Michelle Caswell’s Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation; Jarrett M. Drake’s Liberatory Archives: Towards Belonging and Believing; and Randall C. Jimerson’s Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice were excellent resources for helping me understand memory work.

Now—there is much thanks to give!

To my agent, Seth Fishman, for being fun and delightful, in addition to being a wonderful agent, of course. Thanks also to the rest of the team at the Gernert Company, especially Ellen Coughtrey, Jack Gernert, Rebecca Gardner, Nora Gonzalez, Will Roberts, and also to Shiv Doraiswami and Sean Berard at Grandview.

This book transformed under the eagle eyes of my editor Jessica Williams, who made pretty much everything make more sense, and also convinced me to give EMBRS a better name (maybe SparkLE will live on in another book . . . ). Thanks for championing my book so wonderfully! Thanks also to Peter Kispert for being so wonderfully responsive and encouraging, and to the tireless efforts of others at HarperCollins: Laura Brady, Ana Deboo, Kyra DeVoe, Jennifer Hart, Jen McGuire, Kelsey Manning, Mumtaz Mustafa, Eliza Rosenberry, Nancy Singer, and Liate Stehlik. And to Will Staehle at Unusual Co. for such a wonderful cover!

Thanks to Kish Widyaratna at 4th Estate for bringing this book to the UK! And to everyone else who has worked to bring this book to new lands.

I have many colleagues from various software jobs to thank for themes that wormed their way into this book. First, my colleagues at Cortico for all things digital archival and what it means to build story-sharing software in partnership with communities. To my colleagues at Ethyca for teaching me more than I ever wanted to learn about data privacy. Building open-source software with you all also taught me the value of a good commit message, a good git rebase, and a good emoji :chefskiss:.

This book started as a short story, and I only had the confidence to make it into something longer thanks to the encouragement of Amy Johnson, the Dream Foundry writing contest, and my wonderful cohort at Aspen Summer Words, led by the incomparable Fonda Lee.

Super special thanks go to the earliest readers of this book, back when it was rambling and rough: Constance Fay and Mike Meneses, the best writing group anyone could ask for! Thanks for all the love and silliness. In addition, Zhengyang Wang made sure I didn’t make terrible gaffes in Chinese and pushed me to be more detailed on the historical portions. He also helped me chase down what exactly happened to those bronze lions. Sam Cordero, in addition to providing always valuable feedback, made sure Louise didn’t give our heroes food poisoning by taking a five-hour bus ride without putting her food in a cooler. Sam also gets a special shout-out for making incredible egg-tart ice cream sandwiches in Monica’s honor. Monica would have loved them.