Rylin was still staring unabashedly at Avery, her face a mask of hurt and wounded pride. Watt wondered what had happened between them.
“I’m sorry I had to call you all here, so late at night. But you need to know what happened, and it couldn’t wait,” Leda began. The pillow was still in her lap; she kept fidgeting with the fringe, pulling at it until the pieces began to unravel. “Tonight I was confronted by a girl named Mariel. She’s out to get us. All of us.”
“Who is she?” Avery’s flawless features creased into a frown.
Leda winced as she spoke. “I think she was Eris’s girlfriend. She works as a bartender at Altitude, and came here tonight as part of the catering team. Apparently she’s been on some kind of vigilante quest to find out what happened the night Eris died. And I gave her exactly what she wanted.”
Nadia was already working at top speed, trying to put together all the pieces of the puzzle in a complete file for Watt. Get her to tell it all. In detail, Nadia requested, speaking directly in Watt’s head now that the others were present. Watt nodded.
“Tell us from the beginning,” he asked Leda. “Everything you can remember.”
Slowly, Leda explained how Mariel had been there tonight, standing behind a bar right when Leda was upset, and alone. Watt knew why—because he’d abandoned her—and felt even more miserable at the realization.
Leda told them that she’d only had one drink, but the next thing she knew the two of them were out on the beach, and Mariel was pestering her with questions about Eris.
Found her, Nadia said, and a pic of Mariel—the official one, from her ID ring—appeared on the back of Watt’s eyelids.
There was something familiar about her, though Watt couldn’t place it. Nadia, have we seen her before?
You ordered a drink from her at the Hudson Conservancy Ball, Nadia reminded him.
Thank god for Nadia’s photographic memory. Maybe she was spying on us then too.
“Is this her?” Watt asked aloud, pretending to use his contacts to send Leda the photo, since Avery and Rylin were watching.
Leda’s jaw tightened in recognition. “That’s her.” She made a swishing motion with her wrist, and the pic projected onto one of the suite’s enormous full-screen walls.
Avery gasped. “I met her at Eris’s grave! She stared at me like she hated me.”
Leda looked down. “After Mariel drugged me and kidnapped me, she asked me how I kept you all from telling the truth. I told her all your secrets.” Her voice quavered, but she forged bravely on. “I told her what you did to Cord, Rylin—and, Avery, I’m so sorry, I told her your secret too.” Watt glanced at Avery, waiting for a pained expression to cross her face at the reference to Atlas, but she just pursed her lips and said nothing.
Leda turned to Watt last of all. “And, Watt, I told her about Nadia …”
It’s okay, Watt hastened to reassure Nadia, we can figure this out—
“… I even told her where Nadia is,” Leda finished.
Watt swallowed bravely over the horror that threatened to close up his chest. If Mariel told anyone that Nadia was in his brain, it was the end of both of them. “It wasn’t your fault, Leda,” he assured her.
Leda looked around the room, clearly waiting for the others to jump on her, to blame her—but neither Avery nor Rylin spoke up. Watt was surprised, and glad. Maybe he wasn’t the only one Leda had made peace with recently.
Leda took a shaky breath. “Now Mariel thinks you all deserve to pay for Eris’s death, since you helped cover it up. I wanted to warn you, because she’s out for revenge, and there’s nothing she won’t do. She left me for dead.”
“Let me get this straight,” Rylin interjected. “This girl Mariel thinks we’re all involved in the death of her ex-girlfriend, and she knows all our secrets, and she’s out to make us pay?”
Hearing it said like that, Watt was overcome by a terrible wave of despair. In some ways it felt like he was reliving that terrible night on the roof, that nothing had changed in the last several months; but of course that wasn’t true. Everything had changed. This time they were working together, instead of attacking one another.
They all looked around the room with hollow, terrified eyes. Watt kept hoping that Nadia would chime in with a suggestion, but she’d been frighteningly quiet. It wasn’t a good sign.
“We have to do something,” Leda finally spoke into the fractured silence. “We have to get rid of her somehow.”
“Get rid of her? You don’t mean kill her?” Rylin exclaimed.
“Of course Leda doesn’t mean kill her,” Avery interrupted, then glanced hesitantly at Leda. “Right?”
Watt chimed in. “I saw what Mariel did to Leda. I know what she’s capable of. We have to do something before she does something to us. We have to keep her from ruining our lives.”
They all looked around the room as the import of those words sank in. Through the window Watt saw fireworks explode into the night, the very last fireworks show before dawn, illuminated a searing, vicious red against the black sky.
Nadia? he asked, but she didn’t answer, and he knew with a sinking feeling what that meant.
For the first time in his life, Watt had confronted her with a problem that she truly couldn’t solve.
MARIEL
MARIEL WRAPPED HER arms tighter around herself and bent her head into the blistering wind, walking doggedly home from another of her cousin José’s parties. She shouldn’t have gone out tonight in the first place; should have known that all it would do was stir up memories of Eris. Tender memories that hurt like a bruise, but that she still kept pressing on, because it was better to feel the pain than to feel nothing at all.
She could have taken the monorail, but she liked this stretch of the East River, especially cloaked in the liquid inky shadows of nightfall. It was nice to have a moment to herself, to be alone with her thoughts in the wide-eyed darkness.
She still didn’t understand what had gone so wrong in Dubai. After learning that Leda had killed Eris, Mariel had wanted nothing more than to leave Leda’s life in tatters. Death was too good for Leda—she needed to watch her entire world fall apart, lose the people she loved, be locked away behind bars somewhere dark and hellish and lonely.
Mariel had planted drugs on Leda and abandoned her on the beach, in a spot known only to maintenance workers and drug-ferrying gangs. Then she’d sent in an anonymous tip about her, fully expecting Leda to go to jail for possession—or at the very least, to a rehab facility so miserable that it might as well be jail. She’d been floored when Leda had arrived safely back in New York and stepped into her old life as if nothing had happened at all.
Once again the upper-floor world had flung up an invisible, impenetrable wall to keep people like Mariel out—and to protect its own.