1

Uptown, Minneapolis

“You’ve been coming home late. I worry.”

He stared at her.

Salem planted her hands on her hips. “Strong and beautiful,” her mom called her curves, exhorting her to be proud of her half-Persian heritage. The hips and strong thighs came with a head of unruly dark curls and khaki-green eyes that tipped slightly at the outer edges. From her dad, an Iowa transplant, she’d inherited skin that burned easily, an Irish nose more potato than patrician, and a small chest that did not counterbalance her booty. Her best friend, Bel, referred to her as “farm girl on top, phat magic below.”

Her mismatched parts had never bothered him, though. He’d always been loyal, neither needy nor distant. A perfect balance. That was, until the past two weeks, when his nights out had inexplicably grown late and then later.

“You’re tomcatting around, aren’t you?”

He held his tongue, watching her coolly.

She sighed, the puff of air pushing a curl out of her eyes. “I deserve better, you know? Have you even seen this?”

She pointed toward the copy of Minneapolis Magazine. The cover headline was “Top Twenty-Somethings to Watch” over a photo of Carl Ivy, a twenty-six-year-old Edina native who’d developed a social media grinder app that simultaneously placed the same photo on a dozen different sites, generating a unique, web-vetted, guaranteed-hilarious caption for each of the twelve posts. He’d named the app Looking Glass. Mark Zuckerberg had offered him $3 million for it.

“I’m on page twenty-seven, not that you’d care.”

Actually, Salem didn’t care either, unless embarrassment counted. She’d grown up watching her mom, Vida Wiley, deal with the surprising amount of media attention that came with being one of the country’s most controversial history professors, and one of the few specializing in women’s history. Whenever a politician stuck his foot in his mouth commenting on rape or reproduction, or Roe v. Wade came under attack, or some new international atrocity was committed, Professor Wiley was called on to comment. Behind closed doors, she joked that the media saw her as the “Woman Whisperer.” Salem thought it was more likely that they knew her mom could be counted on to contribute jet fuel to any fire.

Professor Wiley’s comments always made news, typically to the chagrin of the Hill College regents who signed her paycheck. The most recent brouhaha had developed when a New York Post reporter called Dr. Wiley’s office to ask her opinion on the source of the recent, virulent, and personal media attacks on Democratic Senator Gina Hayes, the first viable female presidential candidate in the history of the United States.

Dr. Wiley had offered to send the reporter a mirror and a greased shoehorn to help her remove her head from her own ass.

Professor Wiley’s opinions unsurprisingly generated death threats. Buckets of ’em. For a well-armed segment of the population, there was nothing more unnatural, more threatening, more demanding of elimination than a woman with an opinion and an audience.

Salem had learned that young.

Subsequently, she went out of her way to dodge the public eye. Bel teased her that she even avoided having opinions for fear of turning into her mother.

Bel hadn’t been far off.

Salem’s chosen field—a double degree in computer science and mathematics with an emphasis in cryptanalysis as an undergrad, and a fresh master of science in Computational Analysis and Public Policy, all from the University of Minnesota—created a perfect place to hide. At least until the news leaked about the breakthrough she’d made two years ago last spring as she was outlining her master’s thesis.

It involved two words guaranteed to set the technological community abuzz: quantum computing.

The idea that a computer could run on multidimensional qubits rather than binary digits, processing information a million times faster than the best computer operating today, wasn’t new, but the reality of it was fifteen years out. That was, until Salem stumbled across an anomaly while researching Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine 2 for her thesis. Babbage, a polymath famous in the 1800s for his work on computational design, came as close to being a rock star as a mathematician was allowed. Sure, he’d been a fist-shaking grump, but in addition to conceiving the first computer, he’d established the modern postal system, invented the locomotive cowcatcher and the ophthalmoscope, and cracked Vigenère’s autokey cipher, previously believed to be unbreakable.

Salem’s Babbage research had been preliminary, really only intended as background for her thesis on cryptanalysis and government security. It was while collating the cipher research with the Difference Engine data that she’d made her unexpected breakthrough. Two seemingly unrelated pages of research had accidentally fallen to the floor. When she reached to pick them up, the link between them shone like a beacon: the modular arithmetic Babbage used to solve Vigenère’s cipher could be applied to a binary digit at the atomic level.

Two great tastes that taste great together!

She remembered a cold sweat breaking out. If she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, it would revolutionize the field of computers and computer science.

She’d immediately changed the focus of her research.

The offers to publish her findings began to roll in before she’d even finished her thesis. Every outlet wanted to be the first to announce the quantum computing breakthrough. And indeed, once her thesis was written and published, her discovery turned the security world in particular on its ear. If her innovation played out as hypothesized, it would result in a quantum computer with the power to solve the deepest cryptography and blow through the thickest firewall in less than a second. As a result, the head of the National Security Agency, among others, had been requesting meetings with her for the past two months.

She’d deflected those. Since the day fourteen years earlier when her dad had killed himself, she’d avoided anything that required leaving her familiar path. She was happy teaching North Minneapolis kids how to use the Microsoft Office Suite, her job for the past year. The building was familiar. The kids liked her. She didn’t correct them when they called her “Salem Whitey” rather than “Salem Wiley,” didn’t back down when they dared her to dance the Nae Nae.

And only last week, her thesis adviser had offered her a research position at the college to supplement her income. She planned on accepting it. The job would mean she’d need to travel to only three places, not counting shopping or doctor’s visits: her apartment, the Jordan Neighborhood Community Center, and the University of Minnesota. So what if her adviser had offered the research job as a way to keep her active in computer innovation, a last-ditch effort to save her from “wasting the code-breaking genius” she’d displayed in her thesis?

And anyhow, her idea was only theory at this point.

Enough theory to get her onto page twenty-seven of Minneapolis Magazine’s “Top Twenty-Somethings to Watch,” though.

Meow.

“That’s all you have to say for yourself?” Salem asked her cat, who was still largely ignoring her. “You finally talk, and that’s all I get?”

She scooped up Beans, nuzzling his head in her neck. She loved the softness of his glossy black fur. A purr rumbled just under the surface. “Because I expected more from you. A confession, maybe. You’ve got a lady kitty out there, don’t you?”

She leaned over the windowsill he’d been perched on, hugging her wool cardigan tighter. Beans had come with her Uptown apartment. She knew her mom hadn’t wanted her to move out of the house, had in fact assumed she never would. While Salem had turned down several scholarships to colleges on either coast because her palms turned clammy at the thought of venturing outside of the Twin Cities, she’d certainly never confess that to Vida. Instead, she’d enrolled at the U of M, upped her Ativan prescription, and moved to Uptown, quickly establishing a routine to feel safe.

She inhaled deeply, enjoying the greasy sweetness wafting up from Glam Doll donuts. She knew it was leftover smells from yesterday, that the workers wouldn’t arrive to begin tomorrow’s batch of deep-fried sweetness for a few more hours, but her mouth watered nonetheless. The sour cherry pistachio was her favorite, a fluffy cake donut wrapped around a tart filling.

And they delivered.

Bel, three years older than Salem and in her second year on the Chicago Police force, would ream her inside-out if she knew Salem left her window unlocked on the nights Beans was roaming. Bel—who’d grown up J.Crew beautiful, strawberry blond with skin like cream, who felt any teasing of Salem as her own pain, who’d come out in eleventh grade and never looked back—had always looked out for Salem, knuckle-sandwiching the bullies in elementary school and slaying them with scathing words when they reached South High School.

Salem missed Bel so much. They’d grown apart in the last few years, with Bel in Chicago and Salem not willing to leave Minnesota. Salem did like being able to keep her windows open without getting shit for it, though. She lived on the second floor. Who was going to risk the fire escape to get to her?

She glanced at the clock. Almost bar close, so Connor might stop by soon. She didn’t confess to Beans that this was really why she was up so late. Connor Sawyer had read the Minneapolis Magazine article and called Salem immediately. He’d said he missed her. She knew he hadn’t. A tall Aryan lawyer whom she’d met when she was working at the U of M Law Library and he’d come by to pick up some files, he had only ever found time for her when the bars let out. She knew she deserved better. But who did it hurt to let him stop by every now and again? Anyhow, the guy was a wizard in bed.

She set Beans on the couch and shuffled to the mirror to check her make-up for the fifth time. She tousled her hair, touched up her lip gloss. It took a lot of energy to look natural.

Her phone rang, pulling her out of her contemplation.

She sighed. At least he’d bothered to call. Usually he would either show or he wouldn’t.

She addressed her cat before she reached for the phone. “What do you think is the excuse this time, Beansy? Too drunk? Respects me too much to sneak around? It’s been at least four months since I heard that one. Maybe it’ll sound new all over again.”

Disappointment heavy on her shoulders, she grabbed the iPhone from the table. A photo of Bel’s smiling face, all blue eyes and white teeth, flashed at her. Salem’s heart tumbled. Bel never called this late. Her hand flew to the scar on her left cheek.

“Isabel?”

“Salem? It’s my mom.” Bel’s voice cracked. “The police are at her apartment. There’s blood everywhere.”