BOOK REVIEW – The Dazzling Heights: Katharine McGee

Blurb:

New York City, 2118. A glittering vision of the future, where anything is possible – if you want it enough.The dazzling sequel to The Thousandth Floor.Manhattan is home to a thousand-story supertower, a beacon of futuristic glamour and high-tech luxury… and to millions of people living scandalous, secretive lives.LEDA is haunted by nightmares of what happened on the worst night of her life. She’s afraid the truth will get out – which is why she hires WATT, her very own hacker, to keep an eye on all of the witnesses for her. But what happens when their business relationship turns personal?When RYLIN receives a scholarship to an elite upper-floor school, her life transforms overnight. But being here also means seeing the boy she loves: the one whose heart she broke, and who broke hers in return.AVERY is grappling with the reality of her forbidden romance – is there anywhere in the world that’s safe for them to be together?And then there’s CALLIOPE, the mysterious, bohemian beauty who’s arrived in New York with a devious goal in mind – and too many secrets to count.Here in the Tower, no one is safe – because someone is watching their every move, someone with revenge in mind. After all, in a world of such dazzling heights, you’re always only one step away from a devastating fall….

Rating: 4 1/2 /5 stars

Side Notes:

2nd book in the The Thousandth Floor series
Begins and ends with death
References to explicit language, drugs, and misuse of alcohol

Book Quotes:

He was right, of course. Leda wasn’t sleeping well. She dreaded falling asleep, tried to stay awake as long as she could, because she knew the horrific nightmares that awaited her. Whenever she did drift off, she woke almost instantly in a cold sweat, tormented by memories of that night—of what she’d hidden from everyone- Eris’s death wasn’t a drunken accident. She knew it with a primal, visceral certainty.
Mariel was terrified of forgetting the only girl she’d ever loved.
She’d been quietly erased from the narrative, as if Eris had never even met her at all. A silent tear slid down her cheek at the thought.
She loved this part of the vid, because Eris seemed so happy, yet she resented it because she wasn’t part of it.
God, she had half a mind to apply for the scholarship herself, just to prove how screwed up these people were beneath the gloss of their money and privilege.
It was so unforgivingly final.
After all, no one goes to a party expecting to die.The girl had certainly made enough mistakes in her too-short lifetime.
But she couldn’t have known that they would all come crashing down around her tonight.
Her arm was outstretched, as though she were reaching for someone she loved, or maybe to ward off some unspoken danger, or maybe even in regret over something she had done.
There was something deceptively peaceful about the scene. Water flowed around the girl in a serene dark sheet, making it seem that she was merely resting. The tendrils of her hair framed her face in a soft cloud. The folds of her dress clung determinedly to her legs, as if to protect her from the predawn chill. But the girl would never feel cold again.
The girl floated facedown in the water. Above her stretched a towering city, dotted with light like fireflies, each pinprick an individual person, a fragile speck of life. The moon gazed over it all impassively, like the eye of an ancient god.
It was late now; so late that it could once again be called early—that surreal, enchanted, twilight hour between the end of a party and the unfurling of a new day. The hour when reality grows dim and hazy at the edges, when nearly anything seems possible.
It would be several hours before the girl’s body was found.
“I dreamed that I lost you,” she blurted out, a note of trepidation threading through her voice. Now that they were together, against all odds, losing Atlas was her greatest fear.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell Atlas about it all. The knowledge would only hurt him, and the truth was, Avery didn’t want him to learn what had really happened that night. If he knew what she’d done, he might not look at her this way anymore—with such blinding love and devotion.
And even here, with Atlas, she wasn’t wholly safe from herself. She hated the web of secrets that kept tightening around her, driving an invisible wedge between them, though Atlas had no idea.
She looked out to the hazy purple of the horizon, which stretched into a deep fathomless black overhead. She loved the way she felt up here, aloof and alone and safe with her secrets.
But Avery wasn’t ready to leave the roof. This was her secret place, where she retreated when all the furious lights and sounds down there, in the rest of the city, became too much to bear.
A few droplets of rain began to fall. They stung lightly where they touched her bare skin.
She couldn’t wait to find her next mark.
Calliope had learned through the years that rich people did a lot of things they would rather keep buried.
Here lies Gemma Newberry, beloved thief, Calliope thought in delight, burying her most recent alias with a silent flourish. She was as shameless as she was beautiful. She had a terribly morbid habit of composing epitaphs each time she set aside an identity, though she never shared them with her mom. She had a feeling that Elise wouldn’t find them quite so amusing.
New York, the first of the great supertowers, the original sky city. Already Calliope felt a burst of tenderness toward it.
Her mom poured them two glasses and clinked hers to Calliope’s. “Here’s to this time.” “Here’s to this time,” Calliope echoed with a smile, as the words sent a familiar shiver of excitement up her spine. It was the same phrase she and her mom always used when they arrived somewhere new. And there was nothing Calliope loved more than starting somewhere new.
“You could call me Callie,” Calliope offered, and her mom nodded absently, though they both knew she would just call Calliope by endearments. She’d said the wrong alias once, and it ruined everything. She’d been paranoid about making the same mistake ever since.
She turned away, leaving her former best friend to weep alone on a tiny fragment of sky.
It took Leda a moment to realize that Avery was crying. She had to be the only girl in the world who somehow became more beautiful when she cried; her eyes turning an even brighter blue, the tears on her cheeks magnifying the startling perfection of her face. And just like that, Leda remembered all the reasons she resented Avery.
Leda didn’t bother telling her how wrong she was. Avery would always see the world the way she wanted to.
There was something morbid and futile about it, as if she were kneeling there in prayer, trying to bring Eris back to life.
Avery didn’t get it, because everything came so easily to her. But Leda knew what would happen if she tried to tell the truth.
But the thing about the truth was that once you learned it, it became impossible to unlearn. No matter how many pills Leda popped, it was still there, lurking in the corners of her mind like an unwanted guest. There weren’t enough pills in the world to make it go away.
How she’d had to drug Watt to uncover that particular grain of truth.
But Leda wasn’t ready for that kind of forced, upbeat normalcy right now. She needed a moment to herself, to quiet the thoughts and regrets chasing one another in a wild tumult through her head.
“The movements of anything living must be rendered with perfect relation to any viewer, no matter where he or she is located with respect to the holo.
But Watt knew that at his core, he believed in Nadia’s good intentions as if she had a human conscience.
Leda felt like everything was spinning wildly out of control. If she hadn’t sworn never to touch drugs again, she would be searching for a xenperheidren right now; but it had become a matter of pride, and Leda’s pride was matched only by her stubbornness.
He was the one who’d started sleeping with her friend, and had betrayed everything their family was built on.
“All I know is that you’re a walking reminder of a night I’d rather not think about.”
“I guess it isn’t. I’ll see you around, Cord,” she told him, which was, unfortunately, the truth. She would keep seeing the boy who didn’t want her, over and over again.
“I wish I could rewind, do things differently,” she said uselessly. “I wish that too. But that’s not how life works, is it?”
In the brief moment of illumination, Rylin caught sight of his face: distant, cold, closed-off. It terrified her. She would rather that he yell at her, seem angry or wounded, even cruel. This casual indifference was infinitely worse. He was retreating somewhere deep inside himself, where she could never reach him—where he would be lost to her forever.
And she didn’t tell Cord how much she’d loved him. How much she still loved him.
“Rylin Myers,” he said, in the old familiar drawl; the one he used for people he didn’t know well. Rylin’s heart broke a little when she heard it. It was the way Cord had spoken the first night he met her, when she was nothing but the hired help. Before she stole from him and fell in love with him and everything spun wildly out of control.
It felt like it was happening to another person, a bizarre series of images that someone else had dreamed.
Thus began the life Calliope and her mom had lived for the past seven years.
The thing about rich people was that once they thought you were one of them, they became much less wary around you—and that made them easy targets.
She would rather see a tiny sliver of that beautiful, charmed world than not know of its existence at all.
She would look up into mother’s eyes and see her own childlike longing reflected there, like a candle.
It hadn’t always been like this. When she was younger, Calliope had known about these sorts of things, but never actually experienced them. She could look, but never touch. It was a particularly excruciating sort of torture. It felt like a long time ago, now.
She did love rich things, she thought with unadulterated pleasure, now that she got them for real—and usually on someone else’s dime.
“It’s a long story,” Avery answered, which was proof enough to Calliope that she was right. She felt a momentary stab of sympathy for Leda. That must suck, being the girl who had to compete with Avery.
She’d never been quite as good at faking friendship as she was a romantic attachment. Lust was so delightfully uncomplicated and straightforward, while female friendships were inevitably layered with conditions, and history, and unspoken rules of behavior. Still, Calliope was nothing if not a fast learner. She could already see that Risha would be the easiest of the three to win over, but Avery was the crucial one, so she focused her efforts on her.
It’ll be fine, he told himself, but he couldn’t help thinking that this was just one more thing in his life that could end in disaster. He seemed to be collecting a lot of those lately.
And in truth, it was impossible. Everything about their relationship kept proving impossible at every turn, yet somehow they had willed it into being.
The closet lights turned on as he opened the doors; but for an impossibly brief instant, Avery was in the dark while Atlas seemed illuminated from behind—light streaming around him, gilding the edges of his form, making him seem almost otherworldly. It seemed suddenly impossible that he was real, and here, and hers.
“Maybe …” She trailed off, but she couldn’t help thinking that she and Atlas were inevitable. The universe would have conspired for them to meet, some way or another, pulling them together with a gravitational force that was all their own.
“You don’t hate me anymore?” she asked, and her voice was very small. Cord looked at her with a funny expression. “I never hated you.”
What was he trying to tell her? She felt tangled in a state of painful, sweet, unbearable confusion.
Spending time with Leda was a dangerous gamble. He might set himself free—or he might destroy life as he knew it.
“Feelings that can be easily hurt. You should remember that.”
Lost-sounding snatches of music drifted through the open door toward him, echoing strangely in his mind, or maybe the thought of Leda was literally driving him insane.
The vid-cam bobbed cheerfully above them, a tiny silver planet lost in a universe of glow lights.
Someone had turned off the pool lights to keep them from getting caught; but moonlight streamed in from the windows, dancing across the shadowed forms that splashed through the water like sleek dark seals. An electric beat pulsed through the space. Rylin could make out the silhouettes of a few couples on the outdoor patio.
Next time, show me how you see the world, not what you think I want to see.
Chrissa had sighed over their relationship, but something about it—maybe the forbidden, impossible love thing—had irritated Rylin.
She just hoped their love was enough to keep them safe.
But now it felt like nothing so much as an ornate, blue-and-cream prison.
She smiled, pleased with the notion, even as a dark, hateful part of her whispered to herself that it wouldn’t be real. After all, Watt wasn’t actually choosing her. Leda would have to force him into coming, blackmail him the way she blackmailed everyone in her life lately. But then, who had ever truly chosen Leda?
It was so much easier to focus all her anger on Avery when they were both at school; when Avery was her usual cool, perfect self. Seeing how fragile she was beneath the veneer, it was a lot harder to hate her.
She didn’t get any reaction at all, really. Avery just sat there in complete stillness, her hands clasped in her lap, her long legs crossed. Was she even breathing? She looked like she was carved from stone. Tragic Beauty, a sculptor would have named her, and called it his finest work.
She and Atlas had cut it close one too many times. And now their father was doing what he always did with a business problem: isolating it until he could figure out a solution. Avery recognized her dad’s announcement for what it really was. Atlas was being sent away.
Light and dark. Good and evil. Truth and lies. She knew plenty about contradictions right now, with her seemingly perfect life that was riddled with dark secrets.
“The Mirrors derives its name from the fact that it is, in fact, two separate towers, one light and one dark. Polar opposites, like night and day. Neither of which has meaning without the other, like so many things in our world.”
Gone was the holographic snowy sky, replaced by the blueprints of the new tower, which were projected in a tangle of lines and angles and curves. The schematic glowed like a living thing.
Every December since they were children, Avery and Atlas had been expected to attend these events, to act charming and look perfect. That didn’t change as they got older; if anything, the pressure was even greater now.
Avery just hoped it was because of people’s interest in the Dubai tower, rather than their morbid curiosity about her, and what had happened on the thousandth floor the night Eris died.
There never had been a boy she couldn’t get, once she set her mind to it. Atlas didn’t stand a chance.
Now, as Calliope’s eyes traveled over Atlas—the one boy she’d never been able to hook, never even kissed—she knew she was tempting fate. She couldn’t predict what he might do, and that made him dangerous. Calliope and Elise didn’t like the unknown. They didn’t like not being in control.
“Dance with me.” There it was again, that self-assurance, tinged with just a hint of recklessness. He was acting out of character. He was trying to escape something—a terrible thing he’d done, maybe, or a relationship that had ended badly. Well, she should know; she was running from a mistake herself.
The truth was, she’d wanted Atlas from the first moment she saw him.
The only boy who’d ever gotten the better of her; and here he was, halfway around the world.
Almost immediately she caught sight of Avery Fuller moving through the crowds. It was as if Avery had her own personal spotlight trained on her: illuminating her flawless features, making her ivory cheekbones even more pronounced, her eyes an even brighter blue. Calliope would have resented Avery for being so impossibly beautiful, if she weren’t so deeply confident in her own charms—which were different, certainly, but no less effective.
At times like this, Calliope loved watching her mother at work. There was a deliberateness to all her movements—to her laughter, the way she tossed her tawny tousled hair—that drew eyes to her like a magnet.
Calliope loved looking at herself as much as the next girl, but the one time she didn’t care about her reflection was this high up. She wanted to look out—at the world, the light, the stars.
“There are good parts and bad parts, as with most things in life. But I think you’ll find that after a time, the good outweighs the bad.”
Rylin nodded, her eyes widening at the sight of Xiayne’s arms. Inktats covered every square centimeter of skin—beautiful, abstract shapes in a dizzying array of colors. They gathered like fabric over his biceps, swirled down his muscled arms to finish in a visual kaleidoscope at his wrists. Rylin found her gaze drawn to those wrists, watching them bend and flatten, the inktats shifting in anticipation of his every moment. They were the kind of inktats that went nerve-deep: the micropigment shards had been blasted into his skin with a fibrojet, lined with astrocytes that would sink deep into his tissue and cleave irrevocably to the nerve cells, enabling them to shift with constant movement. By far the most painful, and therefore the most badass, kind of inktat.
Normally Avery switched the mirrors to project an ocean view—she hated the way her mom had decorated this bathroom, made Avery the focus of it, just as she was the centerpiece of the rest of their lives. But now she leaned forward on her palms and studied her reflection. A ghostlike self, pale and hollow-eyed, looked back at her.
“Welcome to LA, the city of dreamers. Beautiful, yet hopelessly illogical,” Xiayne said, as if reading her thoughts.
Leda couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Silver Cove. It was crowded with too many memories. If she went back, she would be forced to confront everything that had happened in the past few months—would have to remember the Leda Cole who’d first shown up there; young and wounded and still in love with Atlas. That girl may have been stupid, but at least she was better than this new Leda, who had killed someone, then blackmailed others into lying about it. Leda was afraid, she realized, of the ghost of her former self.
Atlas was leaving, and he wasn’t coming back.
There was nowhere they could go that was safe; nowhere that the truth of who they were, the forbiddenness of their love, wouldn’t come chasing them. Maybe love wasn’t enough after all. Not when every last obstacle was arrayed against you, all the odds stacked to make you fail. When the entire world was keeping you apart.
Atlas was right, what had happened was just a symptom of the larger issue: the sheer impossibility of them being together.
“Did you fall in love with me because it was complicated, and forbidden—because I was the only thing in the entire world that you were ever denied? The only thing you ever wanted that you were told ‘no,’ instead of ‘yes’?”
For once, she didn’t really feel like admiring her own reflection.
Her mom was right; Calliope was a pro, and she always landed her mark in the end. She would land Atlas too, no matter how long it took.
Not the pinched, forced smile she’d worn for so long, but a genuine, easy smile; and Calliope saw that her mother was shedding some terrible skin she’d been forced into, and becoming someone new.
But they needed Princess Day. It was a chance for the two of them to escape their routines and step into someone else’s life, just for a moment. And Calliope could tell that her mother loved it as much as she did: being the one catered to, for once, rather than the other way around. She loved being presented with a silver tray of delicate little sweets and being asked which she would like, and she would lift her ring-crusted finger and say in an imperious tone, that one and that one, and also that. Commanding someone else, the way that Mrs. Houghton constantly commanded her.
She felt worlds different from the girl who’d walked in here on her first day, all anxiety and uncertainty. Now she just felt excited, and curious about the week ahead.
Time seemed to stretch out like a liquid.
Maybe if she focused on the confusion on the screen, she could ignore the tangled, tender mess that her life had become.
The world seemed to be tilting violently, as if the planet had spun wildly off course, and the sky was beneath her feet.
Watt’s skin felt warm and oddly reassuring against hers. Leda clung wordlessly to him. It was glorious and dangerous and utterly without compassion. Watt could never find out how much she needed him right now, she promised herself: the strong clean lines of his body, the strong solidity of him, the bitter press of his anger pulling her back from the edge of the vortex. Holding her demons at bay, for just a little longer.
The old familiar fear was prickling at her again, the panic that no matter what she did, she would never be pretty enough, clever enough, enough enough. And on top of it was the newer, even sharper fear that someone would learn what she’d done on the roof and her life would come crashing down in a million fiery pieces.
It made her feel surprisingly vindicated, proving that the only boy who’d ever rejected her wanted her after all. Finally. It was about damn time.
She glanced over at Brice, who was laughing too, but standing a little apart from the rest of them, with the sleek self-assurance that comes from being wealthy and drunk in a bubble at the bottom of a river.
Everyone’s eyes kept darting toward him with undisguised interest.
For the rest of tonight she would be the most sparkling, unattainably gorgeous version of herself, nothing but smiles and flashing eyes—and no one would ever see how hurt she was, beneath it all.
The part of her that was seventeen and in love felt utterly snubbed, and bruised, and a little bit eager to lash out.
“That’s not fair. I can’t change the past.” Atlas started to reach for Avery, only to think better of it, and let his hands fall helplessly to his side. “There’s one easy way to fix everything, Aves, and it’s to leave. But you’re the one who won’t run away, and won’t tell me why.”
Avery’s vision was getting blurry. She was a little surprised with herself for bringing that up, but maybe she shouldn’t have been. It was always there, a small hurt that she stubbornly kept nursing deep inside her: the knowledge that Atlas had been with Leda, probably even with other girls, while she’d only ever been with him. It made Avery feel wounded, and inadequate.
It pained her that he clearly thought so little of her. Her intentions toward Watt had always been genuine: she’d never intended to hurt him, never set out to use him, or trick him. Yet he obviously resented her for what had happened.
He needed a drink if he was going to keep getting further tangled in the Gordian knot of these highliers’ screwed-up lives.
“Too perfect. Now there’s an underused phrase if I’ve ever heard one. If only more things in the world were too perfect.” Leda’s dark eyes glimmered.
Watt was surprised at how little resistance Leda offered as he led her through the dance, how easily she fit into his arms. It felt like the tension was seeping slowly from her like poison from a wound. She curled her arms around his back and leaned her head on his chest, closing her eyes as if to momentarily shut out the world.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” she said at last. “But I’m done letting other people use me. Especially the ones I care about.”
“No, that’s exactly what it is. And I refuse to lose just because I didn’t grow up like the rest of them.” Leda’s voice was like steel. “You wouldn’t understand, Watt, but it’s a shitty feeling, always worrying that you’re not good enough.”
In other words, everyone who knew her darkest secret. Something about Leda’s flippant nervousness made Watt almost sad. He might have pitied her, if he didn’t resent her so much.
Watt ran his hand lightly along the wall as he walked down the stairs; the material gave way easily, leaving an indentation where he’d traced his fingers as if it were iridescent cake frosting. The steps shimmered and changed color beneath his dress shoes, like something out of that old Disney holo about the mermaid.
And then it was over: he had walked past, and the moment was gone.
“I asked you to show me how you see the world, and you did it. This footage—it’s visually arresting, it’s narratively compelling, it’s colorful and vibrant. It’s …” He shook his head. “It’s fucking great, okay?”
Because even as she sat in this room, on a black velvet chair, Rylin felt transported back in time.
She tried to push that thought aside, but it felt like the ice-cold walls were slowly closing in on her, crushing the air from her lungs, and she couldn’t escape.
Even here, far outside New York, she and Atlas couldn’t escape the cold hard truth of who they were. There was nowhere for them to hide. Her heart constricted in panic. What if it was like this forever? The world was so small now—how could she and Atlas ever be free?
She kept thinking of Miles and Clemmon, of her parents, of Eris and Leda and everything else digging little tears into the fabric of her relationship with Atlas.
Avery couldn’t listen anymore, so she silenced his words with her lips.
The trust in Atlas’s smile nearly broke her. “And of course you’re worth the wait. I would wait a lifetime for you.”
Actually getting to be together, without fear of being caught. It was a beautiful dream. And an impossible dream, at least right now.
Tears pricked at her eyes, and the tears fragmented the light even further, splintering it into a million beautiful shards.
She imagined that she could hear the lights swishing in the silence, whispering to her against the curtain of the sky.
An array of colors burst suddenly into life: streaks of blue and green, of blush and apricot, arcing and twisting around one another.
It seemed to Avery that there was nothing in the world at all except the cold outside and the warmth of Atlas’s body next to her, and the velvety vault of the sky stretching endlessly above her.
She glanced at the darkness swishing past, thick and layered and beautiful. It felt like there could be ghosts out there in the woods—or nymphs maybe, some kind of ancient spirit. The Tower felt worlds away.
Atlas laced his fingers in hers, bringing her hand lightly to his mouth and kissing it. It was a tender, almost courtly gesture, and it melted Avery’s lingering anxieties.
It might just be her greatest con yet.
There was no better way to get a boy’s attention than showing up to a party, dressed to kill, on someone else’s arm. She would make damned sure that Atlas regretted not asking her to that party first. And then she would take him for everything she could, before she and her mom skipped town.
All summer she’d expected to feel those hands on her, yet Atlas had never touched her, not once.
Calliope should have been accustomed to waiting by now; she’d certainly done plenty of it the past few years. But she’d never been especially patient, and didn’t intend to start today.
She wondered if someday, maybe, she might be able to fix it—or if some things you couldn’t fix, no matter how much you wanted to.
The rest of it was her doing. She’d broken something in their relationship when she violated his trust.
Here she was, at the same school as Cord, and yet she felt further from him than ever.
She shifted over in the narrow bed, not especially surprised that she’d fallen asleep there. She felt so … at ease with Watt, her sleep finally free of the nightmares that normally chased her down long, endless hallways and grasped at her with phantom fingers.
“Shut up,” Leda said impatiently, and kissed him again, her arms over his shoulders. It was easy to stand, to carry Leda to the bed—she was so light—and lay her gently down, never breaking the kiss. Then his hands were on her back, the curve of her hip, and her skin was so soft, and Watt didn’t know anymore whether he liked her or detested her. Maybe he felt both, at the same time, which would explain why all his nerve endings were going haywire, like his whole body might explode at any moment.
Before Avery could say anything, the girl had turned and sprinted away, vanishing into the air like smoke. Avery tried to dismiss it as a coincidence, but the whole walk back to the monorail stop, she couldn’t shake the prickly feeling that someone was watching her.
“Live, Avery. With or without Atlas, here in New York or on the damned moon, I don’t care. Just live, and be happy, since I can’t. Promise me that.” “Of course I will. I love you, Eris,” Avery vowed, her heart constricting. It came out a whisper. “Love you too.”
“Who cares? Life is always complicated. Don’t let other people get in the way of you and Atlas, if it’s what you really want. I learned that one the hard way,” Eris added, her voice small.
She felt isolated and lonely, and worst of all, she couldn’t even talk to anyone about it.
He held out a hand to pull her to her feet. Where their skin touched it sent electric vortices down Rylin’s nerve endings, all the way to her toes.
Cord took a moment to answer. “I never stopped caring what happened to you, Rylin. Even after everything that happened between us.”
It was easy to forget you were inside a steel Tower in places like this, full of life and oxygen and growing things.
Overhead, the ceiling was a beautiful false blue.
She was Calliope Brown, she reminded herself, and once again she was getting what she wanted. But for the first time, it didn’t feel like such a victory.
She thought of Atlas—the way he smiled, the earnest warmth in his brown eyes, the sad wistfulness that seemed to haunt him, no matter what she said—and felt an odd protectiveness of their relationship, or friendship, whatever it was. She found that the thought of stealing from him wasn’t as appealing as it used to be. He probably won’t even notice, she reminded herself, but that wasn’t the point.
She thought of Atlas—the way he smiled, the earnest warmth in his brown eyes, the sad wistfulness that seemed to haunt him, no matter what she said—and felt an odd protectiveness of their relationship, or friendship, whatever it was. She found that the thought of stealing from him wasn’t as appealing as it used to be. He probably won’t even notice, she reminded herself, but that wasn’t the point.
“Staying means getting attached to people, and we can’t afford that even more than we can’t afford this hotel.”
There were always protests surrounding them—some people claimed they were unnatural, that it was cruel to deprive any living thing of a normal, full existence. Calliope didn’t think it sounded all that bad, being young and adorable your whole life.
In that moment, Rylin lost all respect for Xiayne. And for herself, too, for letting it all happen the way that it had.
“So, Rylin. Are you still glad you came out here?” he finally asked, turning back to her. A tiny curl of his inktat had escaped the collar of his shirt to snake up onto his neck, like the tongue of a flame. Rylin forced herself to look up at his face.
Everything was finally starting to right itself in her world.
Leda sat there, listening as Avery poured her heart out, feeling like her own heart was expanding within her chest. She had her best friend back. And there was a new boy in her life—a confusing, dangerously addictive one.
Still, Leda hadn’t let Watt get too far. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. She kept holding something back, out of self-preservation. Because she was developing feelings for him, and that was the one outcome she had never expected.
and she let him wordlessly in the back door, and then they collapsed together onto her bed in a tangle of silent, crushing need.
She never even asked him—he just showed up the first evening
“I thought I loved him, but it was just … infatuation. I loved the idea of him. Or maybe I should say that I wanted to love him, but I never succeeded in it.” That night in the Andes felt so long ago now, when Leda thought she’d fallen hopelessly for Atlas. But all it had really been was hormones and excitement.
She knew this wasn’t what Avery wanted to talk about—that it would be safer to avoid it altogether. But talking was the only way to make things right. Leda imagined her words spanning the space between her and Avery, like the etherium bridges that built themselves molecule by painstaking molecule.
She wasn’t sure how to treat Leda anymore, given everything that had happened between them. Were they best friends, or enemies, or strangers?
She realized that for the first time in a week, she felt something other than howling grief—or worse, that terrible aching numbness. She wanted desperately to preserve this fragile sense of warmth before she clattered inevitably back to reality.
She tried to lose herself in the movement, to work so hard that she would cut off the oxygen to her damn brain, so that for at least a few blissful minutes she wouldn’t torture herself with thoughts of Atlas.
Losing someone you loved was harrowing enough already, Avery reflected, without the added cruelty of constantly running into that person.
“To be loved,” she said simply. They might have been the truest words she’d ever spoken aloud.
Against that, she weighed the siren song of all the new places she still had yet to explore, the adventures still lying in wait for her.
“Of course. It means nothing,” Watt agreed, knowing full well that they were trading lies.
In that moment she didn’t look anything like Watt’s enemy, like the bitter, hard-edged girl who had threatened and coerced him. The girl in this bed was a stranger, who looked young and lost and achingly lonely.
Leda was twisted in a knot of sheets, her eyes closed, her mouth contorted in a grimace. She was screaming—a primal, otherworldly cry that made Watt want to cover his ears and back away. Instead he hurried forward to grab Leda’s hands, which were clawing frantically at the covers.
Despite looking like a high-end spa, it probably brought back some memories that were complete shit.
That night with her had been dark and bitter and reckless and honestly, the most electric hookup of his life.
And so it begins, Avery thought, as if she were squaring her shoulders to pick up an impossibly heavy load. She needed to start putting herself back together, piece by piece, because this was the start of her life without Atlas in it.
Avery felt suddenly exhausted. Too much had happened lately—her world falling apart, all the tears she’d shed, the knowledge that Atlas really was leaving, going halfway across the world. She closed her eyes and allowed herself the luxury of resting her head on Cord’s chest.
The kaleidoscope of light and sound washed over her, dulling the persistent ache in her heart.
Eris would have understood this feeling, Avery thought: the sensation that there was a terrifying emptiness inside her, where something sharp and brittle rattled hollowly. Probably the broken pieces of her heart.
The scent was soothing, and so painfully familiar that it made Avery want to cry.
They stood there, their faces pressed together, clinging to each other. Rylin wanted desperately to look away but she couldn’t; some cruel masochistic instinct forced her to watch. Her blood pounded through her body, close to the surface of her skin, like liquid fire. Or maybe liquid pain.
“I’m sorry …” Avery tried not to feel panicked, but the moment Cord’s lips had left hers, the darkness was back, worse than before—tugging relentlessly at the corners of her mind, dragging her down into its endless, terrible depths.
The words seemed to be coming from very far away, and Leda was falling, but with every last force of her being she listened, reaching up to hear what Mariel was saying, because it frightened her; and because she could hear the truth behind the hatred, ringing with the force of a gong.
“Your dad was Eris’s dad too. You killed your sister, Leda,” Mariel spat. And then Leda did fall into the blackness, and there was nothing more.
Leda burst into sudden tears—angry, ugly sobs that racked her body. She marveled at the clarity of her own emotion. What was happening to her? She was long past drunk; she was high, maybe, but this was unlike any drug she’d ever taken, as if she’d become detached from her own body and was hovering far above it. She was suddenly very afraid. Watt’s face kept swimming up in her consciousness, the eerie way he’d listened to her confession, without blinking. He hadn’t hesitated to hurt her. He didn’t care about her. No one cared about her. She didn’t deserve to be cared about.
All the pieces were fitting together into the truth, like shards of a warped, broken mirror that couldn’t possibly depict reality. Except it did.
For once, making up an epitaph for her lost alias wasn’t particularly amusing.
“I’m sorry, Aves, but I promise it’s better this way,” he said, and then he was gone. Avery stood there awhile, her eyes firmly shut, just herself and her secrets and her heartbreak alone in the dark.
Avery closed her eyes. She concentrated on memorizing his touch, wanting to stop time and stop the world and hold on to this moment forever, because as long as her eyes were closed, she could believe that Atlas was still here. Still hers.
She couldn’t take it anymore—she flung herself into Atlas’s arms and kissed him, over and over, and this time Atlas returned the kisses, returned them wildly and passionately, and it made Avery’s heart break because she knew deep down that he was kissing her good-bye. She clung tighter to him, pressing her body the whole length of his, trying to hold him so close that he could never leave, as if she might anchor him here through sheer force of will. She wished she could snatch each kiss from the air and tuck it away somewhere safe, because each kiss was one kiss closer to the final kiss of all.
“I’ll have you. And you’ll be enough.” “I don’t know if I am.” Atlas’s voice cracked, but she pretended not to hear it. “Honestly, I’m scared. I’m scared of losing you. But I’m even more scared of forcing you down a path you don’t want to be on.”
“I’ll have you. And you’ll be enough.” “I don’t know if I am.” Atlas’s voice cracked, but she pretended not to hear it. “Honestly, I’m scared. I’m scared of losing you. But I’m even more scared of forcing you down a path you don’t want to be on.”
“It means destroying yourself for the one you love.” Atlas spoke urgently. “That’s us, Avery. Don’t you see? We’re literally destroying each other. It’s too complicated, and there are too many people who can be hurt. Especially you and me.”
But Leda knew there was no hope for her. She picked up the black goblet and braced herself for another sip of the biting whiskey, hoping it would obliterate the pain of what Watt had done.
For a moment, Leda thought she caught a glimpse of something eager and intent in Mariel’s gaze. It puzzled her. She set down her half-empty drink to look up at the sky. It glowed with stars, scattered about like tiny pinpricks of something fervent and bright. Hope, maybe.
To think that she’d found the one boy in the world who was her equal, and fallen for him; yet in typical Leda Cole fashion, she’d managed to make him her sworn enemy.
She didn’t even blame him for wanting revenge. She would have done the same, if their roles were reversed. Hadn’t she said more than once that she and Watt were cut from the same cloth? An old familiar instinct for self-preservation was stirring, urging her to fight fire with fire—to use every weapon in her arsenal to destroy Watt, before he could destroy her—but Leda found that she didn’t have the heart. Besides, with that quant in his brain he’d probably already sent her confession video to the police. They might be coming for her right now.
Leda reached up to wipe away a tear. She shouldn’t really be surprised. But it hurt more than she would have guessed, realizing that all time they’d spent together had been a lie. How stupid of her, to think that Watt could care about her for real.
Maybe Watt hadn’t fully appreciated it until now. Maybe when she bared her soul and he realized all the darkness that lay coiled there, he had realized he wanted no part of it.
What the hell had just happened? She’d offered him her deepest and most dangerous truths—told him all the ugliness in her family, in herself—and he’d turned and run away.
He took a step back, running a hand through his hair. He couldn’t think, not with Leda so close, looking at him in that wide-eyed, wounded way. He felt dazed and shaky. What had happened to him? When had he become the type of person who tried to trick other people into revealing their darkest secrets?
Most of all, he felt an overwhelming sense of self-loathing. He’d tricked Leda into opening up her most private, vulnerable self to him—all so he could destroy her.
“Because you enjoy playing puppeteer with other people’s lives.”
Calliope wasn’t particularly worried about the details. They’d fled many places in their day, and under worse circumstances than this; she knew they would get out all right. But after her mom’s announcement, she’d allowed herself to hope that this time might actually be different. Now she felt strangely adrift, as if she’d been offered something bright and wonderful, only to have it snatched away.
Then Calliope thought of something her mom had said once: that if she was ever caught in a tough situation—if her lies weren’t working, if all else failed—sometimes the best way out was to tell the truth.
She kept her eyes on Avery, trying to interpret the dance of her emotions across her face. She’d predicted so many actions of so many people in her life, yet for the first time, her instincts seemed to have failed her.
She started to speak, but Avery was shaking her head at Calliope’s silence, her perfect features twisted in disgust.
Calliope felt a stab of guilt at the accusation. She’d considered it, hadn’t she? And she would’ve done it, too, not so long ago; yet tonight something had held her back. She hadn’t wanted to treat the Fullers that way. She hadn’t wanted to treat anyone that way anymore. Maybe she was developing that thing people called a conscience.
CALLIOPE WAS STANDING alone near an arrangement of mood-flowers, which currently glowed a soft, contented gold to match her happiness. Their so-called emotion-detection system was pretty flimsy—based on heart rate and body temp and, supposedly, pheromones—but for once Calliope thought their reading was actually spot-on.
A memory flitted into her mind, unbidden, from one day in the edit bay, when Xiayne had told her that holography was all about perspectives. That different people saw the world in different ways. Rylin knew she had wronged so many people—and been wronged by them too: Hiral, Leda, Xiayne, and most of all Cord. But maybe she needed to look at it from another angle.
There was a live human chorus singing on one of the other terraces. Their voices unfurled like interwoven ribbons into the night.
“There you are!” Leda sidled over, holding the skirts of her sweeping white gown with both hands so that she could move more easily. She smiled, and it transformed her face: softened the angularity of her features, brought out the liveliness in her eyes. She looked nothing like the angry, drugged-out girl who’d threatened Rylin on the roof that night. Now she actually looked … happy.
“Here’s to this time,” Calliope repeated, and no one but her mother would have heard the hopeful, eager edge to the phrase she’d spoken so many times before.
They were done conning. They wouldn’t have to cheat or lie or betray anyone’s trust; wouldn’t have to put on fake names and couture dresses and start the whole vicious cycle over again. The entire world felt brighter, lighter, and full of infinite possibility.
“I’ve deprived you of the chance to live your life, a real life, and that wasn’t fair to you. Where on earth will you end up, when all of this is over?”
Calliope sank wordlessly into one of the Lucite armchairs and looked out into the night. It was so dark. The torches flickered in the rising wind, which was how Calliope knew they were real flames, not holos. Some bizarre part of her wanted to walk over and touch the flames, just to be sure.
Avery missed Atlas so fiercely that the force of it clawed at her chest. She reached up roughly to wipe at her tears. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. The day Atlas told her he loved her had been the happiest day of Avery’s life. It was the first day she’d felt truly alive. As if the world up till that moment had existed only in shades of black and white, like this ridiculous party, then exploded into Technicolor. She loved Atlas and she always would. Loving him wasn’t even a choice. It was hardwired into her very DNA; and Avery knew, deep down, that it was the only love her heart would ever be capable of, for all the days of her life.
Between that and the secrecy—the fact that they were constantly on edge, living in fear that their parents might catch them—it was more than any relationship could bear.
Avery felt a darkness rising up in her—a vast empty blackness, like a pool with no bottom. She reached down to feel along the uneven hem of her gown. For some reason its frayed, flawed imperfection was reassuring.
It’s okay. As you so aptly put it, I don’t have any feelings for you to hurt. Watt knew what she said was true, and yet for some reason, it made him inexplicably sad.
“People aren’t like tech, Watt. They aren’t predictable, and they malfunction far more readily.”
For the first time, Watt felt like he finally understood the name; this was like a dream city, full of mirrors and reflections. Every last detail on one of the towers—every archway, every glittering square of glass, every curve in the railing of a balcony—had been cunningly doubled on the other side, in alabaster carbonite or smooth dark nyostone.
Above him soared the two massive towers of The Mirrors, rising up into the darkness to new dazzling heights.
She wanted them and she hated herself for taking them and she couldn’t look away from them.
Calliope wouldn’t know, because she’d never stuck around long enough to find out.
There was something about crossing the sky in a temporary tunnel that felt like a good omen, like everything that happened tonight would go her way.
“You’re not afraid of it,” Atlas remarked approvingly. Calliope turned to glance back at him over one arched shoulder. Her expression was almost a dare. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“That’s not fair. I don’t have a choice,” he snapped, and turned away like a coward, before he had to see the hurt in Cynthia’s eyes. But he couldn’t help wondering if she was right.
For the first time in her life, Leda Cole had dirt on someone—serious dirt, come to think of it—and had absolutely no intention of putting it to use.
Her block seemed simpler, cleaner; the lights from the lamps falling in beautiful pools against the darkness. It was the same and yet utterly different from normal, and Leda realized that maybe she was what had changed. There was a great gulf between the Leda of yesterday and the Leda of today.
Leda propped herself on one elbow to glance down at Watt’s sleeping form, tawny and lean and dangerous. He was like a flame, drawing her in, and she couldn’t stop even though she knew it might hurt her.
She staggered onto her knees, stumbling on the pavement near the water. Stars burst before her eyes, and a scream escaped her throat. But whoever—or whatever—it was hit her again, relentless. She scrabbled to grab on, but there was nothing there; she was tumbling out into the water. It was bitterly, bracingly cold. Mariel couldn’t swim.
She fumbled for a foothold, but the river was too deep. The rain kept falling around her, hissing angrily onto the water’s turbulent surface, and she was sinking into a discordant, slippery blackness. The sky was wet and dark, and the water was wet and dark, and there was no way to tell which way was up.
Mariel tried to cry out again, but the sound was lost. The water dragged her limbs down, with cold dead fingers that would never let her go. And then there was nothing more.
One by one, no matter how long it took, she would make all four of them pay.
Mariel had wanted nothing more than to leave Leda’s life in tatters. Death was too good for Leda—she needed to watch her entire world fall apart, lose the people she loved, be locked away behind bars somewhere dark and hellish and lonely.
Tender memories that hurt like a bruise, but that she still kept pressing on, because it was better to feel the pain than to feel nothing at all.
Nadia? he asked, but she didn’t answer, and he knew with a sinking feeling what that meant. For the first time in his life, Watt had confronted her with a problem that she truly couldn’t solve.
Hearing it said like that, Watt was overcome by a terrible wave of despair. In some ways it felt like he was reliving that terrible night on the roof, that nothing had changed in the last several months; but of course that wasn’t true. Everything had changed. This time they were working together, instead of attacking one another.
LEDA SCREAMED AND kept running down the corridor. It went on and on, no doors or end in sight, just the jagged floor beneath her and the shadows chasing her, flapping their great dusty wings above her face. They looked like harpies, scratching her with her claws, cackling maliciously. Leda recognized them for what they were. They were all her secrets.
How funny hearts were, Rylin thought, that she wasn’t dating Cord—had no claim on him anymore—yet this hurt her as much as ever. More so, even, now that she knew the girl he’d chosen over her.