The Thousandth Floor

“Oh?” she said cautiously, trying not to get her hopes up.

“I owe you an apology.”

Leda felt like she’d been slapped. “You don’t owe me anything,” she said quickly, defensive. Stupid, she chided herself, thinking that Atlas might have missed her, when all he apparently felt was that he owed her. God, she hated that word. It was about as far from romantic as you could get.

They looked at each other in layered silence. “Want to play Spinners?” he asked after a moment.

“No.” The last thing she wanted was to sit next to Atlas like everything was normal, and play a game that might end with them being forced to kiss. “I’m going to find Avery,” she amended. “She seemed a little drunk earlier.”

“I’ll come with you,” Atlas offered, but she was already pushing past him.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, heading into the hall. “I’ve got it.”

The pull she felt toward him was as insistent and powerful as it had been in Catyan, when their bodies were so intertwined that he’d felt like a part of her. Yet she didn’t understand him any better now than she had then. Maybe she never would.

Leda’s stomach gave a sudden twist, her head pounding angrily. It felt like something was pressing at her from within, the way she used to feel when she came down too abruptly from a high—

She needed to get out of here. Now.

She elbowed through the hot, teeming crowd that filled Cord’s apartment, a mechanical smile pasted on her face, and slipped into the first hover she could find.

By the time she got home Leda was nearly frantic. She raced down the hall to her room and flung open the door, reaching for her lavender-scented aromatherapy pillow and burying her face in it, taking several deep, desperate breaths. Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. God, she was an idiot. She couldn’t believe how easily seeing Atlas had sent her veering toward the edge.

Finally Leda plopped into the chair at her vanity. She began wiping the makeup—and the tears—from her face with brusque, angry movements. Her body was so tense it was almost shaking.

A tentative knock sounded at her door. “Leda?” Ilara Cole appeared in her daughter’s doorway. “How was the party?”

“You didn’t need to stay up.” Leda didn’t turn, just met her mom’s gaze in the mirror. Ilara never used to wait up for her before.

Her mom ignored the comment. “I saw some of the snaps, from the feeds,” she persisted, in a clear attempt to be upbeat. “All the costumes looked fantastic. Especially you and Avery together!”

Leda spun around on the vanity chair and stood up, her hands clenching into sudden fists. “You’re spying on me now? I thought you said you would trust me this year!”

“And you said that if I let you go to the party, you wouldn’t drink!”

Leda recoiled, and her mom’s tone softened. “I’m sorry,” Ilara went on. “But, Leda, I’m not stupid. I can smell the atomic from here. What am I supposed to think?”

“It was just one drink,” Leda said tersely. “That’s not exactly going on a xenperheidren bender last I checked.”

Ilara started to put a hand on her shoulder, but Leda brushed it away, and she lowered her hand in defeat. “Leda, please,” she said softly. “I’m trying here. I want to trust you again. But trust has to be earned. And so far I’m not seeing any effort from you, to—”

“Fine,” Leda said woodenly, interrupting her mom. “The party was great. Thank you for letting me go. I promise I won’t drink at the next one.”

They stared at each other, neither of them sure what to say next. There was affection on both their faces, but wariness too. They weren’t sure how to act around each other anymore.

Finally Ilara sighed and turned away. “I’m glad you had fun. See you in the morning.” The door clicked shut behind her.

Leda yanked off her dress and shimmied into her monogrammed pajamas. She sent a quick flicker to Avery, apologizing for her earlier outburst and saying that she’d left the party early. Then she crawled into bed, her mind spinning.

She wondered if Avery and Atlas were still at the party. Was it weird of her, to have left early? Was Avery upset with her about earlier? Why couldn’t Avery just accept that some things in Leda’s life were private? And now, as if she didn’t have enough to deal with, her stupid mom had started monitoring her every move on the feeds. Leda hadn’t even realized Ilara knew how to look that stuff up.

At the thought of the feeds, she decided to pull up Atlas’s, though she already knew what she would find. Sure enough, it was as vague as it had always been. While most of the guys she knew lived their entire lives on the feeds, Atlas’s profile had nothing but an old picture of him at his grandparents’ beach house and a few favorite quotes. He was so maddeningly opaque.

If only Leda could see past the public profile, to his messages and hidden check-ins and everything else he wasn’t sharing with the world. If only she knew what he was thinking, maybe she could put all this behind her and finally move on.

Or maybe she could get him back, part of her whispered; the part she couldn’t seem to ignore.

Leda rolled onto her stomach, tangling her fists in her sheets in frustration—and had an idea so simple that it must either be brilliant, or stupid.

Atlas might be hard to read, but maybe there was another way to figure him out.

AVERY

SEVERAL HOURS INTO the party, Avery found herself in the liquor closet off Cord’s kitchen. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d come in here: maybe for some of the gold-leafed bourbon lined up on the top shelf, or the stash of illegal retros. She paused, swirling the ice chips in her empty cup. Her two empty cups, she realized; she had one in each hand.

Atlas was back. The look on his face when he saw her—and that word, later—kept replaying in her head. She’d been desperate for him to come home for so long, and yet now that he was finally here she didn’t know what it meant. So she’d decided the best course of action was to get as drunk as possible. Evidently she’d succeeded.

A shaft of light sliced through the darkness as the door was pushed open. “Avery?”

Cord. She sighed, wanting to just be alone with her thoughts right now. “Hey. Great party,” she murmured.

“Here’s to your guy,” he said, and reached over her to grab a handle of the bourbon. He took a long, slow sip, his eyes glittering in the dim light.

“Who?” she asked sharply. Did Cord somehow know? If anyone could figure it out, she thought darkly, it would be him. He’d known her forever. And he was screwed up enough himself to guess the crazy, twisted truth.

“Whoever got you so hot and bothered, and brought out Double-Fisting Fuller. Because it isn’t Zay Wagner. Even I can tell that.”

“You’re a real asshole sometimes, you know,” Avery said without thinking.

He barked out a laugh. “I do know. But I throw such great parties people forgive me for it. Kind of like they forgive you for being prudish and unreadable, because you’re the best-looking person on earth.”

Avery wanted to be angry with him, but for some reason she wasn’t. Maybe because she knew what Cord was really like, under all the layers of sarcasm.

“Remember when we were kids?” she said suddenly. “When you dared me to climb into the trash chute, and I got stuck inside? You waited with me the whole time until the safety bots came so I wouldn’t be in there alone.”

The lights in the liquor closet flickered off. They must have been standing very still to turn off the motion sensors. Cord was nothing but a shadow.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “So?”

“We’re all very different now, aren’t we?” Shaking her head, Avery pushed out the door and into the hallway.

She looped idly around the party for a while, saying hi to everyone she hadn’t seen since the end of last spring, drinking steadily from her two different cups. She couldn’t stop thinking about Atlas—or Leda. Where had Leda been all summer, that she refused to tell Avery about it? Whatever was going on, Avery felt terrible for the way she’d pressed the issue and clearly upset Leda. It wasn’t like her to leave a party early. Avery knew she should go to the Coles’ and check on her, yet she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving while Atlas was still here. After all those months apart, she just wanted to stay close to him.

I’m sorry about earlier. See you tomorrow? she sent to Leda, pushing aside her guilt.

Eventually she found Atlas in the downstairs library, playing a game of Spinners, and paused near the doorway to watch. He was leaning over the table as he Spun, his lashes casting subtle shadows on his cheekbones. Avery hadn’t played Spinners in years, since that time when she was fourteen—at another of Cord’s parties, in this very room. If she closed her eyes, it almost felt like it had happened yesterday, not three years ago.

She’d been so nervous to play. It was her first time drinking, and though she hadn’t told anyone, it was her first time at Spinners. She’d never even been kissed. What if they could all tell?

“Hurry up, Fuller!” Marc Rojas, a senior, had groaned at her hesitation. “Spin!”

“Spin! Spin!” the rest of the room took up the chant. Biting her lip, Avery reached up to swipe the holographic dial projected in the middle of the table.

The arrow whipped around the room in a blur. Everyone leaned forward to watch its progress. Finally it began to slow, and paused in front of Breccan Doyle. Avery braced herself, on the edge of her seat.

With its very last bit of momentum, the arrow shifted onto Atlas.

The game console immediately cast a privacy cone where they sat, refracting the light to hide them from the rest of the room, and deflecting all sound waves. Beyond the shimmering wall of photons—which rippled and bent like the surface of water in a pond—Avery could see the others, though they couldn’t see her. They were shouting and waving at the gaming console, probably trying to reset the game and make her spin again. Nothing fun about having siblings together in the cone, right?

“You okay?” Atlas asked quietly. He had a half-full bottle of atomic in his hand, and tried to pass it to her, but she shook her head. She was already confused, and the alcohol was stirring up her feelings for Atlas in a dangerous way.

“I’ve never kissed anyone before. I’m going to be terrible at it,” she blurted out, and cringed. What had made her say that?

Atlas took a long pull of the atomic, then set it down carefully. To his credit, he didn’t laugh. “Don’t worry,” he finally said. “I’m sure you’ll be a great kisser.”

“I don’t even know what to do!” Outside the cone, Avery saw Tracy Ellison, who had a huge crush on Atlas, gesturing angrily.

“You just need practice.” Atlas smiled and shrugged. “Sorry it’s me in here instead of Breccan.”

“Are you kidding? I’d rather—” Avery halted. She couldn’t let herself finish that sentence.

Atlas looked at her curiously. His brow furrowed in an expression she couldn’t quite read. “Aves,” he said, but it came out more like a question. He leaned closer. Avery held her breath …

The invisibility cone dissolved, letting reality back in.

Avery had never been sure whether that almost kiss was real, or whether she’d just imagined it. As the memory washed over her now, she looked at Atlas, who glanced up, seeming to feel her gaze. But if he was thinking of that night too, he didn’t give any indication. He just studied her for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. “I’m out this round,” he said, disengaging from the game and walking over to where she stood.

“Hey.” He gently pulled the drinks from her hands and set them on a table. Avery had forgotten she was holding them. She tripped forward a little.

“Want me to take you home?” Atlas reached out to steady her. It was just like always; Atlas knowing what she wanted without her even having to say it. Except, of course, for the one thing he could never know.

“Yes,” Avery said, a little too quickly.

He nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

They walked out onto Cord’s doorstep and took the hover that Atlas had called. Avery leaned back on the seat and closed her eyes, letting the familiar hum of the magnetic propulsion system wash over her. She listened for the rise and fall of Atlas’s breathing. He really was here, she kept telling herself. It wasn’t just another one of her dreams.

When they reached the thousandth-floor penthouse Avery fell backward onto her bed, still in her dress. Everything was a little dizzy. “You okay?” Atlas asked, settling onto the corner of her enormous cream-colored comforter.

“Mmm-hmm,” she murmured. She was better than she’d been in months, here, alone, with Atlas, in the semidarkness. He scooted over a little. She closed her eyes. Right now, with him sitting on her bed, Avery could almost pretend he was just a boy she’d met and brought home. Not someone her parents adopted when she was five years old, because she was lonely and they didn’t have time for her.

“Remember when you first came here?” she asked. She’d been sitting on the playroom floor brushing her doll’s hair, and the front door had opened to reveal her mom, holding the hand of a hopeful, lost-looking boy. “This is Atlas,” her mom had said, and the boy had given a tentative smile. From that moment on Avery adored him.

“Of course I remember,” Atlas teased. “You demanded that I go straight to the park with you, and drag you along on your hoverboard so you could pretend it was a pirate ship.”

“I did not!” Avery propped herself up on her elbows to glare at him in mock anger.

“It’s okay. I didn’t mind,” he said softly.

Avery leaned back on her pillows. How strange that there had ever been a time in her life before Atlas. It didn’t seem possible anymore.

“Aves?” she heard Atlas say. “If there was something I needed to know, you would tell me, right?”

She opened her eyes and looked at his face, so clear and guileless. He wasn’t suggesting the truth—was he? He couldn’t be. He didn’t know what it was like, wanting something you could never have; how impossible it was to un-want it once you’d let the feeling in.

“I’m glad you’re back. I missed you,” she told him.

“Me too.”

The silence stretched between them. Avery fought to stay awake, to drink in Atlas’s presence, but sleep was dragging her down. After a moment he stood and walked to the hallway.

“I love you,” he said, and pulled the door quietly shut behind him.

I love you too, her heart whispered, curling around the phrase like a prayer.

ERIS

I’M HEADING HOME, Eris flickered Cord, not bothering to wait for his response. His apartment was emptying as the party began to slowly disintegrate, people stumbling home alone or in pairs. Everywhere she looked Eris saw the debris of an epic night, scattered cups and lost costume pieces and broken halluci-lighters.

She hadn’t meant to stay this long. She’d been flitting from group to group and lost all sense of time. She wasn’t sure where Cord was and she felt too exhausted, suddenly, to go looking for him. All she wanted was a cleansteam shower and her thousand-thread-count sheets.

Eris started toward the door, scrolling idly through her messages, and realized with a start that she had several missed pings from home. They were timestamped from a couple of hours ago—she’d been on the dance floor; she remembered tossing her head back and forth, ignoring them—but she hadn’t registered at the time that they were from her parents. She wondered what was going on.

When she reached her apartment on 985, Eris opened the door as slowly as she could, her black shoes in one hand and her clutch in the other. She knew the moment she stepped inside that something was wrong. The lights were on their brightest setting, and an awful strangled sound came from the living room. Oh god. It was her mom, crying.

Eris dropped her shoes on the floor with a loud clatter.

“Eris?” Caroline lifted her head from where she lay curled on the couch. She was still wearing her evening gown, a beautiful scarlet question mark against the white cushions.

Eris ran forward to throw her arms around her mom, pulling her close. She thought suddenly of when she was little and her parents would come home from parties. Eris would hear her mom’s heels clacking in the hallway—a sound she’d always found strangely reassuring—and no matter how late it was, Caroline had always come to brush Eris’s hair and tell her about all the wonderful, magical, grown-up things she’d seen that night. How many times had Eris fallen asleep listening to the sound of her mom’s voice?

“It’s okay,” Eris said softly, though clearly it wasn’t. Her eyes darted nervously around the apartment. Where was her dad?

“No, it’s not okay.” Caroline took a deep breath, and pulled back to look Eris squarely in the eye. Mascara-filled tears etched black rivers down her face. “I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?” Eris scooted back from her mom to sit upright, the movement brusquer than she’d intended. “Where’s Dad?”

“He … left.” Caroline looked down, studying the hands clasped tight in her lap, the crumpled folds of her magnificent crimson dress.

“What do you mean, he left?”

“Remember that DNA test you took today?”

Eris nodded impatiently. Of course she remembered; she’d taken countless tests, given a cheek swab and peed on a stick, and signed so many old-fashioned paper documents with a real ink pen that her hand had cramped with the unfamiliar movement.

Wordlessly Eris’s mom tapped the coffee table, which, like all the surfaces in their apartment, had touch-screen capabilities. A few quick swipes and she’d pulled an attachment from her message queue. Eris leaned forward to look.

Her DNA was mapped there in all its glory, its strands an unrealistic bubblegum pink, but Eris’s eyes were already skimming past that, to the jumble of medical words and bar charts below. She knew they’d run her DNA against her dad’s, which was already on file, yet she couldn’t process what she was seeing now. What did it all have to do with her?

Her eyes caught on a single line at the bottom—percentage match: 0.00%—and she reached out a hand to steady herself. An ugly, sticky realization was closing around her throat.

“I don’t believe this.” She sat up straighter, her voice gaining volume. “The lab messed up the sequencing. We need to ping them back, get them to redo it.”

“They did redo it. It’s not wrong.” It seemed as if her mom was talking from very far away, as if Eris were underwater, or buried under a mountain of sand.

“No,” Eris repeated blindly.

“It’s true, Eris.”

The finality in Caroline’s tone made Eris cold all over. And then she understood why her DNA wasn’t a match, why her mom wasn’t acting more surprised. Because Eris wasn’t her father’s daughter, after all.

Her mom had cheated on her dad, and kept it a secret for the past eighteen years.

Eris shut her eyes. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. If she kept her eyes closed it would go away, like a bad dream.

Her mom reached out a hand and Eris shot to her feet, knocking over the coffee table as she did. Neither of them looked at it. They just stared at each other, mother and daughter, so painfully alike—and yet to Eris they had never felt more like strangers.

“Why?” she asked, because it was the only word her mind could process. “Why did you lie to me all those years?”

“Oh, Eris. I didn’t mean—it wasn’t about you—”

“Are you serious? Of course it’s about me!”

Caroline winced. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just … whatever happens between me and Everett—it’s not your fault.”

“I know, because it’s your fault!”

Neither of them spoke. The silence scraped at Eris’s eardrums.

“Where did Dad go? When is he coming back?” she asked finally.

“I’m not sure.” Her mom sighed. “I’m sorry, Eris.”

“Stop saying that!” By now Eris was screaming. She couldn’t help it; she didn’t want to hear another apology from her mom. Apologies meant nothing when the person you trusted the most had been lying to you your whole life.

Her mom was utterly still. “I know this is really hard on you, and you must have a lot of questions. I’m here to answer—”

“Fuck you and your fucking explanations,” Eris interrupted, enunciating each word.

Her mom drew back in wounded shock, but Eris ignored it. Her mind was shuffling through all her memories of her mom: of when Caroline would come wake her up for elementary school, only to snuggle into Eris’s bed with her and fall back asleep, forcing Eris’s dad to come wake them both up, laughing about what sleeping beauties his girls were. Of the Christmases they had baked cookies to put under the tree for Santa, made almost entirely from raw dough, and then Dad would go eat them in the middle of the night even long after Eris knew Santa wasn’t real. Of every year before her birthday, when Caroline would make up a fake doctor’s appointment and pull Eris out of school to go shopping so they could pick out her presents and then go to Bergdorf’s for tea. “Your mom is so cool,” the other girls always said, because none of their moms ever let them out of school just for fun, and Eris would laugh and say, “Yeah, I know, she’s the best.”

It all felt fake now. Every gesture, every I love you; all of it was tinted by the great ugly lie underpinning her life. Eris blinked in confusion at her mom’s familiar face. “So you’ve known my entire life,” she said bitterly.

“No. I wasn’t sure.” Her mom’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears, but she managed to hold them back. “I always thought—hoped—that you were Everett’s. But I never knew for certain until now.”

“Why the hell did you let me take that DNA test, then?”

“You think if I knew there was a test I would’ve let you go?” her mom cried out.

Eris didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand how her mom could have done this to her, to her dad, to their family.

“Please, Eris. I want to make this right,” Caroline began, but Eris shook her head.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said slowly, and turned away.

Somehow Eris stumbled to her round bed, nestled to one side of her enormous circular room. Shock and fear were swirling dangerously in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She clawed suddenly at the neck of her shirt, still damp with her mom’s tears, and yanked it brutally over her head, then took a desperate, ragged breath. She was pretty sure she’d heard one of the seams rip out.

Can I be of assistance? her contacts prompted, sensing that she was almost crying. “Shut up!” she muttered, and they obediently powered down.

Everett Radson wasn’t her father. The truth of it kept ricocheting painfully against her skull like gunfire. Her poor dad—she wondered what he’d said when he got the lab results. Where was he now? A hotel, the hospital? She wanted to go talk to him, yet at the same time she wasn’t quite ready to face him. She knew that when she saw him—when she truly came face-to-face with it all—that everything would be different, for good.

Eris closed her eyes, but the world kept spinning around her. She wasn’t even drunk tonight. This must be the feeling, she thought bitterly, of her life coming untethered.

She sat up and studied her room with an odd sense of detachment. Everywhere she looked were expensive things—the crystal vase with its ever-young roses, the closet filled with delicate, colorful dresses, the custom-made vanity cluttered with gleaming pieces of tech. All the trappings of her life, everything that made her Eris Dodd-Radson.

She started to lean back onto her pillows and cursed aloud as something sharp dug into her ear. Her mom’s earrings. She’d forgotten all about them.

Eris unscrewed the right earring and held it out on her palm. It was so beautiful; a glass sphere glowing with whorls of color, like the eye of a coming storm. A beautiful, rare, expensive present from her dad to her mom. Suddenly the earring and everything it stood for struck Eris as unbearably false.