Chapter 1

“I can defend him.”

The laughter started in the front row.

It spread the way laughter always does when someone says something that makes powerful people uncomfortable — fast, loud, and mean. Reporters, lawyers, spectators who’d lined up before dawn just to watch a rich man fall. All of them laughing at the same thing.

At her.

Camika Foster was eight years old, four feet four inches tall, and wearing a dress her grandmother had washed so many times the blue had gone gray at the elbows. Her sneakers didn’t match — not the laces anyway — and her backpack had three different kinds of duct tape holding the left strap together. Her hair was in pigtails that had started the morning even and hadn’t stayed that way.

She was standing in the third row of courtroom 9B with one hand gripping the bench in front of her, and she was not sitting back down.

“I can defend him,” she said again, louder this time.

The laughter got louder too. Someone in the press row actually slapped his knee. The bailiff looked at the judge. The judge looked at the girl. The prosecutor, a man named Morris McDaniels who wore suits that cost more than Camika’s grandmother made in a month, was grinning like he’d just won something.

Maybe he thought he had.

Judge Margaret Sanders banged her gavel. “Order.”

The laughter died down the way it always does when a judge uses that voice. The smirks stayed. They always stay.

“Young lady,” Judge Sanders said, and her voice had gone careful the way adult voices do when they’re talking to someone they’ve already decided not to take seriously. “What is your name?”

“Camika Foster.”

“Camika, how old are you?”

“Eight. Almost nine.”

Someone in the gallery made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh but wanted to be. Camika didn’t look to see who. She kept her eyes on the judge because the judge was the one who mattered right now.

“Sweetheart, this is a very serious courtroom. You can’t simply—”

“I know what courtrooms are for,” Camika said. “And I know Mr. Forbes didn’t kill anyone.”

That quieted the room in a different way than the gavel had. Not obedience. Something closer to curiosity, like when you think you know the shape of something in the dark and then it moves.

Malcom Forbes was sitting at the defense table in an orange jumpsuit with his wrists cuffed in front of him, staring at her like she’d appeared out of the floor. The chair beside him was still warm from the attorney who’d walked out twenty minutes ago. Just closed his briefcase, straightened his tie, and left. Mid-trial. On the record. In front of everybody.

Camika had watched that too, from the third row where she’d been sitting every day after school for two weeks. She had watched everything. She had written most of it down.

“And why,” Judge Sanders asked carefully, “do you believe Mr. Forbes is innocent?”

Camika took a breath. Her hands were shaking. She was glad the bench in front of her gave her something to hold onto.

“Because the evidence doesn’t make sense,” she said. “And I can show you why.”

McDaniels was on his feet before she finished the sentence. “Your Honor, this is absurd. The child has no legal standing, no training, and frankly no business—”