Super Agent Mira

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She has two hundred and three days, nineteen doses, and one president to keep alive. Mira Kovač arrives naked in an Ontario wood at four in the morning on the fourteenth of May, 2029, eleven days later than the people who sent her intended. Nothing crosses with her. No clothes, no weapon, no documents, no proof that she was born in 2040 in a country that will one day be a republic with a president. What she has is a body built to run at twenty-eight kilometres an hour, a drug grown into a pocket under her ribs that will keep that body from killing itself, and an instruction: keep the president alive until the third of December. She knows how it goes. She has memorised the record. Five attempts on Étienne Rousseau's life, four of them failures, and the fifth one the reason a machine gets built that will one day remove her sister from the record of her own country — every document, every photograph, every registry line, until the people who loved her keep the memory and lose the proof. What she does not know is why the record is wrong about almost everything that matters. A thriller about the argument, not the chase Mira is not the only person in 2029 who came from somewhere else. Teodor Vane has been here since 2027. He is seventy, he is dying, he has spent twenty years and eleven lives trying to stop the machine from ever existing — and the case he makes is the one she cannot answer. Because her side keeps records, which means her side can be proved wrong in a court. And his side keeps none, which means nobody will ever be able to prove anything about the Undertow at all. Fifty-one per cent against forty-nine. She is on the right side of it by about one per cent, and the book never pretends the margin is wider than that. What you get • A one-way time traveller with no gadgets, no backup and no way home — only a failing body and a date • An antagonist who is right about almost everything and is never secretly venal • A police inspector who cannot be told the truth and works it out anyway • A president who is not a symbol: a constitutional lawyer with a bad knee, a terminal diagnosis, and a signature four months from being worth more than his life • A body count that is counted — every death has a name, an age, and a line in a notebook that looks like accounts • A resolution that turns on a demonstration in front of four journalists, not on who shoots first Super Agent Mira is a complete standalone novel of roughly 51,000 words, set in an alternate near future. It is a thriller for readers who want the moral argument to be as sharp as the action, in the tradition of the spy novel that is really about institutions. A note on what this book is not There are no gadgets and there is no way back. The technology is fixed, small and cruel: one direction, nothing crosses, an eleven-day error at forty-two years, and a drug that runs out. Nobody in this book saves everybody. The nurse who dies in chapter twenty-eight stays dead, and three chapters are spent on that, and if you want a thriller where the cost is announced and then quietly waived, this is not it. Canada in these pages is a republic with a president. In the world you live in, it is a constitutional monarchy with a prime minister. Every institution, official and event in the book is invented.