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Copyright © 2017 by Vivien Jackson
Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover art by Craig White
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Sputnik, the Butterfly, and El Conejo. Am honored and blessed to be part of your team.
Prologue
MUSTAQBAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 2042
Angela Neko did not celebrate Christmas. First of all, she was thirteen and had long since grown past that kind of fantastical bullshit. Also, she had been taught a severe secular protocol, one that would give her entrée to a whole buffet of opportunities someday, after she graduated. Besides, everybody with a brain knew religion was for anti-intellectuals. Faithmongers believed the fantasies that others fed to them because they lacked the imagination to shape their own realities. Well, she definitely didn’t lack imagination. Or intelligence. Or creativity. She was going places, and fanaticism of any kind could only distract her.
Also, the Santa Claus thing was repulsive. A fat old man invading her dorm in the middle of the night to eat her cookies? Creepy. Not to mention illegal under at least half a dozen statutes.
Still, there were a few sad devotees here at her school, newcomers mostly, homesick kids who were trying to hang on to scraps of wherever they’d come from, and she couldn’t fault them their comfort. They’d produced a plastic tree from the wide-volume printer in the engineering lab and decorated it with paper ribbons and flickery LED lights and other crap. Somebody had stuck a bangle on top that she was fairly certain had started out as a pole dancer’s pastie.
The fake tree stood out in the courtyard in front of her dorm building, so she saw it a lot, but it never, ever tempted her into humming those peppy seasonal songs under her breath. Nope. Angela had control.
So much control, in fact, that it pissed her off mightily when other students lost theirs. Her hyperdeveloped sense of justice meant she had no problem bringing her hammer down where it was warranted.
As was the case on a certain night in late December. After a full day of lecture and lab, Angela hurried through the courtyard, a supplemental master class piping itself directly into her embedded earpiece, but she drew up short near the row of water reclaimers. She tapped the earpiece, silencing her disembodied professor.
A newcomer stood by the spangled plastic tree. Singing.
He had a terrible voice, composed entirely of flats and sharps. But holy fuckturtle was he pretty. She had never seen a live, nondigital person who looked like this, all golden and shining, staring up at the pastie bangle like it really was the star of Bethlehem. Like it was going to magically poof and lead him somewhere special. The Christmas myth contained angels, she’d read, and here, insubstantial and glowing in the moonlight, this boy could very well have been one of those.
If, you know, she believed in any of that.
“Hey, rube,” one of her fellow students called, striding into the courtyard and flanked by his minions. “Can you shut up already? You sound like a dying cat.”
The new boy flinched and stopped singing. He didn’t look abashed or embarrassed, though, not even when the others surrounded him. Four of them, all prime-tier recruits. Angela knew their schedules, family situations, intelligence measurements, and class rankings. She had worked with two of them on a psych-engineering team project last summer. All of them had been here at the academy for half a dozen years.
Not as long as her, though.
One student said something in French about the boy’s clothes, and the others laughed. Odd, Angela hadn’t noticed his clothes, but she looked now. Shabby would be a good word for them. Also inappropriate for a desert winter. He didn’t even have a coat. He must have been really cold out there in the courtyard.
They teased him some more. Apparently one of his tormenters was his roommate but had locked him out. He wasn’t welcome here, another said. He was part of the problem, part of the old world and everything the modernists had sought to eradicate earlier this century. Clearly the mentors had made a mistake. He needed to go home.
With a roll of her wrist against her smartsleeve, she accessed enrollment records on her internal com. She ran them against facial recognition. The new student’s name was Kellen Hockley. Nice name, lots of voiced sonorants.
His profiles had been defaced. Did he not know enough tech to tidy them up? Or did he not mind the things they called him? The threats they made to his “people” and his home? No one had made any attempt to hide their assumptions about him, and no one had defended him either, not even his recruiters or assigned mentors.
This last got Angela’s hackles up. Her school was better than that. She was better than that. She wasn’t about to let a bunch of self-important jackwagons bully this boy into feeling bad about himself.
Because no, he wasn’t here by mistake. Not even remotely. He had put up a perfect score on the open testing. Perfect score. Even she had gotten half points on three items at the last exam cycle, and she’d been on an intensive study tier here since she was five.
Where had he come from? A place full of threadbare, holey-kneed trousers and dishy, golden-haired angels, apparently. And also supergeniuses. She consulted the enrollment, but it didn’t list a nation of origin. Guardianship transfer sections were blank.
Angel. From heaven.
Complete bullshit.
However, bullshit or not, he deserved a warm place to sleep and salvation from this teasing. It wasn’t funny at all, and her justice hammer had gotten pretty heavy.
Angela stepped into the courtyard, and the cacophony of voices fluttered to silence. The four tormenters could not meet her steady gaze, though they didn’t run away.
“It is la
te,” she said, pushing authority into her voice. “You all should be in bed preparing for tomorrow. Good night.” Implicit in every word was a threat. Her mentor, Zeke, wielded power beyond the walls of the school. All kinds of rumors swirled around him. People on the conspiracy-shrouded darknet swore he was trying to take over the world. Angela wouldn’t go so far as that, but even so, she knew Zeke could nudge whole lives off course if he so chose. If she told him he should.
The bullies echoed her good night in a rainbow of languages, showing off like complete losers. Two told her to have pleasant dreams. She didn’t inform them that her only dreams were nightmares. The darkness inside her mind wasn’t any of their business.
Only she and Kellen remained in the courtyard then. He finally spoke. “Ain’t you on the tiny side to be the boss of them?”
Yow, what an accent. Roughly a dozen words in, and she wasn’t certain she could stand to listen to even one more. And yet, that niggle of justice remained, like a stone in her sandal. And, okay, the pretty didn’t hurt.
“It’s late. I’ll hack your dorm lock tomorrow,” she said. “Yamal should not have shut you out. He’s a prehominid on his best days. And was that a short joke?”
“Of course it wasn’t. I like little,” said Kellen. “And don’t rush or nothing. I was gonna crash in the liberry.”
“The what?”
“The liberry. As in books. You do know English, dontcha?”
“Of course I know English. I’m from Minneapolis. And the correct pronunciation is li-brary. You’ll note the r.”
He tilted his head and a fringe of spun-gold hair half shrouded his face. It made him look like secrets and mischief. He grinned, and suddenly, Angela could not breathe. Could hardly think.
“Yeah. The library.”
“Well, you don’t have to stay there, no matter what you call it. Here, follow me.”
“As you wish, princess.” He had deep dimples on either side of his mouth when he grinned wide.
She let his soft sarcasm pass. It wasn’t an overt challenge to her authority, and to be honest, she didn’t mind being called princess. Princesses were things that had happened. They weren’t myths. Princesses could be mighty. Princesses could become queens.
What did worry her was how…aware she was of him following her through the hallways, back to her dorm. It felt like all the other students were watching through peepholes or something. Ridiculous, but also real. She was being observed, ranked, rated. She knew how the weight of such an evaluation felt. And even though every time they tested her, she was found worthy, the fear of failure never quite went away.
In her dorm, she gave him a blanket and showed him to her haptic study hammock. It was fairly comfortable if you didn’t load in any simulations. He could sleep there until they got his dorm lock sorted.
She wasn’t used to people arguing with her when she gave instructions, but she expected something, a pushback from him. Another sarcastic comment, maybe. Or really anything other than a knowing, slow-honey smile.
He was just as unsettling as that creep Santa. And he was in her lounge. Where he would presumably stay all night. While she slept. Defenseless. For the first time, she had a second thought about this plan.
He didn’t seem to. He kicked off his ratty sneakers and rolled up his borrowed blanket before shoving it behind his head. “So, I’m Kellen. You got a name, little princess?”
When he stretched impossibly long limbs across the hammock, she tried not to stare at his naked feet. What was wrong with her? She saw naked feet all the time, but his were uniquely obscene. And a bit hypnotic.
“Angela.” She swallowed.
A shadow smile fitted over his mouth, but it didn’t dig in, didn’t make the dimple. “Shoulda guessed, way you do that guardian thing and all. Thank you for that. For all that.”
She searched for the sarcasm, the joke. But…there wasn’t one. He was completely sincere. Which might make him the most fantastical creature in the universe.
“Well, good night, Angela,” he told her, closing his eyes and getting comfortable. “Sleep tight, y que sueñes con los angelitos.”
She mumbled something and practically ran to her bed in the next room. She changed her passkey on the bedroom door four times, but her face still felt hot. The blanket, also: too hot. Impossible to sleep.
His words, even in that ghastly accent, kept knocking around in her head.
She’d never thought much of her name, outside of it being boring and Western and old-fashioned. But in his voice? None of those. In his voice, it evoked the angels he’d told her to dream of. Just, you know, not the kind that flits around misinforming new mothers as to the divinity of their offspring. Also not the fallen ones. Or the many-eyed wheels-for-feet ones. And totally, definitely not one that Kellen Hockley was dreaming of tonight.
Which, she had to confess in secret, kind of sucked. She might enjoy being in that boy’s dreams.
Chapter 1
HOTEL RIU, GUADALAJARA, OCTOBER 2059
Angela didn’t play chess. Her game board was, um, bigger. Like the whole fucking planet big. She didn’t have time for small games.
She had an election to win, a war to start, a career to kick in its slow-moving ass. And accomplishing those goals was going to require her emotional experience today to be on point. Thousands of potential voters would be feeling it along with her.
Still, in moments like these, it would be delicious to face the vid-emote recorder and utter a cheesy chess line like, “Queen takes your everything. Check. Mate.”
In prep for this remote interview, mech-Daniel—the high-tech, human-skinned mechanized clone built as a physically identical replacement for her husband—had set up their hotel suite with enough lights to fry a vampire. Angela perched in a hard-backed chair right in the middle, trying to come off as cool and in control despite the pancake cosmetics that threatened to melt under this broiler.
Zeke was going to owe her big time for this, but when he was reelected to the continental presidency, she had a couple of ideas for how he could repay her. How they all could repay her.
She flashed her sincerest furrow-down-the-middle-brow frown, clasped her gloved hands, and addressed the empty space that, in the editing room half a continent away, was being filled with a real-time holo of her interviewer, Rafael Castrejon, one of just a couple of media mavens she had met with in person. Trusted a little. Trusted enough. “I know it’s hard to believe, Rafa, but every word is true.”
The skin behind her left ear tingled as the psych-emitter engaged her neural net. She channeled worry/compassion/dismay, letting the emotional cocktail shiver her body. The implanted web over her brain recorded everything and ran it through the emotion translator, so her loyal fans/constituents could experience her reaction as if they were in her head, in her place. People trusted a leader who felt things. People trusted Angela.
“Let us be clear,” Rafael said, leaning forward in his chair, his color-enhanced eyes pooling liquid for the cameras. All over the unified continent, channel subscribers would be holding their breaths, awaiting his question. “Are you accusing the leadership of the Texas Provisional Authority of somehow causing Superstorm Agatha? That’s…” He chuckled, as if he considered his own words absurd. “That’s a serious charge, Senator. I mean, we don’t want to start a war here.”
Except starting a war was exactly what she was trying to do.
Angela didn’t allow herself even the tiniest eye roll. Instead, she firmed her mouth, took a deep, steadying breath, and said, “War might not be the right word, Rafa. We don’t recognize the TPA as a state. They’re violent extremists, domestic terrorists, and any action against them would be considered law enforcement or interior security at this time. However, yes, unequivocally I’m saying that Damon Vallejo and his rebel technocrats engineered the storm that destroyed Houston. I have proof.”
Sta
tistics from the feeds of channel subscribers hung steady for a heartbeat, then climbed. In Las Cruces, critical subscriber, gossip hound, and uber-pollster Ursula Dioda sent a network-wide “high!alert!news” message. Way to work it, Dioda. The ripple of interest from her point of origin was logarithmic. Seventeen thousand logged-in subscribers cast similar nets out to their audiences. The feed stats soared.
Hopefully, somewhere, Zeke’s poll numbers were going up, too.
A bead of sweat formed between Angela’s shoulder blades, but her mask remained in place: caring, brave, resolute, the face of leadership. She concentrated on projecting matching emotions through the psych-emitter.
Deliberately she laid out her evidence, one bread crumb at a time. Ten years ago in Texas, Damon Vallejo had been in charge of the lab working on nanorobotic cloud seeding, weather displacement, and environmental engineering. Vallejo wouldn’t have developed the tech himself, but somebody in his lab had, and the research had been within his easy grasp, as had a particularly large not-otherwise-dedicated nanovat. Angela had recently uncovered transfer records for that vat, which had conveniently disappeared shortly after Superstorm Agatha.
Meaning Vallejo likely used it, a one-shot, to cause that goddamn storm. It was easy to build a narrative that he was the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world.
A monster like that needed to be stopped. By Angela’s government.
The creation of a war ministry and her appointment as its head hovered so close now, she could taste it.
Rafa let her build her case, and then he paused, leaving a silence for viewers to fill with their own burgeoning horror. Finally he said, “So Damon Vallejo is actually alive?”
“Absolutely. He was captured by our special commando units during the Austin riots, but the TPA negotiated his release recently as part of our ongoing efforts to secure a lasting peace with the rebels.” She laid out the fresh meat for predator gossips to devour, and they went after it. Like piranhas. Everyone with a moderate-interest current-events profile would have the story in their newsfeed now. Angela blinked slowly, catching the green upward-pointed arrow and the notation “2%” on her heads-up display. A polling boost. Well, that was quick.
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