Page 122 of The Towering Sky
He lifted a hand to just above his right ear, where a crinkly Medipatch was the only evidence of the surgery he’d just had. His head throbbed with a confused pain that was physical and emotional at once.
“You again?” the doctor had asked when Watt opened the door to his unmarked clinic. The self-styled Dr. Smith, official medical consultant of the black market—the person who had installed Nadia in Watt’s brain several years ago.
And now the doctor had uninstalled her.
Watt glanced down at the palm of his glove. The entire citylay behind him, vibrant and busy, but Watt’s focus had zeroed to a tiny fixed point: the disc he was holding.
There was something oddly intrusive about seeing Nadia this way, her qubits laid bare before him, almost as if he were seeing a girl without her clothes on. To think that this tiny quantum core, this warm pulsing piece of metal, contained the vastness that was Nadia.
It felt weird, not having her voice in his head. She had been there for so long that Watt had forgotten what it was like without her.
He was going to miss her. He would miss her sarcastic sense of humor, their constant chess matches. He would miss feeling as if he always had an ally—as if there were someone in his corner, no matter what.
But maybe he didn’t need to stop feeling that way, Watt thought, as a figure detached itself from the shadows to step toward him.
“Leda? How did you know where I was?”
“You told me,” she said, her nose wrinkled in adorable confusion, and Watt realized what must have happened.
Nadia must have messaged Leda for him, intuiting his emotions the way she always did. She had known that he would need a friend right now.
Or maybe, he amended, Nadia had known that Leda needed him.
The ambient light reflected off the snow to illuminate Leda’s face, which was bright with grief. Her features were drawn, her eyes glassy and brilliant with tears. Huddled into her puffy green jacket, her hands stuffed into her pockets, she looked frail; yet there was a new quiet strength to her movements.
“Are you okay?” he asked, though it was patently obvious that she wasn’t.
Leda threw her arms around him in response. Watt closed his eyes and hugged her back, hard.
As they stepped away, they both couldn’t help glancing up at the top of the Tower: too high to see properly from this close, but it didn’t really matter. They knew what it looked like up there.
“I still can’t believe what Avery did for me. For all of us.” Leda’s voice fractured over the words.
Watt shuddered a little. Avery must have felt incredibly trapped up there on the thousandth floor, to want to give it all up and let the rest of them go free.
But then, Watt had seen the turmoil over Avery and Atlas, the hateful things people had spewed at them both. 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.
He knew that he should feel guilty for the role he had played in helping her—he and Nadia both, really—except that he had a feeling Avery would have found a way to do exactly what she wanted, with or without his help.
He glanced down again to where Nadia was clutched tight in his palm like a talisman. Leda followed the movement, and her eyes widened.
“Is that Nadia?” she whispered.
Watt nodded. “I had her removed,” he managed to say. Just barely.
“Why?”
“Because she killed Mariel.”
Watt heard the sharp intake of breath, saw the final weight ofuncertainty slide from Leda’s shoulders as she realized, once and for all, that Mariel’s death wasn’t her fault.
“I’m not a killer?” she said quietly, and Watt shook his head. The real killer was him, even if he hadn’t known or meant it.
He turned back toward the water, which was a smooth, mirrored gray, reflecting the hammered surface of the clouds overhead.Good-bye, Nadia. And this time, for the first time in years, she didn’t answer his silent thought, because she was no longer in his head to hear it. The only person who could hear his thoughts was Watt himself.
He hurled his arm back and threw Nadia out over the water in a single clean motion, as hard as he possibly could.
