December 2119
THERE HAS ALWAYS been something otherworldly about the first snow of the year in New York.
It gilds the city’s flaws, its hard edges, transforming Manhattan into a proud, glittering northern place. Magic hangs heavy in the air. On the morning of the first snow, even the most jaded New Yorkers pause in the streets to look up at the sky, stilled by a quiet sense of awe. As if every hot summer they forgot that this was possible, and only when the first flakes of snow kiss their faces can they believe in it again.
It seems almost that the snowfall might wash the city clean, reveal all the monstrous secrets buried beneath its surface.
But then, some secrets are best kept buried.
It was on one of these mornings of cold, enchanted silence that a girl stood on the roof of Manhattan’s enormous skyscraper.
She stepped closer to the edge, and the wind whipped at her hair. Snowflakes danced around her in splintered crystals. Her skin glowed like an overexposed hologram in the predawn light. If anyone had been up there to see her, they would have said that she looked troubled, and sharply beautiful. And afraid.
She hadn’t been on the roof in over a year, yet it looked the same as ever. Photovoltaic panels huddled on its surface, waiting to drink in the sun and convert it to usable power. An enormous steel spire twisted up to collide with the sky. And below her hummed an entire city—a thousand-story tower, teeming with millions of people.
Some of them she had loved, some of them she had resented. Many she had never known at all. Yet in their own ways they had betrayed her, every last one of them. They had made her life unbearable by depriving her of the one person she had ever loved.
The girl knew she’d been up here too long. She was starting to feel the familiar slippery light-headedness as her body slowed down, struggling to adjust to the decreased oxygen, to pull resources in toward her core. She curled her toes. They were numb. The air downstairs was oxygenated and infused with vitamins, but here on the roof it felt whip-thin.
She hoped they would forgive her for what she was about to do. But she didn’t have a choice. It was either this, or go on leading a shriveled, starved, half life: a life deprived of the only person who made it worth living. She felt a pang of guilt, but even stronger was her profound sense of relief, that at least—at last—it would soon be over.
The girl reached up to wipe at her eyes, as if the wind had stung them to tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, though there was no one around to hear. Who was she talking to, anyway? Maybe the city below her or the entire world or her own quiet conscience.
And what did it matter? New York would go on with or without her, the same as ever, just as loud and electric and raucous and bright. New York didn’t care that those were the last words Avery Fuller ever spoke.
Three months earlier
AVERY DRUMMED HER fingers restlessly on the armrest of her family’s chopper. She felt her boyfriend’s gaze on her and glanced up. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, teasing.
“Like what? Like I want to kiss you?” Max answered his own question by leaning over to drop a kiss on her lips. “You may not realize it, Avery, but I always want to kiss you.”
“Please prepare yourselves for the final approach to New York,” the chopper’s autopilot cut in, projecting the words through unseen speakers. Not that Avery needed the update; she’d been tracking their progress this entire trip.
“You okay?” Max’s eyes were warm on hers.
Avery shifted, struggling to explain. The last thing she wanted was for Max to think she was anxious about him. “It’s just . . . so much happened while I was gone.” It had been a long time. Seven months, the longest she’d ever spent away from New York in all her eighteen years.
“Including me.” Max gave a conspiratorial grin.
“Especially you,” Avery told him, mirroring his smile.
The Tower swam up rapidly to dominate the view through their flexiglass windows. Avery had seen it from this perspective plenty of times—all those years of traveling with her family, or with her friend Eris and her parents—but she’d never before noticed how much it looked like a massive chrome headstone. Like Eris’s headstone.
Avery shoved that thought aside. She focused instead on the autumn sunlight dancing over the choppy surface of the river, burnishing the golden torch of the Statue of Liberty, which once seemed so tall but now was absurdly dwarfed by its great neighbor, the thousand-story megatower that sprouted from the concrete surface of Manhattan. The Tower that her father’s company had helped build, in which the Fullers occupied the top floor, the highest penthouse in the entire world.
Avery let her gaze swoop to the boats and autocars buzzing below, the monorails suspended in the air as delicately as strands of spider’s silk.
She’d left New York in February, soon after the launch of her father’s new vertical living complex in Dubai. That was the night when she and Atlas had decided that they couldn’t be together, no matter how much they loved each other. Because even though they weren’t related by blood, Atlas was Avery’s adopted brother.
Avery had thought then that her entire world was shattered. Or maybe she herself was shattered—into so many infinitesimally small pieces that she’d become the character from the nursery rhyme, the one who could never be put back together.