by Kit Rocha
Plus, crossing things off was extremely satisfying.
“Marjorie?”
The name felt so out of place here, it took a moment for Maya to understand the once-familiar sound. She glanced up and found the speaker hovering just inside the open warehouse door.
She was tall and thin, with a cascade of curly hair dyed electric blue braided back from her face and tumbling down her back. Dark lipstick and thick winged eyeliner stood out dramatically against her pale skin, and her clothes were the height of punk-chic fashion up on the hill.
But her arm was the show-stealer—her asymmetrical top was cut to show off the full prosthetic, composed of shiny chrome at the shoulder and wrist. The space in between glowed softly—a moving, full-length LED tattoo sleeve. An ethereal mermaid framed by a sunset, her dark hair floating on an invisible wind. Beneath her, the waves broke against her rock, the surf churning in ever-changing teals and greens and midnight blue.
The skill involved with creating such a thing was breathtaking. Not just science but art, and it took hearing her name—her old name—a second time to drag her attention back to the woman’s unfamiliar face. “I’m sorry, I don’t…”
Her memory caught up a moment later. The face had thrown her, but she knew that voice. “Diana?”
A gentle smile curved the woman’s lips, and even if the face had changed, that smile hadn’t. Neither had the mischievous spark in her eyes. “Hey, Starborn.”
Shock held Maya in place as the stranger with Diana’s voice approached the wide counter. If Maya had been the brains of Birgitte’s rebellion, Diana Cameron had been its gleefully dirty hands. Birgitte would have denied having a fixer, but that was exactly what Diana had been. She dabbled in forgery, dipped her toe into larceny, navigated the black market with ease, and cheerfully laundered TechCorps cash into clean credits.
She’d vanished in the month before Birgitte’s death. Maya had always assumed Richter had gotten to her, too.
Diana stopped on the other side of the counter, both hands resting lightly on the surface as she studied Maya. “God, you’re all grown up now, aren’t you?”
“Time does that.” Maya tilted her head, taking in the green eyes—probably contacts—pointed chin, and more prominent cheekbones. “So … I got older, and you got a new face.”
That won her another cheerful grin that was pure Diana. “It seemed prudent, all things considered.”
No doubt it had. Tobias Richter would have done damn near anything to get his hands on the woman who had helped Birgitte fake deaths, embezzle funds, and pay for sedition. And unlike with Maya, Richter wouldn’t have been forced to avoid carving pieces off Diana until he got what he wanted. “I looked for you after I got free.”
“I was long gone. That was my deal with Birgitte.” Diana dipped a hand into the bag slung across her shoulder and withdrew a bulky envelope. “To leave Atlanta and not come back until Tobias Richter was dead.”
Maya glanced down at the envelope. It was ragged around the edges but had clearly once been one of the standard white envelopes meant for internal printouts, one of the thousands available in every storage closet in HQ but rarely used in a mostly digital world. This one had her name written across the front in Birgitte’s crisp penmanship, the ink faded but still sharp.
A chill claimed her. “What is it?”
Diana pushed the envelope across the counter. “There were things Birgitte wanted you to know if she didn’t survive to tell you herself. But she made me promise not to bring this to you unless there was absolutely no chance Richter could find it.”
Hesitantly, Maya touched the package. It was thick across the middle, like someone had placed a small book inside. A diary, maybe? She’d never known Birgitte to write in one—but Birgitte had been far too paranoid to put her private thoughts down in a digital format. Maya had been the receptacle of her secrets.
Maybe this was where she’d kept her secrets about Maya.
Diana cleared her throat. “Anyway, Starborn, I can’t stay long, even with my new face. I still have enemies in this town. But here.” She slid over a scrap of paper with an IP address scrawled across it. “If you need me.”
“Thank you, Diana.” Maya folded her fingers around the paper. “And I’m glad you’re okay.”
“You, too, kiddo.” Diana gave the envelope one last tap, an odd glint in her eye. “You’d best look at it soon. Birgitte left you more than you realize.”
“I will.”
Diana gave a two-fingered salute and pivoted toward the exit. Maya watched her go before she dropped her gaze to the envelope.
Birgitte’s handwriting was a punch to the gut. Even now, with the demons of her past dead and buried and her focus turned toward finishing the revolution Birgitte had started …
Maya had been a child drafted into a war she didn’t understand by a woman who had no doubt hated herself for it but had done it anyway.
Did she want to know whatever secrets this envelope contained? Secrets so terrible, Birgitte had been willing to let them vanish forever rather than fall into Tobias Richter’s hands?
Put that way, could Maya afford not to know them?
Taking a deep breath, she ripped open the envelope. A thin leather journal spilled out onto the counter, along with a dozen credit sticks and another envelope marked Last Will and Testament of Birgitte Skovgaard.
Ignoring the second envelope, Maya carefully unbuckled the journal and opened to the page marked by a thin, black ribbon. Birgitte’s clean, sure strokes marked the date at the top—June 1st of 2069.
I met my data courier today. If hell exists, I’ve surely secured my spot there for agreeing to this.
The girl is all of seven years old and already fluent in six languages. She’s studying astronomy and just started integral calculus. The scientists are excited. Few of their subjects have adapted to the procedure as well as DC-031 …
Gray came in, rubbing the top of his head. He did it almost habitually now, running his hand over the short but growing stubble on his scalp. “Ready for a break, sweetheart?”
“Yes.” She slapped the journal shut and shoved it away. “Way past ready.”
He wrapped his arms around her and peered down at the package’s scattered contents. “What’s all this?”
“Birgitte’s last gift to me.” She started to sweep the credit chips back into a little pile. “A journal and her will. Apparently she left it with someone who was only supposed to bring it to me if Richter turned up dead. So … congratulations to me, I guess.”
He picked up a chip and idly turned it over in his hands. “Are you going to read it?”
“I think I have to,” she admitted reluctantly. “There might be something in there that can teach me about myself. Or help us take down the TechCorps.”
“I can do it—if you’re not up to it, I mean.” He held up the chip. “How much?”
“No idea.” She shoved the envelope with the will toward him. “It probably says in here. Will you look? I don’t know if I can.”
He released her, took the envelope, and eased open the flap. It was so old that the adhesive cracked open, yielding several folded papers. Gray straightened them and started skimming the first page. After a moment, he froze, his eyes wide. “Uhh, Maya? Scan one of those chips, would you?”
She slid her stool to the side and jerked open one of the drawers set under the table. A jumble of tech and solar batteries cluttered it, but the chip reader was right on top. She grabbed it and rolled her stool back.
It only took a second. The reader beeped, and she waited for the amount to pop up.
1,021,008.
Maya dropped the scanner.
Gray looked up at her. “Birgitte left you just over ten million credits. Clean and untraceable, according to this.”
The number stared up at her, stark and undeniable. Not quite believing her eyes or Gray’s words, she snatched up the scanner and tried again.
1,021,008.
She dropped the credit chip and grabb
ed another one.
978,213.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. “Holy shit.”
“I think you can afford to finish and heat the basement this winter.”
A hysterical giggle bubbled up. Maya slapped her hand over her mouth, but it escaped anyway. “Oh my God, am I rich?”
He chuckled. “You are very, very rich. Rich enough to do whatever the hell you want.”
Her mind spun with the possibilities. They could heat the basement. They could provide free meals for people struggling through the winter. Hell, they could buy a whole new building and heat that, too, and fill it with food and warmth and hope.
She could fund her revolution.
She bounced off the stool and threw her arms around his neck, laughing as he lifted her off the ground and spun her. His mouth found hers, and the kiss wove heat through her. She wrapped her legs around his hips and clung to him as the pleasure of touching him—of having him alive to touch—swept her away.
The money would be useful. But she already had her miracle, and she was never letting him go.
March 19th, 2081
Marjorie,
If you’re reading this, you survived and Richter did not.
I know because I’ve arranged for it to be delivered to you only after confirmation of his death. I couldn’t risk this journal falling into his hands, you see. In the back, I’ve recorded the truth of you. Your true aptitude test results, which are astounding. Your undoctored neurological benchmark tests, which are unprecedented. If the TechCorps saw these, they would take you apart to try and replicate you.
You are something special. I think you would have been, even without our genetic tampering. Your mind is a gift. You shouldn’t hesitate to use it to its fullest potential.
There will likely be consequences. There always are. Those you’ll have to figure out on your own, because we have no road map for this. I believe in you, though. There’s nothing you can’t do if you set your formidable mind to the task.
I shouldn’t have smothered your potential. I have done so many terrible things in my life, but there’s nothing I regret more than making you fear yourself.
You are a miracle, Marjorie. Learn everything you can. Be anything you want to be. Do it in spite of us. Do it to spite us.
Do it for yourself.
Birgitte
TESSA
Tessa Morales was growing to hate Monet.
Perhaps it was an uncharitable thought. After all, the canvas propped on her easel was going to score her twenty thousand in clean credits. She’d run herself ragged as a delivery girl in her teens and had been lucky to bring home a hundred credits a week. This? This was easy. She could paint water lilies in her sleep by now.
Which was why she hated them.
She’d never understand the fixation of the rich people on the Hill. It wasn’t as if the water lilies were even Monet’s most interesting works. He’d painted pieces that would have been a challenge and a wonder to recreate. And there were so many works that had gone missing in the chaos after the Flares. Hell, huge chunks of the Eastern Seaboard were underwater. The opportunities for miraculous “discovery” were endless.
But the boring rich people wanted Monet. They wanted water lilies.
Tessa wanted their money, so she painted her expert forgeries and tried not to resent the utter banality of their collective taste.
At least the technical aspect still held her attention. There was a science to creating the perfect forgery, and Tessa had refined it to high art. She mixed her own pigments, stretched and aged her own canvas. She’d learned to rescue antique frames and fit them seamlessly to her perfect creations. She knew how a painting recovered from the end of the world should look and feel and even smell. She made it all happen.
And then she sold it to the highest bidder.
Well, she didn’t. Tessa lived a painfully circumspect life almost entirely off the grid. She delivered her forgeries to a middleman, who passed them off to a fence, who supplied an art dealer, who sold them for millions, probably. The fact that only a fraction of the score trickled down to Tessa in return for doing the hardest part sometimes rankled, but she didn’t have the luxury of taking risks.
Rafael had given up everything to buy them their snug little life on the outskirts of Atlanta. She had no right to endanger that.
He’d be horrified to know Tessa felt the weight of that sacrifice, but how could she not? Her softhearted big brother had turned himself into a weapon, mortgaging larger bits of his soul every year. Rafael lied about it, of course. He came home with gifts for the babies and painting supplies for her and endless stacks of untraceable credits for their mother, who always hid her heartbroken tears until he was gone, because Rafael wanted them to be happy.
So they were. Or at least they pretended when he was around.
They pretended they couldn’t see the pain in his eyes, too. The shock, that they’d grown so much. The hurt that he’d missed it. The sharp sting of realization that he had at best a few hours before he had to leave them again. Every family reunion was forced cheer wrapped around grief and impending loss.
And now they couldn’t see him at all, because he was supposed to be dead.
The small fortune in credits that had come with that announcement had been enough to keep the family comfortable until even Rosa was fully grown. She was thirteen already, with a green thumb and a love of gardening that had turned their backyard into a wonderland of living things. Fifteen-year-old Antonio had finally won their mother’s permission to apprentice with the mechanic two doors down and was showing a real flair for it.
And Tessa, at twenty-one, was a master forger. Wouldn’t her big brother love that.
Maybe these water lilies would be her last one. The challenge was losing its appeal, and she didn’t need to supplement the money Rafael could send anymore. Not with his final windfall resting in her mother’s stash in the floorboards under her bed.
Maybe she could take this money and do something for herself with it.
Shame at that bit of selfishness surged, and she welcomed the pounding on her cramped studio door. “Just a second!”
She draped her current work and put up her brushes before opening the door. Rosa stood on the other side, in the middle of a growth spurt that put her eyes almost level with Tessa’s. She’d have their father’s height, no doubt … but the wariness in her eyes was their mother’s. “There’s a stranger at the door, and Mama’s still down at the baker.”
Tessa’s heart thumped. Strangers rarely came to this boring little community, and they never came to the Morales’s front door. But Tessa held her calm expression and put a hand lightly on her baby sister’s shoulder. “Go out into your greenhouse. Stay until I come and get you or until Mama comes back.”
“But Tessa—”
“Now, Rosa.”
Rule number one in the Morales household was obedience. Rosa hurried down the hallway to the back door. Once Tessa heard it shut, she opened a drawer, pulled out her stun gun, and thumbed the biometrics. She walked to the front and canted her body so that her hand would be out of sight before cracking the door.
And immediately knew she was busted.
The stranger was from the Hill. She had to be. Her shiny, red hair was twisted up in an elegant knot that revealed diamonds sparkling at her ears and emeralds circling her throat. Her expensive suit was the height of fashion and tailored perfectly to her long legs and lanky frame. Tessa had seen the advertisement for the woman’s boots on the vid network—this year’s exclusive from the hottest designer on the Hill. There were only a hundred pairs in existence.
The idea that those boots would have found their way to her doorstep if she weren’t about to go down for felony forgery was unimaginable.
“Tessa Morales?” Perfectly outlined lips curved into a smile in her perfectly made-up face, but those eyes sparkled as hard as the diamonds she wore.
Tessa fought a shiver and tightened her grip on her stun gun.
But there was a massive bodyguard lurking a few paces back and another next to the silent car with tinted windows idling in the street.
Fight? Or go quietly? Going quietly might be the only thing that saved the rest of her family. “I’m Tessa,” she said hoarsely.
“Wonderful.” That smile was utterly predatory. “My name is Cara Kennedy. I’m here to make all your dreams come true.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I imagine the acknowledgments for any book written during 2020 will either be incredibly long and detailed … or just broken laughter punctuated by emoji sobs. We don’t have to tell y’all why. You were there.
But for posterity: Hi. Welcome to our pandemic book.
This book was hard. We came into 2020 thinking we’d finally put a string of health and personal crises behind us. February was our month for writing this book. We were going to dig in, get it done, be amazing.
Yes, this is where you say, Oh, you sweet summer children.
We turned in this book Late. We were late before 2020 dawned, and surviving political horror and pandemic devastation as we struggled to keep ourselves and our families going did not help. On top of that, the release for Deal with the Devil had been pushed back, and we launched our first traditionally published book into a chaotic world where bookstores couldn’t open and everyone was having to learn how to Zoom.
Without our team at Tor, this would have all been unlivable. The Mercenary Librarians rode out into the world thanks to the tireless work of publicity bad-asses Caroline Perny and Laura Etzkorn, as well as marketing geniuses Renata Sweeney and Rachel Taylor. Our incredibly encouraging editor, Claire Eddy, held our hands the whole way, and her editorial assistant, Sanaa Ali-Virani, has never met a question she can’t find the answer to. And we ask a lot of questions!
Our agent, Sarah Younger, coaxed us through this book one paragraph, one page, one chapter at a time. It would not exist without her. We would have given up sometime shortly after The Age of Sourdough Starters. We love you, fierce mama shark.
For years, Lillie Applegarth has kept the ever-growing series bible of our world in tip-top shape. The fact that anyone has consistent eye color is a tribute to her. Sharon Muha has been the final proofreading pass on all of our books for just as long. Any mistakes that slip by them are our own (and very determined). Also big shout-out to our copy editor, NaNá Stoelzle, who was a dream to work with. We’re sorry that Bree can’t decide how she feels about typing out numbers.
