FOR LORIE ANN GROVER
WHO DANCES IN LIGHT EVEN IN
THE GRIMMEST OF NIGHTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
“You promised guys,” my little sister grumbles as she adjusts the gun belt slung low on her hips.
“And I delivered,” I tell Roz, gesturing to the mosh pit of (balding and, hopefully, starving) men congregated before the doors of the Museum of Pop Culture, a full two hours before it opens. They are the perfect, captive audience for my bake sale. “Behold.”
“They’re old. And they’re playing dress-up.”
“They’re in character.” I don’t point out that so are we. Roz, nice and covered in my original costume: a faux-leather vest stretched to the point of ruin. Me, exposed in a flimsy slip dress I wasn’t planning on wearing today.
But Roz is right. Little kids in costume are cute. Girls geared up as some of the most fearless women in sci-fi history? Fierce. Fortysomething men dressed as their favorite characters from a TV show? Vaguely creepy. Even creepier, guys older than our dad are staring at my not-so-little sister, fresh from an elite rowing camp and with the muscles to prove it.
“Everyone here is just … ummm”—quick, how would our parents phrase this?—“expressing our appreciation for Firefly. Best sci-fi series. Ever.”
“You’re expressing something, all right.” Roz emits a long-suffering sigh. “What’s Firefly about again?”
“Think hot cowboys who fight bad guys in outer space.”
“People actually watched this thing?”
“People are still obsessed with this thing.” Like my best friend and me. Ever since Aminta and I binge-watched the entire season on a single snow day back in eighth grade, we’ve been superfans. Hence, my grand plan: sell out of the bake sale in an hour flat, then head into the exhibit, slap the HoloLens on my head, and compete in the bar fight scene. All great journalists need to be able to hold their own, whatever, whenever, and wherever the fight, on the streets or in a bar. And I, Viola Wynne Li, am that.
Once word leaked six months ago that MoPOP was curating a special exhibit of Firefly, I’ve been prepping my spaceport bake-sale stand to match my costume as Zoë Washburne, she of the fierce leather vest and second-in-command on the spaceship Serenity. But then my parents announced last night that they had to be in Portland for an emergency meeting first thing this morning with a client who was having an epic crisis, which meant me babysitting Roz, even though she’s in high school. And since Roz hasn’t worn a dress in approximately seven years, she got to be me.
“Who am I again?” she demands.
“Zoë,” I tell her for what must be the fifteenth time this morning, “first mate and—”
Roz interrupts with a contemptuous sniff. “So not me. I’m going to be crew captain by junior year. And who are you?”
“River Tam, badass weapon in a dress and boots.”
“What’s her weapon?”
“She is the weapon.”
Even though my dress is breezy at best, I’m sweating, most likely from dragging the card table by myself from the station wagon parked two blocks away. Call me compulsive, but I straighten the already tidy pile of my latest article featuring today’s bake-sale beneficiary, a girls’ education fund through CARE International. Now, I set up the sign lettered in Firefly font: JOIN THE REVOLUTION: GEEKS FOR GOOD! And at the bottom, in smaller font, is the requisite legalese that my parents insist I include in accordance with King County Public Health codes: BAKED IN A KITCHEN THAT IS NOT INSPECTED BY A REGULATORY AUTHORITY. Perfect.
Roz multitasks in displeasure, picking at the blisters populating her palms (which, hello, is not going to help move a single baked good) and complaining, “It’s the last day at Bumbershoot. I could be listening to Black Pink. I could be sleeping.”
I choose to ignore her operatic sigh. Besides, in the middle of her woe-is-me soliloquy, I’m suddenly not feeling in bake-sale shape. It must be ninety-five degrees, uncharacteristically toasty for late August in Seattle, but I might as well be in the Serengeti with my aunt, the relentless sun pelting down on us. My forehead leaks sweat, and I feel oddly weak. But who cares if my face is beginning to feel sickly warm? I brandish a copy of my article, complete with my interview with the vice president of advocacy in charge of the education fund, and raise my voice at two oncoming older men dressed as Browncoats: “Buy a bao and help the thirty-one million girls who are out of school around the world!”
The Browncoats veer away from me at light speed.
“You’re scary,” says Roz, herself moving a stratospheric distance from the table. “I’m getting something from Starbucks.”
“By yourself?” I ask, a mini-Mom. “Can’t you wait an hour?”
Again with the sighs.
As Roz flounces away, my fingers worry the leather lariat at my throat, Zoë’s signature talisman I wear every single day. My
right foot taps an impatient beat on the pavement. I was counting on obsession with this short-lived series—just fourteen episodes before it got canceled—for a large turnout of hungry nerds and a rapid sell-out of the bake sale. But there are zero takers for my painstakingly crafted, pillow-fluffy, individually packaged, good-for-the-world red bean buns. In Firefly, everyone speaks (curses) in Mandarin. Hence, Chinese dessert: red bean baos. Clever, no?
Apparently not.
I fight a vague wave of nausea. I know one thing for absolute sure: I can’t leave my station for some impending cold. Life with my parents has always meant living and breathing these issues, but now they matter even more to me as the next great foreign correspondent.
“Educate girls around the world!” I shout again, and shove an article at another Browncoat who looks shocked, but takes it. Five feet away from me, he tosses my article—the one that took a good ten hours to research, let alone write—into the garbage. “Hey!”
Right when I’m about to stalk over to the garbage can to see if I can salvage my article, I realize, I’m hunting the wrong prey: I shouldn’t focus on old geeks, but perpetually hungry guys my age. How hard could it be to find one of those? I rise on my tiptoes, even though my legs are shaky. Miraculously, I spot my target: a broad-shouldered, ridiculously blond, young Thor-gone-lumberman in jeans and flannel shirt.
Before I can yell, “Baos,” Thor quarter turns. He should be swaggering around Iceland, circa twelve centuries ago, brandishing a battle-ax, but instead he’s making straight for me like he knows exactly who I am and what I’m selling. My flowy dress feels like it’s cinching my rib cage. The late-summer sun is burning my face more than ever now. Where was Roz when I needed her?
Thor sets a towering pile of comics next to my articles on the table. The cover on them distracts me from Thor himself—not hard to do because a young woman is busting—and I do mean, busting—out of her stripper outfit (pardon me, costume), an obscenely high-cut bikini bedazzled with stars. The title reads Persephone from Planet X. More like Persephone from Planet XXX.
I glare up at him. He is so not colonizing my private bake-sale space with this ode to sexism.
“Excuse me. What do you think you’re doing?” I ask, just stopping myself from shoving his comics off. Let them be trampled. But then he picks up one of my articles, skims it, and tucks it in his front pocket.
“Doing what most people do at bake sales. Buying one?” Thor digs out his wallet from his back pocket. “Actually, make it two. My swim coach was in a foul mood today. Super hard set. I’m starving.”
“Oh.”
“But since when are pork hum baos a hot bake-sale item?”
“Red bean baos,” I grudgingly correct him when he holds out a five-dollar bill. “The barbeque pork wouldn’t make it past Seattle’s nonhazardous food code.” I thrust two buns at him. As my parents say, the best offense is defense. So I start to gather his comics to hand back to him.
“Take one,” he tells me.
“No, thanks.”
“Really?” He looks genuinely perplexed.
My silence speaks eloquently for itself, if I say so myself.
Unfortunately, my silence is a foreign language to him. Gesturing to the geeks around us, Thor continues, “A new superhero. Planet X. I mean, come on! This could drive traffic to you.”
“ ‘Sir,’ ” I say as I pass him his change, knowing that the iconic line was going to be thoroughly lost on him, “ ‘I think you have a problem with your brain being missing.’ ”
“Zoë, I’m desperate,” he answers.
I blink up at him in surprise. He speaketh Firefly?
“No one wants one. Besides, Aminta texted that I could sell my comic here,” Thor announces.
My best friend, Aminta? Aminta, president of the Geeks for Good? Aminta, who conducted a private study proving that our teachers did, in fact, unconsciously call on guys more than girls in our science classes? I eye Persephone’s chest, a solar system unto itself, one that defies gravity (not to mention, reality). Whatever universe Thor and his comic hail from, I’m pretty sure that Aminta and I have never seen, heard, or wanted to populate it.
“I’ll donate all my proceeds to your cause,” he says.
More like he’ll drive traffic away from my cause. I prepare to give Thor a polite brush-off, yet, I swear, I’ve been teleported to the Sahara Desert, the glare is so harsh. Still, it’s not harsh enough to stop me from witnessing with my very own eyes the stealth moves that any pilot in any universe would envy. Roz (finally) returns with her iced coffee and maneuvers in front of me. Her back may be to me now, but I can feel the gale force of her eyelashes fluttering at Thor.
“River on Zoë action. Nice,” some balding guy snickers as he and his Browncoated buddy pass us.
My hand automatically shoots out to Roz’s arm, yanking her out of harm’s way, even though she towers over me by a good eight inches. I snap at them, “Yeah, and we can kill you with our brain cells.” My outburst saps me. I end up clutching Roz for balance.
From my side, I hear Thor: “Very River Tam.”
I try to glare up at him, except that the sun is so bright. I squint, lower my head. Too fast. The planet moves in dizzying circles.
Thor asks urgently, “Hey, you okay? You’re really red.”
Roz finally acknowledges my presence and frowns. “Whoa, Viola. You really are.” Her hands fan her own face. “Like, really red. Really, really red.” She looks revolted. “And you’re getting puffy.”
The familiar hard guitar chords of Firefly’s theme song strum overhead. Hundreds of voices roar their approval. The cowboy twang of the lyrics fills the air: “Take my love, take my land / Take me where I cannot stand.”
Let’s go, I want to tell Roz, except I can’t. I don’t feel flushed; I feel faint. Not “weak in the knees” faint either. But faint faint. Like “I’m going to collapse in front of this guy” faint. Like I’m going to be trampled by the Great Migration of geeks who are now thundering toward the opening doors. The earth buckles underneath me. I lurch. As I fall, Thor reaches for me, his arms tightening around me.
“Call 911,” Thor says, his voice muffled in the ringing of my ears.
“I’m fine,” I protest. At least I think I protest.
All I see is the answering blue sky of Thor’s eyes. The theme song—my theme song—swells, mocking me: “You can’t take the sky from me.”
The world falls black, and my sky disappears.
When your company is under cyberattack, the first thing you must do is calibrate the threat. Where is the attack coming from? Who is behind the attack? What is the damage?
—Lee & Li Communications
Inside the War Room: The Crisis Management Playbook
I shiver, cold with sweat, lion-stalked in the middle of the savanna. My heart pounds. Escape is impossible. My skin itches and prickles and stings, assaulted by legions of mosquitoes and tsetse flies. Waking from a dead faint is nothing like stirring from a good sleep, all groggy and blurry, wispy dream remnants floating away into the ether-space of happy. Instead, think: nightmare.
“Mom?” I whisper. “Dad?”
My eyes blink open, slowly. There are strange men, and we are moving, and I’m lying in a cot, strapped down. For one panicked moment, I almost believe that I’ve been kidnapped. Isn’t this the very situation that my parents warned me about when I turned ten and was allowed to bike down the street by myself for the first time? What was I supposed to do to escape a locked van? But the men are in uniforms: crisp white shirtsleeves stitched with official-looking Medic One patches. One tells me, “You passed out. We’re taking you to the Emergency Department.”
“Roz?” I ask. “My little sister!”
“She’s with your friend.”
Friend? What friend? Then I remember Thor and fainting in front of him, not to mention hordes of strangers, and I’ve just met the guy for a nanosecond and they left Roz with him? There are no words for this crisis. My parents
are going to skin me alive when they find out that I’ve left her behind. As if the paramedics divine my thoughts, the older one with a buzz cut assures me, “Your sister said that your parents are already on their way from Portland.” He gives me a grandfatherly pat on the shoulder, and I moan. Who jerks away first is unclear and doesn’t matter; I’m relieved that no one is touching me. “Just rest.”
I don’t need to be told twice. I close my eyes.
…
Where other (normal) parents might hover and fret and liquefy into blubbering pools of utter incompetence in a crisis, mine shine. Of course they do. They’re professional crisis managers. Throw in an emergency room? They’d go bioluminescent, glowing at the opportunity to come to my rescue. Only my parents aren’t here. Which left me alone to contend with the on-call doctor at the Children’s Hospital who ordered approximately a billion and one tests: a CT scan, a couple of vials of blood (!), and an EKG. And now I find myself the lab rat of a pediatric dermatologist, who is hmm-ing and hunh-ing in a not-so-comforting way in my new exam room in a different ward at the hospital. Dr. Anderson looks young enough (no stubble on his preternaturally smooth chin) to be sitting next to me in physiology, especially the way he’s worrying his top lip like he’s cramming for a test. He very well could be. As soon as I made it to registration in the Emergency Department, the nurse called Mom, who authored and emailed a mini-textbook on my medical history in ten minutes flat.
“Hmm. Are you sure there’s no family history of lupus?” Dr. Anderson asks, peering at me like I’m a pickled organ he wants to dissect.
“Pretty sure. Was it just a heat stroke?” I’d seen my Auntie Ruth have one of those during our trail run on Tiger Mountain when it hit ninety-eight degrees last summer. I self-diagnose. “I was nauseous and dizzy, and I fainted.”
“No, you have a rash, too,” says Dr. Anderson. “Try not to scratch.”
Which, of course, makes me notice that I am, in fact, itchy, and I do, in fact, have a blotchy red rash running along both arms. When Dr. Anderson returns to the intake form, frowning because Mom writes at the speed of her thoughts, rapid, dense, and always indecipherable, I surreptitiously check my phone. My parents ought to have all the answers about my condition any moment now. Instead, there’s a text from Aminta.