“Dance with me.” There it was again, that self-assurance, tinged with just a hint of recklessness. He was acting out of character. He was trying to escape something—a terrible thing he’d done, maybe, or a relationship that had ended badly. Well, she should know; she was running from a mistake herself.
Calliope let him lead her past the fire. The little bell earrings she’d bought in the open-air market that morning jangled with each step. Music blared from speakers; it was instrumental and wild, with a drumbeat pounding relentlessly through it. “I’m Calliope,” she decided. It had been one of her favorite aliases, ever since she read it in an old-fashioned play, and she always felt like she had good luck as Calliope. The shadows from the holo-fire flickered over the boy’s face. He had prominent cheekbones, a high forehead, a light dusting of freckles beneath his slight sunburn.
“Travis.” She thought she heard a falsehood in his voice. He wasn’t practiced at lying. Unlike Calliope, who’d been telling lies for so long she’d half forgotten how to tell the truth.
“Nice to meet you,” she told him.
When the party drew to a close, Travis didn’t invite her over. Calliope found to her surprise that she was glad of it. But as they said good-bye, she realized that her mom had been right: cons were much easier to manage when the mark was ugly. This boy was too attractive for her own good.
Now, as Calliope’s eyes traveled over Atlas—the one boy she’d never been able to hook, never even kissed—she knew she was tempting fate.
She couldn’t predict what he might do, and that made him dangerous. Calliope and Elise didn’t like the unknown. They didn’t like not being in control.
Calliope tossed her head restlessly, a little bit of a challenge in it. She’d slipped up with Atlas once, but now she was wiser, and determined. There never had been a boy she couldn’t get, once she set her mind to it.
Atlas didn’t stand a chance.
AVERY
“THE SPARKLING COCKTAIL, please,” Avery said, the tulle skirt of her gold lamé dress—which her mom had insisted she wear, “for the holiday theme”—swishing a little as she approached the bar.
The bartender tapped a tall cylindrical beaker on his counter, which re-formed into a round pitcher, its crystals moving along their preprogrammed patterns. Then he grabbed the pitcher by the handle and poured her drink into a glass, adding a festive sprig of holly for good measure.
The walls of Avery’s apartment were festooned with bright green garlands and gold twinkle lights. Tentlike bars soared on both sides of the room, flanked by miniature reindeer, which were tethered to a real-life sleigh with enormous bows. Thanks to holo-renderers, the ceiling seemed to disappear into a vast snow-filled sky. The apartment was more crowded than Avery had ever seen it—full of men and women in cocktail attire, clutching their sparkling red drinks and laughing at the holographic snow.
Avery just hoped it was because of people’s interest in the Dubai tower, rather than their morbid curiosity about her, and what had happened on the thousandth floor the night Eris died.
Her father threw this holiday party for Fuller Investments every year, to schmooze his stockholders and biggest clients and, of course, to show off. Every December since they were children, Avery and Atlas had been expected to attend these events, to act charming and look perfect. That didn’t change as they got older; if anything, the pressure was even greater now.
Back in middle school, Eris used to always be Avery’s partner in crime on these nights. They would sneak plates of cake from the dessert bar and listen to all the lavishly dressed adults trying to impress one another. Eris had this funny habit of making up the conversations they couldn’t overhear. She would use exaggerated voices and accents, spinning outrageous dialogues full of unearthed secrets and lovers’ quarrels and families reunited. “You watch too many trashy holos,” Avery would say through her muffled laughter. That had been one of her favorite things about Eris: her wild, sky-high imagination.
Avery felt someone’s gaze on her. She looked up to see Caroline Dodd-Radson—Caroline Dodd now, she reminded herself, since the divorce. Eris’s mom looked as gorgeous as ever in a screen-printed jacquard dress with a layered skirt. But the glow of the lanterns bobbing in the room picked out silver threads in her red-gold hair, the same bold shade as Eris’s; and new lines were etched on her face. Her eyes were staring mournfully into Avery’s.
Avery didn’t think of herself as a coward, yet in that moment she wanted nothing more than to turn and run—anything to avoid making eye contact with the woman whose daughter Avery had allowed to fall. Because no matter how things had played out on the roof that night, Eris had died at Avery’s apartment. Avery was the one who’d opened the trapdoor, and now the worst had happened; and she had to live with the consequences for the rest of her life.
She nodded at Caroline in a silent gesture of remorse, and grief. After a moment, Eris’s mom inclined her head in reply, as if to say that she knew what was in Avery’s heart, and understood.
“Is that Caroline Dodd? Didn’t her daughter die in this apartment?” Avery heard a voice murmur behind her. A group of older women were bent together, their eyes cutting furiously toward Eris’s mom. They seemed unaware of Avery, who stood there in frozen hurt.
“How shocking,” another of them said, utterly placid and calm, the way people are when shocking things do not touch them at all.
Avery’s hand tightened around her fizzy pink cocktail, and she retreated toward the library, away from this loud room with its vicious canned gossip and the searching eyes of Eris’s mom.
But in the library, she was startled by the sight of another unexpected face. Though it shouldn’t have been unexpected, Avery realized, given that she’d invited the girl herself. Calliope was here, wearing a low-cut dress and talking with Atlas in a way that was unmistakably flirtatious.
“Calliope. I’m so glad you made it,” Avery interrupted, making her way over. “I see you’ve already met my brother,” she added, and finally turned to the boy she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Ever since that near miss with their dad, she and Atlas had tried to avoid each other around the apartment. Avery had scarcely seen Atlas all week. Now she let her eyes travel gratefully over his features, with a wicked sense of having gotten away with something forbidden. He looked as handsome as ever in a navy suit and tie, his hair parted to one side. He’d freshly shaven for the party, which Avery always thought made him seem younger, almost vulnerable. She tried to ignore the way her heart picked up speed at his nearness, but her whole body already felt several degrees warmer, just from knowing he was close enough to touch.