Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

The suppressor fired, and Nilah’s bound limbs came free. A harsh, acrid mist filled the air as the phantoplasm caking Nilah’s body melted into the magic-numbing indolence gasses. Gale-force winds and white-hot flames snuffed in the blink of an eye. The sense of her surrounding energies faded away, a sudden silence in her mind.

Her disconnection from magic was always the worst part about a crash. The indolence system was only temporary, but there was always the fear: that she’d become one of those dull-fingered wretches. She screwed her eyes shut and shook her head, willing her mechanist’s magic back.

It appeared on the periphery as a pinhole of light—a tiny, bright sensation in a sea of gray. She willed it wider, bringing more light and warmth into her body until she overflowed with her own magic. Relief covered her like a hot blanket, and her shoulders fell.

But what had just murdered Cyril? Mother had smashed his head open without so much as a second thought. And Mother would know exactly who she was—Nilah’s name was painted on every surface of the Lang Hyper 8. What if she came back?

The damaged floor gave way, and she flailed through the darkness, bouncing down what had to be a mountain of cardboard boxes. She came to a stop and opened her eyes to look around.

She’d landed in a warehouse somewhere she didn’t recognize. Nilah knew every inch of the Galica Speedway—she’d been coming to PGRF races there since she was a little girl, and this warehouse didn’t mesh with any of her memories. She pulled off her helmet and listened for sirens, for the banshee wail of race cars, for the roar of the crowd, but all she could hear was silence.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Jackson Ford

Excerpt from Velocity Weapon copyright © 2019 by Megan E. O’Keefe

Excerpt from A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe copyright © 2018 by Alex White

Cover design by Emily Courdelle and Steve Panton—LBBG

Cover photographs © Shutterstock

Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2019

First Edition: June 2019

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930332

ISBNs: 978-0-316-51915-1 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-51916-8 (ebook)

E3-20190517-JV-NF-ORI