BOOK REVIEW: The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee

Blurb:

Welcome to Manhattan, 2118. A thousand-storey tower stretching into the sky. A glittering vision of the future, where anything is possible – if you want it enough.A hundred years in the future, New York’s elite of the super-tower lie, backstab and betray each other to find their place at the top of the world. Everyone wants something… and everyone has something to lose. As the privileged inhabitants of the upper floors recklessly navigate the successes and pitfalls of the luxury life, forbidden desires are indulged and carefree lives teeter on the brink of catastrophe. Whilst lower-floor workers are tempted by a world – and unexpected romance – dangling just out of reach. And on the thousandth floor is Avery Fuller, the girl genetically designed to be perfect. The girl who seems to have it all – yet is tormented by the one thing she can never have. So when a young woman falls from the top of the super-tower, her death is the culmination of a scandal that has ensnared the top-floor elite and bottom-floor. But who plummeted from the roof? And what dark secrets led to her fall?Friends will be betrayed and enemies forged as promises are broken. When you’re this high up, there’s nowhere to go but down…

Rating: 4/5 Stars

My Notes:

Book 1 in the The Thousandth Floor Series
Reminds me of Penthouse (similar vibes/plot)
The book starts and ends with a girl falling from the 1000th floor
5 main protagonists + their stories
Interconnected stories
Reference to drug/alcohol use, murder, sex and death
The plot is slow at the start, however, it gets more enticing the further you get through the book

Book Quotes:

They say that before death, people’s lives flash before their eyes. But as the ground rushed ever faster toward her, the girl could think only of the past few hours, the path she’d taken that ended here. If only she hadn’t talked to him. If only she hadn’t been so foolish. If only she hadn’t gone up there in the first place.
He didn’t know whether she’d fallen, or been pushed, or whether—crushed by the weight of unspoken secrets—she’d decided to jump
She loved it here—loved the wind battering her face and tangling her hair, bringing tears to her eyes, howling so loud that it drowned out her own wild thoughts
And beneath her bare feet lay the biggest structure on earth, a whole world unto itself. How strange that there were millions of people below her at this very moment, eating, sleeping, dreaming, touching. Avery blinked, feeling suddenly and acutely alone. They were strangers, all of them, even the ones she knew.What did she care about them, or about herself, or about anything, really?
And there it was: the reason Avery had to climb into a windstorm to escape her thoughts, the part of her engineering that had gone horribly wrong.
There was always something magical about this first glimpse of the city, especially now, with the windows of the upper floors blazing in the afternoon sun. Beneath the neochrome surface Leda caught flashes of color where the elevators shot past, the veins of the city pumping its lifeblood up and down. It was the same as ever, she thought, utterly modern and yet somehow timeless. Leda had seen countless pics of the old New York skyline, the one people always romanticized. But compared to the Tower she thought it looked jagged and ugly.
Three thousand accumulated messages instantly pinged in her ears, invitations and vid-alerts cascading over one another like musical notes. The rumble of attention was oddly soothing.
But the thought of telling Avery made Leda clutch at the seat beneath her until her knuckles were white. She couldn’t do it; couldn’t reveal that kind of weakness to her perfect best friend. Avery would be polite about it, of course, but Leda knew that on some level she would judge her, would always look at Leda differently. And Leda couldn’t handle that.
To Leda, they seemed just as beautiful as anything she’d seen on her afternoon hikes at Silver Cove. But Leda wasn’t the type to look for beauty in nature. Beauty was a word she reserved for expensive jewelry, and dresses, and Avery’s face.
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.
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.
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.
She gave her head an impatient toss and the earrings danced, catching all the glorious colors of her hair as if lit from within. The earrings glowed against her hair like twin stars.
“Winner’s curse,” Nadia whispered into his eartennas, and he could swear he heard amusement in her tone. “Where the victor gets exactly what he wants, only to find that it isn’t quite as he expected.”
She nodded, breaking every promise to herself, loving him.
She sensed suddenly that his carelessness was deceptive, that beneath it all he was watching her intently.
It was so beautiful; a glass sphere glowing with whorls of color, like the eye of a coming storm. A beautiful, rare, expensive present from her dad to her mom. Suddenly the earring and everything it stood for struck Eris as unbearably false
Everywhere she looked Eris saw the debris of an epic night, scattered cups and lost costume pieces and broken halluci-lighters.
She opened her eyes and looked at his face, so clear and guileless. He wasn’t suggesting the truth—was he? He couldn’t be. He didn’t know what it was like, wanting something you could never have; how impossible it was to un-want it once you’d let the feeling in
The invisibility cone dissolved, letting reality back in.
Cord was nothing but a shadow.
Atlas might be hard to read, but maybe there was another way to figure him out.
It exploded into a million pieces, which scattered over the floor like shards of glittering tears.
Leda had long ago accepted that she wasn’t beautiful. She was too severe, all sharp edges and narrow angles, and her chest was painfully small. Still, she had her mother’s rich brown skin and her father’s full mouth. And there was something interesting in her face—a bright, hard intelligence that made people look twice.
Especially not now, when the whole reason she’d broken down in the first place was back again, and as gorgeous as ever.
I love you too, her heart whispered, curling around the phrase like a prayer.
She sensed suddenly that his carelessness was deceptive, that beneath it all he was watching her intently.
It was if nothing had happened. Then again, they were the ones obsessed with maintaining appearances; this whole illusion of normalcy was probably their idea.
She wondered what the Fullers thought about his reappearance, the way he’d just materialized inexplicably at Cord’s party and jumped right back into their lives as if nothing had happened. Then again, they were the ones obsessed with maintaining appearances; this whole illusion of normalcy was probably their idea.
Then again, I’ve never kept a secret from her before, Leda thought, just as Atlas turned back to smile at them both, and she realized of course that wasn’t true at all; her biggest secret was standing right there before her.
She just hoped he wasn’t also her biggest mistake.
Avery liked it down here, the way the buildings all felt unique, with their own scrolling ironwork and their own facades.
Avery pinched her forearm to keep from tearing up. Her best friend and the boy she could never admit to loving. It was like the universe was playing a cruel joke on her.
ERIS LAY ON her stomach, head tilted to one side, eyes firmly shut as a children’s cartoon played across the back of her eyelids.
She’d come to the hospital hoping her dad would fix everything the way he always did, and yet he seemed even more broken than she was.
“I miss the way things were,” he said in answer, and Eris’s heart sank.
But even pressed into the crushing sea of people, Eris had never felt more acutely alone.
But more than that, Rylin hated that she didn’t really have a choice.
Leda’s gesture seemed saturated with meaning: possessive, somehow. It was the kind of touch you gave someone you’d already touched in other ways, or who you really wanted to. The kind of touch Avery could never, ever give Atlas.
It was like she wasn’t even there, like she’d suddenly erased herself. Which was exactly how she felt.
He thought he saw tears in her sky-blue eyes.
“Do you ever feel like people think they know you, but they can’t, because they don’t know the most important thing about you?”
“Good luck in there,” he called out, but Avery was already a world away.
Avery didn’t get it. She was the same as she’d always been, still sailing effortlessly above everyone else’s sordid little problems up there in her thousandth-floor palace, while Eris had lost everything. In their whole lifetime of friendship, Eris had never truly resented Avery until this moment. “You know, I really don’t feel well,” she repeated, overemphasizing each word. “I’m going home.” She saw Jeffrey meet her eyes knowingly, and felt like she might scream.
It felt good, floating around this abandoned house without caring what any of them thought of her. She had needed a night like this.
Forget them, she told herself, the resentment still warming her from within. They had all treated her terribly, her mom, her dad, even her birth dad, whoever he was. She didn’t need any of them. She didn’t need anyone at all. She was doing just fine without them.
So she’d hooked up with Mariel—oh god, what was her last name? Eris winced. Well, it didn’t count and didn’t matter, she thought as she drifted restlessly back to sleep. It would be like the whole thing had never happened at all.
It really was beautiful. Usually Avery looked all bright and sunshiny, but the dark stones captured something else in her, the shadows flitting across her face and along the curve of her collarbone.
Her heart felt lighter than it had in weeks.
“You’ve been lying to everyone! This is why I need to meet my birth father! Because I need at least one functioning parental relationship in my life, and I clearly can’t get it from you!”
Eris felt like those wadded-up pieces of trash that she’d seen the kids on this floor kicking idly around. Unwanted and useless, and belonging to no one.
He was crazy to think he might ever have a shot. What could a guy from downTower ever hope for, with the most beautiful girl on earth—a girl who literally lived on top of the world? Avery probably had dozens of guys constantly asking her out, all of them taller or richer than Watt.
He sped up as the trees thinned ahead, and the dark ribbon of the path turned along the edge of a wide illusion lake.
“It’s nice how you can go miles without seeing anyone, you know?”
They arrived just in time to climb the steps. By the end Rylin was racing like a child, gasping as she reached the upper platform. Dusk had settled over the streets of Paris below, making everything feel enchanted.
“To Paris,” Rylin repeated softly. She clinked her champagne to his in the flickering candlelight, wondering what exactly she thought she was doing. But she couldn’t summon even a shred of regret.
At some point they had started holding hands, their fingers interlaced, Cord running his thumb lightly over the back of her wrist. It sent shivers up and down her body. Rylin knew she should pull away, and yet she didn’t.
The moonlight silvered the padlocks fastened all over the bridge, where so many countless lovers had locked their hearts and thrown the key into the river.
It seemed to Rylin that she was in a sort of trance, that time had halted and the whole world was holding its breath.
For the first time in weeks, Eris’s life was as it should be.
“You’re right, I’m no expert. It’s like they say, the more you see, the less you know.”
Avery, of course, was utterly perfect. But Leda was jealous of Eris too, of the way she somehow managed to stand there in a too-short leather dress looking like the queen of everything. It was in the way she moved, the easy confidence with which she carried herself, the scornful entitlement that echoed behind her commands.
The more he talked to Avery, the more complicated she seemed. They were both seventeen, and yet sometimes it felt like she was far older, as though she’d already been everywhere and seen everything, and was exhausted by it all.
Atlas was as boring and introspective as all of Watt’s hacking had led him to believe.
A splash sounded in the water behind them, as another pair of lovers tossed a key off the bridge and into the night.
Cord’s lips on hers felt like fire. Without another thought she was rising on tiptoe to kiss him back, clinging tight to his shoulders as the only solid thing in a dizzying world.
Her mind was jumbled, everything from yesterday morning onward all blurred together and confused. But from the tangled knot of her feelings she’d extracted a single crucial thread.
The skies began to open overhead. Sudden rain poured down, the droplets so cold and fast that they stung Avery’s face. But she couldn’t move. She just stood there like a lightning rod as the storm gathered around her, her feet rooted in place, a hand raised to touch her lips in wonder.
Avery froze, hardly daring to breathe. The touch of Atlas’s lips on hers was featherlight, tentative, uncertain. She closed her eyes as the kiss sent a thrill through her body, until it felt like her hair was standing on end, like her whole body was a live wire, humming with electricity. She wanted to wrap her arms around Atlas, to pull him close and never let go. But she didn’t dare move, terrified to break the spell.
He turned to look at her. His face was an unreadable shadow against the darkness of the sky.
She’d still had a handle on things, though, until Leda capped off the night by telling her how she’d slept with Atlas. At that news, Avery’s last shreds of self-control had snapped.
Eris had turned and was running blindly out of Bubble Lounge, tears streaming down her face for all the world to see.
It was the last fragment of her old life, falling away for good. She wasn’t Eris Dodd-Radson. Not anymore.
Tears pricked at the corners of Eris’s eyes. She looked out over the party she’d been so excited about all evening, the beautifully dressed crowd and expensive booze bubbles, and felt suddenly like an imposter. Her old life didn’t belong to her anymore. She was a nobody who would go home to a cramped, cockroach-filled apartment two miles below them. She couldn’t even return to her old apartment if she wanted to, because her dad apparently might sell it. She’d known he was staying at the Nuage, but she hadn’t quite realized how painful the apartment must be to him, with all the memories flitting around it like ghosts. She felt an aching sense of loss, at the realization that she’d likely lost her childhood home forever.
Eris always felt that Leda said one thing and meant another, as if she were secretly amusing herself at everyone else’s expense. Even her compliments seemed double-edged.
Rylin’s heart clenched in pride. At times like this, everything she had given up seemed worth it.
Somehow, despite everything that was going on, Rylin was happy.
She moved gracefully, like a dancer, like she was in one of those fancy low-grav chambers and her feet barely touched the ground.
The candle made strange shadows dance across Mariel’s face, strong-boned and willful, her eyes pools of darkness that Eris couldn’t read. She’d never felt this way about anyone before—that they were achingly familiar and yet at the same time a stranger. She started to reach across the table for Mariel’s hand, but Mariel yanked it away, shaking her head.
Mariel shook her head. “No, it’s just … Every time I think I’ve figured you out, you do something unexpected.” Eris laughed. “Good luck with that,” she said. “Even I haven’t figured me out, and I’ve been trying for eighteen years.”
Even after she finally fell asleep, her dreams were filled with locked rooms and frantic chases down endless dark hallways, a far cry from the flying dreams and Technicolor fantasies she used to upload to the Dreamweaver.
Her heart aching, Avery leaned her elbows on the table and looked down at her new flowers. They seemed so beautiful now, but they were all doomed, she thought darkly, their tiny roots racing toward the inflexible confines of the pot.
There had never been a problem she couldn’t solve, once she set her mind to it. Except Atlas. Well, she wasn’t giving up yet. Not without a fight.
“I don’t know,” Rylin whispered. She wasn’t really sure of anything anymore.
She didn’t love Hiral anymore. She hadn’t loved him for a while now. Maybe she never had. She’d certainly thought she did, back when they were so young that words like love and grief described burgers and exams. Back when their biggest problems were things like the air regulator in Rylin’s apartment breaking—Hiral had climbed up into the vents to fix it for them—or when Hiral forgot his brother’s birthday and Rylin helped him bake a cake last minute. Before Rylin’s mom died, and they both became harder, flintier versions of themselves.
Avery was right. She deserved more than the way he’d been treating her, pretending to be something he wasn’t, trying to tell her exactly the right thing. He wasn’t just trying to sleep with her—well, he amended, he wasn’t only trying to sleep with her—so why was he acting like it? What he really wanted was to pursue Avery. For real.
“I didn’t lie. At least, not about anything important. I just didn’t tell you everything,”
“That must be torture for you and Eris, looking at lots of pretty things you’re not allowed to buy,”
Maybe he had disappeared last year because he’d been running away from something too. Something big, if he had to go all the way to the rain forest to escape it. Whatever it was, she wondered if Atlas had ever figured it out—or if his demons still chased him at night the way hers did.
Did anyone else ever feel this way, alone and frantic, haunted by a fear she couldn’t quite place?
Back then she’d had these dreams every night: of drowning in ink-black water; of fingers reaching for her, still and cold as death. I am my own greatest ally, Leda repeated, trying to center herself, but she couldn’t, it was freezing in here and her brain felt muted and all she wanted was a burst of xenperheidren to bring her back to life.
Eris felt herself soften a little. She thought suddenly of when she’d gone to church with Mariel, the way strangers forged a connection with her through nothing but a touch and a look. And this was her birth father, not a stranger at all, trying in his own way to connect with her.
“I love you, Eris,” Caroline whispered. Eris felt dampness on her neck, and realized that her mom was crying. “I love you too, Mom,” Eris said, as the wall she’d built between them began to crack, just a little.
“You don’t get it, okay? You don’t understand what it’s like downTower, that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to! Because you don’t have a choice!” “You always have a choice,” Cord said quietly.
They had to rely on their own flawed, human memory to pass this test. Unlike Watt.
Still, Avery knew her mother was achingly self-conscious about the way she looked. It was the whole reason she’d insisted they pay so much, to ensure that Avery would never have to worry about it.
Avery almost wished the kiss had never happened. Almost, but not quite. Because at least now she had the memory of it, could replay it in her head as often as she wanted. It was torture sometimes, remembering the brush of his lips, the warmth of his breath on her cheek, the way his hands had rested on her waist. But Avery couldn’t bring herself to regret it. If she never kissed anyone again, she knew she could live on the memory of that kiss for the rest of her life.
She relaxed for what felt like the first time in weeks, taking deep, rose-scented breaths, letting the skin of her hands wither into prunes. It didn’t matter how much water she used; it was all being collected and filtered for some other use anyway. So she stayed, letting the tension seep out of her tired body.
Everything was wearing on her. Weighing on her. The water stung like a million tiny needles pricking at her raw skin.
She knew she was acting insane, but she couldn’t face Avery or Atlas. At least not until she felt a little more in control of everything.
“What? Why?” The comet had faded from the sky. Downtown, they could hear the screams of revelers toasting its arrival. Eros, the love comet.
There was something new in the kiss, a tenderness Eris wasn’t familiar with.
“Sometimes love and chaos are the same thing,” Mariel said softly.
A comet sliced through the velvet-dark sky, its tail streaming after it like a fan.
“Somewhere we can see around that.” Eris pointed back at the Tower, which stretched impossibly high into the darkness.
Of course you picked that, Leda thought, with a surprising bitterness. It’s a dress that literally reflects you to yourself ad infinitum.
Every time he shifted his weight, Leda felt the movement reverberate through her. It was torture, having him so achingly close.
She hadn’t thought it was possible, but maybe, eventually, she could fall for someone who wasn’t Atlas.
“It’s about being in love even when you never get to see the person, because you’re a thousand miles apart. No one would write anything like this now, because our lives are so automated and easy. Which I guess is thanks to people like you,” she added, teasing.
“You’re right,” she said, thinking aloud. “I do love the romance that everything had, back when there were more obstacles in the world. Like, listen to this song.”
“The way you talked about the song just now. Or what you said in Redwood Park, or how you talk about Florence. You’re so … nostalgic. Why do you like ancient stuff so much?”
Up in her hair, the incandescent glowed like a living lightbulb.
She’d loved the delicious irony of it, that when people tried to look at her, they’d be forced to look at themselves instead.
It was close to dawn. She should get back to her room before her parents woke up. She stole another glance at Atlas, who lay propped on one elbow beneath the rumpled white sheets. He watched the play of emotions across her face, reading her as always. “You’re leaving,” he said.
“Of course I remember. How could I forget kissing the girl I love?” Avery caught her breath. “I love you too,” she said, so glad to finally say it aloud.
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters but you.” She reached up to kiss him again but Atlas beat her to it, his kisses burning her skin, obliterating all thought.
The words hung there, quietly ending the world Avery had always lived in. In the silence a new world was unfolding. Avery held her breath.
Yet she hesitated. If she said it, if she told Atlas what she really wanted to, she risked losing him forever. “Not you,” she whispered at last.
She wondered, suddenly, if part of why she was so interested in the past was because it was easier than thinking of the future—of her future. Because a future with Atlas was impossible, and yet a future without him would be unbearable.
But the moment she was safely in her room, Leda crumpled to the floor, cradling her head in her hands. A terrifying part of her hated Atlas for the way he’d treated her. She wanted to hurt him, him and whatever stupid girl he supposedly had feelings for.
Without another word, he turned and walked out of Avery’s room, out of her apartment, and maybe out of her life for good.
When they finally broke apart, neither of them spoke. Avery felt a strange, aching happiness. She’d finally done it: kissed someone who wasn’t Atlas. For real this time, not someone she was halfheartedly avoiding, not a sloppy makeout at a holiday party, but someone she might actually like. It felt like sacrilege, and yet it hadn’t been that hard at all.
By the time he was brushing his lips to hers the kiss felt inevitable. Avery kissed him back without thinking, eager to see what Watt felt like, tasted like. The kiss was soft and slow and she loved how warm his hands were on her hips.
He obediently held out the incandescent, his eyes on her, thoughtful. Avery reached for the dead blossom and held it tight in her palm. She felt like she could hear Watt’s heartbeat echoing across the space between them.
“I promise,” Eris said again, and the words drifted up like smoke into the darkness.
“I just …” Mariel seemed about to say something. Eris could feel nervousness crackling across the surface of her skin, like electricity. “I don’t want to get hurt.”
She didn’t want to go to bed because that meant the end of another day—which meant that they were one day closer to the return of reality.
They lay there contentedly, their breathing soft and even, neither of them eager to move. “Atlas,” Avery ventured after a while, “when did you know that you loved me?” “I’ve always loved you,” he said earnestly. “I mean, when did you truly realize it?” Atlas shook his head. “I’ve known it forever. Why, did you have a moment in mind?”
She knew what Atlas meant. She hadn’t even known it was possible to be this happy. It was as if her entire life she’d lived in a world with limits, and then suddenly she’d discovered the way into a vaster, better, brighter world.
Avery shivered. She loved when he touched her like that. She loved when he touched her any way at all, really, even if it was just brushing her foot under the table, the way he’d done at dinner all week.
She needed to get high, so high that even the sight of Eris kissing her father was erased brutally from her mind.
What a great therapy candidate she was turning out to be.
Her birth father was disavowing all relation to her. It upset Eris more than she would have guessed. She felt lonely, and rejected, and angry. But emerging the strongest of all her warring emotions was a sense of relief that she wouldn’t have to be poor anymore.
Eris didn’t answer right away. She was looking at her father’s face, which she’d been studying all week in search of her own features, except this time she was trying to read his emotions. There was resignation there, and a little fear, and also something that might have been affection. She could see herself reflected in his eyes as he looked back at her, unspeaking.
He was buying her silence.
Spokes in her back pocket. It all faded to a distant blur, drowned out by the rainstorm and the beat of her heart.
She kissed him in answer, pulling him down deliberately onto the cold sand. The rain drummed even harder over their tiny hovercover-protected square of beach, but underneath, the sand was still warm. Cord seemed to understand her sense of purpose. He didn’t say anything, just kissed her back, slowly, as if they had all the time in the world.
Watt wondered what it had been like back when people were at the mercy of the weather: if they, too, thought rain was beautiful, or if they hated it because they couldn’t control it.
“Because I couldn’t have you, Aves.” He shook his head. “I thought being with Leda might keep me from thinking about you all the time. That’s why I went away—to escape the way I felt about you. I kept hoping that if I just ran far enough, eventually I’d figure out a way to stop loving you.”
Rylin hesitated at something in Chrissa’s voice. It was hope, she realized: a stupid, naive, romantic hope that love could conquer all. Rylin felt silly for believing in it, but Chrissa was right. She had to at least try.
“No, you won’t,” Rylin said, more bravely than she felt. “Because even though you act like it sometimes, you aren’t hateful. You’re still the person I fell in love with, even if we’ve gone our separate ways.” Her voice lowered, a little wistful. “I know you told V that you were the one who stole the Spokes. Thank you. For protecting me.”
He remembered how sad she’d seemed, that very first day he met her at the ARena, when she’d said wistfully that no one could really know anyone else, because everyone was hiding something big.
She thought of running after Mariel, but her feet were rooted in place. Eris felt as if something were shattering inside her. Maybe it was her pride breaking, she thought; her stupid, foolish, stubborn pride. Or maybe it was her heart.
“Guess what, Eris? Money won’t solve your problems for you.”
“I thought you’d changed,” Mariel went on, and the disappointment on her face hit Eris like a physical blow. “I thought you were different. But I was wrong. You’re just the same spoiled bitch you were back when you waltzed into Altitude every day and saw straight through me like I wasn’t even there.”
And suddenly Leda knew. The answer was so elegant in its simplicity that she marveled she hadn’t thought of it before.
She knew it suddenly and instinctively, with a deep animal certainty brought on by the drug, the way she knew that she needed air to breathe. She’d done this before, experienced this particular blend of chemicals and neurostimuli.
Leda stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back on her elbows, the rest of the drugs still scattered on the clover around her like brightly colored candy. The shadows were increasing, stretching longer over the fountain and across her legs. It wasn’t cold out anymore. Eris and her dad, Leda thought again, with a dark, strangled laugh. She closed her eyes. Shadows of memories, half-formed thoughts, crouched hidden in her mind. I know you, she wanted to say, but why? How strange, it felt like déjà-vu, like this was all a song she’d heard before. Colors and shapes danced across her vision.
Everything felt softer, more liquid. Time seemed to stretch like a rubber band. She blinked. Whoever these belonged to, it was clearly someone with anxiety—this was practically a relaxant. She could almost feel the other person, like a ghostly presence, as the drug began to make its way through her brain, searching for memories that weren’t there, trying to elicit whatever emotional responses the person had needed.
“Good,” he said softly. “Let’s go everywhere. Together.” And then the night really was over, and the holoscreen kept on playing its movie to an audience of none.
“No one is perfect, least of all me,” she countered, a little thrown by the statement. Atlas had always known not to say stuff like that to her. He was the one person she could count on not to.
“Sorry. I should have said that you’re perfect for me,” Atlas amended.
Atlas looked at her. She forged on, the idea gaining momentum. “You just said it, they’re completely tech-dark. No one would ever find us. We could reinvent ourselves, start a new life.”
She’d been trying to ignore the reality of their situation, but the ugly truth of it was always there, looming in the corners of her mind. Because no matter what she and Atlas did, their relationship couldn’t amount to more than this—stolen, secret moments whenever they could manage it. They could never have a life together.
She glanced around at the blissful chaos that had taken over their apartment: discarded plates of food and pillows thrown off the couch and Atlas’s shirt wadded in a corner.
Avery felt Leda growing restless next to her, a silent time bomb ticking down. Then Avery got the idea that would change everything, forever.
Avery marveled at the illicit thrill of it, of being wrapped up in the boy she loved—the boy she planned on running away with, in just a few days—when their classmates were just meters away down the hall. It was insane.
It seemed like no time at all had passed, like it was summer again and she and Cord were playing their games—and yet everything was different. It was like an echo of that time, a little less sharp, a little less thrilling. They had both changed too much.
As though Cord were Eris’s dark mirror. He didn’t expect anything more of Eris than he did of himself—which was to say, not much at all.
“I believe in happiness,” Cord said, and there was a look in his eyes that told her he was far away right now, from her, the party, the entire Tower. “I’m just not sure love will actually get you there.”
Yet for some stupid reason, tonight felt false—her friends’ designer clothes looked garish, their words seemed meaningless. Eris couldn’t stop thinking about what Mariel had said. Compared to the time she spent with Mariel, this felt like a bizarre whirlwind that moved too fast. Why did she care about it all anyway?
They were liars, all of them, she thought, Atlas and Avery, Eris, her parents—they’d all been hiding something from her. It was hurtful, and yet the knowledge was also strangely reassuring, as if she’d known it on some level all along, and now had the satisfaction of seeing her suspicions proven correct. She couldn’t trust anyone in the world but herself, but then again, Leda never really had.
Leda had barely slept after learning about Avery and Atlas. She’d spent all day huddled at home, popping various pills from her little bag, her mind chasing down one rabbit hole and then another as she concocted ever more elaborate scenarios for revenge. She’d come to the party tonight in order to do just that. She wanted to destroy Avery and Atlas, publicly and painfully.
No wonder she needed drugs, Leda thought, a little crazed. All along she’d been playing the role of third wheel in the Fuller siblings’ twisted love story, and she hadn’t even known. Well, tonight that was all going to change.
What he’d said was awful and incomprehensible and shocked Leda into silence—but she’d realized that as utterly fucked up as it was, it made a twisted kind of sense.
Rylin nodded at her sister’s words, gripped by a sudden sense of urgency. She should go up there, tell Cord the truth, and try to fix what she’d so terribly broken. Maybe Cord could find it in himself to forgive her.
But there was no foreseeable way out. He was going to lie about an innocent girl’s death. Watt finally nodded, inevitably, as Leda had known he would.
In the distance the sun was edging over the horizon, stretching bold red fingers into the retreating night sky. When she looked at it, all Leda could see was the sickening red of freshly splattered blood.
In the distance the sun was edging over the horizon, stretching bold red fingers into the retreating night sky. When she looked at it, all Leda could see was the sickening red of freshly splattered blood.
Eris stumbled backward, almost in slow-motion, her sky-high heels folding underneath her.
Eris had already fallen backward. Her beautiful face was wide-eyed with shock. Leda watched as she hurtled toward the earth, the folds of her scarlet dress fluttering around her, the scarf whipping up like a useless white flag of surrender. She looked strangely beautiful, Leda thought with an eerie sort of detachment, the way her tiny form was slipping away into the darkness of the city below. Leda stood there watching long after Eris had disappeared from view. An unknowable eternity later, the horror of what had happened finally sank into Leda’s mind. She buried her face in her hands and began to scream.
“You love her, even though she used you,” she went on, wondering. “After all your big statements about not believing in love, you’re as much of a sucker as anyone.” “Love and trust aren’t the same thing,” he shot back, just as Eris’s contacts lit up with an incoming message.
Those words—the realization that Cord had talked about her with this stranger—unlocked something in Rylin, and she whirled blindly around, suddenly desperate to escape.
Why was she on the rooftop anyway? It was all Avery’s fault—Avery had tricked her into coming, “for the sake of our friendship.” What friendship? Leda should have asked. She needed to get back to her plan—although what it was, she was struggling to remember … All she knew was that she wanted Avery to suffer as much as she had. Atlas too, though for some reason most of her anger was focused on Avery. But that made sense. It was a much greater betrayal. “I don’t know,” she said again, staring at her former friend, as a cloud drifted to cover the moon.
Although there was a beautiful poetic justice to it: that the boy who’d fallen hopelessly for Avery was the one to spill her darkest secret.
The moonlight glimmered on the silver-blue of her dress, making her look like some ancient Greek statue of a goddess.
Her Italian leather stilettos slipping a little on the rungs of the ladder, Avery started the climb up into the darkness.
But anyone who looked would have noticed the candelabra casting shadows on her dramatic cheekbones, illuminating the tears that streamed down her face.
She’d loved Eris from the beginning, almost. She couldn’t say why, but she’d felt inexorably pulled in from the very first moment. Eris was bright and careless, sure; but she was also luminous and magnetic, with an energy that made Mariel feel suddenly alive. She’d tried to fight it, for a while, but in the end Mariel had never really had a choice. She couldn’t help loving Eris. When Eris called her that night from the party, Mariel was overcome with relief. They were going to make up. Eris said she would be there soon. Mariel had stayed up all night and half the morning waiting, but Eris never came. In the end, she lost Eris to this upper-floor world after all.
She knew she loved Eris more than Eris loved her—that Eris might not even love her at all. That knowledge terrified her.
Certainly they didn’t miss Eris the way she did, with a howling grief that roared up from inside her, threatened to drown her.
She wanted to look nice as she said her final good-bye to Eris. The only girl she’d ever really loved, though she hadn’t told Eris, at least not in so many words.
Everything was different now. The time before Eris’s death felt like another lifetime, another world. That Avery was gone. That Avery had broken, and a new Avery—harder, more brittle—had stepped out of the shards. As she stood there, unable to even cry in grief over her friend, it seemed to Avery that she would never feel safe again as long as Leda was around.
Avery didn’t know what to do about Atlas. She loved him so much that it hurt, with a love that saturated every fiber of her being. But her love was complicated now, underpinned as it was by tragedy, and grief.