The Dazzling Heights. Катарина Макги

her toilet to start tracking her urine the way the ones in rehab did? Well, he was welcome to it; he wouldn’t find a damned thing.

      The doctor tapped a dispenser in the wall, and it spit out two small pills. They were a cheerful pink—the color of children’s toys, or Leda’s favorite cherry ice whip. “This is an over-the-counter sleeping pill, lowest dose. Why don’t you try it tonight, if you can’t fall asleep?” He frowned, probably taking in the hollow circles around her eyes, the sharp angles of her face, even thinner than usual.

      He was right, of course. Leda wasn’t sleeping well. She dreaded falling asleep, tried to stay awake as long as she could, because she knew the horrific nightmares that awaited her. Whenever she did drift off, she woke almost instantly in a cold sweat, tormented by memories of that night—of what she’d hidden from everyone—

      “Sure.” She snatched the pills and shoved them into her bag.

      “I’d love for you to consider some of our other options—our light-recognition treatment, or perhaps trauma re-immersion therapy.”

      “I highly doubt reliving the trauma will help, given what my trauma was,” Leda snapped. She’d never bought into the theory that reliving your painful moments in virtual reality would help you move past them. And she didn’t exactly want any machines creeping into her brain right now, in case they could somehow read the memory that lay buried there.

      “What about your Dreamweaver?” the doctor persisted. “We could preload it with a few trigger memories of that night and see how your subconscious responds. You know that dreams are simply your deep brain matter making sense of everything that has happened to you, both joyful and painful …”

      He was saying something else, calling dreams the brain’s “safe space,” but Leda was no longer listening. She’d flashed to a memory of Eris in ninth grade, bragging that she’d broken through the Dreamweaver’s parental controls to access the full suite of “adult content” dreams. “There’s even a celebrity setting,” Eris had announced to her rapt audience, with a knowing smirk. Leda remembered how inadequate she’d felt, hearing that Eris was immersed in steamy dreams about holo-stars while Leda couldn’t even imagine sex.

      She stood up abruptly. “We need to end this session early. I just remembered something I have to go take care of. See you next time.”

      She quickly stepped out the frosted flexiglass door of the Lyons Clinic, perched high on the east side of the 833rd floor, just as her eartennas began to chime a loud, brassy ringtone. Her mom. She shook her head to decline the incoming ping. Ilara would want to hear how the session had gone, would check that she was on her way home for dinner. But Leda wasn’t ready for that kind of forced, upbeat normalcy right now. She needed a moment to herself, to quiet the thoughts and regrets chasing one another in a wild tumult through her head.

      She stepped onto the local C lift and disembarked a few stops upTower. Soon she was standing before an enormous stone archway, which had been transported stone by stone from some old British university, carved with enormous block letters that read THE BERKELEY SCHOOL.

      Leda breathed a sigh of relief as she walked through the arch and her contacts automatically shut off. Before Eris’s death, she’d never realized how grateful she might feel for her high school’s tech-net.

      Her footsteps echoed in the silent halls. It was sort of eerie here at night, everything cast in dim, bluish-gray shadows. She moved faster, past the lily pond and athletic complex, all the way to the blue door at the edge of campus. Normally this room was locked after hours, but Leda had schoolwide access thanks to her position on student council. She stepped forward, letting the security system register her retinas, and the door swung obediently inward.

      She hadn’t been in the Observatory since her astronomy elective last spring. Yet it looked exactly as she remembered: a vast circular room lined with telescopes, high-resolution screens, and cluttered data processors Leda had never learned to use. A geodesic dome soared overhead. And in the center of the floor lay the pièce de résistance: a glittering patch of night.

      The Observatory was one of the few places in the Tower that protruded out past the floor below it. Leda had never understood how the school had gotten the zoning permits for it, but she was glad now that they had, because it meant they could build the Oval Eye: a concave oval in the floor, about three meters long and two meters wide, made of triple-reinforced flexiglass. A glimpse of how high they really were, up here near the top of the Tower.

      Leda edged closer to the Oval Eye. It was dark down there, nothing but shadows, and a few stray lights bobbing in what she thought were the public gardens on the fiftieth floor. What the hell, she thought wildly, and stepped out onto the flexiglass.

      This sort of behavior was definitely off-limits, but Leda knew the structure would support her. She glanced down. Between her ballet flats was nothing but empty air, the impossible, endless space between her and the laminous darkness far below. This is what Eris saw when I pushed her, Leda thought, and despised herself.

      She sank down, not caring that there was nothing protecting her from a two-mile fall except a few layers of fused carbon. Pulling her knees to her chest, she lowered her forehead and closed her eyes.

      A shaft of light sliced into the room. Leda’s head shot up in panic. No one else had access to the Observatory except the rest of the student council, and the astronomy professors. What would she say to explain herself?

      “Leda?”

      Her heart sank as she realized who it was. “What are you doing here, Avery?”

      “Same thing as you, I guess.”

      Leda felt caught off guard. She hadn’t been alone with Avery since that night—when Leda confronted Avery about being with Atlas, and Avery led her up onto the roof, and everything spun violently out of control. She wanted desperately to say something, but her mind had strangely frozen. What could she say, with all the secrets she and Avery had made together, buried together?

      After a moment, Leda was shocked to hear footsteps approaching, as Avery walked over to sit on the opposite edge of the Oval.

      “How did you get in?” she couldn’t help asking. She wondered if Avery was still talking to Watt, the lower-floor hacker who’d helped Leda find out Avery’s secret in the first place—Leda hadn’t spoken to him since that night, either. But with the quantum computer he was hiding, Watt could hack basically anything.

      Avery shrugged. “I asked the principal if I could have access to this room. It helps me, being here.”

      Of course, Leda thought bitterly, she should have known it was as simple as that. Nothing was off-limits to the perfect Avery Fuller.

      “I miss her too, you know,” Avery said quietly.

      Leda looked down into the silent vastness of the night, to protect herself from what she saw in Avery’s eyes.

      “What happened that night, Leda?” Avery whispered. “What were you on?”

      Leda thought of all the various pills she’d popped that day, as she’d sunk ever deeper into a hot, angry maelstrom of regret. “It was a rough day for me. I learned the truth about a lot of people that day—people I had trusted. People who used me,” she said at last, and was perversely pleased to see Avery wince.

      “I’m sorry,” Avery told her. “But, Leda, please. Talk to me.”

      More than anything, Leda wanted to tell Avery all of it: how Leda had caught her cheating scumbag of a father having an affair with Eris; and how awful she’d felt, realizing that Atlas had only ever slept with her in a fucked-up attempt to forget Avery. How she’d had to drug Watt to uncover that particular grain of truth.

      But the thing about the truth was that once you learned it, it became impossible to unlearn. No matter how many pills Leda popped, it was still there, lurking in the corners of her mind like an unwanted guest. There weren’t enough pills in the world to make it go away. So Leda had confronted