Page 38 of The Dazzling Heights
A buzzer sounded in the fencing arena. With great effort, Rylin pushed the door open and started inside.
It was a wide oval room, with nondescript white flooring marked by colored squares that must be the piste. Two fencers from the varsity team slashed at each other, both of them dressed in white jackets and helmets, scuttling back and forth like drunken crabs. Their impact-resistant épées whipped through the air in thin, quick motions. It would look incredible on camera, Rylin thought approvingly.
Leda stood at the edge of the piste. Her silver vid-cam already floated above them, near the overhead lights. “There you are,” she hissed, not even glancing up as Rylin approached.
“Sorry. I got lost.”
“Looked to me like you were busy flirting with Cord, but what do I know,” Leda retorted.
Rylin gave a jerky nod. She didn’t owe Leda any sort of explanation, she reminded herself.
Finally, Leda lifted her eyes to look squarely at Rylin. “What is it between you two, anyway?” she asked bluntly.
Rylin felt somehow both angered and amused by Leda’s complete lack of tact. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I used to work for him, and now I don’t.”
Leda pursed her lips, as if she knew there was more to the story, but was willing to accept Rylin’s explanation for now.
They fell into silence, watching the fencing for a while, one or the other of them occasionally waving to change the position or angle of the vid-cam. Finally, something occurred to Rylin.
“Leda,” she decided to ask. The other girl looked over in irritation. “Last week, you said something about how the class is only open to seniors, that you got in because of an application essay. But I’m a junior, and I’m in—”
“I told you, you’re a fluke,” Leda said impatiently. “Think of it as a mid-semester exception, for the sole purpose of pissing me off.”
“And Cord is a junior, too,” Rylin went on determinedly, an eyebrow lifted.
Leda made an exasperated motion. “It’s different for Cord. After all, he has abuildingnamed after him. So, yes, he gets into any class he wants.”
Rylin felt a strange lurch in her stomach. “What building?” She thought she’d seen the names of all the buildings, especially after getting lost so much the past few weeks.
“Maybe I should have said buildings, plural,” Leda pronounced meaningfully. “The whole high school is named after Cord’s family. You wouldn’t have noticed, since you haven’t gone downstairs to the lower and middle schools, but everything on this floor—the entire high school—is technically the Anderton campus.”
The brief moment of closeness Rylin had shared with Cord seemed to dissolve into the air like smoke. Once again she was reminded of the vast distance between them, and how foolish she was to think that she could bridge it. How many times did the universe have to teach her the same stupid lesson? Here she was, at the same school as Cord, and yet she felt further from him than ever.
Rylin wanted to blame the difference in their circumstances: the fact that Cord’s family had endowed the entire upper school, while she was only here because a girl had died. But she knew that only explained part of what was keeping her from Cord.
The rest of it was her doing. She’d broken something in their relationship when she violated his trust.
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.
CALLIOPE
CALLIOPE STRETCHED THEentire length of the lounge chair, pulling her arms overhead in a deliberately lazy gesture, though her body thrummed with alertness. How long till Atlas showed up? She knew he would be here; he was meeting with one of the hotel executives about some business negotiation or other. She took a distracted sip of her water, its non-melting cold cubes clinking together, and fiddled with the strap of her new crocheted one-piece.
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.
Her stacked jade bracelets slid down her arm as she propped herself on one elbow to glance around. The Nuage sundeck had one of the best views in the Tower, with its sparkling infinity-edge pool seeming to stretch all the way to the horizon. Yellow-and-white umbrellas dotted the space, solely for ambiance: the soaring blue ceiling overhead was lined with solar lamps that projected an even, UV-free sunlight. Calliope remembered that once, when she and her mom had been at a pool in Thailand, it had actuallyrainedon them, because the local government didn’t even bother to control the weather. Calliope and Elise had loved it—it felt like some glorious adventure out of a romance novel, as if the sky were breaking open, and suddenly anything was possible.
She heard a door open overhead and risked a glance up. Sure enough, there was Atlas, walking from the executive offices onto the hotel’s famous suspended bridge, which looped over the pool and the surrounding interior vineyards. Like the umbrellas, the vineyards were mostly just for show, barely producing enough wine to make a few barrels a year.
Calliope had chosen her seat with excessive care. She waited until Atlas was directly above her. “Atlas? Is that you?” she called out, a hand raised as if to shade her eyes. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him since that party as his parents’ apartment last weekend, so here she was, resorting to a staged run-in. It was a little bit desperate, but every great con has to start somewhere.
“Calliope. What are you doing here?” Atlas stepped onto one of the edges of the bridge. “Down, please,” he added. Calliope’s mouth twitched a little as his segment of bridge detached itself to float down. Only Atlas would saypleaseandthank youto a robotic control system.
She debated standing up to greet him but decided against it. It gave Atlas too much power, and besides, she looked better from this angle.
“I live here. What’s your excuse?” she said archly, with a glance at his suit and tie. “All work and no play?”
“Something like that.” He ran a hand through his hair in that absentminded way of his.
