Gods of Risk by James S.A. Corey Page A

toward him without seeing him. The years hadn’t been kind. Her skin belonged on a woman twice her age and the elfin chin now just looked small. She had a child on her hip that looked about six months old and still too unformed to have a gender. She could have been anyone, except he had no question. A thin, electric jolt passed through him. For a split second he was fifteen again, on the edge of sixteen, and reckless as a fire. He remembered the way her kiss had felt, and almost without meaning to, he lifted his hand in a little wave.
    He saw it when she recognized him; a widening of the eyes, a shift in the angle of her shoulders. Her expression tightened with something like anger. Fear looking for somewhere to go. The man sitting beside her touched her shoulder and said something. She shook her head, faced away. The man turned, scowling at the crowd. He met David’s eyes for a moment, but there was nothing like understanding in them. David looked away from her for the last time.
    “Here we go,” Cassie said as the first results began to come. David put his elbows against the table as one by one values within his error bars clicked into place. He watched Dr. Fousek’s eyebrows lift, watched Jeremy start to grin.
    The euphoria came.

Also by James S. A. Corey
T HE E XPANSE
    Leviathan Wakes
Caliban's War
Abaddon's Gate

If you enjoyed GODS OF RISK,
look out for
ABADDON'S GATE
    BOOK THREE OF THE EXPANSE
by James S. A. Corey
PROLOGUE: MANÉO
    M anéo Jung-Espinoza—Néo to his friends back on Ceres Station—huddled in the cockpit of the little ship he’d christened the Y Que . After almost three months, there was maybe fifty hours left before he made history. The food had run out two days before. The only water that was left to drink was half a liter of recycled piss that had already gone through him more times than he could count. Everything he could turn off, he’d turned off. The reactor was shut down. He still had passive monitors, but no active sensor arrays. The only light in the cockpit came from the backsplash of the display terminals. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in, corners tucked into his restraints so it wouldn’t float away, wasn’t even powered. His broadcast and tightbeam transmitters were both shut off, and he’d slagged the transponder even before he’d painted the name on her hull. He hadn’t flown this far just to have some kind of accidental blip alert the flotillas that he was coming.
    Fifty hours—less than that—and the only thing he had to do was not be seen. And not run into anything, but that part was in los manos de Dios .
    His cousin Evita had been the one who’d introduced him to the underground society of slingshots. That had been three years earlier, just before his fifteenth birthday. He’d been hanging at his family hole, his mother gone to work at the water treatment plant, his father at a meeting with the grid maintenance group he oversaw. Néo had stayed home, cutting school for the fourth time in a month. When the system announced someone waiting at the door, he’d figured it was school security busting him for being truant. Instead, Evita was there.
    She was two years older and his mother’s sister’s kid. A real Belter. They had the same long, thin bodies, but she was from there. He’d had a thing for Evita since the first time he saw her. He’d had dreams about what she’d look like with her clothes off. What it would feel like to kiss her. Now here she was, and the place to himself. His heart was going three times standard before he opened the door.
    “Esá, unokabátya,” she said, smiling and shrugging with one hand.
    “Hoy,” he’d said, trying to act cool and calm. He’d grown up in the massive city in space that was Ceres Station, just the way she had, but his father had the low, squat frame that marked him as an Earther. He had as much right to the cosmopolitan slang of the Belt as she had, but it sounded natural on her. When he said it, it was