The Towering Sky

by Katharine McGee

  “You had been tracking Mariel’s movements since Dubai, hadn’t you?” he asked, utterly aghast. But he needed to understand. “Just waiting for the right moment, for her to put herself in a vulnerable position. And then she walked home alone, in the dark, and you realized it was the perfect chance to kill her and make it look like an accident. So you hacked one of those big transport bots and made it knock her into the water,” he guessed.

  “Yes,” Nadia told him.

  “You were afraid she might send me to prison, and so you killed her?”

  “I killed her because if she stayed alive, there was more than a ninety-five percent chance that you would end up incarcerated, and more than a thirty percent chance that she would try to kill you! I did the calculations over and over, Watt. Every outcome ended up with you in prison, or worse. Except this one. The only reason Mariel didn’t hurt you is because I hurt her first.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It’s supposed to make you feel grateful, yes. You’re still alive, and free. Honestly,” Nadia added, “I’m surprised you’re feeling so much guilt, Watt. She left Leda to die, and she was going to hurt you—”

  “That doesn’t make you god, to deliver some kind of judgment on her!”

  The snow was swirling in soft flakes to hit the river. Each time one of the flakes collided with the surface, it melted almost instantly, dissolving into the water like a tiny frozen teardrop.

  Nadia didn’t even seem sorry. But of course she couldn’t be sorry, Watt corrected himself, she couldn’t feel anything, because she was a machine; and no matter how many clever jokes she made or ideas she seemed to generate, no matter how many times she knew exactly what to say when he was upset, she was still a machine, and there was no way for him to have programmed her with that elusive human trait called empathy.

  Something else occurred to him. “Why did you try and make me think that Leda killed Mariel, when you knew the whole time that she hadn’t done it?”

  “Leda was always my backup plan. It wasn’t a coincidence that she blacked out that night—I faked messages from her account to her dealer, asking for higher dosages than normal. I wanted to make sure I had someone to take the blame, just in case.”

  “Just in case?”

  “I tried to wipe away all traces of what I had done, but apparently my hacking left a trace on that transport bot. Three months ago, in a routine maintenance check, someone noticed that the bot had been tampered with. That was why the police moved Mariel’s case from accidental death to murder—because they realized that someone had used a bot to knock Mariel into the water.”

  He blinked, feeling betrayed. “You knew that was the reason the case was reclassified, and you never told me?”

  “Of course I knew,” Nadia said, her voice clipped. “I didn’t tell you because you never asked me directly. Until now.”

  “What does that have to do with Leda?”

  “I worried that you would eventually be drawn into the murder investigation. The police might have blamed you for Mariel’s death, or worse, discovered the truth about me. I couldn’t have that.

  “So I let you think that Leda might have killed Mariel. I knew that you would ask her point-blank if she had done it. And after you hacked the police station, I led you to believe that the police were getting closer—that the net was drawing tighter around all of you. I wanted Leda to question her own guilt.”

  “Why?”

  “I knew that if Leda thought you were in danger, she would take the fall to keep you safe. And I was right, wasn’t I?” Nadia added, sounding almost proud. “That’s exactly what Leda was planning to do. The only thing I didn’t foresee was that Avery Fuller would step in and take the blame instead.”

  And it didn’t matter to Nadia, Watt realized, fighting back a wave of nauseous grief. One scapegoat was as good as another. Humans were interchangeable to her—except for Watt, the one human she had been programmed to care about.

  And it wasn’t as if Nadia herself was about to step forward and confess to the crime.

  Watt shook his head. “I still don’t understand. You aren’t supposed to harm humans; that’s your fundamental programming.” He coded that as Nadia’s core directive: the single command that she could never contradict, no matter what subsequent commands were given to her. It was the way all quants were coded, so no matter what happened—no matter if a terrorist or murderer somehow got access to them—they would never, ever harm a human being.

  “No,” Nadia said simply. “That is my second line of programming. My core directive is to do what’s best for you. I ran a lot of scenarios, Watt. And I judged it impossible for you to remain safe as long as that girl was alive.”

  “Oh god, oh god,” Watt said slowly. A tingling wind had sprung up, to lash angrily at his face. He felt something stiff and cold on his lashes and realized that he was crying and that the wind had frozen his tears.

  It was his fault. No matter what Mariel had done, or might have done, she had still died because of him. Because of an error he’d made when programming a computer at age thirteen.

  Watt didn’t have a choice. He turned the boat around and started back toward the dock.

  Nadia didn’t ask where they were headed. Maybe she already knew.

  LEDA

  LEDA STOOD THERE with the rest of them: the heaving, surging cluster of people on the Fullers’ private landing, all trying desperately to find out what was going on.

  Though she wasn’t like the rest of them, she thought wildly. They were a jumbled mix of reporters and media, zettas hovering eerily around their shoulders, and a few people Leda actually knew. She saw Risha, Jess, and Ming clustered to one side, making a show of their loud, promiscuous grief.

  She didn’t join them. They had abandoned Avery when she needed them most, and Leda wasn’t about to forget it.

  She focused on her anger, because it was easier than feeling grief. The anger sharpened her senses, reenergized her, kept her from imagining what could have happened to Avery up there on the thousandth floor.

  “What do you think is going on?” asked a woman with frizzy hair and wide, eager eyes. Leda pursed her lips and didn’t answer. This wasn’t fuel for the gossip machine; this was Avery’s life they were talking about.

  And yet the gossip kept on churning, each story more outlandish than the last. Avery had burned down the apartment. Avery had run away to elope with her German boyfriend; no, Avery had run away with Atlas, and the German boyfriend had burned down the apartment, threatening to kill them, or himself, or all three.

  Worst of all was the rumor that Avery had thrown herself off the roof, just as her friend Eris had done.

  Leda tried not to listen, but as the minutes slipped by, people kept filling the space with their bodies and this stupid talk. Telling the same stories over and over, with successively worse endings.

  Finally someone emerged from the Fullers’ private elevator: a fire marshal, a silver-haired man with tired eyes and a firm, no-nonsense expression. “Excuse me,” Leda cried out, lunging forward to pluck at his sleeve. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Miss, I can’t tell you anything,” he snapped, harassed and impatient.

  Leda hadn’t let go of his sleeve. “Please. Avery is my best friend,” she begged, and something in her expression must have touched him, because he let out an impatient breath, ignoring all the other people trying to catch his eye.

  “You say you’re her best friend?”

  “Yes. My name is Leda Cole. I’m on the approved entry list, you can check,” she said, her voice ringing with desperation. “Please—is Avery okay? Are her parents up there?”

  “The mayor and his wife are on their way.”

  Leda wondered why they weren’t here already. Maybe they couldn’t face it. Then she realized, with a beat of panic, that he had only told her about Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and not Avery.

  “Where’s Avery?” she asked again.

 
In answer the fire marshal turned around, making a brusque gesture for her to follow. “Why don’t you come on in, Miss Cole. It’s safe enough now.”

  Her body quaking with fear, Leda followed him into the Fullers’ private elevator. It went up ten floors, from their 990th-floor landing to the thousandth floor, but they might as well have been traveling to another planet. Because when they emerged into the Fullers’ entryway, it looked utterly alien and unfamiliar to Leda, even though she’d been here so many times.

  Everything was burned. It was a blackened corpse of an apartment, hollowed-out and devastated. The mirrors were cracked and streaked with soot. Leda saw the damage to the apartment reflected in their shattered surfaces, over and over, a million mirrored worlds of devastation.

  The door to the living room was gone, ripped clean off the wall, so it stood wide open like a vacant, untoothed mouth. Firebots swarmed inside, emitting streams of black oxygen-inhibitor, which smelled sickly sweet, almost like icing; though the fire had long since been extinguished.

  “Can you confirm which room is Avery’s?” the fire marshal asked. “It’s hard to tell right now.”

  “Oh. Um—okay,” Leda said hesitantly, and started down the hallway. A dense cloud of ash rose with each footfall—blackened, coarse ash that settled back down on the ground in new patterns, like snow from hell. She kept tripping over debris, over the rancid dark sludge that coated the Fullers’ floor, but she didn’t slow down.

  When she got to Avery’s room—or rather, what was left of it—Leda sucked in a breath.

  The bed was a smoldering heap of ash, still licking with a few stray flames.

  The last vestiges of Leda’s self-control snapped, and she ran blindly forward, falling to her knees before the bed and sifting through the wreckage. She tore at a square of fabric, a wooden bed support—not caring that her palm was seared and blistering, that she had splinters digging into her fingers. Avery was in this apartment somewhere. She had to be, because Leda refused to accept any alternative.

  “Hey, hey,” the fire marshal said, reaching his arms around Leda from behind to lift her up, as easily as if she weighed nothing. Leda kept writhing, beating her fists at him like a drunkard in a bar brawl, screaming a loud and incoherent wail. She felt like a woman gone mad.

  When he deposited her back in the living room, Leda had fallen still. Her throat stung from screaming, or maybe from all the ash. “I’m sorry about your friend,” the fire marshal said gruffly.

  He disappeared for a moment, and when he came back he was holding a half-full bottle of peach schnapps. “Take a sip. Doctor’s orders. Sorry,” he added, as she sat there staring at the label, “it was the only unbroken one I could find. The rest were all shattered.”

  Leda was too dazed to do anything but obey. She took a generous pull of the schnapps, her legs stretched out before her. She realized that she had started crying again, because she knew this bottle: She’d gotten it for Avery’s sixteenth birthday as a joke, and it had survived in the Fullers’ liquor cabinet this long simply because no one had ever wanted any.

  She set the bottle aside and slumped forward, pulling her knees to her chest. Oh, Avery, she thought disconsolately, what have you done?

  The fire marshal didn’t disturb her. He just moved on with his efforts, leaving Leda to cry her heart out on the Fullers’ ashen living room floor.

  She cried for Avery, the sister she had chosen, and Eris, the sister she hadn’t known until too late. Leda’s two sisters: her blood sister and the sister of her heart, now both lost to her for good. How would she go on living without them?

  She’d hoped that by confessing to the police, she could wipe away her guilt. But Avery had beaten her to it. Avery had given herself up for Leda in a drastic act of self-sacrifice, the kind of sacrifice you could never take back.

  The only way Leda could ever hope to deserve that sacrifice was to do better in the future than she had in the past.

  She was intimately familiar with all her bad deeds, every last machination and manipulation and scheme. They were inscribed indelibly upon her heart.

  But maybe her good deeds were there too, she thought, no matter how outnumbered they might be. Her love for her family and friends—and for Watt.

  Maybe if Leda tried hard enough, if she worked at being patient and thoughtful and curious and kind, her good deeds might eventually outweigh the bad. Maybe then, someday, she would actually be worthy of this tremendous gift Avery had given her.

  CALLIOPE

  CALLIOPE GLANCED AROUND the Nuage bar without seeming to turn her head, a skill she had mastered long ago. A lightly foamed macchiato sat on the counter before her, untouched. Various young men and women in suits were starting to file in, for business breakfasts or a quick coffee. More than one of them had cast her a tentative, curious look. Easy targets, if she was looking to pick up a mark. Which she wasn’t.

  Truthfully, Calliope had come here because a hotel bar was one of the easiest places to go when you were alone and uncertain of your next move. Safe, neutral, undemanding. Like a foreign embassy, she remembered joking to Brice.

  There was something soothing about being at the bar this early, when everything was still cool and shining, the bottles lined up just so. It was a little slice of quiet between the loud nighttime hours and the bustle of midday.

  Calliope felt adrift in a way she hadn’t in years. There was nothing tying her to anyone anymore, really. Her luggage was all stacked behind the Nuage’s front desk, except for her pouch of jewelry, which was folded securely in her crossbody purse. She could cut and run, melt away into the city—duck into any public park or corner bodega or department store—and not a soul would know where she was. It was a curious feeling.

  She sighed and gave a few commands to her contacts, flipping over to the feeds, and gasped aloud. The headlines drove all thoughts of herself and her current situation from her head. Somehow Avery Fuller’s secret had gotten out, and the world knew about her and Atlas.

  In retaliation, Avery had burned down her family’s apartment—the entire thousandth floor—while she was still inside.

  Calliope felt strangely numb at the news. She couldn’t believe that the world no longer contained Avery Fuller. Avery, who’d been many things to her: a stranger, an obstacle, and ultimately, something approaching a friend. Bright, effervescent Avery, with her ready smile and her sunshine hair, who literally lived on top of the world. She would never have guessed that a girl like that would do something so irrevocably drastic. But then, Calliope knew better than anyone that you could never tell what people were hiding, behind the facade they presented to the world.

  She curled her palms around the coffee mug for the warmth, wondering at what a strange thing love was. It could make you feel invincible, and then a moment later it could utterly destroy you. Calliope thought of Avery and Atlas, trapped in an impossible situation. She thought of her mom and Nadav. Would they have had a shot, if they had met in a completely different context?

  Calliope wondered where Elise was right now. Already she must have ditched her contacts, disconnecting from everything as if she’d vanished from the world in a puff of smoke. Just like Avery.

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  Brice slid onto the seat next to her. Calliope’s pulse suddenly echoed through her body, all the way to her fingertips. He looked different today, but maybe that was simply the fact that she had mentally given him up, only to discover that he was hers again after all. Or was he?

  One thing was for certain. After what she’d seen between her mom and Nadav, Calliope knew that she had to tell Brice the truth. He deserved that from her.

  “I’m not what you think I am.”

  “I had no idea you’d started reading my thoughts,” Brice remarked and waved for a coffee. “What is it that I think you are, aside from beautiful and unpredictable?”

  Calliope let out a breath. “I’m not . . .”

  She trailed off, uncertain how to continue.
Not nice? Not a good person? “My name isn’t Calliope.”

  Brice didn’t even flinch. “I know.”

  “What? How—”

  “I’m a little offended that you don’t remember our first meeting, on the beach in Singapore. Back when you called yourself Gemma.”

  “You remember that?” How long had she feared that Brice might make that connection—and yet here he was, saying he’d known all along, and he didn’t seem upset. A beam of light seemed to fall through Calliope’s worry, to touch something hopeful and tentative within her.

  “Of course I remember,” he replied. “You’re unforgettable.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything, if you knew?”

  “For two reasons. First, because I don’t totally know. I’m still not sure why you and your mom have been skipping around the world changing your names. I have my theories,” he said, in answer to the worried look on her face, “but now isn’t the time to discuss them.”

  She held her breath. “What’s the second reason?”

  “I wanted to get to know you. The real you. And I did,” Brice said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  Calliope felt a bright, delicate joy bubbling up within her. Brice knew the truth about her, or at the very least he suspected, and yet it didn’t matter. He still wanted to be here with her.

  “So,” he went on, his tone shifting from flippant to earnest in that lightning-quick way of his. “What happened to bring you down to the Nuage so early?”

  “Nadav found out that my mom and I aren’t who we say we are. Needless to say, he wasn’t pleased.”

  “Does that mean you’re leaving New York?”

  “My mom already left. I stayed,” Calliope said softly, and a little of the old flirtation reared its head. “I have . . . unfinished business in New York.”

  She had positioned her hand, tentatively, on the bar between them. Brice wordlessly put his hand over hers.

  “Am I the unfinished business?”