“Our cover stories place us as wealthy, influential women, so the most important courtiers—including the king’s mistress—should be keen to meet us.”
“My cover story includes wealth and influence. You, my dear, are my ward.”
“Semantics,” I say, waving a dismissive hand. “You won’t dress me in rags and refuse to let me attend the king’s festival, right?”
She chuckles under her breath, a small concession. I’ll take it. Even in our toughest times, if I can get her to laugh a little, I can get her agreement to a plan, too.
“Francis won’t spend more than a single night away from the mistress; where he goes, she goes. As long as we make ourselves indispensable to her, we’ll get an invitation to the ball. This meeting is as much about one-upmanship as Henry’s goals of gaining acceptance of Anne.”
“And once we’re in Calais?” she asks.
“I introduce myself to Mary Boleyn. The critical path to England goes straight through Lady Anne’s sister. She slept with both Francois and Henry, so she knows the inner workings of both courts.”
“I’ll admit it’s not the worst plan I’ve heard. I need to watch the research holograms again to see if there’s anything we missed. Some angle we haven’t spotted.”
“You don’t trust me?” It stings to even have to ask the question. Whatever else happens, their damage to my partnership with Fagin can’t be a casualty of war.
“I trust your skills,” she says in a resolute tone. I can hear the “but” coming from a mile away. “It’s the attitude I don’t trust. Your anger controls you. That’s dangerous.”
“You’ve never had an issue with how I work before. You love that I’m unconventional, that I take risks no one else does and always come out on top.”
“Your unconventional ass attracted the wrong attention from the wrong people, and here we are.” Fagin flings both arms out to the side and lets them fall with an exasperated slap against her chair. “Every mistake you make in training, every tantrum or mood swing is weighed against you, and your talent may not be enough to balance the scales.”
“Why can’t they send us somewhere else? To some other time?” I hate the pleading tone in my voice. It makes me sound like a five-year-old whining about bedtime. “This can’t be the only way to prove my worth to them.”
“Not happening, kid. This is your only chance to right this ship.”
A faint buzzing grows steadily louder in the background. Fagin crosses over to her desk and taps the display screen on her tablet computer several times. I can’t see what she’s reading, but her brow furrows and she closes her eyes. She exhales a short, sharp breath. “You ready for this?”
Shaking my head and suddenly, feeling quite small and vulnerable, I answer. “Does it matter?”
There’s a shaky laugh—the polar opposite of the chuckles I finessed from her today. “I guess it doesn’t. Nico says that the Timeship is ready and we have our departure window. We leave at dawn tomorrow.”
Chapter 9
Morning people annoy the hell out of me. Chipper, bright-eyed people who spring from bed fully loaded and excited to tackle a new day are freaks of nature who get a buzz out of beating the rest of us to the productivity punch. Early birds don’t really get the worm; they just wake everyone else up. Overachievers, every damn one of them.
I need coffee.
It’s a little before four o’clock in the morning. Dawn is an hour away and, for some perverted reason, the Benefactors scheduled our time jump nearly four hours before any reasonable person should be expected to work. The ground crew swarms around the outside of the shuttle like worker bees, running diagnostic tests and prepping for launch.
Stepping into the ship, I hear someone whistling a happy tune deep in the bowels of the cargo hold. The trilling notes echo up through the opening in the floor, as Nico ascends the ladder into the main cabin.
He looks me over head-to-toe and I’m suddenly self-conscious about my untucked shirt, untied boots, and disheveled hair bound up in a loose elastic band, which allows half of its volume to hang past my shoulders on the right side of my head.
“You look like hammered shit.” He walks past me to the galley and gives a command to the replicator. “Sixteen ounces of Garcia’s French Roast and chicory root coffee blend. Mix with fifty percent organic whole milk. Brew at precisely one hundred-forty degrees Fahrenheit.”
A muted orange glow radiates from the replicator as it produces a glass mug filled with steaming, aromatic coffee. He offers the cup to me, and it’s the most perfect Café au Lait I’ve ever tasted. My personal replicator comes close to reproducing the brew I remember from childhood, but Nico’s blend beats every other twenty-sixth-century knockoff in existence. He orders the same brew for himself.
“Mm. Coffee and chicory,” I say. The heat from the mug warms my hands as the drink warms my insides, making the ship’s cabin a little less frigid. The cold isn’t quite at the stage where you can see your breath hanging in a frothy cloud in front of your face, but with the hangar bay air drifting through the open door, it’s close.
“After our last mission to New Orleans,” he says. “I’ll never drink it any other way if I can help it.” His morning-person eyes are clear and alert, and he looks annoyingly put-together: his dark curls are tamed with hair product, and a pressed khaki shirt is tucked into his blue jeans. He takes a swig from his own mug and beams a big smile.
“Cooks in French Louisiana’s great houses made coffee this way for a century before the American Civil War. When I was a child—”
Nico’s eyebrows raise, and he leans forward onto the balls of his feet, like he’s anticipating a revelatory tidbit from my past.
Fagin’s words ring in my ears. Giving people your past gives them power over you. I wave away his interest with a dismissive hand.
