“You’re going to love it!” Nicki gripped the rail of the Thames Clipper as it cruised down the river. She bounced on her tiptoes with excitement. “The observatory is one of my favorite places in the city. You can stand right on the prime meridian.” She glanced over at me. “Do you know what that is?”
“It divides the earth into Eastern and Western hemispheres,” I said, my voice flat. She raised her hand for a high-five, but I refused to slap it back.
“Got it in one. Nicely done. The observatory was built in 1670.”
I couldn’t stand her nonstop tour guide patter. She’d called and insisted we meet at the wharf. I agreed because I was fresh out of ideas. I’d had to skip our official activity, too, pleading a fake migraine headache. Kendra had made a snide comment about how it was turning out that I was quite the delicate flower with all my health issues. So not only was I missing a chance to see Stonehenge and ticking off the other people in my group, but I was also stuck with a psycho.
“I went here the first time as a kid with my grandfather,” Nicki said. “He was an amateur astronomer. He had his own telescope, and when I would stay with them at their cabin up on the Orkney Islands, he would wake me up late at night and take me out to look at the stars.”
“Sounds nice,” I mumbled.
“It felt so naughty, being up past bedtime, when of course my grandma knew the whole time. She was the one who would make sure we had a big thick quilt and a thermos of hot chocolate and ginger biscuits, but I liked thinking it was something special, just for Grandpa and me. As if we were getting away with something. We’d sit in the garden, me in my pajamas, and he’d tell me all about the various constellations and Newton and Herschel and Halley.” Nicki’s voice trailed off as if she were still listening to the far-off voice of her grandfather. “I think that’s when I got interested in science. His excitement was infectious. How about you? Who got you into robotics?”
I watched the brown water slip past the boat, turning into a frothy cream in our wake. The Thames had an interesting odor, briny like the ocean, but with a thick, murky smell of mud. “My dad, I guess.” I shrugged. “I was always good at it. It made sense to me. I like things that can be measured. Data. Stats.”
“Was that hard with your mum? She seems a bit more . . . woo-woo. All that trust in your destiny, find your passion, know your moon cycle blah blah, she seems like the kind who’d believe in crystals.”
My hands tightened around the rail, the knuckles turning white. “What do you know about my mom?” I refused to even think about the line of “healing” crystals that Mom had lined up in the kitchen, reflecting light across the walls.
Nicki tossed her head to get her hair out of her eyes. “I checked you out online. I found her blog and started reading. Fascinating stuff.”
My heart clenched into a hot fist in the center of my chest. I hated the idea of Nicki crawling all over stories of me as a kid. Picking apart my history by reading between the lines. It was also a reminder that she didn’t leave any stone unturned. She thought of everything. She knew too much.
“Mothers, huh? Can’t live with them, hard to get away with killing them.” Nicki barked out a laugh just as the Clipper bumped against the Greenwich dock. Nicki squealed and grabbed my hand. “We’re here! Come with me.”
She pulled me through the crowd, weaving our way up to the observatory, calling out the sights as we went. I tried to pull my hand out of hers, but it was as if we were handcuffed together.
Nicki stopped short at the top of the hill. “Ugh, there’s a line to get in.” She glared at the people waiting to get inside the observatory. “Let’s wait a bit to see if it clears. It’s no fun to look around if a bunch of insipid tourists are milling about.” She poked me in the ribs. “No offense. I feel like you’re an honorary local. Here, check out the view.”
I walked over to stand next to her. There was a field of green below us leading to a cluster of old buildings, then the river and the glass high-rises just beyond. “Nice.” There was no way I was going to admit it was impressive, as though we were in the past looking toward the future. London was always overlapping the present onto the past, blurring the two together.
“We can talk here,” Nicki said.
Hot acid rose up in my throat. I’d known that’s why she wanted to get together, but now that she was going to speak, I wanted to bolt before I heard what she had to say. “Okay,” I said. I made sure I was ready.
“Now, this might seem rude, but I’m going to need your phone”—Nicki shrugged—“and I’m going to pat you down.” She smiled. “No bad touch, I promise.”
I stepped back. “What?”
“I want to make sure you’re not recording what I say. I want to trust you, but with recent events . . .” Nicki let her voice trail off.
I handed over my phone, feeling my hopes shrinking down, collapsing in on themselves. She smirked when she saw the record function open, but she didn’t seem angry. If anything, she seemed proud of me for making the attempt. She erased the track, then clicked the phone off, jamming it into her bag. I stood stiffly while she quickly patted down my pockets and ran her fingers through my hair, making sure I wasn’t wearing any kind of wire. “You done?” I asked coldly.
“Don’t be a cranky pants. I’m just making sure that we go into this discussion as equals. No more trying to outmaneuver the other—we’ll start fresh, okay?”
“Clean slate?”
“Exactly.” She linked arms with me. “Let’s walk and talk. We started off well, but we got onto a bad track.”
I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the fog of anger. “A bad track? You murdered Connor. That’s not bad. That’s a fucking disaster.” I glanced around belatedly to make sure no one was close enough to overhear our conversation.
She rolled her eyes. “A disaster would have been getting caught. We went over this last time. Connor isn’t worth being this upset.”
“He didn’t deserve what happened to him.” I flashed to the image of his shoe lying on the train platform.
“You want the world to be this place where things happen because people deserve them, but you know it’s not that way. Does someone who gets cancer deserve it?”
“No, of course not,” I said furiously.
“And someone who’s born into a family with a lot of money, did they do something to deserve their privilege?”
I pulled my arm back from hers. “No, I’m not saying that . . .” I wanted to shake her words out of my ears. They had this tendency to burrow in, as though they wanted to take root. She repulsed me, but she was also fascinating.
“But you are. You’re trying to insist that there is some ultimate sense of justice in the world. My point is that Connor wasn’t a great guy. Because he’s dead, you’re focusing on the good stuff instead of remembering his real character.”
“I’m not saying Connor was perfect, but he wasn’t evil.” My mind darted against my will to what Miriam had told me about him manipulating girls to get photos and then sharing those pictures with the world. I shoved away the uncomfortable truth that Nicki might be right, that he wasn’t worth it.
Nicki giggled. “Evil? Jesus, you do have a bit of your mum’s woo-woo genes. Next thing I know, you’ll be reading his aura. Of course he wasn’t evil—this isn’t some BBC drama with angels and demons. He was in your way and now he’s not. It’s that simple. If it had been an accident, you wouldn’t admit it, but part of you would have felt he got what he deserved.”
I refused to even let myself think about how I might have felt. It didn’t matter. It hadn’t been an accident. “And your mom is in your way,” I said.
Nicki nodded enthusiastically as if she were my tutor and I’d finally figured out a tricky geometry problem on my own. “Exactly.”
“I can’t just kill someone.” I cracked my knuckles in the hope that that would release the tension building up in my body.
“Do you know how the military trains people to kill?” Nicki asked. “They studied it—an American, I think. He called it killology.” She noticed my expression. “I’m not making it up. I can’t recall the guy’s name, but he wrote a book about it after studying World War Two. It’s complicated, of course, but it’s all about training. If you want to make people who are generally not killers into a military unit capable of shooting and bombing others, you have to change how they think.”
“And that’s what you’ve done?”
“You’re making it sound like I’ve got loads of people buried in the cellar or something.” She rolled her eyes. “Do you think a soldier in the army is looking at the guy across the field from him and pondering how that guy might have a family, or own a dog who likes him, or be a great painter? No, of course not. He thinks, That guy is in my way. That guy’s my enemy. He doesn’t even really see him as human, but an obstacle. That’s how you win wars.”
“At least that’s how you get what you want.”
“If that’s your best option, then yes.” Nicki pointed to a small food cart ahead of us on the path. “Do you want something to drink?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She walked up, considered her choices, and fished through her pockets for some money.
“A Perrier and . . .” She looked back at me. I shook my head. I was certain if I swallowed anything it would come right back up. Once she had her drink, we kept circling the observatory building.
“Why is your mother in your way?”
Nicki unscrewed the top of her Perrier with a crackle of the metal cap and took a drink before answering. “Did you know that you have to be really careful if you’re trying to rescue someone who’s drowning?”
“No.” The headache I’d faked to get out of going with my group was developing for real. Trying to keep up with Nicki’s conversational train was like navigating a carnival fun house. You’d turn one way and it would be a dead end. You’d go in a new direction and think you were going the right way and then run smack into a mirror. Up was down, right was left, and nothing made sense.
“I worked for a summer as a lifeguard. Lousy job, by the way, sounds way better than it really is,” Nicki said as an aside. “One of the things we were warned about in our training is that if someone is going down, they’ll do anything. They’re in survival mode. They’ll try to crawl up your body to get out of the water. All that matters to them is getting their head clear so they can breathe.”
“Okay.”
Nicki took another long sip of her water. “That’s my mum. It’s bad enough that she’s going down, but she’s trying to take me with her. She’s drowning in regret for her horrid decisions. She drinks too much. Then she falls for these guys who are total wankers and is surprised every time when they show their true colors. And then that makes her want to drink more, and that takes us full circle back to more bad decisions. She got a decent settlement from my dad when they split, and my grandparents left her money. She doesn’t have to work, but she’s spending cash like she’s trying to punish someone. Except she’s the only one who’s going to get hurt.”
“Why don’t you move out?”
Nicki rocked back and forth on her heels. “It’s not that easy.”
I wanted to pull my hair out in frustration. “It’s a hell of a lot easier than murdering her.” I realized my voice was getting louder and forced myself to quiet down.
“God, you have a flair for drama.” Nicki tossed her empty bottle into a recycling bin with a loud clank. “I chose you because I thought you were more of a scientist, but now you’re acting like you’re trying out for the Globe Theatre summer series.
“My mum is spending every last pound she has in the bank. Money that my grandparents meant to be for my university education. Maybe even to buy a small flat in the city. If I move out, I’ll get none of that. My mum will cut me off to punish me for leaving. What I will get is an earful. How I’ve abandoned her just like my dad.” Nicki’s eyes narrowed and her normally calm demeanor broke as she spat out her last words. “She’s used to getting her way. She thinks she’s entitled to what she has, but I intend to teach her she’s wrong.”
I seized on what Nicki had said. “So, this is about money.”
She sighed dramatically, her shoulders dropping. “It’s partly about money. It’s also about my freedom, which doesn’t come without a cost after all. It’s about doing what’s right. And I know you don’t believe it, but it’s also about helping my mum.”
I choked on the spit in my mouth. “Are you kidding? Getting me to kill her is doing her a favor?”
“Yes.” Nicki paused. “Do you think things are going to get better for her? Because I don’t. She’s going to keep drinking. She’s going to end up broke with a liver that gives out. If she goes now, it’s ending all of that before it gets worse, before she ends up in some shitty bed-sit that she can barely afford while being on the dole. My mum’s going to keep spiraling down. She’s going to be miserable. And she’s going to try to take me with her. Just like a drowning victim.”
“She could turn her life around.”
“Please. Let’s not bother talking about things that are never going to happen. Let’s keep the focus on finding a way you can do it that doesn’t freak you out too much. I don’t want you running off with things unfinished.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say. I’m never going to think the solution is killing your mom.” I could hear the quaver in my own voice.
Nicki stopped walking and turned to me so we were face-to-face. “You don’t have to think it’s the best solution for me, or my mum. But you better realize it’s the only solution to the problem you’ve got.” Nicki tossed me my phone and it bounced off my chest. I caught it just before it hit the ground. She waved and then melted into the crowd of tourists.
I backed away from her. I refused to believe that homicide was my only solution, but I was scared. I couldn’t go to the police or she would make it look as though I had murdered Connor. I couldn’t tell my parents about her; with my past, they’d never believe me. I couldn’t bear to tell Alex—the last thing I wanted to do was enmesh him in this black hole. Emily was too far away to give advice, and this wasn’t the kind of thing I could put in a letter. Every direction I turned mentally, a door slammed shut, closing me in tighter and tighter until I felt ready to scream.