“It wasn’t illegal. For all its size, Connexion is a company, not a government, and we didn’t need your fucking permission! Just because Ainsley paid our salary doesn’t mean he owned us. So screw your fucked-up corporate policy! And it did happen.”

“We have those policies for a reason. If you’d told us you were in a relationship, if you’d been honest, everything would have been different. You created the problem. Don’t try and make me out as the bad guy.”

I couldn’t have planned it better. I wanted their stories, especially Yuri’s. It had taken me a while to convince him he should come along on the mission in person, rather than just rely on my reports.

And now here they were, angry but uncensored, with something to prove. All they could use against each other now was the truth, because it was truth that could inflict damage more accurately than any smart missile strike, and their animosity hadn’t even begun to heal over, not after 112 years. It always amazes me how long humans can hold on to grudges.

I glanced around as unobtrusively as I could, saw Kandara and Alik holding back smiles, enjoying the show they’d provoked. Yuri and Callum reheated their old war, ready to say anything, spill any secret.

“So it wasn’t a dark and stormy night,” Callum began. “Quite the opposite.”

Callum and Yuri

CALLUM AND YURI

HEAD TO HEAD, AD 2092

The beach was perfect. That was a major part of Barbuda’s appeal. The tiny Caribbean island had a single Connexion portal door, which led to its larger and more prosperous neighbor, Antigua. In 2092, a solitary portal serving an entire population made it almost unique on Earth, where quantum spatial entanglement had brought everywhere “one step away”—as Connexion’s tag line ran.

The resorts spaced along Barbuda’s southern coastline depended on that exclusivity. The prices they charged for a week of privacy and seclusion were phenomenal. Callum Hepburn considered it entirely worthwhile. The Diana Klub just north of Coco Point was a sprawl of thirty boutique cabins set a few meters back from the top of the pristine white sands. By day it was gorgeous, a tropical sun searing down out of a cloudless azure sky to enhance the verdancy of the palm trees that ran along the top of the beach, turning the white sand into a dazzling slope that by midday was too hot for bare feet to walk on, while the turquoise water with its languid waves was clear enough to reveal the colorful shoals of fish that flittered playfully through the shallows.