Read ‘Stars and Smoke’ by Marie Lu Book Excerpt

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If this is what spy training is like, sign me up!

Marie Lu is back! Granted, she wasn't gone that long, but if you're a big fan of her work, it feels like a long time. After the end of the Skyhunter series, fans have been wondering what comes next for the author, and now you can get a special sneak peek.

Stars and Smoke, which is set to be released on March 28, 2023, is an alternating POV thriller that will absolutely get you thinking about your favorite boy band member. The book follows superstar Winter Young, who suddenly finds himself working with a spy organization after he gets booked for a private concert for a criminal tycoon's daughter. And this new opportunity also brings along Sydney Cossette, a spy who is set to train and act like his bodyguard as they get ready for the mission.

If that left you wanting more, then get ready because the official description from Roaring Book Press will have you even more excited:

Oh, and did we mention there are sparks between these two? Don't believe us? Hear from Marie Lu from herself about their relationship:

"One of my favorite things about writing Stars And Smoke was the sexual tension between Winter and Sydney. They're Grumpy meets Sassy, and it means they're bickering all the time. Winter is a superstar and a boy with an easily bruised heart--he's beautiful, he's used to people fawning over him, and he falls in love too quickly, often with people who aren't good for him," she exclusively told Cosmopolitan. "Sydney, meanwhile, is a secret agent with walls and barbed wire up around her heart, someone who thinks love is a liability. Neither one has ever met someone quite like the other. They fight constantly, but they also can't help being drawn to each other for their individual strengths and weaknesses. Ramping up the romance between them as the story goes on was incredibly fun for me."

Before you run to preorder Stars and Smoke (and maybe even add Marie's other books to your TBR), don't miss out on an exclusive excerpt below!

An Excerpt From Stars and SmokeBy Marie Lu

"Basics for you is going to be a bit accelerated," she said. "So I’m going to start with some universal rules you should always keep in mind as an agent." She folded her arms. "Do you know what your ultimate goal is?"

"To succeed at our mission?" he guessed.

"No." She shook her head. "To come out of it alive. There will always be another mission. But losing an agent is a harder hit than any failed job. You aren't just a life. You’re an investment. So everything you’ll learn here will be geared toward keeping you unharmed."

Winter's attitude turned sober at that. Sydney watched the light change on his face, the spark of grief that came and went in his eyes, and felt a twinge of pity for him. No doubt his thoughts had gone to his brother.

She nodded to the space around them and shifted the topic. "This is one of our many simulation rooms. I’ve created some presets for us in various London locales as we go through some situations for you."

He nodded once, turning his back to her again to study the setting."And what are these universal rules I should start with?"

"First," she replied, "don't ever look behind you. You don't need to. Simply assume that someone is always watching you. Look back, and you clue them in to you being conscious of their presence—and up to something."

At her words, Winter turned back around to face her and tilted his head. "Nothing new to me."

There was something about that head tilt of his that made her want to linger on him. She looked away. "Second," she went on, "be prepared. Always. If something goes wrong, be ready to pivot. If something unusual happens, you’ll need to adapt in a split second. Harder than it sounds. Think of it as one of your performances. You must have had all sorts of things go awry onstage and been forced to shift midsong."

He nodded stiffly. "What kind of things?"

"Here's an example." She took a few steps away from him, as if walking to the end of the simulated street, and then turned back around.

"Ready?" she asked him.

He didn't seem like it, but to his credit, he lifted his head and gave her a steady nod. "Sure," he replied. "Hit me."

She wanted to smile a little at that, but held it in. Then she headed in his direction like she was a passerby.

As they drew near to each other, Winter started to say, "I hope you know it's been a long time since I was able to walk down a street alone like this—"

Before he could finish his sentence, she pretended to trip and fight for balance, stumbling into him hard enough to make him step back. One of her closed fists came out of her pocket to strike him in the side.

He flinched away from her with a startled gasp. As he did, she widened her eyes and held up her hands at him. "God, I’m sorry!" she exclaimed, then continued hurrying down the path. Then she stopped and turned back around.

She unclenched her other fist to reveal a pen-like weapon in her hand. When she tapped the end of it, a long, needle-thin blade shot out.

"What I just did was exactly how an anarchist assassinated the Empress of Austria in 1898." She compressed the blade back into its holder again. "It only takes the blink of an eye."

She half expected him to pale at her words, but instead, his eyes just fell to the blade in her hand before going back to her face. There was a glimmer of grave awe toward her in his expression, and she wondered when the last time was that he’d been taken completely off guard like this.

"And how should I be constantly prepared for a knife attack?" he asked.

"Your instincts are more valuable than you know. The only difference between a normal person's instincts and an agent's is that an agent is trained to react in more ways. Now, in this scenario, what would your current instincts tell you to do?"

"Run?"

"That's honestly not a bad plan," Sydney answered. "If you can, dodge and run. You’re fast, I’ll give you that—I’ve seen your onstage footage enough times.

He gave her an amused smile. "Have you, now?"

Sydney scowled, forcing down a rising flush at his words. "Yes. It's called research for work. Anyway, use your speed to your advantage. Escaping might be your best choice."

He frowned. "And if not?"

"I’ll show you." Without warning, she tossed the knife at him.

To her surprise, Winter darted quickly back and caught the knife in one hand.

"Nice reflexes," she said. "Left-handed?"

"Ambidextrous." He glared at her. "Now what?"

"Try to get me."

Winter took a deep breath, then retreated a few steps. He walked toward her in the same nonchalant fashion. Again, Sydney found herself feeling impressed. He had memorized her previous movements, even the way she had blinked and looked around, and replicated it so well that it was as if he had already been trained in this exercise.

As he passed her, he stumbled and fell against her. His right hand flashed as if to attack her with the pen-knife. So he was ambidextrous, after all.

Sydney moved faster than she could think. Her body curved instantly away—in the same move, her arm shot out and seized his wrist in a vise-like grip. She twisted it hard, hearing him grunt, then yanked him toward her while angling backward and pulled his arm into an uncomfortable right angle. Her leg came out to trip him. In the blink of an eye, she had her knee on his chest and the knife at his throat, their faces barely a few inches from each other.

He blinked, stunned momentarily into silence, and she found herself studying his pupils out of habit. They were constricted in pain, revealing all the golden-brown slashes in his irises. His shallow breaths were warm against her skin, and she noted the hard panels of his body as his chest rose and fell beneath her knee. He was staring at her now, truly taking her in—and although she didn't know what he saw, she felt her heart lurch unexpectedly at his attention.

Then he winced, his arm still locked painfully down by her other hand. "Okay," he said hoarsely. "Let go."

She released him, then offered a hand to pull him up. "You practice that for two straight years," she said, "and it becomes a new part of your instincts. Like another immune system."

"Good to know."

"Now you try it."

When Sydney had struggled early on to pick up combat moves,

Sauda had reassured her, telling her most people took time to train their reactions into instinct.

But when she lunged at Winter this time, he reacted instantly. Each of his moves mimed her earlier ones perfectly, right down to the specific angle of his body and the turn of his arm. He performed it so accurately that she didn't have time to get out of his lock. His leg swept her off her feet.

She fell—and a blink later, she found herself on her back, Winter'sknee pressed lightly against her chest, the knife held to her throat.

For a moment, she just stared at him, heart pounding, all sarcasm forgotten. Her lungs squeezed in a painful spasm, and she sucked her breath in sharply. It’d taken her weeks to master those moves. Two years to make them part of her instinct. And this boy had just absorbed them like it was nothing.

Trained dancer, indeed.

"That was almost too good," she muttered.

He winked, then got up, holding a hand out to her. "It's just like learning choreography," he answered.

She narrowed her eyes, studying the brief emotions flitting across his face. He wasn't telling her something.

"You’ve been attacked by a knife before," she said carefully.

He hesitated, then nodded. "Once," he replied. "Outside an after-party, when a crowd swarmed me and I got separated from my bodyguards. Claire made me take a self-defense course after that."

She frowned. "There was no article about it."

"Because I didn't know I’d been stabbed until Claire got me into our car," he explained. "And I insisted on my private doctor treating me instead of going to a hospital. No word got out."

"You told no one?"

"No one except Claire."

Somehow, she’d thought that a guy like Winter would have wanted to talk to the press about an incident like that to drum up publicity. She wouldn't even have blamed him for it.

Maybe Winter really was private. She analyzed his face, wondering how else to pry him open. Trying not to think about her own encounters with a knife.

"Nice of you not to worry your mom," she finally said, gentler this time.

"She wouldn't have been worried," he answered.

She looked back up at him to see that his smile had taken on a faded quality. "I’m sorry," she decided to reply.

"We’re fine."

She studied his expression and filed it routinely away, annoyed by the flicker of sympathy that rose in her chest. These were the kinds of things someone would tell a person they’d consider a friend, and even now, she could sense him letting a little of his wall down to her, confiding something to her that he seemed to hold close to his chest.

But she wasn't his friend. She was an agent training him. So she sighed, then confessed, "Do you see how I asked you those questions?"she asked.

He looked at her, confused by her pivot. "What do you mean?"

"While you were busy practicing my second piece of advice," she said, waving the knife once, "we were also going over my third."

Winter hesitated for a moment before realization dawned in his eyes."You were interrogating me?"

Sydney nodded. "Being a secret agent is really about building another's trust in you. Every moment is an opportunity for you to get details out of someone about their life, and for them to do the same thing back to you. I made you concentrate on learning how to defend yourself with a knife. Your focus was somewhere else, and I took advantage of that, asked you questions about your past while you were distracted and had let your walls down. So here's my third universal rule. Always make the people around you trust you, and never trust anyone else."

For the first time, there was hurt in his eyes. She had genuinely wounded him. She could see the way something in his gaze shuttered, the slight recoil of his body away from her, the sting of betrayal sharp on his face before he smoothed it over, let his walls come back up again.

She always hated this part of the training, even with someone she disliked. But deception was one of those instincts that had been trained into her, and it kept her cold.

"It's a lonely job," she said, "but you won't realize just how lonely it is until you start. You’ll learn to cope with it, eventually."

His gaze seared through her now. "Is that why you do your secret breathing exercises?" he asked. "To cope? Or do you have bad lungs?"

Now it was his turn to surprise her. She blinked at him. "What do you mean?"

She could tell from his face that he knew he’d hit on something. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, as if he wanted to make sure no one heard them. "Your breathing exercises. I noticed it from our first meeting—how you take a measured breath through your nose and then exhale twice as slowly through your mouth." He nodded, looking sidelong at her. "I was taught the same exercise to strengthen my lungs for my performances. But why do you need breathing therapy?"

Well. Sydney reminded herself yet again that Winter wasn't stupid. He had turned the interrogation back around on her, had snapped back at her just as she was pitying him. For a second, she just stared at him.

The memories rushed through her—

—the sound of her mother's labored breathing at the hospital—

—Sydney's persistent chest pains that began in adolescence, worsening whenever she was under extreme stress—

—her diagnosis coming back as her mother's same chronic condition—

—the way she’d struggled for air when her father had once threatened her with a kitchen knife—

The memory disappeared, leaving only an old fear sitting in her chest.

Winter tightened his lips. "Panacea doesn't know, do they?"

Three years, she’d hidden this successfully from everyone at an intelligence agency. How did he figure it out? How could he have noticed so quickly?

"Are you suggesting I’m a liar?" she said, her voice low, a thread of anger in it.

He stared straight at her. "I’m suggesting that two can play at your game."

"Creative of you," she replied tersely. "But my lungs are doing just fine."

He studied her. "I won't tell them, you know," he said quietly.

The boy standing before her had the power to end her career right now. To dissolve everything that mattered to her.

Her training kicked in. Her eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, Sydney tossed the knife back at him. "There's nothing to tell," she said.

Winter caught the knife smoothly in one hand and twirled it, as if this was just another dance move he’d been practicing all his life. Then he tossed the knife back. She caught it.

"You learn fast," she said.

"Yes, ma’am," he replied, his gaze still locked on her. "As fast as you can spin a story."

He was poking holes in her shield, hunting for clues about her past as ruthlessly as she had for him. She could feel her heart racing, suddenly that trapped girl again, desperate to escape.

She didn't know if he noticed discomfort in her expression—she doubted it, as she had trained well to keep her emotions off her face. But his words rang in her head as she continued their lesson. She had no idea if he would keep her secret, or if he would run straight to Sauda and Niall after this—and she couldn't bear the idea of asking him to keep it to himself. Admitting it was true.

But whatever the reason, he backed off, then picked up the knife and turned it around in his hand.

"Glad we’re in sync," he said.

She understood what he meant. If I can trust you, you can trust me."Let's keep it that way," she answered.

He smiled a little at her. And when they moved on to the next exercise, he sounded like he always had around her, with no indication that he knew anything about her secret.

She had to be better about keeping her distance. She had to be more careful around this boy.

Excerpted from STARS AND SMOKE by Marie Lu. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted by permission of Roaring Book Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Stars and Smoke, by Marie Lu will be released on March 28, 2023. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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Tamara Fuentes is the current Entertainment Editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers TV, movies, books, celebrities, and more. She can often be found in front of a screen fangirling about something new. Before joining Cosmopolitan, she was the entertainment editor over at Seventeen. She is also a member of the Television Critics Association and the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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