Attune

First you thought of it. Then you saw the ad. Nile wants to switch the order.

When her teaching assistant catches her altering a grade, Marie Cuervo expects the worst. Michael Warner offers her a job instead: get him inside Nile — the company that runs half the internet and sits in most people’s living rooms — and he’ll pay enough to clear her overdue bills.

He’s spent two years trying to reach the corporation he blames for his mother’s death. She can get him closer. Neither expects to find they already know each other — the writer and the artist who once made a story together, until he vanished without a word.

Their next job leaves them carrying stolen files and something neither knows they’ve taken: Attune, an experimental neural implant. Days later, Michael answers a thought Marie never said out loud.

Two people who swore off ever being known that well can no longer keep a thought from each other. The link is something Nile never intended — and the two people who stole its research have become its evidence. Michael’s body is rejecting the implant. Getting it out means going back for what they couldn’t steal.

She made him promise they’d leave together. She’s going to hold him to it.