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“You’re talking in spy. I’m tech, remember? You have to explain. Why can’t I wear clothes?”

“Because no woman wears very many clothes at Wally’s, and all the men there are mean girls.

By which I mean they’re professional gossips.

Powerful. Tech will have to build you a profile, but you barely need a cover story.

” Yardley glanced at her wrist, checking the time on the gold watch she’d worn every day since KC gave it to her.

She stood up. “Let’s go, Eliza Doolittle. ”

“Who’s that?” KC asked, rising from her seat at the table. “Eliza Doolittle?” She had to jog to catch up to Yardley striding down the hall, cutting into a tunnel that opened up after they passed through the double doors’ biometric lock.

“It’s a story about a linguist who proves he can transform a flower seller from the streets of London into a lady. Eliza is Henry Higgins’s protégé. Henry’s the linguist. You’re Eliza. I’m Henry.” She stopped in the middle of the tunnel. “You know it’s a love story?”

“I graduated from high school when I was fifteen. I can’t be expected to know this kind of thing.”

But Yardley was already on the move again.

Her reply drifted over her shoulder. “It’s a Greek myth originally.

This sculptor makes a sculpture of a beautiful woman and falls in love with her.

Then the goddess Venus brings her to life for him.

” She turned and tapped a code into a door KC didn’t recognize.

“Revolting.”

Yardley flung the door open. The overhead lights illuminated a vast carpeted room filled with racks of clothes.

The wall opposite the door was mirrored, creating the illusion of endless space in front of changing cubicles.

Yardley walked to a rack in the middle of the room, near the front, and began flipping through the hangers.

“I concede your point. But also, Henry and Eliza are from the stage version of Pygmalion . The fancy British linguistics expert who tries to teach a Cockney-speaking flower girl how to talk and act like a lady? He does it on a bet with a friend. Eliza doesn’t know about the bet.

She thinks he’s a good guy who’s going to help her crawl out of poverty. ”

“Class bias, power imbalance, and barefaced lies are such a good foundation for a love story,” KC said.

“They are, actually. The problem is always the ending. No one knows how to pull it off.”

Yardley gave a lot of niche-knowledge speeches like this. It was weirdly calming to listen to her deliver an impromptu lecture on an obscure subject while preparing KC for an experience she had in no way anticipated when she woke up this morning. “Explain.”

“Well, in the original ending, she doesn’t fall for Higgins.

There’s a different guy.” Yardley paused, removed a hanger from the rack, and held up a red dress.

“Too obvious.” She put it back and continued flipping.

“But nobody likes that ending, because clearly they’ve got something, these two.

There’s a connection, it’s kind of hot, and the audience hates being told it’s impossible and Eliza has to stick to her own kind.

So when Lerner and Loewe wrote a screenplay for a musical version, which got turned into a movie later, they changed the ending.

Now, every time the story’s retold, they use the love story ending where Henry and Eliza waltz off into the sunset together. ”

She stopped again, slid a gold dress off its hanger, and dropped the hanger on the floor.

After shoving the dress at KC, Yardley made her way to a rack of shoes, her blue eyes rapidly scanning through rows of open boxes.

“I mean, obviously, the discovery of the bet is quite the third-act dark moment. But the romance of it all manages to survive. It takes some hand-waving, though.”

“Because, again, class difference, power imbalance, and lies. Tough to overcome.”

“Yep. Audrey Hepburn plays Eliza in the movie, which helps. Turns out it’s mostly a casting issue. Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman is another example. Irresistible.”

“And yet I am feeling so much resistance.” KC turned the dress in her hands. “Which is the front and which is the back?”

“How adventurous are you?” Yardley’s smile was too familiar. “I’ll turn around.”

KC shucked out of her clothes and looped her body into the garment in the most likely configuration of gold straps, limbs, and areas that needed to be covered to avoid arrest. The dress exposed her underboobs, she supposed in lieu of her nonexistent cleavage, as well as her legs starting from the hipbone, and—going by the breeze—at least an inch of her ass.

Yardley handed her a pale pink bobbed wig, which KC dutifully put on. It matched her footwear. She couldn’t bring herself to call the impractical four-inch stilettos with laces that crisscrossed up to her knees “shoes.”

When she was done dressing, a woman knocked on the door and handed Yardley something, which she gave to KC. Matte black eyeglasses packed with tech. “DC loves glasses on a beautiful woman,” Yardley said by way of explanation.

KC slid them on, struck again by déjà-vu as her mind tried to smash together her life as a spy—she’d written the lion’s share of the code that could package, encrypt, and transfer raw data from these glasses—and her life with Yardley, on whose nose the very same glasses had perched more than once as she tipped her head, batted her eyes, and tricked a target into telling her more than they should.

It was a lot. This was a lot.

KC sat down, then sat down a different way when she realized that sitting her normal way flashed everyone. While she’d been getting ready, agents had slowly filtered into the room, bringing things Yardley must have requested. There were a number of murmured conversations.

Yardley handed her a tablet, awake and preloaded with KC’s cover.

There was a photo of her in thumbnail with the pink hair and the glasses, so KC could only assume the mirrors in this room had cameras.

She read over the name they’d given her, the background, the objective.

Surreal. KC had compiled cover documents like this for other officers.

“There is absolutely no way this is going to work,” she said, mostly to herself.

But when she looked up, she was startled to discover Yardley smiling the big, nose-crinkling, double-dimpled grin that signaled she was on the verge of breaking into laughter.

KC’s breath caught. She hadn’t seen that smile in forever.

“Is it so strange, really?” Yardley’s voice had dropped below the murmur in the room, for KC’s ears only. “Are we that surprised right now to find ourselves here? Even when I thought you were a web developer and told you I was a finance bureaucrat, we’ve always respected each other’s competence.”

KC couldn’t disagree. However much their connection had been stress-tested and warped beyond bearing by the lies they’d told in the past, Yardley was right that it didn’t feel strange to be here with her, doing this.

They knew and respected each other. It wasn’t everything they’d had, but it was something.

Although, from what KC had heard earlier, it sounded like Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins had formed a pretty tight bond, too.

“If you truly don’t think it will work,” Yardley said, “now’s your chance to call it off.”

“No.” KC rose to her feet, aware of every muscle in her legs as they adjusted to the sensation of four new inches of height tipped forward at a forty-degree angle. “It’s never been the challenge that’s kept me from trying to convince straight older men that I’m a lusty coed.”

Then Yardley did laugh—her best laugh, with the tiny third dimple that sank in at the top of her cheekbone—and KC took a deep breath and let herself relax.

The mission would be fine. KC would do her best, and so would Yardley. Together, they were more than the sum of their parts. Like Henry and Eliza, they had something.

KC wished she didn’t already know they could never pull off the ending.