Page 99 of Dalla's Royal Guards

Her fingers hovered over the stack of files tucked neatly in the corner—classified dossiers, red-stamped reports, and a handful of surveillance summaries. It had taken her four months to get everything Adam took back, but she had done it—with a vengeance.

This private collection of classified documents was going with her.

Because Debra Carr-Myers was no longer just a deputy director.

She was about to become the Director of the CIA.

Adam hadn’t taken it well. Not after his offshore accounts—suspiciously fattened by Kramer O’Toole’s “consultingbonuses”—came to light through an anonymous source. Debra hadn’t even needed to file the report. Someone else beat her to it.

She didn’t ask who.

Some truths revealed themselves when they were meant to.

She turned to her computer to shut it down when the screen flickered.

Tiny yellow smiling bugs swept across the screen.

Thousands of them—crawling, dancing—a wave of digital insects that scurried across the monitor’s glass in a pattern before turning in unison.

She jerked back. “What the?—?”

The bugs paused. A line of text unfurled.

DON’T BE AFRAID

A second later, a cheerful yellow smiley face popped up.

And then she was there.

“Hello, Debra,” a gorgeous, fully defined, holographic woman greeted in a cheerful voice. “I’m RITA. Welcome to your new level of security clearance.”

She dropped hard into her chair.

“Jesus. What—who—are you?” she breathed.

“I’m RITA. I work at Cosmos Raines Industries.”

Debra’s gaze darted to the files.

“Cosmos Raines… as in the playboy inventor?”

RITA laughed and waved an elegantly manicured hand with red nails dotted with rhinestones in dismissal. “Yes, well, Cosmos is a bit more than that.”

Debra sat forward, her gaze flicking to the files in the box again. “I don’t suppose you know anything about Operation Rebirth, do you?” she asked cautiously.

“Oh, I know lots of things,” RITA said brightly. “But yes. Operation Rebirth: sometimes, people are born at the wrong time, and sometimes, the universe corrects itself.”

“That’s… that’s what this is?”

“It’s the simplest way to explain it. Harlem, Dalla, Runa, Lily—they’re not anomalies. They’re balance. The universe always tries to find an equilibrium between light and darkness. And sometimes… it needs warriors to do it.”

Debra stared.

“Am I part of it?”

RITA’s laugh was a melodic trill. “I like to thinkIam, so maybe you are, too. Your former boss was not. Horrid man on a good day. It really was time to take out the trash with him.” She leaned forward with a conspiratorial grin. “There are a lot of strange and wonderful things happening in this galaxy, Director Carr-Myers. And in others. Cosmos wanted me to welcome you to the team.”

And then she was gone.