Katharine McGee - The Towering Sky

First there had been that whole mess with Avery and Atlas. Hard to believe now, but Leda used to like Atlas—even, foolishly, thought that she loved him. Until she learned that he and Avery were secretly together. Leda flinched, remembering how she’d confronted Avery about it on the roof, the night when everything went so terribly wrong.

Their friend Eris had tried to calm down Leda, despite Leda’s shouts that she should back off. When Eris came close, Leda pushed her away—and inadvertently pushed her off the side of the Tower.

After that, it was no surprise that Avery wanted to leave New York. And Avery didn’t even know the full story. Only Leda had learned the darkest and most shameful part of the truth.

Eris had been Leda’s half sister.

Leda found out last winter, from Eris’s ex-girlfriend, Mariel Valconsuelo. Mariel had told her about it at the launch party for the new Dubai tower—right before she drugged Leda and left her for dead, abandoning her at the water’s edge during a rising tide.

The truth of Mariel’s words had resonated in Leda with sickening finality. It made so much more sense than what she thought was going on: that Eris was secretly having an affair with Leda’s dad. Instead, Eris and Leda shared a dad; and worse, Eris had known the truth before she died. Leda realized that now. It was what Eris had been trying to tell her, that night on the roof, which Leda so drastically misunderstood.

The knowledge that she’d killed her own sister burned Leda from within. She wanted to pound her fists and scream until the sky split open. She couldn’t sleep, haunted by plaintive images of Eris up on the roof, staring balefully at her with those amber-flecked eyes.

There was only one way to find relief from this kind of pain, and Leda had sworn never to touch it again. But she couldn’t help herself. With a shaking voice, Leda pinged her old drug dealer.

She took more and more pills, mixing and combining them with a shocking recklessness. She didn’t care what the hell she took as long as it numbed her. And then, as she’d probably known deep down that she would, Leda took one too many pills.

She was missing for an entire day. When her mom found her the next morning, Leda was curled atop her bed, her jeans and her shoes still on. At some point Leda must have gotten a nosebleed. The blood had trailed down her shirt to crust in sticky flakes all over her chest. Her forehead felt clammy and damp with sweat.

“Where were you?” her mom cried out, horrified.

“I don’t know,” Leda admitted. There was a flutter in the empty cavity of her chest where her heart should have been. The last thing she really remembered was getting high with her old dealer, Ross. She couldn’t account for anything else in the last twenty-four hours; she didn’t even know how she had managed to drag herself home.

Her parents sent her to rehab, terrified that Leda had meant to kill herself. Maybe, on some subconscious level, she had . She would only be finishing what Mariel started.

And then, to Leda’s surprise, she learned that Mariel was dead too.

In the aftermath of that terrifying confrontation in Dubai, Leda had set an i-Net alert to flag any mentions of Mariel’s name. She’d never expected it to catch an obituary . But one day in rehab, she found the obit waiting in her inbox: Mariel Arellano Valconsuelo, age 17, has gone to the Lord. She is survived by her parents, Eduardo and Marina Valconsuelo, and her brother Marcos. . . .

Has gone to the Lord . That was even more vague than the usual passed away or died suddenly . Leda had no idea what had happened to Mariel, whether she’d been in an accident or suffered a sudden illness. Perhaps she too had turned to drugs—out of grief at losing Eris, or regret for what she’d done to Leda in Dubai.

At the news of Mariel’s death, a chilling new fear began to seep into Leda. It felt oddly like some kind of omen, like a terrible portent of things to come.

“I need to get better,” she announced to her doctor that afternoon.

Dr. Reasoner smiled. “Of course, Leda. We all want that for you.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Leda insisted, almost frantic. “I’m caught in this vicious cycle of hurt, and I want to break away from it, but I don’t know how!”

“Life is hard, and drugs are easy. They insulate you from real life, protect you from feeling anything too deeply,” Dr. Reasoner said softly. Leda caught her breath, wishing she could explain that her problem was more than just drugs. It was the gaping vortex of darkness within her that seemed to pull her, and everyone around her, inexorably downward.

“Leda,” the doctor went on, “you need to break the emotional patterns that cause your addiction, and start over. Which is why I’ve recommended that your parents send you to boarding school when you’ve finished your treatment here. You need a fresh start.”

“I can’t go to boarding school!” Leda couldn’t stand the thought of being away from her friends—or her family, as broken and fragile as it was.

“Then the only way you can escape this cycle is with a complete and total overhaul.”

Dr. Reasoner explained that Leda would have to amputate the poisoned parts of her life, like a surgeon with a scalpel, and move forward with whatever remained. She needed to cut out anything that might trigger her problematic behavior, and rebuild.

“What about my boyfriend?” Leda had whispered, and Dr. Reasoner sighed. She had actually met Watt earlier that year, when he came to Leda’s rehab check-in.

“I think that Watt is the worst trigger of them all.”

Even amid the blind haze of her pain, Leda realized that the doctor was right. Watt knew her— really knew her, beneath every last scrap of deceit, all her insecurities and fears, all the terrible things she had done. Watt was too tangled up in who she had been, and Leda needed to focus on who she was becoming.

So when she got back from rehab, she broke up with Watt for good.

Leda’s thoughts were interrupted by a bright-red notification flashing in the corner of her vision. “Look! It’s time for our massages!” Ilara exclaimed, glancing hopefully at her daughter.

Leda tried to muster up a smile, though she didn’t really care about massages anymore. Massages were something that had belonged to the old Leda.

She waded through the water after her mom, past the mud mask station and carved ice bar to the cordoned-off area reserved for private spa treatments. They stepped through an invisible sound barrier, and the laughter and voices of the Blue Lagoon cut off sharply, replaced by harp music that was piped in through speakers.

Two flotation mats were arranged in the sheltered space, each anchored to the bottom of the pool with an ivory ribbon. Leda froze with her hands on her mat. Suddenly, all she could see was the cream-colored ribbon of Eris’s scarf, fluttering against her red-gold hair as she tumbled into the darkness. The scarf that Leda had so drastically misinterpreted, because it was a gift from Leda’s dad —

“Leda? Is everything okay?” her mom asked, her brow furrowed in concern.

“Of course,” Leda said stiffly, and she hauled herself onto her massage mat. It began heating up, its sensors determining where she was sore and customizing her treatment.

Leda tried to force her eyes shut and relax. Everything would be fine, now that all the darkness of last year was behind her. She wouldn’t let the mistakes of her past weigh her down.

She let her hands trail in the artificially blue waters of the lagoon, trying to empty her mind, but her fingers kept splaying and then closing anxiously into a fist.