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“Avery,” Jess McClane said, leaning forward. “Did you end things with Zay? I ran into him earlier, and he seemed down.”
“Yeah,” Avery said slowly. “I mean, I think so? I do like him, but …” she trailed off halfheartedly.
“Oh my god, Avery. You really should just do it, and get it over with!” Jess exclaimed. The gold bangles on her wrists glimmered in the solar panel’s light. “What are you waiting for, exactly? Or maybe I should say, who are you waiting for?”
“Give it a rest, Jess. You can’t exactly talk,” Leda snapped. People always made comments like that to Avery, because there was nothing else to really criticize her about. But it made even less sense coming from Jess, who was a virgin too.
“As a matter of fact, I can,” Jess said meaningfully.
A chorus of squeals erupted at that—“Wait, you and Patrick?” “When?” “Where?”—and Jess grinned, clearly eager to share the details. Leda leaned back, pretending to listen. As far as the girls all knew, she was a virgin too. She hadn’t told anyone the truth, not even Avery. And she never would.
It had happened in January, on the annual ski trip to Catyan. Their families had been going for years: at first just the Fullers and the Andertons, and then once Leda and Avery became such good friends, the Coles too. The Andes were the best skiing left on earth; even Colorado and the Alps relied almost exclusively on snow machines these days. Only in Chile, on the highest peaks in the Andes, was there enough natural snow for true skiing anymore.
The second day of the trip, they were all out drone-skiing—Avery, Leda, Atlas, Jamie, Cord, even Cord’s older brother, Brice—falling from the jump seats of their individual ski-drones to land on the powder, cut a line through the trees, and reach back up to grab their drones before the drop-off at the glacier’s edge. Leda wasn’t as strong a skier as the others, but she’d swallowed an adrenaline drop on the ride up and was feeling good, almost as good as when she stole the really good stuff from her mom. She followed Atlas through the trees, trying her best to keep up, loving the way the wind clawed at the contours of her polydown suit. She could hear nothing but the swish of her skis through the snow, and, beneath it, the deep, hollow sound of emptiness. It struck her that they were tempting fate, hurtling through the paper-thin air up there on a glacier, at the very edge of the sky.
That was when Avery had screamed.
Everything afterward was a blur. Leda fumbled in her glove to push the red emergency button that would summon her ski-drone, but Avery was already being scooped up a few meters away. Her leg jutted out at a garish angle.
By the time they got back to the hotel’s penthouse suite, Avery was already on a jet home. She would be fine, Mr. Fuller assured them; she just needed her knee re-fused, and he wanted her to see experts in New York. Leda knew what that meant. Avery would visit Everett Radson afterward to have the surgery microlasered. God forbid there be the slightest trace of a scar on her perfect body.
Later that night the kids were all in the hot tub on the deck, passing around frosted bottles of whiskeycream, toasting to Avery, the Andes, the snow that had started falling. As it started to come down ever faster, the others eventually grumbled in protest and retreated to bed. But Leda, who was sitting next to Atlas, stayed behind. He hadn’t moved yet either.
She’d wanted Atlas for years, ever since she and Avery became friends, since the moment she first met him at Avery’s apartment, when he walked in on them singing Disney songs and she turned bright red with embarrassment. But Leda had never really thought she had a chance with him. He was two years older, and besides, he was Avery’s brother. Until now, as everyone was clambering out of the hot tub and she hesitated, wondering if maybe, possibly … She felt hyperaware of where her knee brushed Atlas’s under the water, sending tingles up her entire left side.
“Want some?” he murmured, passing her the bottle.
“Thanks.” Leda forced herself to look away from his eyelashes, where snowflakes were clumping like tiny liquid stars. She took a long sip of the whiskeycream. It was smooth, sweet like a dessert, with an aftertaste that burned in her throat. She felt light-headed, dizzy from the heat of the hot tub, of Atlas so close to her. Maybe the adrenaline drop hadn’t worn off yet, or maybe it was just her own raw excitement that made her feel strangely reckless.
“Atlas,” she said softly. When he turned to her, an eyebrow raised, she leaned forward and kissed him.
After a moment’s hesitation he kissed her back, his hands reaching up into the heavy curls of her hair, dusted with snow. Leda lost all sense of time. At some point her bikini top came off, and her bottoms too—well, it wasn’t like she was wearing much clothing to begin with—and Atlas was whispering “Are you sure?” Leda nodded, her heart hammering. Of course she was sure. She’d never been so sure of anything.
The next morning she nearly skipped into the kitchen, her hair still damp from the hot tub’s steam, the memory of Atlas’s touch carved indelibly on her skin, like an inktat. But he was gone.
He’d taken the first jet back to New York. To check on Avery, his dad said. Leda nodded coolly, but inside she felt sick. She knew the truth, why Atlas had really left. He was avoiding her. Fine, she thought, anger swirling in to cover the pang of loss; she would show him. She wouldn’t care either.
Except that Leda never got a chance to confront Atlas. He went missing later that week, before classes resumed, even though it should have been the spring semester of his senior year. There was a brief and frantic search for him, limited only to Avery’s family. It ended within hours, when his parents learned he was okay.
Now, almost a year later, Atlas’s disappearance was old news. His parents publicly laughed it off as a youthful indulgence: Leda had heard them at countless cocktail parties, claiming that he was traveling the world on a gap year, that it had been their idea all along. That was their story and they were sticking to it, but Avery had told Leda the truth. The Fullers had no idea where Atlas was, and when—or if—he would ever come back. He called Avery periodically to check in, but always with the location heavily encrypted, and by then he was about to move on anyway.
Leda never told Avery about that night in the Andes. She didn’t know how to bring it up in the wake of Atlas’s disappearance, and the longer she kept it to herself, the more of a secret it became. It ached like a bruise, the realization that the only boy she’d ever cared about had literally run away after sleeping with her. Leda tried to stay angry; feeling angry seemed safer than letting herself feel hurt. But even the anger wasn’t enough to quiet the pain that pounded dully through her at the thought of him.
Which was how she’d ended up in rehab.
“Leda, will you come with me?” Avery’s voice broke into her thoughts. Leda blinked. “To my dad’s office, to pick something up,” Avery repeated. Her eyes were wide with meaning; Avery’s dad’s office was the excuse they’d been using for years, when one of them wanted to ditch whoever they were with.
“Doesn’t your dad have messenger bots for that?” Ming asked.
Leda ignored her. “Of course,” she said to Avery, standing up and brushing bits of grass off her jeans. “Let’s go.”
They waved good-bye and started on the path toward the nearest transport station, where the clear vertical column of the express C line shot upward. The sides were startlingly transparent; Leda could see inside to a group of elderly women whose heads were tipped together in conversation, and a toddler picking his nose.
“Atlas pinged me last night,” Avery whispered as they moved to stand on the upTower platform.
Leda stiffened. She knew that Avery had stopped telling her parents about Atlas’s calls. She said it only upset them. But there was something weird about the fact that Avery didn’t share this with anyone except Leda.
Then again, Avery had always been oddly protective of Atlas. Whenever he dated anyone, she invariably acted polite, but a little aloof—as if she didn’t quite approve, or thought that Atlas had made a mistake. Leda wondered if it had to do with Atlas being adopted, if Avery worried he was somehow more vulnerable, because of the life he’d come from, and felt an impulse to protect him as a result.
“Really?” she asked, keeping her voice steady. “Could you tell where he was?”
“I heard a lot of loud voices in the background. Probably a bar somewhere.” Avery shrugged. “You know how Atlas is.”
No, I really don’t. Maybe if she understood Atlas, Leda would be able to make sense of her own confused feelings. She gave her friend’s arm a squeeze.
“Anyway,” Avery said with forced brightness, “he’ll come home soon, when he’s ready. Right?”
She looked at Leda with a question in her eyes. For a moment, Leda was struck by how much Avery reminded her of Atlas. They weren’t related by blood, and yet they had the same white-hot intensity. When they turned the full force of their attention on you, it was as blinding as looking into the sun.
Leda shifted uncomfortably. “Of course,” she said. “He’ll come back soon.”
She prayed it wasn’t true, and at the same time, she couldn’t help hoping it was.
RYLIN (#u55fe127b-6976-595b-9134-9f74783f82dc)
THE NEXT EVENING, Rylin Myers stood at the door to her apartment, struggling to wave her ID ring over the scanner while balancing a bag of groceries in one arm and a half-full energy drink in the other. Of course, she thought as she kicked shamelessly at the door, this wouldn’t be a problem if they had a retinal scanner, or those glitzy computerized lenses that the highlier kids all wore. But no one could afford anything like that where Rylin lived, here on 32.
Just as she was drawing back her leg to kick again, the door opened. “Finally,” Rylin muttered, shoving past her fourteen-year-old sister.
“If you got your ID ring fixed like I keep telling you to, this wouldn’t happen,” Chrissa quipped. “Then again, what would you say? ‘Sorry, officers, I keep using my ID ring to open beer bottles, and now it’s stopped working’?”
Rylin ignored her. Taking a long sip of her energy drink, she heaved the grocery bag onto the counter and tossed her sister a box of veggie-rice. “Can you put this stuff away? I’m running late.” The Ifty—Intra Floor Transit system—was down again, so she’d been forced to walk all twenty blocks from the lift stop to their apartment.
Chrissa looked up. “You’re going out tonight?” She’d inherited their mom’s soft Korean features, her delicate nose and high arched brow, while Rylin looked much more like their square-jawed dad. But they’d both somehow gotten their mom’s bright green eyes, which glowed against their skin like beryls.
“Um, yeah. It’s Saturday,” Rylin answered, purposefully ignoring her sister’s meaning. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened on this day a year ago—the day their mom died and their entire world fell apart. She would never forget how Child Services came to their house that very night, while the girls were still holding each other crying, to tell them about the foster system.
Rylin had listened to them for a while, Chrissa’s head turned into her shoulder as she kept on sobbing. Her sister was smart, really smart, and good enough at volleyball to have a serious shot at a college scholarship. But Rylin knew enough about foster care to know what it would do to them. Especially to Chrissa.
She would do anything to keep this family together, no matter what it cost her.
The very next day she’d gone to the nearest family court and declared legal adulthood, so that she could start working her terrible job at the monorail stop full-time. What other choice did she have? Even now, they were barely keeping up—Rylin had just gotten yet another warning notice from their landlord; they were always at least a month behind on rent. Not to mention all their mom’s hospital bills. Rylin had been trying to pay those down for the last year, but at this interest rate the mountain of debt was actually starting to grow. Sometimes Rylin felt like she’d never be free of it.
This was their life now, and it wasn’t changing anytime soon.
“Rylin. Please?”
“I’m already late,” Rylin said, retreating into her roped-off section of their tiny bedroom; thinking about what she would wear, about the fact that she didn’t have to go into work for a whole thirty-six hours, about anything but the reproachful look in her sister’s green eyes, which looked so painfully like their mom’s.
Rylin and her boyfriend, Hiral, clattered down the steps of the Tower’s Exit 12. “There they are,” Rylin muttered, raising a hand against the glare of the sun. Their friends were gathered at the usual meeting place, a hot metal bench across the street at 127th and Morningside.
She glanced at Hiral. “Are you sure you don’t have anything with you?” she asked again. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about the fact that Hiral had started selling—at first just to their friends, then on an even bigger level—but it had been a long week, and she was still on edge after her conversation with Chrissa. She could really use a hit, of relaxants or halluci-lighter, anything to silence the thoughts that were cycling endlessly through her brain.
Hiral shook his head. “Sorry. Cleared my whole inventory this week.” He glanced at her. “Everything okay?”
Rylin was quiet. Hiral reached for her hand, and she let him take it. His palms were rough with work, and there were black circles of grease underneath his fingernails. Hiral had dropped out of school last year to work as a liftie, repairing the Tower’s massive elevators from the inside. He spent his days suspended hundreds of meters in the air like a human spider.
“Ry!” her best friend, Lux, exclaimed, rushing over. Her hair, cut in jagged bangs, was ash-blond this week. “You made it! I was worried you weren’t going to come.”
“Sorry. Got caught up,” Rylin apologized.
Andrés snorted. “Had to get a little transmission in before the concert?” He made a crude gesture with his hands.
Lux rolled her eyes and pulled Rylin into a hug. “How are you holding up?” she murmured.
“Fine.” Rylin didn’t know what else to say. She felt a confused pang of gratefulness that Lux had remembered what day it was, mingled with irritation at the reminder. She caught herself toying with her mom’s old necklace and quickly let go of it. Hadn’t she come out precisely to avoid thinking about her mom?
Shaking her head, Rylin let her gaze roam over the rest of the group. Andrés was leaning back on the bench, stubbornly wearing a leather jacket in spite of the heat. Hiral stood next to him, his deeply bronzed skin gleaming in the setting sun. And on the far side of the bench was Indigo, wearing a shirt that she’d barely managed to turn into a dress, and sky-high boots.
“Where’s V?” Rylin asked.
“Providing the fun. Unless you were planning on bringing today?” Indigo said sarcastically.
“Just partaking, thanks,” Rylin replied. Indigo rolled her eyes and went back to messaging on her tablet.
Rylin took plenty of illegal drugs, of course—they all did—but she drew the line at buying or selling. No one cared much about a few smoking teenagers, but the laws were harsher on dealers. If she ended up in jail, Chrissa would go straight to foster care. Rylin couldn’t risk that.
Andrés glanced up from his tablet. “V’s meeting us there. Let’s go.”
A blistering wind tossed a few stray pieces of trash along the sidewalk. Rylin stepped over them, taking a deep, bracing breath. The air out here might be hot, but at least it wasn’t the recycled, oxygen-heavy air of the Tower.
Across the street, Hiral was already crouched at the side of the Tower, sliding a blade beneath the edge of a steel panel and peeling it back. “All clear,” he murmured. Their hands brushed as Rylin stepped into the opening, and they exchanged a look; then Rylin was stepping into the steel forest.
The sounds of outside instantly vanished, replaced by the low hum of voices and drugged-out laughter, and the whoosh of air cycling from the bottom of the Tower. They were in the underworld beneath the first floor; a strange, dark space of pipes and steel columns. Rylin and Lux walked softly through the shadows, nodding at the other groups as they passed. One cluster was gathered around the dim pink glow of a halluci-lighter. Another, half clothed and sprawled out on a pile of pillows, was clearly about to start an Oxytose orgy. Rylin saw the telltale gleam of the machine room door ahead, and started to walk a little faster.
“You can all go ahead and thank me now,” came a voice from the shadows, and she almost jumped. V.
He wasn’t as tall as Andrés, but V had to weigh at least twenty kilos more, and it was all muscle. His broad shoulders and arms were covered entirely in inktats, which danced across his body in a swirling chaos; shapes forming, breaking apart, and reforming elsewhere. Rylin winced at the thought of inking that much skin.
“Okay, guys.” V reached into his bag and produced a stack of bright gold patches, each the size of Rylin’s thumbnail. “Who’s in for communals?”
“Holy shit,” Lux exclaimed, laughing. “How did you score these?”
“Hell, yes!” Hiral high-fived Andrés.
“Seriously?” Rylin asked, her voice cutting through the celebrations. She didn’t like communals. They induced a shared group high, which felt somehow invasive, like having sex with a bunch of strangers. The worst part was being unable to control the high, putting herself entirely in someone else’s hands. “I thought we were smoking tonight,” she said. She’d even brought her halluci-lighter, the tiny compact pipe that could be used for almost anything—darklights, crispies, and of course the hallucinogenic weed it had been created for.
“Scared, Myers?” V challenged, after a moment.
“I’m not scared.” Rylin drew herself up to her full height and stared at V. “I just wanted to do something else.”
Her tablet vibrated with an incoming message. She looked down to see a text from Chrissa. I made Mom’s baked apple bites,she’d written. In case you want to come home!
V was watching her, an open challenge in his gaze. “Whatever,” Rylin said under her breath. “Why the hell not?” She reached out to grab the patches in V’s hand and slapped one on her inner arm, right by the elbow where her vein was close to the surface.
“That’s what I thought,” V said as the others began eagerly reaching for the patches.
They stepped into the machine room, and suddenly all Rylin could hear was the electronic music. It slammed angrily into her skull, obliterating any other thought. Lux grabbed her arm and began jumping hysterically, shouting something unintelligible.
“Who’s ready to party?!” the DJ exclaimed from where he stood perched on a coolant tank, an amplifier spreading his voice throughout the room. The space, hot and close with cramped bodies, erupted in screams. “All right,” he went on. “If you’ve got a gold, put it on now. Because I’m DJ Lowy, and I’m about to take you on the most insane ride of your life.” The dim light reflected off the sea of communal patches. Almost everyone here was patched up, Rylin realized. This would be intense.
“Three—” Lowy shouted, counting down. Lux gave an eager laugh and jumped higher on her tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd. Rylin glanced at V; his inktats were swirling even wilder than usual in the space surrounding his patch, as if his very skin knew what was about to happen.
“Two—” Most of the crowd had joined in the count. Hiral came to stand behind Rylin and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her head. She leaned back into him and closed her eyes, bracing herself for the communals’ activation.
“One!” The scream reverberated through the room. Lowy reached for the tablet hovering before him and flicked on the electromagnetic pulse, tuned to the frequency of the communals. Instantly all the patches in the room released waves of stimulants into the bloodstream of everyone wearing them. The ultimate synchronized high.
The music turned up and Rylin threw her hands into the air, joining the loud, seemingly endless scream. She could already feel the communal taking over her system. The world had realigned to the music, everything—the flashing of the lights overhead, her breathing, her heartbeat, everyone’s heartbeats—timed perfectly with the deep, insistent pulse of the bass.
Don’t you love this? Lux mouthed, or at least that’s what it seemed like she said, though Rylin couldn’t be sure. Already she was losing her grip on her thoughts. Chrissa and her text messages didn’t matter, her job and her asshole boss didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except this moment. She felt invincible, untouchable, like she would be this way forever: young and dancing and electric and alive.
Lights. A flask of something strong being passed to her. She took a sip without tasting what it was. A touch on her hip—Hiral, she thought, pulling his hand closer in invitation. But then she saw Hiral a few rows forward, jumping and punching at the sky with Andrés. She spun around only to see V’s face whirl up out of the darkness. He held up another gold patch, an eyebrow raised suggestively. Rylin shook her head. She wasn’t even sure how she’d pay him back for the one she’d already taken.
But V was already peeling back the adhesive on the back side. “No charge,” he whispered, as if reading her thoughts, or had she spoken them aloud? He reached down to sweep her hair back from her neck. “A little secret: The closer it is to your brain, the faster it kicks in.”
Rylin closed her eyes, dazed, as the second wave of drugs snapped through her. It was a razor-sharp rush, setting all her nerves afire. She was dancing and somehow also floating when she sensed a vibration in her front pocket. She ignored it and kept jumping, but there it was again, drawing her painstakingly back into her awkward, physical body. Fumbling, she managed to grab her tablet. “Hello?” Rylin said, gasping as her breathing became irregular, no longer in time with the music.
“Rylin Myers?”
“What the—who is this?” She couldn’t hear. The crowd was still buffeting her back and forth.
There was a pause, as if the speaker couldn’t believe the question. “Cord Anderton,” he said finally, and Rylin blinked in shock. Her mom had worked as a maid for the Andertons, back before she got sick. Dimly Rylin realized that she did recognize the voice, from the few times she’d been up there. But why the hell was Cord Anderton calling her?
“So, can you come work my party?”
“I don’t … what are you talking about?” She tried to shout over the music, but it came out more like a rasp.
“I sent you a message. I’m throwing a party tonight.” His voice was fast, impatient. “I need someone here—to keep everything clean, help with the caterers, all the stuff your mom used to do.” Rylin flinched at the mention of her mom, but of course he couldn’t see. “My usual help bailed last minute, but then I remembered you and looked you up. Do you want the job or not?”
Rylin wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. Who did Cord Anderton think he was, summoning her on a Saturday night? She opened her mouth to tell this rich, entitled asshole to shove the job right up his—
“I forgot,” he added, “it pays two hundred nanos.”
Rylin choked back her words. Two hundred nanodollars for just one night of dealing with drunk rich kids? “How soon do you need me there?”
“Oh, half an hour ago.”
“I’m on my way,” she said, the room still spinning. “But—”
