The Towering Sky. Катарина Макги

      Calliope took a tentative sip of the lemon drink, wincing at its tanginess. “So, Endred, tell me about yourself. Where are you from?”

      Endred preened, predictably, beneath the attention. “Miami. Have you ever been?”

      Calliope shook her head, though she and Elise had run cons in Miami countless times.

      He began describing the city’s waterlogged streets; which had been flooded for half a century, ever since the sandbars surrounding Florida crumbled into the ocean. Calliope didn’t listen. As if she hadn’t taken a Jet Ski up and down those very streets. She loved Miami, loved the stubborn sexiness of the city, the way it refused to admit defeat even when it was flooded, and instead rose boldly from the waters like a modern super-Venice.

      But Calliope could tell that Endred was the type of guy who could be easily won over by talking about himself. Like most boys.

      As she peppered him with questions, slipping in the occasional lie about herself, Calliope felt herself reviving like a plant in water. She’d forgotten what a rush it was, playing this game. But now she was in her element again, and all her self-confidence came rushing back as she did what she did best: become someone else.

      “If it isn’t Calliope Brown,” an unexpected voice said behind her.

      Calliope turned around slowly, trying to mask her trepidation. It was Brice Anderton, Cord’s older brother. He wore a dark jacket and oversized sunglasses, which he lifted now, his eyes roving unabashedly over Calliope’s skintight dress. He was swarthy and tall and far too good-looking, and he knew it.

      “I’m afraid you have the wrong girl,” Endred interrupted, oblivious to the tension between them. “This is Amada.”

      “Yes. You must have me confused with someone else,” Calliope heard herself say in the Australian accent.

      “My mistake.” Brice’s mouth twisted in amusement.

      Endred tried to pick up their conversation where it had left off, but Calliope’s smile was beginning to slip from her frozen features. “Excuse me,” she murmured, and ducked back up the narrow stairs to the neon-decked bar just as the lights began to dim for the next fight.

      Brice was leaning negligently against the bar, as if he’d known that she would come. “Calliope. What an unexpected pleasure,” he said in that unmistakable entitled drawl.

      She refused to back down. “The unexpected pleasure is all mine. I had no idea you were into ComBattles.”

      “I could say the same thing. This doesn’t exactly strike me as your scene.”

      This is far closer to the real me than the Little Bo Peep version of me everyone has seen all year. “I like to think of myself as a thing of mystery,” she said flippantly.

      “And I like to think of myself as a person who solves mysteries.”

      The smart thing to do would be to ignore him and head home. Brice was the only person aside from Avery with the power to blow Calliope’s cover. She’d met him once before, in Singapore, when she’d conned his friend and then skipped town. Whether or not he recognized her—which she never could quite figure out—there was always a dangerous, and slightly magnetic, edge to their interactions.

      But instead of leaving, Calliope leaned forward over the bar, kicking one boot behind the other. She held Brice’s gaze. “I haven’t seen you in a while. Since last year’s Under the Sea ball, I think.”

      “I’ve been traveling a lot. To East Asia, Europe, all over the place.”

      “Is New York too boring for you?”

      “Not anymore,” Brice said meaningfully, his eyes on her. “But really, what were you doing in there, telling people your name is Amada, using that fake accent?”

      For once, Calliope felt an urge to tell the truth. “I was bored. I guess I just wanted to be someone else for the night.”

      “Want to be someone else somewhere else?” Brice offered. “There’s a great dumpling place around the corner, and I’m starving.”

      The prospect was oddly tempting. But Calliope knew better. She’d already risked too much simply by coming out tonight; she couldn’t be seen with the infamous, notorious Brice Anderton. Not when she’d worked for so long to convince everyone on the upper floors that she was a soft-hearted philanthropist.

      “I actually need to get home,” she told him, hating how much she sounded like a teenager on curfew. Part of her hoped that he would try to convince her to stay.

      Brice just shrugged and took a step back. “All right, then,” he said easily. He disappeared downstairs, back into the roaring darkness of the ComBot arena, taking with him the only flicker of excitement that Calliope had felt in months.

RYLIN

      THE FIRST DAY of school, Rylin stepped out of Berkeley’s main quadrangle, lifting a hand to her eyes to shade them even as her contacts switched to light-blocking mode: one of the few things they were able to do on school grounds. The UV-free solar beams prickled pleasantly on her arms.

      Ahead of her rose the science building, surrounded by a turquoise reflecting pool that was filled with multicolored koi and a few croaking frogs. Rylin shuddered as she passed. She’d had to dissect a frog last year in biology class, and even though she knew it wasn’t real—that it was actually a synthetic frog-like thing built specifically for high school students to avoid animal cruelty—she still didn’t like the sound of the real ones.

      She hadn’t wanted to take a science class this year at all, but since it was mandatory, Rylin had settled on the most innocuous-sounding option: Introduction to Psychology. Actually, her summer boss, Raquel, had been the one to suggest it. “All good storytellers study psychology,” she’d proclaimed, drumming her fingers idly over the film storage boxes. “Novelists, filmmakers, even actors. You have to know the rules of human behavior before you can make your characters break them.”

      That sounded reasonable to Rylin. Besides, psychology seemed so much friendlier than the other options—no test tubes or scalpels, just surveys and “social experiments,” whatever that meant.

      She started down the two-story science hallway past the robotics lab, where electrical sparks jumped from one wire to another like fiery spiders; past the meteoroculture lab, where students gathered around a massive holographic globe, studying the weather patterns that broke in soft gray waves over its surface; past the massive steel door marked SUBZERO LAB: THERMAL PROTECTION REQUIRED. The so-called “ice box,” where the Advanced Physics class conducted below-freezing experiments in subatomic particles. Rylin didn’t even want to know how much it cost to maintain that temperature.

      When she turned into room 142 at the end of the hall, Rylin was relieved to see rows of two-person lab stations, each equipped with nothing but a pair of holo-goggles. She took a seat at one of the empty tables and pulled up the notepad function on her school tablet—just in time.

      “Humans are illogical and irrational. That’s the first rule of psychology.” A glamorous Chinese woman strode into the classroom, instantly skewering them all with her stare. Her heels clicked lightly on the floor.

      “Psychology as a science was born because humans have been trying for millennia to understand why we do the things we do. Psyche, meaning mind, and logos, study. We’ve been doing this since the ancient Greeks, and yet we still haven’t come close to making sense of it all.

      “I’m Professor Heather Wang. Welcome to Introduction to Psychology,” she announced and narrowed her eyes. “If you’re here because you think this is the ‘easy’ science class compared to physics or chemistry, think again. At least elements and chemicals behave in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, are shockingly unpredictable.”

      Rylin