“Oh, right. I’m sorry.” Avery turned back toward the front of the room, her stylus poised on the tablet to take notes.
Leda bit back a reply and tried to focus on Professor Pitkin’s opening remarks. He had a PhD in materials science and had authored the national chemistry textbook. That was the reason parents paid for Berkeley, because the teachers were leaders in their fields: the people who composed the lecture vids everyone else watched rather than public school preceptors. But when Leda looked at the professor, all she could think was that with his bald pate and bloodshot complexion, he resembled nothing so much as a purple, overripe fruit. Professor Plum, they would call him. She started writing the joke to Avery, then put down her stylus with a sigh.
Things between her and Avery were weird. Leda wasn’t sure whether it was because of Cord’s party—if Avery was still upset that Leda hadn’t told her the truth about this summer—or whether it was about Atlas. She’d acted a little strange during the whole AR thing, after all. Hadn’t she left the game at one point?
Leda wondered if Avery was upset that Leda hadn’t checked with her first, before asking Atlas out. It would be kind of weird for Avery, if her best friend started dating her brother. But this still seemed like an overreaction.
An overreaction if your friend dated your brother, sure, but not if she’d slept with him, Leda thought suddenly. The realization made her nauseated. Did Avery know about the Andes? That would certainly explain her behavior: she was pissed that Leda had lost her virginity to Atlas and didn’t even tell his sister, her best friend, about it.
But how exactly was Leda supposed to talk about that when Avery was always so weirdly protective of Atlas?
She glanced over at Avery’s profile, desperately trying to figure out what her friend was thinking. Should she apologize? She didn’t want to unless Avery actually knew. And Leda had no desire to march up to Atlas and ask whether he’d told his sister about their hookup.
The old familiar xenperheidren urge nipped at her, whispering that it had the answers, that it would smooth away all her insecurities. I am enough in myself, Leda repeated silently, but the mantra didn’t soothe her the way it had back at Silver Cove.
Maybe Nadia could figure out what was up with Avery. The hacker had been tracking Atlas’s movements over the last few days, providing transcripts of his flickers and receipts from his bitbanc, although none of it was particularly helpful. It wasn’t Nadia’s fault. The problem was Atlas; he was too private for any of that to be much use.
Avery looked up and met her gaze head-on, and Leda glanced away, annoyed that she’d been caught staring. She was uncomfortably reminded of the beginning of seventh grade, when she’d been so anxious about what everyone thought of her.
Compared to midTower, the upper floors had felt sleek and high-tech and oppressively expensive. And her classmates had done everything so fast, punch lines snapping back and forth between them in some kind of code. Leda wished she knew what they were saying, who their jokes were referencing. She had watched one group of girls in particular, blazing with confidence, led by a tall blonde almost too perfect to be real. She had wanted, desperately, to be one of them.
It wasn’t long before she learned some of these kids took xenperheidren—the anxiety pills, the same ones her mom took—as a study aid.
Getting her mom’s pills had been far too easy. Leda’s parents were so trusting that they’d never activated the biosecurity on their new apartment’s touch surfaces. That night, Leda had slipped into their bathroom while they were watching holos and grabbed her mom’s xenperheidren from the medicine cabinet. She shook two of the pills into her palm and was back in the hall in a matter of seconds. The next day, before school, she took one of them.
Instantly the world had become brighter, more focused. Her brain was moving at warp speed, mining her long-term memory for facts she’d forgotten, watchful and alert for every detail of the world. She felt more confident than she’d ever been. When she walked up to Avery at lunch and asked to sit at her table, Avery had just smiled and said sure. Fueled by the xenperheidren, Leda laughed at all the right jokes, said exactly the right thing. She knew in that moment that she was in.
She took more and more of the pills over the next few years, eventually buying from a dealer named Ross so she wouldn’t get caught stealing her mom’s. She had tried to space them out, to take them only before exams or big parties—she didn’t need them socially anymore, now that she was friends with Avery. But she loved the Leda the pills brought out. That Leda was sharper and cleverer and more insightful, able to read the nuances of a situation and manipulate it to her advantage. That Leda figured out how to get everything she wanted.
Except, of course, Atlas.
Leda startled to sudden attention, aware that everyone around her was standing up, chairs scraping the floor as they paired off into lab partners. She turned to Avery, but Avery had her back to Leda and was talking to Sid Pinkelstein.
“Avery?” Leda said, reaching around to tap her friend on the shoulder. “We’re partners, right?”
“I just promised Sid,” Avery apologized. Sid stood there looking a little bewildered by his good fortune. “Junior year, college applications and all. I need to really ace this,” she added quickly. “I’m sorry.”
Wow. Avery was so desperate to avoid her that she’d rather hang out with the kid they’d always called Sid Pimpleface? “Sure,” Leda said. “Risha?” She grabbed the other girl’s arm and dragged her, seething, to the lab table.
“Here it is.” Risha pulled up the lab instructions on her tablet. Her eyes darted back and forth between Leda and Avery, who was working with Sid two tables away. But Leda had already started to mix things, throwing powders and chemicals into the bowl at random and grinding them with a pestle.
“So according to the instructions we don’t actually need magnesium …” Risha said warily, lowering her goggles over her eyes.
“Too late,” Leda replied. What the hell, she thought a little wildly. With any luck maybe she would create an explosion.
RYLIN
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, RYLIN stepped into Cord’s bedroom and pulled the door quickly shut behind her. She’d been waiting for this chance all day. Cord had been gone since she arrived this morning—come to think of it, he hadn’t been home much at all this week, though she had no idea where he went every afternoon. Maybe he was avoiding her after that weird moment on his step, she considered, then felt foolish for even thinking it. Cord Anderton had probably never made a decision based on a girl in his entire life, let alone a girl who worked for him.
But even with Cord gone, Rylin didn’t feel comfortable enacting her plan until Brice left the apartment. He’d skulked around for hours, watching her clean, until ten minutes ago when he finally left to “hit the cardio,” whatever that meant. She shuddered at the memory of how he’d looked at her on the way out, the way his eyes had traveled over her form and he’d wet his lips, like a lizard. Small wonder Cord was so messed up, when the only real family he had left was a debauched twenty-six-year-old who did nothing but jet from one expensive playground to another.
Rylin had dealt with worse than Brice, though; she could put up with him for a while longer. Truthfully she owed him, for being the reason she’d kept this job all week. She was starting to dread her inevitable return to the monorail snack station, with its screeching train cars and endless flow of angry customers. But her options as a seventeen-year-old high school dropout were kind of limited.
Working at Cord’s was a nice change. His apartment was cool and quiet, and she could get things done at her own pace, alone with her thoughts for once in her life. Cord paid better too.