But her mom’s head pivoted so fast, eyes wide, that Thea knew she’d accidentally presented the truth. Her mother had known about the match, after all.
Amira paused between standing and sitting, and she waited in a frozen stance, blinking and waiting. After a long second, she lowered herself back to the seat and shook her head. Blair’s curtains were drawn and the ocean tumbled and soared below them. Someone down the hall, another of the suite holders, blasted music as they walked down the corridor toward the stairs. The music drifted toward them, and away, and disappeared altogether.
“I won’t be let out of this contract in a year,” Amira said, paling. “Did my dad know or did you just go over his head, too?” She wasn’t crying anymore but she looked the same as when they called Maverick’s name to begin with.
Thea wanted to feel bad, but she couldn’t. Gordy spoiled his daughter from the moment she was born, treating her like an entitled princess. But Thea knew better. Her mother put her in the dresses and taught her how to navigate the crowd, and she knew how to walk the line between criticism and praise. And while it may have appeared like Thea was a princess, too, that was the difference between her and Amira. After she shed the dress and the smile, Blair would quiz her: What did you notice? What did you hear? Who was in the room during dessert and who wasn’t? What time was it when you heard the alarm bell?
The dress was a persona. Thea was being trained for a different role.
As she grew very cognizant of her education, she and her mother became a glistening duo—playing off of each other’s energies and reading entire playbooks in each other’s eyes. Rarely did they misstep, but there it was: her dying grandfather made some strange request to pair the future queen of his kingdom, as Gordy’s lone heir, to a playboy partier.
And even if Blair didn’t know the reasons, she was relishing in the agony.
A knock on their door startled them forward and Amira closed her eyes, conceding it all in one moment, and Thea relished in the power. Blair waltzed over and opened the door to a young and charming man, wearing a business suit and glasses.
“My massage is here,” Blair announced without looking back at her daughter or niece. She brought the man inside, shut the door, and started up the staircase to the second floor of the suite. “See yourself out,” she added to Amira before disappearing into her bedroom. Amira stood when the bathwater began to run and Blair’s laughter carried down the stairs.
“That’s the life she’s envisioned for us?” Amira asked, whispering, even though there was no need. “Unhappy and paying for companionship with a scheduled guest.”
“She wouldn’t say she’s unhappy,” Thea replied. She walked to the door and slipped on her house slippers. She’d wander to the spa, maybe venture to the Augmented Reality rooms and pick someplace calming to wander: the streets of Venice maybe or a rainforest in Costa Rica; she was only halfway through her Pathways of Europe series.
Amira exited the suite and stared at Thea as though she could will her cousin to her side with looks alone. Thea frowned and patted her on the shoulder.
“He’s really quite handsome,” Thea said and smiled. “And I’m sure he could make you quite happy making babies…if that’s your thing. I can personally verify his virility.”
Amira’s shoulders slumped and she looked about to cry again. “You?” she asked.
Thea couldn’t help but shrug.
“Oh God, I barely remember it. I had to actually pull that memory from obscurity when they said his name. But yes, a few long years ago. But, hey, he used to say he’d never court,” Thea said and she tried to make it sound so insignificant, even though she knew precisely how to push in the dagger. She knit her brows and put her hand over her heart, feigning sincerity. “I mean, had I known then he’d someday be your betrothed, I would at least have had the courtesy to ignore him when he begged for seconds.”
And with that, Thea left her cousin standing alone in the hall, mouth gaping.
It was only vaguely true.
Maverick danced with her at a party in the labyrinth and kissed her on the forehead and told her to come back when she was older. She slinked off back home thoroughly exhilarated and disgusted with herself.
She wasn’t going to wait for her cousin’s reaction; Amira’s pride was in her commitment to the role assigned to her at birth, and Thea’s pride was in her commitment to her own role, assigned to her by design. The princess and the politician.
Which was exactly how it should be.
The fragile and insecure princess always knew her purity was for sale to the highest bidder, but still, she had the audacity to cry at the injustices of a system she benefited from? Please. Thea didn’t know why Maverick James wanted Gordy’s runny-nosed maid, other than the obvious attempt at popping out little royals that would move Blair and Thea more death certificates away from ruling. Gordy. Amira. Blair. Thea. Just like that. Add in brats and well, game over. Who wanted to kill children? Which meant she’d have to wait to earn her place after they grew up to be assholes. That was a long game.
But what was Maverick’s motive, after all, why did he care who led as long as they let him do what he wanted?
If her mom was preoccupied and her grandfather smelled like piss and applesauce, she supposed she’d need to go to a different source. Someone who’d breezily share all the gossip.
Thea pushed the door to open the stairs and pranced off without looking back. The door closed with a bang behind her.
When Lesedi applied to work in Kymberlin’s tech department after her school exams, Thea was overjoyed.
First of all, it kept Lesedi on the Island and second of all, the tech department had fun tools and games.
She envisioned them breaking into the Augmented Reality machines and coding themselves into a blissful weekend on some tropical island. Or maybe they could get a suite to share—moving on from their parents’ pads in the hub of the Island—and experience their twenties as it was designed: they were there to experience.
Neither Thea nor Lesedi thought her job would be cumbersome, but Lesedi spent long hours in Kymberlin’s tech hub, the third tower, staring at her screen and working on various top-secret projects. When pressed, she’d say, “Designs for the future. He’ll unveil them when he’s ready,” with a tired smile.
That was code for: he’s listening and I’m not risking anything for you.
Thea knew Lesedi was working, so she bypassed sending a message to arrange a meet-up and decided to show up at her workspace instead.
She rode the walkways and jumped levels, and soon found herself in Tower Three, staring at the glass dome above her with its displayed artificial sky. It was a digital throwback to the underground cities they came from and a reminder that all things could be created.
Historia vitae magistra, the hub’s motto, greeted her as she crossed into the tower and stared at their concierge who was on her tablet when Thea walked up and knocked on the desk.
“I’m here to see Lesedi. In tech,” Thea announced with a curt smile.
“Of course, Ms. Truman,” the young woman said with a bow. Thea didn’t know if the girl knew who she was or if she’d been fed the name through a tiny earpiece no one could see. All the best concierges were raised, their jobs handed down through the generations. Just like her, they learned to smile through the pain and whisk through a room aware of every need.
An escort arrived and Thea followed him through a winding maze of rooms filled with the latest tech experiments, past boring offices with people staring off into space, and up to the third level of the dome where laughter emanated from a large theater-seating conference room.
She followed the voices and drew upon the crowd of programmers, and she noticed Lesedi in the first row sitting next to a rotund man who rested his arms on his stomach. The room was brimming with humor. They laughed as someone sat center stage and captivated them all with a story. With her escort gone, Thea leaned against the doorframe, half in and half out, and watched, enjoy
ing the brief moment of invisibility before someone caught her lurking.
“—his face was all puffed up and red and he had his arms out like this,” the man talking said and he curled his body into a hunch, elbows out, fists up. “Just really hunting for a fight. He demanded I hand him over the algorithm results. And—” he noticed her then and stopped dead. “Oh, hello, Ms. Truman,” he said instead.
Every head in the place pivoted behind to see if he was telling the truth or trying to break their necks. Some were appropriately shocked and others laughed, assuming he was joking, but she pretended to ignore their surprise and go along as if she hadn’t heard what was surely going to be a punch line involving someone in her family.
The Truman name had that effect.
She knew they must have blocked the spyware transmissions if they felt emboldened to joke without consequence.
“I’m just here to see Lesedi,” Thea said in her best cheery voice.
Lesedi, who’d already turned and recognized Thea, stood up at once and hurried out of the conference hall. She tugged her work shirt down as she walked and waved low. When she was in earshot, Lesedi smiled and said, “Hello! You’ve never visited! What do I owe the surprise?” But quickly Thea could ferret out the tension in her voice; the way she kept looking back at her coworkers as fits of giggles and hushing died down.
“Making a little house call,” Thea said. She didn’t mind making Lesedi sweat for a bit. Indeed, her friend swallowed and attempted a breezy smile.
And without looking back to the group that stared and gawked as she left, Lesedi pointed into the hall and walked toward her office.
Thea followed.
“Long time,” Lesedi commented. She sat at her private workstation and closed the privacy shades with a single command. “Open communication port. Call front desk.” One ring, two. “Hey, hold my calls. I have my friend Thea visiting so I’ll take my lunch now.” She waved her hand and the call ended, and she sat back in her custom chair.
“You don’t need to take your lunch,” Thea said. “I won’t be long and besides, can’t you just tell them it’s work related?”
“But it’s not work and they’ll know. They know. What’s up? You’ve literally never been to Tower Three in the two years since I started here.”
“I never wanted to intrude, you know?” Thea said. She leaned over and palmed a small glass paperweight from the edge of the desk. “You and I need a spa weekend. I could book something if you’d like, you know I have connections.”
“There’s a big data event this weekend,” Lesedi replied as if Thea should have some idea of what that even meant. “What’s up, Thea?”
Thea bristled at the sentence. She didn’t like the way her name sounded when Lesedi said it like that—short and mean like she didn’t have all the time in the world to catch up. This was her friend, her partner in crime, and she had an air of embarrassment about seeing Thea out of her element, at work, with people who’d eyed her up quickly and clamped their mouths shut tight.
She wondered how many stories about her family Lesedi had offered up while sitting on that stage with her own captive audience.
“I just came to catch up!” Thea said but even she wasn’t convinced.
Lesedi laughed. It was good-natured despite its teasing tone and her friend leveled her gaze and said, “Please. I know you too well.”
There was a pause in the conversation. A natural lull.
“Who were y’all reminiscing about in that meeting?” Thea asked, breaking the moment. She set the paperweight back down on the desk a little harder than she intended. Lesedi jumped and smiled.
“Oh now.” She stared up at the ceiling for a brief second. “You know I can’t go around talking about our meetings.”
“You don’t have recorders in here. Or you have a blocker. So…”
“Come on, Thea. I wouldn’t show up where you work and harass you to tell you all your work secrets while your boss watches.” She ran her hand over her forehead and cleared her throat. “I heard about the tea thing.”
Thea rolled her eyes. She knew which version Lesedi heard.
“It didn’t go down like that.”
“Sure,” Lesedi shrugged. The editing of news wasn’t talked about or widely noticed, but the chronic screen watchers knew the moment a story was pulled—there and then not there; unsearchable, gone forever.
Thea knew it happened a few times with events she couldn’t corroborate: a ghost ship sighting off the Island of New Cochran was one. Except one quote said someone noticed movement aboard. She saw the article and read it and then it was gone.
“So, who wanted the algorithm results?” Thea pushed again and Lesedi sat still, hesitant. She scratched at a spot on the back of her neck and leaned close, their knees touching.
Lesedi wasn’t going to budge. Gossip was fun but the cost was too great in that environment.
“Thea—why’d you come here?” Lesedi said.
With a sniff, Thea pulled back and crossed her arms. She could hear people talking outside of Lesedi’s office, the sound wasn’t muffled, and the laughter carried. Lesedi was never cold or withholding and Thea was unsettled by the thought of her friend keeping secrets; she was the one constant Thea trusted to do what she wanted no matter what.
“I heard,” Thea started, watching her friend closely, “you had a new AR level developed and I was bored…” she smiled and shrugged. She’d have better luck getting her to talk inside the game. “Think they’d let you play with me for an hour?”
“My lunch is an hour but we’re hovering over…”
“Come on—”
“Possibly,” Lesedi said but the relief on her face told the full story. She smiled and slumped, the stress dissipating. “I can’t think of any reason why they’d said no.”
So, thought Thea, someone was listening.
She leaned forward and hugged her friend, happy to understand the distance was due to interference and not something she’d done. Or, rather, something her family might have done. But Thea knew once they were inside the AR, they had freedom—and if Lesedi had anything to divulge, that’s where she’d be the most likely to let her guard down.
When Thea was a child on Kymberlin, the AR rooms were strange little boxes with headsets. Movement was limited and most games centered around basic search and find missions. Violent games appeared for a time before Huck banned them. He wasn’t concerned that the shooting games caused aggression; no, he didn’t want to give his Islanders any ideas about how exciting it was to go to war. He’d announced that young people were bursting with extra energy to expend, and if it wasn’t channeled there would be wars and the creation of battles. He started the Land Teams not too long after.
Before his stroke, before he started speaking in sputtering statements of nonsense, her grandfather loved to escape to an AR pod. He requested an invention from his scientists: a fully immersive simulation. To test his idea, he made the programmers create his old childhood home in full detail, and he’d disappear into the dark to act out his nostalgia.
No one knew what he did in there; it wasn’t their business, she supposed.
But just sitting at a house and watching birds and listening to nothing wasn’t her idea of a good time, but she was glad her grandfather’s imagination encouraged the AR to evolve. Thea loved hopping around the dinosaur adventure or the ancient worlds. They had the ability to call forth any land they desired with only a word and access to a program.
Lesedi and Thea suited up in the 4D suits, the mood elevated.
If something brushed up against her in the projector room, she’d feel it, and if something hurt her inside the simulation, she’d receive a shock. Of course, she was always aware she was inside a game, but the technology grew at the hands of the world’s best coders and designers, and Thea often thought it was hard to fully differentiate between real and fake.
Thea joked about the last time they went into a pod together: an old-time whodunit on a train where
Lesedi was locked in the train bathroom for the last half because of a coding error. By the time Thea noticed her friend was taking a long time to pee, she’d already solved the mystery and wanted to stop the program.
“Where are you taking me?” Thea asked.
“Oh, you’ll see,” Lesedi winked. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and cracked her neck like she was getting ready for a fight.
“Is it a running one? I can’t do a running one,” Thea complained and pouted. She waited for the automatic pod doors to open so they could occupy the giant warehouse equipped with smart walls and programmed to the game. The light above them turned green, the pods opened, and the friends stepped inside. The doors closed and for a moment they were submerged in complete darkness.
“It’s not a running one,” Lesedi answered, her voice echoing off the bare walls.
“It’s taking a long time to load.”
“It always takes this long,” Lesedi told her, but Thea didn’t think so.
She cleared her throat and inhaled, hoping the darkness would end and they would be plunged into the story Lesedi picked for them.
“Hey, Thea,” Lesedi said, her voice soft, almost a whisper. “While we’re in here…if…”
But before she could finish her sentence, the simulation roared into action, blasting them from all sides, and Thea knew by the rocking of the floor and the sounds materializing around her that they were on a boat.
She turned and saw Lesedi then: she’d been transformed into a version of herself outfitted with the uniform of a Land Team unit member. Thea looked down and saw she was dressed that way, too. She was wearing thick-soled boots, gray pants, gray jacket. So far, the program wasn’t yielding anything she was excited about.
“What is this one?” Thea called over to Lesedi, who’d wandered to the bow and looked out into a foggy harbor. Before she could answer, the fog lifted and revealed the nickled bottom of the fabled Lady Liberty who greeted people to New York. Except, this was not a New York she’d been to before—the busy metropolis with all the people and the smells and the horns.
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