“Drink,” Nadia commanded. There was a pitcher of water on the tiny table next to his bed, and a bottle of painkillers. Watt managed to sit up and grabbed the pitcher with both hands.
“Wow,” he said, shaking his head, after drinking almost half of it. “What time is it?”
“Eight p.m. on Saturday.”
“What the hell!” Watt started to stand, but sank back down again, his legs unsteady. “My parents—”
“Think you’re sick. I snuck into the local medical mainframe and hacked a check-in bot, made it report that you have the flu. I even got a messenger bot to clear away the whiskey before they woke up, to hide the evidence,” Nadia told him, almost proud. “Your dad carried you to bed this morning. And your mom was taking care of you earlier, before she had to leave for work. I made the med-bot tell her to bring you all this,” she added, referencing the water and the painkiller.
“Thanks,” he murmured. Nadia’s crisis mode was kind of impressive.
“I did warn you about the potential side effects of illegal substances.”
“What?” He took another sip of the water and rubbed at his eyes, exhausted. “God. I’ve never been so hungover before.”
“You aren’t hungover. You were drugged,” Nadia insisted. “By Leda. How much do you remember?”
Leda. He’d forgotten she came over. Watt struggled to put the events of the previous night in order, but it all felt like a blur. He remembered being with Derrick, and then Leda showing up on his doorstep … her questions about Atlas … and their kiss, which had tasted like whiskey …
He didn’t remember anything after that.
“What happened?” he whispered, hoarse.
“I’ll play you the feedback,” Nadia replied. Even when Watt was too intoxicated for Nadia to get through to him—too far gone to record his own memories—Nadia was there to log all of it. It was both a blessing and a curse.
She played it directly onto his contacts, like an immersion vid. Watt relived last night from his own drunken perspective as Leda barged in, talked to him about Avery, offered him the drugs. He watched himself refuse—that part he remembered—and then she shrugged and started to pour them both whiskeys instead.
“There.” Nadia paused the vid and zoomed in on Leda’s hands, replaying it in slow motion. “Do you see? She slipped something into your drink.”
“Why the hell would she do that?” he cried out.
Nadia kept playing. Watt watched, dismayed, as Leda straddled him and kissed him. How stupid he’d been, he thought. The kiss went on, longer than was comfortable for him to watch. “You can fast-forward, Nadia,” he said, and she did.
Eventually Watt’s eyelids began to close—he assumed that was the drug at work—just as Leda sat back, her shrewd gaze on him.
“Watt.” Her tone was light and coaxing, syrupy sweet. “How are you feeling?”
“Great,” he murmured.
“You’ve been very bad, you know.” Watt’s eyes blinked open for an instant, and he saw her reach up toward his head. He guessed she was playing with his hair. Thankfully Nadia’s playback included only audio and visual stimuli, not touch.
“No,” Watt protested. His eyes fluttered closed and didn’t open again.
“You lied to me earlier, when you acted like you could never figure out who Atlas was seeing behind my back.”
“I don’t …”
“You do know, don’t you?” Her voice was soft, like a feather bed. The kind of voice you might use on a sick child.
“Yes.” Shit, he thought, hearing it all now, his stomach twisted in dread.
“Who is it?” The sweetness was gone, replaced by urgency.
“Avery …”
“Focus, Watt! I asked you who Atlas is seeing. Forget about Avery!”
“No, Avery and Atlas, they’re together …”
There was a long silence. Watt was suddenly glad his eyes had been closed this entire time. He didn’t want to imagine the look on Leda’s face as she processed this news.
“You’re sure?” she said quietly, finally. He could hear the shock in her tone. “Atlas and Avery Fuller? You know they’re brother and sister,” she said, but it sounded at this point as if she were reminding herself as much as him.
“Nadia hacked it! I heard them in bed …”
There were the sounds of pill bottles shaking, of rustling and rearranging, and then Leda’s voice came from farther away, by the door. “Thank you, Watt,” she said. “You’ve been so very helpful. Sweet dreams.”
Watt heard the door close, and then the replay ended.
What have I done? Watt thought, horrified.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Nadia was saying. “I did a scan on your vitals this morning, and she’d given you an extremely high dose of vertolomine, mixed with some sedatives. It’s an inhibition-reducing drug, known for slowing the thought processes so much that people find it difficult to lie.”
“I mentioned you!” Watt added, with growing alarm.
“Yes, but Nadia was the name you used with her. She probably thought it was just a drunken slip.”
“You’re forgetting that Leda is completely insane.” And now she knew about Avery and Atlas.
Watt couldn’t explain the sense of responsibility he felt for Avery. He didn’t technically owe her anything—she’d kicked him out in order to hook up with her own brother, he reminded himself. Yet he hated the way he’d handled all this. He remembered how sad she’d seemed, that very first day he met her at the ARena, when she’d said wistfully that no one could really know anyone else, because everyone was hiding something big.
He’d taken her greatest secret and delivered it straight into the hands of her crazy ex–best friend, who had no line she wasn’t willing to cross.
“Has Leda already blasted it out, about Avery and Atlas?” Watt sat up, suddenly panicked.
“No,” Nadia assured him. “I’ve followed all their movements today, and it doesn’t seem like Leda has done anything, yet. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t even seen Avery.”
“Where are they?”
“Avery is having a party,” Nadia said, and pulled up Avery’s feed on his contacts. “Leda’s headed there now.”
“Then I need to get up there!” Watt started for the door, still in his stale, rumpled clothes from last night. He wasn’t sure why, but he had a bad feeling, almost like a premonition, that something terrible was going to happen. This was all too tangled and screwed up not to end in disaster.
RYLIN
RYLIN SAT IN her bed, not seeing anything, barely thinking. The room was dark. She knew Chrissa was worried about her, that she should go say something to her sister, but she couldn’t move right now. She just kept blinking up into the darkness, her mind a whirlpool of dark, spinning thoughts. She wished she could go back and do things differently.
A pounding sounded on the front door.
“Ry,” Chrissa called from the entryway, her voice quavering, “it’s Hiral.”
Rylin stood up and ran a hand through her matted curls. She was still wearing the dress with zippers she’d so naively put on earlier.
“I’ll get it. Don’t worry,” she said to Chrissa, and went to open the door.
There he was, standing on their front doorstep as if nothing between them had changed, wearing the sweatpants he’d been in when he was arrested—they must have returned his clothes when they released him, which meant that he’d come straight here. That didn’t bode well.
“Hiral,” she said carefully, making no move toward him. “I’m so glad you’re out.”
“Thanks to you, babe.” He looked her over and gave a strange smile. “Ready to go celebrate?”
“Why don’t you come in,” she said instead, opening the door.
“What, no welcome-back kiss?”
“Hiral, have a seat. We need to talk,” she said, using the same words she’d used on Cord earlier, though this time she meant them. The bitter irony of it wasn’t lost on her.
He slid into one of their plastic chairs, his fingers drumming on the table. He looked even more muscular than when he’d left, as if the contours of his body had been shaded with a pencil, though Rylin had no idea how he’d managed to bulk up in prison. “You’re still upset that I asked you to help with my bail sale,” he guessed, watching her.
That was part of it. “I don’t like V, yes.”