“It’s because of V that I was able to get out. You should be grateful to him!”
“He made me steal again!”
Hiral’s brows lowered. “You just don’t like doing the dirty work. God, Ry, if I didn’t know any better I’d say you weren’t happy to see me.”
She couldn’t have asked for a better opening. “I want to break up.”
The words hung there between them. She tensed up, waiting for a sudden outburst, violence—
Hiral gave a harsh, joyless laugh. “Can’t say I’m surprised, after the way you acted when you visited me in jail. Like you felt forced to see me.” His eyes narrowed. “At first I thought you were just scared about everything, but then you didn’t even want to touch me. When I kissed you good-bye, you flinched.”
“You threatened me!”
“And it worked! We both know you wouldn’t have handled the sale otherwise.”
When Rylin didn’t answer, he leaned forward, his face twisted into an ugly snarl. “It’s Anderton, isn’t it,” he accused. “You’re seeing that highlier asshole.”
“Hiral, you and I have been over for a long time. We both know it,” she said, as gently as she could.
“Holy shit,” Hiral said, and the fury in his voice was unmistakable. “You slept with him.”
Rylin said nothing. She didn’t trust herself to lie. But the truth must have been written there on her face, because suddenly Hiral made an angry, guttural sound and knocked the entire table onto its side.
“What the hell?” Rylin breathed, in the wake of the crash. A leg had broken off the table, glasses clattering across the floor. Hiral was red-faced, taking great, heaving breaths.
“I trusted you, Rylin!”
“Clearly you didn’t, or you wouldn’t have been forced to blackmail me!” she yelled.
In the sudden stillness, an eerie calm settled over Hiral’s face. “Maybe I still will,” he said. “Maybe now that I know how you cheated on me, I’ll tell the cops all about you, and your little illegal activities.”
“No, you won’t,” Rylin said, more bravely than she felt. “Because even though you act like it sometimes, you aren’t hateful. You’re still the person I fell in love with, even if we’ve gone our separate ways.” Her voice lowered, a little wistful. “I know you told V that you were the one who stole the Spokes. Thank you. For protecting me.”
Hiral looked at her for a moment. “You disgust me,” he said at last, and walked out, slamming the door behind him.
“Rylin?” Chrissa appeared from the bedroom. She was very pale.
“Did you hear everything?”
“Yeah. What’s going on?”
Rylin’s head was spinning. She couldn’t think. She’d wanted to protect Chrissa, to keep her out of all of this, and yet she was failing at every turn.
“Okay,” she said. “Just … promise to hear me out before you get upset.” She took a deep breath, and told Chrissa everything. From the first night she’d worked at Cord’s, to stealing, to Hiral’s arrest and subsequent threat, and everything that had happened since. She left out only the private moments, like the beach.
Chrissa said nothing as she talked, just listened wide-eyed. Together they lifted the table back upright—it wobbled on three legs, but managed to hold—and restacked the fallen cups. Finally, when Rylin was out of words, she sat down and put her head in her hands, closing her eyes.
“You love him,” Chrissa said softly.
Rylin nodded, not looking up.
“So go tell him!”
“I can’t! His brother threatened me!”
“If he loves you the way you love him, you’ll figure it out! He’ll stop his brother from going to the cops. Or he’ll say that he gave you the Spokes. It’ll work out somehow!”
Rylin hesitated at something in Chrissa’s voice. It was hope, she realized: a stupid, naive, romantic hope that love could conquer all. Rylin felt silly for believing in it, but Chrissa was right.
She had to at least try.
“Go up there!” Chrissa said eagerly, gaining momentum. “Go tell him the truth, exactly the way you told me!”
Rylin shook her head. “He’s at a party right now, on the thousandth floor. Thrown by some girl named Avery.” The last thing she wanted was to crash a party, and make a big scene.
“Seriously, Ry? When has a party ever stopped you before?”
Rylin laughed, shaking her head. “This must be a first, you convincing me to go to a party.”
“So do it!”
Rylin nodded at her sister’s words, gripped by a sudden sense of urgency. She should go up there, tell Cord the truth, and try to fix what she’d so terribly broken. Maybe Cord could find it in himself to forgive her.
LEDA
LEDA PAUSED AT the door to Avery and Atlas’s party, looking around the room with a strange smile on her face. God, it was good to be back. She felt fully awake for the first time in months. Every cell in her body was on high alert, thrumming with anger and xenperheidren.
What a wild ride the last twenty-four hours have been, she mused, thinking over everything that had happened—and all the secrets she’d accumulated, which her hyped-up mind was weighing and assessing and hoarding carefully away. Eris and her dad. Leda shuddered at that one, still disgusted. Figuring out that Cord’s Spokes had been stolen, and telling Brice. Confronting Watt, to learn the truth about Avery and Atlas. What he’d said was awful and incomprehensible and shocked Leda into silence—but she’d realized that as utterly fucked up as it was, it made a twisted kind of sense. It explained so many things about both of the Fullers, from the moment Leda had hooked up with Atlas in Catyan. Hell, from the moment she and Avery had first become friends.
No wonder she needed drugs, Leda thought, a little crazed. All along she’d been playing the role of third wheel in the Fuller siblings’ twisted love story, and she hadn’t even known.
Well, tonight that was all going to change.
Leda had barely slept after learning about Avery and Atlas. She’d spent all day huddled at home, popping various pills from her little bag, her mind chasing down one rabbit hole and then another as she concocted ever more elaborate scenarios for revenge. She’d come to the party tonight in order to do just that. She wanted to destroy Avery and Atlas, publicly and painfully.
She made her way through the crowd toward the living room windows, where she knew she would find Avery. She plucked an atomic shot off a passing tray and knocked it back. The alcohol flared hot and fast through her overstimulated system.
Her contacts lit up with an incoming flick-link request—from none other than “Nadia.” Watt. He needed to re-add her, after permanently disconnecting them before. Seized by a dark, warped amusement, she accepted the request.
“Hey there,” she said as he immediately pinged her. “How are you feeling?”
“What are you going to do to Avery?”
She sighed dramatically. “Quit trying to play the white knight, Watt. You’ve already lost.”
“Leda, please—”
“You have enough to worry about yourself right now, you know,” she warned him, and hung up.
Watt’s secret had been the most surprising of all. After she’d drugged him up and gotten him to confess about Avery and Atlas, Leda hadn’t been able to resist snooping around his family’s apartment. The door to Watt’s bedroom was open; it was all too easy for her to slip inside and take a quick look around. She wasn’t sure what she was searching for, exactly. She just wanted to know how he was such a good hacker—how a seventeen-year-old downTower kid had infiltrated the Fullers’ home security, and the State Department.
In one of the drawers of Watt’s desk she’d found a flat box of silicon optic processors. She looked them up online, and what she discovered had stunned her. They were only used in the construction of quantum computers.
Watt Bakradi had an illegal quant.