Page 91 of The Towering Sky
I’m watching them on the security cams!
Watt stabbed desperately at the server. “Comeon!” he muttered, aloud this time, just as the zip-byte glowed the bright amber color that meant the upload was finished.
In a single motion Watt swiped it back into his pocket. He took a trembling breath, his heart hammering in his chest. Sweat dampened the armpits of his T-shirt.Which way?
I’m sorry; this is my only option, Nadia replied as the fire alarm went off.
Watt stumbled out into the corridor, which was flashing an angry red. The siren screamed overhead. He glanced left and right, his head pounding—there was a flash of heels coming from the left, which was enough to send him in the other direction. He hurried back toward the small freight door, realizing a moment too late that it might be locked during an emergency, butof course it wasn’t. Several levels up, he thought he heard fire-bots scrambling to deal with the nonexistent blaze.
Watt crawled through the freight entrance and emerged running onto the street, melting seamlessly into the surging midTower crowd, his ragged breathing and gleaming forehead the only indication that he wasn’t just another commuter.
Thank god for Nadia, his own personal guardian angel.
He walked as fast as he could down the block, hands shoved into his pockets. Fear had lodged in his throat like a shard of ice. He couldn’t believe that they had actually pulled it off.
There was an open plaza at the corner of the street, where people lounged around a cluster of benches: Saturday-evening shoppers holding hands, parents tugging their babies on magnetically tethered hoverstrollers. Watt sank onto a bench and clipped the zip-byte into his tablet.
It was a massive file, an aggregation of dozens of documents related to the death of Mariel Valconsuelo. The death certificate and coroner’s report; transcripts of interviews with Mariel’s parents and friends, and with Leda, Watt, Rylin, and Avery. Watt swallowed. He hadn’t realized that Rylin and Avery were questioned too, though that made sense.
How bad is it? How much do they know?he asked Nadia.
Watt was going to read it himself too, eventually. Probably. But by now Nadia would have already scanned and analyzed the full contents of the file. After all, she could consume the entire dictionary in under half a second.
“Watt,” she replied heavily. “I’m so sorry. It doesn’t look good.”
What do you mean?
“It seems the police have connected Mariel’s death with Eris’s. They know that something happened that night on the roof, that there was some kind of cover-up. Right now they’re still trying to figure out why you all lied.”
Watt felt cold and clammy all over. He ripped the caffeine patches from his arm, and his head instantly erupted into a splitting headache. He winced.If they realize that Leda was blackmailing us, the next logical step is to find out what she had on us—why she was able to force us to hide the truth, and then we’ll really be in trouble... Leda most of all.
“Watt, you need to talk to them. To warn them.”
Nadia was right. He had to talk to the others right away: to Avery and Rylin, and especially to Leda. They had to confer about what they would do next. The only way they could possibly emerge from this unscathed was together. If they all stuck to their stories, if they all guarded one another’s backs, they might possibly have a shot.
Where are they right now?Watt demanded.
They’re all at Pierson Fuller’s inauguration ball.
Oh, right. Watt felt an odd sense of disbelief that events like that were still going on—that the world was still churning forward, when it felt as if it were tilting furiously off-kilter.
He stood up, took a deep breath and began to run, ignoring the alarmed stares of passersby. Thank god he’d bought that tux last year, in a ridiculous attempt to impress Avery. He was getting far more wears out of it than he had ever expected.
As he sprinted toward the downTower elevator, Watt had a curious and unwelcome sense of déjà-vu. This felt too much like last year, when he’d lost Leda at the Dubai party and found her precariously near death—or worse, like the night he’d raced up to Avery’s roof, only to arrive just as Eris fell off the edge.
He could only hope that, this time, he wouldn’t be too late.
CALLIOPE
WHEN CALLIOPE RETURNEDto the Mizrahis’ apartment, she was greeted by a heavy and decidedly menacing silence.
She started hesitantly down the hallway, her footfalls vanishing into the thick carpet. Her reflection danced in the ornate mirror to her left, wearing the jeans and long-sleeved shirt she’d been wearing when she left, hours ago; she’d stopped back at Altitude to change out of her incriminating gown, which she’d left hanging in a locker there. She couldn’t help thinking that she seemed unnaturally pale.
Nadav was seated in a high-backed chair in the living room, as if he were a judge about to deliver some kind of final sentence. He looked up at her arrival, but didn’t speak.
Where was Elise? Maybe she was hiding from the confrontation, Calliope thought; maybe she figured that it was easier to swoop in later, to help advocate on Calliope’s behalf.
Or maybe she’d decided that it was better for her marriage if she didn’t weigh in on what her daughter had done.
