Juno came home to say goodbye to a life she'd already left behind. She came back to the refineries and rusted cranes of the Neutral Belt, to Nisshoku Street, to her mother, and found a city bracing for a war it was pretending wasn't coming.
Then the bombs fell. And everything she came back to was gone.
Captured and thrown into the Black Gauge, a trial designed to break survivors down to their most animal instincts, Juno discovers that her academy training didn't prepare her for this. Nothing prepares you for using the screams of dying strangers as a map. Nothing prepares you for what you become when survival is the only rule left.
But Juno survives. And survival, in the hands of an empire that collects weapons, makes her very useful, and very dangerous.
With her childhood friend Katsumi beside her and the daughter of the man who destroyed her district hidden somewhere in the chain of command above her, Juno begins moving through a world of imperial assassins, underground resistance, and violence that strips away everything she thought she was. She isn't a soldier. She isn't a hero.
She's learning what she actually is. And so is the empire.
