Page 115 of The Towering Sky
Her parting gift to her best friend—a life for a life, an even trade. She knew Eris would have wanted it this way.
Avery wasn’t particularly religious, yet she closed her eyes for a final prayer. She prayed that Leda would find peace, that her parents would forgive her, that Atlas would be okay, wherever he was.
She stared at the glorious beauty of the horizon one last time, studying the way the snow began to dust everything, blanketing the city’s flaws, evening out its imperfections. Its flakes settled in her hair, on the white of her sweater.
“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.
WATT
FROM HIS UNEXPECTEDvantage point on the East River, Watt was one of the first people to see the thousandth floor catch fire.
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.
The magic was in the air, in the way people reacted. New Yorkerslovedthe first snowfall of the year—they wore hats inside the Tower and smiled at strangers and started humming holiday music. Watt remembered hearing that at MIT, the freshmen class went streaking on the evening of the first snowfall. Not that he would ever get to see it.
He wondered how Leda was doing. He’d tried pinging her a few times—okay, maybe a lot of times—since she left him at the inauguration ball on Saturday night, but she had steadfastly ignored him. He understood that she had a lot of things to work through; especially now, after what her best friend had done. Watt had plenty to think about, himself.
This morning he had turned off Nadia to ponder it all in silence, in the privacy of his own mind. And he’d rented a boat for the first time in his life. Or rather, borrowed one without asking.
The dock was closed when he got there: It was far too early, especially on a scheduled weather day.WARNING: PRECIPITATION ALERT, the screen had flashed, refusing to let him rent anything, but Watt wasn’t about to let that stop him. Even without Nadia, it was the work of a few moments for him to hack the rental shop’s operational computer.
He settled on a blue quadro-blade, one of the small speedboats that skimmed above the choppy surface of the waves, lifted on hydrofoil wings. He typed his destination into the boat’s GPS and leaned back as it darted him upriver, like a bug zipping over the water.
Watt saw the infrastructure along the east side of the Tower rip past him without actually registering it. He had an idea too unspeakable to even put into words, and he needed to step back from it—to let himself view it out of the corner of his eye, in his peripheral vision—before he could bear to face it head-on.
Right on schedule, the snow began to fall. It stung Watt into alertness as he sped along. A BrightRain hovercover floated out of the back of the boat; Watt considered putting it away but decided it wasn’t worth the bother. The hovercover floated softly over his head and began to emit a soft yellow glow. Its conductive membrane was converting the kinetic energy of the snowfall into electricity.
Watt pulled up along the spot where Mariel had drowned, near a dock on the East River. He killed the motor. The boat’s foils retracted back into its sides, lowering the boat softly into the water, to be rocked back and forth by the waves.
He stared at the pier. Along this stretch of it, for several hundred meters, extended a multiuse dock—the kind of place you could recharge autocars or pull up a boat. Half the dock was covered by a roof, while the other half was open to the elements, lined with sunplates. A small shed in the corner probably housed spare equipment, maybe a human employee during working hours.
Watt tried to imagine Leda, high and vengeful, logging on to the feeds and figuring out where Mariel was. Following her here from José’s party, then pushing her violently into the water. Except, how would Leda have known that Mariel was going to walk home instead of taking the monorail? Or was Leda reckless and high enough to act on impulse, to follow Mariel not knowing where she was headed? Did Leda know that it was going to rain that night or that Mariel couldn’t swim?
He couldn’t shake the feeling that Leda wasn’t capable of such a thing, no matter how desperate or afraid she’d felt.
Watt’s eyes drank in every detail of the charging station. He watched the autocars dart in and out, watched a few empty boats rock listlessly at the docks. Hulking transport bots rolled back and forth on their programmed routes, their wheels heavy on the pavement.
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.
Watt knew who might have done it.
“Quant on,” he muttered, and felt the familiar textured deepening of his own awareness as Nadia stirred to life. He waited for Nadia to ask what they were doing out here. When she said nothing, his certainty began to calcify. He felt an unfamiliar urge to cry.
“Nadia. Did you kill Mariel?”
“Yes,” she answered, with startling simplicity.
“Why?”he cried out, the wind biting at his words.
“I did it for you, Watt. Mariel knew too much. She was a liability.”
The morning seemed to condense around him, the snowflakes vibrating in midair. Watt felt an anguished swoop in his gut and closed his eyes.
He could have solved this whole mystery months ago if he had simply thought of asking Nadia. She had no choice but to tell him the truth. She was able to withhold information from him—she had to; if Watt’s brain tried to hold everything she did, it would literally break down and die. He had built her with the ability to keep secrets from him, because there was no other way to build her.
But Nadia couldn’tlieto him, not when he asked her a direct question. He had just never thought to ask this one, until now.
