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T he conference room door bangs open so abruptly that I jump. Rian storms inside.

“Hello,” I say cheerily.

Another man follows him in, then slams the door shut again. He has tightly coiled white hair over an ashen face and a grim expression. The infamous Jacques Winters, gala director.

Outside, Fetor’s got to be at least ten minutes into his little speech. Had I not done what I did, there would have been a lot more screaming and a lot fewer inane jokes played for polite laughter.

“Ada, what the fuck, ” Rian snarls.

“Okay, you’re mad,” I say.

Rian glowers at me, jaw tight, but the white-haired man whirls on him. “You know her?”

Rian doesn’t even look at him. His eyes burn into me. “Why?” he chokes out.

In answer, I reach for my purse. The white-haired man jumps, but Rian holds out a hand, ready to take what I’m offering.

My data pad.

I flip it on, unlock the screen, and bring up the kid’s hack. “By the time I caught him, he’d already set the command into motion,” I say, also handing over the transponder.

“What is it?” Winters asks, looking at the screen.

Shit. Rian doesn’t know code. Winters doesn’t seem to, either, but another man enters the conference room—the blue-haired server. He takes the data pad from Rian, and the two of them quickly confer. I let them talk. I shoot Winters a charming smile, but it doesn’t make his scowl lessen. Tough crowd.

Rian turns to me, looking across the room from his position by the door. “Who—”

I cut him off. “The Jarra.”

The gala director whips around to me. Finally an expression from him other than rage. “You intercepted something from the Jarra?”

“Hi.” I beam at him. “My name’s Ada Lamarr, and tonight I saved your ass. In front of all the live feeds, too. You are welcome.”

“You intercepted a terrorist?” Rian said, ignoring my polite introductions. The blue-haired man leaves.

I stopped a kid from fucking up his own life, I think. I could care less what happened to Fetor. But that kid was never going to get away with what he’d done.

“Where is—” Winters looks around as if the entirety of the underground movement were standing in the conference room, weapons drawn.

“He’s gone,” I say casually.

“Gone?” Rian narrows his eyes.

“I took care of it.”

His brows wrinkle; his jaw tightens.

“Speaking of.” I turn to the coordinator, shooting him a smile. “I did promise Fetor that red telephone from the Mission Control display as an apology for messing up his fancy speech.” A lie, but a believable one.

His eyes widen. “That was not yours to—”

“Yeah, obviously. But consider how stopping your own guest of honor’s hover stage from turning into a raging inferno of death and destruction may have saved you a little face.”

“Why didn’t you alert the authorities?” the coordinator shouts.

“I tried.” I look at Rian, raising my hands and making the signs for Do you trust me? A little muscle near his left eye tics. I turn my full attention to the coordinator. “But time was of the essence, and the show must go on, no?”

Winters looks at his cuff band, eyes bouncing off glowing letters as ping after ping swamps the receiver. “I need to—”

Rian waves him off without taking his eyes off me. He pulls out a chair, sitting down as the coordinator leaves us alone, the door clicking shut behind us.

I lean forward before Rian can speak. “I didn’t do this,” I say, jerking my head toward the data pad without breaking eye contact. “I came across a kid who got conned into delivering a hack.” Outside, we can hear Fetor’s speech echoing throughout the museum. He’s not physically lifted above the crowd; there are no glittering displays. But I catch the word nanobots , and the resulting cheers from the audience make me reasonably sure things are going well.

A soft knock on the door. Rian stands to open it. The woman in the silver dress. I hear them muttering for a moment, catching things like “drone footage confirms” and “there did seem to be a breach through the staff hall.” She hands Rian a huge, padded bag. Rian shuts the door again when she leaves.

Inside the black bag is a plethora of devices. Rian sets them up on the conference table, ignoring me when I lean forward to look. He’s checking up on my story, checking all the security drones, linking in to the transponder to see what else it has. I let him work for a while.

I let him prove my story correct.

“Look,” I say once I’m certain he knows I wasn’t lying, at least not about this, “cards on the table. I did not wake up this morning intending to bump into some kid recruited for the Jarra and have to fuck up all his plans to make way for my own.”

“A kid?” Rian’s face softens, then goes tense again. “But what were your plans?”

I shrug. “You won’t believe me. But...I’ve got a little bit of a track record going for me,” I say, quieter. “No one dies. Even if that messes up my own agenda.”

Oh, that’s eating him up inside. Because it’s true. Last time we crossed paths, the last words I said to him were claiming that no one died in the crash of the UGS Roundabout, and I have no doubt that he followed up on that, proving me right. And the evidence of the kid’s hack is right there in front of him.

“You could be working with—”

“No.” My harsh word cuts him off. “No,” I repeat, just as strongly. I let out a breath through my nose. “We all have our lines we don’t cross.”

Rian puts the data pad on the table, scooting his chair close to mine. Our knees bump. It reminds me of being in the shuttle with him, exploring the protoplanet where the Roundabout crashed, telling him truths and lies and waiting to see which ones he believed.

“What other lines do you have, Ada?” he asks. His voice is low, rough.

I shrug, and while my face is casual, my tone matches his. “Very few. Limits aren’t really my thing.”

Eyebrow arch. “I can see that.”

My hands move from my lap to his knees, my fingers pressing against his firm thighs. I stand, the chair scooting behind me, but I keep my face even with his, my hands on him, my body angled so that I fill his vision. “As far as dates go, this one has been pretty terrible, but there’s still time for you salvage it.”

It takes a few minutes for my words to process in his head. He snorts. “This isn’t a date, Ada.” He’s working so hard to keep his eyes on mine, not drifting south. What a gentleman.

“It could be,” I whisper. “And what an exciting story it would become.”

He scoots back in his chair, pushing my hands away. I straighten up, using this opportunity to look down at him. He picks up my data pad.

“I’m keeping this,” he says.

“Then you’re going to reimburse me,” I snap back.

“Consider the data recorder you stole from Halifax to be payment.”

“That was a gift,” I say.

“The information on it wasn’t.”

Fine. He’s not bending on that.

I slip my shoes back on—they’re painful, but the tile floor is cold. “The gala’s almost over,” I say. “Show a girl a good time.”

He’s going to let me off the hook for the stage shenani gans. I know it; he knows it. Everything he’s checked has proven my story. Rian knew that part of the stairs was the only blind spot, but he’s retroactively tracked the kid’s entry and exit, and he sees the evidence I’ve gathered. When some expert analyzes the code, maybe they’ll even be able to trace it back to some member of the Jarra who set the kid up, I don’t know. But it’s pretty obvious now that I stopped a much bigger crisis from happening, and whether he likes it or not, Rian’s going to forgive me for the little stunt I pulled.

And it’s been enough to distract him from what I actually came here to steal.