Take a girl like that. Pallid complexion, cropped mop of black hair, pale blue eyes: waif or demon? She was a bit of a loner. Preternaturally smart for her age: her parents planned her, used a sensible modicum of predictive genomics to avoid the more serious pitfalls. Paid for the most expensive interface implants they could buy, imported from Septagon: they wanted only the best for her. She was seventeen and sullen, going through one of those phases. Refusing to wear anything but black, spending her free time poking around in strange service ducts, training an eighteen-million-synapse nerve garden in her bedroom (parents didn’t even want to think about what she might be training it to dream of). She grew plants: deadly nightshade, valerian, aconite, hemlock — and what were they going to do with the latter when it reached full height? (Nobody knew. Nobody knows.) She liked listening to depressing music in her room with the door shut. Her anxious parents shoehorned her into the usual healthy outdoor pursuits — climbing lessons, solar sailing, karate — but none of them took a grip on her imagination. Her legal forename was Victoria, but the other teens all called her Wednesday; she hated it, but not as much as she hated her given name.

Wednesday was a misfit. Like misfits from time immemorial, she’d had an invisible friend since she was young: they played together, exploring the espionage envelope. Elevator surfing. Duct diving — with an oxy mask; you could never tell what might be on the other side of a sealed bulkhead. But most kids didn’t have invisible friends who talked back via the expensive net implants their parents had shelled out for, much less taught them skills like steganography, traffic analysis, tail spotting, and Dumpster diving. And most kids grew out of having invisible friends, whereas Wednesday didn’t. That was because most misfit kids’ invisible friends were imaginary. Wednesday’s wasn’t.