This book was a hard one, partly because this year was a hard one. Here are some people who helped me through.
First, thank you to everyone on the internet and in real life who told me nice things about the first book in this series, or said they were excited for this one. It meant—and still means—a lot to me.
Thank you to Natasha Snow for her beautiful cover design and for always being such a joy to work with.
Thank you to K. R. Collins, who read multiple early drafts of this book and was unflagging in her encouragements. Thank you to my writing buddies Valentine Wheeler and verity, both of whom listened to their fair share of my despair on the topic of this book.
Thank you to Wren Wallis, lawyer and writer and friend, who was willing to answer my ridiculous questions about future laws concerning kidnapping someone into space and confessing to a crime on a live broadcast. Any legal nonsense in this book is my fault, not hers.
Thank you to Olivia Dade, who lives across the ocean but who wrote alongside me and kept me accountable through Twitter DMs for the final few days of editing this book.
Thank you to Elia Winters, who spent many hours sitting across a café table from me, drinking a London Fog and writing a novel, thus inspiring me to write some words of my own. Our conversations about what we’re writing have scandalized or titillated every coffeeshop patron and employee in the area, which makes me feel like a notorious, dissolute rake in a Regency romance—the dream.
Thank you to Ryan Boyd, who edited this book when it was a total mess, whose insights were crucial to making it less of a mess, and who was patient and kind and funny the whole time. They were right about everything, which is a priceless quality in an editor, and I am grateful for their work and their friendship.
And, as always, thank you to J, whose wish to remain mysterious and elusive I am contradicting by acknowledging him, but it would be a crime not to record here how much I love him. He listens to a lot of meandering soliloquy for every book I write, and this one was especially torturous. He also answers questions on everything I don’t know, which is a vast and varied field. If anything in this book struck you as a cool sci-fi concept, credit goes to my beloved science consultant and would-be cryptid, J. He taught me everything I know about physics (still not much, but that’s on me) and everything I know about love (a lot).