The Towering Sky. Катарина Макги
her father’s final words. Some time alone as a family. Except they weren’t a family right now, because they were missing one very important person.
Avery knew she shouldn’t be thinking about him, yet she couldn’t help wondering what Atlas was doing, half a world away.
“ISN’T THIS NICE?” Leda Cole’s mom attempted, her tone remorselessly upbeat.
Leda cast a brief, disinterested glance around. She and Ilara were standing in waist-deep warm water, surrounded by the jagged boulders of the Blue Lagoon. The ceiling of the 834th floor soared overhead, colored a cheerful azure that clashed with Leda’s mood.
“Sure,” she mumbled, ignoring the hurt that darted over her mom’s features. She hadn’t wanted to come out today at all. She’d been perfectly fine in her room, alone with her slender, solitary sadness.
Leda knew that her mom was only trying to help. She wondered if this forced outing had been suggested by Dr. Vanderstein, the psychiatrist who treated both of them. Why don’t you try some “girl time”? Leda could hear him saying, with invisible air quotes. Ilara would have seized gratefully on the idea. Anything to drag her daughter out of this unshakable dark mood.
A year ago it would have worked. Leda so rarely got a chunk of her mom’s time; she would have been grateful just for the chance to hang out with her. And the old Leda had always loved going to a hot new spa or restaurant before anyone else.
The Blue Lagoon had opened just a few days ago. After last year’s unexpected earthquake, which sent most of Iceland sliding back into the ocean, a development company had bought the now submerged lagoon from the bewildered Icelandic government at a bargain price. They’d spent months excavating every last sliver of volcanic rock, shipping the whole thing to New York, and re-creating it here, stone by stone.
Typical New Yorkers, forever determined to bring the world to them, as if they couldn’t be bothered to leave their tiny island. Whatever you have, they seemed to be saying to the rest of the world, we can build it here—and better.
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 ran a hand dispassionately through the water, wondering if it was treated with light-bending particles to make it that impossible blue color. Unlike the original lagoon, this one wasn’t filled from a real hot spring. It was just heated tap water, infused with multivitamins and a hint of aloe, supposedly much better than that old foul-smelling sulfuric stuff.
Leda had also heard a rumor that the lagoon managers pumped illegal relaxants into the air: nothing serious, just enough to make up 0.02 percent of the air composition. Well, she could use a little relaxing right now.
“I saw that Avery’s back in town,” Ilara ventured, and the name splintered through Leda’s protective shell of numbness.
It had been easy not to think about Avery while she was in England. Avery had never been reliable at vid-chatting; as long as Leda replied to her occasional one-line message, Avery was distracted into thinking that everything was fine. But what if seeing Avery again dredged up all those memories—the ones Leda forced herself not to think about, the ones she had buried deep within her, in the pitch-darkness—
No, she told herself, Avery wouldn’t want to think about the past any more than Leda did. She was with Max now.
“She has a new boyfriend, right?” Ilara fiddled with the strap of her black one-piece. “Do you know anything about him?”
“A little. His name is Max.”
Her mom nodded. They both knew that the old Leda would have bubbled over at the question, offering various conjectures and speculation about Max, and whether or not he was good enough for her best friend. “What about you, Leda? I haven’t heard you talk about any boys lately,” her mom went on, even though she knew perfectly well that Leda had been alone all summer.
“That’s because there’s nothing to talk about.” Leda’s jaw tightened, and she sank a little lower in the water.
Ilara hesitated, then apparently decided to forge ahead. “I know you’re still not over Watt, but maybe it’s time to—”
“Seriously, Mom?” Leda snapped.
“You’ve had such a rough year, Leda; I just want you to be happy! And Watt . . .” She paused. “You never really told me what happened with him.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Before her mom could press her further, Leda held her breath and ducked all the way under the surface of the lagoon, not caring that the weird vitamins would make her hair crunchy. The water felt warm and pleasantly quiet, stifling all sound. She wished she could stay submerged forever, down here where there were no failures or pains, no mistakes and misunderstandings, no wrong decisions. Wash me and I shall be clean, she remembered from her days at Sunday school, except Leda would never be clean, not if she stayed under forever. Not after what she had done.
First there had been that whole mess with Avery and Atlas. Hard to believe now, but Leda used to like Atlas—even, foolishly, thought that she loved him. Until she learned that he and Avery were secretly together. Leda flinched, remembering how she’d confronted Avery about it on the roof, the night when everything went so terribly wrong.
Their friend Eris had tried to calm down Leda, despite Leda’s shouts that she should back off. When Eris came close, Leda pushed her away—and inadvertently pushed her off the side of the Tower.
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.
Eris had been Leda’s half sister.
Leda found out last winter, from Eris’s ex-girlfriend, Mariel Valconsuelo. Mariel had told her about it at the launch party for the new Dubai tower—right before she drugged Leda and left her for dead, abandoning her at the water’s edge during a rising tide.
The truth of Mariel’s words had resonated in Leda with sickening finality. It made so much more sense than what she thought was going on: that Eris was secretly having an affair with Leda’s dad. Instead, Eris and Leda shared a dad; and worse, Eris had known the truth before she died. Leda realized that now. It was what Eris had been trying to tell her, that night on the roof, which Leda so drastically misunderstood.
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.
There was only one way to find relief from this kind of pain, and Leda had sworn never to touch it again. But she couldn’t help herself. With a shaking voice, Leda pinged her old drug dealer.
She took more and more pills, mixing and combining them with a shocking recklessness. She didn’t care what the hell she took as long as it numbed her. And then, as she’d probably known deep down that she would, Leda took one too many pills.
She was missing for an entire day. When her mom found her the next morning, Leda was curled atop her bed, her jeans and her shoes still on. At some point Leda must have gotten a nosebleed. The blood had trailed down her shirt to crust in sticky flakes all over her chest. Her forehead felt clammy and damp with sweat.
“Where were you?” her mom cried out, horrified.
“I don’t know,” Leda admitted. There was a flutter in the empty cavity of her chest where her heart should have been. The last thing she really remembered was getting high with her old dealer, Ross. She couldn’t account for anything else in