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Synopsis
Perfect for fans of Aurora Rising, The Hunger Games, and Three Dark Crowns, this electrifying duology closer is jam-packed with tension and thrills that will hook readers from its first page.
Alyssa Farshot never wanted to rule the empire. But to honor her uncle’s dying wish, she participated in the crownchase, a race across the empire’s 1,001 planets to find the royal seal and win the throne. Alyssa tried to help her friend, Coy, win the crownchase, but just as victory was within their grasp, Edgar Voles killed Coy—and claimed the seal for himself.
Broken-hearted over her friend’s death, Alyssa is hell-bent on revenge. But Edgar is well protected in the kingship. Alyssa will have to rally rivals, friends, and foes from across the empire to take him down and change the course of the galaxy.
Release date: October 12, 2021
Publisher: HarperTeen
Print pages: 384
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Thronebreakers
Rebecca Coffindaffer
Seventeen years ago . . .
NL7 HOLDS PERFECTLY STILL AS THREE FLOATING tablets circle the alloy frame of its body. The only other sentient presence in the room—a woman, human, Helixian—moves from one tablet to the next, her hands touching lightly across the surfaces, her eyes scanning the readouts.
Diagnostic outputs. It is the fifth time she has scanned NL7’s functions in the past twenty-four hours alone. Far more frequent than usual.
The woman stumbles a little and catches herself on the edge of a nearby desk. She leans against it, her breathing heavy.
NL7 has noted recent changes in the woman’s performance and appearance. A loss of body mass. A greater probability of instability. Slurred or inarticulate speech patterns.
“You are experiencing physiological malfunctions,” it says to her.
“Yes. Yes, I am.” She looks up at it and smiles. “That reminds me. I need to tweak those speech patterns a little more.”
Pushing off the desk, she waves one of the tablets over to her. NL7 observes as she taps and swipes along the screen. It has another question, but it cannot ask her until she has finished adjusting its dialogue algorithms.
When she finally waves the tablet away, it takes NL7 a fraction of a second to adjust to its new functionality, and then it asks, “Is it serious?”
She smiles again. NL7 notes that this one differs from the previous one in small ways—shape, intensity, and something else it cannot quantify.
“Brain stem degeneration. So yes, NL7. It’s very serious.”
“Rest would be the preferred course of action for someone in your condition.”
At a gesture from her, the tablets return to their docking ports, and the woman pats NL7 on the equivalent of its shoulder joint. “Not quite yet. I will soon.”
She leaves the room and comes back a moment later carrying another, much smaller creature. NL7 analyzes its face—human, similar in genetic makeup to the woman, approximately two years old. A child, then. The woman’s offspring.
She steps over to NL7. The child stares up at it, and it stares back.
“NL7, I’d like you to meet my son, Edgar,” the woman Prologue
Seventeen years ago . . .
NL7 HOLDS PERFECTLY STILL AS THREE FLOATING tablets circle the alloy frame of its body. The only other sentient presence in the room—a woman, human, Helixian—moves from one tablet to the next, her hands touching lightly across the surfaces, her eyes scanning the readouts.
Diagnostic outputs. It is the fifth time she has scanned NL7’s functions in the past twenty-four hours alone. Far more frequent than usual.
The woman stumbles a little and catches herself on the edge of a nearby desk. She leans against it, her breathing heavy.
NL7 has noted recent changes in the woman’s performance and appearance. A loss of body mass. A greater probability of instability. Slurred or inarticulate speech patterns.
“You are experiencing physiological malfunctions,” it says to her.
“Yes. Yes, I am.” She looks up at it and smiles. “That reminds me. I need to tweak those speech patterns a little more.”
Pushing off the desk, she waves one of the tablets over to her. NL7 observes as she taps and swipes along the screen. It has another question, but it cannot ask her until she has finished adjusting its dialogue algorithms.
When she finally waves the tablet away, it takes NL7 a fraction of a second to adjust to its new functionality, and then it asks, “Is it serious?”
She smiles again. NL7 notes that this one differs from the previous one in small ways—shape, intensity, and something else it cannot quantify.
“Brain stem degeneration. So yes, NL7. It’s very serious.”
“Rest would be the preferred course of action for someone in your condition.”
At a gesture from her, the tablets return to their docking ports, and the woman pats NL7 on the equivalent of its shoulder joint. “Not quite yet. I will soon.”
She leaves the room and comes back a moment later carrying another, much smaller creature. NL7 analyzes its face—human, similar in genetic makeup to the woman, approximately two years old. A child, then. The woman’s offspring.
She steps over to NL7. The child stares up at it, and it stares back.
“NL7, I’d like you to meet my son, Edgar,” the woman says. “Edgar, this is NL7. It’s going to take care of you.”
STARDATE: 0.06.03 in the Year 4031, under the reign of the Empress Who Never Was, Nathalia Matilda Coyenne, long may she rest in glory
LOCATION: Playing the waiting game on a spaceport called Pal
SOMETHING JAGGED AND METAL ON THIS CHAIR IS digging into my back, right near my spine, and it’s gonna leave a bruise. I just know it.
Fuck it. It can join all the other injuries I’ve collected recently. I’ve been shot, dislocated my shoulder, thrown myself off a cliff, blown up the best spaceship in the galaxy, crash-landed on a planet that poured acid rain, and had fifty thousand volts jammed into my body. It’s been a week, is what I’m saying. Or more than a week, I guess. It’s all kind of running together. There are really just two points in time for me right now.
Before Coy died.
And after.
There’s this itching deep inside my muscles. It’s been there for hours and hours, and it makes me want to snarl and snap at things like an Ekarsian saber rat. I want long, sharp teeth. I want fangs I can bare to tell everyone around me right now to get the hell away from me.
Instead, I’m on a spaceport called Pal.
Its official name is Palaxindromedaxardian, but pretty much no one wants to say that more than once so everyone just calls it Pal. As in, buddy. As in, friend. As in, I’ll bump into someone and they’ll apologize to me. It’s that kind of place. Which doesn’t really sound like something to complain about except that my head right now is filled with this primal, from-the-gut screaming and all the politeness around me just makes it louder. I’m too aware of the anger radiating off my skin. Is there a spaceport somewhere where no one talks and everyone gets around by shoving and using their elbows? Maybe that’s the place I should’ve gone to.
I didn’t choose Pal, though. And I only have to stay here long enough to find the person Hell Monkey and I are looking for and then bug out. I’ve got business on Apex that can’t wait.
I shift in my seat, trying to see if there’s a way to sit in the godsdamned thing without getting a blunted stab in the back. Who the hell made this thing anyway? Or better yet, who bought it and set it outside of a spaceport cantina like they thought it’d be great fucking relaxation?
I catch Hell Monkey watching me from across the little metal table between us, his eyebrows way up near his hairline. “You okay over there?”
“Sure.” I try to sound casual, but it comes out like a growl. “Who doesn’t love the feeling of being skewered to death very, very slowly? Your contact is gonna be here, right?”
He nods and leans back, totally relaxed, looking like someone who hasn’t been attacked by furniture his entire life. What must that be like? “They’ll be here. It’s early yet. I told them to meet us on the twelve and we’re still ten minutes out from that.”
Ten minutes. Hand to the stars, it sounds like he said ten hours. I squirm and try not to let my gaze drift over to the big display of media feeds streaming silently on the wall beside the cantina. Edgar Voles is expected to land on the kingship within the hour. His worldcruiser has already been spotted in the Apex system, gliding victoriously home, and dozens of correspondents surrounded by three times as many camera drones are swarming the kingship hangars, waiting to get the first glorious shot of the so-called winner of the crownchase. The new emperor of the United Sovereign Empire.
My face twists with disgust, and I taste sourness and bile on my tongue.
“And you’re sure about them?” I ask. “They can get us what we need? Because the work Drinn is doing is not gonna be enough—”
“They’re good, I promise. They’ve come through for me several times. Alyssa . . .” His hand lands on mine where it
rests on the table. Heavy and warm as a magna-clamp. It’s solid enough that I still and bring my eyes back over to his. “It’ll work. You just need to be a little patient.”
I turn my hand underneath his so we’re palm to palm and my fingertips curl against the underside of his wrist. “Me? Patient? You must be new here.”
His lips quirk a little, just for a second. But his expression sobers quickly. “You still wanna go through with this?”
I stiffen, and my mouth pinches into a thin line. I don’t take my hand back, but I ball it into a fist under his grip. “You know I do. If there’d been any way for us to overtake Edgar before he reached the kingship, I’d have a blaster shoved right up against his stupid head already.”
He drops his gaze to the table, and his words come out slow and careful. “Don’t get me wrong—it’s not like I don’t think he deserves it—”
“Good, because he definitely, definitely does.”
“—and you know how I feel about the Voles family—”
“A bunch of manipulative shitheels, the whole lot of them.”
“—but whether this plan is the plan, though—”
“Nuh-uh, it’s the only plan.” I scoop my hand out and over his, squeezing my fingers tight around his knuckles. “He doesn’t get to keep the throne. He doesn’t get to play emperor. He doesn’t get to sit up there on high and make decisions for you and me and a thousand planets’ worth of people.”
That makes Hell Monkey raise his eyebrows again. Skeptical. Or maybe worried. “Who does, then? You?”
“No. No no no. That’s still a big pass.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I see his shoulders relax just a fraction. “That’s up to the other prime families to figure out, but I refuse to let him steal what Coy was supposed to have and not pay for it.”
He stares at me for a second, and I can see a whole lot of something clicking away behind his hazel eyes, but I can’t read what it is. Which is weird. Almost two and a half years side by side means I’ve usually got a pretty direct line into his thoughts, but this . . . must be way down deep. He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again—
A figure drops heavily into one of the other chairs at our table, and I just about jump out of my skin, my hand dropping onto the butt of my blaster.
It’s a Ravakian, tall and broad with four arms and four legs and a double row of iridescent plates protruding from their spine. They make the chair underneath them look like a toy, and their expression is one that a lot of cultures would interpret as amused—eyes crinkled, wide sharp-toothed mouth turned upward at the corners. I don’t know Ravakian society as well as I’d like, though, so I can’t tell for sure that this is amusement and not, say, something more murderous. I flick a look over at Hell Monkey.
He grins and touches his hands to the sides of his face and then to his shoulders, the best those of us with less than four hands can do for the traditional Ravakian greeting. “Oorva. You’re looking shiny.”
She—the oor designates female—chuckles and mimics the greeting. “Hell Monkey. You’re looking like trouble.” Her voice sounds like rocks tumbling against each other, and her eyes slide over to me, bright yellow and slit-pupiled. “So, crownchaser, I hear you’re looking to sneak onto the kingship.”
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