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Book two of the Quantum Gravity series sees Lila Black drawn into the intoxicatingly dangerous demon realm. Capricious, in love with beauty, demons are best left to themselves. This is not easy when they can't resist tampering with humans. Justina Robson's new series is a joyful melding of science fiction and fantasy brought together in the figure of the dangerously lovely Lila Black, a 21-year-old secret agent who's had much of her body replaced with weapon-and-armor-heavy intelligent metal and who isn't sure where her mind ends and her installed AI begins. Lila's world is one where demons, elves, and elementals live alongside people. And somehow Lila and the other agents of the security agency have to provide security for all and stay alive themselves.
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Published 2007 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books Selling Out. Copyright © 2007 by Justina Robson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Inquiries should be addressed to Pyr 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228-2119 VOICE: 716-691-0133, ext. 210 FAX: 716-691-0137 WWW.PYRSF.COM 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robson, Justina. Selling out / by Justina Robson. p. cm.—(Quantum gravity ; 2) Originally published: London : Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59102-597-9 I. Title. PR6118.O28S46 2007 823’.92—dc22 2007027080 Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
Table of Contents Praise ALSO BY JUSTINA ROBSON Title Page Copyright Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE ABOUT THE AUTHOR THE NO SHOWSVS.CYNIC GURU
More Praise for Selling Out “It’s good. It’s really very good indeed. I loved it.” Peter F. Hamilton “Fast, lucid, and engaging throughout, vivid with inventive detail and sharp with unexpected twists snagging the unwary reader. . . . I can’t wait to see how they’ll tackle what comes next.” SFRevu “You get pulled in by the novel’s sheer energy. The cross-genre pollination of various ideas makes for a quirky read.” Deathray Praise for Keeping It Real “Entertaining fusion of SF and fantasy spiced with sex, rockin’ elves, and drunk faeries.” Publishers Weekly “This is by far the most entertaining book Robson has written, a novel packed with memorable characters and ideas but that doubles as holiday-reading escapism.” SFX “Think an enthusiastic melange of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Meredith Gentry, Tad Williams’s War of the Flowers, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, a touch of Marianne de Pierre’s Parrish Plessis, even The Bionic Woman or The Transformers, and you get an idea of how much fun this book is.” SFFWorld
ALSO BY JUSTINA ROBSON Silver Screen Mappa Mundi Keeping It Real: Quantum Gravity Book One
CHAPTER ONE Lila Black sat in the office of her psychologist, Dr. Williams. Her memory of her last mission was downloading through one of her WiFi outlet channels; key features streamlined for Williams’s analysis by her AI-self, statistics ready-packaged for the medical teams that monitored her health, cybertronic readouts tabulated for the engineering experts, weapons and armour performance playing back for her master-at-arms. Dr. Williams was reading