“Of course it matters now. It always matters, regardless of how everything ends.” Fiona reached out hesitantly. Morgan’s last defenses fell and she threw herself into her mother’s arms. Somehow Fiona was even worse at hugging than Lucareoth had been, but she tried. She kept talking softly into her daughter’s ear. “I’m sorry. So sorry. You’re right, I’ve had giant blinders on. I’ll do better, I promise. Just because you don’t have powers doesn’t mean you’re not part of the community, doesn’t mean that you’re not important. It’s going to be different, I swear.”
Morgan pulled back, hiccuping. “I wish we had time for that. But I’m glad we at least could talk before the end.”
“Young lady, this is not the end,” Fiona said sharply. “Yeah, you screwed up and I screwed up, but we aren’t out of time yet.”
“But Kelly’s going to lose a chunk of her soul. And then so will lots of other people.”
“But they haven’t yet.”
“The plan?”
“The plan always goes to shit, kid.” Fiona ruffled her hairlike she used to do when Morgan was a little girl. “But so far, no one’s bleeding out and there’s only been one ambulance. So you’re doing better than I usually am at this point. How long until everything goes down?”
Morgan sniffled and checked her phone. She had four missed calls from Luke and two from Gisele. “Ten minutes until the demo, twenty until my deadline.”
“All right. So we have to disrupt a major Working in front of civilian witnesses.”
“It’s not a Working, it’s a tech demo.” She gave a watery snort. “The really ironic thing is that the only thing that actually works on its own is the soul-catching part.”
“What do you mean? They’re getting up there in front of a bunch of reporters and shit with a product that doesn’t work?”
“Ha. Apparently it’s a dirty little secret that a lot of the demos are faked.”
“So you have to un-fake it.”
“I guess, although it would be pretty obvious who did it. And then they say that we sabotaged the Kaleo and it becomes a story about a jumped-up SDR who flew too close to the sun and tried to kill an amazing product, and they get a big flood of investment money. Besides, who cares whether the Kaleo works or not? It’s the contract that Bel’aliol and Ravenfell cares about.”
Her mother held up a finger. “Ravenfell cares about it? The partners do?”
“Well, I don’t know if Vesper gives a shit, but his deputy’s pretty ambitious.” She glanced at her phone again. The clock was ticking down. “She was the one who determined that the contract will be binding even if people don’t believe in it, as long as they’ve been informed.”
“Hold up. The contract doesn’t work if someone hasn’t been informed of the fine print, right?”
“Yeah—I mean, people never read all the terms and conditions, but we tried to—” She swallowed, ashamed. She continued in a smaller voice. “We tried to have someone sign a contract when they didn’t know what was in the terms. It didn’t work. But Brad made this giant point of telling everyone what’s in the terms.”
“And that will still work?”
“Apparently, yes. Ravenfell and Bel’aliol both seem pretty sure.” She paused, thunderstruck. She couldn’t save herself, but she could save Kelly and everyone else. “Unless. Unless we fake the demo.”
Her mom looked confused. “I thought you were already faking the demo.”
She dialed Luke, hoping he’d pick up. Her mother bit her lip for a moment and then walked off. Morgan didn’t have time to figure out where she was going.
“Morgan?” Luke answered, sounding frantic. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “Listen—I figured out how to stop Brad. We’re faking the hardware to work. But at the same time, we need to fake the software tonotwork.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We need to change the contract, just enough that it’s not valid enough to trap Kelly’s soul. That way, Bel’aliol will think the whole partial-soul-slash-T&C thing doesn’t work and abandons the plan.”
“But Morgan—your contract.” He sounded on the verge of tears.
“It was my fault this happened,” she said, her throattightening. “I was the one who convinced him to take a Deal in the first place. And I can’t ask everyone else to pay for my mistakes.”
There was a long silence on the phone. Finally, he whispered, “You’re sure?”
She wasn’t. And she felt terrible asking him to do this himself. “Yeah.”
