“Here,” Cord said, returning with a neatly folded stack of clothes. Avery quickly ducked into the bathroom to change. It was funny, she thought; the shirt smelled like the normal UV-wand fresh scent but also somehow like Cord.
Moments later she emerged from the bathroom in an old school shirt and mesh shorts, her bare feet padding on the heated kitchen tiles; her hair still set in its elaborate twist, diamond studs in each ear. She knew she looked absurd, but she couldn’t find it in her to care.
“I got you all set up in the blue room, the one at the base of the stairs,” Cord told her as she returned. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Wait,” Avery blurted out as he started toward his room. Cord turned to look at her. She glanced hopefully at the couch. “Any chance you want to stay up for a while?” Just until her mind stopped whirling so frantically, until she could wipe her stupid fight with Atlas—all the pettiness between them—from her brain.
“Sure, yeah,” he said, still watching her.
Avery nestled into her old favorite corner of the couch and pulled her knees up to her chest. Cord sank down next to her, an arm’s length of space between them. His bow tie was loosened, his vest unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. It all cast his profile in a slightly rakish air.
“Do you want to talk about what’s going on,” he asked, “or should we watch a loud, dumb holo instead?”
“Loud, dumb holo. The more explosions, the better,” Avery said, with an attempt at a smile.
She couldn’t believe Atlas hadn’t pinged her or flickered her even once. What was he doing? And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him, since it hurt her so damned much?
“Loud, dumb holo it is.” Cord waved his hands in the air to call up the on-demand menu, then turned to her, his clear blue eyes lit up with a quiet intensity. The full weight of it was almost too much for Avery to bear. “Whatever’s going on, Avery, you know I’m always here if you want to talk about it.”
“Thanks.” For some reason she had to look away from Cord or she might cry. The holoscreen lit up with a hoverchase scene, and she stared at it gratefully, trying to lose herself in the mindless glowing action sequence. Maybe if she focused on the confusion on the screen, she could ignore the tangled, tender mess that her life had become.
Avery realized that the last time she’d been alone with Cord was months ago, when he’d told her that he and Eris had broken up—and she’d figured out that he liked someone new.
“Hey,” she said, eager to think about something else, “what ended up happening with you and that girl?”
Cord blinked, clearly startled. “You mean Rylin? It didn’t work out.”
“Wait—Rylin Myers, who now goes to our school? You were dating her?” The girl from the roof? How had she become so entwined in all of their lives?
“I was, until she lied to me.” Cord looked as if he wanted to be angry, but all he could call up was a wounded sort of regret. Avery knew the feeling. “It’s just hard to get past. I’m not sure how to trust her again, you know?”
“I do know.” She looked away.
“Hang on.” Cord vanished down the hallway, only to return holding a tapered gold candle, covered in flecks of glitter that caught and refracted the light.
“Is that an IntoxiCandle?” Avery had never burned one before. They were just normal candles, with air-transported endorphins and serotonin baked into the wax. But all candles were illegal in the Tower, due to the fire hazard—especially this high up, where the air was pumped with extra oxygen to compensate for the altitude.
“I thought you could use it. It used to help me, when I was drunk and moody.”
“I’m not moody!” Avery cried out, and Cord laughed at her. “Though I am pretty drunk,” she admitted. The room had stopped its slow spin, but she still felt a bizarre sense of unreality, as though none of this was quite believable.
“I can say with firsthand experience that you’re moody as hell, and unquestionably drunk,” Cord declared. She knew he was trying to be lighthearted, but his phrasing only heightened Avery’s sadness. “The candle was Eris’s, actually,” Cord went on. “She bought it for—”
He broke off awkwardly.
“No, it’s okay.” For some reason it felt good talking about Eris, as if by turning to the older, more aching hurt, Avery could ignore the new one that burned in her chest. “I like the idea of using something that was hers. She would want us to burn it.” Avery watched as Cord hunted for an old-fashioned lighter, since no bot would burn anything, not inside.
“I miss her a lot,” she added softly, as he clicked a small flame to life and held it to the candle’s taper.
“I miss her too.” Cord glanced down. The light of the candle cast small shadows under his eyes.
“You know, if I met Eris now, I think I would be intimidated by her. She was so unapologetically original,” Avery mused aloud, fumbling for the words. “But we’d been friends for so long that I took her for granted.” I can’t take anyone for granted ever again, she promised herself, except that she was already losing the people she cared about. Leda hated her, Watt obviously resented her, she and Atlas were fighting, and her parents were watching her like a pair of hawks. When had all of Avery’s relationships started falling apart?
“Eris’s funeral didn’t do her justice,” Cord was saying. “It was too generic for her. She needed something spectacular, like confetti bombs. Or bubbles.”
“Eris would have loved that.” Avery smiled and took a deep breath, letting the scent of the candle travel from her lungs all the way to the farthest corners of her body, seeping into her hair, to the tips of her fingers. It smelled like honey and toast and campfires.
The holo switched to a commercial for a new karaoke game. A silence stretched between her and Cord—the sort of easy, companionable silence that falls between two people who’ve known each other a long time.
She nodded at the commercial. “Why don’t we ever play games like that anymore?”
“Because you’re a terrible singer. Which I’ve never understood, given the whole genetic engineering thing.”
“Not fair!” Avery protested, though she secretly liked it when Cord brought up the fact that she was a custom-order baby. No one else ever dared to.
“It’s okay. There are more important things,” Cord said, and there was a strange note in his voice that made her look up. At some point—she wasn’t sure when—he’d shifted nearer to her, or maybe she’d been the one to move. Either way, here they were.
Time seemed to stretch out like a liquid. Avery’s face was so close to Cord’s, and he was looking at her with that unfamiliar blue-eyed intensity, none of his usual nonchalance or sarcasm, his gaze focused and resolute. Avery couldn’t breathe over the pounding of her heart. She knew she should pull away, but she didn’t, she couldn’t move, it was all too sudden and unexpected. She’d stepped into some strange universe where Cord Anderton might lean in and kiss her.