“What do you mean, you’ll have nowhere to go?” He came to stand next to her at the railing, nervousness flitting across his expression as he saw how very high they were. “You have plenty of places to go.”
“Yeah, well, this place helps me clear my head.” She stared determinedly down into the shadows below, trying to keep from crying. The roof was all she had left. She was losing Leda, she’d already lost Atlas, and now she was about to lose the only place she could escape.
“Are you okay, Aves?”
“I’m fine,” she protested.
“Avery.” He reached out to touch her arm. “What’s going on?”
“Leda told me,” she said flatly, still looking fixedly away from him. She knew she shouldn’t bring it up, but some stupid part of her wanted to. “About January, in the Andes.”
Atlas was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” he said, using almost the same words Leda had used earlier. Avery wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
“I know she’s your best friend,” he went on, watching her. He was speaking very slowly, as if he were choosing his words as carefully as he could. He was even drunker than she’d realized.
“You didn’t go home with her tonight, though.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Do you love her?” Avery blurted out. She dreaded the answer but she needed, desperately, to hear it.
There was another silence. Avery couldn’t really see Atlas’s face in the darkness. “I don’t …” He trailed off. Avery wondered whether he was about to say he didn’t love Leda—or didn’t know.
“How could you?” she whispered.
He turned to look at her. His face was an unreadable shadow against the darkness of the sky.
Then he leaned in and kissed her.
Avery froze, hardly daring to breathe. The touch of Atlas’s lips on hers was featherlight, tentative, uncertain. She closed her eyes as the kiss sent a thrill through her body, until it felt like her hair was standing on end, like her whole body was a live wire, humming with electricity. She wanted to wrap her arms around Atlas, to pull him close and never let go. But she didn’t dare move, terrified to break the spell.
Finally Atlas pulled away. “Night, Aves,” he said before clattering down the ladder and out of sight.
Avery stood there in a daze. Had that really just happened? She braced her palms on the railing for balance, feeling dizzy.
The skies began to open overhead. Sudden rain poured down, the droplets so cold and fast that they stung Avery’s face. But she couldn’t move. She just stood there like a lightning rod as the storm gathered around her, her feet rooted in place, a hand raised to touch her lips in wonder.
RYLIN
RYLIN STOOD AT the back of the Ifty car, clutching an overhead metal railing as the train slowed to a stop at Bedton. The Tower narrowed as it got higher, so unlike Cord’s floor, which was only several blocks square, the 32nd floor was enormous. It stretched the whole breadth of the Tower’s base, from 42nd Street all the way up to 145th, and from East Avenue to Jersey Highway in the west. Hiral lived on the same floor as Rylin, but almost thirty blocks away, at least fifteen minutes on the Ifty.
A giggling posse of twelve-year-old girls piled onto the railcar, and Rylin turned her music up louder, trying to drown them out. She needed to think. Her mind was jumbled, everything from yesterday morning onward all blurred together and confused. But from the tangled knot of her feelings she’d extracted a single crucial thread.
She didn’t love Hiral anymore.
She hadn’t loved him for a while now. Maybe she never had. She’d certainly thought she did, back when they were so young that words like love and grief described burgers and exams. Back when their biggest problems were things like the air regulator in Rylin’s apartment breaking—Hiral had climbed up into the vents to fix it for them—or when Hiral forgot his brother’s birthday and Rylin helped him bake a cake last minute. Before Rylin’s mom died, and they both became harder, flintier versions of themselves.
She’d arrived home from Paris last night and stumbled straight into bed. For once Chrissa’s snoring didn’t even keep her awake. This morning she’d woken to find Chrissa already at volleyball practice, a bacon bagel in the toaster and a pod of coffee in the brewer. Rylin sat for a while at the kitchen table, picking the bacon chunks from the bagel like she always did, thinking over everything that had happened. Finally she stood up with a sigh and got dressed.
After all this time, she was going to break up with Hiral. Yet she didn’t feel guilty, or even very sad—only relieved, and vaguely nostalgic for the way they used to be. She knew Hiral wouldn’t take it well. He didn’t like change; he would’ve been fine staying with her indefinitely, if only out of sheer inertia. He would agree with her eventually, though, wouldn’t he?
The Ifty slowed to a stop again, and Rylin swayed forward, toying with her Eiffel Tower necklace. She didn’t quite understand what was going on between her and Cord, but whatever it was, she wanted to see where it headed. She’d been surprised at how much fun she had had with him yesterday—of course she’d loved Paris, but it wasn’t just that. It was being in Paris with Cord.
She got out her chunky gray MacBash tablet and tried pinging Hiral again, but he didn’t pick up. Are you awake? I’m coming over, she wrote, biting her lip in impatience. She’d thought about waiting till this afternoon, tomorrow even. But she hated delaying any action once she’d decided on it. As her mom used to say, better now than later.
She stepped off the Ifty at Niale, the closest stop to Hiral’s family’s apartment. Most of the shops that littered the main thoroughfare were still asleep, their neon signs flashing booze logos or one-stop clothing stores, or the tech pawnshops that everyone knew carried stolen holo hardware in their basements. A stray cat peed into a doorway. Pets were supposed to exist in the Tower by permit only, and permits were expensive; but no matter how hard Animal Control tried to clear them out, the cats always reappeared. Rylin remembered the time Chrissa had brought home a bright orange kitten, its ribs sticking out starkly beneath its scruffy fur. Their mom had let Chrissa feed it, but later that night Rylin had caught her nudging the kitten out the front door. “We can’t afford it,” Rose had said defensively to ten-year-old Rylin, who had nodded. The next morning, they both told Chrissa it had run away.
Rylin kept her head down as she turned right, toward the residential area, and onto Hiral’s street. The occasional worker walked past on the way to an upper-floor service job, their starched uniforms and glazed exhaustion giving them away.
“Rylin!” Davi, Hiral’s mom, answered the door while Rylin was still knocking. Her broad face broke into a smile. “Come in, come in.”
Rylin shifted her weight, staying in the doorway. “I was wondering if—”
“Hiral!” Davi bellowed, not that she needed to; the apartment was barely bigger than Rylin’s, and for twice as many people. Hiral’s older brother, Sandeep, had just moved out last year; but Hiral still shared a room with his brother Dhruv, who’d been in Rylin’s class at school before she dropped out.
“I think the boys are still asleep.” Davi turned to her. “Can I make you some breakfast while you wait?”
“I’m okay,” Rylin said quickly.
“Some tea, at least.” Davi’s tone brooked no argument. She put her hands on Rylin’s shoulders and steered her forcibly toward the kitchen. Instaphotos of the family were tacked all over the fridge. Rylin’s attention was caught by a pic of her and Hiral at an eighth-grade formal, back before they both became too cool for stuff like that. Rylin had on a bright green dress that brought out her eyes, and her arms were wrapped tight around Hiral, whose face looked rounder and more boyish than it did now. She’d forgotten about this party, this photo. How long had it been since she came to the Karadjans’ apartment? Whenever she and Hiral spent time together anymore, it was always out somewhere.