The door unlocked with my voice and we stepped back inside the relative coolness of the building. I set the basket on the dining table and nodded at her helmet beside it. “You should put it back on.”

“Later,” she murmured and walked back toward the windows, gazing outward.

I sat on a stool and tapped a few quick commands into my laptop. The funds had transferred in full. I let out a breath, releasing the tension I had held ever since stealing this you girl. Three hundred million had been a gamble, but a gamble worth taking. It was enough for Victor to suit up as a you boy and pretend to be one of them, to infiltrate their closed and elite society. We’d destroy them from within.

We wanted blue skies again.

“What are you going to do with the money?” She turned, her hands clasped in front of her.

I jumped at the sound of her voice and shut the MacPlus. “I don’t know. Redecorate?”

She gave me a leveled look, and I broke away first, taking in the chamber I had called home for the past year. I’d have to leave immediately. I would miss this place.

“I’d suggest a new wardrobe first, Dark Horse.”

I laughed despite myself. “What’s your name, then?”

“Seriously?” She raised her eyebrows in mockery.

I shrugged. “What does it matter now?” I did like her. I wanted to know.

“Daiyu,” she replied.

“From the novel?”

She smiled in surprise, and it made her truly beautiful. “You’ve read it?”

I read voraciously, most often from the undernet, but had found an actual copy of Dream of the Red Chamber stuffed and forgotten in the desk drawer of a junk shop. The owner had given it to me for free, waving me off without a glance. Books weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

“Flowers in my eyes and birdsong in my ears,” she murmured to herself.

I’d read the book enough times to recognize the line, from a poem that the hero Baoyu used when thinking of the heroine, Daiyu’s namesake.

“Augment my loss and mock my bitter tears,” I replied.

She glanced toward me, eyes gleaming from the pollution—or fear, I didn’t know. “You have read it.”

It was a favorite of mine. But she didn’t need to know that. Instead, I said, “You don’t look the tragic heroine to me.”

“Don’t I?” She had been leaning against the glass and straightened now, squaring her shoulders. But not before I caught a glimpse of wistfulness in her eyes. Of longing. What more could a you girl possibly want when she already had everything?

“We better go,” I said. “I need to return you to your family, and it’ll be dark soon.”