They were killed. Violently. Unnecessarily. The Moderators hadn’t bothered to find out if any of them was the dreamer before taking them all out. They’d lived like Hennessy and they died like she was supposed to.

Outside, Jordan hugged her too-thin jacket around her and put some speed to her feet. The party was in Back Bay, a ten- or fifteen-minute journey if she hoofed it. As she walked, she looked not at the glowing businesses on the ground floor but rather up at the apartments and lofts above. No one in Boston seemed to care that you could see them in their offices and homes; they went about their business and expected you to go about yours. It became like a screensaver of activity. Jordan, like all the girls, was a city person, and Boston was a good city for Jordan’s kind of art. And it felt good to be in a new place after being stranded for so long in DC trying to solve the escalating problem of Hennessy’s dreaming.

The other girls would have loved it, too. Poor June, Trinity, Brooklyn, Madox. Poor Octavia, Jay, Alba, Farrah. Poor girls who never got futures.

Jordan owed it to them to live a life, since they never got a chance. She couldn’t control Hennessy’s recklessness or the Moderators’ ruthlessness. But she could control her own fearlessness. She was going to live as big a life as she could, for as long as she could.

She arrived at the party.

Parties were like people—they came in lots of different shapes and sizes. They had different hopes and dreams and fears. Some of them were needy. Others were self-contained and only needed you to have a good time. Some were warm, garrulous. Others were chilly, exclusionary.

Jordan could see at once that this party was a very grown-up party, a party that took itself seriously. See and be seen. Et cetera. The venue was small: an after-hours Back Bay art gallery. Age knuckling the burnished floors. Abstract paintings brightening the walls. Provocative sculpture complicating the corners. It was all very nice. One felt smarter to see it. Cultured. The partygoers were beautiful: women, all of them. Lovely dark skin, beautiful blond curls, freckles pebbled across cheekbones, big rounded hips, pale midriffs, golden shoulder blades, dresses and heels of every color and length and height. Jordan didn’t recognize all of them, but she recognized enough to get the gist. CEOs. Diplomats. The daughters of presidents and the mothers of drug barons. Actresses. Musicians. Corn cereal heiresses and influencers made good. Celebrities, too, but, you know, proper celebrities; they didn’t point at each other and say, Look, there’s so and so. They acted cool. Peerish.

Boudicca.

“What can I get you?” asked the bartender. She had outrageously red hair, ridiculously red hair, poured from a bottle or a volcano.