“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

checkpoints, the morning’s intelligence cycle was turning without me.

I thought about what it meant that Ethan had put Oracle 7 in his speech. He would have cleared the name with his commanding officer, who would have known what the designation signified and either permitted it or not.

The fact that it had made the speech meant someone in that chain continue reading …