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She’d been like this ever since Atlas told her over the Toronto comm yesterday to start pulling background on Kris Flynn—the name of the one person who could definitely have found where KC concealed the code for the weapon.

The person who could reassemble it, because once upon a time KC and Kris Flynn had come up with the idea together, and they’d known each other before either one of them had anything to hide.

And now Kris could expose her.

She wondered if Yardley, an old-fashioned rule follower who made sure finance bros followed Uncle Sam’s regulations and didn’t hoard outsized pieces of the pie, would have any sympathy for a woman who wasn’t a good enough spy to keep weapons out of the hands of the enemy.

Probably not.

Gramercy adjusted his tie. “Speaking of what was on that thumb drive.”

“We weren’t.” KC glared at him, but his face revealed nothing, and he didn’t respond to her aggression. Fatigue crept in as her anger drained away. “What, then? What.”

“The analysts have been working with the data that you, as you said, stayed up all night to provide a decryption key for. It seems the target, Kris Flynn, who we now assume was the maker of the device, was collecting intel about her employer.”

KC sat up straighter. “Who?”

“One Devon Mirabel. A nationless criminal whose accomplices are known to acquire and sell gray-market tech to the highest bidder.”

“Never heard of him.”

“The agency’s had a file on him for years. Here’s the critical piece. Mirabel’s shopping the weapon to buyers.”

KC’s heart filled with ice. “I thought it was nowhere close to being ready for sale.”

Could Kris have found, assembled, and made the weapon market-ready so quickly? What did she have? Who had she shown it to? How careful had she been? How many copies existed?

And why the fuck hadn’t anyone heard from Dr. Brown? KC had never needed him more in her life. He was far from a perfect man, but he’d never let her down like this before.

“We’ve confirmed the intel,” Gramercy said. “We already had an asset make contact with Mirabel’s people. We’ll be sending in an agent posing as a buyer.”

KC lapsed into stunned silence.

This was it, then. This was what they’d been working toward—a clear shot at capturing the weapon before it left Mirabel’s hands and they lost any chance of controlling where it ended up or how fast it proliferated.

One of the things that kept KC awake nights was the running list in her head of the ways this cyberweapon could disrupt the world as she knew it.

It wasn’t supposed to have been a weapon at all.

It was supposed to have been a digital skeleton key, a program that unlocked doors and learned as it went.

That was what she and Kris had imagined all those years ago.

With Dr. Brown, her mentor and the agency’s counterterrorism specialist, KC had talked about using the program to stop blockades against aid in war, or deploying it to arrest a train derailment or a fatal traffic pileup before it happened.

When she’d figured out it could cause panic and harm as easily as it could help, she’d explained this to Dr. Brown.

That was why he’d suggested the controlled test in a relatively small area with robust infrastructure.

A Toronto neighborhood on a sleepy Sunday afternoon with full permission from the prime minister.

But it had gone so wrong.

“Where’s this happening?” she asked.

“Mirabel landed at Dulles from Heathrow this morning.”

“Oh, happy day.” KC took a drink from her water bottle, thinking hard, every muscle in her body locking up as she put together what she knew, what Gramercy wasn’t saying, and the sudden development of a new and dangerous mission in her own backyard. “When’s the meeting?”

A muscle in Gramercy’s jaw flexed. He checked his watch.

“Christ in a chicken basket, it’s happening today?

” KC looked through the window at the formerly pink garage.

“All y’all are spies, right? Just tell me you’re not sending the Unicorn in for the meet.

Maple Leaf has been playing catch-up for two months.

Our analysts are as confused as a fly in a fan factory, and the Unicorn’s overexposed.

You send them in, they’re bound to get made. ”

Gramercy pretended not to have heard her. “Our agent will make contact, posing as the buyer. We want you in the van.”

She whipped her head around. “No fooling?”

She’d never been asked to participate in a mission from the field before.

Dr. Brown always said the agency wanted KC for one thing and one thing only.

For years, they’d kept her alone in a room full of monitors with her headphones on, talking over an encrypted channel to someone she couldn’t see, whose real name she didn’t know, or at least wasn’t supposed to.

They called her “Tabasco”—the worst code name ever, considering Tabasco sauce wasn’t even made in Virginia.

An emotion that KC couldn’t interpret flitted across Gramercy’s face. He rubbed his temples, silver against his dark hair. “We need you to capture as much intel about the device as you can. You know how important this is. It has to happen.”

Yep. It absolutely did. It had to happen, because, in an unavoidable, persistent, and very chillingly real way, the fate of the world rested on—

Well, not on KC’s shoulders. Not exactly.

But a little bit. A little bit it did, and it was enough of a burden that she hadn’t been able to think about anything else in her life, any one else in her life, since the grid went down in Toronto and Dr. Brown dropped off the map.

She had known him since before she was a legal adult.

Sixteen years old, her noodle arms barely strong enough to carry her textbooks at MIT and the tendons in her forearms already three-quarters of the way to her first carpal tunnel surgery from the clandestine shit she’d taught herself to do with a keyboard.

The agency had caught her building a backdoor into the EPA system so she and a group of climate activists could move up the dates on industrial site inspections.

Dr. Brown was the man who showed up at her dorm room door and announced he’d been sent to either arrest or recruit her.

He wasn’t the first person to tell KC there were better things she could do with her powers, but he was the first to make an argument that KC found compelling. His vision for her future had fueled KC straight through training.

He knew her better than most.

KC stilled her bouncing knee. “Tell me it’s not the Unicorn, though.”

Gramercy sighed.

“What the fuck? I mean, I get why you used them at the Ritz. Rumor is they’re slick as butter, and they must be something to look at, because Marie-Claire in forensic accounting, who says she’s met them in person, turns red as a fire hydrant whenever the subject comes up, even though she won’t say if they’re a he or a she or neither one.

But, Gramercy, if the CIA had an official mascot, it would be the Unicorn. You’re going to get them killed.”

“It’s not my decision.”

“I’m sure that will be a comfort to you when the time comes,” she said. “And the meeting has to be today?”

“This afternoon.”

“Bring me in for the briefing, then.” Dr. Brown had never let her sit in on a briefing, not even when she told him she needed to be included to understand the scope of what the black op required.

But if KC was going to be made—or ruined—risking her career to keep the secret of Dr. Brown’s op, she wanted to feel like she’d done it as a part of something good.

And she wanted to see the Unicorn with her own eyes before she sat in a van and did what she could to keep them alive.

“You’ll be provided with the information necessary for you to—”

“Let me go to the briefing!” She yanked at her seat belt and twisted to face Gramercy. “I have a better chance of not fucking this up if I know the players and the stakes.”

“You won’t fuck this up.”

“No, because you’re taking me to the briefing.”

“Because you can’t.” Gramercy’s voice had gone hard. There was nothing to argue with when he used that tone, and KC didn’t bother. She opened her car door.

What a waste of a day. She’d thought after her run, after she’d blown off some steam, that she might check in with Yardley. She regretted sending her that text yesterday, essentially telling her to get out, already. There was no reason for acrimony.

No reason when the end of their relationship was completely KC’s fault.

“KC.” Gramercy had opened his window.

“What.”

“Figure out what you can put together in advance, but then we’ll need you in the van at thirteen hundred.”

KC lifted her hand and gave a sharp salute, knowing she’d log in within the hour.

She would be in the Unicorn’s ear for this op.

She never had before. She’d handled only the very barest of the Unicorn’s data—their fingerprints, their location—because silos and separation meant safety.

It was one of Dr. Brown’s mantras and the reason he usually gave for why, for so many years, he’d kept KC with him in their silo of two.

Still. The Unicorn was a legend, and KC had admired the finesse of their work for some time. It would be exciting to partner with them, even for moments.

She headed out of the alley.

“KC!”

The volume with which Gramercy spoke her name in a dark alley at dawn compelled her to turn around. He was leaning his forearm out the open window.

“For what it’s worth, I know it’s hard. Maybe you’ll be surprised, and it will work out. Can’t tell you how many times everything went right up to the line, looking bad, and in the end, there was rescue. Don’t lose hope.”

“Are you talking about my love life, my career, or the fate of our country?”

Gramercy shrugged, and the tinted window went up.

She turned around again and started walking, shoving surprise furious tears off her face. As soon as she got to the end of the alley, KC began to run.