She stared at each of them in turn. Rylin nodded, slowly, and then Avery joined her, like the helpless puppets that they were. Watt stared at Leda for a moment, his mind racing, desperate to think of a solution.
But there was no foreseeable way out. He was going to lie about an innocent girl’s death.
Watt finally nodded, inevitably, as Leda had known he would.
AVERY
AVERY HAD NEVER seen the Church of St. Martin, on the 947th floor, so completely packed as it was the morning of Eris’s funeral.
Eris’s funeral. It was almost impossible to believe, even for Avery, who had seen her die.
The church was dimly lit and draped all in black, filled with somberly dressed mourners. The only bright spot was a profusion of white flowers around the burnished wood casket up front, and the view screen propped up next to it, flashing pictures of Eris—all of them stuffy posed portraits that her mom must have forced her to take, not the spontaneous selfies Eris filled her feeds with.
Eris would have hated this, Avery thought, with a sob that was half laugh. It was somber and far too traditional. Not at all like Eris herself had been, expansive and eager for life.
She had so many memories of Eris. Playing dress-up together when they were kids, fighting over the princess dress that changed color when you waved the matching wand. The time they’d gotten those awful bowl haircuts together in seventh grade, the night they first drank beer, how Eris had snuck Avery back to her place and held back that same haircut while Avery was sick all night. Giggling in Latin class because all the words in their translations sounded dirty. That time they’d run away to London for a weekend, just because Eris professed herself “bored of New York.”
Eris had been going through a rough time lately, though, and Avery suddenly wished that she’d been more supportive. Eris had really needed her, yet Avery had been too wrapped up in her own Atlas and Leda and Watt drama to do more than throw her a birthday party. Even that had ended in disaster.
At least Eris had been happy the last couple of weeks with that lower-floor girl she was seeing. Avery wondered where that girl was, if she was here this afternoon. She wished she’d been able to meet her. Eris had never even told Avery her name.
Avery glanced around from her vantage point at the front of the church. It seemed like everyone who had ever met Eris was here, all their classmates and teachers, their friends’ parents and parents’ friends. Avery had seen Watt toward the back, his eyes just as shadowed as hers, though she hadn’t spoken to him since that night. Eris’s other friends sat in the row behind her: Jess, Risha, even Ming—and Leda, of course, whose eyes were boring into Avery’s back the whole time. Eris’s family was arrayed in the front pew: her mom, wearing a black crepe dress that wasn’t quite funeral appropriate, though no one would dare tell her; Eris’s aunt Layne, flown in from California; and to Avery’s surprise, Everett Radson and his elderly mom. Grandma Radson stared forward, her eyes unreadable. She was draped in more diamonds than Avery had ever seen on a single person, as if she could make up for in carats what she lacked in youth. Next to her, Mr. Radson sobbed into a monogrammed handkerchief.
Avery wanted to be upset with him on Eris’s behalf. It didn’t seem right that he’d abandoned Eris in life, only to act so grieved upon her death. Yet she couldn’t be mad, not at a man who looked broken with sorrow.
Avery and her family were in the second pew, behind the Dodd-Radsons, a surprising place of honor given that Eris had died at Avery’s party. But Eris’s parents didn’t seem to blame her for what had happened. She couldn’t say the same for her own parents, who could barely bring themselves to look at her. Their faces were still white with shock. Next to Avery stood Atlas, looking handsome as ever in his dark suit. He kept trying to catch her eye, but she stared determinedly forward at the screen, flickering with stiffly posed portraits of her dead friend.
“For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out …”
Nothing, nothing, nothing, the word echoed hollowly in her mind. Avery knew about nothing, because it was exactly what she had done for Eris. She hadn’t told anyone the truth about her friend’s death. Not even Atlas.
The truth wouldn’t change things, she’d tried to rationalize to herself. It wouldn’t bring Eris back to life. But Avery knew those thoughts were cowardly and self-interested, and she despised herself for harboring them.
After Eris’s fall—just three nights ago, though it felt like a lifetime—Avery had abruptly broken up the party and called the cops. They’d arrived on the scene almost instantly. Avery led them to the roof and explained in a shaky voice how she’d found it, how she brought a few friends up here to show them the view. The four of them had gone in for police questioning. As they’d agreed, they all stuck to Leda’s story: Eris was drunk, and had slipped.
Avery was a little shocked at how easily their lie was accepted. No one asked for any proof, or pressed any charges. Avery knew she should probably be held accountable for opening the roof in the first place, but the only consequence was a maintenance crew coming to seal it off forever. And all the stares that followed her now, even worse than they’d been before. How shocking that Avery Fuller exhibited such poor judgment, they all whispered, letting her intoxicated friend onto the roof like that. What a tragic accident.
The enormous church organ struck up, and everyone stood to sing a funeral hymn. Avery reached for the old-fashioned songbook—this wasn’t the kind of church that projected the words onto your contacts, like hers did—and tried to follow along, her voice hoarse. She was holding the book with her right hand, but her left, the one next to Atlas, was hanging by her side. He brushed his pinky finger against hers, ever so carefully, in a gesture of silent support.
Avery ignored it. She could feel Leda staring at her from the row behind, just daring Avery to test her limits.
Avery didn’t know what to do about Atlas. She loved him so much that it hurt, with a love that saturated every fiber of her being. But her love was complicated now, underpinned as it was by tragedy, and grief.
They couldn’t run away, not with Leda knowing the truth the way she did. It would have been all right before—their parents would have figured out some story, a way to spin it the way they’d done last year when Atlas went missing. But if they left now, Avery knew Leda would expose their secret the moment they were gone. She refused to subject her parents to that. She and Atlas had to stay, at least until they figured out how to handle Leda.
A secret for a secret, she thought caustically. Yes, she had a secret on Leda, to counteract what Leda knew about her and Atlas. But how long could this tenuous balancing act really last?
Everything was different now. The time before Eris’s death felt like another lifetime, another world. That Avery was gone. That Avery had broken, and a new Avery—harder, more brittle—had stepped out of the shards.
As she stood there, unable to even cry in grief over her friend, it seemed to Avery that she would never feel safe again as long as Leda was around.
MARIEL
MARIEL STOOD AT the back of the church, half hidden in the shadows, almost a shadow herself. She was wearing the dress that Eris had hated so much—she didn’t own any other black dresses—but she’d thrown a sweater over it; paired with her black flats and fake pearl studs, it didn’t look so terrible. She’d even left off her normal red lipstick, only dusting a little powder around her red-rimmed eyes, raw from crying. She wanted to look nice as she said her final good-bye to Eris. The only girl she’d ever really loved, though she hadn’t told Eris, at least not in so many words.