BOOK REVIEW – The Towering Sky by Katharine McGee

Blurb:

The final book in Katharine McGee’s epic The Thousandth Floor series.

It’s New York City, 2118.

In Manhattan’s glamorous thousand-story super-tower, millions of people are living scandalous lives. Leda, Watt, Rylin, Avery, and Calliope are all struggling to hide the biggest secrets of all, secrets that could destroy everything, and send their perfect worlds toppling over the edge.

Because every rise has a fall.

With all the drama, romance and hidden secrets from The Thousandth Floor and The Dazzling Heights, this explosive finale will not disappoint.

Rating: 4.75/5 stars

Side Notes:

3rd book in the The Thousandth Floor series
Has powerful morals
Multi-perspective story
References to death, suicide, and drugs

Book Quotes:

“I can’t go to boarding school!” Leda couldn’t stand the thought of being away from her friends—or her family, as broken and fragile as it was.
“Life is hard, and drugs are easy. They insulate you from real life, protect you from feeling anything too deeply,” Dr. Reasoner said softly. Leda caught her breath, wishing she could explain that her problem was more than just drugs. It was the gaping vortex of darkness within her that seemed to pull her, and everyone around her, inexorably downward.
“I don’t know,” Leda admitted. There was a flutter in the empty cavity of her chest where her heart should have been.
The knowledge that she’d killed her own sister burned Leda from within. She wanted to pound her fists and scream until the sky split open. She couldn’t sleep, haunted by plaintive images of Eris up on the roof, staring balefully at her with those amber-flecked eyes.
After that, it was no surprise that Avery wanted to leave New York. And Avery didn’t even know the full story. Only Leda had learned the darkest and most shameful part of the truth.
Leda used to possess that same kind of cool self-confidence. She had been the girl who knew everything about everyone, who dispensed gossip and favors, who tried to bend the universe to her will. But that was before.
She’d been perfectly fine in her room, alone with her slender, solitary sadness.
Avery knew she shouldn’t be thinking about him, yet she couldn’t help wondering what Atlas was doing, half a world away.
“It’s because language has so many musics,” Max’s mom tried to explain, which Avery took to mean nuances of meaning.
Initially Avery treated it like an experiment. Max was like one of those bandages from before people invented mediwands; he was helping her forget how much she was still hurting after losing Atlas. But at some point it stopped feeling like a Band-Aid, and started feeling real.
There was something decidedly old-fashioned about Max, Avery thought; it was as if he’d stepped through a portal from another century and ended up here. Perhaps it was his earnestness. In New York, everyone seemed to measure their superiority by how contemptuous and cynical they were. Max wasn’t afraid to care about things, publicly and unironically.
“Someday, Avery, you’ll learn that it’s not much use running away from things if you have to eventually come back and face them.”
Avery had thought then that her entire world was shattered. Or maybe she herself was shattered—into so many infinitesimally small pieces that she’d become the character from the nursery rhyme, the one who could never be put back together. She had been certain she would die from the pain of it. How foolish she’d been, to think that a broken heart would kill her, but it was how she’d felt.
Some of them she had loved, some of them she had resented. Many she had never known at all. Yet in their own ways they had betrayed her, every last one of them. They had made her life unbearable by depriving her of the one person she had ever loved.
THERE HAS ALWAYS been something otherworldly about the first snow of the year in New York. It gilds the city’s flaws, its hard edges, transforming Manhattan into a proud, glittering northern place. Magic hangs heavy in the air. On the morning of the first snow, even the most jaded New Yorkers pause in the streets to look up at the sky, stilled by a quiet sense of awe. As if every hot summer they forgot that this was possible, and only when the first flakes of snow kiss their faces can they believe in it again. It seems almost that the snowfall might wash the city clean, reveal all the monstrous secrets buried beneath its surface. But then, some secrets are best kept buried.
The sun felt like a searing kiss on her skin after the cool darkness of the library, even though the library was hundreds of floors above her.
To Rylin’s surprise, the more time she spent watching these old 2-D films, the more she appreciated them. The directors had so little to work with, yet accomplished so much with what they had. There was an elegance beneath the films’ celluloid flatness.
What would he tell those people, exactly? That there was something soothing about looking out over the edge? That it was a sharp reminder of how small and insignificant he was, surrounded by this vast city? Of how little his pain mattered in the scheme of things?
Instead of heading for the exit, Watt found himself walking the other direction. His toes edged against the painted safety line. The stars glittered far up in the sky. To think that their light was careening wildly toward him at three hundred million meters per second. But what about darkness? How fast did the darkness rush toward you after a star died and its light went out for good? No matter how fast light traveled, Watt thought, the darkness always seemed to have gotten there first.
These girls were all looking for someone like them. Someone who echoed their own opinions, who said what they wanted to hear, who didn’t push them or contradict them. Leda was the only girl Watt had ever met who didn’t want that, who actually preferred to be called out on her bullshit.
When he began coming out like this, right after Leda broke up with him, he would skulk around the edges of whatever bar he’d come to, trying to conceal his hurt, which only made it hurt worse. Now at least the wound was scarred over enough for him to stand at the center of the crowd. It made Watt feel marginally less lonely.
The type of people who came here didn’t mind the uncertainty. That was part of the appeal: the thrill of flirting with danger.
But it had been a long time, much longer than she’d ever kept up any con, and Calliope was starting to chafe beneath her constraints. She felt as if she were losing herself in this never-ending performance—drowning in it, even.
He seemed to view the entire world like a computer problem, in stark black and white. Unlike Calliope and her mom, who operated in shades of gray.
Although, was anyone really themselves in New York? Wasn’t this the city full of people from nowhere, people who remade themselves the moment they arrived? Calliope glanced down at the twin rivers, flowing around Manhattan like the cold River Lethe—as if the moment you crossed them, your entire past became irrelevant, and you were reborn as someone new. That was what she loved about New York. That feeling of utter aliveness, a rush and flow of ruthless, furious energy. That New York belief that this was the center of the world, and god help you if you were anywhere else.
Calliope got to stay in New York and live a stable, “normal” life for the first time in years. But it came with a tremendous price tag: She couldn’t be herself.
The sky gleamed with the polished brilliance of enamel. This was one of the very last floors where you could actually step outside. Any higher and the terraces were no longer real terraces, just rooms with a nice view, enclosed in polyethylene glass.
I’ll be fine, she repeated to herself. As long as she kept herself remote, cut away from anything that might trigger her old addictions, she would be safe from the world. And the world would be safe from her.
Leda tried to force her eyes shut and relax. Everything would be fine, now that all the darkness of last year was behind her. She wouldn’t let the mistakes of her past weigh her down.
Even amid the blind haze of her pain, Leda realized that the doctor was right. Watt knew her—really knew her, beneath every last scrap of deceit, all her insecurities and fears, all the terrible things she had done. Watt was too tangled up in who she had been, and Leda needed to focus on who she was becoming.
At least elements and chemicals behave in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, are shockingly unpredictable.”
“All good storytellers study psychology,” she’d proclaimed, drumming her fingers idly over the film storage boxes. “Novelists, filmmakers, even actors. You have to know the rules of human behavior before you can make your characters break them.”
“I like to think of myself as a thing of mystery,” she said flippantly. “And I like to think of myself as a person who solves mysteries.”
The ceiling was lined in prisms of glass that reflected the garish illumination, separating it into a million glowing strands and tossing it down again. The colors were so vibrant that it almost hurt to look at them.
Calliope felt a little shiver of adventure as she slipped out of Nadav’s apartment. Because she wasn’t just sneaking out of the house. She was sneaking out of her life, shedding her skin, sliding neatly from the role of Calliope Brown into another role. One that she was making up as she went along. She knew this was risky. But Calliope had hit breaking point.
She kept the room bulbs on their maximum setting and gave a self-satisfied smirk. Her beauty was as vivid, and almost as harsh, as the overbright lighting.
She hadn’t wanted to lie to Max, but what other choice did she have? He couldn’t ever know who had actually broken her heart last year. If he knew the truth, Max wouldn’t want her anymore. It didn’t matter that she and Atlas were long since over. If anyone found out the truth about them, Avery knew, her life would come crashing down around her.
Avery loved that about Max: the way he seemed so self-assured, so certain of the world and his place in it. The way he noticed things no one else paid attention to. But right now she needed him to pay a little bit less attention, or he might realize that she hadn’t really told him the truth.
She let the words echo for a moment, savoring them, knowing that with those words their relationship had shifted into something new. “I love you too.” She snaked her arms around Max to pull him closer, feeling the muscles of his back through the fabric of his shirt. He leaned forward to drop a kiss on her forehead, but Avery tilted her face up, so that his lips met hers instead. The kiss was soft and tender at first, almost languid. But then Max’s hands were tracing over her body with increasing urgency, sending little tingling whorls up and down her nerves. It felt as if her entire body was sizzling beneath her skin, or maybe her skin had grown too small to contain her. Avery’s breath came faster. She clung tighter to Max, feeling like the vines draping along the walls, as if she wouldn’t be able to stand without his support— Because afterward, in the cruel light of day, Avery saw that kiss for what it was: a selfish attempt to wipe Atlas from her brain. Cord deserved better.
“Max. You know you’re more to me than a summer boyfriend,” Avery said quietly, and was warmed by the broad, eager smile that broke over his face. “You’re more to me than a summer girlfriend, Avery. So much more. You’re part of my life now, and I want you to keep being part of it.” He paused before the final three words, words that balanced on the edge of the sentence like droplets of rain. “I love you.”
“I wish you’d told me.” Avery felt her chest clench with sorrow. Had Leda been like this all year long, avoiding their friends, hiding from the world in that hollowed-out bedroom?
This wasn’t Leda at all. The person before her was a hollow pod-person version of Leda, a mannequin Leda, who looked and sounded like Leda but couldn’t possibly be Avery’s sharp and vibrant best friend.
And most starkly changed was Leda herself, who stood in a pool of shadow near her closet.
A week earlier Rylin would have said absolutely not. But she was starting to learn that things were always changing, that nothing was ever quite what you thought it was, and that perhaps that was a good thing.
Several weeks later, Hiral had knocked on Rylin’s front door. And for some reason—maybe because she felt so alone, or because she’d learned one too many times that people don’t always get the second chances they deserve—she opened it.
And he made Rylin laugh—the sort of deep, helpless laughter that you can only spark when you truly know someone. Rylin had loved that about Hiral: the way he seemed to understand her in a way that no one else ever could. Until Cord.
Rylin remembered being instantly drawn to him: He had an effervescent sort of energy, so palpable she imagined she could see it. She came to realize that it was joy—a hazy afterglow of laughter, like the light that still streaks across the sky after a shooting star has disappeared.
“It’s interesting to study, but it doesn’t have any real impact on the present. The most important thing is to focus on making the world a better place right now, while we’re still in it.”
There was something subtly fragile about her, as if her real self was nothing like the face she presented to the world.
Art history wasn’t about ranking or maximizing things. It was about thoughtfulness, and appreciation—the search for a cohesive thread among all the wondrous things people had created through the centuries, in an effort to say something, to feel a little bit less alone.
Avery took a deep breath. You could taste the difference in the air, in here: It was completely sterile to protect the art from oxidation or corrosion. The whole entrance to the museum felt oddly like a vacuum chamber, as if you were stepping into space, some grand new universe of artistic beauty.
She’d been all sharp angles when he first stepped into the elevator, but now some of those angles were sanded down.
“We’re all in this together,” he said, which was true. The three other people in this room had once been strangers, but now their lives were inextricably bound with his.
Watt had forgotten that about her: the way she was always doubling and twisting on herself, as if it were impossible for her to ever fall still.
Silence hung in the air. Watt imagined he could see it, as if all their unspoken fears had been made tangible, swirling like snowflakes.
Leda’s eyes automatically rose to meet his. For a moment there was no one in the room but the two of them. Watt swallowed against the maddening flood of old tendernesses and love and frustrations that rose up in him.
She was going to have to see them again, she realized. All of them. Even Watt.
She was oddly glad that Avery had insisted she come to Cord’s the other night. Leda hadn’t exactly been the life of the party—it all felt so garishly loud and bright, and she kept worrying that the darkness would open up within her again, like an earthquake that might erupt at any moment. But nothing all that bad had happened. Actually, Leda realized, it had felt good, doing something almost normal again.
The halls were thick with that frantic back-to-school hum, everyone rapidly recalibrating their relationships after three months apart.
“Look, Rylin,” Cord began again, with a bursting sort of desperation. “I wasn’t joking earlier, when I told Professor Wang that timing is everything. Our timing has never been right.”
Rylin felt a little catch in her chest, because she recognized Cord’s confusion for what it was: the feeling of not knowing what to do, what step to take next, when you had no parents to advise you. It was the terrifying feeling of making a monumental life decision and knowing that whether you failed or succeeded, you would do so wholly on your own.
She wondered if Cord was thinking about that day too, only to remember that she shouldn’t be thinking about it. They were friends, and nothing more. Friends who happened to have a romantic history.
Standing there, they looked like the edge of an undulating human bubble.
Now all Leda wanted was to be safe from the darkness within herself. And that meant staying away from Watt. Or at least, she had thought it did.
Watt shrugged. “I guess I always hoped that if I studied computers, I might make a difference; make the world better, even in some small way.”
“Because.” Because she wanted to understand this part of Watt’s life, this thing that he was so startlingly talented at. Because it was important to him.
At least she no longer dreaded falling asleep. She was still having the nightmares, but they were shallower, easier to wake herself up from; especially now that she was waking up to a series of waiting flickers from Watt. There was something comforting in the knowledge that he was on her side. For the first time in months, Leda no longer felt alone.
Avery couldn’t quite believe it. After all this time—after she had finally moved on from him—Atlas was back.
The sheer reality of him, of his presence here after all this time away, struck Avery with a blind, blunt force. Her entire world felt upended.
Avery knew that her parents loved her, but at times like this, it was hard to feel like anything but an employee of the family company, a standard-bearer of the Fuller name. A beautiful, golden, living prop, which her parents had custom-ordered nineteen years ago for precisely this purpose.
“Right,” Avery said wearily, grinding her teeth into a smile. The cameras, of course. Waiting, poised to take snaps, to document the perfect lives of the perfect loving family.
Avery bent over to catch her breath, her hands on her knees. She felt as if she’d just fought a battle within herself, and had the oddest sense that she’d lost.
It struck her what a tricky game it was, politics—trying to please everyone, when everyone wanted such different things.
I wish that I could find my way forward. That I could feel like myself again, she thought fiercely. Then, with a wordless sort of desperation, she threw the wisher into the water. It instantly erupted in a shower of bubbles.
He tasted like heat and like the magic chocolate, and without quite knowing how it happened, Calliope was tipping forward and grabbing at his sweater. She knew this was reckless; it was dangerous, but like all dangerous things, it had a deep, thrilling undercurrent that was richer and better and more alive than anything safe.
For years, Calliope had thought that her greatest fear was getting caught and going to prison. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was more terrifying to live a life that wasn’t yours.
“So that I could fly and burn things. Two powers in one.”
She opened her mouth to spin another lie—and paused. She was sick of hiding behind layers of pretend.
Still, it was nice, pretending to be normal. If only for a moment.
“Sometimes simplicity is the key to success,”
“I thought we could try talking to him. As a smart girl once told me, not every problem needs to be hacked,” Watt told her.
“That girl wasn’t afraid of anything.” That girl was afraid of everything, Leda thought. She was just better at hiding her fear.
Trust Watt? That felt hard to do, given all the broken promises that lay between them.
Calliope looked up to where their three reflected faces hovered together, illuminated by the ambient light. Her eyes met Livya’s in the mirror. The other girl was staring at her hungrily, looking suddenly like a predator, alert and watchful for the slightest sign of weakness.
Calliope could have kicked herself. She’d grown sloppy, playing the same role for far longer than was good for anyone. This was exactly why their cons usually had a four-month time limit: The longer they stayed in one place, the greater their risk of being found out. No matter how convincing a story you wove, eventually the lies and blank spaces would begin to catch up with you. Eventually you would slip up.
Normally, being places like this—cool, expensive boutiques full of beautiful things—calmed Calliope. It was something in the proud look of them, the expectant hush as their doors swung open and you saw all those beautiful rich things arranged within. But today her surroundings seemed to be mocking her.
Most striking of all, though, were the mirrors. They were ubiquitous, so that a girl could see herself from every conceivable angle, and perhaps a few inconceivable ones too.
“I know. But I really have to go,” she said, and smiled. There was a new bloom of color to her cheeks, a translucent liquid glow shining through her skin. When she was like this—when she was happy—Leda was more magnetic and beautiful than anyone in the world.
It was for the best, Leda told herself. Confronting the monster within herself was a task that could only be done alone.
She realized, with a pang of regret, that he wasn’t changing his mind. “I love you,” she whispered. “I know that you do. And I love you too. But I also know that I’m not enough for you.”
What a reckless, stupid thing to have done, Leda thought. Forgetting never fixed anything. She remembered something Eris used to say when she drank until she blacked out. If you don’t remember it, it doesn’t count.
That must be real love, Calliope thought wonderingly—being able to efface your own desires for the person you care about.
“I wanted so desperately to be worthy of you, Rylin. More than anything I wanted to hold myself to the promise I made you when we got back together. I swore that I wouldn’t hurt you ever again.”
“It’s because of everything we’ve been through that I have to walk away. Because you deserve better!” Hiral exclaimed.
Watt held his breath as she leaned in to kiss him. The kiss was like a jolt of nitrogen, of electricity, dancing down every last nerve ending in his body. Her hands closed over his shoulders, slipping under the edges of his sweater, and where her bare skin touched his it felt somehow significant, like the imprint of her hand would be forever tattooed there. Leda’s pulse was as erratic as his. It astonished Watt how utterly right everything suddenly felt. Why had he wasted all those months spinning madly like a top, trying so desperately to forget Leda, when just touching her made the world seem so simple? When she finally pulled away, Watt felt dazed. “I thought . . .” “I changed my mind. Girls do that sometimes, you know.” Leda smiled softly and leaned in to kiss him again.
All this time, Leda had been holding herself at arm’s length, at a stiff and safe distance from the world, and most of all from him. But now her shield was lowered, her electric fence switched off, every last barrier between the two of them zapped into oblivion. He felt as if he was looking at Leda for the first time in months.
Watt was strangely touched by that. “I do know you, Leda,” he said softly. “I like to think I know you in a way that no one else does. That I can see a core of goodness in you that the rest of the world is too hurried or careless to see.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said tersely, taking a step back. “I’m no good for you, Watt.” “Stop saying that. I know you, Leda, the real you—” “That’s just it! You know me too well! You know the real me, the me that no one else has seen. You’re the only person I ever told about me and Eris being related,” she added quietly.
“Stop trying to carry all the guilt in the entire world by yourself. There’s enough blame to go around, I promise.”
But standing in her bedroom, surrounded by all the accumulated clutter of her life, Mariel felt much less like a goddess of vengeance, and much more like a teenage girl. A misguided girl who was desperately hurt by the loss of the person she’d loved.
An oppressive silence hovered in the apartment. Watt could tell that it wasn’t normally this quiet; this was the type of apartment that should be ringing with laughter. The silence was a stranger here, lurking around every corner with heavy footsteps, as uninvited and unwelcome a guest as he and Leda.
Back in her bedroom, Avery couldn’t resist unfurling the carpet near her windows. She had to admit, her room needed this—it was all neutrals, ivory and gray and the occasional soft blue. The carpet was a glorious oasis of color in a sea of boringness. Trust Atlas to bring her the most thoughtful present in the world, then ruin it by turning her emotions upside down.
“I’m just saying, you’ve done a great job pretending that you and I never happened. You have everyone convinced, even me.” He kept his gaze on her, steady and unblinking. “When I saw you with Max, I almost thought that I’d made the whole thing up. That it was something I’d dreamed.” “That isn’t fair,” Avery said again. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “You can’t do this, Atlas. You literally destroyed me. I was so broken, I thought it would be a lifetime before I could put myself back together. And then I met Max . .
When Avery traveled, she took her identity with her; she never stopped being Avery Fuller. She was jealous, she realized, of Atlas’s anonymity.
He stepped out of the kitchen, the shadows falling softly over the planes of his face, so familiar and yet so changed. The silence fluttered between them like a curtain.
Calliope didn’t answer. All the bright, breathless joy she had felt with Brice seemed to vacuum away, leaving nothing but a dull sense of anger.
“The breaking of the glass is a reminder that marriage can hold sorrow as well as joy. It represents the couple’s commitment to stand by each other forever, even during the difficult times.” Calliope felt a shiver of premonition. Forever was a long time for anyone to promise. And she and Elise had broken so many of their promises before.
As she stood here now, staring out at the sea of faces watching her, all she could think was how surreal it all felt.
There really was nothing like the thrill of anonymity. Of stepping into a party as a blank slate and letting the situation dictate who you might become.
At the thought of Brice—of the way he’d kissed her, warm and certain and tasting of chocolate—a secret smile played around her mouth.
It felt impossibly heavy on her skin, like a broken promise.
Her dad’s face was ashen, his eyes gleaming with unshed tears.
Her throat felt swollen. “I miss her,” Leda said quietly. “Or at least, I miss the chance with her I never had. I wish I could remember something more personal than her smile, but I don’t have much else. So I try to concentrate on that. Eris smiled all the time, not fake smiling the way most people do, but a real smile.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, helplessly. Leda saw the grief in his eyes. It was real.
She wasn’t sure why she was crying. She loved Max. They fit together so easily, without conflict or friction or obstacles. He made Avery the best version of herself. So why wasn’t her love for him as free and unencumbered as his was for her? Why wasn’t she as blazingly certain of what she wanted as he seemed to be? “I’m crying because I’m so happy,” she said and leaned over to kiss him, wishing it were that simple.
“I love you,” he said simply. “All I want is to make you as happy as you make me. I want to see your first smile of the day when you wake up, and the last one before you go to sleep. I want to share my fears and my hopes and dreams with you. I want to build a life with you.” He slid one of the pair of key-chips toward her across the wrought-iron table.
Atlas had always known better than to use the word perfect with her.
“The last year with you has been so perfect. You are perfect. You’re like a dream that I’ve been longing for my whole life and never thought I would find. And now that I’ve found you, all I can think about is how much I want to be with you always.”
Maybe there was such a thing as being too smart for your own good.
I wanted someone who will put himself out there, Vivian had said. Not someone who will tell me what I want to hear. But that was how Watt had always gotten by—gaming the system and telling people what they wanted to hear, whether it was teachers or girls or even his parents. That was what he used Nadia for. And what was so wrong with it, anyway?
She smiled up at him in the shadows. “Getting me alone in a dark room and showering me with compliments? If I didn’t know better, Cord Anderton, I would say you’re attempting to seduce me.”
“What is it? What are you afraid of?” She leaned her forehead against his chest to avoid having to look into his eyes. “That we’re being foolish. That nothing has changed, and we’ll just hurt each other all over again.”
“You and me, together again? This is crazy.” No matter how much she wanted him, Rylin knew that she couldn’t go through it a second time: all the countless small wounds they’d inflicted on each other, all the misunderstandings and hurt and loss. Wasn’t that the definition of insanity, to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result?
“I don’t really believe in endings,” he said laconically. “At least, I don’t believe in calling them endings. There’s something too depressingly final about it.” “What would you call them?” “Opportunities. A value change. The beginning of something new.”
It felt somehow easier to make sense of their relationship like this—as vignettes, as a series of disconnected and highly visual moments—than to confront it in its entirety. Maybe when she finished she would send it to Hiral. He would understand what it meant.
She couldn’t help thinking that Chrissa had been right all along. Rylin had been so certain that she and Hiral could have a fresh start. But their secrets and lies had caught up with them once again.
She wished she were still angry with Atlas. Because whatever this was, it felt immeasurably worse.
Why did Avery have to struggle to make herself understood to everyone else in her life, yet Atlas always seemed to get her on an instinctive and elemental level? Why couldn’t she make the rest of the world see her the way that Atlas did?
“It’s just that sometimes I think of the version of me that Mom and Dad do see, sparkling and perfect, and I wish I could be that girl. Instead of the flawed person that I really am.” “Your so-called imperfections are the best part of you.”
“Thanks.” Calliope was suddenly afraid that she’d said too much. She kept offering these real, unvarnished reactions to Brice, allowing a dangerous amount of her real self to bleed through. It just felt like such an unexpected relief, lowering the weighty shield of her public persona and actually telling the truth for once.
“There was always a different answer, no matter how many times I asked the same question. But none of those million answers were true. I guess eventually I stopped caring. What did it matter, anyway? We were perfectly happy without him, just the two of us. Except it isn’t just the two of us anymore,” she added in a softer voice.
“I just don’t understand why you’re trying so hard to be someone you’re not,” he insisted. “You wouldn’t understand.” You don’t know what it’s like to constantly play pretend. To trade in falsehoods—false identities, false alarms, false hopes—all to gain something that you aren’t even sure you want anyway.
She had tried so hard, for so long, to avoid thinking of what she’d done to Eris—to amputate that part of herself and start over. But the damage was still there, buried deep within her like scar tissue. Real grief left that kind of mark on you. The only way to heal from grief like that was roughly: step by clumsy step, as you muddled your way back toward some form of peace, or redemption, or forgiveness, if you were lucky enough to get it.
“You live with yourself because you have to.” Rylin stared into the refracted blue surface of the fountain. “You forgive yourself for what you’ve done. It can only kill you when you try to run from it. If you just look it in the eye and face it, it becomes part of you, and it can’t hurt you anymore.”
All she wanted was to forget. To fight back against the dark cloud with a cloud of her own.
She stumbled through the world at the center of a cloud of wrongness, which seemed to pervade everything, closing its fingers stealthily around her throat. The ground felt unsteady beneath her, like the surface of a ship, like melting quicksand.
Avery nodded, holding tight to his hand like a lifeline. She needed Max right now, to reassure her that she was still here, still herself. That she was the Avery Fuller he knew and loved, and not the broken girl who Atlas had left in his wake all those months ago.
Avery couldn’t help looking over at Atlas. When their eyes met he gave a sad smile, and the sight of it turned Avery’s victory to ashes in her mouth. Unlike everyone else here, Atlas knew her. He knew what that display on the court had meant, how strangely unsettled Avery was feeling. And he knew that he was the reason.
Avery nodded and smiled mechanically. Max probably still thought that he’d helped take her mind off things. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she only felt worse.
“Maybe I can change,” Elise said with surprising vigor. “Maybe I can become the person he’s fallen in love with, if I give it enough time.” Calliope wasn’t sure that was the best foundation for a relationship, but what did she know? She’d never exactly had a real relationship either.
Anyone who wanted to leave their old life without a backward glance.
She hadn’t realized how rattled Avery was by Atlas’s return. Living under the same roof as her ex, being forced to see him every day—Leda should have realized that was a uniquely cruel form of torture. But then, Avery was so expert at disguising her true feelings from everyone, even from herself. Seeing her best friend tonight, the way she stood so proud and glittering in that ethereal gold gown, Leda’s heart had ached for her. She recognized that bright remoteness for what it was—loneliness, and longing.
They turned to kiss again; the silence groaned loud and thick all around them, and the minutes left to them, however many there were, ticked away too quickly. Each kiss felt imbued with significance. Each kiss was a promise that they would fight for each other, even though all the odds, the entire world, were arrayed against them.
Broke up wasn’t the right term for it, she thought. It was more like they broke apart, as if tearing Atlas from her life had involved peeling off a raw exposed layer of flesh.
Tentatively, she kissed him. His mouth instinctively found hers. Their bodies, like their breath, folded quietly together in the darkness. “I love you,” she said wonderingly between kisses. “I love you, I love you,” and Atlas was saying it back; and Avery knew this was wrong, that it was cruel to Max, but she couldn’t find it in her to stop. They kissed as if there was no time left in the world for them, and maybe there wasn’t.
Avery knew she could make Atlas stop saying these things. One word from her and he would stop, and they would pretend it all away, just as they’d pretended away their kiss. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Because she didn’t really want him to stop.
“When I broke up with you in Dubai, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought there was no way we could ever be together. But the problem is, there’s no way I can be without you either. I ran away from you like a coward, and everywhere I went, you caught up to me. Everywhere I fled, I kept seeing you,” he finished. “Every time, Avery, you happen to me all over again.”
Avery blinked. “You always seem happy when I see you.” “Of course. Because definitionally, you only ever see me when I’m with you. And you make me happy, Aves. Just being around you makes me happy.” The silence stretched between them like a rubber band at breaking point. “Atlas,” Avery whispered, then broke off. A million things swirled incoherently in her mind. But Atlas was talking again, his words tumbling rapidly over one another.
“Sorry,” she muttered, somewhere on the precipice between laughter and tears. If only she could see Atlas. The darkness felt pervasive in a heavy, palpable way, like it used to feel in Oxford. Real darkness, without the omnipresent urban glow.
“We should never have gotten back together,” she said heavily. “We were right to break up the first time. We’re too different, you and I.”
It began low and plaintive, full of a longing so sharp that Rylin felt it like a pain between her own ribs. Dimly, she was aware of Cord retreating toward the bar, but Rylin stayed where she was, transfixed by the haunting, tragic music. It put into words what words failed to do.
RYLIN HADN’T PLANNED on falling back in love with Cord so quickly. She’d wanted to be thoughtful and intentional about it, instead of tumbling into their relationship all over again. But then, she hadn’t exactly planned for it last time either. Maybe that was just the way love went—it was something that happened to you, and the best preparation you could hope for was the chance to take a deep breath before the wave of it crashed above you and you were in over your head.
They were leaving New York. And this time, Calliope knew, they wouldn’t be coming back.
“We’re broken,” he said quietly. “My trust is broken. I have no desire to sit here picking up the fragments and try to put them together again when we both know that it will never be the way it was.”
Nadav stared at Elise in blank horror. He stared at her like a man broken: as if he wanted to strip away her charm and her beauty, layer by layer, so he might finally truly understand her, the way that he once believed he did.
“I wanted to be someone you might fall in love with! Someone worthy of your love! I was afraid that you wouldn’t love the real me. Don’t you see?” Elise cried out. “Your love has actually made me better. I’m becoming that person, the woman you fell in love with. I’m right here.”
He could only hope that, this time, he wouldn’t be too late.
Watt shouldn’t have been surprised. Nadia had been programmed to protect him, and thus always tried to lead him toward situations she could control, situations that were in his best interest. But Nadia didn’t understand what it was like to love someone so much that their own safety became paramount to your own. Watt would do anything to keep Leda safe.
“What is the right thing, exactly?” she mused, the words echoing in his eartennas. “It seems like every human has a slightly different version of right and wrong.”
At an intersection like this, it was easy to be invisible.
Atlas was the one who never did what she wanted him to.
For so much of her life, Avery had let her desires be dictated by other people, without really questioning them. She knew how lucky she was to be living a life so many people would give anything for, and yet it hadn’t been hers. She hadn’t chosen it for herself. Her parents had literally custom-designed her to be the exact person they wanted. Avery had absorbed their beliefs every day until they became her own, until she didn’t even know what she wanted anymore because it was all wrapped up in what they wanted for her.
When she emerged onto the observation deck, she let out a great rasping breath, as if she’d been swimming and had finally surfaced for air. The half-moon of the deck curved before her. She took a step closer, reaching her fingers toward the flexiglass. The deepening winter twilight hovered outside the windows. She saw the ghost of her own reflection there, transposed eerily over the view.
The New York princess, running away from it all.
Maybe Leda was right. Maybe the secret to growing up was turning away from the ugliest parts of yourself. Pasting a smile on your face, and pretending that it—the kiss, the confession, the night you watched your best friend die—never happened.
“If only we could go back, do things differently. Fix all our mistakes.” “I wish,” Leda agreed. “But I think the only thing to do is keep going forward, the best we can.”
“Of course if I hurt you, I would apologize,” Brice said, his eyes warm on her. “Think of yourself as the exception to my no-apology rule. You’re the exception to every rule. You are a goddess, after all.”
She was used to being the one who did the leaving, or the hurting; but then, she wasn’t used to being the one who cared.
To one side of the room, Calliope saw Avery talking to a group of reporters. She couldn’t help thinking that there was a tempestuous heat to Avery’s beauty tonight—as if beneath her bright-gold exterior, she was coming rapidly untethered.
Soon enough, everyone might discover that perfect Avery Fuller wasn’t so very perfect after all.
On the center of the table, where Max’s arrangement of lilies should have been, was a small bud vase containing a single red rose. An absolutely perfect rose, every line of its petals curved just so, its color deepening in precise degrees from the edges toward its center. It was the Avery Fuller of roses, the kind of rose that had been genetically designed for this sort of showmanship. The kind of rose that could never exist in nature. Avery imagined the florist placing an order for this maddeningly perfect rose, thinking smugly that it reflected reality. She had a sudden urge to rip it apart. Or better yet, to collect dozens of misshapen, twisted, spotted roses, and arrange them in an enormous bowl for her parents, as a gift. A reminder that nothing in the world is perfect. That imperfection can be celebrated too.
Avery knew she was expected to sit there and smile like the well-behaved, photogenic daughter everyone thought she was. To tell a charming story that helped cast her dad in a relatable light. To act elegant but approachable.
Watt felt his heartbeat echoing in the space between them. He reached up tentatively to trace her smile. He adored Leda’s mouth, the eager fullness of it. He adored everything about her: the arch of her neck, the softness of her arms, the way she fit so perfectly tucked into his chest. Everywhere they touched seemed to explode in a white-hot friction. Watt regretted every moment of the last year he hadn’t spent with her. He regretted every kiss that he had ever given to anyone who wasn’t Leda, because he knew now how much a kiss could mean. He loved Leda—for her wildness and her inner fire and her fierce, stubborn pride. He loved that she was more ruthlessly alive than anyone he had ever met. He wanted so desperately to tell her that he loved her, but he didn’t dare, because he was terrified it might send her running. Instead he kept kissing her, again and again and again, trying to pour his love into the kisses. He hoped, desperately, that she loved him too.
But she was still Leda, still the girl he loved, standing before him—slight and trembling, yet not fragile at all. Watt knew the implacability of her strength, like a blade that was whip-thin but sharp.
To think that at this time last year, Watt had been nothing to her but the person who filled her hacking requests. Now he was her co-conspirator, her partner in crime, the boy she loved. Watt had slipped into her life and under her skin, and Leda was so very glad of it, even though she knew it was what he’d intended all along. Well, if she was going to do this, she’d damned well better dive in headfirst.
She looked over at him. The blood rushed to the thin skin over the bones of her chest; she felt her heartbeat echoing in the space within her ribs. There were no secrets between them, she realized, dazed. Nothing between her and Watt except for space. Then his arms were around her, and she was pressing her mouth to his, certain that she would never get enough of him.
“It was my mistake. I tried too hard to be something that I’m not.” Watt sighed. “On top of losing you, it felt like more than I could handle—that I had somehow screwed up everything in my life through my own foolishness.” “Watt, you haven’t lost me,” Leda assured him. “I just needed some time. I’m scared of myself . . . of what I might have done. But I don’t want to push you away.”
Leda no longer believed that Watt was some kind of human trigger for the darkest side of her. Not anymore. Maybe because she had confronted her darkness—had looked it squarely in the face and wrestled it away—and now there was nothing left for her to fear.
And then they were no longer giggling, because their mouths were pressed together, all the awkwardness between them dissolved. Rylin wondered why she had ever doubted them. How could she when her skin was on fire, when Cord’s skin was her skin and they were tangled like this, hot and slow and elemental all at once? Their ship kept on orbiting farther into the sunrise, the dawn bathing their bodies in a warm golden glow.
Banners of fire spun out into the darkness. It was dazzling, blinding; Rylin wanted to tear her eyes away but she couldn’t, because there it was, the sun, the closest star within reach. Her whole being felt flooded with a rush of glorious lightness. To see the face of the sun, she realized, was a lot like falling in love.
“Look.” Cord nudged her gaze toward the window, where golden flames licked above the horizon. Rylin gasped. They were flying directly into the sunrise.
She wondered how Hiral was doing right now. Maybe his floating city was big enough to be visible from this high up.
Cord had a tendency to focus on the big, epic moments, things like this Skyspear cruise. But a relationship wasn’t made or broken on the dramatic stories. It was built the rest of the time, during the drowsy late-night conversations, the laughter over a bag of pretzels, the quiet study sessions after class. That was what Rylin loved.
“This isn’t about the destination, Rylin. It’s about the journey.” Cord came to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her and resting his chin on her shoulder. But Rylin felt as if most of her life had been about the journey, rather than the destination. Now she finally had a sense of purpose, and she didn’t want to make any moves unless they were in the right direction. She didn’t need to slow down and enjoy the ride. She wanted to get where she was going, and then enjoy being there.
The real showstopper was the flexiglass that lined most of the floor and one entire wall. Rylin could scarcely look away. It was heart-stopping but exhilarating, watching the view unfurl beneath them. The entire world felt like a secret, wild and full of promise, revealing itself only to her.
As the other girl walked off, Calliope turned away from the sunrise to watch the anonymous sea of people moving through the train station: all the greetings and good-byes, the laughter and tears, the commuters chattering on various pings, the travelers standing in pools of isolation. She was very accustomed to being alone. But it suddenly struck her how many other people there were in this vast city, also alone.
Calliope cleared her throat, not wanting to get this wrong. “It is liberating sometimes, but also lonely. Every time I go somewhere new, I have to let go of whoever I was last time, and become the person that the situation calls for. I’m constantly pushing restart on myself.”
“I’m just curious,” Avery said, and Calliope heard the edge beneath her words. Even Avery Fuller doesn’t always know her own mind, she thought wonderingly. Even Avery Fuller occasionally felt torn between two different paths, two different versions of herself.
Maybe Calliope loved train stations because for most of her life, they had been her escape mechanism.
She leaned back in her chair, watching the sunrise as if it were a private performance intended just for her. And for a moment it felt that way: as if the sun, or perhaps the city, was showing off for her benefit, reminding her how wonderful it was to be young and alive and in New York. There was something delicious about being awake while most of the city was still asleep. It was as if Calliope alone presided over the sacred mysteries of the city.
It had been a long time since she saw the sun rise, even longer since she’d actually woken up for it. Usually when Calliope witnessed the dawn of a new day, it was because the previous day hadn’t actually ended.
“There are times, Leda, when the truth can do more harm than good. When sharing a secret is much more selfish than keeping it,” her dad insisted. “I know it’s not fair to put you in the middle like this, and I’m sorry. Someday, when you do something you wish you could undo—something you regret, something that changes you forever—you’ll understand what I mean.” Leda knew exactly what her father meant, far more than he could ever guess.
Leda understood the impulse. It was devastating, showing the worst parts of yourself to the people you cared about. Knowing that they would never look at you the same again.
But no one could ever know you that way either.
She had never—well, almost never—told anyone her real name. That was the central tenet of the rules they lived by. Never tell anyone your real name, because it makes you vulnerable. As long as you protected yourself with fake names and fake accents, no one could hurt you.
She had been everyone but herself, lived every life except her own. But this time, she could be whoever and whatever she wanted to be.
There was so much here, so much color and taste and light and motion. So much pain and so much hope. The city was ugly and beautiful at once, and it was always changing, always reintroducing itself to you; you couldn’t look away even for a moment, or you might miss the New York of today, which would be different from tomorrow’s New York and next week’s New York.
Calliope felt a bright, delicate joy bubbling up within her. Brice knew the truth about her, or at the very least he suspected, and yet it didn’t matter. He still wanted to be here with her.
She curled her palms around the coffee mug for the warmth, wondering at what a strange thing love was. It could make you feel invincible, and then a moment later it could utterly destroy you. Calliope thought of Avery and Atlas, trapped in an impossible situation. She thought of her mom and Nadav. Would they have had a shot, if they had met in a completely different context?
Calliope felt strangely numb at the news. She couldn’t believe that the world no longer contained Avery Fuller. Avery, who’d been many things to her: a stranger, an obstacle, and ultimately, something approaching a friend. Bright, effervescent Avery, with her ready smile and her sunshine hair, who literally lived on top of the world. She would never have guessed that a girl like that would do something so irrevocably drastic. But then, Calliope knew better than anyone that you could never tell what people were hiding, behind the facade they presented to the world.
Maybe if Leda tried hard enough, if she worked at being patient and thoughtful and curious and kind, her good deeds might eventually outweigh the bad. Maybe then, someday, she would actually be worthy of this tremendous gift Avery had given her.
The only way Leda could ever hope to deserve that sacrifice was to do better in the future than she had in the past. She was intimately familiar with all her bad deeds, every last machination and manipulation and scheme. They were inscribed indelibly upon her heart. But maybe her good deeds were there too, she thought, no matter how outnumbered they might be. Her love for her family and friends—and for Watt.
She’d hoped that by confessing to the police, she could wipe away her guilt. But Avery had beaten her to it. Avery had given herself up for Leda in a drastic act of self-sacrifice, the kind of sacrifice you could never take back.
She cried for Avery, the sister she had chosen, and Eris, the sister she hadn’t known until too late. Leda’s two sisters: her blood sister and the sister of her heart, now both lost to her for good. How would she go on living without them?
Everything was burned. It was a blackened corpse of an apartment, hollowed-out and devastated. The mirrors were cracked and streaked with soot. Leda saw the damage to the apartment reflected in their shattered surfaces, over and over, a million mirrored worlds of devastation.
The snow was swirling in soft flakes to hit the river. Each time one of the flakes collided with the surface, it melted almost instantly, dissolving into the water like a tiny frozen teardrop.
The idea in Watt’s mind became more substantial, until finally he could ignore it no longer. Because pushing Mariel into the water on a dark and stormy night—the perfect conditions to make something look like an accident, at least at first glance—didn’t sound like Leda. It was too neat, too rational, too much the perfect crime.
It was striking, really: the brightness of the flames curling above the Tower, an elegant orange-red brushstroke. Opalescent gray thunderheads coalesced around the rain-blimps, hanging in that low winter way that portended the first dusting of snow. There was something magical about it, even now that the whole thing was engineered: the delicate crystalline miracle reduced to a chemical reaction, the mating of hydrosulphates and carbon.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and stepped right up to the edge, her eyes still closed. They were the last words Avery Fuller ever spoke.
If she was giving it all up anyway, she might as well take the blame. Leda didn’t deserve to lose her freedom over those deaths. No, she thought fervently, Leda deserved to live, to move on from her mistakes in a way that Avery could no longer do. Leda deserved redemption, and Avery had found a way to give it to her.
The city below her was a study in dark and light, like an old-fashioned film without color—a city of extremes, Avery thought. So full of love and hate, but perhaps that was the way the world worked. Perhaps the price of a forever love was to feel forever lonely, once you had lost it. Avery didn’t want to exist in a world where she wasn’t free to love the person her heart called her to.
It wavered and flickered, seeming to contain a multitude of colors at once, colors she didn’t normally see in the Tower—not just red, but rich oranges and golds and even a bright liquid blue that seemed to crackle and spark over the whole thing like summer lightning. It was beautiful.
“God forbid you have to spend money on me,” Avery said bitterly. “But then, everything has a price tag to you, doesn’t it, Dad? Even my happiness?”
She had shown Brice her real self, underneath all the false layers and lies that she wore so well.
Don’t think about Brice, she scolded herself. There was no use dwelling on it; it would only hurt her more. She hated to imagine herself quietly vanishing from his memory, like a holo fading out of focus.
She wondered how long it would take everyone to forget her.
They were subdued. A miasma of regret hung over them; and Calliope imagined that their steps resounded louder than usual, like in an echo chamber, because each step took them farther and farther away from New York. From the only people who actually cared about them.
Calliope lifted her eyes to the mirrored wall of the bitbanc on the corner and was startled at the version of herself she saw reflected there. Because she knew this girl. This was Leaving Calliope, the girl who skipped eagerly from one place to another, standing next to her mom in a sleek coat and boots, an assortment of luggage wheeling along in her wake.
It wasn’t worth it, she thought. It had never been worth it.
There it was in all its naked glory: the body her parents had purchased for her. Avery made a few motions, as if she were a puppet being pulled by invisible strings. She twisted a wrist, lifted a shoulder, turned her head back and forth. Whenever she moved, the pale girl in the mirror moved also, staring back at her with hollow eyes. It all felt oddly distant from her. Who was that girl in the mirror, really, and what connection did she have to Avery Fuller?
She needed to see Atlas, no matter the consequences. She needed the warm, comforting feel of his skin on hers, to remind herself that they had each other, that they loved each other. That together they could face anything.
It didn’t matter, she told herself: This was just soda, and these were just words. Love would always be stronger than hate.
Before the doors could slide shut, Avery’s friends had all turned and escaped the lift with an audible sigh of relief, leaving her alone, surrounded by strangers. The entire scene had taken less than five seconds.
She was crying for her best friend’s anguish, and what had happened to Eris, and what she had done to Max. She was crying for her and Atlas, and her own selfish fear that she would lose him—that this crazy, broken world would refuse to let them be together, and it would cost them everything.
It struck Avery as irrational and cruel that the world was built on so many ifs, so many small choices that seem like nothing at the time, but become the axes upon which whole lives turn.
Avery thought of what her dad had said as he signed her transfer papers for Oxford—that it was no use running from things if you would have to face them eventually. She and Leda had both tried to run, in their own ways. And look where it had gotten them.
This felt a little like that: the bright cold truth you never saw coming and yet once you collided with it, you wondered how you hadn’t noticed it there. You felt there had been so many signs, glaringly obvious signs, but you missed them until it was too late.
Rylin sat there for a long time, staring thoughtfully at the water, the lines of her face strong and unreadable.
“It’s from all your years of living alone, from being the adult and taking care of Chrissa. Trust me, I get it,” Hiral said gently. “But you can’t keep living like that. Always holding people at arm’s length, hiding behind the lens of your camera. Sometimes it’s okay to let people in.”
She couldn’t keep doing this. No more thinking about Cord or Hiral. Rylin was more than the sum of the boys she’d loved. She refused to let them define her.
But today it felt painfully monotonous, or maybe just painful. No matter how far she ran, the horizon never seemed to change, as if any illusion of progress was just that: an illusion.
She curled up in a tiny ball, squeezing her eyes shut to black out the world, wishing herself into oblivion.
This was New York, where the pockmarked surface of society was riddled with scandals. Everyone had secrets, everyone had done something shocking. Was it really all that bad, for two unrelated young people to fall in love?
“I tried to stop, don’t you get it? Sometimes you can’t pick who you love. Sometimes love chooses you.” She bit her lip. “Don’t you remember what it felt like to fall in love and know this was the person you were meant to be with?”
This was her forever love. The kind of love that someone would have written a novel about, a century ago. It was her and Atlas against the world, no matter what; and Avery knew that if she couldn’t have Atlas then she would have no one, for all the days of her life.
More, though, she wished her parents could understand how perfect she and Atlas were together, that theirs was a love that could—and had—overcome anything in its way. That no matter how many times the world tried to destroy it, their love kept emerging again, battered and bruised but still stubbornly there.
It was the lie her parents wanted so desperately to hear. But for the first time, Avery couldn’t bring herself to tell it.
Avery felt a cold, detached sense of unreality. To think that after all this time—all the vast lengths she and Atlas had gone to, in order to keep their secret safe—the worst had actually happened, and the truth was out in the world.
And just like that, Avery knew that everything had changed.
They were all collateral damage. Avery swore to herself never to make that mistake again.
Max had been the one who put her back together again after her heart was shattered last year. He had given her his heart, had tried to build a life for them, and Avery had given him nothing in return except pain.
Somehow she had loved Max and yet been in love with Atlas at the same time.
They didn’t deserve to be punished for what had happened, but she did.
On and on her thoughts swirled, circling wildly through her fevered brain. She must have drifted off at some point; she kept waking in a cold sweat, pressing her fists against her closed eyes, but the images wouldn’t go away. Because they weren’t nightmares; they were her reality.
She loved Watt so much that it hurt, so much that it frightened her. Which was why she should never have let him back into the disaster that was her life. She was too toxic. She had done too many terrible things, things she couldn’t run from, and she refused to let Watt be dragged down with her.
But she wasn’t safe. None of them were safe, and it was her fault.
She kissed him for as long as she dared, not caring if anyone saw. She prayed that Watt wouldn’t sense the frantic, desperate beating of her heart. This was her last kiss, her final farewell on death row, and Leda was determined to make it count. So she focused on Watt—on the feel of him, the quiet strength of him, the way his mouth fit so perfectly over hers. She was saying, deep inside herself, good-bye.
Leda had thought that they were all safe—that the police didn’t have anything on them, and that therefore this nightmare would soon be over. That she could pick up the shattered shards of her grief and make a fresh start.
Her father was brave enough to tell the truth: to confess what he’d done and face the consequences. While Leda persisted in hiding the truth beneath a mountain of lies and blackmail and secrecy.
They were all happy to associate with her now, but none of them had been there when she crumpled to pieces last year. None of them were her real friends.
Leda was glowing from what had happened with Watt last night. She could still feel his touch on her, like an inktat that had marked her in new and indelible ways.
Avery Fuller was dead, and the girl who’d been living her life for eighteen years couldn’t wait to learn who she really was, underneath it all. She turned her profile toward the airline counters and walked boldly into her future.
She was glad she’d done it. It freed the rest of them from suspicion, it freed Leda from her guilt, and most of all, it set her free. She hadn’t realized how much her identity was trapping her until she crawled out from beneath it.
Every choice had become a sort of game with her.
Atlas had never deserved her. This world hadn’t deserved her; and ultimately, the world was what killed her, with its cold narrow-mindedness. Atlas didn’t give two shits what they called him, but to tell Avery that she was vile and worthless, just because of who she loved—well, that wasn’t a world Atlas wanted any part of, either.
He was looking out at the vast sea of people and wondering how many of them had known Avery, really known her. Not the delicate painted-on version of herself that she showed the world, but the vibrant, flesh-and-blood girl beneath.
It just proved that he’d been right: If their parents had stood by them, instead of tearing them apart and splitting their family asunder, people would have eventually accepted their relationship and moved on.
The snow had stopped, but it left a light dusting over the sidewalks, so that Watt had the bright clear sensation of walking on snow that no one else had touched. It felt like time was beginning over again.
It never ceased to amaze him, the way humans could hurt each other. No other animal was capable of that kind of vicious, useless cruelty. You’d think that people would have learned to do better by now, as a species. Watt understood why Avery had wanted to get away from that. It was the kind of thing that would have chased her the rest of her life. She would never have escaped it.
His head throbbed with a confused pain that was physical and emotional at once.
Maybe happy endings were real, as long as you understood that they weren’t endings, but steps on the road. Value changes, Cord had called them. If Rylin had learned anything by now, it was that in real life, you never quite knew what was coming. You had to take the bad with the good. You had to take a chance, hold your breath, and trust people. After all, the fun of real-life stories is that they’re still being written.
“I have one very big reason that we will work. Which is that I love you.” He smiled, his eyes on her, as if he was willing her to smile too. “I love you, and I have this foolish hope that maybe, possibly, despite all my countless dumb mistakes, you might love me too.”
“I just worry that we’re doomed to failure. We’ve been down this road before; there are so many reasons that we don’t make sense.”
“That’s because the better you know someone, the easier it is to hurt them,” Cord replied. “See? I actually learned something in psychology class.”
Her story was only beginning, and she had every intention of writing it herself.
There aren’t any happy endings in real life, because there aren’t any endings in life, only moments of change, she wrote, repeating his words. There’s always another adventure, another challenge, another opportunity to find happiness or chase it away.
She remembered something Cord had said about there not being endings in life and realized that he was right. The only endings were the ones that people made for themselves.
In real life the clues don’t add up to anything. Roads lead to dead ends. Lovers don’t make epic romantic gestures. People say ugly things, and leave without a good-bye, and suffer in senseless ways. Story threads are dropped with no resolution. Sometimes what we need is a story—a well-made, uplifting story—to help the world make sense again.
In particular, we long for stories that make us happy. Stories make sense in a way that the real world fails to. Because stories are the cleaned-up version of real life, a distilled version of human behavior that is more comic and more tragic and more perfect than real life. In a well-made holo, there are no lost narrative threads or stray shots. If the camera zooms in on a detail, that means you should pay attention to it, because that detail has some crucial meaning that will become apparent. Real life isn’t like that.
Stories are the only real magic that exists. A story can breach the impossible distance between individuals, take us out of our own life and into someone else’s, if only for a moment. Our hunger for story is what makes us human.
Rylin was still shocked by what Avery had been hiding. To think that beneath her pristine porcelain veneer, she had been in love with Atlas, the one person the world would never let her have.
She had wanted to hate Avery, and yet she couldn’t, because even amid all of that Avery was invariably nice. She could have been the world’s greatest mean girl, Rylin thought, but she never chose to be. Then again, it was probably pretty easy to be a nice person when you had everything in the world you could possibly want. Or at least, almost everything.