  Ilara looked incredible in her wedding gown, a minimalist sheath of ivory silk crepe. Its neckline swooped down in a dramatic V, but she could pull it off. She was as thin and small-chested as Leda was. She looked so happy in this photo, Leda thought, her eyes dancing with a light, almost playful joy.

  “What is it, Leda?”

  She set the photo back down, her heart hammering in her chest. She knew this was the right thing to do, yet she was still afraid. Once she said these words, she could never un-say them.

  “I want to talk about Eris. I know that she was my half sister.”

  Her dad seemed utterly lost for words. His eyes had drifted from Leda to the image of her mom, still smiling blithe and unaware in the hammered pewter frame.

  “Oh, Leda,” he said at last. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

  But you did, Leda thought, though it seemed unnecessarily cruel to say. You hurt all of us. That was always how it happened, wasn’t it? No one ever set out to hurt the people they loved, but they ended up doing it all the same.

  “How did you find out?” he asked.

  Leda remembered lying on the sand in Dubai, shivering and dizzy; Mariel’s face etched eerily against the darkness as she announced that Eris had been Leda’s sister. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “But it wasn’t until after Eris died. I wish I had known earlier. It would have . . . changed things, between us.”

  Her dad leaned forward, his hands gripped tightly around his knees. “I didn’t know for years, Leda. I had only just found out; Eris’s mom told me a few months before Eris died.” He spoke with a rapid urgency, as if it were critical that Leda believe him in this.

  “You should have told me, before—” Before I misjudged things and pushed Eris away, too hard.
Before I lost my chance to actually get to know her—as a sister.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, helplessly. Leda saw the grief in his eyes. It was real.

  Her throat felt swollen. “I miss her,” Leda said quietly. “Or at least, I miss the chance with her I never had. I wish I could remember something more personal than her smile, but I don’t have much else. So I try to concentrate on that. Eris smiled all the time, not fake smiling the way most people do, but a real smile.”

  Leda lifted her eyes to her dad. He was very still and quiet. “Or the way she used to dance. Eris was a terrible dancer, you know, all arms and elbows—a complete klutz, with no rhythm. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t, because it was Eris. When she was on the dance floor, no one could look away.”

  Her dad’s face was ashen, his eyes gleaming with unshed tears.

  “I hold on to these memories,” Leda forced herself to continue. “The easy, superficial ones, because those are all I have. That, and the memory of how she died.”

  “Leda,” her dad said brokenly, throwing his arms open; and Leda moved forward into the hug. They stayed like that for a while in a silence that was thick with regret. Leda felt her dad’s tears, which startled her; she wasn’t sure if she had ever seen her father cry. It struck something deep within her.

  She let him cry like that, his tears soaking her sweater, feeling as if she had become the parent, as if she were the one taking care of him. A strange catch released in her chest. At least they were no longer pretending to be okay when they weren’t.

  “Does your mother know?” her father asked at last.

  “I haven’t told her, if that’s what you mean. It isn’t my secret to tell.” Leda looked piercingly into her dad’s eyes. “I think you should, though.”

  “Why? It will just hurt your mom, and it won’t change anything. Eris is gone. And Caroline and I—we were over a long time ago,” he hurried to say, naming Eris’s mom.

  Leda understood the impulse. It was devastating, showing the worst parts of yourself to the people you cared about. Knowing that they would never look at you the same again. And yet—“Doesn’t it weigh on you, keeping a secret like that?”