Chapter 18: Mary makes her Move. A Magician Pulls a Hat out of a Rabbit

My family demanded to know how I’d anticipated the attack on the building.

I couldn’t exactly tell them an old hacker friend had brute-forced my HIAI inputs, yanked me from what had been shaping up to be a spectacular dream, and counted down the seconds until a hijacked hovercab crashed through my window.

With me directly in its path.

Instead, I fed them a half-truth: I still had contacts within an old hacking collective. They hadn’t been able to stop the hovercab from being compromised, but they’d spotted the intrusion in time to ping an old dead drop I had barely thought about since beginning neural regeneration. They had warned me.

That was the story, anyway.

My family swallowed it, but only reluctantly. They wanted names. Locations. Some tangible proof that the mysterious hackers who had saved my life weren’t the exact same people who had endangered it. The only thing keeping them from pressing harder was the zero-day security flaw Lancelot had uncovered.

I played that card without a single shred of shame. They could spend the next several hours interrogating me about confidential sources, or they could patch the glaring vulnerability that had allowed someone to turn a city transit vehicle into a kinetic strike weapon.

That pivoted the conversation nicely. The discussion immediately became about my safety. Or, as I saw it, how best to suffocate me in the loving, smothering arms of my family’s security apparatus. They wanted to bury me fifteen stories underground with a legion of bodyguards. No movement without twenty-four hours’ notice. Pre-clearance for anyone who stepped within two hundred and fifty feet of my chair. In other words, they wanted me alive, protected, and completely unable to live.

I told them I had a better plan, so they had better listen.

My lingering reputation as “Broken Mary” was likely the only reason they didn’t laugh me out of the room. Back then, when I got upset, electronics had an unfortunate tendency to violently explode. Without that history, they probably would have patted me on the head, called me a dear, and locked me in a bunker anyway.

The attack had been too precise to be random. The hovercab had struck my room directly; someone had been aiming squarely at me. If I vanished off the grid, leaving them knowing I was still out there, what then? Would they begin striking House Donovan holdings at random, hoping to get lucky?

So, we would tell them the truth. A curated truth, at least.

My rehabilitation was progressing, but neural regeneration remained highly experimental. I would continue my convalescence on Meredin, a House Donovan holding renowned for its rehabilitation centers and long-term recovery services. The public would see a recovering House daughter being transferred to a quieter, better-equipped facility. Anyone hunting me would see exactly where I was going.

What I would actually be doing was going to Avelonne. I would travel under a false name, enter a House Donovan center as a private patient, and quietly continue the treatment my family was so determined to protect. Only three members of the local security staff would know my real identity, operating under the strict directive that disclosing my presence—even to House leadership—was a direct threat to my life. To everyone else, I’d just be a recovering woman with excellent insurance, an inconvenient number of privacy restrictions, and a bodyguard who looked capable of eating anyone who asked too many questions.

The part I carefully neglected to mention was that I had zero intention of going to Avelonne.

Once we were safely in the black of space, I would change our destination. Oops. I would claim that Avelonne had somehow leaked through my hacker contacts. Returning directly to Terra would only confirm the leak, so I’d chosen a new destination on the fly. For security reasons, naturally.

Shame about that.

It next became about my escort. It STARTED at five ships. It grew from there. It was touching, really, they cared about me so much to go to this effort. But about the time they started musing about whether they should ask one of their FedNavy liasons for an official escort, I had to step in. Once again, they were narrowing my options.

“So you want to advertise my location to every pirate man, woman, child, and perhaps subatomic particle of scum within thirteen parsecs?”