Katharine McGee - The Dazzling Heights

“I’m fine,” she said briskly.

She knew she’d have to offer up something more expansive than “fine” if she wanted to get out of this session easily. Leda had been to rehab; she’d learned the scripts. She took a deep breath and tried again. “What I mean is, I’m recovering, given the circumstances. It’s not easy, but I’m grateful to have the support of my friends.” Not that Leda actually cared about any of her friends right now. She’d learned the hard way that none of them could be trusted.

“Have you and Avery spoken about what happened? I know she was up there with you, when Eris fell—”

“Yes, Avery and I talk about it,” Leda interrupted quickly. Like hell we do. Avery Fuller, her so-called best friend, had proved to be the worst of them all. But Leda didn’t like hearing it spoken aloud, what had happened to Eris.

“And that helps?”

“It does.” Leda waited for Dr. Vanderstein to ask another question, but he was frowning, his eyes focused on the near distance as he studied some projection that only he could see. She felt a sudden twist of nausea. What if the doctor was using a lie detector on her? Just because she couldn’t see them didn’t mean this room wasn’t equipped with countless vitals scanners. Even now he might be tracking her heart rate or blood pressure, which were probably spiking like crazy.

The doctor gave a weary sigh. “Leda, I’ve been seeing you ever since your friend died, and we haven’t gotten anywhere. What do you think it will take, for you to feel better?”

“I do feel better!” Leda protested. “All thanks to you.” She gave Vanderstein a weak smile, but he wasn’t buying it.

“I see you aren’t taking your meds,” he said, changing tack.

Leda bit her lip. She hadn’t taken anything in the last month, not a single xenperheidren or mood stabilizer, not even a sleeping pill. She didn’t trust herself on anything artificial after what had happened on the roof. Eris might have been a gold-digging, home-wrecking whore, but Leda had never meant to—

No , she reminded herself, clenching her hands into fists at her sides. I didn’t kill her. It was an accident. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. She kept repeating the phrase over and over, like the yoga mantras she used to chant at Silver Cove.

If she repeated it enough, maybe it would become true.

“I’m trying to recover on my own. Given my history, and everything.” Leda hated bringing up rehab, but she was starting to feel cornered and didn’t know what else to say.

Vanderstein nodded with something that seemed like respect. “I understand. But it’s a big year for you, with college on the horizon, and I don’t want this … situation to adversely affect your academics.”

It’s more than a situation, Leda thought bitterly.

“According to your room comp, you aren’t sleeping well. I’m growing concerned,” Vanderstein added.

“Since when are you monitoring my room comp?” Leda cried out, momentarily forgetting her calm, unfazed tone.

The doctor had the grace to look embarrassed. “Just your sleep records,” he said quickly. “Your parents signed off on it—I thought they had informed you …”

Leda nodded curtly. She’d deal with her parents later. Just because she was still a minor didn’t mean they could keep invading her privacy. “I promise, I’m fine.”

Vanderstein was silent again. Leda waited. What else could he do, authorize 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.