Katharine McGee - The Dazzling Heights

When Atlas finally pulled away, she felt his smile, even if she couldn’t see it. “No scary dreams anymore. Not while I’m here. I’ll keep them away, I promise.”

“I dreamed that I lost you,” she blurted out, a note of trepidation threading through her voice. Now that they were together, against all odds, losing Atlas was her greatest fear.

“Avery.” He put a finger under her chin and gently lifted it, so that she was looking into his eyes. “I love you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know,” she replied, and she knew that he meant it, but there were so many obstacles in their path, so many forces stacked against them, that at times it all felt insurmountable.

She lay back down in the soft, warm space next to his body, but her thoughts were still scattered. She felt like she was coiled too tightly and couldn’t be unwound.

“Do you ever wish another family had adopted you?” she whispered, voicing a thought she’d had countless times. If he’d ended up with some other family, if some other boy had grown up as her adopted brother, then Atlas wouldn’t be forbidden. She wondered what it would have been like, meeting him in school, or at some party; bringing him home to meet the Fullers.

It would all be so much easier.

“Of course not,” Atlas said, startling her with the vehemence of his tone. “Aves, if I’d been adopted by a different family I might never have met you.”

“Maybe …” She trailed off, but she couldn’t help thinking that she and Atlas were inevitable. The universe would have conspired for them to meet, some way or another, pulling them together with a gravitational force that was all their own.

“Maybe,” Atlas conceded. “But that’s not a risk I’m willing to take. You’re the most important thing in the world to me. The day your parents brought me home—the day I first met you—was the second-best day of my life.”

“Oh really? And what was the best day?” she asked with a smile.

She expected Atlas to say that the best day was when they confessed their love for each other. But he surprised her. “Today,” he said simply. “Which will only last until tomorrow, and then tomorrow will be the best day. Because every day with you is better than the one before.”

He leaned over to kiss her lightly, just as a knock sounded on the door.

“Atlas?”

For a terrible instant, every cell in Avery’s body was frozen. She looked up at Atlas and saw her own terror reflected on his handsome face.

His door was locked, but here—like everywhere in the apartment—Mr. and Mrs. Fuller had the ability to override.

“One second, Dad,” Atlas called out, a little too loudly.

Avery stumbled out of bed, wearing her ivory satin shorts and a bra, and stumbled breathlessly toward Atlas’s closet. Her bare feet nearly tripped over a shoe as she ran.

She’d just managed to pull the door shut behind her when Pierson Fuller strode into his adopted son’s room. The overhead lights flicked on with his steps.

“Everything okay in here?” Did she hear a note of suspicion in her dad’s voice, or was she imagining it?

“What’s going on, Dad?” Typical Atlas, answering a question with a question. But it was a good deflective technique.

“I just heard back from Jean-Pierre LaClos, in the Paris office,” Avery’s dad said slowly. “It looks like the French might finally let us build something next to that antique eyesore of theirs.” His form was just visible through the slats of the closet door. Avery stayed utterly still, pressing back into a gray wool coat, her arms crossed over her chest. Her heart was pounding so erratically she felt certain her dad would hear it.

Atlas’s closet was much smaller than hers. There was nowhere to hide, if Pierson came to open the door. There was no possible explanation for why she would be here, wearing a bra and pajama shorts in Atlas’s room, except, of course, for the real reason.

Out there in the bedroom, her pink shirt lay on the floor like a glaring searchlight.

“Okay,” Atlas replied, and Avery heard the unspoken query. Why was their dad coming over in the middle of the night, for something that didn’t sound particularly urgent?

After what was surely too long a silence, Pierson cleared his throat. “You’ll have to come early to the development meeting tomorrow. We’re going to need to do a full analysis of their streets and waterways, to start prepping.”

“I’ll be there,” Atlas said tersely. He was standing directly on top of the shirt, trying to discreetly cover it with one of his feet. Avery willed her dad not to notice the movement.

“Sounds good.” A moment later Avery heard the door to her brother’s room click shut.

She leaned back and slid helplessly down the wall to a seated position. It felt like tiny needles were prickling all over her skin, like that time she’d been vitamin-checked at the doctor, except laced with adrenaline. She felt restless and reckless and strangely exhilarated, as if she’d tripped into quicksand and somehow emerged on the other side unharmed.

Atlas flung open the closet. “You okay, Aves?”

The closet lights turned on as he opened the doors; but for an impossibly brief instant, Avery was in the dark while Atlas seemed illuminated from behind—light streaming around him, gilding the edges of his form, making him seem almost otherworldly. It seemed suddenly impossible that he was real, and here, and hers.

And in truth, it was impossible. Everything about their relationship kept proving impossible at every turn, yet somehow they had willed it into being.

“I’m fine.” She stood up to run her hands up his arms, settling them finally on his shoulders, but he took a reflexive step back and reached for her top, which still lay there on the ground.

“That was not good, Aves.” Atlas held out the shirt, his features creased with worry.

“He didn’t see me,” Avery argued, but she knew that wasn’t the point. Neither of them mentioned what their dad might have already seen: Avery’s bedroom, on the other side of the apartment, her pristine white bedcovers rumpled but decidedly empty.

“We need to be more careful.” Atlas sounded resigned.

Avery pulled her shirt over her head and looked up at him, her chest constricting at what he wasn’t saying. “There’s no more sleeping over, is there?” she asked, though she already knew the answer. They couldn’t risk it, not anymore.

“No. Aves, you need to go.”

“I will. Starting tomorrow,” she promised, and pulled his mouth to hers. Now more than ever Avery knew how dangerous it was, but that just made each moment with Atlas infinitely more precious. She knew the risks. She knew they were walking a tightrope; that it would be so, so easy to fall.

If this was their last night sleeping over, then she was going to make it count.

She wished she could tell him everything, but instead she willed it all into her kisses: all the silent apologies, the confessions, the promises to love him forever. If she couldn’t tell him aloud, there was no other way to tell him than this.

Clutching Atlas by the shoulders, she yanked him forward, and he followed her into the closet as the overhead light clicked back off.

WATZAHN BAKRADI LEANEDback in the stiff auditorium chair, studying the chessboard currently displayed over his field of vision. Move rook three spaces on the left diagonal. The chessboard, projected in ghostly white and black onto the high-res contacts he constantly wore, changed accordingly.

That wasn’t a wise move , pointed out Nadia, the quantum computer embedded in Watt’s brain. Her knight immediately swooped forward to capture his king.