Thank god she’d at least had the presence of mind to tell her parents she was studying late with friends. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice her tiptoeing upstairs at this hour. Then again, they hadn’t noticed her sneaking Watt into her room all week, either.
Leda propped herself on one elbow to glance down at Watt’s sleeping form, tawny and lean and dangerous. He was like a flame, drawing her in, and she couldn’t stop even though she knew it might hurt her.
She let her gaze trace over his features in a way she never would while he was awake, studying his strong nose; his full, sensuous mouth; the shadowed lids over those glowing hazel eyes. His eyes were twitching a little, as if he was dreaming. What did that mind of his dream about? Maybe he dreamed of her.
She reached her hands up into his thick dark hair, playing with its curls, feeling the ridged smoothness of his skull beneath. So much intelligence in that whirling, humming, genius brain of his, she thought, so much that she didn’t understand. Watt fascinated her, and scared her a little too, because he was so unlike anyone she’d ever met.
Her fingers traced a bump under his right ear, and her breath caught. His skin was raised in a perfect circle, far too regular to be natural. It was firm to the touch, as though something had been surgically embedded there. She tried to lift his hair to get a glance at his scalp, but she couldn’t see even a trace of a scar.
A cold shiver of foreboding traveled up her spine, and her hand darted quickly back. Surely not, Leda thought, in answer to the bizarre thought that had traveled up from some place deep within her. Surely Watt’s computer wasn’t embedded in his brain. It seemed impossible.
Yet it explained so many things about him—the way he moved through the world more effortlessly than other people, without ever mumbling to his contacts. All those times he seemed to communicate with Nadia in complete silence. The fact that Leda had never been able to locate Nadia, no matter how diligently she’d searched through his room.
It seemed impossible, yet if Leda had learned anything in her seventeen years, it was that the impossible was very often true.
Watt stirred, his eyes fluttering open. “What time is it?”
“Shh, it’s late. Go back to sleep.” Her mind was still frantic, trying to sort out the implications of what she’d found.
“Don’t leave yet,” Watt said drowsily, reaching up to run a hand down her bare arm. His touch sent tiny explosions along her skin. Leda wanted more than anything to lie back down, press herself into him, unlearn the truth that she’d inadvertently discovered. She wanted to ask Watt about the strange bump in his skull. How had he gotten Nadia in the first place, and did it hurt? Did he regret it, being part computer?
Watt started to sit up. Leda cast her gaze wildly around the room so that he wouldn’t catch her staring, and her eyes caught on something she hadn’t noticed before, a virtual reality headset on his bedside table. It looked like a half-completed prototype; even Leda could tell that huge chunks were missing. Only really hardcore gamers still wore headsets, since the rendering on them was still better than even the most powerful contacts. “Did you build this?” Leda asked, picking it up, hoping to distract him from her rapidly beating heart.
Watt shrugged. “That’s just a side project. I was trying to see if I could improve the motion-tracking features, using Nadia’s computing abilities.”
She pulled the headset on, but nothing happened. “It doesn’t actually work yet,” Watt pointed out, though he seemed amused by her efforts.
Leda left the headset on for a moment. She liked having the safety of the lens between herself and the world, liked hiding her features from Watt’s incisive gaze. She wondered what Nadia was thinking right now, hiding there in Watt’s brain, watching her. Oh, god—had Nadia been watching them through Watt’s eyes this whole time? Something about it creeped Leda out, as if there had been a ghost in bed with them.
She pulled the headset off and stood up to hunt for her clothes, which were scattered in the textured darkness. “I should go.”
“Okay,” Watt said. He sounded disappointed, but maybe she was imagining it.
Leda paused in the doorway to look back at him. He’d kicked off the sheets and lay back in bed like a sketched shadow. The soft light from the hallway picked out his unruly hair, his disarming smile. He suddenly looked very young and boyish and not scary at all. Leda’s heart slowed a little.
She remembered that she was going to Dubai for the weekend. It would be her first night without Watt since before the rehab check-in.
“Hey,” she whispered. Watt looked up at her, expectant. “Do you want to come with me to Dubai, for the Mirrors launch party?”
Watt smiled. “Yeah. I’d like to come.”
Later, as she walked home from the lift stop, Leda looked around, startled, at the familiar yet somehow alien streets. Her block seemed simpler, cleaner; the lights from the lamps falling in beautiful pools against the darkness. It was the same and yet utterly different from normal, and Leda realized that maybe she was what had changed. There was a great gulf between the Leda of yesterday and the Leda of today.
She knew that Watt had a computer inside him. But so what? It wasn’t any weirder than anything else that had happened lately. He was still Watt, she reasoned, and he was still going to Dubai with her. Coming for real; not coerced, or blackmailed, but because he actually wanted to be there as her date.
For the first time in her life, Leda Cole had dirt on someone—serious dirt, come to think of it—and had absolutely no intention of putting it to use.
RYLIN
“PLEASE, MRS. LANE. I really need to switch to the intro-level holography class,” Rylin pleaded, standing at the registrar’s desk yet again.
It was Friday morning, and she was repeating the same plea she’d been making all week long to no avail, begging the registrar to switch her from Xiayne’s holography class to the Intro to Holography section that Cord had mentioned. That class was taught by a woman named Elaine Blyson—who had white hair and bright red lipstick and seemed like a perfectly safe choice for a professor.
So far Mrs. Lane had been no help, but Rylin refused to give up. She couldn’t bear the thought of walking into the classroom that afternoon and seeing Xiayne. She wanted to put the whole damn mess behind her and move on.
“I’ll do anything,” she said urgently, leaning her forearms onto the woman’s desk. “I’ll take double arts next year. I’ll do another independent study. I just cannot stay enrolled in that class.”
“Miss Myers, as I’ve reminded you all week, the course selection period has long since ended. It’s too late for you to drop a class now. It was already too late when you were added to the class—you only got in at all because you were a mid-semester addition.” Mrs. Lane sniffed and turned back to her tablet. “Frankly, I don’t understand your desire to drop the class. You know it’s our most popular elective. And after that fabulous independent study you just participated in … I’m a bit shocked.”